An in-depth report published by the Washington Post on Tuesday offers new details about the damage being done to the Social Security Administration during President Donald Trump’s second term.

The Post, citing both internal documents and interviews with insiders, reported that the Social Security Administration (SSA) is “in turmoil” one year into Trump’s second term, resulting in a customer service system that has “deteriorated.”

The chaos at the SSA started in February when the Trump administration announced plans to lay off 7,000 SSA employees, or roughly 12% of the total workforce.

This set off a cascade of events that the Post writes has left the agency with “record backlogs that have delayed basic services to millions of customers,” as the remaining SSA workforce has “struggled to respond to up to 6 million pending cases in its processing centers and 12 million transactions in its field offices.”

The most immediate consequence of the staffing cuts was that call wait times for Social Security beneficiaries surged to an average of roughly two-and-a-half hours, which forced the agency to pull workers employed in other divisions in the department off their jobs.

However, the Post‘s sources said these employees “were thrown in with minimal training... and found themselves unable to answer much beyond basic questions.”

One longtime SSA employee told the Post that management at the agency “offered minimal training and basically threw [transferred employees] in to sink or swim.”

Although the administration has succeeded in getting call hold times down from their peaks, shuffling so many employees out of their original positions has damaged the SSA in other areas, the Post revealed.

Jordan Harwell, a Montana field office employee who is president of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 4012, said that workers in his office no longer have the same time they used to have to process pay stubs, disability claims, and appointment requests because they are constantly manning the phones.

An anonymous employee in an Indiana field office told the Post that she has similarly had to let other work pile up as the administration has emphasized answering phones over everything else.

Among other things, reported the Post, she now has less time to handle “calls from people asking about decisions in their cases, claims filed online, and anyone who tries to submit forms to Social Security—like proof of marriage—through snail mail.”

Also hampering the SSA’s work have been new regulations put in place by Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency that bar beneficiaries from making changes to their direct deposit information over the phone, instead requiring them to either appear in person at a field office or go online.

The Indiana SSA worker told the Post of a recent case involving a 75-year-old man who recently suffered a major stroke that left him unable to drive to the local field office to verify information needed to change his banking information. The man also said he did not have access to a computer to help him change the information online.

“I had to sit there on the phone and tell this guy, ‘You have to find someone to come in... or, do you have a relative with a computer who can help you or something like that?’” the employee said. “He was just like, ‘No, no, no.’”

Social Security was a regular target for Musk during his tenure working for the Trump administration, and he repeatedly made baseless claims that the entire program was riddled with fraud, even referring to it as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”

Top Trump White House aide Stephen Miller on Friday elicited disgust after he said that a beloved Christmas television special reminded him of his own personal animus toward immigrants.

Miller, often seen as the architect of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation policy, revealed in a post on X that he and his children had just watched “Christmas with The Martins and The Sinatras,” a one-off 1967 TV holiday special that featured singers Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra.

Miller then quickly pivoted from that to once again bash immigrants who come to the US.

“Imagine watching that,” Miller wrote, “and thinking America needed infinity migrants from the third world.”

As Rolling Stone politics reporter Nikki McCann Ramírez pointed out in response, both Martin and Sinatra both had parents who were first-generation Italian immigrants.

“Dean Martin was born Dino Paul Crocetti and gave himself a stage name because of braindead xenophobes like Stephen,” McCann Ramírez observed. “Sinatra was also a child of Italian immigrants. Imagine watching them and thinking immigrants didn’t build the culture you fetishize today.”

A similar point was made by civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill in a post on Bluesky.

“Imagine watching Sinatra, son of Dolly and Antonini born in Genoa and Sicily, respectively,” she wrote, “and Martin, son of Gaetano and Angela, born in Montesilvano, Italy and Ohio respectively... and crusading against the value of children of immigrants to the US.”

Journalist and author Jeff Yang added some historical context to Miller’s remarks by noting that Italian immigrants in the early and middle decades of the 20th century faced many of the same stereotypes that Miller and his political allies ascribe to immigrants from Latin America.

“A reminder,” Yang wrote, while also posting old cartoons that featured racist depictions of Italians, “that Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra’s parents emigrated here during a period when Italians were considered to be a genetically inferior and criminal-minded underclass that Stephen Miller’s racist predecessors said should be excluded from America.”

Yang added that Frank Sinatra’s mother “ran an underground free abortion clinic, chained herself to a fence to fight for women’s suffrage, and was an extremely influential organizer for the Democratic Party.”

Princeton University historian Kevin Kruse promoted Yang’s thread that demonstrated Miller’s apparent ignorance of Dean and Sinatra’s family histories, and said it showed the Trump adviser is “a horrible racist in the sense that he is actually not that good at being racist.”

Tim Wise, a senior fellow at the African American Policy Forum, managed to find an upside to Miller’s holiday-themed anti-immigrant rant.

“The one silver lining in all this sickness is that one day your children will despise you as much as most of America already does,” he commented.

Film producer Franklin Leonard was even more succinct in his response to Miller.

“Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra would hate Stephen Miller and his politics,” he wrote.

Even as US beef prices have continued to surge, American cattle ranchers have come under increased financial pressure—and a new report from More Perfect Union claims that this is due in part to industry consolidation in the meat-packing industry.

Bill Bullard, the CEO of the trade association R-CALF USA, explained to More Perfect Union that cattle ranchers are essentially at the bottom of the pyramid in the beef-producing process, while the top is occupied by “four meat packers controlling 80% of the market.”

“It’s there that the meat packers are able to exert their market power in order to leverage down the price that the cattle feeder receives for the animals,” Bullard said.

To illustrate the impact this has had on farmers, Bullard pointed out that cattle producers in 1980 received 63 cents for every dollar paid by consumers for beef, whereas four decades later they were receiving just 37 cents for every dollar.

“That allocation has flipped on its head because the marketplace is fundamentally broken,” Bullard told More Perfect Union.

Angela Huffman, president of Farm Action, recently highlighted the role played by the four big meatpacking companies—Tyson, Cargill, National Beef, and JBS—in hurting US ranchers.

Writing on her Substack page earlier this month, Huffman zeroed in on Tyson’s recent decision to close one of its meatpacking plants in Lexington, Nebraska to demonstrate the outsize power that big corporations have over the US food supply.

The Lexington plant employs more than 3,000 people and is capable of processing 5,000 head of cattle a day, and its closure is expected to both devastate the local economy and have a major impact on US ranchers throughout the region.

Huffman noted a report from the Associated Press estimating that the Lexington plant’s closure, combined with projected job cuts at a Tyson plant in Amarillo, Texas, could cut national beef processing capacity by up to 9%.

“Ranchers were already dealing with high costs, drought, and years of uneven prices,” Huffman wrote. “Now they face even less competition for their cattle. When there are fewer packers active in the market, ranchers have less bargaining power, and cattle prices fall even as beef prices in grocery stores stay near record highs.”

Dan Osborn, an independent US Senate candidate running in Nebraska, has made the dangers of corporate consolidation a central theme of his campaign, and on Monday he released a video explaining why he spends so much time talking about monopolies, particularly in the agricultural industry.

“If you’re a farmer, your inputs, your seed, your chemicals, you have to buy from monopolies,” he said. “Sygenta, Chinese-owned company you’ve got to buy your seed from, they control and manipulate that market. And then when your production’s over and you’re selling it, you’re selling it to monopolies as well.”

Osborn said that the trend of industry consolidation wasn’t just limited to agriculture, but is now moving forward with major railroad and media mergers.

“We need to create an economic environment in this country that favors competition,” he said. “That’s what a free market is. A free market isn’t three or four big people or big corporations controlling everything.”

The US Department of Justice on Tuesday released a new batch of documents related to the criminal investigation of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein—along with a disclaimer aimed at exonerating President Donald Trump, who is mentioned numerous times in the latest disclosures.

In a message posted on X, the DOJ asserted that some of the latest documents “contain untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election.”

The DOJ insisted that “the claims are unfounded and false, and if they had a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already.”

Among the latest batch of documents released by the DOJ was a letter purportedly written by Epstein in prison to fellow convicted sex offender Larry Nassar in which he claimed that Trump “shares our love of young, nubile girls.”

The existence of this letter was reported by the Associated Press in 2023, although its contents were not known at the time. According to MeidasTouch, investigators who found the letter submitted it for handwriting analysis to verify its authenticity, but it is not definitively known at this time if it was written by Epstein.

An internal DOJ email from 2020, meanwhile, states that Trump flew with Epstein on his private plane at least eight times between 1993 and 1996, which was more than had been previously known.

On two occasions, Trump and Epstein shared flights with two people whom the DOJ described as “possible witnesses” in a criminal case against Ghislaine Maxwell, a longtime Epstein accomplice who is serving a prison sentence for conspiring to help him sexually abuse minors.

The DOJ’s post defending Trump from allegations made in the documents it had just released drew scrutiny from Politico senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney, who pointed out some basic logical inconsistencies with the department’s claims.

“Bizarre defensive post from DOJ saying if allegations of Trump had any credibility they would’ve been ‘weaponized’ against him,” he wrote in response. “But... if they had credibility, then pursuing them, by definition, wouldn’t be weaponization.”

