“This ban could not be a more direct assault on the First Amendment, nor a more blatant violation of our most fundamental constitutional principles”

 

September 18, while White House chief of staff Susie Wiles was out of town, Trump suddenly announced he was banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House. “Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America,” Trump wrote. “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose deep unpopularity means he is likely eager to curry favor with Trump, promptly posted that the Defense Department fully supported Trump’s decision. He claimed that the same outlets, which recently have reported that Russia has been helping Iran target U.S. troops and that the Defense Department has not fully accounted for deaths of service members or destruction of U.S. military bases, “endangered our troops with false stories, leaks, and trafficked in fiction and lies about the President, our Warriors, and their mission.”

The next day, reporters from those outlets attempting to enter the White House complex where the press facilities are located were denied entry, and Secret Service agents confiscated their press badges. On Sunday afternoon, Trump posted an image of three full black trash bags, labeled “CNN,” “MSNBC,” and “Politico,” outside the White House.

This morning, after the weekend’s backlash, he posted: “The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish. It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America. It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW!”

There’s that “national security” claim again: the same justification he’s using for building his ballroom and now his triumphal arch. It is also, not coincidentally, the excuse President Richard M. Nixon floated for covering up the Watergate break-in in June 1972.

In any case, no one’s buying it. MAGA Republicans have tried to claim that President Joe Biden cancelled 400 press passes. In fact, in 2023 the Biden administration tightened the rules to get a “hard” press pass that allows repeated, unaccompanied access to the press area of the White House. To have one, a reporter had to renew it annually, be employed full-time as a reporter, have a Washington, D.C., area address, and have had recent access to the White House. With that change, the number of White House hard passes fell from 1,417 to 975 because many of those who held passes didn’t reapply. Those people could still get day passes. In any event, these changes regarded individual reporters, not entire media outlets. The Biden White House did not identify the one journalist whose hard pass application was denied.

Today CNN, MS NOW, and Politico sued Trump, Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung, Secret Service director Sean Curran, and White House chief of staff Wiles for violating both the Fifth and the First Amendments. 

“This ban could not be a more direct assault on the First Amendment, nor a more blatant violation of our most fundamental constitutional principles,” the lawsuit says. It says Trump banned the outlets and the reporters to retaliate against the reporters for their past news coverage “because he deemed it ‘negative’ and chilling future reporting about him and his administration’s policies and actions.” They are suing for the restoration of their press credentials for their coverage of the White House.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, appointed by Trump to the bench in 2017, was assigned the case. Although Trump appointed Kelly, in 2018, the judge ruled that Trump’s revoking of journalist Jim Acosta’s hard press pass likely violated his due process rights. Trump groused that the news outlets “have drawn a great Judge, for them, a man who ruled in favor of Jim Acosta.” Apparently anticipating a loss, he has already vowed to appeal.

He ranted that journalists were demeaning the Oval Office by reporting negative stories about him. “Virtually every story about me, or anything having to do with me, is negative, wrong and, in many cases, DANGEROUS for our Country! No matter how GREAT my Achievements, they trivialize and demean,” he posted. “I have an obligation to fight for the Success and Safety of our Country. FAKE NEWS IS A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY, and I will do whatever is necessary to make sure that the U.S.A. thrives.”

Podcaster Allison Gill noted that Judge Kelly ordered the government to respond to the lawsuit by tomorrow, and that he has set a hearing for Wednesday afternoon at 3:30. Perhaps of even more concern to Trump is that the major news networks are refusing to cover him on television, starving him of media oxygen.

ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NBC News take turns providing the television coverage of the president, and CNN was supposed to be in charge of the TV pool today. With CNN banned, the other networks refused to take its place, leaving television coverage of Trump suspended. A.J. Katz of The Wrap reported on their joint statement, in which they said: “The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”

This afternoon, Trump held an event at the White House, but without a press pool, there was no audio. It was just footage of Trump standing with a group of people and apparently talking. The White House advertised “The White House App” on social media, claiming users could “[g]et real-time updates and live events streamed DIRECTLY to your phone. No noise. Just the news that matters most—straight from the Trump Administration. DOWNLOAD NOW,” it said.

Users were not kind. One commented: “I’d rather launch my phone into the sun than install a government propaganda app.” Others noted that the administration is eager to get its hands on user information, and only a fool would install what could be spyware on their phone. Peter Alexander of MS NOW had his own response to Trump’s attacks on the press: “This is not normal. This is not business as usual,” he said.

“What’s happening right now is different. The latest threat against our cherished freedoms protected by the U.S. Constitution. The media is not perfect. There’s a debate to be had about who you trust, where you should get your news.

“This is something bigger, though. Among the privileges, the duties of a free press, are to hold power to account, to ask the difficult questions, to document history as it happens. The president says fake news is reporting that is untrue. In fact, it’s reporting that he finds unflattering.

“And here’s the reality. A little more than seven weeks until the midterms, many of the facts are unflattering. Where to begin? Gas prices, now $4.48 a gallon on average, $1.50 more than where they were before the war with Iran began. Ask farmers about the price of diesel, now at a record high, nearly $6.50 a gallon.

“All of it due to a war the president started, a war he vowed would be done within weeks but is now in its seventh month. Eighteen American service members dead, if not more, and that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.

“A trade war with Canada, an obsession with the Kennedy Center, if it’s not demolished like the East Wing, then there’s the grift, the self-dealing, a Russian oligarch paying for Trump’s son’s wedding party, billions of dollars made by the Trump family.

“Those are the facts. They may be unflattering, but they are not fake.

“I’ve been there since the beginning. Trump’s frustration, this fury, it didn’t happen overnight. On the campaign trail, I remember, before he even took office, he would yell at us in the bullpen in the back of those large rallies, riling up the MAGA crowd. Once elected, he would insult reporters to their face—I’ve been there—and he would call journalists the enemy of the people. As one of my former colleagues described it, Trump is trying to discredit the messenger, to create a vacuum where his version of reality fills that void.

“But the answer from journalists is simple. To report more, with more sources, more digging, more facts.” Trump has his own answer. The White House YouTube channel announced this afternoon that at 7:00 tonight it will launch “TRUMP TV: The Essentials Station.”

—Heather Cox Richardson

 

The FBI Anti-Corruption Squad Was Circling Susan Collins — Until Trump Got in the Way

 

In the final weeks of 2019, a top fundraiser for Sen. Susan Collins walked into a perilous meeting at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C. For the first time in her two-decade Senate career, the Republican lawmaker from Maine was in danger of losing her seat. Donald Trump’s dismal approval ratings were dragging her down in the polls, and she was falling behind her likely 2020 Democratic challenger in fundraising.

Scott Reed, head of the Collins super PAC, was on a mission to close that gap. Reed was meeting that day with three executives from a Hawaiian defense contractor, Navatek. A year earlier, Collins had helped their company land a multimillion-dollar Navy research contract in Maine. Now, seated at a coffee shop not far from the U.S. Capitol, Reed asked them for a $500,000 donation.

