A quick overview of the most important developments in Ukraine this week

 

 

✈️ Ukraine Gets Fighter Jets — 36 Gripens Are Coming                            On May 28, President Zelenskyy flew to Uppsala, Sweden, where he and Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson announced the largest single Western fighter jet commitment of the entire war. Ukraine will receive 36 Swedish JAS 39 Gripen fighter jets — 16 donated Gripen C/D aircraft from the existing Swedish Air Force inventory, plus 20 newer Gripen E/F variants that Ukraine will purchase using €2.5 billion from the EU's Ukraine Support Loan. The 16 donated aircraft will be delivered in early 2027. 🔥 Russia's Deadliest Attack on Kyiv — Oreshnik Missile Used          Russia launched 90 missiles and 600 drones at Ukraine in one of the largest attacks of the entire war. Damage was reported in every district of Kyiv. At least 2 killed, 77 injured. Zelenskyy confirmed Russia used the nuclear-capable Oreshnik hypersonic missile — only the third time in the full-scale war. 📍 On the Frontline — Ukraine Claws Back Territory                         Ukrainian forces recaptured roughly 104 square miles over the past 30 days. Russian forces recorded a net territorial loss in the April 28–May 26 period — a meaningful shift after months of grinding advances. Fighting continues near Pokrovsk, Kramatorsk, and Kupyansk. 🍞 Russia Bombed Humanitarian Food Supplies                                    Russia struck a frontline aid facility containing food for 130,000 people, destroying $1.4 million worth of supplies. This is what they target when they run out of military objectives. When you wear Ukrainian Apparel, you're standing with a nation that fights back — on the frontline, in the sky, and in the history books.​

 

"Trump’s past is finally catching up with him"

 

We’ve discussed Trump’s ongoing efforts to prevent the release of former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on the now-dismissed classified documents prosecution against the president. That issue has now resurfaced. As we discussed at the time, Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed by Trump and has always ruled in his favor, was never going to order the release of Volume II of the Special Counsel Report, which covers the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago. But now the matter is in the hands of a different court, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which has not hesitated to correct Cannon’s errors in the past.

There is a fascinating resonance between Cannon’s decision to prevent the release of Volume II and the issue we’ve seen surface in Trump v. IRS, the case whose “settlement” led to the creation of the slush fund Trump can use to give taxpayer dollars to January 6 defendants while erasing his and his family’s liability for debts owed to the government, like back taxes from tax audits. 

The common thread is cases where, instead of a legitimate adversarial process, with opponents duking it out in court, Trump is the actual party in interest on “both sides of the v.” In both of these situations, it’s Trump v. Trump, which leaves the president to decide what positions government agencies will take in these supposed legal conflicts. In the case of the special counsel’s report, DOJ, which would normally argue for its release, has taken Trump’s side. And Judge Cannon has played along.

On Inauguration Day, she issued an order blocking the Justice Department from sharing the Volume II with leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary committees, who were set to receive it in accordance with the typical practice after a special counsel concludes their work. With DOJ on Trump’s side, there was no one to challenge it.

Then, in February in a piece appropriately titled, “If DOJ is Trump’s Law Firm, Aileen Cannon is his Judge,” we discussed Cannon’s next move. She ruled on what she characterizes as two “unopposed” motions, one by Trump, one by his co-defendants in the Mar-a-Lago case, both designed to prevent release of Volume II. 

At the time I noted, “If it weren’t such a serious matter, ‘unopposed’ would be funny—these motions preventing the routine release of a special counsel’s report are only unopposed because the Attorney General, who should have filed an opposition, lives in Trump’s hip pocket. Cannon has managed to hold up the release of Volume II for over a year at this point.”

While Judge Cannon was doing everything possible to prevent the release of Volume II, two groups of journalists, American Oversight and the Knight First Amendment Institute, asked to intervene in the case to ensure a truly adversarial proceeding, with the parties presenting opposing views on whether the report should be released. 

Cannon dealt with that by dragging her feet, simply refusing to rule on the request. That went on until November, when the matter reached the Eleventh Circuit and she was given 60 days to rule. The Eleventh Circuit pointed to “undue delay.” Cannon predictably ruled against permitting intervention, and the issue was appealed to the Eleventh Circuit.

Now, the Eleventh Circuit has ordered a briefing schedule on the requests to intervene and argue in favor of the release of the report. The timing is fast, with the next set of briefs due 14 days from the date of the order, and all of the briefing to be concluded by July.

The scheduling order is signed by Judge Nancy Abudu, who was appointed to the Eleventh Circuit by President Biden. The court will have to consider the issues once the briefs are in, but the ruling over Cannon’s foot dragging signaled they were out of patience with her efforts to keep her thumb on the scale for Trump. 

There is good reason to be optimistic here, even if the process takes time. Assuming the media entities are permitted to join the proceedings, there would still have to be briefing on the issue of release, but here again, Cannon was an outlier, and there is good reason to believe the Eleventh Circuit would not agree. DOJ’s accidental release earlier this year of a document detailing some of the work in the case gives us reason to believe there could be interesting material in the report.

Is it coincidence that two separate cases, involving two of the most important challenges to Trump’s ability to exert control over the government and pervert the rule of law, are coming to fruition at the same time? Perhaps so. 

