President Donald Trump has repeatedly promised to make America more competitive compared to China, yet a recent report suggests the opposite has proved to be the case.

“While Washington raises walls, Beijing is opening doors,” wrote Fortune’s Steve H. Hanke on Sunday. “On May 1, Chinese tariffs on imports from all 53 African countries with which China holds diplomatic relations plunged to zero. Europeans now enter China visa-free. India’s Modi government is fast-tracking minority Chinese investment in seven strategic sectors. China’s DeepSeek AI went open source, giving the world’s developers free access to a frontier Chinese AI model. While Washington is tightening export controls on America’s AI enterprise, China is open for business.”

Hanke explained that, as the price of oil has risen due to Trump policies like the war against Iran, China has provided relief to many suffering countries. He also noted that, unlike America under Trump, China’s government has worked hard to improve its public image in other nations.

“And then there is Beijing’s ace: rare earths,” Hanke added. “Beijing’s control of neodymium, praseodymium, samarium, europium, gadolinium, and yttrium oxides is virtually total. Every advanced weapons system, every electric drivetrain, every wind turbine, every smartphone in the United States runs through China’s critical materials. To replenish its weapons stockpiles that have been depleted due to America’s proxy war against Russia and its open warfare against Iran, the U.S. Department of Defense now needs Beijing’s permission to restock. The rules of the road are being rewritten, and they are being rewritten in Beijing.”

He added, “The verdict is in. The Alliance of Democracies’ Democracy Perception Index, which was released on May 8, puts China’s net global perception at +7 [percent]. Meanwhile, the international perception of the U.S. has collapsed. Two years ago, it sat comfortably at +22 [percent]. Today, it has plunged to a dismal -16 [percent]. It is clear that Trump will be tiptoeing through the tulips with Xi and coming home empty-handed.”

Hanke is not alone among mainstream financial analysts to point out that Trump’s policies have given China an edge over America in the world economy. Bryan Riley, director of the Free Trade Initiative for a 501(c)(4) called the National Taxpayers Union, wrote last month about how Trump’s tariffs have failed to alter China’s behavior.

“Government reviews have repeatedly documented the ongoing failure of Section 301 tariffs to change China’s behavior,” Riley explained. “Ways and Means and Finance Committee Members may want to ask Amb. Greer why we should expect new Section 301 actions launched by USTR to fare any better.”

“Amb. Greer,” or U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Jamieson Greer, was scheduled to speak before both the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee about Trump’s tariffs.

“In light of USTR’s recent announcement of new Section 301 trade investigations, those committees may want to follow up on his statement to the House Appropriations Committee last week,” Riley explained. “‘In President Trump’s first term, the Section 301 tool was used to great effect.’ His comment referred to tariffs imposed following a 2017 Section 301 investigation into China’s Acts, Policies, and Practices Related to Technology Transfer, Intellectual Property, and Innovation. The goal of the investigation was to reduce or eliminate China’s unfair practices in these areas.” Yet despite these goals, “subsequent reviews cast substantial doubt on the effectiveness of this action.”

President Donald Trump’s reaction to a recent outbreak suggests that America could be in serious trouble in the event of a more serious pandemic, a conservative recently warned.

“They know that Donald Trump has spent much of his second presidency waging an all-out assault on America’s global health infrastructure—by downsizing or eliminating existing agencies and programs, and transforming them in ways that make them instruments of other goals like extracting mineral rights or ending DEI,” The Bulwark’s Jonathan Cohn wrote on Sunday. “This assault has also included withdrawing from the World Health Organization, and from global health cooperation more generally.”

Cohn added, “That has left the federal government without some of the tools, systems, and personnel it has deployed in the past. The result is a federal response to outbreaks that is weaker overall, and could falter in the face of a more serious threat.”

After breaking down how the hantavirus outbreak both observed that “the CDC hasn’t ‘had a press briefing, we haven’t heard anybody talk about mobilizing investigators across the world who are already working on potential treatments,’” Jeanne Marrazzo, an internationally recognized physician who now leads the Infectious Diseases Society of America, told Cohn by phone. Overall, Marrazzo expressed concern that gutting the CDC weakened America’s ability to effectively monitor and contain outbreaks, with the hit-or-miss reaction to the hantavirus incident serving as key evidence of this.

Cohn is not alone among writers for The Bulwark to issue this warning. Lauren Egan, a reporter for the conservative website The Bulwark, wrote for The Bulwark on August 31st that “the descent of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into an agency of anti-vaccine agendas and organizational chaos…. has created additional fodder for Democrats already keen on campaigning on health care in 2026.” She mentioned that Democrats like Sen. Patty Murray of Washington have focused on the controversial policies promulgated by Trump officials like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

"Democrats are already attacking Republicans for passing Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill' that cut Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, which could leave nearly 12 million Americans newly uninsured and unable to afford basic health care," Egan wrote. "When Republicans return to D.C., they will face pressure to extend the enhanced ACA subsidies, which were created with the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and are set to expire at the end of the year…. Some Dem officials and health care advocates see parallels between the upcoming midterms and the 2018 cycle, when the party focused its campaigns on Trump's failed attempt to repeal Obamacare. The difference this time around is that Republicans actually succeeded in passing their legislation."

Brad Woodhouse, executive director of Protect Our Care, warned Egan that the issue of health care costs will be politically fraught for Republicans in 2026.

As Woodhouse told The Bulwark, "I do think it's gonna be a health care election, but I think it's gonna be wrapped into this whole issue of affordability. There's a wicked brew here that is amassing against Republicans, and it's all self-inflicted. They've committed political suicide."

President Donald Trump continues to falsely claim that he won the 2020 presidential election — and now that fabrication is fueling the agendas for a new generation of potential Republican governors.

Michigan Republican strategist Jason Cabel Roe argued that the emphasis on supporting Trump’s election denial is “silly because they know better,” wrote The Washington Post's Dan Merica, Patrick Marley and Clara Ence Morse. The former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party then added “but, you know, it’s still what the base wants to hear.” Despite this obsession, however, Roe added that voters are far more concerned about the economy and the price of gas.

“There’s enough muddying of what everybody’s feelings are about election integrity at this point — and maybe even a little exhaustion with relitigating an election that was six years ago — that I just don’t know that it really matters to voters,” Roe explained. His position was supported by a March NBC News poll which determined voters are mostly concerned with inflation and the cost of living, followed by threats to democracy.

The Republicans running for governor in their respective states on election denier platforms include Minnesota's Mike Lindell, who founded MyPillow; Arizona's Rep. Andy Biggs; Georgia's Lt. Gov. Burt Jones; Pennsylvania’s Republican treasurer's Stacy Garrity; Wisconsin's Rep. Tom Tiffany; Michigan's state Senate Minority Leader Aric Nesbitt and Rep. John James; and California's Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco.

In addition to demonstrating their fealty to Trump, election denying also means these candidates could try throwing out valid vote counting efforts in the 2028 presidential election if urged by the White House.

“This is an important issue,” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, chair of the Democratic Governors Association, a group preparing to make Republicans’ history of election denialism a key issue in 2026, said at a speech. “But it’s not the only issue, and it shouldn’t necessarily be the lead thing. Almost everyone in this economy is struggling because of [Trump] and these folks that are running, these election deniers, were willing to do anything for this president. So, their past attempts to steal an election were to steal it for a guy that’s made life tougher. They’re certainly not going to stand up to him to try to make life easier.”

As conservative columnist George F. Will wrote in February, Trump has thoroughly litigated his claims of election fraud, and they have all been found wanting.

“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will explained in The Washington Post. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will added, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

President Donald Trump has promoted his “Trump Accounts,” or stock market investment accounts for American children, as being great for future generations — but experts are not so sure.

“The federal government is less than two months away from opening Trump Accounts for private contributions on July 4, 2026, and a debate over what should go in them has begun,” wrote TheStreet's Damilola Esebame on Sunday. “White House and Treasury officials have discussed allowing wealthy donors to contribute shares of stock directly into the children's savings accounts, a shift that could reshape the program.”

Esebame pointed out that the accounts currently only accept cash and all of it gets invested in low-cost S&P 500 index funds where the expense ratios are capped at 0.1 percent. Yet there is talk about changing the rules regarding how these funds are managed, in particular allowing White House and Treasury officials to contribute shares of stock directly into the children's savings accounts.

“If the rules change, millions of children already enrolled may end up with a completely different type of account,” Esebame explained. “What you need to understand is how this fight over stock donations could affect the money designated for your child.”

Financial experts have come forward to raise the alarm about these changes.

"The whole point of the requirement for holding low-fee index funds is to avoid speculative investing in single stocks, and reversing that rule would encourage much more speculative risk-taking in accounts that are meant for steady accumulation of retirement savings," Ben Henry-Moreland, CFP, Senior Financial Planning Nerd at Kitces.com, recently told CNBC. Similarly Adam Michel, director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute, recently observed that Trump Accounts carry more restrictions and fewer tax benefits than 529 plans and Roth IRAs, and that therefore the purpose of the accounts is to receive free money rather than deposit personal savings.

“The stock donation debate is unfolding against a broader wave of billionaire giving that has transformed these accounts beyond their original design,” Esebame reported.

Earlier this month, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) admitted as a “dirty little secret” that Trump accounts are really part of the Republican Party’s larger long-term plan to privatize Social Security.

“Conservatives in America, for 50 years ... have been trying to do Social Security personal accounts,” Cruz said, referring to President George W. Bush’s proposed policy to have citizens put money into stocks rather than funding Social Security. "Here's the dirty little secret: Trump accounts are Social Security personal accounts."

Cruz, described by many as the “chief architect” of the Trump accounts, added “How did we get it done this time? Because we gave the money to babies, and so the old people didn't get pissed. But you know what? Babies grow up.”

President Donald Trump is losing the war he started with Iran — and a political expert is warning the president will behave increasingly erratically because he psychologically cannot handle losing.

“We are witnessing what happens to a person who is consumed with the need to dominate, but cannot,” Robert Reich, who served as President Bill Clinton’s labor secretary, wrote for The Guardian on Friday. Describing Iran’s success in imposing economic pressure on the United States by blocking the Strait of Hormuz, and thereby rising prices on gas and food, Reich described Trump’s ongoing failure as “not just a serious geopolitical defeat for the United States; it’s a personal crisis for Trump. Those rising prices coupled with an increasingly unpopular war have increased the likelihood that Democrats will take back control of the House and even possibly the Senate in the upcoming midterms.”