Government contractors are banned from making political contributions. More consequentially, for the company to offer donations to Collins in exchange for an official action, or for Collins to accept, would constitute criminal bribery.

But the company did have such a proposal: Navatek was hungry for more government contracts in Maine. If they cut a big check, the CEO told Reed, Navatek wanted Collins to guarantee tens of millions of dollars in additional federal funding.

To skirt campaign finance laws and conceal the source of the funds, Navatek planned to funnel the donation through a shell company. The CEO wanted assurance that Collins would know where the money came from. Reed confirmed that she would, the executive said — and that Navatek would get its government contracts.

After the Corner Bakery meeting, Navatek’s CEO, Martin Kao, sent an initial $150,000 to the Collins super PAC using the shell company. Two months later, he told Navatek executives that Collins committed to getting the company $32 million in naval contracts, according to an internal company email reviewed by ProPublica.

Three years later, Kao holed up in a conference room to recount the Corner Bakery meeting to a group of four FBI agents and federal prosecutors. The FBI had seen through his shell company ruse, and in 2022 a grand jury indicted him for making illegal campaign contributions. No one working for Collins was charged. Facing years in prison, Kao hoped to do less time by revealing the entire scheme.

What he told them has never before become public. The Corner Bakery meeting, he asserted, was just one episode in a sprawling pay-to-play operation that embroiled some of the most powerful figures in Congress.

Over three days at the U.S. attorney’s office in Honolulu, Kao laid out in devastating detail how his operation worked. He gave agents a 50-page document naming dozens of lobbyists, congressional staffers and members of Congress who he said helped him trade cash for contracts. Kao and his close associates had donated nearly $900,000 to dozens of politicians, allowing Navatek to establish operations in half a dozen states with over $40 million a year in government funding.

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We’re still reporting on pay-for-play arrangements between powerful companies and elected officials.

William Turton

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Most damningly, Kao told FBI agents and prosecutors, the company’s work for the government was of no real value. Navatek’s research under his stewardship never resulted in products the military wanted to buy, ProPublica found.

Kao’s tell-all interviews with the FBI lasted into late 2024. His confessions opened up an entirely new phase of the investigation. Agents sifted through hundreds of thousands of records seized during Kao’s arrest and found that many were consistent with his account of widespread influence peddling.

Kao had credibility issues. He was now a felon trying to avoid a lengthy prison sentence. And there were other challenges. Building a corruption case against elected officials requires extraordinary proof of a quid pro quo arrangement, in part because the Supreme Court has narrowed what counts as bribery.

Even so, by the end of 2024, the agents had enough evidence to pursue a sweeping bribery probe that could ensnare top lawmakers of both political parties. 

They asked their supervisors to approve a new investigation and contemplated using undercover operatives to gather more evidence. Although their effort was in its early stages, and it was unclear where it would lead, FBI agents asked Kao extensive questions about his dealings with Collins and her office.

Then Trump returned to the White House. Consumed by a campaign of vengeance, he stacked the Department of Justice with his personal lawyers and demanded a purge of anyone who had ever investigated him. The specialized FBI and DOJ teams handling public corruption investigations, some of which were involved in Trump-related cases, were eviscerated. 

One of the agents who had taken Kao’s confession was pushed out as retribution for her role in investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Dozens of agents and prosecutors quit amid the department’s destruction, including the career attorney assigned to Kao’s case.

Trump’s Justice Department no longer takes on public corruption in any meaningful fashion, former officials said. The investigation sparked by Kao’s revelations is dead. And the government is no longer talking to an informant who had offered a road map to corruption in Congress.

The White House referred ProPublica to the FBI.

FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson said the agency had investigated claims against Collins years ago “and ultimately found nothing implicating Senator Collins or Senator Collins’ campaign. Any suggestion otherwise is totally false.” Williamson said the Trump administration has removed agents only “if they have been found to have acted unethically, undermined the mission, or engaged in weaponization of law enforcement.”

Williamson did not respond to questions about the new investigation launched in 2024 based on Kao’s previously unreported cooperation with the FBI.

ProPublica is revealing the existence of the case for the first time. We reviewed a trove of evidence gathered by the FBI and thousands of pages of legal records, and interviewed dozens of people familiar with Navatek, its Washington operations, and the FBI inquiry to conduct our own investigation. We independently corroborated much of Kao’s account. Whether or not Kao’s dealings with politicians amount to criminal bribery, the Trump Justice Department has little interest in finding out, and his sheer success reveals how easily influence is purchased in Washington today. This is the first in a series of stories drawn from our reporting.

Of all the politicians Navatek courted under Kao’s leadership, Collins was its most important patron. The senator’s office steered government contracts worth millions toward the company while her campaign was pumping Kao and his network for donations, according to emails seen by ProPublica. Sometimes they cut checks within 24 hours of the annual defense spending bill, which funds military contracts, clearing a key Senate hurdle.

Collins’ office did not specifically address questions about the Corner Bakery meeting, the senator’s relationship with Kao and the millions she helped appropriate for Navatek.

Annie Clark, Collins’ deputy chief of staff, told ProPublica in an email that Collins’ office “vigorously” denies allegations of bribery and pay-for-play made by Kao, calling his claims “outlandish.” Collins’ campaign was not part of the discussions between Kao and the super PAC, and her office “fully cooperated” with the FBI investigation, Clark said.

“The fact that the FBI and Biden-led Department of Justice thoroughly examined the Navatek matter demonstrates this,” Clark wrote. “These issues were resolved in 2021 and concluded when the Collins campaign disgorged the illegal contributions that Martin Kao had made without our knowledge.”

Collins is once again fighting to keep her seat, in a race that could determine control of the Senate. On the campaign trail, she spotlights the funding she directs to Maine while leading the appropriations committee, which she calls “the most powerful committee in the Senate.”

She demonstrated that power with Navatek. After the budgets became law, Collins’ office pushed the Navy to award specific contracts to Navatek, emails seen by ProPublica show, even though awards are supposed to be competitive.

“I spoke with Sen. Collins office regarding the $8M,” a naval official wrote in an email on Feb. 6, 2019. “The interested company is Navatek.”

In a meeting with Collins and two campaign officials, Kao said, the officials told him the senator expected his ongoing support. Collins told him: “You’ve seen me deliver,” Kao said.

Reed knew Kao was behind the $150,000 anonymous donation, emails showed, because Kao told Reed he planned to donate through a shell company. “Very smart,” Reed replied in an email viewed by ProPublica.

Reed did not respond to detailed questions about the Corner Bakery meeting, the $150,000 donation and Kao’s allegations. “I understand Martin Kao is now sitting in federal prison,” Reed wrote in a brief email. “I never had any communications with Senator Collins [or] her staff about Martin Kao and/or Navatek.”

But an email seen by ProPublica suggests that someone must have relayed the news of Kao’s donation to Collins, just like Reed promised to do in Kao’s recounting of the Corner Bakery meeting. Seven days after the super PAC cashed the check from Kao’s shell company, one of Reed’s subordinates emailed a Navatek lobbyist asking for Kao’s phone number: “Senator Collins would like to call Martin to thank him.” […].

