On Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee, hats in hand. The Pentagon is burning through appropriations, with both Navy and Air Force 2026 operations budgets set to run out by the end of July. The war in Iran has depleted key weapons stockpiles, reducing U.S. inventories of interceptor missiles and stealth cruise missiles to less than half and costing over $37 billion to date. To the naked eye, these costs reflect disastrous mismanagement of an unauthorized and escalating war.

On Wednesday, the GOP-led House approved a whopping defense funding bill anyway, authorizing an unprecedented $1 trillion for military spending. Not only did the MAGA wing reward Trump’s incompetent war in Iran with a massive spending boost, it codified Hegseth’s rebrand of the “Department of War,” snuck in Trump’s voter suppression bill, and blocked hormone therapy coverage for gender care just as Hegseth is braying about testosterone levels.

Hegseth expected lawmakers to correct his urgent shortfall, but wouldn’t correct, clarify or explain his own false claims about Iran. Hegseth’s early-in-the-war announcement that Iran’s military had been “destroyed and made combat ineffective” was obviously untrue, but republicans still put an unprecedented $1trillion budget in his hands. Arming a blowhard who delivers braggadocio instead of sober analysis is not confidence inspiring, it’s irresponsible. It’s also scary as hell.

Hegseth’s bloodlust

As a Fox News commentator, Hegseth lobbied hard for presidential pardons for war criminals, leading Trump to fully pardon a Lieutenant convicted of murdering two Afghan civilians, and a Major who admitted to the CIA that he killed someone off base in 2010 and buried his remains. For his own activities in Iraq, Hegseth kept a ‘kill board’ totaling up his kills, including dead civilians, providing context for his bloodlust today (“maximum lethality not tepid legality”) and his disdain for restraint (“stupid rules of engagement.”)

Hegseth seems to be grooming U.S. servicemembers for war crimes, taking them to a place where rules and laws do not apply. Added to over 200 extrajudicial killings in South America, they bombed a school in Iran, killing 175 grade-schoolers, and are now bombing Iran’s civilian energy infrastructure and water desalination facilities, more war crimes. Millions of Iranians are living under fire in nightmarish hellscapes, compounding anti-American hatred sure to outlast Trump for generations.

This is the same idiocy that blames other countries for climate-change induced wildfires, while pouring gas on the flames. But of all the mistakes, bloodlust, and incompetence displayed to date, none is more dangerous than Hegseth’s new obsession with testosterone.

Hegseth is mandating testosterone testing

On July 16, Hegseth announced mandatory annual testosterone screening for troops 30 years and older, a new initiative that Hegseth claims will ensure enlistees “have the right testosterone levels to operate at your absolute ⁠best.” What he didn’t announce is that testosterone supplements can cause infertility, shrink testicles, and drive up red blood cell counts, which thickens blood and raises the risk of blood clots and pulmonary embolism.

Even worse is what T supplements can do to overall IQ and cognitive functioning. Medical studies have tracked how increased testosterone levels can induce aggressive behavior because they also change brain wave patterns.

Although Hegseth and other chest beaters think increased testosterone will make men quicker and sharper, medical research suggests the opposite. The relationship between T and IQ is shaped like an inverted U: cognitive performance is strongest when testosterone sits in a moderate range, and dramatically declines at both low and high ends of the spectrum.

In short, when T levels are too high, men get stupid. While that may explain some of Hegseth’s frequent blunders, excessive testosterone among the troops would present obvious risks.

Too much T rots your brain: How excess testosterone impairs cognitive performance

In controlled studies that raised serum testosterone in healthy men to ‘supraphysiological’ levels — beyond what the body normally produces — researchers measured how verbal and spatial memory changed, confirming a downturn in cognition levels at high doses. Rather than testosterone being simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for the brain, research shows that it can help or hurt cognition depending on where a person's levels fall relative to their own physiological baseline.

This pattern shows up in the medical research repeatedly, across different populations and cognitive domains. But Hegseth’s directive aims to establish hormonal baselines across the force, which cannot measure or indicate how a person's levels compare to their own past historical baseline.