Trump’s problem, Reich argued, is his inability to accept defeat from the perspective of his ego. This is why Trump attempted a coup after losing the 2020 presidential election despite the courts debunking his claims of fraud, and Trump is displaying similar erratic and violent behavior again because of his impending political defeat in the 2026 midterm elections.

As one example, Reich pointed to Trump’s “numerous social media posts, including a bizarre one ‘On Friday night, he posted an AI-generated image of himself, JD Vance, Marco Rubio and Doug Burgum, all shirtless and with young physiques, standing in the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, along with an unidentifiable woman in a bikini.’” He also claimed that Trump “is fanatically seeking other ways to assert dominance” by attacking transgender college students and falsely accusing House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffried of “INCITING VIOLENCE” by calling for a “maximum warfare” redistricting campaign to counter Republican gerrymandering.

More ominously, though, Reich predicted that Trump would attempt another coup if he loses the 2026 midterms.

“What if Democrats win control of one or both chambers of Congress in the midterms and he claims they lost or cheated?” Reich wrote. “The nation barely survived the last time Trump’s fragile ego faced a major loss. We’ll also have to cope with Trump as a lame-duck president who can no longer dominate and gain submission as he did before. Will he try to remain president beyond his second term to avoid this?”

He concluded, “The man is unwell. Seriously unwell. Lame-duck presidents fade away, but injured dictators can be dangerous.”

Reich is not alone in worrying that Trump is mentally ill. Dozens of psychiatrists and other mental health professionals have written, either in congressional testimony or in private editorials, describing his behavior as troubling because it is consistent with cognitive decline. Speaking with AlterNet last week, psychiatrist Dr. Henry Abraham (formerly of Tufts University) — the chief signatory of a letter warning of Trump’s perceived decline — explained that “the president’s condition appears to be deteriorating,” adding that “there has been a frightening progression of symptoms. These include grandiosity without moral safeguards, paranoia, impulsivity, vindictiveness, easy misperception of being harmed, moments of omnipotence, uncontrolled rage, and sole control over the use of nuclear weapons in a time of war. As a psychiatrist reviewing these, I can only say Yikes!”

A Democratic congressman recently accused members of his own party of applying a double-standard to the issue of anti-Semitism — that is, condemning it when it comes from Republicans but turning a blind eye when it comes from Democrats.

“Consider the response to — really, the embrace of — Hasan Piker, a prominent left-wing commentator with millions of online followers,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) wrote in a New York Times editorial published on Sunday. Gottheimer had previously criticized the neo-Nazis who rioted in Charlottesville in 2017 and the popular alt right influencer Nick Fuentes.

“He referred to Orthodox Jews as ‘inbred’ and said ‘America deserved 9/11,’ both statements he halfheartedly walked back,” Gottheimer wrote. “He said that Hamas — a designated terrorist organization that has killed Americans and taken Americans hostage — is ‘a thousand times better’ than Israel, America’s ally, which he called a ‘fascist settler colonial apartheid state’ — a statement he stands by.”

Gottheimer continued, “None of this should be waved away as mere edgy commentary. Mr. Piker traffics in antisemitic and anti-American extremism that has been met by silence from many on the Democratic left.” He then pointed out that a number of prominent Democrats have appeared on Piker’s show and even campaigned with him, even though other Democrats admit to privately being “disgusted” by Piker’s statements (which they then, Gottheimer added, do not speak up to oppose out of fear of Piker’s fans).

Yet Gottheimer did not limit his criticism of supposed left-wing anti-Semitism to Piker.

“At their recent party convention, Michigan Democrats nominated a candidate to run for a seat on the University of Michigan’s Board of Regents who had shared a social media post praising the former leader of Hezbollah as a martyr and another post that invoked age-old antisemitic tropes by referring to Israelis as ‘demons’ who ‘lie, steal, cheat, murder and blackmail,’” Gottheimer said. The lawmaker then connected those statements to Senate Democrats voting to block sales to Israel based on its human rights record.

“If this is now the standard for supporting military aid and arms sales, then Democratic members of Congress should at least be consistent,” Gottheimer argued. “Do they also believe we should block weapon sales to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey, given the history of human rights abuses in those countries?” He accused congressional Democrats of a similar double-standard in denouncing Israel’s allegedly “apartheid” policies against Palestinians but not denouncing Muslim Middle Eastern countries that discriminate against women and LGBTQ people in ways Israel does not.

“When Mr. Trump lashes out at Pope Leo XIV in ways that millions of Catholics rightly find deeply offensive, none of us should look the other way,” Gottheimer added. “When a Republican congressman tries to dehumanize Muslims, we should all speak up. When Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson use hateful rhetoric, they should be rebuked. The same should go for Hasan Piker. Everyone has a right to express his or her views, however repugnant those views may be. But Democratic leaders have the same right — and a duty — to challenge them.”

He concluded, “There should be one response to those who express hatred toward any American: condemnation. Hate is hate. It doesn’t get a pass because it comes from your side of the aisle.”

Speaking with AlterNet in March about the issue of American anti-Semitism, Brandeis University historian Jonathan Sarna stated that one can criticize Israeli government policy without being anti-Semitic. Valid concerns morph into bigotry, he argued, when those criticisms evolve into arguments about supposed Jewish world control or when they vilify all Israelis instead of solely the policymakers.

“If you go back to ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ — the great antisemitic forgery of the turn of the last century — that really began this sense that Jews are all-powerful, that they operate behind the scenes, and that whatever happens is ultimately their fault,” Sarna explained to AlterNet. “Before then, for centuries, the prevailing view was that Jews were persecuted and lowly because they had killed Christ, and that was what they deserved — they were powerless. That was their punishment. But ‘The Protocols’ flipped that.”

Sarna added that “especially as Jews in modernity have begun to succeed economically, it doesn't much matter what the issue is — whether it is 9/11, which some blame on the Jews, or the crash of 2008, or now the war with Iran. You can predict before it happens that people will blame Jews, because as The Protocols taught people, it's always the Jews. It's the great conspiracy theory. And even many people who have never read The Protocols believe many of the things in it — just as many people have never read Darwin, but they know the word ‘evolution.’ This is simply the latest iteration.”

Overall, Sarna told AlterNet that he reminds audiences “I can be critical of President Trump without being un-American. Most people who criticize President Trump or the Republicans would assure you how much they love America and hold a fundamentally positive view of it. It seems to me that it's deeply important for us to do the same with Israel — that is, to make clear that there is a huge difference between disliking the policies of the Prime Minister of Israel and hating Israel itself.”

He concluded, “If you wouldn't equate criticism of the President with hating America, there is no reason — and indeed it is wrong and wicked — to do so with regard to Israel.”

Speaking to this journalist for Salon in 2017, former Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) recalled experiencing no anti-Semitism when he ran for vice president on the Democratic ticket in the 2000 election. Even though the presidential nominee, Vice President Al Gore, had initially been concerned about anti-Semitism, he told Lieberman “I talked to a group of friends who are Jewish, among them there was high anxiety and uncertainty about whether the country was ready. Then I talked to my Christian friends, really trusted advisers, and every one of them said, ‘No problem.' ‘So obviously,” Al joked — he had a better sense of humor than some people gave him credit for — ‘since I know that there are so many millions more Christians than Jews in America, I was free to make the choice that I wanted to make!’”

Lieberman added that this anecdote demonstrated how, at the time, “the Christian reaction reveals a totally different reality than Jews have experienced in any place that they’ve been in the world except when Israel was a Jewish state.”

President Donald Trump and the Republicans are so unpopular, a political scientist was able to break down a long litany of Democrats eager to run in the 2028 election — some of whom, they added, have a realistic chance of winning.

After describing Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear as “too dull” and insufficiently “exciting, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker was then described as “potentially the candidate who could win a lot of Black support but also reach out to a lot of white voters,” at least based on what Seth Masket, a professor at the University of Denver in political science, and Mark Schmitt, the director of the Political Reform Program at New America, told The New Republic’s Perry Bacon in a podcast episode dropped on Sunday. Booker was also described as “one of those politicians who goes anywhere and talks to anybody, in the way that Mamdani is. And I think there’s just real value in that right now—not parsing out micro-targeting, but just getting in there and showing up in an unfriendly audience and listening. I feel like he’s got a little of that gift. Might help.”

The three commentators offered even greater praise of Pete Buttigieg, the former South Bend, Ind. mayor who went on to serve as President Joe Biden’s Secretary of Transportation.

“He’s clearly just the most—he brings to mind pictures of—just—strengths: he’s just like Obama in terms of ability to articulate a viewpoint and get people going,” Schmitt said. “And he has real credentials now, which—mayor of South Bend was not. And I think he’s super impressive,” despite possible weaknesses such as working for the management consultant firm McKinsey and encountering prejudice as a homosexual.

They also described Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego as a candidate who could run on his ability to win a swing state and based on his support within the Latino community; his colleague, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, could similarly run based on his ability to win that swing state and being “martyred” by Trump targeting him in politically-motivated prosecutions. By contrast, the three pundits were skeptical of former Vice President Kamala Harris’ chances.

“I was a little surprised when I saw how well she does in polls, but really shouldn’t be, because that’s just like the classic—I remember when I was a kid, every year Ted Kennedy would be at the very top of the polls, Al Gore for a while, people like that,” Schmitt said. “I like her a lot. I thought she ran about as good a campaign as she could. But I just don’t think the Democratic Party’s going to have confidence in her, even giving—even understanding—how much she was screwed by Joe Biden.”

The pundits also handicapped potential candidates like California Rep. Ro Khanna, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. The three also paid close attention to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is widely regarded as a frontrunner in the race.

“Gavin Newsom—I’ve seen this among some people on the left, that he rubs them the wrong way,” Masket said. “But also he’s been, I think, a success in California. Importantly, a lot of Democrats have talked pretty harsh stuff about Donald Trump over the last year and a half. Gavin Newsom is one of the few who can actually claim to have achieved something, right?”

He added, “He actually pushed back on redistricting. He engineered a redistricting in California to counter what Trump pushed for in Texas and essentially neutralized that. And I think that shows, okay, he’s someone—even in a party that is not in the majority nationwide—who is capable of doing some real actions and changing national politics to a good degree. And I think he deserves some credit for that.”

In September, Democratic strategist James Carville argued that Republicans have made it easier for Democrats to want to run in 2028 because of their own unpopular policies.

