A three-time Olympian reached into the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to feel a strip of peeling paint, and Park Police led him away in handcuffs. The paint is peeling and the water has gone swamp green, two weeks after a $14 million renovation. Donald Trump ordered the pool drained and repainted, then rushed the job … Read more
Giorgia Meloni recorded a video and told the president of the United States that Italy does not beg. He felt sorry for her, Trump volunteered on Italian television, because she had begged him for a photo she wanted so badly. That never happened, she says, and the woman he tried to diminish is the same … Read more
Donald Trump’s best birthday present came two days early, right before he had cage fighters and a few thousand guests over to the White House. The present was more than a third of a billion dollars, which his budget director Russ Vought pulled out of the Secret Service and moved into a White House construction … Read more
Marco Rubio’s State Department named it the America First Global Health Strategy, and the name is the confession. For decades the United States helped the world’s sick and asked for nothing, and the world was a little better for it. Now it refuses unless the country hands over the personal health records of its citizens. … Read more
At the end of this month, Tennessee’s health department starts reporting sick children to ICE. The Children’s Special Services program is the last resort for the sickest children in the state, the ones on ventilators and feeding tubes and partway through chemo. The department told about 400 immigrant families that if their child keeps getting … Read more
McMinnville, Tennessee, is exactly the kind of small town the data center industry expects to roll over. The industry has been dropping data centers into small towns, betting that quick tax revenue will smother any local objection. McMinnville’s board would not take the bait. Instead of rubber-stamping a permit, it called an 18-month time-out to … Read more
Five hundred nights ago, ten days into Trump’s second term, I started dropping headlines into my family’s group chat because I was scared by how fast the norms were coming apart. The next day I put them on my Facebook page. The day after that I posted them again and told everyone that since they’d … Read more
Thursday, FBI agents raided an Ohio voter registration group and walked out with its computers and phones. The country is watching Washington this weekend, where Trump’s name came off the Kennedy Center on Saturday and a 92-foot fighting cage has risen on the White House’s South Lawn for Sunday’s mixed martial arts fights. Both have … Read more
Friday night, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei switched off Fable 5, the most powerful AI his company had ever released. Its performance had crushed every rival when it launched days earlier. He pulled it because the Commerce Department invoked national security and barred every non-American from it, down to the noncitizens inside Anthropic who built it. … Read more
Postal Service leaders proposed a rule letting them refuse to deliver your ballot if your state won’t give Trump its voter rolls. States would enroll their mail voters in a new federal portal, and ballot envelopes that don’t match the government’s list get returned to sender. The ballot your county mails to you never arrives. … Read more
Alabama doesn’t need nitrogen gas to execute Jeffery Lee tonight, but keeps fighting to use it. The federal judge who ruled the nitrogen method cruel and unusual left two other methods available. Alabama appealed for the right to use the gas and lost again Wednesday night. Now the state is asking the Supreme Court. Lee’s … Read more
Juan Carlos Rodriguez Romero was driving to a DoorDash shift when an ICE agent shot at him, and the government charged him with assaulting its agents. That was four days before Christmas. DHS claimed he rammed federal vehicles, and prosecutors stacked felony charges carrying 20 years. The case survived more than five months, until five … Read more
Two lawyers who built careers defending powerful politicians accused of crimes took opposite paths. Dan Cogdell spent nine years defending Ken Paxton through a felony fraud case and the impeachment that ended in acquittal, and he gave money to Paxton’s campaigns along the way. Today he endorsed Paxton’s opponent and said the man he once … Read more
Donald Trump says he calls all the shots, and hours after he said it, Israel bombed Iran against his wishes. This is not a lie about crowd sizes. The leader of the world’s strongest military spent Sunday begging Netanyahu to hold fire and believed he had won. Israel bombed Iran anyway. A president who cannot … Read more
Activists are turning 17,000 pounds of the government’s own printed Epstein files into a public archive in Washington, with Trump’s name on the door. The “Trump and Epstein Memorial Reading Room” opens in days, timed to his birthday next week, and holds 3,400 volumes. Every page the DOJ released is now printed and bound, there … Read more
A DOGE official pushed Social Security to mark 2.7 million living people as dead. These were immigrants the administration wanted gone. Once Social Security marks you dead, getting a job or opening a bank account makes you look like an identity thief using a dead person’s number. The goal was to make life impossible until … Read more
Marco Rubio told Congress this week the war with Iran is over. Andrea Pedro-Francisco walked out of ICE detention on Wednesday still suffering from an ovarian cyst the size of a lime, four months after agents arrested her in Minnesota and jailed her in Texas. She got out alive for one reason: a senator called … Read more