-ProPublica

by William Turton, Avi Asher-Schapiro, Molly Redden and Kirsten Berg

For the entire story:

FBI Eyed Susan Collins Over Defense Contractor’s Donations — ProPublica

"His conduct has surely desensitized Americans to some degree. But..."

 

Donald Trump’s personal behavior is often strange, his conduct over the last 12 days has been pretty remarkable — especially with the midterm election around the corner.

He’s offered voters what even some Republicans say amounts to a bribe. He’s threatened (jokingly?) to withhold disaster aid from a state if it doesn’t elect a GOP senator. Ahead of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, he told a dubious story about his proximity to Ground Zero. He’s baselessly suggested Democrats conspired to kill him. He’s threatened to halt all foreign trade. He’s holding the future of the Kennedy Center hostage if judges don’t allow him to put his name on it and says he wants his proposed 250-foot triumphal arch across Arlington National Cemetery to double as a military complex housing drones and snipers. He’s also now denying certain media outlets, including CNN, access to the White House.

One of the most underestimated reasons for the decline in Trump’s political fortunes is Americans’ loss of faith in his leadership capabilities. Polling in recent months has shown: 67% of Americans said he doesn’t carefully consider important decisions. 71% said he’s not “even-tempered.” And more than 7 in 10 adults and registered voters said he doesn’t even have a plan for the Iran war, according to both Fox News and CNN polling. And in the runup to the 2026 midterm elections, he’s doing very little to disabuse people of these notions.

Trump’s offer of $5,000 to every adult US citizen if Republicans keep their House and Senate majorities is certainly a quid pro quo. Registered voters say 66%-18% that it’s “inappropriate.”

His joke-y threat Wednesday to withhold disaster aid from North Carolina if it elects a Democratic senator is also eyebrow-raising. Trump said he was kidding, but his track record makes clear his administration has discriminated against blue states on such things. And it’s a pretty unfunny thing to even joke about.

His tale ahead of the 9/11 anniversary about firefighters carrying him away amid fears of a building collapse was unconfirmed and misleading at best, as CNN’s Daniel Dale wrote. And to the extent the story is embellished, it sounds a lot like the president stealing valor.

Trump also claimed this week that the 2024 assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pennsylvania, was “a Democrat Plot, to get me out of the Election” — an explosive claim, if there were any truth to it. But there remains no evidence that any Democrats were involved and he didn’t provide any more detail. Indeed, attempted assassin Thomas Crooks was a registered Republican.  And even the same day as Trump’s comments, FBI Director Kash Patel testified that there was “no evidence” that Crooks “was literally even speaking to any other human being other than his parents.”

Trump repeatedly threatened to halt large portions of US foreign trade — including with all countries with whom the US has a trade deficit — if the Federal Reserve doesn’t lower interest rates. “If we stop trading with every country that we have a deficit with, which is most of them, and which would be very easy to do, we’d make at least $1.5 trillion a year,” Trump claimed Wednesday in North Carolina. That logic makes no sense.

By Friday, Trump suddenly announced he was “banning” CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House “effective immediately,” catching even some of his own staff off guard. A CNN reporter was denied access to White House grounds Saturday morning, and her press pass was seized. A reporter for Politico and a reporter and photographer for MS NOW was also denied access.

Some of the other examples of Trump’s behavior are a little more small-bore, but curious, nonetheless.

Trump on Tuesday suggested the Supreme Court justices he nominated might have misrepresented their intentions, saying that they were “not the people I interviewed” and “are merely a shell of their original selves.” He broke with longstanding US foreign policy protocol by praising the prospect of the reunification of Ireland. He called concerns about AI safety a “hoax” despite large swaths of Americans being quite concerned about that topic.

And finally, Trump has spent much of this week angling for a way to force the courts to let him put his name on the Kennedy Center, despite that being apparently illegal. Trump is now explicitly suggesting he might let the institution wither and die if he doesn’t get what he wants.

It seems like a long time ago, but the talk during Trump’s first term was often about his “temperament” and his tweets. His conduct has surely desensitized Americans to some degree. But these seem like the kinds of behaviors he’d want to rein in ahead of a midterm election where his party’s grip on power is on the line and voters have real doubts about his steadiness as a leader. Trump has gone in the other direction, by upping the antics.

-CNN Politics

America: "Recommit to Ukraine!"

 

I recently returned from an incredible (and dangerous) trip to Ukraine. The people inspired me, showing amazing resilience in the face of Vladimir Putin's illegal war. I came away with one major takeaway: 

They deserve so much better from America.

Getting to Ukraine isn’t easy because you can’t just hop on a flight into an active war zone. I ping ponged from Munich to Warsaw then a bus and a train. Basically two whole days to just get to Kyiv. Then we took a convoy of twenty vans running seven hours to Kharkiv before turning around and doing the reverse all over again to get back home. So why, you might ask, would I go through all that? Well, buckle in, I've got a long dispatch for you.

The trip was organized by an organization called With Honor, which exists to fight polarization in Congress by supporting principled veterans of both parties. They work alongside a bipartisan group in the House and the Senate to move legislation on national security, national service, and veterans’ affairs and care deeply about the future of Ukraine.

The centerpiece of the trip was the Yalta European Strategy conference, a gathering of world leaders and thinkers. The truth is, it mattered that Americans showed up. There’s a perception right now, pushed from the very top of our own government, that America is done with Ukraine. 

Going there in person was a way of saying that millions of Americans still care about and stand with Ukraine. There’s another reason too, and it’s more personal. I’ve been to war. But I want to be honest with you: my war was a very different war than this one. You cannot understand the battlefield picture of this conflict until you’ve seen it all around you. What I saw in Ukraine confirms exactly where the future of warfare is heading and that the US needs to get onboard immediately.

We met with leaders from Ukraine’s F-16 program. We toured a drone manufacturer and got a rundown of what they’re building, and I’m telling you, the innovation is staggering. Let me give you one example. They’ve developed a totally unique air defense with drones. A fighter drone goes up, carries an interceptor drone toward an incoming threat, releases it onto the target, and then a human operator takes over visually to finish the intercept.

Instead of firing a multimillion-dollar Patriot interceptor at a cheap incoming drone, you knock it down with something a fraction of the cost. This is the exact kind of technology Ukraine offered to share with the United States before our war with Iran, and we turned it down. If we’d listened, it would have saved lives, and it would have meant we weren’t burning through our most precious missiles to stop threats a drone could have handled.

This is the future of warfare, and the truth is that the United States and most of the world are behind on it. Ukraine is ahead because they’ve had no choice but to be.

I want you to really understand what daily life looks like there now. Until fairly recently, Kyiv might absorb a few attacks in a night. Now it’s constant. In the time I was there, I personally heard something like four impacts over the course of a few hours outside, plus anti-aircraft fire going up to meet what was coming down. A gas station was struck. Civilian targets, with no military value at all, were hit over and over.