“You’re gonna win the presidency in 2028 and it’s a pretty good chance you control both the House and Senate,” Carville said at the time, arguing about Republicans that “every time they get into power, they try to cut taxes for rich people and cut healthcare access to middle class people. They’ve done what you thought they were going to do… They can call that bill anything they want, it was still the most negatively viewed piece of domestic legislation in this century I think.”

President Donald Trump is reportedly cultivating tension between two of his top officials, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, as he tantalizes each with the prospect of being the Republican nominee in 2028.

“Every now and then, while talking to officials in the Oval Office, with friends over dinner, or on the patio at Mar a Lago, President Trump pauses and muses aloud about a subject quietly captivating the Republican Party,” The New York Times reported on Sunday. “What do you think? JD or Marco?”

The Times cited multiple sources close to Trump as saying the president frequently asks advisers if they would prefer either Vance or Rubio to succeed him. After receiving their various responses, he will then reportedly speculate that Vance and Rubio should run together in 2028.

“Mr. Trump’s advisers say he is simply having fun polling people, and that 2028 is not at the top of his mind at all,” the Times added. “Still, it would be hard for Mr. Trump to ignore that lately, the two men he refers to as ‘kids’ are taking on bigger profiles as the midterm elections approach.”

The Times added that both public polls and anecdotal evidence suggests that between Vance and Rubio, Vance would have the clear edge. In addition to being far more popular among primary voters than Rubio, Vance has even received an indirect endorsement from the Secretary of State himself. Speaking to Vanity Fair last year, Rubio said that “if JD Vance runs for president, he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him.”

“He is unpopular, with an approval rating sitting at 35 percent in the most recent Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll,” the Times reported. “But according to a Pew survey taken earlier this year, Mr. Vance is a far more recognizable figure to American voters than most other Trump administration figures — only Mr. Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health and Human Services secretary, are better known.”

The newspaper added, “According to Pew, 75 percent of Republican voters have favorable views of Mr. Vance, compared with 64 percent who have favorable views of Mr. Rubio. And 19 percent of Republican voters have never heard of the secretary of state.”

Reports of Trump playing Vance against Rubio precede the recent Times report. In March Trump reportedly played a “game” with the two men about who would follow him in power.

“The 2028 election is more than 2½ years away, but it is very much on Trump’s mind, as he casts about for a suitable heir to his MAGA empire,” The Wall Street Journal wrote at the time. “For months, the president has privately polled advisers, donors and friends about the political strengths and weaknesses of his vice president and secretary of state, pitting the two young, ambitious Republicans against each other—whether they like it or not.”

The Journal continued, “Less than a day after the U.S. began bombing Iran, President Trump met with two dozen donors at his Mar-a-Lago club. As attendees dined on jumbo crab and rib-eye steaks, Trump asked the crowd: What do you think of JD Vance and Marco Rubio? The guests applauded louder for Rubio, according to people in the room.”

President Donald Trump’s attempt to cancel more than $100 million in humanities grants was just overturned in court.

U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon in Manhattan sided with The Authors Guild over the government in determining that Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) engaged in “viewpoint discrimination” when they targeted those institutions, according to the Associated Press. By targeting a number of arts and humanities programs on the grounds that they promoted “DEI,” McMahon ruled that they behaved illegally.

As a result, McMahon permanently prohibited the administration from terminating their grants and criticized DOGE for using artificial intelligence to decide who should be defunded.

“Government lawyers had argued that the cuts of more than 1,400 grants of congressionally approved funds were legal moves to implement President Donald Trump's directives, eliminate grants associated with diversion, equity and inclusion and reduce discretionary spending under the administration's priorities,” the Associated Press said. McMahon said that these actions violated the targeted groups’ First and Fifth Amendment rights to free speech and equal protection. Furthermore, she argued that DOGE — which was managed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a Trump booster — lacked the legal authority to cancel grants.

“The public interest favors permanent relief,” McMahon ruled. “The public has a strong interest in ensuring that federal officials act within the bounds set by Congress and the Constitution.”

While Trump and Musk have characterized their cuts as necessary to eliminate supposedly insidious ideologies, digital media strategist Elizabeth Spiers recently wrote in The Nation that the Silicon Valley oligarchs who back Trump — including Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Palantir chairman Peter Thiel, former Netscape CEO Marc Andreessen and former Zenefits CEO David Sacks — harbor a deliberate anti-intellectual agenda.

“As the historian Richard Hofstadter noted, a fierce anti-intellectual spirit has long animated American culture, but it has typically targeted the knowledge elite from below,” wrote Spiers, a digital media strategist. “What’s striking about today’s brand of anti-intellectualism is that it infuses the American knowledge elite; it stems from the bedrock conviction among tech oligarchs that they have mastered everything and have nothing left to learn.”

Spiers added, “In this cloistered vision of tech-driven learning, they believe that deep intellectual work—the kind you do when you author a complex piece of music, for example — has little or no inherent value.”

“Their disdain for it has fueled their attacks on higher education, the humanities, and learning for its own sake, which they believe has no purpose beyond its inevitable digitization and monetization.” This is why, in addition to calling to defund the arts and humanities, these oligarchs take on other causes such as “Peter Thiel’s crusade against college attendance and his program that subsidizes high school students who want to forgo it” and Palintir CEO Alex Karp’s joyful statement “that AI will hurt educated women the most.” She concluded that “as ardent monopolists, they’ve managed to believe they’ve cornered the market on critical thinking. Everyone else needn’t be troubled by the rigors of learning, since they exist solely to serve as drones in the tech regimes of the future.”

An anti-woke WSJ columnist is taking issue with President Donald Trump’s vice president, JD Vance's demeaning attacks on his own wife Usha Vance and roughly a billion other Hindus all over the world.

“Vice President JD Vance caused an uproar this past fall when he expressed his wish that his wife, Usha, a practicing Hindu, would one day follow his spiritual path,” Avatans Kumar, president and trustee of the nonprofit INDICA, wrote Thursday. “Many in the billion-strong global Hindu community were outraged at his declared hope that Mrs. Vance would convert to Catholicism.”

Kumar is still stinging months later, however, complaining that while the so-called religious freedom movement advocates for proselytizing religions like Catholicism and evangelical Christianity, it seems to deprioritize faiths that do not focus on converts.

“The root of this general dismissal of nonproselytizing religions is the dominance of Christianity and Islam,” Kumar explained. “The former is known for promoting evangelism, as seen in Jesus’ directive in Mark 16:15: ‘Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.’ Islam emphasizes dawah, instructing Muslims to invite people to Islam. Muslims ruled large parts of India from the early 13th to the 19th century, and during this era Muslim preachers and Sufi mystics actively proselytized for Islam. The pattern of seeking converts is manifested in the missionary work of both Christianity and Islam.”

He added, “As these forms of faith came down to the present day, they tended to ignore the strain of religions that are mostly nonproselytizing—Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Judaism, Taoism, Confucianism, Shinto and tribal indigenous traditions. In these nonproselytizing religions, actively seeking new converts serves no theological purpose.”

From there Kumar asserted that Americans who wish to promote religious freedom should not zero in on the conversion-focused faiths to the neglect of others. Not only did this leave certain individuals feeling excluded, but it reeks of the West’s imperialist past.

“Colonialism is closely linked to religious conversion, as British missionaries sought to convert Hindus,” Kumar wrote. “Many British Christians believed their religion was more advanced and enlightened than those of the people they ruled, motivating their missionary activities.”

Kumar’s advocacy of Hindu representation arguably conflicts with his previous opposition to what he described in India Currents as “wokeism.” In his 2024 editorial, he argued that supposed “woke” culture contributed to President Donald Trump’s reelection that year.

“The Democrats, the U.S. legacy media, and wokeism have become synonymous with each other over the past few years,” Kumar wrote. “When the 2024 US election results came out, they all ended up on the losing side, individually and collectively. The thrashing was so comprehensive that it left the Democrats and their surrogates in US media, as well as the out-of-touch Hollywood celebrities, in a state of shock.”

Like Kumar, the Second Lady has publicly associated with right-leaning views. As The Verge’s Gaby Del Valle reported in April, Vance’s recent podcast “Storytime with the Second Lady” seemed to subtly reaffirm conservative gender roles.

“She’s … the latest conservative spouse to pivot to content creation,” Del Valle wrote. “It’s a new front of the ongoing culture wars: Instead of trying to win back supposedly liberal institutions, the right is hell-bent on creating its own. And if these institutions reinforce conservative gender norms, that’s all the better.”

President Donald Trump is worsening America’s ballooning debt with his proposed $1 billion ballroom, according to a recent account by a debt hawk.

“Senate Republicans have unveiled their plan to fund immigration enforcement and President Donald Trump's ballroom, and the proposal might take fiscal irresponsibility to a new record high,” wrote Reason reporter Eric Boehm on Wednesday. “The two bills included in the package call for spending nearly $72 billion. Remarkably, every single dollar would be borrowed.”

Citing the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis of Trump’s recent immigration enforcement bill, Boehm observed it would “direct $38 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and spend $26 billion on various programs run by Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The largest share of the CBP funding is $19.1 billion to allow the agency to ‘hire, pay, train, and equip border patrol agents, officers, and support staff,’ according to the CBO. Another $3.5 billion will fund screening efforts at the border.”

Perhaps most controversially, Boehm speculated that “with how quickly the ballroom's price tag is growing, it seems likely the $1 billion included in the reconciliation package will soon be deemed insufficient.”

Yet regardless of the ultimate price tag for these measures, Boehm argued that the bigger problem is that they are not being directly charged to taxpayers, but rather added to a debt he characterized as dangerously unsustainable.

“Of course, saying that ‘taxpayers’ are paying for the ballroom is a bit inaccurate,” Boehm wrote. “Taxpayers aren't directly paying for any of this, because the whole cost of the bill—the ICE funding, the ballroom, and the assorted other things included here—is simply being added to the national debt.”

He added, “That is actually worse. If lawmakers believe the American people should have to pay for Trump's ballroom or for enhanced immigration enforcement, they should have the courage to propose tax increases that will cover the cost, or cut spending in other parts of the budget as offsets.” Additionally, because the CBO calculated that additional spending in the reconciliation bill will add $26 billion in borrowing costs over the next 10 years, “that brings the final price tag of this package to nearly $100 billion, once the interest costs are included.”

Boehm is not alone among fiscal hawks in raising the alarm about America’s growing debt. Writing for The Wall Street Journal earlier this month, Brookings Institution senior fellow William Galston argued that “unless we change course, the debt will only get worse—fast. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that we are on track to accumulate more than $24 trillion in debt over the next decade, for a total of $56 trillion—120 percent of estimated GDP in 2036.”