None of this makes testosterone a villain. Men with low testosterone face meaningfully higher risk of dementia, and testosterone loss with age also contributes to cognitive decline. The nuance assuredly lost on Hegseth is that pushing testosterone artificially high — whether through unsupervised supplementation, misuse of steroids, or aggressive hormone therapy — can backfire, and erode memory and executive function. Hegseth seems to think that hormones are simple dials where more is better, but they are biometric signals the brain has evolved to interpret within complex ranges, and stepping too far outside that range — in either direction — comes at a cost.

Will Hegseth have the cognitive bandwidth, or even the professional discipline, to consult medical research before pushing T supplements to millions of servicemembers? Color me skeptical. He’s chief mouth-breather to the most incompetent, anti-science, anti-intellectual administration the world has ever seen. But he knows that when Trump starts deploying the military against U.S. citizens, aggressive soldiers with low brain function will make the perfect Praetorian Guard.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Last week, Trump blasted another announcement of his ignorance to the world, claiming that Canada’s wildfire smoke is an air “invasion,” one that he’s going to fight with… tariffs. Before thanking everyone for their attention to this matter and announcing more punitive Canadian tariffs, Trump deemed Canada “responsible” for the wildfire smoke still blanketing parts of the U.S. “They are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!... This is Willful Negligence!...”

Republican toadies were quick to parrot the idiocy. Meeting Trump’s bombast and raising him one, Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, introduced the "CANADA FIRE Act" declaring a national emergency, stripping Canadian officials of their visas, and expelling the Canadian ambassador until the smoke clears. Moreno announced, “Ohioans across the state are being subjected to hazardous conditions – we will not tolerate this incompetence.” Representative Lisa McClain borrowed Trump’s phrasing and his penchant for turning everything into us vs. them, claiming that Michiganders were “breathing Canada’s negligence,” because Canada is “exporting” their smoke “into our skies.”

Yet another coalition of Republican dunces sent a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney threatening military reprisals. They warned that if Ottawa didn't act, the US military/agencies would “act on our own” by physically crossing the border to perform unilateral logging and fire suppression. Funny how threatening invasion against a sovereign ally is easier than contradicting a petulant boss.

Satire and irony glove up, punch back

While Trump and Republicans try to punish the wind, the internet is having a field day. Mocking the sheer absurdity of the world's largest historical carbon emitter demanding damages for climate-driven wildfires, one plan, the "Build a Sky Wall" Plan, would have Trump construct a massive wall along the border to keep the "illegal air" out. A competing “Weather Bureaucracy” proposal would post U.S. customs agents at the border to issue speeding and littering tickets to wind currents passing through.

Canadian satirist David Hehn presented an initiative to draft every able-bodied Canadian between 16 and 65 to tidy up the Boreal Forest. The Forest Undergrowth Clearing Kindling Operation for Foreign Friends (boss acronym) promises to negotiate with local Canadian beavers to submit environmental impact reports. Canadian internet users, overall, were quick to see the incongruity, with one viral tweet noting: “We'll pay for the smoke as soon as you give us a refund for the acid rain and global warming.”

While this irony may be obvious, another one, more subtle and even more delicious, hasn’t made the headlines. By demanding damages from Canada for the wildfire smoke, Trump and his anti-science republicans are endorsing the legal theory currently pending in 51 lawsuits brought against major fossil fuel corporations. Big oil accountability lawsuits, filed by ten states, fifteen municipalities, and two tribal governments, seek to hold fossil fuel corporations accountable for deceiving the public about their role in the climate crisis.

Republicans’ performative outrage over the smoke also implicitly supports legal claims from developing countries now demanding that nations like the U.S. and China, which have emitted the most greenhouse gases since the industrial revolution, assist them financially in addressing heatwaves, floods, disappearing coasts, droughts and crop failures worsened by rising temperatures.

An adult in the room responds

Although political commentators routinely criticize Trump for dismissing climate change as a ‘con job’ while simultaneously complaining about its effects, no U.S. elected official has yet accused Trump of causing Canada’s wildfires through climate inaction. It’s not clear why democrats haven’t come out swinging on this; research shows that the U.S. has directly caused over $10 trillion in climate damages globally since 1990.

At least Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, the only adult in this spat, can still state the obvious. Carney countered Trump's accusations by pointing out Trump’s willful failure to address the climate crisis.

Carney replied to Trump’s wildfire threats by noting, statesmanlike, that “fighting climate change is the responsibility of all countries, including the United States.” While Canada is investing in clean energy, Carney noted, Trump is doing just the opposite.