In Kharkiv we met with medical units and drone units, and I saw a demonstration of the range of what these systems do, everything from carrying supplies to carrying munitions. The medical side of their innovations truly stunned me.

In the American military we live by “the golden hour.” If you’re wounded, we move heaven and earth to stabilize you and get you to a hospital, often in under an hour by whatever means necessary. In Ukraine, on parts of that front, a wounded soldier might have to hold on for a month before evacuation is even possible. So, they’ve adapted. They fly drones out to wounded troops carrying medicine and supplies. They run telemedicine, a doctor on a video call walking someone through what to do. They’re using unmanned ground vehicles, some for offense, some to drive in and carry a wounded person out so that a rescue doesn’t turn into multiple casualties.

It’s hard for the American mind to comprehend the realities that Ukrainian soldiers face on the front lines. A wounded soldier, stuck in a position for a month, kept alive by a doctor’s face on a screen and a drone dropping supplies. The physical toll is obvious. The mental toll of that month is almost unimaginable. And they endure it, and they innovate through it, because the alternative is losing their country.

The numbers are the same they’ve always been. Ukraine is badly outnumbered on personnel compared to Russia. So they win with innovation and grit. They invent something new, and for five or six months it devastates the Russians. Then Russia studies it, adapts, and counters, which we’re now seeing especially in air defense and in faster jet-powered Shahed drones. It’s a brutal, relentless cycle of adaptation, and the Ukrainians are extraordinary at it. But you cannot out-invent a much larger enemy forever without help.

And that brings me home, to us.

There was a time, not that long ago, when standing with Ukraine was a bipartisan issue. I think of the leaders in my old party who understood, in their bones, that American strength meant standing against Russian aggression. That consensus has been deliberately blown up. 

This administration has stepped back from the fight, treated our support as a favor to be bargained away rather than a strategic necessity, and left the Ukrainians guessing about whether the arsenal of democracy still has their back. When we don’t send what we’ve promised, people die.

Leaving Kharkiv, because I was in a van convoy, I took the road. Others from the conference took the train back out, a train we could have been on. That train was hit by a strike that landed about ten minutes before it crossed the border. I could have been on that train. Everyone made it, thank God.

But I’ll be straight with you. I wasn’t personally afraid in the moment, but it was the most real danger I’ve been in since I was at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the difference is, I got to come home to my own bed. 

The people of Ukraine wake up to that every single day, and they have for four and a half years, with the air raid sirens going off hour after hour without safe harbor.

Now let me tell you what makes my blood boil, and why I can’t write about Ukrainian courage without being perfectly honest about the stark contrast with the Trump family. While Ukrainians are keeping wounded soldiers alive by drone and this administration slow-walks the weapons that would keep Ukrainian children from being pulled out of bed by sirens, we learned this week that a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin secretly bankrolled Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding.

According to ProPublica, a man named Umar Kremlev, whom Putin personally recognized with a state honor, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for Trump Jr.’s lavish Bahamas celebration. He rented one of the private islands. He paid for the fireworks. His team helped plan it. And a large group of fellow Russians attended the intimate, roughly fifty-person wedding that Trump Jr. said, “was really small, like, just really close friends.”

A retired FBI counterintelligence official put it plainly: “if I’m paying for your wedding, at some point you’re going to owe me something.” This should be unthinkable for the son of a president, especially when Kremlev is connected to an organization facing sanctions for its alleged role in abducting Ukrainian children from occupied territory.

This is who Putin is. A man who bombs gas stations and apartment blocks, who steals children, and a man who sends the same drones I heard overhead to terrorize civilians night after night. And rather than stand against him, Trump and his allies are stepping back from Ukraine while a member of Putin’s circle picks up the tab for a Trump family party. The corruption is staggering.

So, I travelled halfway around the world into an active war zone. Now what? Great question. I think it’s clear we as Americans owe a debt of gratitude to Ukraine for their steadfast defense of freedom and the fight they’ve taken directly to Russia. 

The isolationist crowd would have you believe that America has no business intervening in overseas conflicts. But we know what happens in Ukraine will have effects around the world for decades to come. It is not just the right thing to do; it is in America’s interest to support Ukraine.

So, beyond what we can do as individuals, here’s my ask of our leaders in Washington:

First, recommit to Ukraine! Send what we promised. America’s word means something. And people die when we don’t follow through.

Second, protect the idea that free nations stand together against tyrants, because that alliance is the only thing that has ever reliably kept the tyrants in check.

Finally, reject Putin, plainly and without hedging, and reject the leaders here at home who keep making excuses for him.

That’s the least we can do.

I saw spirit in Ukraine that I won’t forget. I saw resolve in people living under a sky that poses a threat every night. And I saw a level of military readiness and invention that, frankly, we should have humility to learn from. The Ukrainians are holding the line for all of us. The least we can do is refuse to drop our end of the agreement.

Slava Ukraini!

— Adam Kinzinger

A Few Questions for Our Would-Be AI Overloads by Jean-Marie Kauth

Are you creating a species to replace our own, then, oh mighty AI Overlords? It seems the answer to that is yes since you believe there is a 10% chance AI will wipe out humanity entirely and are proceeding heedless, nevertheless. Then I have just a few questions, I beseech you, before your planned apotheosis into the electronic ether.

Just as we have killed off all but 4% of wild mammals by weight, with another 60% for food, will the species that succeeds us likewise dramatically deplete us to sustain themselves? Will we be kept for food or some such? We need the ecosphere, but they might not so long as they reduce our numbers by billions, preserving just a few to feed and serve them.

Here’s my next question. Will AI creatures voluntarily constrain their own numbers and level of consumption so as to be themselves sustainable? Or will they also spin out of control, further and further destroying the ecosystem on which all of us, including AI Overlords, depend?

I wonder, whether the overlord species is human or AI, how this unlimited growth and insatiable voracious hunger will NOT ultimately destroy the planet on which all lives (even those in silico) depend? Or is that part of the plan, with Mars and all?

Could we not instead imagine a real revolution in intelligence, one consonant with a living planet and all its species, right down to the microbiota, to actually sustain continued life and mutual prosperity on Earth in the long-term? Can we imagine the plastic intelligence of AI coexisting long-term with the living biosphere?

If you are going to bring about the apocalypse, shouldn’t we also think about how to prepare our children? Will atrophying their brains and stunting their ability to solve problems and encounter adversity prepare them for anything but a future of cognitive surrender and abasing service to machines? Or is pacifying and mesmerizing them just the thing as we prepare them for the altar of sacrifice? Is that what you are already doing with the toxic combo of Tik-Tok and brain-stunting pesticides from the womb onward? 

How clever. Destruction of the natural world, which AI is accelerating, means that we cannot continue on this way. Instead of college, should we be preparing our students for a world without lightbulbs, clean water, healthy food, or indoor plumbing, much less the Internet?

Is all this just a distraction from climate change as AI ramps up the real damage to our ecosphere, tainting the air, spewing out CO₂, sucking dry the aquifers, sullying our soil, and cluttering our planet with a slatternly scattering of endless e-waste? Is AI both a smokescreen for bringing back coal-burning power-plants (pun intended) and also an accelerant poured on the already burning fires of our planet?