Galston added, “These numbers are so large that it is hard to grasp what they mean. One key measure is the cost of financing this swelling debt burden. Twenty-five years ago, interest payments on the national debt were 2 percent of GDP. This year they will claim 3.3 percent; a decade from now, 4.6 percent.”

Similarly Fortune business editor Nick Lichtenberg wrote in March that the government under Trump has hit an ominous milestone by having its debt equal its GDP.

“The milestone, confirmed in Wednesday’s Daily Treasury Statement, lands amid a politically charged moment: it comes roughly two weeks before the ten-year anniversary of President Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to eliminate the national debt within eight years,” Lichtenberg wrote. “Instead, the gross national debt has roughly doubled since Trump first took office—it was $19.9 trillion in January 2017.”

Lichtenberg also referenced a Peterson Foundation study which projects the debt will exceed $40 trillion by the end of 2026.

“Perhaps the most alarming dimension of the crossing is what it costs just to carry the debt,” Lichtenberg argued. “Net interest payments on the national debt are projected to exceed $1 trillion in fiscal year 2026—nearly triple the $345 billion in interest the government paid in 2020, at the onset of the pandemic. In the first three months of the current fiscal year alone, net interest payments reached $270 billion, already surpassing the nation’s defense spending for the same period.”

More of President Donald Trump’s own voters are turning on him over two of the most controversial issues besetting his administration: His war against Iran and the rising oil prices that come of it.

“I'm hating these gas prices,” one Trump voter said in a recent Bulwark survey. “The car I'm driving currently is a giant SUV, so it's already terrible. It's 15 mpg, so yeah, sucks right now.”

Bulwark Editor Sarah Longwell said voters view gas prices as a stand-in for how the economy is doing.

“They drive past gas stations every day, they fill up their cars every week, they know what that number used to be, and they see what the new number is, and they are really upset about that new number," said Longwell. "It's the same thing with grocery prices. People talk about the price of eggs. It's not that people are mad about just the price of eggs, right? It's a stand-in for a conversation about how expensive grocery prices are.”

Longwell added that gasoline's position as a unit of measurement for the greater economy was the reason little stickers on gas pumps in 2024 proclaiming Biden saying, ‘I did this,’ were so devastating.

Another Trump voter complained that “gas prices are up — the prices are going up everywhere ... and I don't appreciate it.”

"War happens, gas prices jump up, what, a full dollar? And we probably won’t see that drop back down for another years because that’s just regular," complained yet another voter who went Trump in 2024. "You now when Covid happened food prices rose all the way up and you’re still not seeing them shrinking to what they previously were."

Other Trump voters in the survey were furious that Trump failed one of his most heartfelt promises on lowering inflation.

"Energy costs have gone up. so my electric bill has gone up 20 percent," complained another. "The tolls have gone up because I have to go into New York City for health care sometimes. Everything's gone up. I have to pay $10 to get in. Parking's gone up. The tolls, gas, even price of goods haven't gone down. So, it just seems like the prices keep going up and he promised to bring grocery prices down."

Longwell reported voters are also following the markets and seeing that, despite seemingly good results, things are not looking good for ordinary people. Their sentiment, overall, is that “people can't afford the things they need. People can't afford gas, healthcare — basic things that you need as a human to exist. And he promised — he literally campaigned on a promise to make that better — and it has just gotten worse.”

The Bulwark correspondent summarized the situation by noting, “Let me remind you that these are Trump's own voters blaming him for increases.”

Trump’s approval ratings continue to plummet as a result of the Iran war and economy, with roughly one out of three voters approving Trump’s handling of those issues. In April, an NBC News Decision Desk Poll powered by SurveyMonkey showed “showed 32 percent of adults approved of Trump’s handling of inflation and the cost of living,” according to NBC at the time. “These surveys also deepen a trove of numbers reflecting Americans’ dissatisfaction with the Iran war, which is tied to the economy by spikes in gas prices.”

President Donald Trump’s FBI director, Kash Patel, is reportedly in “panic mood” as he scrambles to save his job amidst reports of excessive drinking.

“FBI Director Kash Patel ordered the polygraphing of more than two dozen former and current members of his security detail, as well as other staff, and has been described as being in panic mode to save his job and find leakers among his team, according to two people briefed on the development,” MS NOW’s Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian reported on Thursday. They added that Patel reportedly “walled himself off” from senior leaders at the FBI because of the multiple media reports about his drinking impairing his leadership.

“The director has also avoided meeting this week with some key operational leaders of the bureau, the people said, raising concerns inside the FBI about Patel’s ability to stay abreast of pressing threats and investigations in order to make the best decisions,” Leonnig and Dilanian added.

In addition to being angered at reports of him drinking (which prompted Patel to sue The Atlantic for covering them), Patel is also upset for reportedly ordering SWAT agents to protect his girlfriend, country music performer Alexis Wilkins, in Nashville, as well as for using a government jet to travel for a so-called “date night.”

“MS NOW reported in February that Patel decided to fly to Milan, Italy, on the government jet to watch the U.S. men’s ice hockey team in the final games of the Olympics,” Leonnig and Dilanian wrote. “At the time, a spokesperson for Patel said in an on-the-record statement that the Italy trip was for business, and Patel was attending several security and partner meetings. Videos emerged shortly after Team USA won the gold medal of Patel in the men’s ice hockey team’s locker room, joining a victory celebration by chugging beer, spraying alcohol in the air and jumping up and down and cheering.”

They added, “The images infuriated the president, according to sources who spoke to MS NOW at the time, and he told Patel he didn’t like the optics of a director drinking while claiming to be on a government business trip.”

Speaking to MS NOW on Thursday, former FBI Assistant Special Agent Michael Feinberg told anchor Katy Tur that Patel’s alleged poor behavior has demoralized the bureau he was appointed to lead.

"Most FBI agents feel — I do not know a single agent who, like me, left, nor do I have any friends whatsoever still in the Bureau who have a single positive thing to say about his stewardship," Feinberg told Tur on Thursday. "Nobody agrees with every director's every decision. I was there for [Robert] Mueller, for [James] Comey, for [Christopher] Wray, and for a brief time for Patel. And the difference is, with the first three, you might have disagreed with their decision or their policies, but you had respect for their intellectual credentials. You had respect for their professional achievements. You had respect for their temperament and their character, their integrity. Patel brings no intellectual credentials to the job. He has no relevant experience whatsoever that would have enabled him to do this well. And as near as we can tell, he has no integrity. So it's unclear what anybody would look up to."

Feinberg continued that "I have never seen morale in any organization as low as it is in the FBI right now," from Patel characterizing the FBI as a "diseased temple" to dismissing criticism of him as being motivated by the agency supposedly having a liberal bias.

"I'd humbly suggest that allegation alone has no basis whatsoever," Feinberg explained to Tur. "In reality, people who work in law enforcement and national security are not exactly known for being leftists. These aren't people singing the Internationale and celebrating May Day. I think it's pretty fair to call most of them, at least on the law-and-order side, right-leaning."

Despite these reports, FBI spokesman Ben Williamson argued that the reports about Patel’s performance are political.

“The only people in panic are the ‘panicans’ in the media pushing out false stories because they spend zero time covering the record-breaking success in reduction in crime at this FBI," Williamson told MS NOW.

President Donald Trump’s Justice Department recently targeted a powerful Virginia Democrat — but one expert worries that the Democratic Party will not be the primary casualty of this prosecution.

“[MS NOW’s Carol] Leonnig also reports that Lindsey Halligan, a former insurance lawyer who Trump illegally attempted to install as the top federal prosecutor in eastern Virginia, pressured prosecutors to bring charges against Lucas prior to the midterm elections, believing that ‘it would be good for the White House to be able, before the midterms, to accuse a prominent state Democrat in Virginia with bribery,’” wrote Vox's legal reporter Ian Millhiser on Thursday. Millhiser, who noted that the Justice Department claims to have been investigating Lucas for allegedly soliciting and accepting bribes since President Joe Biden’s administration, added that the charges against her may have at least some merit.

Yet even if the charges against her are valid, Millhiser pointed out that the charge appears to be politically motivated. It follows Trump pursuing ultimately-failed cases against other political opponents like New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey.

“The raid targeted state Sen. Louise Lucas, the 82-year-old president pro tempore of the Virginia Senate, who is nationally prominent for two reasons,” Millhiser explained. “Lucas was the driving force behind the 10-1 Democratic congressional map that Virginia recently enacted to retaliate against similarly biased Republican maps drawn by red states. She’s also a pugnacious tweeter who gleefully mocks her political opponents online. After her congressional maps became law, Lucas posted an AI image of four incumbent Republican members of Congress working at McDonald’s.”

Given that Trump recently fired his previous attorney general, Pam Bondi, for failing to successfully prosecute his political enemies, Millhiser speculated that the questionable circumstances surrounding the Lucas case have larger ramifications.

“One other factor looming over the Lucas raid is that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was formerly one of Trump’s personal lawyers, has not yet locked down his job,” Millhiser wrote. “Blanche is the Senate-confirmed deputy attorney general, which means that he runs the DOJ unless and until the Senate confirms a permanent leader to replace Bondi, who Trump removed last month. Bondi was reportedly fired because Trump felt that she was ineffective in targeting his political foes.”

In light of the pressures on Blanche and Trump’s own history of political prosecutions, Millhiser speculated that it will be much harder for the administration to obtain a conviction against Lucas.

“When prosecutors run a media campaign against a criminal defendant, that shifts the conversation about whether that defendant is guilty or innocent from a courtroom, where there are procedural rules and clear jury instructions, to a public forum where potential jurors may draw unpredictable conclusions,” Millhiser said. “That’s doubly true when the defendant is someone like Lucas, who is more than capable of pushing her own opposing narrative to the press. And it is triply true when the defendant is a prominent political opponent of the prosecutor’s boss.”

He added, “By politicizing the Lucas investigation, in other words, the Justice Department tainted its jury pool. If Lucas is eventually arrested and brought to trial, prosecutors are going to have a tough time finding jurors who haven’t been exposed to media reports suggesting that the prosecution is a sham brought for an improper political purpose.”

One sign of the seemingly political nature of the Lucas prosecution is that Fox News broadcasted the fact of the FBI’s raid on Lucas’ office immediately.