But what’s at stake here is a core constitutional principle. Article III of the Constitution gives federal courts jurisdiction to decide actual “cases” or “controversies,” which means there must be opposing parties with conflicting interests. The Supreme Court has held that the “case or controversy” requirement means there has to be a genuine, active dispute between genuinely adverse parties for a court to have jurisdiction. Trump has elicited favorable decisions in both the IRS case and the release of the report case by trying to avoid that requirement. But it’s starting to look like time is up.

If this doesn’t sound like an enormous development, admittedly, it’s a bit inside baseball. But by forcing Trump to act within the confines of the rule of law, courts can create accountability. Refusing to let Trump him get away with using them as a sham vehicle for perpetrating frauds that allow him to extract government funds for his personal use or avoid accountability for past conduct is an important reassertion of real guardrails. The one-two punch of courts requiring him to face an actual adversary would be a welcome development.

Trump’s past is finally catching up with him.

Pieces like this one take time — tracking cases across multiple courts, connecting the legal dots, and translating what actually matters into plain English. If that kind of analysis is valuable to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber. It helps keep Civil Discourse going and keeps this work accessible to everyone who needs it. If you haven’t already, you can join for $6 a month, or $50 a year if you want to save a bit.

We’re in this together,

Joyce Vance

 

"Two hundred and fifty years... and to celebrate, we are building a wrestling arena on the White House lawn"

 

Two hundred and fifty… years of the most powerful, most resourced, most theoretically capable nation in the history of human civilization and here is what we have to show for it.

Forty million people on food stamps, thirty million without health insurance, the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, the highest incarceration rate on earth, an opioid crisis that has killed over half a million people and counting, a housing market so broken that working people cannot afford to live in the cities they work in, an education system that buries young people in debt before they earn their first dollar, infrastructure that is literally collapsing, a life expectancy that is going backwards, a political system so thoroughly purchased by concentrated wealth that the laws it produces bear almost no relationship to what the public actually wants or needs, a working class that has not seen meaningful real wage growth in thirty years, a mental health crisis so severe we normalized it, a gun violence epidemic so routine we don’t even act when preschoolers are slaughtered, and a climate hurtling toward catastrophe while the people paid to address it collect checks from the industry causing it.

Two hundred and fifty years of that. And to celebrate, we built a wrestling arena on the White House lawn.

Not a hospital, or a school, or a housing development. Not a single fucking thing that addresses a single goddamn item on the list above. A wrestling arena. With cranes and pyrotechnics and a steel arch that probably cost more than the annual budget of three rural counties combined, erected in front of the building where Lincoln and Roosevelt and every president who ever tried to make any of this mean something once lived and worked and, in some cases, died trying. Truthfully, this is not a departure from American values. This is the fullest possible expression of them. Because this is what we chose. Every single time the choice was presented.

We built a culture where a football coach makes forty times what a physics professor makes and then expresses genuine bewilderment at the outcomes. Where a reality television star becomes president and a school district cuts its art program in the same fiscal year. Where children know every statistic of every player on their favorite sport team and cannot locate their own country on a map. Where scientific consensus on vaccines, climate, evolution, and basic nutrition gets weighed against a Facebook post and the Facebook post wins at the dinner table. Where the school that wins the state championship gets a parade and the school that produces a Nobel laureate gets a budget cut.

We chose the bomber over the teacher. The tank over the clinic. The aircraft carrier over the water treatment plant. We spend more on military than the next ten countries combined, including our allies, while veterans sleep on the streets of the cities they came back to. We built the most expensive killing apparatus in human history and then told the nurse she made too much money. We sent young men to die in wars that made defense contractors rich and called it freedom and put a yellow ribbon magnet on the back of the car and called that support. We made the soldier and the police officer into sacred untouchable symbols of national identity and then cut their benefits, denied their PTSD claims, let them die waiting for VA appointments, and sent them back for third and fourth tours because it was cheaper than taking care of them when they came home.

We worshipped the uniform and neglected the human inside it because the uniform is a symbol and symbols are cheaper than healthcare and housing and the therapy that would actually help. We built bases in a hundred and fifty countries and could not build enough affordable housing in fifty states. We funded a military budget that could have ended homelessness and medical debt and student debt several times over and we did it with bipartisan enthusiasm and called the people who questioned it unserious.

We chose entertainment over education so many times and for so long and at every available level of society that we forgot there was a distinction worth making. Spectacle over substance, performance over policy, the aesthetics of greatness in place of the actual thing, and the feeling of winning instead of asking what was being won and who was paying for it and what it would cost the people who came next. Rome had bread and circuses. We Americans have food stamps and a wrestling ring outside the Oval Office.

Two hundred and fifty years. This is what we built. This is what we chose. This is what we are celebrating. And the most perfectly, catastrophically, irreducibly American thing about all of it is that anyone pointing at this image and asking what it means will be called unpatriotic by people watching it on a television they bought on credit they cannot afford to pay back, rooting for a sport they cannot explain, in a country they cannot describe, celebrating a birthday they cannot contextualize, for a nation that has spent two and a half centuries confusing the noise it makes with the work it never did, all while claiming to be the greatest country on Earth.

Happy Birthday America! You have never looked more like yourself!