Former Republican congressman Joe Walsh, who left the party over his disgust with Trump, said the DOJ post was further evidence of a justice system that had been totally compromised by the president’s personal interests.

“Technically, this tweet is coming from our government,” he wrote. “But it sounds like and reads like it’s coming from Trump’s lawyers. Trump has so completely corrupted our Justice Department.”

Walsh’s sentiment was echoed by Rep. Nellie Pou (D-NJ), who argued that “the US Department of Justice shouldn’t be acting like the White House’s personal law firm.”

Trump’s past relationship with Epstein has come under greater scrutiny in recent months, and the New York Times last week published a lengthy report detailing the two men’s years of friendship.

Stacey Williams, a former model who has accused Trump of groping her in front of Epstein in 1993, told the Times that the two men were engaged in “trophy hunting” when it came to their pursuits of women.

The Times report also found that Epstein and Maxwell over the years “introduced at least six women who have accused them of grooming or abuse to Mr. Trump,” including one who was a minor at the time.

The report emphasized, however, that “none have accused Mr. Trump himself of inappropriate behavior.”

Yale historian Greg Grandin believes that President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is putting the US on a dangerous course that could lead to a new world war.

Writing in The New York Times on Monday, Grandin argued that the Trump administration seems determined to throw out the US-led international order that has been in place since World War II.

In its place, Grandin said, is “a vision of the world carved up into garrisoned spheres of competing influence,” in which the US has undisputed control over the Western Hemisphere.

As evidence, he pointed to the Trump White House’s recently published National Security Strategy that called for reviving the so-called Monroe Doctrine that in the past was used to justify US imperial aggression throughout Latin America, and that the Trump administration is using to justify its own military adventures in the region.

Among other things, Grandin said that the Trump administration has been carrying out military strikes against purported drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean, and has also been “meddling in the internal politics of Brazil, Argentina, and Honduras, issuing scattershot threats against Colombia and Mexico, menacing Cuba and Nicaragua, increasing its influence over the Panama Canal, and seizing an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela.”

Most ominously, Grandin said, is how the US Department of Defense has been “carrying out a military buildup in the Caribbean that is all but unprecedented in its scale and concentration of firepower, seemingly aimed at effecting regime change in Venezuela.”

A large problem with dividing the globe into spheres controlled by major powers, Grandin continued, is that these powers inevitably come into violent conflict with one another.

Citing past statements and actions by the British Empire, Imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany, Grandin argued that “as the world marched into a second global war, many of its belligerents did so citing the Monroe Doctrine.”

This dynamic is particularly dangerous in the case of Trump, who, according to Grandin, sees Latin America “as a theater of global rivalry, a place to extract resources, secure commodity chains, establish bulwarks of national security, fight the drug war, limit Chinese influence, and end migration.”

The result of this policy shift, Grandin concluded, “will most likely be more confrontation, more brinkmanship, more war.”

A democracy advocacy organization is stepping up pressure on the federal government to release more information on President Donald Trump’s scheme to receive a $230 million payout from the US Department of Justice.

Democracy Forward on Monday filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) complaint against the DOJ and the US Department of Treasury, alleging that both agencies have so far refused to turn over any records related to what the group describes as Trump’s “stunning effort to obtain a $230 million taxpayer-funded payout for investigations into his own misconduct.”

The group notes that it has already filed multiple FOIA requests over the last several weeks, and in response neither DOJ or Treasury has “produced a single substantial record or issued a legally required determination.”

The complaint asks courts to compel DOJ and Treasury “to conduct searches for any and all responsive records” related to Democracy Forward’s past FOIA requests, and also to force the government “to produce, by a date certain, any and all non-exempt responsive records,” and to create an index “of any responsive records withheld under a claim of exemption.”

Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said her organization’s lawsuit was a simple demand for government transparency.

“People in America deserve to know whether the Department of Justice is entertaining the president’s request to cut himself a taxpayer-funded $230 million check,” Perryman said. “If senior officials are processing this grift behind closed doors—including officials who used to represent him—that is not just bad optics, it is a direct threat to government integrity.”

Democracy Forward’s complaint stems from an October New York Times report that Trump was lobbying DOJ to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars to him as compensation for the purported hardships he endured throughout the multiple criminal investigations and indictments leveled against him.

Trump was indicted in 2023 on federal charges related to his mishandling of top-secret government documents that he’d stashed in his Mar-a-Lago resort, as well as his efforts to illegally remain in power after losing the 2020 presidential election. Both cases were dropped after Trump won the 2024 presidential election.

When asked about the DOJ payout scheme in the wake of the Times report, Trump insisted he would give any money paid out by the department to charity and asserted that he had been “damaged very greatly” by past criminal probes.

Perryman, however, insisted that Trump was not entitled to enrich himself off taxpayer funds.

“President Trump may think he can invoice people for the consequences of his own actions,” she said, “but this country still has laws, and we demand they be enforced.”

A new poll shows US voters’ approval of President Donald Trump’s handling of the economy has hit an all-time low, even as the president and his officials insist the economy is the best in the world.

The latest Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released Thursday found that only 31% of voters approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, the lowest figure in that survey throughout either of his two terms in office. Overall, 68% of voters said that the current state of the economy was “poor.”

What’s more, Trump’s approval rating on the economy among Republican voters now stands at just 69%, a strikingly low figure for a president who has consistently commanded loyalty from the GOP base.

Despite the grim numbers, the president and his administration have continued to say that the US is now in the middle of an economic boom.

During a Thursday morning interview on CNBC, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that the US now has “the greatest $30 trillion economy in the world.”

“We are doing great,” Lutnick said. “Nothing bad is happening. Greatness is happening. We grew at 4% GDP! Come on!”

Lutnick’s message echoes the one Trump delivered earlier this week during a rally in Pennsylvania, where he said that voters’ concerns about being able to afford basics such as groceries, electricity, and healthcare were a “hoax” concocted by Democrats.

“Prices are coming down very substantially,” Trump falsely claimed during his speech. “But they have a new word. You know, they always have a hoax. The new word is affordability.”

As NPR reported on Thursday, data shows that the prices of groceries and electricity have continued to rise throughout Trump’s second term, directly contradicting his claims that prices are “coming down.”

University of Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson told NPR that Trump is playing with fire by making false claims about prices when US consumers can see costs persistently going up.

“Trump’s claims about inflation are false, and you can go to the grocery store and see it yourself,” Stevenson said.

Even some members of Trump’s own party are growing wary of him insisting that America is experiencing an unprecedented economic boom when voters feel otherwise.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) told The Hill that Trump’s insistence on making happy talk about the economy would not fly with voters.

“You can’t call it a hoax and suggest that people are going to believe it,” she said. “What you say matters.”

An anonymous Republican senator also told The Hill that they were concerned about the optics of Trump building a massive luxury ballroom in the White House at a time when Americans say they are struggling financially.

“The cost of living just makes life very difficult on people,” the senator stressed.

And Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) gently pushed back on Trump’s messaging by telling CNN that “a lot of people are still having trouble making ends meet” in her state.

A top FBI official struggled on Thursday to answer basic questions about antifa, a loosely organized collective of anti-fascist activists that he labeled the top terrorist threat facing the US.

Michael Glasheen, operations director of the FBI’s National Security Branch, testified before the US House Committee on Homeland Security that antifa was “the most immediate violent threat” facing Americans today when it comes to domestic terrorism.

But when Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee, asked Glasheen for specifics about this purportedly dire threat, he mostly came up empty.

“So where is antifa headquarters?” Thompson asked him.

Glasheen paused for several seconds and then said, “What we’re doing right now with the organization...” before Thompson interrupted him.

“Where in the United States does antifa exist?” asked Thompson.

“We are building out the infrastructure right now,” Glasheen replied.

“So what does that mean?” asked a bewildered Thompson. “I’m just, we’re trying to get information. You said antifa is a terrorist organization. Tell us, as a committee, how did you come to that? Whether they exist, how many members do they have in the United States as of right now?”

“Well, that’s very fluid,” Glasheen said. “It’s ongoing for us to understand that... no different from al-Qaeda and ISIS.”

Thompson again interrupted and tried to make Glasheen answer his original question.

“If you said antifa is the No. 1 domestic terrorist organization operating in the United States,” he said, “I just need to know where they are, how many people. I don’t want a name, I don’t want anything like that. Just, how many people have you identified, with the FBI, that antifa is made of?”

“Well, the investigations are active...” Glasheen said.

Thompson then became incredulous.

“Sir, you wouldn’t come to this committee and say something you can’t prove,” he said. “I know you wouldn’t do that. But you did.”

Many observers were stunned that Glasheen appeared to know so little about what he proclaimed to be the top domestic terrorist threat facing the US.

“Total amateur hour in US law enforcement,” remarked Democracy Docket news editor Matthew Kupfer, “where the No. 1 terror threat is an organization that does not formally exist and a career FBI official is dancing around before a congressional committee trying to make the Trump strategy sound legit.”