"I will say. Some pretty remarkable instincts by Fox News to have its London correspondent placed in Portsmouth, Virginia right in time for the FBI raid of Louise Lucas," Bulwark reporter Sam Stein noted at the time.

President Donald Trump's FBI director, Kash Patel, is reported to have caused morale at America's top federal law enforcement agency to fall to an all-time low.

"Most FBI agents feel — I do not know a single agent who, like me, left, nor do I have any friends whatsoever still in the Bureau who have a single positive thing to say about his stewardship," Michael Feinberg, a former FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge, said to MS NOW's Katy Tur on Thursday. "Nobody agrees with every director's every decision. I was there for [Robert] Mueller, for [James] Comey, for [Christopher] Wray, and for a brief time for Patel. And the difference is, with the first three, you might have disagreed with their decision or their policies, but you had respect for their intellectual credentials. You had respect for their professional achievements. You had respect for their temperament and their character, their integrity. Patel brings no intellectual credentials to the job. He has no relevant experience whatsoever that would have enabled him to do this well. And as near as we can tell, he has no integrity. So it's unclear what anybody would look up to."

Following this breakdown, Feinberg added that "I have never seen morale in any organization as low as it is in the FBI right now." Mentioning that Patel describes the FBI as a "diseased temple" and this further alienates his workforce, he also addressed claims that the FBI is full of liberals.

"I'd humbly suggest that allegation alone has no basis whatsoever," Feinberg told Tur. "In reality, people who work in law enforcement and national security are not exactly known for being leftists. These aren't people singing the Internationale and celebrating May Day. I think it's pretty fair to call most of them, at least on the law-and-order side, right-leaning."

Patel is currently embroiled in a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic after the magazine reported Patel's FBI colleagues expressing alarm at his reported excessive drinking and unexplained absences. He allegedly has been difficult to rouse due to his severe intoxication and drank heavily at a private Washington club, raising concerns that he was not able to effectively protect the public in his job. Furthering the concerns about his fitness, Patel snapped at NBC's Ryan Reilly at a press conference when he was asked if he feared he had been fired after being unable to log into his government computer.

“The problem with you and your baseless reporting is that is an absolute lie,” Patel shot back. “It was never said. It never happened. And I will serve in this administration as long as the president and the attorney general want me to do so.” He added, “you are off topic,” and “the answer to your question is you are lying.”

Despite his repeated denials of excessive drinking, Patel was reportedly personally chided by Trump after he was seen on video drinking beer and seeming intoxicated while celebrating with the USA Hockey Team during this year's Winter Olympics.

https://youtu.be/48ss-UF-voM

President Donald Trump and his supporters are focusing on alleged fraud cases, from accusations against Minnesotan Somali-American daycares to supposed home-care fraud and Medicaid/Medicare fraud. Yet as one conservative commentator pointed out, these same Trump supporters are singing a very different tune when it comes to one of their own.

“In what appears to be a coordinated effort on X, MAGA influencers as varied as a pro-Trump rapper and a Gateway Pundit editor are calling for leniency for Utah businessman Andrew McCubbins, arguing that his conviction for looting $89 million in Medicare money isn’t really that big of a deal, all things considered,” The Bulwark’s Will Sommer wrote on Thursday. “McCubbins is the former head of a Utah company that was found to have ordered unnecessary genetic testing, with nurses and doctors bribed to request the tests for patients.”

Sommer added that McCubbins pled guilty to all three charges in September 2020, had to forfeit his multi-million-dollar Utah house and testified at a co-conspirator’s trial about his crimes. Yet McCubbins also financially supported projects near and dear to MAGA hearts, most notably by executive producing the 2023 film “Sound of Freedom,” which promoted the QAnon conspiracy theories of alleged serial sexual abuser Tim Ballard and reportedly grossed almost $20 million in ticket sales by conservatives buying thousands of unused tickets. For these reasons, McCubbins is widely admired in MAGA circles regardless of his criminal background.

“With McCubbins’s sentencing on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud Medicare looming later this month, conservative influencers have launched a months-long—and what appears to be coordinated—effort to win him a pardon, or at least to get the Justice Department to drop the case,” Sommer wrote. These include the pro-Trump rapper Forgatio Blow, who calls himself “Trump’s nephew,” who wrote that “the math on this case just doesn’t add up and addressing the U.S. pardon attorney as “My nxgga” (sic). Blow has previously described himself as “the Donald Trump of rap.”

“In the music industry, everyone loved me, but nobody wanted to support me on a big record label,” Blow said in 2022. “Or everybody wants to support me and be my friend when they need something from me. I felt like that was like Trump—before he was president, everybody loved him… Said he’s going to be the president and they said, ‘No way.’ And then what happened? He became the president. That’s like me and music. I said I was going to make it through, you know, being a white rapper.”

A pro-Trump influencer in Spain cited McCubbins’ involvement in Ballard’s group that he and his supporters claim rescued children, although others have described it as a scam for allegedly exaggerating and/or fabricating claims and ignoring Ballard’s own alleged serial sexual misconduct.

“Sound of Freedom showed the grit needed to save kids,” Ada Lluch, the pro-Trump influencer in Spain, claimed. “Andrew McCubbins was a key operative on those missions. It is crazy that a case from the last administration is still active against him.”

Sommer had a different interpretation besides the desire to free McCubbins.

“One thing that is striking about the push to obtain a pardon for McCubbins is the uncomfortable racial double standard it suggests: After all, the right-wing anti-fraud campaign this year has largely focused on minority and immigrant communities whose populations include many people dependent on government support for services and funding, like those Somali-American daycare providers in Minnesota,” Sommer wrote. “For right-wingers to push for leniency for a well-connected white guy who confessed to white-collar fraud has an odor of hypocrisy.”

McCubbins, Ballard and others also have not condemned Trump for his decades-long and close friendship with the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who allegedly facilitated Trump sexually assaulting a 13-year-old in the 1980s.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision to gut the 1965 Voting Rights Act has left both Democrats and Republicans scrambling to redistrict to their advantage — and at least one conservative is warning that the liberal party will not only work to keep up but plan big payback for the court that made it all necessary.

“Party leaders are already plotting how to counteract the gerrymanders that Republicans are expected to undertake in Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, and Louisiana,” The Bulwark’s Laura Egan wrote on Wednesday. “House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has pointed to New York, Illinois, Maryland, and Colorado as states where Democrats could redistrict ahead of the 2028 election cycle. Other Democratic officials whom I spoke with said there’s discussion about pursuing redistricting in Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, and New Jersey as well.”

Because the Supreme Court’s ruling is what ramped up insane gerrymandering, some Democrats are calling for the Supreme Court to be packed to offset the influence of the conservative judges. Overall, Egan explained that the dynamics of American politics have changed since Joe Biden stood down from Supreme Court reform.

“The political scene looks very different today from how it looked in 2020 when Biden was so gun-shy about reforming the Court,” Egan wrote. “Since then, SCOTUS has struck down Roe v. Wade, granted presidents immunity from criminal prosecution, and gutted the VRA. Not to mention the various ethics issues that have surfaced regarding Justice Clarence Thomas. A Pew Research Center survey last August found that the Court’s favorable rating was 22 percentage points lower than it was in August 2020.”

He added, “The circumstances have changed. The question Democrats will have to face is whether voter appetites have changed as well.”

Shortly after the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, which curtailed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, Cook Political Report’s Erin Covey wrote that it is difficult to predict exactly which party will wind up ahead after they finish partisan gerrymandering.

“The Supreme Court’s April 29 decision in Louisiana v. Callais curtailed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the provision of the law responsible for the creation of majority-minority districts,” Covey wrote. “The ruling has prompted an effort to redraw Louisiana’s maps before the 2026 midterm, which could net them up to two seats.”

Covey elaborated, “Republicans may also try to redistrict in other southern states — including Tennessee, South Carolina, Alabama and Georgia — but it’s unclear whether gains will be possible for 2026 given the tight timelines lawmakers would be under to make changes.”

She further broke down the different dynamics facing each party.

“A best-case scenario for Republicans: new maps in Texas, Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, Missouri and Louisiana result in 13 Republican pick-ups, while new maps in California, Virginia and Utah result in seven Democratic pick-ups. Republicans would flip five seats, on net,” Covey argued. On the other hand, “a best-case scenario for Democrats: new maps in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas result in five Republican pick-ups. But new maps in California, Utah, and Virginia also allow Democrats to flip 10 seats, resulting in Democrats picking up five seats, on net.”

The ongoing rise in prices under President Donald Trump, which is being exacerbated by the war in Iran, has prompted one food CEO to cut prices for his company’s products as consumers “run out of money.”

“Consumers are literally running out of money toward the end of the month,” Kraft Heniz Chief Executive Steve Cahillane told The Wall Street Journal’s Jesse Newman in an interview that ran on Wednesday. “Being there with the right offering at the right time has never been more important.”

Kraft Heinz is working to lower prices to keep purchases up, but there's only so many cuts a company can make before the destroying profits. Nevertheless, Cahillane explained that passing down savings is necessary because of rising inflation.

“We could see more significant inflation, and nobody wants to see that because in our industry we still haven’t seen a return to volume growth,” Cahillane said. “We had four years of volume degradation because the consumers had to absorb too much price. I think the industry has been battling to be as affordable as possible, but the consumer hasn’t been able to really handle that.”

"Seeing another wave of inflation is not what anybody wants to see," added Cahillane, "and nobody wants to be out there taking more price [increases], but it’s just the world that we live in — we have to be prepared for what could be yet again another unprecedented event. Nobody had in their plan a war in the Middle East."

The CEO said prices were high prior to Trump’s reelection in 2024, but they have increased significantly since he took office in part because of his tariffs and his unexpected war against Iran. As a result, vulnerable economic sectors like American farms have taken a major hit.

"Few professions have been as reliably supportive of Donald Trump as farmers, and few U.S. states voted for him by a greater margin than Mississippi," i Paper reporter Kieron Monks wrote on April 30. "But now, agricultural workers in the southern Republican stronghold say they are suffering from the effects of the President's war on Iran."

Iran’s decision to block the Strait of Hormuz has caused major hardships for farmers who rely on low gas and fertilizer prices.

"The national average of gasoline prices hit a four-year high of $4.23 (£3.14) on Wednesday, (April 29), a 40 per cent surge on pre-war prices, according to the AAA motor club," Monks reports. "Economists say that some demographics key to Trump's electoral success could be among the most affected by war-related price rises, with some of the worst impacts yet to come."