-Oliver Kornetzke

 

Shut down Trump’s corrupt slush fund

 

Trump’s second term has been marked by levels of corruption unprecedented in US history. But the regime’s creation of a $1.8 billion slush fund for the president to dole out to insurrectionists and other political allies is perhaps the most corrupt, lawless act of all. 

In the United States, Congress has the power of the purse. Only they have the constitutional authority to apportion funds. If a president can raid the treasury through sham lawsuits and dole out our taxpayer dollars as they choose, that’s an end-run around our constitutional order that makes the executive not a coequal branch of government, but an autocratic one.

Congress cannot accept this usurpation of its power and subversion of our constitutional order. There are already several pieces of legislation in Congress that could block this money and create guardrails around federal settlement funds. 

Every Member of Congress, regardless of party, should be opposed to this egregious overreach, and the good news is, members of both parties are. But we need to demand they go beyond concerned statements and actually act.  The slush fund not only threatens to reward people who attempted to overturn a free and fair election, it incentivizes Trump’s rabid supporters to try to help him do so again. 

And there’s no reason to expect this to be a one-time gambit. If Congress doesn’t act, Trump could sue his own administration again for some other imagined slight, order his underlings to settle, and draw new funds for whatever program or patronage system he wants to implement. 

But while the slush fund is unimaginably dangerous, it’s equally unpopular.  Polling shows that even a majority of Republican voters oppose it. The fund is so unpopular that it spurred a backlash on Capitol Hill and caused the GOP’s reconciliation bill to stall in the Senate last week. Vulnerable Republicans in Congress know that Trump’s corruption will be a liability in the midterms -- we need to keep up the pressure and make them act, if not for loyalty to their oaths of office, then in a desperate bid for political survival. 

Congress will be back in session on Monday. Let’s make sure when they return, their inboxes are flooded with demands to shut down Trump’s corrupt slush fund.

Email your Members of Congress

If you’ve already emailed your Members of Congress, you can drive the message home by calling as well. Click here to call your representative's office and then contact your senators here.

In solidarity,
Indivisible Team

P.S. -- Today, a federal judge temporarily halted payouts while legal challenges against the fund move through the courts. This is good news, but we still need Congress to act, and we need every Member of Congress on the record supporting or opposing the Trump regime’s corruption.

Email your Members of Congress and tell them to block Trump’s corrupt slush fund for insurrectionists.

 

Lawsuit could block Illinois' FOID law

 

The lawsuit, filed by the New Civil Liberties Alliance in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, targets the state's Firearm Owners Identification (FOID) Act. The case, Laurent v. Kelly, argues that requiring citizens to obtain and carry a state-issued ID to simply own firearms violate Second and Fourteenth Amendment rights. [1, 2]

The Plaintiffs

Christopher Laurent (Navy Veteran) & Kim Dalton (Chicago Restaurateur): Both wish to keep firearms in their homes for self-defense but refuse to apply for FOID cards, arguing Americans should not have to seek government permission to exercise a constitutional right.

Justin Tucker: Holds a valid FOID card but objects to the mandate that requires him to physically carry it on his person whenever he is in possession of a firearm or ammunition. [1]

The Legal Challenge

The Core Argument: The lawsuit contends that Illinois and Massachusetts are the only two states that require a government-issued license to possess any type of firearm. The NCLA argues this "show your papers" mandate is an unconstitutional barrier to a fundamental right.

Second & Fourteenth Amendments: The suit alleges that the FOID law burdens residents with securing government approval before they are legally allowed to exercise their right to bear arms.

The Defendants: The lawsuit targets top state and county officials, including Illinois State Police Director Brendan F. Kelly, Attorney General Kwame Raoul, and Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O'Neill Burke. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Next Steps and Potential Impacts

Plaintiffs are seeking an injunction to block the enforcement of the FOID law entirely across the state. If the federal court rules in favor of the plaintiffs, it could invalidate a licensing system that has been on the books since 1968. State officials are expected to respond, and the case could ultimately be appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

-Lawsuit could block Illinois' FOID law | The Chicago Report

 

Trump's Next Big Lie

 

The war Donald Trump started with Iran in February is now collapsing, slowly and predictably, into the same theater of fraud he’s run his entire life. So get ready for the next Big Lie: it’s coming as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow morning.

Three months in, his bombing campaign has done less damage than he claims, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, gas is pushing five bucks a gallon, his own Pentagon admits Iran’s nuclear program was only set back a few years rather than “completely obliterated,” and the negotiations he’s been bragging about in Islamabad are, by Iran’s own foreign ministry’s careful phrasing, simultaneously “very far and very close” to a deal.

Translation: there is no deal and it’s unlikely there will be one anytime soon, at least on terms Trump can honestly defend. And so, just as Wall Street learned to call his serial lies, bluffs, and retreats on tariffs the “TACO trade” — Trump Always Chickens Out — we’re about to watch the wartime version of the same play.

He’ll declare “Total Victory” (complete with the caps), the billionaire-owned right-wing media will trumpet it as the greatest foreign policy triumph since Yalta, and the rest of us will be expected to swallow this newest Big Lie and just shut up about it.

But a brutal reality is still there, even if the White House won’t acknowledge it. Under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that Obama signed in 2015, Iran shipped 98 percent of its enriched uranium out of the country, capped enrichment at 3.67 percent (what was needed for their one nuclear power plant), dismantled thousands of its most advanced centrifuges, redesigned the Arak reactor so it couldn’t produce weapons-grade plutonium, and accepted IAEA cameras and inspectors at every nuclear facility on its soil.