Zeteo editor-in-chief Mehdi Hasan argued that Glasheen’s testimony was proof that the administration was simply concocting domestic terrorism threats with zero basis in reality.

“Wow,” Hasan marveled. “Just a complete admission here that the entire ‘antifa’ threat narrative is totally manufactured by this administration.”

Fred Wellman, a Democratic congressional candidate in Missouri, wondered how many actual dangerous criminals are running free while the FBI focuses on taking down an organization that it apparently knows nothing about.

“This would be comical if there wasn’t real world impact from this idiocy,” Wellman wrote. “We have real crimes and real threats and they are chasing a fake ‘organization’ for politics.”

Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee also piled on Glasheen, citing his testimony as evidence that the Trump administration is completely unserious about law enforcement.

“If your ‘top threat’ has no headquarters, no organization, and no definition then it’s not a top threat,” they posted on social media. “The Trump administration is ignoring real threats, and the American people see right through it.”

Venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of data platform company Palantir, is calling for the return of public hangings as part of a broader push to restore what he describes as “masculine leadership” to the US.

In a statement posted on X Friday, Lonsdale said that he supported changing the so-called “three strikes” anti-crime law to ensure that anyone who is convicted of three violent crimes gets publicly executed, rather than simply sent to prison for life.

“If I’m in charge later, we won’t just have a three strikes law,” he wrote. “We will quickly try and hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others.”

Lonsdale then added that “our society needs balance,” and said that “it’s time to bring back masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable.”

Lonsdale’s views on public hangings being necessary to restore “masculine leadership” drew swift criticism.

Gil Durán, a journalist who documents the increasingly authoritarian politics of Silicon Valley in his newsletter “The Nerd Reich,” argued in a Saturday post that Lonsdale’s call for public hangings showed that US tech elites are “entering a more dangerous and desperate phase of radicalization.”

“For months, Peter Thiel guru Curtis Yarvin has been squawking about the need for more severe measures to cement Trump’s authoritarian rule,” Durán explained. “Peter Thiel is ranting about the Antichrist in a global tour. And now Lonsdale—a Thiel protégé—is fantasizing about a future in which he will have the power to unleash state violence at mass scale.”

Taulby Edmondson, an adjunct professor of history, religion, and culture at Virginia Tech, wrote in a post on Bluesky that the rhetoric Lonsdale uses to justify the return of public hangings has even darker intonations than calls for state-backed violence.

“A point of nuance here: ‘masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable’ is how lynch mobs are described, not state-sanctioned executions,” he observed.

Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll argued that Lonsdale’s remarks were symbolic of a kind of performative masculinity that has infected US culture.

“Immaturity masquerading as strength is the defining personal characteristic of our age,” he wrote.

Tech entrepreneur Anil Dash warned Lonsdale that his call for public hangings could have unintended consequences for members of the Silicon Valley elite.

“Well, Joe, Mark Zuckerberg has sole control over Facebook, which directly enabled the Rohingya genocide,” he wrote. “So let’s have the conversation.”

And Columbia Journalism School professor Bill Grueskin noted that Lonsdale has been a major backer of the University of Austin, an unaccredited liberal arts college that has been pitched as an alternative to left-wing university education with the goal of preparing “thoughtful and ethical innovators, builders, leaders, public servants and citizens through open inquiry and civil discourse.”

A leaked memo written by US Attorney General Pam Bondi directs the Department of Justice to compile a list of potential “domestic terrorism” organizations that espouse “extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment.”

The memo, which was obtained by journalist Ken Klippenstein, expands upon National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), a directive signed by President Donald Trump in late September that demanded a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”

The new Bondi memo instructs law enforcement agencies to refer “suspected” domestic terrorism cases to the Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs), which will then undertake an “exhaustive investigation contemplated by NSPM-7” that will incorporate “a focused strategy to root out all culpable participants—including organizers and funders—in all domestic terrorism activities.”

The memo identifies the “domestic terrorism threat” as organizations that use “violence or the threat of violence” to advance political goals such as “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, or anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality.”

Commenting on the significance of the memo, Klippenstein criticized mainstream media organizations for largely ignoring the implications of NSPM-7, which was drafted and signed in the wake of the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

“For months, major media outlets have largely blown off the story of NSPM-7, thinking it was all just Trump bluster and too crazy to be serious,” he wrote. “But a memo like this one shows you that the administration is absolutely taking this seriously—even if the media are not—and is actively working to operationalize NSPM-7.”

Klippenstein also warned that NSPM-7 appeared to be the start of a new “war on terrorism,” but “only this time, millions of Americans like you and I could be the target.”

Economists on Wednesday expressed significant concerns after new data from global payroll processing firm ADP estimated that the US economy lost 32,000 jobs last month.

As reported by CNBC, small businesses bore the brunt of the job losses, as firms with fewer than 50 employees shed a total of 120,000 jobs, more than offsetting the 90,000 in job gains reported by firms with 50 or more employees.

The loss of 32,000 jobs in November marked a major miss for economists’ consensus estimate of 40,000 jobs added on the month, and CNBC noted that the total number of jobs lost according to ADP data “was the biggest drop since March 2023.”

Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, noted in a post on X that the job losses recorded by ADP were widespread across the US economy.

“Yikes,” she wrote in reaction to the report. “Most industries were doing layoffs. The only ones still are hiring are hospitality and healthcare.”

Long also said the disparity between small and large businesses in terms of job growth was more evidence that the US is experiencing a “K-shaped” economy in which those at the top of the economic ladder thrive, even as everyone else struggles.

“Larger companies are still hiring,” she explained. “Smaller firms (under 50 workers) are doing the layoffs. It’s been a very tough year for small biz due to tariffs and more selective spending from lower and middle-class consumers.”

Kevin Gordon, head of macro research and strategy at the Schwab Center for Financial Research, observed that ADP hasn’t reported such a big drop in small-business employment since October 2020, when the US economy was suffering through the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, cautioned against reading too much into ADP data, although he added that “in the absence of up to date government payrolls, all other signs point to a further deteriorating labor market.”

Charlie Bilello, chief market strategist at financial planner Creative Planning, argued that the ADP jobs numbers were part of a negative three-month trend in which the US economy lost an estimated 4,000 jobs per month, which he said was “the first three-month decline since the 2020 recession.”

Bilello added that “a year ago, we were adding over 200,000 jobs per month.”

Diane Swonk, chief economist at accounting firm KPMG, argued that the ADP report showed job losses in the US economy were “broad based” and “were accompanied by a cooling of wage gains” for workers who still have jobs or are switching from one job to another.

“Those with a job are clinging on, while those without are left wanting,” she explained.

Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, argued that the ADP report blows up President Donald Trump’s spin about the health of the US economy.

“The booming job market exists only in Donald Trump’s demented head,” he wrote.

Democratic lawmakers who participated in a video warning US military personnel against following unlawful orders issued by President Donald Trump remained defiant after being contacted by the FBI.

As reported by Reuters on Tuesday, the FBI has requested interviews with Sens. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), as well as Reps. Chris Deluzio (D-Penn.), Maggie Goodlander (D-NH), Chrissy Houlahan (D-Md.), and Jason Crow (D-Colo.), just days after Trump demanded their imprisonment or even death for supposed “sedition.”

One US Department of Justice official told Reuters that the FBI interviews are to determine if the Democratic lawmakers engaged in “any wrongdoing” when they spoke out against the president potentially giving unlawful orders that pit the US military against American civilians.

The Democrats, however, vowed that they would not be intimidated by any FBI investigation.

In a social media post, Slotkin said that Trump’s push to jail the Democrats for exercising their First Amendment rights demonstrated the reason why they decided to participate in the video in the first place. Slotkin accused Trump of “weaponizing the federal government against his perceived enemies,” while adding that he “does not believe laws apply to him or his Cabinet.”

“This is not the America I know,” added Slotkin, a former CIA analyst. “I’m not going to let this next step from the FBI stop me from speaking up for my country and our Constitution.”

Houlahan, Crow, Goodlander, and Deluzio issued a joint statement accusing Trump of “using the FBI as a tool to intimidate and harass members of Congress,” and vowed that “no amount of intimidation or harassment will ever stop us from doing our jobs and honoring our Constitution.”

“We swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” they emphasized. “That oath lasts a lifetime, and we intend to keep it. We will not be bullied. We will never give up the ship.”

The FBI interview requests came just a day after the US Department of Defense (DOD) said it had “received serious allegations of misconduct” against Kelly, who is a retired US Navy captain, and was launching an investigation that could result in him being recalled to active duty to face court-martial hearings for violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).

In a separate social media post, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attacked all the Democrats who participated in the video as the “seditious six” and said that Kelly had been singled out for DOD investigation because he was the only member who was still subject to UCMJ given his status as a retired naval officer.

The US Department of Defense on Monday announced it was launching an investigation into a Democratic senator who had participating in a video warning active-duty troops to not follow illegal orders given by President Donald Trump.

In a social media post, the DoD said it had “received serious allegations of misconduct” against Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), a retired US Navy captain who was one of several Democrats with backgrounds in national defense to speak out against the president potentially giving unlawful orders that pit the US military against American civilians.