Marco Rubio told Congress this week the war with Iran is over. The next day, Iranian drones tore through a terminal at Kuwait’s main airport that had reopened only two days before, killing one person and wounding more than sixty. The House voted that same day to demand Trump end a war his own administration … Read more
The Pentagon hired Elias Irizarry to work in the office that helps run the missions guarding American embassies and rescuing citizens taken hostage. That work requires a top-secret clearance, but Irizarry spent fourteen days in jail after pleading guilty to entering the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection. Prosecutors say he carried a metal pole … Read more
Voters in New Jersey’s 7th District go to the polls today for a congressman no one has seen since March. He has not campaigned but has no Republican challenger, so today’s nomination is a formality. A bill still went out under Tom Kean’s name last week, though the Democrat listed beside him as cosponsor says … Read more
A year after federal agents arrested Newark Mayor Ras Baraka for protesting at Delaney Hall, he has imposed a nightly curfew around the same jail to protect residents from the same fate. Federal prosecutors also charged a member of Congress who was there with him that day. The privately run jail is now packed with … Read more
Anabella Gyasi told the truth about why she was afraid, and it cost her a week in a locked room at Dulles. The pregnant teacher came to the US on a valid visa to get her disabled son to a doctor. She said her own mother had told her to kill the boy. The government … Read more
Maria Shriver called it a great birthday gift for her late uncle. Her uncle was John F. Kennedy, and Friday would have been his 109th birthday. A federal judge marked the day by ruling that Donald Trump broke the law when he bolted his own name onto the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing … Read more
Michael Dell gave $6.25 billion to Donald Trump’s signature children’s accounts, and now the Pentagon has handed Dell a $9.7 billion contract. Trump personally told the country to go out and buy Dell, so the contract looks less like a competition than an order being filled. It is not the only one. ProPublica reported today … Read more
Donald Trump’s Justice Department is criminally investigating the 82-year-old woman who won a sexual abuse case against him. They claim E. Jean Carroll lied in a deposition about who paid her legal bills. An appeals court called that a nonissue. Hers was a civil case, and now they want her charged with a crime. Donald … Read more
Suzanne Swierc collected $225,000 from Ball State on Tuesday for being fired over a Charlie Kirk post, the third American in six days paid six figures after government retaliation for speech in the wake of his murder. Across four red states this year, government employers buckled to the loudest voices and have paid more than … Read more
On Memorial Day, America bombed Iran during a ceasefire while Iran’s foreign minister negotiated peace in Doha. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf flew to Qatar to work with mediators on the deal Trump keeps saying is “largely negotiated.” Hours later, U.S. Central Command announced it had attacked Iranian missile sites … Read more
The president spent some of his Sunday posting AI mugshots of his political enemies. Trump’s “Shady Bunch” put Obama, Comey, and six other opponents in orange prison jumpsuits, arranged in a Brady Bunch grid. “Sick group of people,” he wrote. His Justice Department charged Comey last month with threatening to kill the president over a … Read more
The Justice Department spent Memorial Day weekend deleting the record of who attacked the Capitol. Press releases announcing the charges against Jan. 6 rioters disappeared from DOJ’s website. After a Washington Post reporter noticed, DOJ replied on X: “Nothing quiet about it. We are proud,” calling the deleted record “partisan propaganda.” Police officers, led by … Read more
Kilmar Abrego Garcia will sleep tonight without a criminal charge against him. Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland ordered him brought home last year from a Salvadoran torture prison where guards beat him with batons and kept him on his knees through the night. The Supreme Court agreed. The administration produced him in handcuffs and charged … Read more
Speaker Mike Johnson sent the House home Thursday rather than vote on Trump’s war. He didn’t have the votes. Senate Republicans also walked away from Trump’s $72 billion immigration enforcement bill, and Mitch McConnell called Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund “utterly stupid, morally wrong.” The Senate went home too. Tens of thousands of service members … Read more
Two January 6 officers sued Donald Trump Wednesday to block his $1.776 billion fund for the rioters. Harry Dunn and Daniel Hodges say the Anti-Weaponization Fund violates the 14th Amendment. Ratified after the Civil War, Section 4 bars the federal government from paying debts “incurred in aid of insurrection.” Their complaint calls the fund “the … Read more
Todd Blanche killed a $100 million IRS audit on the Trump family Tuesday with a one-page memo. Blanche, Trump’s former criminal defense attorney and now acting attorney general, settled the $10 billion lawsuit Trump filed against his own IRS Monday. The Trump family would receive “a formal apology but no monetary payment.” Tuesday’s memo revealed … Read more
Trump dropped his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS Monday in exchange for a $1.776 billion fund he controls. The move came 48 hours before a federal judge’s deadline requiring Trump’s side to explain whether a sitting president can legally sue agencies he runs. Now Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer, … Read more