The deal pushed Iran’s breakout time back hard and was verified by international inspectors who reported to the world every ninety days. Trump stupidly tore it up in 2018 because Black President “Barack Hussein Obama” had negotiated it, and within three years Iran was enriching to 20 percent and barring inspectors.

Then Trump bombed the sites he himself had freed Iran to build, and now he’s trying to negotiate his way back to something resembling what Obama already had, except he doesn’t have the leverage Obama had, because he’s shown the world he’d rather bomb than talk and he’s already used up so many of our munitions that it’s become a crisis for the Pentagon.

As a result, what he’ll come up with, if he comes up with anything, will be a fraction of the JCPOA dressed up in red, white, and blue bunting and sold to the rubes as a miracle produced by a “true genius.” Just ask any of his Cabinet members, who spend one in every six sentences during their “Apprentice” TV meetings slobbering over how wonderful, strong, and manly Trump is.

On February 29, 2020, in Doha, Trump’s envoy Zalmay Khalilzad signed a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban that excluded the elected Afghan government entirely, freed 5,000 violent Taliban fighters from prison, and set a hard deadline of May 1, 2021, for full American withdrawal.

If Hillary Clinton has put together such as surrender on the Taliban’s terms, we would’ve had hearings for a decade, but the GOP pretended it wasn’t happening. Biden inherited that contract, extended the deadline by a few months, and got blamed for the wreckage Trump had wired to explode.

The pattern’s identical to what we’re watching now with Iran: Trump makes a catastrophic decision, walks away, and either he or his Fox “News” chorus blames the cleanup crew. This time, since Trump’s in the White House instead of Biden, my bet is he’ll find a way to blame Whiskey Pete or maybe his Joint Chiefs.

Now layer NATO on top. While the Iran war drags on and the Strait of Hormuz stays closed, Trump’s been quietly gutting the most successful peacekeeping military alliance in human history. He’s already pulled 5,000 troops out of Germany and is threatening deeper cuts in Spain and Italy.

Most recently, his envoy Alexander Velez-Green told NATO allies behind closed doors that the U.S. will slash its fighter jet commitment to the alliance by a third, withdraw destroyers from NATO’s naval pool, and pull every single American submarine out of European waters. This is a major disaster for the alliance, as these American military assets are irreplaceable over the short term.

The single biggest beneficiary of every one of these moves, without exception, is Vladimir Putin. The Butcher of Moscow now watches the alliance built to contain him hollowed out by an American president whose family business was, according to investigative journalism by Craig Unger, kept solvent through the 1980s and 1990s by what amounted to billions in today’s dollars from Russian organized crime laundering money through Trump real estate after Donald had bankrupted himself repeatedly.

Now he’s bankrupting the rest of us, taking the nation down with him, with economists around the world predicting a severe recession or even a second Republican Great Depression. America is the newest version of Trump University, Trump Steaks, and the Trump Casinos.

We don’t need to draw a complicated chart to see what’s happening, this treason in plain sight, and neither do the leaders of the world’s other countries. Look at the foreign policy moves and ask one question: “Who benefits?”

— An Iran war that goes nowhere and leaves Tehran’s mullahs in charge? Russia and China both win, because the U.S. is bogged down and gas prices spike.
— This insane NATO drawdown? Putin wins, openly and obviously.
— Cruelly abandoning Ukraine? Putin.
— Trashing USAID and creating the conditions for the Ebola outbreak now spreading through East Africa? China expands its influence into the void.
— Killing the Voice of America and shuttering Radio Free Europe? Putin and Xi both throw parties.

Meanwhile the Trump family is taking a $400 million 747 from Qatar, cutting $2 billion crypto deals with the UAE, and pocketing additional billions from the Saudis. Every single move on the international chessboard either lines Trump’s pockets, advances Putin’s interests, or both. This man Eisenhower would have called a traitor and Reagan would have called an obvious Russian asset is now running the country after having seized control of the party those two built.

Most Americans are watching this with a growing sense of helpless horror — the deconstruction of USAID, the killing of Voice of America, the abandonment of allies, the protection rackets dressed up as diplomacy, the construction of hundreds of concentration camps, the lies stacked on lies, the arming and masking of lawless thugs who’re literally killing American citizens, the self-dealing grift — and the Republican Party, the party of Eisenhower and Reagan and even the patrician George H.W. Bush, can’t find ten senators willing to stand up and say “enough.”

Republican senators and members of Congress know what’s happening. They know who Trump is really working for. Many have even said so, albeit before Trump had power. They’ve read the same intelligence we have, but they say nothing because they’re afraid of a primary challenge funded by the same billionaires who’re profiting from the wreckage.

So, get ready. The Big Lie about Iran is coming, and it’s going to be loud. Trump will declare a “total and complete victory” he didn’t win, just as he declared one he didn’t win in 2020. Hegseth will hold a Pentagon presser and tell us, as he already has, that America won “a capital-V victory” and Fox “News” will run the chyron in bright red.

The rest of the press, terrified of Trump’s lawsuits, his FCC, and his street thugs (who he’s now trying to pay off), will increasingly fall in line.