As a result of the investigation, the DoD said that Kelly could be recalled to active duty to face potential court-martial proceedings for violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).

“All servicemembers are reminded that they have a legal obligation under the UCMJ to obey lawful orders and that orders are presumed to be lawful,” the DoD said. “A servicemember’s personal philosophy does not justify or excuse the disobedience of an otherwise lawful order.”

In addition to Kelly, Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) and Reps. Chris Deluzio (D-Penn.), Maggie Goodlander (D-NH), Chrissy Houlahan (D-Md.), and Jason Crow (D-Colo.) appeared in the video.

In a follow-up social media post, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attacked the Democrats in the video as the “seditious six” and said that Kelly had been singled out for investigation because he was the only member who was still subject to UCMJ given his status as a retired Naval officer.

“As was announced, the Department is reviewing his statements and actions, which were addressed directly to all troops while explicitly using his rank and service affiliation—lending the appearance of authority to his words,” wrote Hegseth. “Kelly’s conduct brings discredit upon the armed forces and will be addressed appropriately.”

Trump has been calling for the prosecution of the six Democrats who appeared in the video for the last several days, and he even went so far as to say in one Truth Social post they deserve to be executed for “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

Shortly after the Pentagon announced its investigation into Kelly, he responded with a lengthy social media post in which he defended his service record and vowed not to back down despite threats from the Trump administration.

“If this is meant to intimidate me and other members of Congress from doing our jobs and holding this administration accountable, it won’t work,” he said. “I’ve given too much to this country to be silenced by bullies who care more about their own power than protecting the Constitution.”

Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) responded on X with a much shorter five-word post that read, “F--- you and your investigation.”

Legal experts and reporters reacted with shock on Wednesday after Trump-appointed interim US Attorney Lindsey Halligan acknowledged that a grand jury never voted on the operative indictment filed against former FBI Director James Comey.

Politico reports that the admission appears to have put the Comey prosecution “in serious jeopardy,” as Halligan told US District Judge Michael Nachmanoff the grand jury never saw the final indictment that was handed down in September that charged Comey with one count of making a false statement to Congress and one count of obstructing a congressional proceeding.

The final indictment was a revised version of an originally proposed three-count indictment that needed to be changed after the grand jury rejected one of the proposed charges against Comey.

Former federal prosecutor Ken White attempted to piece together exactly what Halligan did in a post on Bluesky.

“So here’s what apparently happened: they tried to indict Comey on the last day of the statute with a three-count indictment,” he explained. “The grand jury rejected one. Rather than cross it out or indicate on the indictment that only two of the three counts were voted upon, Halligan creates a new indictment, which shows only the two counts they true billed, and has the foreperson sign it without presenting it to the grand jury.”

Assistant US Attorney Tyler Lemons told Nachmanoff that it was necessary to revise the indictment on short notice after grand jurors no-billed one of the charges since the statute of limitations for Comey’s alleged crimes was set to expire within mere hours.

“They really had no other way to return it,” he told the court.

Nonetheless, many observers expressed shock that Halligan could make such an elementary error that could singlehandedly get the entire case against Comey dismissed.

“Lindsey Halligan should be immediately disbarred,” wrote Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at the Georgia State College School of Law, in a post on X.

Political and leadership consultant Elizabeth Cronise McLaughlin, a former human rights attorney, also believed that Hallingan should face severe consequences for pushing forward with an indictment that had not been voted on by a full grand jury.

“This should result in the interim US Attorney losing her bar license,” she wrote on Bluesky. “Never, in almost 30 years as an attorney, have I heard of this big of an intentional fuck up before a grand jury.”

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) argued that Halligan’s actions were enough to justify her termination as interim US attorney.

“In a normal Department of Justice not run by hacks and sycophants and malicious clowns,” he wrote, “Lindsey Halligan would resign and the indictment against James Comey would be dismissed.”

Quinta Jurecic, a longtime legal journalist who writes for The Atlantic, said that she found Halligan’s error to be “impressive” because “I honestly didn’t even know this was a mistake you could make.”

Anti-Trump attorney George Conway, meanwhile, encouraged his followers on X to “please remember to give thanks to the Lord that Trump and his people are so unbelievably incompetent.”

Maya Sen, a political scientist at the Harvard Kennedy School, drew a line between the quality of legal competence in the Comey case and a three-judge panel in Texas shooting down the administration’s efforts to redraw Texas’ congressional map as part of a mid-decade gerrymandering scheme.

“High levels of incompetence between this and the DOJ-TX gerrymandering situation,” she wrote on X. “It’s hard to find people with high levels of competence and expertise when maximizing on ideological and personal loyalty, and this is a problem for [Republicans] in the age of educational polarization.”

Dozens of former US Department of Justice attorneys have now gone on record to describe the unprecedented corruption of federal law enforcement taking place during President Donald Trump’s second term.

In a lengthy story published on Sunday by the New York Times, the former DOJ attorneys described rampant politicization of prosecutions, directives to dig up evidence on Trump’s political foes, and orders to drop investigations into potential terrorist plots and white-collar crimes.

Several attorneys told the paper that the corruption of the DOJ began on Trump’s very first day in office when he issued a blanket pardon to everyone who had been convicted of rioting at the US Capitol building on his behalf on January 6, 2021, in a last-ditch effort to prevent the certification of former President Joe Biden’s electoral victory.

Gregory Rosen, who oversaw the unit at the DOJ that prosecuted January 6 rioters, told the Times that he felt “numb” seeing the pardons of the rioters, but he nonetheless facilitated the pardons because he understood they were within the president’s constitutional powers.

Mike Romano, a prosecutor who worked on January 6 cases, said that he had to resign as soon as he saw the broad scope of the pardons, which included rioters who were guilty of assaulting police officers.

“It’s incredibly demoralizing to see something you worked on for four years wiped away by a lie—I mean the idea that prosecution of the rioters was a grave national injustice,” he said. “We had strong evidence against every person we prosecuted.”

The mass pardon of the Capitol rioters was only the beginning, as prosecutors said that this politicization soon swept over the entire department.

In early March, for instance, Trump signed an executive order targeting law firms that had in the past represented prominent Democrats. Among other things, the order demanded federal agencies cancel government contracts with the firms and strip the firms’ employees of their security clearances.

The orders also accused some of the firms in engaging in supposed racial discrimination for maintaining policies related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Dena Robinson, a former attorney at the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, told the Times that the DEI investigation into law firm Perkins Coie was a particularly extreme example of the department’s politicization under Trump.

“The idea of the investigation was that Perkins Coie supposedly engaged in illegal discrimination against white men,” she explained. “But Perkins Coie is an extremely white firm—only 3% of the partners are Black. When my colleague pointed that out, the leadership didn’t care. They’d already reached their conclusion.”

Robinson said that this attitude was emblematic of how Trump appointees conducted investigations: They begin with desired conclusions and systematically ignore evidence that undermines them.

“I wouldn’t even call it the Justice Department anymore,” she said. “It’s become Trump’s personal law firm. I think Americans should be enraged.”

Another aspect of the DOJ under Trump that has drawn scrutiny has been his use of pardons for political allies, including his decision last month to pardon Changpeng Zhao, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, who pleaded guilty to money-laundering charges in 2023, and who had helped boost the value of the Trump family’s own cryptocurrency venture.

A new investigation from ProPublica found that Trump’s use of the pardon hasn’t just been relegated to prosecutions that took place during Democratic administrations.

The ProPublica report found Trump had wiped out convictions in “at least a dozen criminal cases that originated during his first term,” many of which involved politicians convicted of taking bribes or engaging in kickback schemes.

Frank O. Bowman III, a professor emeritus of law at the University of Missouri, told Pro Publica that the Trump pardons taken together are part of what he described as “the systematic destruction of the Justice Department as an objective agency that seeks to uphold the law and fight crime.”

In addition to this, Joseph Tirrell, former director of the Departmental Ethics Office, told the Times that the Trump DOJ has been hacking away at rules that bar law-enforcement officials from accepting gifts.

In one instance, Tirrell said he tried to intervene to stop DOJ employees from accepting cigars given by mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor and a soccer ball from the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA).

“I felt like I really had to go to the mattress to convince the AG’s office: You can pay for the item or you can return the item or you can throw the item away,” he said. “There’s no other way to do this.”

Shortly after this, Tirrell said he got a call from the FBI general counsel inquiring “about changing exceptions to the gift rules because his boss, [FBI Director] Kash Patel, felt like he should be able to accept more expensive gifts.”

Tirrell said that he then reminded the counsel that “his client was not Mr. Patel, but the United States.”

Patel in recent weeks has come under scrutiny for some of the perks he’s taken during his time as FBI director, including using the FBI’s private jet to fly to a wrestling event where his girlfriend, country music singer Alexis Wilkins, was performing the national anthem.

MS NOW reported on Monday that Patel has also given Wilkins “a security detail made up of elite FBI agents usually assigned to a SWAT team in the FBI field office in Nashville,” an unprecedented arrangement for the girlfriend of the FBI director.