Do our would-be AI overlords have no children? Do they love no other human being or any of the rare fruits of human civilization?

There is a poignant, tragic plaint, not long ago a joke, patiently pacing the lonely hallways of the internet: “In the fast-paced world of Silicon Valley, the way you quit says everything about where you work. When someone leaves a normal job, they say, ‘you know, I’ve had a great time here, and now it’s on to the next adventure.’ When someone leaves an AI tech job, they say, ‘I have stared into the abyss. I am retiring to write poetry. Please spend time with your families.’”

And this sounds almost verbatim like the warning a resigning Anthropic safety lead issued just months ago: “The world is in peril. And not just from AI or bioweapons, but from a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding in this very moment. We appear to be approaching a threshold where our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world, lest we face the consequences. 

Moreover, throughout my time here, I’ve repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions…. I feel called to writing that addresses and engages fully with the place we find ourselves, and that places poetic truth alongside scientific truth as equally valid ways of knowing, both of which I believe have something essential to contribute when developing new technology. I hope to explore a poetry degree and devote myself to the practice of courageous speech.”

As a literature professor, the appeal to poetry tickles my soul, but don’t we think we need to also do something more concrete to avert disaster? What about commonsense regulation? What about Garrett Hardin’s “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon”? Who does not feel disappointment that so many are giving up without a fight for our world, for all we love, without so much as a bang or a whimper?

-Jean-Marie Kauth

The book I have worked towards for more than 20 years, Poisoning Our Children, is now available for pre-order at https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/54124/poisoning-our-children

Pre-orders are hugely important, as they affect whether bookstores stock the book, how algorithms surface it, and how seriously publishers take authors. Your support matters more than you know. All author profits will be donated to Environmental Health non-profits.

Figure 1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2019/06/05/dont-fear-robot-overlords-ais-will-rule-the-world-through-humans/

Just How Bad Is It?

 

Before last week, the name Jacob Coxon was probably not one any of us would have known. But as he announced his resignation from his role as a researcher for AI giant Anthropic and published a warning that AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade” kicked off a global conversation about the scale of the potential threat of out-of-control artificial superintelligence.

Soon after, Anthropic released a report detailing recent misuses of its powerful AI models, including designing missiles and bombs, creating deadly pathogens and surveilling dissidents. And CEO Dario Amodei, rather than dismissing Coxon as yet another disgruntled ex-employee, announced that he largely agreed with him, calling for a new regime of monitoring, coordination and even regulation. What followed was a rare show of unity and contrition from big tech bosses.

For the TechScape newsletter, Blake Montgomery wondered why Coxon’s warning has cut through, while Nick Robins-Early, David Smith, and Chris Stein reported on Donald Trump’s dismissive reaction, which provoked a backlash from both Republicans and Democrats. David also reported on the unlikely pairing of Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon, who shared a stage to argue for more protections. Nick asked experts how likely it is that AI CEOs will follow through on pledges to slow the pace. 

And, among the many fascinating opinion pieces we published, make sure you read the one by Alex Turner, a former Google DeepMind staffer who said we really should be listening to the warnings, and the one by Stuart Russell, one of the leading AI experts in the world, on why Amodei’s call for “pacing the frontier” is not enough.

That we’re at this point is as bizarre as it is scary, especially as we’re still working out the impact of the AI models we’re already using in day-to-day life. That’s been a constant theme of our journalism recently. I’d urge everyone reading this to listen to series two of our brilliant podcast series Black Box, presented by Michael Safi and executive produced by Joshua Kelly. 

In Black Box: the Chatbots, Michael meets ordinary people who have become convinced they have made scientific breakthroughs, cured diseases or invented new technologies using AI chatbots, symptoms of what’s now known as “AI psychosis”.

This excerpt of Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s brilliant new book End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World is a must-read, too, examining the motives of the infinitely rich men behind some of this technology and their alliance with the far right. The piece is a call for action to urgently defend what we love – the planet and fellow humans. 

Naomi was also interviewed by Zoe Williams and, with Astra, joined Carter Sherman on our US podcast Stateside to discuss why the convergence of recent climate, far-right and tech crises are creating an atmosphere of apocalypse, and how “hereness” is our way through the doom. I love the idea of “hereness”, particularly in the context of the Guardian’s mission to report on “many somewheres”.

As another antidote to the dire warnings, Nick Evershed wrote a somewhat comforting column urging us not to accept AI domination as inevitable and reminding us that we have the power to change things for the better, as we have done before. And Lois Beckett compiled the definitive list of books to make sense of it all. We could also always talk to each other.

-Katharine Viner, The Guardian

"Monsters Walk Among Us"

 

We have many monsters to destroy. –George Seferis

But how can anyone tell the truth about fascism, unless he is willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it forth? –Bertolt Brecht

More than four decades ago, the Greek composer and public intellectual Manos Hadjidakis issued a warning that now reads less like a reflection on fascism than a prophecy of our own time. The greatest danger, he suggested, comes when we grow accustomed to the monster, when its presence no longer shocks the conscience and its violence begins to merge with the routines of everyday life. Tolerance does not diminish the monster; it multiplies the conditions that allow it to flourish, strengthening its presence in public life until monstrosity itself acquires the authority to govern. In this instance, the collapse of conscience is inseparable from the uncoupling of “belief from judgment, conviction from action.”

We have reached such a moment.

The monsters are no longer hiding in the shadows. They occupy presidential offices and ministries, command armies and police forces, control digital platforms, dominate television screens, administer borders, build detention centers, and transform the suffering of others into political theater. Their language of racial purification, mass deportation, extermination, vengeance, and disposability no longer produces the outrage it once might have summoned. Cruelty is displayed as strength. Humiliation becomes entertainment. The spectacle of suffering becomes a source of political pleasure. What should be unbearable becomes familiar; what should provoke resistance is absorbed into the rhythms of everyday life.

The monster triumphs not simply when it commits atrocities, but when its language becomes ordinary, its violence becomes acceptable, its weaponization of racial and class divisions goes unnoticed, and its presence no longer disturbs the moral imagination. 

Toni Morrison gave us another language for understanding how monsters become ordinary. She called it “dead language,” a language emptied of ethical responsibility and enlisted in the service of domination. Morrison’s dead language is itself monstrous.  As she writes, oppressive language “does more than represent violence; it is violence.” It is a language that “drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind.”

Morrison’s insight reaches beyond rhetoric. Monsters require a language that prepares the ground for their violence, strips their victims of humanity, and teaches people to accommodate the unthinkable. Dead language is one of the conditions that allows monstrosity to pass into everyday life disguised as common sense.

Primo Levi once observed that “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” Levi remains right about the role of unthinking functionaries, but today the monsters themselves have acquired institutional power and public legitimacy. Emboldened by staggering economic inequality, empowered by the machinery of high-tech authoritarianism, and legitimated by an expanding culture of state violence, they have moved from the political margins to the commanding heights of American society.