And the truth — that Trump started a war he couldn’t win, lost it, walked away with less than Obama had a decade ago, gutted NATO in the process, and handed Putin his greatest geopolitical prize since the fall of the Berlin Wall — will be told only by writers and reporters operating outside the captured corporate press.

Which is why what you do next matters. Call your senator and your representative through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them you expect them to demand congressional oversight of any Iran deal Trump signs, to defend NATO and stop his military hardware withdrawal, and to investigate the financial ties between Trump’s family and the foreign governments he’s enriching.

Find your state legislators at openstates.org and make sure they’re on record. Register everyone you know to vote at vote.org, because the 2026 midterms are now the firewall. If you can support independent journalism — including this newsletter — please do so, and please share this piece widely. The billionaire-owned media won’t tell the truth about what Trump is about to claim. That job falls to us.

-Thom Hartmann

Help keep billionaires out of newsrooms

Like so many of this newsletter’s readers, Louise and I have children and grandchildren who’ll inherit the consequences of this man’s foreign policy, so when we watch him repeat the same pattern across continent after continent it doesn’t feel like ordinary political disagreement. It feels like watching someone systematically dismantle the country they’ll grow up in.

P.S. Consider Afghanistan. Trump blamed the chaotic exit from Kabul in August 2021 on Joe Biden because Biden was the one in the chair when the helicopters lifted off, but the deal that forced that timeline was Trump’s.

 

"As Trump becomes more unhinged and reckless, more people and players will discover their backbones"

The second Trump presidency has proved beyond doubt that cowardice is contagious. A blustering, mentally unstable bully has cowed powerful law firms, giant media companies, venerated universities and mighty tech billionaires. And Congress. Where there should have been challenge, there has been timid acquiescence from Republicans who depend on his patronage. Barely a muffled squeak of protest or questioning.     

After 250 years of independence, this is where we are.

This past week has shown Trump at his most mind-blowingly corrupt – confident in the knowledge that America is now a land with few of the checks and balances supposedly put in place by the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. And yet it is just possible that a few worms have begun to turn.

Let’s start with this week’s staggering act of corruption. Trump, as president, sued his own Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for an astonishing $10bn over the leak of his personal tax records. It was the ultimate art of the deal: Trump facing himself across the courtroom table. There could only be one winner. And – surprise! – Trump won. Not in actual court – why risk a judge, even if he has many of those in his pocket? No, instead, he reached a settlement with himself. The deal Trump thrashed out with Trump was to create a $1.8bn political slush fund, supposedly to compensate anyone who had been a victim of government “lawfare”.

Trump’s acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, wouldn’t rule out the possibility that 1,600 rioters at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, would receive payouts. That could include those convicted of assaulting police officers. The fund will be administered by a panel, which Trump will effectively control. The money was soon dubbed “stupid on stilts” and “payout for punks”. 

Blanche, who obviously relies on Trump’s patronage to secure his position, went further by granting Trump and his family virtual immunity from any kind of investigation into his financial affairs. The United States – under President Trump – agrees that it is “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” President Trump, his eldest sons or any of their businesses. The agreement covers matters “whether presently known or unknown” and cases that “have been or could have been asserted” by the government.

The document which Trump signed this week will prevent any cases against the Trumps by the IRS or other agencies or departments. That seems to mean that the Justice Department is also barred from ever charging the Trumps with other crimes.

Trump’s Supreme Court had already granted immunity for the president for any “official” actions while in office. He now has civil immunity. The law, as one observer commented this week, has become adapted to the man. A New York Times editorial was headlined. “There Has Never Been an Example of Presidential Corruption Like This.”

But this was just one story in a week of grotesqueries. The US media barely had the bandwidth to fully explore Trump’s revelation that his big, beautiful ballroom is effectively the cherry on top of a massive six-story underground bunker-cum-military complex with its own hospital and bomb and bio-defense shelters. He wants to add the estimated $1bn cost onto an immigration enforcement bill.

Simultaneously – and by no means coincidentally – Trump has been whacking any Republicans who have shown less than total loyalty to him. Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky had questioned Trump’s policy on Iran and demanded the release of sensitive Epstein files. So, Trump ended his career this week by endorsing a rival.

In Louisiana, Trump actively campaigned against Senator Bill Cassidy, who had voted to impeach the president over the January 6 riot. So Cassidy is now toast. The same fate befell the Georgia official who couldn’t “find” the 11,780 extra votes to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in that state. And, in Texas, Senator John Cornyn is doomed for being insufficiently loyal. Offering to rename a 1,800-mile highway “The Trump Interstate” was not enough to save his skin. The president has endorsed a rival.

If it all feels a bit Tony Soprano, that’s because it is. “I don’t know what’s with him,” Trump said this week of a GOP representative who voted to end the war in Iran. “He likes voting against Trump. You know what happens with that… doesn’t work out well.”

But Trump knows that, come November’s midterms, the Republicans are almost certain to lose the House. So, he’s six months left in which to behave as lawlessly as he likes – and no one’s getting in his way. Or are they? It’s just possible that Trump has gone too far this week and that the people he has contemptuously treated like voting fodder have had enough.

The thing about January 6 is that it was a terrifying attack on the very people Trump now needs. Multiple representatives thought they were about to die or be taken hostage. Some whispered final goodbyes to their loved ones; others quietly removed their congressional pins so they wouldn’t be targeted in the hallways by the rampaging mob.