Christopher O’Leary, a former senior FBI agent and MS NOW law enforcement contributor, said that there is “no legitimate justification” for granting Wilkins this level of security.

“This is a clear abuse of position and misuse of government resources,” he said. “She is not his spouse, does not live in the same house or even the same city.”

As poll numbers on his handling of the US economy have continued to sink in recent weeks, President Donald Trump has floated sending Americans a $2,000 check that he has claimed will be funded with revenue collected from his tariffs on imported products.

However, economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) on Tuesday crunched some numbers and found that Trump’s proposed tariff “dividend” simply doesn’t add up.

In particular, Baker found that the revenue being generated by the tariffs is less than half of the total cost of sending nearly every US citizen a $2,000 check.

“At $2,000 a piece it would come to $600 billion, more than twice what Trump is collecting from us with his import taxes,” Baker explained. “Since he’s already $330 billion short, how can Trump think he has money to pay down the national debt?”

Baker declared Trump’s tariff math “crazy,” and then speculated that the president sincerely believes the false claims he’s been making about securing $18 trillion in investments from foreign countries. What’s more, Baker said that it appears that no one on the president’s economic policy team wants to tell him that this belief is purely delusional.

“People like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent or National Economic Adviser Kevin Hassett may not be brilliant intellects, but they know that Trump does not have trillions of dollars from foreign countries to play with, and that we are still running deficits that would ordinarily be considered very large,” he said. “But they are too scared of Donald Trump to explain this to him.”

Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy at the Tax Foundation, said in an interview with CNN published on Tuesday that Trump could also reignite inflation by sending out $2,000 checks to everyone, as this would likely increase demand for goods and services without a corresponding increase in supply.

“All of this is exactly the wrong recipe if you want to get inflation under control and make things feel more affordable,” she said.

York also said in a separate interview with the Associated Press that it makes little sense to cut Americans a check when one of the main reasons they’re paying more for so many products has been the president’s tariffs.

“If the goal is relief for Americans, just get rid of the tariffs,” she said.

Michael Pearce, deputy chief US economist at Oxford Economics, echoed York’s concern about the dividend checks worsening inflation, and he told CNN that the risk with Trump’s plan is “if you add a stimulus check on top of a tax cut refund, you’re going to overheat the economy.”

University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers was even more blunt in his take on Trump’s tariff dividend idea, which he labeled, “insane, unfair, pointless and dumb.”

“If tariffs are making Americans poorer,” Wolfers told CNN, “the simplest and fairest way to stop that is not to tariff.”

President Donald Trump's policy of bombing purported drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean, which multiple legal experts have decried as an illegal act extrajudicial murder, is now meeting resistance from a top US ally.

CNN reported on Tuesday that the UK has now stopped sharing intelligence related to suspected drug-trafficking vessels with the US because the country does not want to be complicit in strikes that it believes violate international law.

CNN's sources say that the UK stopped giving the US information about boats in the region roughly a month ago, shortly after Trump began authorizing drone strikes against them in a campaign that so far has killed at least 76 people.

"Before the US military began blowing up boats in September, countering illicit drug trafficking was handled by law enforcement and the US Coast Guard, [and] cartel members and drug smugglers were treated as criminals with due process rights," explained CNN.

Last month, after his administration had already launched several strikes, Trump declared drug cartels enemy combatants and claimed he has the right to launch military strikes against suspected drug-trafficking boats.

Appearing on CNN on Tuesday to discuss the story, reporter Natasha Bertrand described the decision to stop sharing intelligence as "a really significant rupture" between the US and its closest ally.

"We're told that the UK is deeply uncomfortable with [the boat strikes], and they believe that it is pretty blatantly illegal," Bertrand explained. "It really underscores the continued questions surrounding the legality of this US military campaign."

The US military began its boat attacks in the Caribbean in September, and has since expanded them to purported drug boats operating in the Pacific Ocean.

Reporting last month from the Wall Street Journal indicated that the administration was also preparing to attack a variety of targets inside Venezuela, whose government Trump has baselessly accused of running drug cartels. Potential targets include “ports and airports controlled by the military that are allegedly used to traffic drugs, including naval facilities and airstrips.”

The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier has now arrived off the coast of Latin America, in a move that the paper notes "has fueled speculation the Trump administration intends to dramatically escalate its deadly counternarcotics campaign there, possibly through direct attacks on Venezuela."

Reports from the US government and the United Nations have not identified Venezuela as a significant source of drugs that enter the United States, and the country plays virtually no role in the trafficking of fentanyl, the primary cause of drug overdoses in the US.

The administration's military aggression in Latin America has also sparked a fierce backlash in the region, where dozens of political leaders last month condemned the boat attacks, while also warning that they could just be the start of a regime change war reminiscent of Cold War-era US-backed coups like ones that occurred in Chile, Brazil, and other nations.

President Donald Trump’s push for mid-decade redistricting to prevent Republicans from losing control of the US House of Representatives appears to be on the verge of backfiring.

The latest blow to Trump’s nationwide redistricting efforts came in Utah, where District Court Judge Dianna Gibson shot down a proposed map drawn by Utah Republicans because it failed to abide by a 2018 ballot measure that restricted partisan gerrymandering in the state.

As reported by NBC News, Gibson instead approved a map that created “a solidly Democratic seat ahead of next year’s midterm elections,” thus giving Democrats a likely net gain of one seat in the US House.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin hailed Gibson’s ruling and vowed that Democrats weren’t finished fighting Trump’s efforts to rig next year’s elections in his favor.

“Utah Republicans gerrymandered the maps because they knew they were losing power in the state,” he said. “Republicans doubled down when they chose to submit another gerrymandered map, but today, they were once again thwarted by impartial Courts. Democrats will continue to fight for fair maps in Utah, regardless of what Donald Trump and Utah Republicans try next. Every seat counts, and Democrats everywhere are fired up and ready to take back the House in the midterms in 2026.”

Dave Wasserman, a senior elections analyst at Cook Political Report, wrote in a post on X that the Democrats’ Utah victory, along with California voters’ approval of newly gerrymandered maps and reported plans to redraw maps in Virginia, have “pushed the mid-decade redistricting war closer to a draw.”

In a lengthy analysis published in Bloomberg on Tuesday, columnist Mary Ellen Klas argued that Republicans should take a deep breath before going all-in on Trump’s unprecedented mid-decade redistricting crusade, which began in Texas and subsequently spread to Missouri and North Carolina.

The issue, Klas explained, is that Republicans in those states have carved out more GOP-friendly districts based on assumptions that Republican gains among Latino voters and young men would hold in 2026. As last week’s sweeping Democratic victories showed, however, the GOP now appears to be hemorrhaging support among these two demographics.

“In New Jersey, 68% of Latino voters broke for Democrat Mikie Sherrill,” wrote Klas. “So did 56% of men under the age of 30. In Virginia, 67% of Latino voters went for Democrat Abigail Spanberger. So did 57% of men under 30. Many of these voters had voted for Trump last year. The exit polls show that both Sherrill and Spanberger won 7% of Trump’s 2024 voters, with Sherrill getting a whopping 18% of Trump’s Hispanic support in the state.”

If those trends hold over the next year, it could wipe out advantages the GOP had hoped to gain with its Texas gerrymander, which assumed that Latino voters who swung to Trump in the state would remain loyal partisan soldiers.

“Republicans are hardly going to admit it, but they should evaluate whether Trump’s push to ignite a redistricting arms race may have made it easier for a blue wave to wipe out more Republicans than if they had left their maps alone,” argued Klass.

In fact, some Republican strategists are already fretting about Trump’s gerrymandering plan, as one anonymous GOP insider told NBC News that if the endgame of the plan was “to net one seat across the country, then it will not have been worth it.”

A second anonymous GOP insider told NBC that there was “some concern” about whether Texas Republicans may have made themselves more vulnerable to a blue wave next year.

“In Texas, I do think there is some sense those seats will be ours, but nothing is guaranteed, so some concern there,” they said.

As millions of families across the US are about to lose their access to food aid over the weekend, President Donald Trump on Friday decided to show off photos of a White House bathroom that he boasted had been refurbished in “highly polished, statuary marble.”

Trump posted photos of the bathroom on his Truth Social platform, and he explained that he decided to remodel it because he was dissatisfied with the “art deco green tile style” that had been implemented during a previous renovation, which he described as “totally inappropriate for the Lincoln Era.”“I did it in black and white polished Statuary marble,” Trump continued. “This was very appropriate for the time of Abraham Lincoln and, in fact, could be the marble that was originally there!”

Trump’s critics were quick to pan the remodeled bathroom, especially since it came at a time when Americans are suffering from numerous policies the president and the Republican Party are enacting, including tariffs that are raising the cost of food and clothing; expiring subsidies for Americans who buy health insurance through Affordable Care Act exchanges; and cuts to Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (SNAP) programs in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

“Sure, you might not be able to eat or go to the doctor, but check out how nice Trump’s new marble shitter is,” remarked independent journalist Aaron Rupar on Bluesky.Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who has become a critic of Trump, ripped the president for displaying such tone deafness in the middle of a federal government shutdown.