Even some of Trump’s fellow conservatives, like former chairman of the Senate Banking Committee Phil Gramm and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute Michael Solon, have argued that rising prices are only going to get even higher in 2026.

“Things will get worse in 2026,” Gramm and Solon recently wrote for The Wall Street Journal. “The Congressional Budget Office projects that Mr. Trump’s tariffs will generate $331 billion this year, while the CBO estimates the new tax cuts will save taxpayers $230 billion. Families and businesses will be worse off on net.”

President Donald Trump’s economy has reached a point where it is impacting an institution upon which countless Americans rely for survival — soup kitchens.

Theresa Wilson, the owner of Rose of Sharon soup kitchen said the need for her services is "growing,” reported AL.com’s Megan Plotka on Wednesday.

"We see people from everywhere, and I’ve been seeing an increase in the different types of people coming here, and it’s because the food prices are so high, gas prices are so high, and they have food insecurity,” Wilson said. “We want to be a resource.

Wilson currently serves about 300 people a day. But even as the Trump economy squeezes the line in her kitchen a little further out the door, Wilson said rampant inflation affecting Americans across the nation appears to be whacking her own utility costs, which have "increased very suddenly," peaking at $2,200 per month in February before dropping to a still-high $1,783 per month. Usually at this time of year, she reports the energy bill is between $800 and $1,000 per month.

Wilson said it was in the first year of Trump's second term, in Fall 2025, that she saw the first significant cost jump. She said it has stayed relatively high since its February peak of $2,200.

“Wilson knows another high utility bill is coming next month,” Plotka reported. “She knows that they’ll make ends meet in one way or another. ‘I’m a faith-based girl,’ she said. ‘We pray. We fast here. We just trust God that he’ll take care of things.’”

As of April, NBC News reported only 32 percent of adults approved of Trump’s handling of inflation and the cost of living. These surveys also deepen a trove of numbers reflecting Americans’ dissatisfaction with the Iran war, which is tied to the economy by spikes in gas prices.” Also in April, Chris Rupkey, chief economist for FWDBONDS LLC, predicted the current jump in energy prices was going to precede a much larger recession.

"Every recession since the 70s has been preceded by an energy price shock and if consumers thought there was a cost of living crisis before, get ready, as you haven't seen nothing yet,” Rupkey said. “The bond market is holding up as traders for now as they are unsure how transitory this inflation surge is, but one thing is for sure and that is the longer Fed officials sit on the sidelines and do nothing, the worse inflation is going to get.”

Trump’s White House continues to argue that the American economy is in good shape and that discussions of inflation and other economic hardships are overblown. When asked in April about economists’ observations about the Iran war raising energy prices, White House spokesman Kush Desai sent a statement to AlterNet defending Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro, who argued the war in Iran would ultimately lower prices and stimulate economic growth.

"These ‘economists’ are idiots,” Desai told AlterNet about Navarro’s critics. “Peter Navarro is an American Patriot whose loyalty to the President and the American people is unimpeachable.”

President Donald Trump’s first Supreme Court appointment, Justice Neil Gorsuch, has a children’s book out about America’s founding — as well as some opinions on whether the current bench lives up to the founders' ideals.

Gorsuch told The New York Times’ David French in an interview that the U.S. Supreme Court has a long way to go in meeting those expectations.

French asked Gorsuch for his views on the connection between the founders’ ideals and the statements in Gorsuch's book “Over Ruled.” The same judge who has consistently sided with Trump over vulnerable groups like immigrants, federal employees, racial minorities and women said those who ask those questions are “allowed your theories.”

“You’re allowed your theories,” Gorsuch said. “But I would say that one of the most striking and inspirational things about the American experiment, to me, is the emphasis it places on the individual and its intrinsic value. You’re not valuable as a cog and a machine to others’ ends. You have value in your own right. You are my equal. You have inalienable rights. You have every bit as much right to rule yourself as I do. And those ideas, I just think those are perfect ideas.”

He added, “Are they imperfectly executed? Do we have a ways to go, even today? You betcha!" The judge then added that "those ideas speak to every human heart. They exclude no one and they inspire me, yes.”

Gorsuch's court, which has hit hit record levels of disapproval as it kowtows to President Donald Trump, and openly politicizes the bench, is losing tremendous credibility, according to the New York TImes. But In an interview published Monday with Reason’s Nick Gillespie, Gorsuch argued that as a judge he needed to think about high ideals rather than this being a “popularity contest.”

“The judicial branch, it isn't a popularity contest, right?” Gorsuch told Gillespie. He later elaborated that “one of the major grievances that the colonists had was that they didn't have independent judges. They had politicized the judges and they wanted no part of that, right? And you wouldn't hire a judge to write the laws for the country. That's not self-rule. But you would hire a life-tenured judge who didn't care what anybody had thought about his decisions.”

Gorsuch also told Gillepsie that he believes the Supreme Court is doing “pretty darn well” in serving as an example for the rest of America to follow.

Critics have called Gorsuch's books "an embarrassment."

One of President Donald Trump’s most outspoken supporters, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, is trying to get out of owing $5 million to an engineer who proved him wrong about his 2020 election conspiracy theories.

Robert “Bob” Zeidman, an engineer who in a 2021 contest successfully proved Lindell relied on junk science to claim China meddled in the 2020 election to steal it from Trump, filed a motion for a rehearing “by the original arbitration” panel that awarded him a $5 million settlement. Although those judges determined that Zeidman had proved Lindell wrong beyond a reasonable doubt and therefore Lindell owed him money, three Republican-appointed judges from the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the settlement. The Supreme Court, also controlled by Republicans, refused to intervene.

Despite Zeidman wanting the settlement restored, Lindell’s attorneys are arguing that the decision to throw out his claims should remain final.

“In an April 30 filing, Lindell Management LLC attorney Barbara Podlucky Berens asked Senior U.S. District Judge John R. Tunheim, a Bill Clinton appointee, to agree that Zeidman should get no such rehearing because he would have ‘no viable theory’ to collect the $5 million upon a ‘second bite of the apple’ before the arbitration panel,” Law and Crime’s Matt Naham reported on Wednesday.

The filing argued that "Zeidman's alleged successful demonstration regarding the data at issue was based solely on the absence of capture packet data. Thus, in order to succeed, this claim, like the breach of contract claim, is contingent on the validity of the extracontractual data-format requirement imposed by the Pane. And like the breach of contract claim, the Eighth Circuit's express reversal of the Panel's capture packet data requirement defeats this claim as a matter of law."

Lindell’s legal team concluded, "Any rehearing would thus be futile.”

Despite Trump, Lindell and others in the MAGA movement insisting the 2020 election was stolen, conservative columnist George F. Will recently noted that the Republicans’ claims have been thoroughly litigated and debunked.

“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will wrote. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will added, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

President Donald Trump is so unpopular right now, he is heading toward a historic defeat in the upcoming midterm elections, a longtime Republican strategist recently argued.

“Donald Trump's poll numbers and his coalition are falling apart,” Steve Schmidt, who advised the previous Republican chief executive President George W. Bush said in a Tuesday Substack post. “It's simply staggering — unprecedented, even. Across the entire coalition, his voters are running. The Trump catastrophe is starting to land, and it's starting to be felt at the gas pumps. Everything is going to get more expensive, not less expensive, as the summer rolls on. Because Trump's war in Iran — the war of choice that he's losing — the impact of it? Well, we haven't even begun to start feeling it.”

Schmidt ticked off other midterm elections that historically went poorly for the incumbent, even more so than is usually the case, such as in 1974 (when President Richard Nixon resigned because of the Watergate scandal), 1994 (when President Bill Clinton lost control of both houses of Congress due to the so-called “Gingrich Revolution”) and 2006 (when President George W. Bush suffered historic losses due to the unpopular Iraq War).

“In 2026, there will be a tsunami that outdoes them all,” Schmidt predicted. “In Ohio, we're going to see a Democratic governor and the return of Sherrod Brown to the United States Senate. In the state of Iowa, we're going to see a Democratic governor and a Democratic senator. And it's not just there. David Jolly in Florida has an outstanding chance to be the governor of the state. Lindsey Graham — a bloodthirsty wacko with no principles whatsoever, whatsoever — can be defeated in South Carolina.”

After quoting Trump saying that he may not leave office when his term expires in 2029, Schmidt added that “that's what the election is about: people who revere the Constitution, as opposed to revering or fearing Donald Trump.” Although Trump and his supporters insist he is doing a great job, “when the American people get to say, ‘Hey, how's he doing after two years in power?,’ and the answer to that question is found in the polls.”

He concluded that Trump has “the lowest net approval ratings ever for the president of the United States. That is approval minus disapproval. The lowest previous record, according to the ABC News/Washington Post poll, was Trump at 24 points underwater — and that was all the way back in term number one.”

Other political experts have also noted that Trump is suffering in the polls. According to The Hill’s Julia Mueller and Caroline Vakil, “President Trump’s surging disapproval rating is threatening to become a liability for downballot Republicans as the party looks to keep its fragile GOP trifecta in November. An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll released Sunday found the president at a new high in his disapproval — 62 percent — while 37 percent said they approved of his job helming of the country.”

They added, “On Trump’s handling of the cost of living and inflation, 76 percent and 72 percent disapproved, respectively. In addition, 66 percent of respondents said they disapprove of how Trump is handling the Iran war. The polling, coupled with low marks he’s received in similar surveys, risk jeopardizing GOP candidates in an election cycle already shaping up to look like the 2018 midterms fueled by anti-Trump sentiment.”

Because Trump is so determined to keep control of Congress, some experts worry that he will try to steal the midterm elections.

Robert Kagan, a conservative historian who has written extensively about American foreign policy, warned CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in February that President Donald Trump is likely to meddle in the 2026 midterm elections and in so doing take America “one big step into dictatorship.”

“I am worried, as I have said and others have been pointing out, about whether we will even have free and fair elections in 2026, let alone in 2028,” Kagan told Amanpour. “I think Trump has a plan to disrupt those elections, and I don't think he's willing to allow Democrats to take control of one or both houses as could happen in a free election.”

President Donald Trump’s political brand is based on convincing unexceptional people that they are better than they actually are, but one critic says he's doing so at the expense of exceptional people who happen to belong to marginalized communities.

“Donald Trump is literally hypnotizing mediocre people into thinking that they are meritocratic geniuses, while telling highly accomplished Black, Brown, and Asian people that they are nothing — that everything they have was given to them by those same mediocre people,” liberal commentator Joy-Ann Reid said on Tuesday in an episode of “The Left Hook with Wajahat Ali and Joy-Ann Reid.” The pundit elaborated that Trump and his administration promote the idea that white men do not need to prove their merit because, by virtue of being white men, they are already exceptional.