So, when Todd Blanche turned up at the Capitol on Thursday to drum up support for Trump’s $1.8bn slush fund, which could be used to compensate those convicted of violent crimes on January 6, he, the acting attorney general, had a rough ride from Republicans. Blanche reportedly came in for withering questioning and criticism from incredulous lawmakers.

“So, the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops?” said Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky. “Utterly stupid, morally wrong – take your pick.”

At the same time, Senate Republicans refused to hand over the money for the “ballroom” project, and House Republicans cancelled a vote on a resolution on the war in Iran (remember that?). GOP lawmakers are said to bitterly resent Trump’s mafia-style approach to disposing of his perceived enemies.

So, finally, the unthinkable happened. The Senate refused Trump his money. On Thursday, they closed up shop and went home. A pattern is developing. Harvard fought rather than folded. The universities which moved quickly to appease Trump now look weak, isolated or permanently vulnerable to further demands. The elite law firms which defied Trump’s extortionate claims now bask in public approval, while the firms which struck deals with Trump look like shabby stooges.

As Trump becomes more unhinged and reckless, more people and players will discover their backbones. This week may have been the week defiance began to look stronger than accommodation. Trump’s spell may finally have been broken.

- By Alan Rusbridger, Newsbreak

 

"It’s important that we speak plainly about where we are and where our country is right now"

Memorial Day feels very somber this year. It’s hard to avoid the obvious question—what would your family member who fought for the U.S. against Hitler, against Mussolini, against Japan in World War II think about handing over the keys to the country to Donald Trump? Did they serve so Trump could line his own pocketbook and those of family members? So, he could tear down the East Wing of the White House to build a ballroom with ever-changing justifications? So, he could start a war with Iran in which American lives were lost, and for what?

All important questions. Questions that anyone who supports Trump should be forced to answer as we honor the people who served. Memorial Day is dedicated to mourning and honoring military personnel who died while serving in our Armed Forces, the people Trump has called “suckers” and “losers”. It’s hard for me to imagine a veteran who would believe that Trump’s authoritarian, self-serving approach to government is the right path for this country.

...I know what my grandfather’s answer would have been—he would have been out on the streets protesting from the get-go, a proud Navy veteran who imparted his love for this country to his children and grandchildren. We’ll be honoring him on Monday as we gather with friends and family. He would have found lots of reasons to celebrate America, even in this difficult season, including these two goofy dogs who he would have loved and this gorgeous cake one of his granddaughters made for the weekend. 

Even as you enjoy yourself over the long weekend, don’t be afraid to ask people the hard questions, like how would the people we honor on Memorial Day have viewed Donald Trump? It may make people uncomfortable. But that’s better than giving a pass to the president who wants to use taxpayer money to reward people who fomented an insurrection to try and keep him in office after he lost an election. It’s important that we speak plainly about where we are and where our country is right now.

We’re in this together,

-Joyce Vance

 

“Democracy must be defended at all costs..."

 

…“Democracy must be defended at all costs, for democracy makes all this possible,” former President Joe Biden said in a 2021 Memorial Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery. “Democracy — that’s the soul of America, and I believe it’s a soul worth fighting for, and so do you; a soul worth dying for. Heroes who lie in eternal peace in this beautiful place, this sacred place, they believed that, too.”

Throughout his presidency, Biden spoke out on the growing threat to democracy not just at home but also worldwide. After his remarks about this in 2023, the Atlantic Council’s John E. Herbst called it a “bravura moment.”

It’s difficult to imagine President Donald Trump saying or deeply believing these things, given his history of trashing U.S. prisoners of war (“I like people who weren’t captured”) and praising authoritarian leaders. The Contrarian has covered his own authoritarian instincts. 

But that doesn’t mean the dangers to democracy are only coming from the right. “Today’s political violence is occurring across the political spectrum — and there is a corresponding rise in public support for it on both the right and the left,” Robert A. Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, wrote in the New York Times last year. “The political goal that matters most,” he added, “is what has always been the driving force in America’s democracy: free elections — free from intimidation and interference — and the freedom of elected leaders to legally enact the people’s will.”

In September, the Center for Strategic and International Studies said 2025 marked “the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing terrorist attacks outnumber those from the violent far right.” And the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) reports that:

“Those students who are the furthest to the left have been the most accepting of violence for as long as we’ve asked the question. That includes very liberal and democratic socialist students. But a rising tide of acceptance of violence has raised all boats. Now, regardless of party or ideology, students across the board are more open to violence as a way to shut down a speaker… Violence is antithetical to free speech, and political violence is wholly incompatible with — and toxic to — democracy.”

Commitment to democracy itself “appears to be waning by generation,” the Charles F. Kettering Foundation reported. Its survey showed that “80% of adults aged 65 and older say democracy is the best form of government, compared with just 53% of those aged 18 to 29.”

It’s partly a result of young people raised on memetic warfare pouring into their phones. The recent Global Terrorism Index, from the Institute for Economics & Peace, reported on jihadist groups radicalizing adolescents toward glorification of mass violence. The effort is “designed to delegitimize democratic statehood” and erode social cohesion, the report said.

Many Americans want to work together to solve all this. To do so, we need to start with facts. I often liken our situation to a team of doctors trying to help a sick patient. If they’re looking at different data, or X-rays of different patients entirely, they can’t cooperate and build solutions.