“Government still shutdown, Americans not getting paid, food assistance for low-income families and children about to be cut off, and this is what he cares about,” he wrote on X. “He’s a psychopath, humanly incapable of caring about anyone or anything but himself.”

Don Moynihan, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, expressed extreme skepticism that the White House bathroom during Abraham Lincoln’s tenure was decked out in marble and gold.

“Fact check based on no research but with a high degree of confidence: This is not the marble that was originally in the Lincoln Bedroom,” he wrote. “It is more likely to the be retrieved from a Trump casino before it was demolished.”

Fashion critic Derek Guy, meanwhile, mostly left politics out of his criticisms of the remodeled bathroom, instead simply observing that “White House renovations are currently being spearheaded by someone with famously bad interior design taste.”

Earlier this month, Trump sparked outrage when he demolished the entire East Wing of the White House to make way for a massive White House ballroom financed by donations from some of America’s wealthiest corporations—including several with government contracts and interests in deregulation—such as Apple, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon, and Palantir.

President Donald Trump’s family has long generated controversy and criticism for running a cryptocurrency business during his second term in office, and now they’re adding an online betting business to their portfolio.

The Financial Times on Tuesday reported that the president’s Truth Social platform is getting into the prediction market business to allow bettors to place wagers on the outcomes of elections, sports games, and other events.

The new “Truth Predict” betting market platform will be a partnership between the Trump Media and Technology Group and Crypto.com, a cryoptocurrency trading platform that in the past has donated millions to Trump causes.

According to the Financial Times, the Trump family in recent months has become more intertwined with the online betting industry, as Donald Trump Jr. has taken on “advisory roles at the two industry-leading prediction market companies, Kalshi and Polymarket.”

Additionally, Trump Jr.'s venture capital firm has invested in Polymarket, which Wired reports has not operated in the US since 2022 when it reached an agreement with the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission to settle allegations that it operated an unregistered derivatives trading market.

Mike Masnick, a journalist at Techdirt, pointed out the glaring conflict of interest posed by the most powerful person in the world owning his own prediction market platform.

“So the company the president currently owns is teaming up with a cryptocurrency company to create a prediction market, which will take bets... on things the president himself has quite a lot of control over?” he wrote in a post on Bluesky. “Gosh, I’m sure nothing bad will happen.”

The Trump family’s entrance into the online betting market came on the same day that Reuters published an extensive report showing how the Trump family has used its cryptocurrency business to generate a massive increase in wealth in a matter of mere months.

According to Reuters’ calculations, “the Trump Organization’s income soared 17-fold to $864 million from $51 million a year earlier,” with more than 90% of this income coming from the Trump-backed cryptocurrency venture. Reuters also reported that the $800 million is just the actual income the Trump Organization has taken in so far, and that it has billions more in unrealized gains from the crypto venture.

Washington University law professor Kathleen Clark, who specializes in teaching government ethics, told Reuters it was obvious that investors in the Trump crypto venture were hoping to get some kind of favor from the government in exchange.

“These people are not pouring money into coffers of the Trump family business because of the brothers’ acumen,” she said. “They are doing it because they want freedom from legal constraints and impunity that only the president can deliver.”

Trump last week sparked corruption accusations when he pardoned cryptocurrency magnate Changpeng Zhao, whose company Binance has been a major booster to the Trump family’s crypto business.

“Binance has been one of the main drivers of the growth of World Liberty’s dollar-pegged cryptocurrency, called USD1,”The Wall Street Journal reported at the time. “It delivered World Liberty’s first big break this spring when it accepted a $2 billion investment from an outside investor paid in USD1. Binance has also incentivized trading in USD1 across platforms it controls.”

House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chair James Comer (R-Tenn.), who for years investigated former President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, for his foreign business dealings, was asked by CNN host Jake Tapper if he would investigate the Trump family’s crypto venture.

Comer indicated that he was fine with the Trump family’s potentially corrupt money-making schemes because they were being done out in the open.

“We... are reading about this, we’re trying to digest it,” he said. “The difference between the way the Trump family’s operating and the Biden family, is they’re admitting they’re doing this. The president campaigned as a business guy... as long as you disclose the income and disclose the sources, I think that’s acceptable.”

Critics of the president, however, said this hands-off approach to investigating the Trump family’s business dealings was unacceptable.

Democratic operative David Axelrod wrote in a post on X that it is “kind of incredible that the House Oversight Committee is spending its time on Biden’s auto pen but they won’t touch how Trump has doubled his wealth in a year.”

Axelrod also thought congressional investigators should be asking about “who’s buying his meme coins,” “the deals his kids are cutting all over the world,” and “the gifted jet from Qatar.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) argued that no president in US history has engaged in this level of corruption.

“Trump and his family’s crypto ventures are selling out our national security through sweetheart deals with money launderers, fraudsters, and foreign governments,” he wrote on X. “The scale of this corruption—reaping more than $800 million and pardons for business partners—is unprecedented.”

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) noted on Tuesday that Binance this week promoted sales of the Trump family’s meme coin mere days after the president pardoned its founder.

“The White House is a full-time, 24/7 corruption machine,” he said.

Even as they acknowledged that only the public opposition of people in power would rein in President Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy and the rule of law, a number of political, military, business, and academic elites made clear Friday that they “are scared of crossing” the president.

In a column published on Friday in the Financial Times, Edmundv Luce revealed that he has been talking with “dozens of figures, including lawmakers, private sector executives, retired senior military figures and intelligence chiefs, current and former Trump officials, Washington lawyers, and foreign government officials,” and he found that the vast majority asked to remain anonymous for fear of attacks from the president and his administration.

“Such is the fear of jail, bankruptcy, or professional reprisal, that most of these people insisted on anonymity,” Luce explained. “This was in spite of the fact that many of the same people also wanted to emphasize that Trump would only be restrained by powerful voices opposing him publicly.”

Trump’s revenge campaign against his foes has taken many forms, Luce found. The most high-profile examples have been instances in which the president has personally pushed for officials at the US Department of Justice to criminally indict many longtime adversaries, including New York Attorney General Letitia James, former FBI Director James Comey, and John Bolton, Trump’s own former national security adviser.

Luce also learned that the administration has been waging pressure campaigns on private employers to blacklist former Biden administration officials and other opponents from being offered jobs.

“Every employer says something along the lines of ‘We’d love to hire you but it’s not worth the risk,’” one former Biden White House staffer told Luce. “All they offer me is apologies.”

Former Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan, who is now a professor at Harvard University, told Luce that he spends much of his time “trying to help former colleagues find jobs” because so few employers are willing to chance angering the president.

Military officials who spoke with Luce expressed fears that the US armed forces will not resist Trump, as they did in his first term, were he to give them illegal orders. One retired four-star general said he worried that Dan Caine, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would not refuse to carry out requests to have the military interfere with elections, as many officials did in 2020 when Trump tried to get the US Army to seize voting machines in swing states that he had lost to former President Joe Biden.

“Caine has the thinnest background to run the military at its most difficult stress test in modern history,” the general said.

Many Trump critics who read Luce’s reporting found it appalling that so many wealthy and powerful Americans were afraid to publicly criticize the president.

“When all this is over, we need to have a pretty serious conversation about the utter moral failure of the elite of this country,” remarked Leah Greenberg, co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, on Bluesky.

Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, said that Luce’s reporting shows “how much opposition we never see or hear because people fear reprisal” from the president.

Bradley Moss, a national security attorney who was one of Luce’s few sources willing to speak on the record, wrote on Bluesky that more elites needed to start speaking out against the president and his authoritarian ambitions.

“I am disappointed in those who think keeping quiet will save them,” he said. “It will not.”

Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard University, acknowledged the dangers outlined in Luce’s column but also pointed out reasons for hope.

“This wannabe dictator is also extremely unpopular and those of us with the courage to stand up have the American people on our side,” he argued. “It’ll take courage and focus, but democracy can win.”

The elites interviewed by Luce expressed their reticence to publicly speak out against Trump days after more than 7 million people gathered at thousands of “No Kings” protests condemning the president’s authoritarian agenda—despite the administration’s threats against protest movements. Residents in cities including Portland, Oregon and Chicago have also resisted federal agents carrying out Trump’s mass detention and deportation campaign.

President Donald Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to South Africa this week refused to say whether he would support or oppose repealing laws allowing Black Americans to vote.

During a Thursday Senate confirmation hearing, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) asked Trump nominee Brent Bozell, a right-wing media critic and founder of the conservative Media Research Center, about his support for Trump administration plans that limit refugee admissions almost exclusively to white Afrikaners.

“Senator, I don’t make that policy,” Bozell replied.

Murphy, however, did not accept this attempt at evasion.

“If I were to ask this question of virtually any nominee to be an ambassador, prior to this panel, that would be an easy layup answer: ‘No, no, of course we don’t support having a refugee policy where we only admit white people,’” said Murphy. “So why can’t you give me your personal view on that?”

“Because, senator, I am here to serve America and to do what the president is asking me to do,” Bozell said.

Murphy then asked him if he would support bringing back “laws in this country to only allow white people to vote.”

Bozell again refused to answer.