Here Hannah Arendt’s warning about the failure of thinking takes on a renewed urgency. Monstrosity thrives when judgment is surrendered, when the obligation to think becomes a burden, and when ignorance is transformed from an absence of knowledge into a cultivated refusal to know. We might call this the banality of ignorance: the willful suspension of judgment that allows people to see suffering without confronting it and to hear lies without rejecting them. The monster does not merely demand obedience. It needs subjects who have learned not to think about what their obedience makes possible.

Yet Hadjidakis’s warning poses a question more disturbing than whether monsters now govern us. What does it mean for a society to begin to resemble its monsters? And what pedagogical forces are at work in creating and normalizing that resemblance? Resemblance does not mean that everyone becomes a killer or a fascist. It means that the habits of thought, structures of feeling, and forms of indifference on which monstrosity depends begin to penetrate everyday life. The banality of ignorance becomes a social condition, a cultivated form of moral blindness in which not knowing offers a refuge from responsibility and refusing to think becomes a condition of belonging. But such ignorance does not exist outside the realm of desire. It has an emotional register, a psychology of authoritarianism and a pedagogy of terror through which people learn not simply to live with cruelty but to bathe in its emotional charge, finding pleasure and belonging in “patterns of domination and submission [that harden] into a syndrome of attitudes regarding hierarchy, power, sexuality and tradition.”

The monster has a long history, born in the darkest regions of the social imagination where fear, difference, and power converge. As Manvir Singh has observed, monsters have long haunted the boundaries between the human and the inhuman, the familiar and the terrifying, the civilized and what it casts outside its gates. But monsters are never simply creatures of fantasy. They are warnings, projections, embodiments of collective fears, and often weapons for deciding who belongs within the circle of humanity and who can be expelled from it. What matters politically is what happens when the monster steps out of myth and fantasy, takes possession of the institutions of power, and acquires the authority to decide who may live, who must suffer, and who can be made disposable.

There is, however, another problem with the metaphor of the monster itself. To imagine Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Benjamin Netanyahu, or other architects of contemporary authoritarian violence simply as monsters risks placing them outside history, as if their cruelty originated in some private pathology detached from the society that produced them. The monster can then become an alibi for the society that created him. 

Moral outrage becomes individualized, while the institutions, economic interests, racial hierarchies, cultural apparatuses, and political forces that make organized cruelty possible disappear. This is the crucial insight in Jorge Gonzalez Arocha’s argument that turning perpetrators into monsters can itself become a way of looking away. Arocha argues that “reducing the perpetrator to nothing more than a monster protects us from recognizing ourselves as potential perpetrators. It distances us from the event and its reality, while placing us in a position of moral superiority…. [It] is a way of denying that the ability to destroy also belongs to us, that it forms part of the human condition.”

The problem is not that monsters do not exist. The problem begins when monstrosity becomes an explanation rather than a question. Monsters do not descend upon society from somewhere outside history. They are produced within history, cultivated through institutions, protected by bureaucracies, legitimized by law, financed by powerful economic interests, amplified by media, and normalized through culture. The political significance of monsters lies not simply in the horrors they commit, but in the social order that makes those horrors possible, useful, legitimate, and eventually ordinary. A singular focus on monsters can obscure the deeper structure of gangster capitalism, a system that “prioritizes certain forms of power over the common good and enables the gradual dehumanization of our societies.”

The question must therefore change. We must move from monster to machinery, from the pathology of the individual to the political economy of organized cruelty, and from there to the cultural and educational forces that teach people how to live with the suffering such machinery produces. Monsters do not act alone. Their power becomes visible in the institutions that protect them, the wealth that sustains them, the laws that authorize them, and the violence that follows in their wake. We see their handiwork in streets stained with blood, in migrants brutalized and left to die in detention centers, in the torture documented in Israeli prisons, and in the bodies of children and families torn apart by Israeli and American bombs in Gaza. 

Behind these abstractions are torn limbs, dismembered bodies, children pulled from rubble, families burned and buried beneath the ruins of their homes, and human beings reduced to flesh and bone by systems in which cruelty has been organized, authorized, and repeated until even the most horrific violence threatens to lose its capacity to shock.

The horror lies in a society’s growing accommodation to monsters, in the silence surrounding their crimes and the erosion of moral and political boundaries that once made their actions intolerable. Such silence is never innocent. It is the rigor mortis of ethical and political decay, the point at which a politics organized around death begins to pass as ordinary life. 

The nightmare no longer lurks in the shadows; it claws its way into daylight and is met with indifference, resignation, or applause. The question is how people learn to live amid mass suffering and eventually look away. What forms of power require such silence? What institutions cultivate it? What culture teaches people to turn away from the bodies left behind? And most important, what pedagogical machinery teaches millions not merely to tolerate cruelty but to identify with those who inflict it, desire the power they embody, and experience the suffering of others as the price of their own imagined liberation?

Political economy, culture, and pedagogy converge here. The monster becomes inseparable from gangster capitalism, pedagogical terrorism, and the culture of cruelty. Gangster capitalism does not accidentally produce monsters. It increasingly requires them, along with publics capable of loving them.

Arendt’s concept of radical evil takes this argument further, moving us from the failure of judgment to the political machinery that renders human beings superfluous. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, radical evil emerges from a political order capable of stripping human beings of rights, history, individuality, and finally their claim to membership in the human community. The concentration camp represented the most extreme realization of this logic, but its political significance extended beyond the camp. Totalitarianism required institutions capable of transforming human beings into disposable matter.

Arendt’s later account of Adolf Eichmann complicated the picture further. Eichmann did not appear before her as a demonic figure possessing some unfathomable depth of evil. He appeared frighteningly ordinary: bureaucratic, careerist, obedient, incapable of thinking seriously about the consequences of his actions. The banality of evil did not mean that his crimes were banal. It meant that extraordinary crimes could be administered through ordinary routines, bureaucratic language, professional ambition, obedience, and the suspension of judgment.

Reinhard Heydrich, one of the principal architects of the Nazi machinery of terror and mass murder, represents another configuration of the political monster. Here ideological fanaticism, administrative intelligence, and extraordinary institutional power converged. Eichmann and Heydrich should not be collapsed into the same psychological type, but both expose the inadequacy of treating atrocity simply as the work of monsters. Modern systems of terror require administrators, lawyers, technicians, police officers, propagandists, intellectuals, journalists, and functionaries. Evil becomes most politically dangerous when it acquires an office, a budget, a bureaucracy, a vocabulary of necessity, and a public willing to accept its premises… .

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.

from When Monsters Walk Among Us - CounterPunch.org

 

45 Days to Midterms

The biggest problem Democrats may have if they, as seems increasingly likely, win majorities in one or both houses will be deciding where to begin in their investigation of Donald Trump’s reign of incompetence and corruption.

The urgent need for congressional oversight got a boost this week with ProPublica’s damning article detailing how a Russian oligarch, Umar Kremlev, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to help host Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding reception — just the latest example of egregious foreign influence peddling. 