We need trustworthy sources of truth. But we don’t have them. Instead of helping people understand reality by sharing only fact-checked information, big news agencies are serving up a steady diet of rage bait. A study found that headlines are increasingly negative and focused on click-through rates “regardless of journalistic quality.” Another found that people who spend more time-consuming news are frequently more misinformed about their political opponents.

Fixing this requires a long-term effort. News agencies need to end the era of acting as stenographers for what people said. They should limit themselves to telling us what’s definitively true and how they know it. That could mean giving up short-term clicks, but in the long term it could mean winning back the many who have flocked away from following the news closely.

On Memorial Day, news agencies claim to venerate soldiers who risked, and in many cases sacrificed, their lives to protect our democracy. But these same agencies aren’t even willing to sacrifice short-term click rates to protect our democracy.

The mission is clear: Focus on truth. Demand that people on both sides of the aisle address it. Demand that they provide concrete solutions to our problems, instead of giving them “open mics” to attack each other constantly.

At this point, that’s a pie-in-the-sky hope for the legacy media. But those of us in new, independent media can take up the mantle. The mission doesn’t compare to the sacrifices of the fallen, but it’s crucial, nonetheless.

Josh Levs is host of They Stand Corrected, the podcast and newsletter fact-checking the media. Find him at joshlevs.com.

-The Contrarian

"European powers remind Americans that free people have agency to reject the siren call of nationalism, racism, isolationism, militarism, and authoritarianism"

Donald Trump doing a bang-up job weakening the U.S. by waging a counterproductive and illegal war, bending the knee to Russia and China, thwarting green energy investment, ballooning the debt, fostering unprecedented corruption and instability, hobbling international trade, stomping out dissent, persecuting enemies, attacking civil society, and corrupting the rule of law. His empty-handed return from the China summit after lavishing (unreciprocated) praise on China’s President Xi and throwing doubt on support for Taiwan reflects America’s decline.

We are in no sense leading the Free World. (Amazon founder and owner/destroyer of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos must be a shameless sycophant and an ignoramus if he thinks Trump is more “mature” than he was in his first term.)     

America’s claim to exceptionalism (built on its defense of a stable global order, generosity in humanitarian aid, and opposition to thugs) and its reputation for can-do optimism have been severely frayed under Trump. Across all political ideologies, Pew found: “Majorities of Black (66%), Hispanic (64%) and white adults (57%) say the country’s best years are behind us, as do 53% of Asian adults.” Frankly, their conclusion is not unreasonable. Unless we get off the MAGA freight train barreling toward irreversible decline and permanent chaos, America’s future will be bleak.

Given the betrayal by the U.S. and the threats from Russia and China, the EU deserves more recognition for upholding democratic values and at least partially filling the vacuum created by Trump’s retreat from reality. As Matthias Matthijs and Nathalie Tocci write, Trump’s erratic, aggressive, and unhinged behavior “has jolted European leaders into working more effectively as a bloc and taking stronger action to shore up their own defense, trade, energy security, and democratic resilience.”

The authors urge European leaders to build on the anti-Trump backlash to craft a pro-democracy agenda that includes proposals to “strengthen the rule of law, protect European borders while remaining open to regular immigration, continue to boost the continent’s defense, pursue greater energy security by transitioning from fossil fuels and diversifying their energy sources, and seek economic renewal through significantly higher investment and deeper single-market integration.”

This week, EU leaders managed to clear the way for a trade deal with the U.S. to accompany their own bilateral deals with other trading partners (e.g. Mexico, India). While Trump has abandoned the idea that we prosper when we support a free trade network, the EU has created its own parallel free trade agreements, leaving Trump to flail and America to lose markets.

European powers’ most impressive accomplishment may be its consistent support for Ukraine. Unlike Trump, they have not abandoned Ukraine nor forced it toward capitulation. 

The EU’s steadiness has allowed Ukraine to gain ground and further batter Russia. Trump picked the losing side (Russia), while European powers stuck with Ukraine, which has established drone superiority and become arguably the most potent military force in Europe.

America under Trump is becoming the dispensable nation.

The contrast between the U.S. under Trump and European powers could not be more vivid. America may be in an authoritarian tailspin, but European countries, as historian Anne Applebaum recently noted, have adhered to “the rule of law, the separation of powers, judicial independence, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the idea that governments are accountable to citizens.”  While Trump genuflects to Russia and China, runs roughshod over democratic institutions, and systematically destroys our international reputation, we can be relieved that those democratic attributes continue to flourish somewhere on the planet. We should not be surprised that as Trump and his ilk have followed Putin’s model of deriding the EU and showing disdain for their liberal values. 

The endurance and success of democratic allies that Trump has abused no doubt rankles him. As Applebaum recalled: “At a speech in Munich last February, the American Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, declared that America and Europe are bound together not by values, not by a commitment to democracy, but by Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry—by blood, soil, DNA and the distant past, in other words, not the present or future.” Applebaum noted that Rubio, like Vladimir Putin, baselessly denigrated “modern Europe as a continent overwhelmed by migrants, crime, and decay.”