“Senator, I’m going to serve as ambassador to South Africa, and I’m going to focus on that,” he said.

“You will not share your personal views on whether it is right or wrong to reinstitute discriminatory policies in this country to prevent Black people from voting?” Murphy pressed.

“Senator, my personal views are irrelevant,” Bozell insisted. “I am serving here to do what the president is asking me to do in South Africa.”

Murphy rejected this premise, however, and informed Bozell that the entire point of the Senate confirmation process was to learn more about a nominee’s personal views so that senators can make informed decisions about their qualifications.

“We wouldn’t have this process if your personal views were not relevant,” Murphy said. “That is pretty stunning that you will not share your views, not only on whether we should have a refugee admissions process that is race-based, but you won’t share your personal views on whether we should reimpose discriminatory treatment against Black Americans. That is absolutely relevant to your qualifications to serve. And your refusal to answer it, I hope, is something that every member of this committee will think about.”

Commenting on the exchange afterward, Murphy wrote on Bluesky that Bozell’s answers to his questions offer “a window into the truly radical nature of the people Trump is nominating.”

Trump has falsely accused the South African government of committing “genocide” against its white citizens, and his administration has given white South Africans priority for resettlement in the US.

South Africa has a long history of racial injustice, as the apartheid system that lasted for more than four decades in the country brutally oppressed its majority Black population to ensure white minority rule.

Several wealthy Trump backers, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Palantir founder Peter Thiel, and venture capitalist David Sacks, were all either born in or spent time growing up in South Africa when it was still under the apartheid regime.

New research from investment bank Goldman Sachs affirms, as progressive advocates and economists warned, that US consumers are bearing the brunt of President Donald Trump’s trade wars.

As reported by Bloomberg on Monday, economists at Goldman released an analysis this week estimating that US consumers are shouldering up to 55% of the costs stemming from Trump’s tariffs, even though the president has repeatedly made false claims that the tariffs on imports exclusively tax foreigners.

Goldman’s research also found that US businesses will pay 22% of the cost of the tariffs, while foreign exporters will pay just 18% of the cost. Additionally, Goldman economists estimate that Trump’s tariffs “have raised core personal consumption expenditure prices by 0.44% so far this year, and will push up the closely watched inflation reading to 3% by December,” according to Bloomberg.

Despite all evidence that US consumers are shouldering the costs of the tariffs, the Trump administration has continued to insist that they are exclusively being paid by foreign countries.

During a segment on NBC‘s “Meet the Press” last month, host Kristen Welker cited an earlier Goldman estimate that 86% of the president’s tariffs were being paid by US businesses and consumers, and then asked US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent if he accepted that the tariffs were taxes on Americans.

“No, I don’t,” Bessent replied.

As Common Dreams reported in August, executives such as Walmart CEO Doug McMillon have explicitly told shareholders that while they are able to absorb the cost of tariffs, Trump’s policy would still “result in higher prices” for customers.

Goldman’s report comes as Trump is piling up even more tariffs on imported goods that will ultimately be paid by US consumers as companies raise prices.

According to The New York Times, tariffs on a wide range of products including lumber, furniture, and kitchen cabinets went into effect on Tuesday, and the Trump administration has also “started imposing fees on Chinese-owned ships docking in American ports.”

The administration has claimed that the tariffs on lumber are necessary for national security purposes, although some experts are scoffing at this rationale.

Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, told the Times that the administration’s justification for the lumber tariffs are “absurd.”

“If war broke out tomorrow, there would be zero concern about American ’dependence’ on foreign lumber or furniture, and domestic sources would be quickly and easily acquired,” he said.

Vice President JD Vance sparked alarm on Sunday when he said that President Donald Trump was considering invoking the Insurrection Act under the pretenses of combating violent crime in US cities.

During an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” host Kristen Welker asked Vance if Trump was “seriously considering” invoking the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to use the US military to carry out law enforcement operations.

Vance responded by saying Trump is “looking at all his options,” and added that he hasn’t felt the need to invoke it for the time being.

Vance proceeded to justify invoking the Insurrection Act, which he said could be necessary to protect the work of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials.

“We have to remember why we’re talking about this, Kristen,” he said. “Because crime has gotten out of control in our cities, because ICE agents, the people enforcing our immigration laws, have faced a 1,000% increase in violent attacks against them. We have people right now who are going out there, who are doing the job the president asked them to do, who are enforcing our immigration laws, they’re being assaulted.”

Welker countered by noting that a judge in Illinois found last week that the ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois has remained entirely open and operational despite being the target of protesters in recent weeks.

She also informed Vance that crime has been coming down significantly in both Chicago and Portland, two US cities where Trump has tried to deploy National Guard forces.

“Kristen, crime is down in Chicago and Portland often because they’re so overwhelmed at the local level, they’re not even keeping their statistics properly,” Vance replied, without providing any evidence to back up his claim.

Vance’s justifications for invoking the Insurrection Act on the grounds that he laid out drew alarmed reactions from many critics.

“This is a pretext to take over American cities by force,” wrote CNN political commentator Karen Finney in a post on X.

Shannon Watts, the founder of anti-gun violence organization Moms Demand Action, linked Vance’s comments to the current shutdown of the federal government and questioned whether the government deserved to be funded when its executive branch was threatening to unleash the military against its own citizens.

“Why should Democrats vote to open the government while this is still happening?” she asked.

Cornell William Brooks, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and former president of the NAACP, argued in a post on Bluesky that Vance’s comments show that the Trump administration “insults your intelligence.”

“The same administration that fired an economist for reporting statistics on the economy,” he wrote, “is asking you to not believe lower statistics on crime, not see safer streets, and accept the National Guard in your front yard.”

Democratic political strategist David Axelrod warned that the Trump administration seems genuinely eager to send troops into US cities.

“Believe them when they tell you what they’re planning, folks,” he wrote. “Trump wanted to use American troops against Americans in his first term, and was dissuaded by responsible civilian and military leaders. No more. The guardrails are gone.”

Attorney George Conway, a former Republican who left the party over its embrace of Trump, responded to Vance’s comments by posting a video of anti-ICE protesters in Chicago dancing in the streets to the classic Neil Diamond hit, “Sweet Caroline.”

Talk of invoking the Insurrection Act has ramped up in recent weeks, despite the fact that protests against ICE facilities in Illinois and Oregon have remained overwhelmingly peaceful and have featured impromptu dance parties carried out by people dressed in inflatable animal costumes.

A federal judge on Friday night released her full opinion justifying an earlier decision to block President Donald Trump from deploying Texas National Guard troops in Chicago, and she even went so far as to question his administration’s grasp on reality.

In her ruling, Judge April Perry began by citing a lengthy quote from the Federalist Papers in which Alexander Hamilton addressed concerns that a tyrannical US president would use a militia from one state to invade and occupy another state.

After giving the matter brief consideration, Hamilton dismissed fears about a would-be tyrant carrying out such a scheme on the grounds that “it is impossible to believe that they would employ such preposterous means to accomplish their designs.”

And yet, Perry noted, this exact scenario is one that the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago claim is happening right now, as they argue that “National Guard troops from both Illinois and Texas have been deployed to Illinois because the president of the United States wants to punish state elected officials whose policies are different from his own.”

Perry went on to consider circumstances in which the president may federalize the National Guard, and concluded that the administration’s case for sending the National Guard to Chicago did not meet any of them.

Perry noted that the president may federalize the National Guard if “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority” of the US government, but she argued there has historically been a “very high threshold for deployment” that is not justified by current circumstances.

“In the late 1800s and early 1900s, ‘rebellion’ was understood to mean a deliberate, organized resistance, openly and avowedly opposing the laws and authority of the government as a whole by means of armed opposition and violence,” she explained. “As an example, during the late 1800s, after the close of the Civil War, the Supreme Court and several statutes referred to the Civil War as constituting a ’rebellion.‘”

She then found that the administration itself has not claimed any Civil War-like rebellion is occurring in the US right now.

“In all of the memoranda actually deploying the National Guard to Illinois, the court does not see any factual determination by President Trump regarding a rebellion brewing here,” she wrote. “This is sensible, because the court cannot find reasonable support for a conclusion that there exists in Illinois a danger of rebellion.”

Elsewhere in the ruling, Perry examined the government’s claims that local law enforcement officials have been unable to contain demonstrations at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Broadview, Illinois, which has become a focal point for protests in recent weeks.

Although there have been incidents in which local law enforcement has had to intervene to keep protesters from getting too close to the facility, Perry said, there has never been a level of disorder that would justify the deployment of the National Guard.

“The ICE Processing Center has continuously remained open and operational throughout the protest activity,” she wrote. “Broadview Police are not aware of any occasion where an ICE vehicle was prevented from entering or exiting due to activity by protestors.”

This led her to remark upon a “troubling trend” of the Trump administration “equating protests with riots” and “a lack of appreciation for the wide spectrum that exists between citizens who are observing, questioning, and criticizing their government, and those who are obstructing, assaulting, or doing violence.”

“This indicates to the court both bias and lack of objectivity,” she wrote. “Ultimately, this court must conclude that defendants’... perceptions are not reliable.”