“For a decade, Putin’s government, regarded as a chief adversary of the U.S., has been accused of efforts to influence American elections,” ProPublica noted. “Attempts by Russia to make inroads with the Trumps before the 2016 election exploded into controversy that dogged much of the president’s first term.” 

This should alarm all Americans, as it raises more troubling questions about Trump’s pro-Putin stance in the Ukraine war. As the article posed, “National security experts expressed alarm at Trump Jr. accepting the oligarch’s largesse, saying it raised an urgent question: What motivated Kremlin to spend a fortune cultivating the connection?” One can only imagine. But as bad as this is, it is only one instance of one category of egregious misconduct that Trump and the Republicans have countenanced.

Democrats will have their hands full, as was evident in a recent Washington Post article that laid out the categories of potential investigations:

-self-enrichment by Trump and his families and cronies;

-handouts and pardons to supporters;

-self-glorifying construction projects; immigration abuse; spotlighting misconduct allegations against immigration officers; the detention of lawful residents and citizens; the rising death toll in immigration detention centers; the deployment of the National Guard in liberal cities; and the alleged mishandling of spending and contracts by then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem;

-dismantling/destroying the federal government;

-prosecution of enemies; pressure campaigns on corporations, universities, and law firms, “often in violation of the First Amendment”;

-foreign affairs: “the Board of Peace, a multinational group meant to end conflicts; the new presidential plane gifted by Qatar; tariffs and trade deals; the Iran war; military intervention and strikes against alleged drug-trafficking boats in Venezuela; and the redevelopment of Gaza”; and

-the Epstein files.

It’s an impressive list, with many specific scandals that could easily be slotted into the categories above (e.g., DOJ attorneys’ possible violation of professional ethics and federal court rules, nominees and officials’ alleged lying under oath and/or misleading lawmakers, racism and discriminatory practices at the Pentagon and elsewhere, widespread Hatch Act violations by Cabinet officials).

The most obvious concern about embarking on this ambitious plan — “the lawless Trump gang will refuse to cooperate” — is a further indictment of the Trump regime’s unfitness to serve and its contempt for democracy. 

But it is also an example of counterproductive fatalism. For starters, not even the Trump goons can stop everyone from cooperating. There are ex-regime employees, victims of abuse, private sector collaborators (who fear consequences of ignoring Congress), whistleblowers, and yes, even some responsible current officials who will show up and testify truthfully under oath. There are also written documents that cannot be concealed or destroyed.

Congress should be clear that failure to cooperate and testify truthfully will have serious, ongoing ramifications. These include the defunding of relevant government departments, referral for criminal proceedings in a future Democratic administration (or to state and local authorities who may have jurisdiction for underlying misconduct), and civil suits against individuals and government entities — for which courts will have jurisdiction to hand down contempt sanctions for noncooperation.

Other anticipatory objections to the investigations smack more of self-defeatism: ‘Nothing will happen to these people. Trump cannot be impeached or go to jail.’ Such complaints get the process backward. First, Congress compiles the record, then Congress, the courts, and the voters decide what to do about it.

Moreover, the absence of maximalist penalties for Trump (who cannot be certain that the MAGA Supreme Court’s absurd grant of criminal immunity extends, for example, to acts of pure personal enrichment having nothing to do with his core duties as president) leaves a universe of potential ways to hold wrongdoers accountable. These range from clawing back ill-gotten gains to professional sanctions (e.g., disbarment) to criminal prosecution (federal, state, or local) for lower-level officials to military discipline to permanent exclusion from federal jobs.

Let’s not overlook one of the key reasons for the entire exercise: To make an historic record that removes any reasonable doubt about the extent of the cruelty, incompetence, malfeasance, and lawlessness of this regime. Voters in future elections should have no doubt as to who enabled what misconduct, who looked the other way, who profited from office, and who put party loyalty and personal interest above their obligations to the Constitution and the American people.

Protect Democracy, the nonpartisan pro-democracy organization, in its 2022 report observed the wide-ranging purposes oversight and accountability can provide: “[C]omprehensive fact-finding and truth-telling can combat disinformation and work towards creating a more shared reality; lay the political groundwork for institutional reforms; and generate support for other critical accountability measures, such as criminal prosecutions.”

It is vital that those who engaged in wrongdoing is not allowed to waltz away with reputations untouched by their participation in conduct that should shock the conscience of decent Americans:

Accountability can break the revolving door of wrongdoers cycling in and out of power and recommitting offenses—using their time out of power to rehabilitate reputations. In the absence of accountability, history may favor glossing over the breadth and gravity of transgressions that occurred and create an environment amenable to reputationally rehabilitating wrongdoers.

Anyone running for office who served under Trump will have to account for his or her record; anyone seeking important positions in civil society (e.g. partners in law firms, corporation board members) will also need to explain their conduct. Every voter, every public entity, and every private sector employer or philanthropic organization will make an evaluation of past conduct — then themselves be held responsible if they decide to entrust former Trump lackeys with new positions.

In sum, the task of investigating Trump regime wrongdoing may seem overwhelming, but Democrats have no choice but to proceed swiftly, on multiple fronts. Delay, non-confrontation, and “bottom-up” investigation of Jan. 6 under the well-meaning but hapless former Attorney General Merrick Garland had disastrous ramifications for democracy. Congressional Democrats should not repeat that pattern. They should be prepared, focused, and determined to search out wrongdoing at the highest levels of the Trump regime as soon as they take office. 

We will not get a second chance to investigate and hold responsible those who have inflicted so much harm on so many.

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

 

“To destroy things he can’t possess, or control is his essential nature.”

 

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper of the District of Columbia refused to permit the Kennedy Center board, stacked by Trump with his own loyalists, to return Trump’s name to the facade of the building. Cooper reiterated that Congress had prohibited such an addition and would have to change that law in order to make the addition of Trump’s name legal.

The board of the Kennedy Center promptly appealed and voted to close the venue for two years for renovations. Then Trump posted on social media that those renovations couldn’t take place unless the court approved the addition of his name to the building. Without that, he posted, “unfortunately, the building is destined to doom. Isn’t that too bad?”

Although the Kennedy Center board insisted that only Trump’s name on the building would restore donations, in fact, the Washington Post reports that ticket sales and fundraising plunged when Trump added his name to the building in the first place. Nonetheless, Trump posted that he is the only one who can save it, “because I have the ability to raise the money, and the ability to construct—that few others have. I also have the strength and power of the Presidency, which will be needed [to] do what must be done, and give it a strong shot at Greatness again!”

As George Conway of the Bulwark noted, “To destroy things he can’t possess, or control is his essential nature.” It is also as if Trump is self-soothing by celebrating his core identity even as his incompetence and greed have driven the United States, and the world, into crisis.

But even that is not providing him comfort these days. Representative Joyce Beatty (D-OH), an ex-officio member of the Kennedy Center board and the member who sued over his takeover of the center, explained to Symone Sanders-Townsend of MS NOW that Trump called into the board meeting after the court decision and “went into a tantrum.”