Vice President JD Vance joined the chorus and accused Europe of “civilizational suicide” by letting in too many immigrants. In words that thrill neo-Nazis (and echo the original ones), he insisted that you just can’t allow “culturally incompatible” immigrants come into an Aryan German country. (Does he know the U.S. became the world’s most powerful and prosperous nation after taking in 10. 4 million immigrants between 1861 and 1890, another 14.5M between 1900 and 1924, and 70M since 1965?)

MAGA disdain for Europe is remarkable, considering they claim to be saviors of “Western civilization,” the intellectual and cultural heritage of Europe. 

They fawn over cathedrals and cultural contributions, but are unremittingly hostile to Europe’s liberal political traditions being incorporated into our political DNA. MAGA cultists, not left-leaning Democrats, threaten to undermine the most significant achievements of Western civilization (e.g., respect for the individual, tolerance, rejection of absolute monarchy).

To be certain, the EU has its problems (e.g., productivity, the rise of antisemitism) but it must be doing something right if its violent crime rate is a fraction of the U.S., its people live longer, and 7 of the 10 happiest countries in the world are EU members.

In short, the EU is punching above its weight. We should salute European leaders who have steered clear of Trump’s illegal war, defended Ukraine against bullies in the Kremlin and the White House, stood up for human rights (whether in Kyiv or Gaza), continued to advance clean energy, and refused to give AI and tech billionaires free rein to invade their people’s privacy and manipulate them through opaque algorithms.

European powers remind Americans that free people have agency to reject the siren call of nationalism, racism, isolationism, militarism, and authoritarianism. Refusing to capitulate to Trump’s demands or cower from his bullying, the EU has remained undaunted and courageous in upholding humane, democratic, tolerant, and fact-based government at home while supporting a rules-based order internationally.

We should be rooting (as the world rooted for Britain before the U.S. entered WWII) for the countries that bequeathed us Western civilization to prosper, innovate, and thrive. The EU cannot replace the U.S., but it deserves high praise for stepping into the breach when America lost its bearings.

-Jennifer Rubin, The Contrarian is community-supported. Help celebrate the undaunted while funding bold journalism and critical lawsuits to stop Trump’s corruption by becoming a paid subscriber. Join the fight now.

"The president will now have the power to legislate and the power to appropriate?"

 

Does anyone else remember the kerfuffle over the Trump International Hotel in Washington from early in the first Trump administration? The hotel was located in the Old Post Office building, a federal property that the Trump Organization had leased in 2013 and continued to lease after Donald Trump became president. The idea that the president would benefit privately from an arrangement with an agency over which he had authority was scandalous, and we all got a nice little civics lesson on the emoluments clause of the Constitution.

That all feels a bit quaint in hindsight. On Monday, Trump settled a $10 billion lawsuit he had filed against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns in 2019. Under the settlement, the Department of Justice established a $1.776 billion fund “to issue formal apologies and monetary relief” to those “who suffered weaponization and lawfare.” While the terms of the settlement dictate that neither Trump nor any of his family members can benefit, he has broad control over who does. If that sounds a little funny to you, or you’re wondering who might be on the receiving end of our tax dollars, let Kevin D. Williamson explain:

Donald Trump has sued the Donald Trump administration over alleged wrongdoing by the Donald Trump administration, and an out-of-court settlement between Donald Trump and the Donald Trump administration will have Donald Trump’s DOJ ponying up the better part of $2 billion to be put into a fund controlled by Donald Trump and used for the benefit of—let’s check in here with dead-eyed White House trash panda J.D. Vance—“people who voted for Donald Trump and participated in the January 6th protests.”

On Tuesday, a day after the fund was announced, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche—Trump’s former personal lawyer—issued an addendum to the settlement banning the IRS from ever auditing the past tax returns of Trump, his family, or their businesses. In Boiling Frogs, Nick Catoggio had some thoughts on that:

One might assume that a taxpayer-funded payday for criminals wouldn’t look worse as details emerged, the concept already being as rotten as rotten gets. One would be wrong. For instance, did you know that the part of the settlement that bars the IRS from proceeding with any pending audits of the president’s tax returns might be worth more than $100 million to him? Trump, a billionaire, paid a total of $750 in income tax in 2016 and $750 again in 2017. The taxman will henceforth take no notice of that fact. Did you also know that, under federal law, the only official empowered to ask the IRS to terminate an audit is the attorney general? That was a problem for Trump in this case, per Andy McCarthy: Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche used to be the president’s personal defense lawyer, and lawyers are supposed to recuse themselves in cases pitting their current client against a former one. Blanche had an obvious conflict of interest. He ignored it and nuked Trump’s tax audits anyway.

Is there any way that any of this is legal? For that we turn to Sarah Isgur and David French at Advisory Opinions. On Thursday’s episode, they run through the ways that the settlement could possibly pass legal muster. Sarah starts by asking what, exactly, the agreement is. Is it a settlement to Trump, who sued as a private citizen? Is it a class action lawsuit? Or is it money for “future claimants”? Those could all potentially be legal under certain circumstances, they agree. But they also agree that none of those circumstances reflect what is going on with this weaponization fund. And Sarah shares an even bigger concern about the long-term consequences:

This to me feels like, if we've already ended the legislative power of Congress and handed that over to the president in the form of, you know, government by executive action and how bad that has been for the country in the last 15 years, this is the end of the power of the purse. The president will now have the power to legislate and the power to appropriate? We're done.

-Rachael Larimore, Dispatch Weekly