“They're literally seeing a deficit of white men even trying to go to college now, because they're being told: you don't have to do anything, you just have to be,” Reid said. “You just have to exist as a white man and you're qualified to do anything. You can be a neurosurgeon — just walk in there, use your brilliant European brain, and start operating on people. You're fine. You don't need to know anything. But Black people, according to the late Charlie Kirk, can't even be a pilot — even after going to school to become one. If they're sitting behind the wheel of a Cessna, the claim is they don't know how to do it, that they were just pulled off the street and thrown into the chair.”

Not only do these arguments hurt ordinary people by encouraging discrimination, Reid argued; they also hurt the American economy and do damage to the government when second-rate leaders inevitably stumble at their jobs.

“So they're telling women and people of color: you're not qualified to do anything. But white men are being told: you're qualified to do everything," Reid said. "So you're having people walk into positions they're not ready for. This is Donald Trump doing exactly what they claimed affirmative action did to Black students — setting them up to fail by placing unqualified people in positions beyond their preparation. That was their theory. And that's literally what's happening to these mediocre white guys now.”

Reid offered up the Trump administration as the clearest example.

“RFK Jr. cannot help but fail because he's not qualified for the job,” Reid said. “Pete Hegseth cannot do anything but look like an idiot because he's not qualified for the job. When you're not seeking the most qualified people, you're setting all of these men up to fail — including the President of the United States.”

Reid is not alone among liberal pundits who argue that Trump’s appeal relies in part on elevating mediocre men into believing they are great. Salon writer Amanda Marcotte made a similar point in July on “The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent.”

“So much of the MAGA movement really is driven by this jealousy that they can’t admit to themselves,” Marcotte said. “…I think you see that come up again and again with these fascist movements, right? They are full of mediocre people who are burning with resentment and grievance toward people that they call ‘the elites,’ who are often just people that are more excellent than they are, who are better at stuff than they are. They hate them and they just want to punish them.”

A prosecutor appointed by President Donald Trump has Georgia election workers in his sights.

“Fulton County, Georgia, is trying to fend off a subpoena from a federal prosecutor in North Carolina seeking contact information for thousands of poll workers from the 2020 election,” The Guardian’s George Chidi reported on Tuesday. “The subpoena, issued in April by Dan Bishop, the interim US attorney of North Carolina’s middle district, demands the county provide rosters of election staff members who served in the November 2020 election, including their identification by name, position, residential and email address and personal telephone number.”

Fulton County attorneys are responding by trying to quash the federal grand jury subpoena by saying it is a politically motivated act of harassment, adding that even if election fraud had occurred in 2020 it would now be past the statute of limitations.

“Election workers are the referees of our democracy, and they’re going after the referees,” Michael McNulty, policy director for the voting rights organization Issue One, said in a statement. “This is about intimidation of election officials for 2026, and taking executive branch control of elections in 2026. Election workers are supposed to be getting gratitude and protection from the federal government, not being targeted by it. This is a sign of authoritarianism, not a democratically oriented government.”

In January, the FBI raided Fulton County’s clerk of courts and board of registration to seize about 700 boxes of original 2020 election materials, claiming they were part of a criminal investigation. Kurt Olsen, Trump’s “Stop the Steal” lawyer from the 2020 election, initiated the raid. As conservative columnist George F. Will recently explained, Trumpers continue to push the lie that the 2020 election was stolen despite all of their claims being disproved.

“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will wrote. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will added, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

In addition to relitigating the 2020 presidential election, some observers believe Trump is laying the foundations to overturn the 2026 midterm elections if Republicans lose seats as anticipated.

According to The Hill’s Julia Mueller and Caroline Vakil, “President Trump’s surging disapproval rating is threatening to become a liability for downballot Republicans as the party looks to keep its fragile GOP trifecta in November. An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll released Sunday found the president at a new high in his disapproval — 62 percent — while 37 percent said they approved of his job helming of the country.”

They added, “On Trump’s handling of the cost of living and inflation, 76 percent and 72 percent disapproved, respectively. In addition, 66 percent of respondents said they disapprove of how Trump is handling the Iran war. The polling, coupled with low marks he’s received in similar surveys, risk jeopardizing GOP candidates in an election cycle already shaping up to look like the 2018 midterms fueled by anti-Trump sentiment.”

People who regularly watch Fox News are more likely to believe in a debunked conspiracy theory that has been widely linked to violence, according to a recent study.

“Recent years have witnessed an increase in white Americans’ support for the Great Replacement Theory (GRT), the xenophobic conspiracy theory that posits that political elites are embracing permissive immigration policies to bring in ‘obedient’ voters who will vote for them and who will eventually replace native white citizens,” scholars Jesse Rhodes, Seth Goldman and others wrote for the journal PS: Political Science & Politics. They added that, because Fox News frequently promotes this theory, the article’s authors decided to study “the American Multiracial Panel Study to investigate whether exposure to Fox News is associated with support for the GRT.” After surveying more than 1,000 people over a period of more than a year, they concluded that “whites who receive their political news from Fox News are significantly more likely to support core tenets of the GRT than those who do not,” a phenomenon consistent with what they dubbed a “Fox News Effect.”

“Our study extends this research by exploring whether exposure to Fox News is associated with stronger support for key tenets of the GRT among whites,” the authors wrote. “Using results from a panel survey of American adults, we found that whereas pluralities of whites support core aspects of the GRT, majorities and sometimes supermajorities of Fox News viewers express support for these beliefs. We then tested the robustness of this bivariate relationship with multivariate OLS regression and discovered that exposure to Fox News was associated with greater support for the GRT, controlling for demographic and political characteristics.”

To explain the link between watching Fox News and supporting the Great Replacement Theory, the authors wrote that “undocumented immigration is best understood as a ‘hard’ issue and, as a result, public opinion is more likely to be susceptible to strike elite influence,” adding later in their paper that “studies of mass opinion have shown that Americans have low levels of information concerning the scope of undocumented immigration to the United States and the factors that account for the recent increase in unauthorized migration to the country. Given this lack of knowledge and the consistently positive coverage of the GRT on Fox News, it is no surprise that Fox News viewers have opinions closely aligned with the core tenets of this troubling belief system.”

In the United States, the Great Replacement Theory was cited as the rationale behind a number of mass shootings including a 2018 synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, a 2019 attack on a Poway Chabad center, a 2019 mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart and a 2022 shooting at a Buffalo supermarket.

“According to the study text, scholars point out that individuals who subscribe to these beliefs also show an increased inclination to endorse violence as a political tool,” PsyPost’s Karina Petrova wrote when describing the study. “The perpetrators of several mass shootings targeting minorities in the United States have cited the theory in their writings. Because the ideology frequently emerges alongside acts of violence, understanding how the beliefs spread has become a major concern for social scientists.”

Despite the serious consequences of the Great Replacement Theory, Trump has appointed a number of high-ranking officials who support it. When one of them, Jeremy Carl, withdrew his nomination for Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizational Affairs because of his pushing of GRT, he defended himself by saying “I mostly just kind of saying this ... to troll the libs.”

Adding he wanted to take “some genuine ironic distance,” Carl claimed that “I don’t actually think that we are in a cultural genocide per se. I’m trying to kind of push people.” Yet he later added that Democrats “hyperdiversify the country.”

According to a top defense expert, President Donald Trump’s Iran war has made it impossible for millions of Americans to ever trust their government’s foreign policy again.

“For decades, the U.S. government has been willing to start wars but not strategically and transparently manage them, consistently misleading its citizenry to justify adventurism abroad,” Alexander Langlois, a contributing fellow for Defense Priorities, wrote for Reason on Tuesday. “The conduct of the Trump administration in the current war with Iran is no exception.”

Langlois added, “President Donald Trump's claims of ‘victory’ as the war persists through a blockade and multiple troop surges without a clear win-case highlights how optics designed to mislead dictate Washington's approach to war today. This war could mark a crucial lesson and potential turning point, however, forcing the nation to come to grips with the real costs of violent conflict.”

The foreign policy scholar explained that Trump’s loss of credibility over the Iran War did not occur in isolation. In fact, for more than 60 years, American foreign policymakers have made unpopular decisions that eroded the public’s ability to believe their words.

“Unable to achieve already unclear objectives and trapped in a quagmire of its own making, Washington has chosen destruction as the war's defining characteristic,” Langlois observed. “The evolution of the war in this direction reflects the ‘body count’ rhetoric used by the White House during the Vietnam War, in which a narrative of mass killing and destruction was believed to bolster perceptions of American victory. In reality, it only obscured the quagmire, prolonging an already lost war in a conflict with no military resolution in the first place.”

Comparing Vietnam to Iran, Langlois concluded that “a strategic loss cannot be defined as a win. A lie is still a lie. That victory is and will be hollow.”

Langlois is not the only foreign policy scholar to raise the alarm about the president’s Iran war and how its ongoing unpopularity could hurt America’s foreign policy.

“Trump’s Easter Sunday blast at the Iranians thus offered a stark contrast with even his most profane predecessors,” presidential historian Barbara A. Perry recently wrote for The Atlantic. Perry quoted Trump’s Easter Day social media post to Iran in which he wrote “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F—— Strait, you crazy b------, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP”

While presidents like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were notoriously profane in private, Perry pointed out that they were very careful about protecting the office’s image and credibility by not speaking like that in public.

“All previous presidents have wanted to appear serious, dignified, and statesmanlike when speaking to their fellow Americans and the world about war,” Perry wrote. “Not every commander in chief can rival Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg—or even Franklin D. Roosevelt describing Japan’s ‘unprovoked and dastardly attack on Sunday, December 7, 1941’ as a ‘day that will live in infamy’—but the others have all tried.”

President Donald Trump has led America into so much debt that it now exceeds the entirety of the nation’s gross domestic product, and one academic is warning that the bill is coming due.

“Unless we change course, the debt will only get worse—fast,” wrote Brookings Institution senior fellow William Galston for The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. “The Congressional Budget Office estimates that we are on track to accumulate more than $24 trillion in debt over the next decade, for a total of $56 trillion—120 percent of estimated GDP in 2036.”

He added, “These numbers are so large that it is hard to grasp what they mean. One key measure is the cost of financing this swelling debt burden. Twenty-five years ago, interest payments on the national debt were 2 percent of GDP. This year they will claim 3.3 percent; a decade from now, 4.6 percent.”