While most people appear to have refused to confront Trump to his face—Maine governor Janet Mills’s “We’ll see you in court” was so rare it made headlines—Beatty took him on. She recounted: “It was the most unprofessional thing that I’ve ever witnessed or been a part of it.” But after he called her “an obstructionist” and “dumb” and said he thought she was “incompetent,” she retorted: “I know you’re incompetent.” Beatty appealed to the chair to stop Trump’s unprofessional behavior, but when he continued to berate her, claiming it would be her fault if someone were killed at the center, she responded: “You’re already killing people, we’re at war.” And when he talked about what a great developer, he was, she “reminded him that he had more bankruptcies than anybody in the room. I mean, it really went there,” Beatty told Sanders-Townsend. “I was not going to let him bully me, intimidate me. And the facts stand for themselves.”

Indeed, these days, facts across the board are challenging Trump’s image of himself. Panic is sounding across the U.S. about oil prices. The Houthis in Yemen, backed by Iran, are threatening the Bab el-Mandeb strait at the outlet of the Red Sea on its way to the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, threatening another 4% of the world’s oil supply to global markets. Saudi Arabia had diverted oil shipments from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea through the East-West pipeline across the country, but officials have closed the pipeline after strikes. Today, senior executives from Shell and Equinor warned that the world is looking at tightening supplies of oil and “price volatility” as the industry is losing the ability to offset the disruptions.

On X, Patrick De Haan, a petroleum analyst at GasBuddy, charted the rise of diesel prices in the U.S. this week. Diesel jumped $0.82 a gallon in Fort Stewart, Georgia; $0.82 in Moorhead, Minnesota; $0.75 in Athens, Georgia. In the twelve hours before 1:30 this afternoon, Eastern time, gasoline jumped $0.30 a gallon in Lawrence County, Ohio, and Edwardsburg, Michigan. It jumped $0.28 a gallon in Des Moines, Iowa. De Haan reported that gas prices in and around Chicago appeared to be rising to $4.99 a gallon today.

As De Haan noted, it was “no shock, with diesel setting new all-time records and showing no signs of slowing,” that the Federal Reserve raised interest rates today for the first time since July 2023. Trump has been adamant that he wants to see interest rates lowered and has threatened to cut off trade with certain countries unless the Fed lowered them. But rising inflation meant that the board instead voted unanimously to raise rates by a quarter of a percentage point to a target range of 3.75% to 4%.

Trump did not take the news well. “Interest Rates in the United States should be 1%, or less, because we are the Best Credit in the World—BY FAR,” he posted. “LOWER THE INTEREST RATES FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND FAST!”

At a political rally in North Carolina, Trump suggested that the Fed is attacking him personally. “They’re raising the rates to make Trump do as bad as they can possibly do,” he said, referring to himself in the third person. “The problem they have is that we have the greatest economy in history.” “So, they’re raising that only for political reasons and that’s a raise against Trump.”

In Ireland, where he traveled for the Irish Open golf tournament at his course in Doonbeg, Trump told reporters on Sunday that the U.S. might stay in Iran and “keep the oil” as the U.S. did in Venezuela. He claimed Venezuelan oil has “paid for the war many times.”

But—even aside from the fact invading a country and taking its resources violates the U.N. charter—there is no record of that money or where it is going. In January 2026, a U.S. official told Jarrett Renshaw of Reuters that the U.S. had completed its first sale of Venezuelan oil, valued at $500 million. That money was to be held in a U.S. account in Qatar, not the U.S. Treasury.

Yesterday, testifying before the House Financial Services Committee, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent refused to answer questions Representative Sean Casten (D-IL) asked about the Venezuelan oil money. Bessent refused to say how much money from Venezuelan assets—including gold, as well as oil—had flowed through Treasury accounts or accounts managed by Treasury since January and said he had no knowledge of whether the money was flowing to “the U.S. government, U.S. persons, or U.S. corporations.” He deflected by saying simply: “Again…this is the, uh, one of the largest assets that maybe ever to go on the U.S. balance sheet.”

Yesterday was a big day for revelations about the war on Iran. Jonah Kaplan of CBS News published photographs showing the damage caused to buildings, vehicles, and equipment at U.S. bases in the Middle East by Iranian strikes. Active service members leaked the photos to CBS News because, as one said, “This is major damage to our bases that hasn’t been communicated to the American public. We’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face.” “We’re not defending these bases,” the service member said. “We’re just watching them get destroyed.”

John Ismay of the New York Times reported on a new report from the Pentagon’s inspector general on Monday explaining that the first four months of the Iran war caused “strategic inventory shortfalls”; that Iranian strikes have destroyed “hundreds of buildings and structures” at U.S. bases in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates; that dozens of military aircraft have been damaged or destroyed; and that the Defense Department has limited facilities for medical treatment in the region and has had to relocate helicopters for medical evacuations from Iraq and Kuwait.

A new report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said that the Iran war, which has taken 18 U.S. lives and wounded more than 800 servicemembers, has also cost the U.S. about $38 billion as of August 1 and could cost as much as $2 billion a month while it goes on, and that it will continue to drive inflation.

For the third time, the House passed a war powers resolution directing Trump to remove U.S. military personnel from hostilities against Iran unless Congress explicitly authorizes him to keep them there. Seven Republicans joined the Democrats to pass the measure by a vote of 220 to 204. Yesterday Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) blindsided House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) by introducing eight counts of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

The first three articles accuse him of “waging war in contravention of the War Powers Resolution of 1973.” The fourth accuses him of “ignoring laws that minimize civilian casualties.” The fifth accuses him of directing “the extrajudicial killings of at least 221 persons aboard seagoing vessels” in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. The sixth accuses him of “suppressing free speech” through his attempts to silence Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ), a Navy veteran. The seventh article accuses him of the “kidnapping of a sovereign foreign leader,” Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro. The final article charges Hegseth with waging an “unlawful war in Yemen,” in 2025.

Massie told CNN that he had kept his plan secret to prevent House leadership from keeping him from the floor to read the articles. To protect Republican lawmakers from having to take a stand either for or against the Iran war, Speaker Johnson canceled votes set for Thursday and sent the House home until November 9, 2026, after the midterm elections.

Johnson blasted Massie, saying: “Secretary Hegseth has done an extraordinary job, the Department of War. We’re in the middle of international conflicts right now, and we should not be playing games with national security.” As for sending lawmakers home early, he said: “It’s time for our members to go home to their districts and make their case to the American people, to go and explain all the great things we’ve done.”

Trump apparently does not think voters will swing behind the Republicans based on their record. News broke on Monday that the Supreme Court would not allow him to implement new rules that would allow the United States Postal Service to screen mail-in ballots, something Trump insisted was imperative to purify voting.

On Tuesday, he dropped the facade that the rule was about anything other than rigging the election and expressed anger that his three hand-picked appointees to the Supreme Court did not do his bidding. “Republicans just got another bad decision from the United States Supreme Court,” he posted. “This Supreme Court is bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years. These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court; they are merely a shell of their original selves.”

—Heather Cox Richardson