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry landed in Greenland today for a conference he wasn’t invited to. Trump named Landry his Greenland envoy after Denmark and Greenland both refused to entertain a U.S. takeover of the island. Not a single Greenlandic politician is scheduled to meet with him. Two other governments contradicted him on the record today. … Read more
Bill Cassidy finished third in his own Senate primary tonight for voting to convict Trump in the January 6 impeachment trial. It’s the second Trump-driven primary purge in twelve days, with a third already teed up. Five Indiana Republican state senators lost their seats May 5 for refusing to redistrict on Trump’s timeline. Representative Thomas … Read more
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis freed Tina Peters today and called it sentencing reform. He may even have believed it. Peters is an election denier who helped Mike Lindell’s people copy a Colorado county’s voting machines. She is part of the coup attempt that ran for weeks after Trump lost the 2020 election. Trump couldn’t pardon … Read more
A federal judge stopped the Justice Department from making a list of every trans kid treated at Rhode Island Hospital and their parents. Eight federal judges have now blocked these subpoenas nationwide. The judge wrote that the administration “publicly characterized gender-affirming care for minors as abuse, directed the DOJ to bring its practice to an … Read more
Pete Hegseth will preach on the National Mall this Sunday at a nine-hour festival to rededicate the country to the Christian God. Taxpayer money set aside for America’s 250th birthday will help pay for it. The First Amendment forbids exactly this. Freedom 250 is already under congressional investigation for misusing federal funds. Use 5 Calls … Read more
ICE agents are walking around with a target list of 20 million people on their phones. Palantir compiled the list, which is roughly the number of undocumented people living in the United States. When agents conduct an immigration raid, the app displays the names of other people who may be nearby, so one arrest can … Read more
The Cultural Landscape Foundation sued today to stop the $13.1 million paint job on the floor of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The original quote was $1.5 million. The Trump administration skipped competitive bidding, the normal process for federal contracts this size. They handed the work to a Virginia company that painted the swimming pool … Read more
Some drivers in downtown Chicago paid $5.78 a gallon for regular today. That price is the cost of 72 days of war Trump initially told the New York Times would take “four to five weeks.” The 60-day War Powers Resolution clock expired May 1, and Hegseth told Congress the ceasefire pauses it, even though drones … Read more
A Mississippi county prosecutor put up a billboard near the Tennessee line, advertising death by firing squad. It greets drivers leaving Memphis: “Welcome to Mississippi. Where the firing squad is legal. Think twice.” Memphis is 64% Black. The prosecutor paid for the billboard and called it deterrence. He didn’t invent the genre. In 1989, Donald … Read more
Twelve naturalized Americans learned today that the Justice Department began the process of stripping their citizenship. The twelve are indefensible. The lead case is a Colombian priest accused of sexually abusing a child. They were picked on purpose, because the public face of a new program needs to look impossible to argue with. For 27 … Read more
Kathy Hochul didn’t blink when it came to protecting New Yorkers, especially the kids. She wasn’t guessing. Today, ProPublica documented 79 children harmed by federal agents using tear gas and pepper spray. Those are only the ones reporters could find and confirm. Tom Homan threatened twice this week to flood New York with more agents … Read more
Protesters filled the Tennessee and Alabama capitols this week before either state could finish redrawing congressional maps. Last Wednesday the Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s map for relying too heavily on race, and three Southern states walked through that door within seven days. In Tennessee, Republicans refused to hold a hearing in Memphis where the … Read more
Attorney and politician Robert F. Kennedy Jr., ignored established medical practice today and discouraged Americans from taking antidepressants. He and Donald Trump ran the same play when they said taking Tylenol during pregnancy causes autism. And while no serious doctor will tell you flavored vapes are safe, Kennedy’s FDA also approved four fruit flavored vapes … Read more
Donald Trump’s Justice Department is building a list of nearly 3,000 Americans who volunteered to help run the 2020 election in the Atlanta metro area. The Trump administration is demanding their home addresses, personal emails, and personal phone numbers, all the way down to individual precinct volunteers. The statute of limitations on 2020 federal election … Read more
Donald Trump’s prosecutor Jeanine Pirro told the country today she’ll appeal the ruling that called her Powell investigation a pressure campaign. Jerome Powell leads the Federal Reserve, the agency that sets the country’s interest rates. Trump has spent a year demanding lower rates, and Pirro opened a criminal probe into Powell in January over construction … Read more
Donald Trump thought he found another loophole. He told Congress Friday hostilities with Iran had ended. By Saturday he was rejecting Iran’s peace proposal because Iran hadn’t “paid a big enough price.” Last night, Rubio used emergency authority to bypass Congress and sell $8.6 billion in arms to Israel, Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE, including … Read more
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