Galston broke down the numbers in terms of how they will impact ordinary Americans. By 2036, the US will increase its spending on debt interest from $1 trillion to $2.1 trillion, amounting to nearly one-fifth of the total federal budget. This means that, by that time, “more than 2 out of every 3 dollars we borrow will go to finance interest on the debt. The longer this continues, the worse it gets.”

Because President Clinton worked with both parties in Congress so that by 2001 the debt had fallen to just 32 percent of GDP, Galston argued that the current crisis is not unsolveable. He expressed support for a recent bipartisan plan by 14 representatives, half from each party, to "commit the country to reduce the budget deficit to 3 percent of GDP and maintain it at or below this level."

While backing this target, however, Galston also urged pragmatism.

“A serious effort to slow and then halt the growth of public debt would involve reductions in popular programs, increased revenue from taxes as well as economic growth, and devolution of some federal programs to the states,” Galston wrote. “Given how hard-pressed working- and middle-class households are these days, wealthy Americans would have to bear a substantial share of the burden.”

He added, “A political version of the Hippocratic oath—first, do no harm—would be a good place to start. If the Trump administration wants to increase defense spending by more than $400 billion in the next fiscal year, it should specify how this can be done without increasing the deficit. The same holds for Democrats who want to increase domestic spending above current levels. If Congress isn’t willing to accept the needed offsets, it shouldn’t increase spending.”

Galston concluded, “None of this will happen without a president who is prepared to persuade the people that getting the debt under control is a top priority.”

Galston is not alone among budget hawks who are alarmed at the rising debt.

“Biden ramped up spending, especially on his way out the door,” Reason's Nick Gillespie wrote last month. “Trump is doing more of the same. Yes, he's pushing to cut certain types of spending, but in the aggregate, it's just more and more red ink as far as the eye can see, a tendency that was true of him during his first term, both before and after the pandemic.”

Gillespie added, “In fact, federal spending under Trump increased $1,441 per person before COVID fully opened the spigot. Of the $7.8 trillion in new debt he signed off on in his first term, less than half was related to COVID relief. And by every indication—including his recent budget proposal, which calls for a record-high defense budget of $1.5 trillion—Trump aims to sign off on ever-increasing amounts of spending until his term expires in 2029.”

President Donald Trump was the target of an assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents Dinner in April — but many of his own supporters seem unwilling to believe the official story.

“It turns out that Trump supporters, already swimming in a sea of other conspiracy theories, don’t necessarily trust the WHCD shooting story presented by the feds, either,” wrote The Bulwark's Will Sommer on Monday, juxtaposing widespread liberal skepticism about the shooting attempt with the comparatively more surprising right-wing response. “That’s one of the big findings of a recent focus group conducted by Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell’s Longwell Partners of nine people who voted for Trump at least twice (in 2020 and 2024). Those nine people were picked for the focus group because they all now say they disapprove of his presidency.”

Sommer added,” As for the WHCD attack, six participants said they believed the assassination attempt attributed to California teacher Cole Tomas Allen was ‘a psyop.’”

Sommer proceeded to quote some of the ex-Trumpers who expressed doubt about the assassination attempt story. One focus group member observed that “it doesn’t make sense that somebody should be able to get that close this many times in that way to the President of the United States,” while another pointed out that “I can’t even go to a baseball game and bring in a can of Diet Coke . . . or a concert without a metal detector or them emptying my pockets.”

A third, noting how Trump and his supporters immediately began calling for a White House ballroom (one of Trump’s longtime and controversial projects) very shortly after the assassination attempt occurred.

“I feel like it was a ploy to get his ballroom that he wants, and that’s his reason,” the commenter explained. Still another participant expressed doubt about the assassination attempt during the 2024 election in Butler, Penn., comparing it to Nazi propaganda and speculating that there was “a paintball or something in his hand that he squished on his ear because I think he wanted to gain some support.”

The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell, speaking with former Republican speechwriter David Frum, argued last week that people are overall distrustful of Trump and American leaders in general.

“It just doesn't make sense to me that we have our leader — who is supported/protected by what is supposed to be the … the most dominant military force on the planet,” one Trump voter told Longwell. It doesn't make sense to me that there have been this many close attempts on his life when we have all these other presidents recently who haven't really had that issue.”

Last month The Telegraph’s Ed Cumming also reported widespread doubt among Trump’s own supporters that the assassination attempt even happened.

“In recent months, former Trump supporters, such as Tucker Carlson, have suggested the FBI was involved in the Butler attack. Joe Kent, the former US National Counterterrorism Center director who resigned over the Iran war, used an interview with Carlson to raise his own doubts, including claiming – without evidence – that investigations into the Butler shooting were shut down prematurely,” Cumming reported. “Some prominent Right-wing accounts have suggested that Saturday’s incident may have been staged, too, possibly in order to facilitate Trump’s ballroom.”

He continued, “Despite the rapid destruction of the old building, the new facility has run into trouble recently. In March, Judge Richard Leon temporarily halted construction, upholding a complaint by the National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP) that Trump’s planned improvements required congressional approval. Work has resumed after an appeal, but is only allowed to continue until another hearing — due to take place on June 5 — is held.”

President Donald Trump’s poll numbers are so low, only three out of eight Americans support him compared to five out of eight who oppose him — and that bodes poorly for Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections.

“President Trump’s surging disapproval rating is threatening to become a liability for downballot Republicans as the party looks to keep its fragile GOP trifecta in November,” wrote The Hill's Julia Mueller and Caroline Vakil on Monday. “An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll released Sunday found the president at a new high in his disapproval — 62 percent — while 37 percent said they approved of his job helming of the country.”

They added, “On Trump’s handling of the cost of living and inflation, 76 percent and 72 percent disapproved, respectively. In addition, 66 percent of respondents said they disapprove of how Trump is handling the Iran war. The polling, coupled with low marks he’s received in similar surveys, risk jeopardizing GOP candidates in an election cycle already shaping up to look like the 2018 midterms fueled by anti-Trump sentiment.”

Mueller and Vakil pointed to Trump’s ongoing problems with high inflation, rising unemployment and an unpopular war against Iran.

“Trump’s approval rating on the economy dropped 8 percentage points between March and April in The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll,” Mueller and Vakil wrote. “Though a majority of Republicans still had a positive view of Trump’s economic moves, that number dropped from 74 percent to 62 percent in the last month, a stark change from the president’s base.”

Mueller and Vakil added that, with all of these factors working against Trump’s political brand, Democrats are likely to focus on them in the hope of hurting Republicans.

“The Democrats are going to say, ‘This is about Trump. Forget about who we are. Forget about our platform or issues. This is just about what the president is,’” Spencer Kimball, executive director of Emerson College Polling, told The Hill.

He added, “The Republicans are going to have to somehow distance themselves from some of those policies while still coming up with other ideas for why voters should vote for them as opposed to just continuing on with the Trump policies, and I think they’re in a tough place.”

Because Trump is doing so poorly in polls, and historically incumbent parties in a president’s second term lose seats in midterm elections, the president has said he is determined to keep control of both houses — prompting conservative historian Robert Kagan to express the fear in February that he will attempt to rig the midterms and thereby put America on “one big step into dictatorship.”

“I am worried, as I have said and others have been pointing out, about whether we will even have free and fair elections in 2026, let alone in 2028,” Kagan told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour at the time. “I think Trump has a plan to disrupt those elections, and I don't think he's willing to allow Democrats to take control of one or both houses as could happen in a free election.”

President Donald Trump has forfeited America’s longstanding stature as leader of the free world, a conservative commentator argued on Monday — but three non-American world leaders are stepping up to fill that void.

“Under the Trump administration, we’re no longer the leader of the Free World,” The Bulwark’s William Kristol wrote on Monday. “Indeed we’re barely on the side of the Free World.” Citing the Trump administration’s human rights violations and isolationist foreign policy, Kristol claimed that Trump’s administration is not championing democracy and human rights, in stark contrast to every president before him since World War II. In lieu of Trump, Kristol pointed to three other world leaders who are instead championing the cause of freedom through the globe.

“Seven years ago, in April 2019, an entertainer who’d never held elective office, Volodymyr Zelensky, was elected president of Ukraine,” Kristol wrote. “What his nation has done in defending its national freedom against the brutal assault of a much larger and dictatorial neighbor has surely been the twenty-first century’s finest hour.” Kristol then quoted New York Times columnist David French, who said that “for the first time in my adult life, the moral and strategic heart of the defense of liberal democracy doesn’t beat in Washington. . . . It’s in Kyiv, where a courageous leader and a courageous people have picked up the torch America has dropped.”

In addition to Zelensky, Kristol argued that Pope Leo XIV is standing up for the free world by criticizing Trump’s anti-immigration and pro-war policies.

“For all President Trump’s belittling of him, People Leo XIV has turned out to be a formidable enough figure that Trump is sending his secretary of state to Rome this week to pay his respects,” Kristol wrote. “This is not quite Henry IV journeying to Canossa—but it’s not nothing.”

By denouncing the Pope so vehemently, Trump also tapped into America’s deeper history of anti-Catholic prejudice, historian Dr. Christopher Shannon told AlterNet last month.

“Anti-Catholicism is baked into Anglo-American political culture,” Shannon told AlterNet. “During the Revolution, patriot leaders from [future president] John Adams to Thomas Paine repeatedly denounced British oppression in language drawn directly from earlier denunciations of the Catholic Church. For example, in Common Sense, Paine likened monarchy to ‘popery.’”

The conservative finally praised Péter Magyar, who recently defeated Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán by turning “the election into a referendum on illiberalism. . . . Presented with a clear, stark choice between reactionary conservatism and national liberalism, Hungarians chose liberalism.”

In fact, as journalist Steven Greenhut wrote for the libertarian magazine Reason last month, Orbán was widely admired by the far right for creating a government in Hungary they insisted could serve as a model for other nations.

"Legions of conservatives — including the sitting vice president — have flocked to Hungary to champion the wonders of Viktor Orbán's self-described 'illiberal" government," Greenhut wrote. "If you're not up on political lingo, the term 'illiberal' does not refer to modern liberalism, but to the classical liberalism of our founders. Right-wing post-liberalism is about replacing limited government with something like elected autocracy…. Hungarian voters handily rebuked him and his Vladimir Putin-friendly Fidesz party…. despite President Donald Trump's fawning support."