US President Donald Trump and his administration have been trying to depict the city of Portland, Oregon as a lawless apocalyptic wasteland in which roving bands of Antifa activists set fire to local businesses and terrorize federal immigration enforcement officials.

Local residents and elected officials, however, have been openly ridiculing Trump for making claims that are, according to CNN fact checker Daniel Dale, “detached from reality.”

Trump’s latest salvo against Portland came on Friday, when he said, “Every time I look at that place it’s burning down, there are fires all over the place.”

Trump went on to falsely claim that “when a store owner rebuilds a store they build it out of plywood, they don’t put up storefronts anymore, they just put wood up.”

These descriptions of Portland are are odds with the reality on the ground, where people dressed in inflatable animal costumes have been conducting peaceful protests and dance parties outside of a local Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) center for the last few weeks.

US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem appeared to recognize this discrepancy earlier in the week, and on Thursday she accused every public official in the city, including the chief of the Portland Police Department and the superintendent of the Oregon State Police Department, of trying to cover up the rampant lawlessness taking place there.

“They are all lying and disingenuous, dishonest people!” Noem claimed during a White House Cabinet meeting.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) responded to Noem’s claim with open ridicule, and he posted a video showing Portland to be a safe and vibrant city.

“Thoughts and prayers to Cosplay Cop Kristi who had to endure the dogs, farmer’s markets, capybaras, and marathon runners of Portland this week,” he wrote in a post on X.

Portland City Council member Angelita Morillo appeared on CNN Thursday night and also heaped scorn on Noem for her remarks about her city.

“I never thought that renowned puppy-killer Kristi Noem would be so afraid of protesters wearing frog costumes and chicken costumes, but here we are,” she said. “We’re not hiding anything. The reason she didn’t see anything on the ground is because everything here is under control. People are exercising their right to free speech, as they are allowed to under the Constitution... There is no terrorism happening here, I think that they are just a very scared people.

Portland resident Samuel Cosby also posted a video from Portland that showed people going about their daily lives peacefully and without incident.

”There are not ‘fires all over the place,’“ Cosby emphasized. ”Stop letting these buffoons lie to you.“

The Not Above the Law Coalition on Thursday released a report documenting how President Donald Trump’s administration has been corrupting every aspect of federal law enforcement.

The report, titled Trump’s “Crooked Cops”: The Corruption of Federal Law Enforcement, said that the president has “gone to extreme lengths to appoint top officials with no compunction about abusing their power to pervert justice to punish political enemies and favor political friends,” before showing how these appointees have swiftly eliminated their agencies’ independence from White House political pressure.

“Law enforcement that serves the political interests of the president rather than the public eliminates a core tenet of democracy, namely that we are a country of laws, not of men,” the report emphasizes.

The report begins by recounting how Attorney General Pam Bondi followed direct orders from the president to file criminal charges against former FBI Director James Comey, while at the same time noting that she has overseen “a department-wide purge of career officials who were assigned to Trump’s criminal cases or who were suspected to be insufficiently loyal to Trump personally.”

Other Trump officials who feature prominently in the report include FBI Director Kash Patel, who is facing a lawsuit from former agents who have alleged they were fired as part of a “campaign of retribution”; Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who conducted an interview with convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, and then moved her “to more comfortable, low-security accommodations” after she told him that Trump had no involvement in her former partner Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal activities; and White House border czar Tom Homan, who was allegedly caught on video accepting a $50,000 cash bribe from undercover FBI agents.

The report also takes a swipe at Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, who publicly pressured ABC to take late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel off the air mere hours before the network decided to suspend him.

“This was by no means the first instance of Carr weaponizing his regulatory enforcement power for political ends,” the report says. “His threats have been all the more significant as many media companies have business interests pending before the administration.

During a conference call announcing the report, Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY) described the Trump administration’s actions as ”so distressing and so disturbing,“ and vowed that he was ”not going to stand by while the Department of Justice is used to subvert the rule of law.“

Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-NY), a former federal prosecutor, said on the call that it was ”personally devastating“ to watch the corruption of the Justice Department, and he vowed that House Democrats would be ready to go with oversight investigations should they return to the majority after the 2026 midterm elections.

”Trump is trying to turn this government into his own personal fiefdom,“ said Goldman, who later described the weaponization of the Department of Homeland Security as ”downright scary.“

”We’re losing the fabric of our country,“ he said.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker issued a new warning on Wednesday about President Donald Trump’s efforts to deploy the American military in US cities against the wishes of local elected officials.

Hours after Trump called for Pritzker’s imprisonment in a Wednesday morning Truth Social post, the Illinois governor claimed in an interview with MSNBC that the president’s ultimate goal with sending troops into US cities was to control the outcomes of future elections.

”He wants to militarize major cities across the United States, especially blue cities in blue states, because he wants us to get used to the idea of military on the streets,” he said. “2026 elections, I believe he’s going to post people outside ballot boxes and polling places, and, if he needs to in order to control those elections, he’ll assume control of the ballot boxes and count the votes himself.”

Pritzker pointed out that Trump considered ordering the military to seize ballot boxes after he lost the 2020 presidential election, but he was met with resistance from officials in his own administration.

However, Pritzker said that “I believe he would do it in 2026” to help Republicans maintain control of Congress.

Pritzker also struck a defiant tone when asked about Trump’s call to imprison him.

”This guy’s a convicted felon who’s threatening to jail me!” he exclaimed. “This guy is unhinged. He’s insecure. He’s a wannabe dictator. And there’s one thing I really want to say to Donald Trump: If you come for my people, you come through me. So come and get me.”

Pritzker’s remarks come as Trump and his administration have deployed Texas National Guard soldiers to Chicago over the objections of both Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. The state and city are challenging the deployment in court.

Federal immigration officials have been employing increasingly aggressive and violent tactics in the Chicago area in recent weeks, including attacking a journalist and a protesting priest with pepper balls outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility; slamming a congressional candidate to the ground; dragging US citizens, including children, out of their homes during a raid in the middle of the night; and fatally shooting a man during a traffic stop.

Ian Roberts, the superintendent of Des Moines Public Schools, has been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.

The Des Moines Register reports that Roberts, who has served as superintendent in the Iowa district since 2023, was taken into custody by ICE agents on Friday morning.

The Des Moines Register has confirmed that Roberts is currently being held at the Pottawattamie County Jail, which the paper noted would put him in close proximity to the Omaha Immigration Court.

According to local news station KCCI, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claims that that Roberts was been taken into custody as part of a “targeted enforcement operation.”

DHS said that after ICE officers approached Roberts’ vehicle on Friday, he sped away and tried to escape. They eventually apprehended him and found a loaded handgun, $3,000 in cash and a fixed-blade hunting knife inside his vehicle.

DHS also claimed that Roberts had been ordered to be removed from the US in May 2024, and that he had an existing weapons possession charge dating from 2020.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, put out a brief statement on Friday saying she was “made aware this morning that Ian Roberts was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and is in contact with the Iowa Department of Public Safety and federal authorities.”

Reynolds last year touted a meeting she’d held with Roberts in which she said the two discussed “our shared goal of providing all Iowa students a world-class education.”

Local residents who spoke with The Des Moines Register were stunned by news of Roberts’ detention. Alison Hoeman, founder of the local nonprofit Des Moines Refugees Support, told the paper that her phone “blew up” from concerned parents as soon as they heard the news about Roberts’ arrest.

“You know it’s the Black and brown kids who are worried,” she said. “If it’s Ian Roberts who’s in trouble, what does that mean for them?”

Roberts was born to parents who immigrated to the US from Guyana, and he told local news station WHO 13 last year that he spent considerable time in both countries growing up.

Prior to pursuing a career in education, Roberts competed in the 2000 Summer Olympics as a middle-distance runner for the Guyana team.

Late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel will be back on the air this week after his suspension last week raised alarms about the Trump administration using the power of the federal government to silence critics.

ABC parent company Disney announced in a Monday statement that Kimmel, a little more than a week after he was suspended following a pressure campaign from Trump-appointed Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr.

“Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country,” Disney explained. “It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive. We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”

Kimmel was suspended last Wednesday over remarks he’d made two days earlier about slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. In his opening monologue, Kimmel accused US President Donald Trump and his allies of trying “to score political points,” while also suggesting that Kirk’s alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, could belong to the far right.

Following the monologue, Carr appeared on a right-wing podcast and said that ABC stations could have their licenses revoked unless they stopped showing Kimmel.

“There’s actions we can take on licensed broadcasters,” Carr said. “And frankly, I think that it’s sort of really past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say... we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out because we licensed broadcasters are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC if we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of these distortions.”

The decision to suspend Kimmel after threats from a Trump official sparked protests against Disney, and several prominent artists on Monday signed a letter organized by the ACLU that slammed the company for apparently caving to government demands for censorship.

“Jimmy Kimmel was taken off the air after our government threatened a private company with retaliation for Kimmel’s remarks. This is a dark moment for freedom of speech in our nation,” the letter stated. “This is unconstitutional and un-American. The government is threatening private companies and individuals that the president disagrees with. We can’t let this threat to our freedom of speech go unanswered.”