An anti-science moron, Trump is deliberately accelerating climate change

Carney’s right. Trump has systematically rolled back almost every clean air protection; his regulatory rollbacks directly accelerate emissions and global warming. Aside from withdrawing the US from global climate bodies like the Paris Agreement, Trump consistently promotes climate disinformation (“it’s a hoax”) and claims black air from burning coal is good for you. One expects an Executive Order any day now requiring home furnaces to convert to coal.

While Trump engages in coercive, anti-factual measures to benefit his fossil fuel donors, he has halted all federal permitting for offshore wind, closing deals with energy companies to abandon wind farms off California, New Jersey, New York and North Carolina in exchange for investing in fossil fuel projects. His other climate-change acceleration projects include:

• Revoking the scientific declaration that greenhouse gases threaten public health.
• Eliminating federal tailpipe emissions and efficiency rules for cars and trucks.
• Weakening methane regulations and enforcement codes that required fossil fuel companies to fix gas leaks.
• Freezing billions of dollars in incentives for renewables and paying over $2.6 billion to cancel wind farms already under development.

Even Trump, at 80 years old, knows he won’t be around in 30 years when Miami slips into the ocean.

As he engages in unparalleled corruption, starts WWIII out of sheer stupidity, and tries to take the planet into the grave with him, the silver lining in his attack on Canada should be celebrated. Just as his war in Iran is hastening the world’s transition to renewables, his lets-sue-Canada-for-climate-damages policy will make a fine opening exhibit— and closing argument— for plaintiffs suing big oil.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

ICE agents just shot and killed two more innocent people, a man in Texas and another in Maine. Both men were legally authorized to work in the United States; both were shot in the early morning while driving to work.

Neither victim was ICE’s intended target, meaning each man died because federal agents pursued him in error.

Anyone who’s ever been chased—even if just in a nightmare— can imagine the terror of being followed by a masked and armed aggressor in hot pursuit. But instead of waking up from the dream right when he catches you, the masked man chasing you is actually real. He’s not floating at the foot of your bed, he’s at your car door with a loaded gun. He really does pull the trigger, you really do die, and your family really does have to grieve your absence for the rest of their lives.

An American horror story

On July 7, 2026, in Houston, Texas, ICE fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican national who had lived and worked in the U.S. for over 30 years, recently reaching his goal of owning his own construction company. According to preliminary reports, ICE agents in unmarked vehicles pursued Araujo while he was driving his construction crew to the morning’s job site.

Although agents admit that Mr. Araujo was not even their intended target, DHS is claiming Mr. Araujo “tried to run over an officer” with his vehicle. The three workers in the van with Araujo said no one was in front of his vehicle. They said that Araujo, a life-long construction worker with expensive tools in his work van, thought the masked men chasing them in two unidentified, unmarked black vans wanted to steal his equipment.

Six days later, similar story. In the early morning of July 13, 2026, an ICE agent shot and killed 26-year-old Johan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine. Guerrero was from Colombia, was authorized to work in the U.S., and was also on his way to work when he was killed. Although Mr. Guerrero was not the federal agents’ intended targeteither, ICE claims that Guerrero also “tried to use his vehicle as a weapon” against officers, similar to ICE allegations against Araujo and Renee Good in Minnesota. A witness saw Guerrero “bleeding profusely from the head. He was talking. (Guerrero) said: ‘I tried to stop’” before taking his last breath.

The only definitive proof of what happened in either encounter would be video footage. Authorities have not released any such video, and the agents were not wearing body cams, but rest assured some doctored recording will soon surface on Fox News, cropped and manipulated to blame the victims.

Killing reflexively

Since last year, federal ICE agents have shot at least 21 people, several of whom were attempting to drive away when they were killed. Then, after Senator Markwayne Mullin replaced Kristi Noem as DHS Secretary in March 2026, it seemed ICE began keeping a relatively quiet and lower profile. That was either because Mullin preferred less attention, or because he wanted to avoid making waves while waiting for Congress to grant DHS even more funding. On June 10, 2026, Congressional Republicans authorized another $70 billion for ICE, after DHS had already received an unprecedented and absurd $170 billion last year from Trump’s big bill.

Armed with an un-American, dystopian level of funding, with taxpayers literally buying the bullets now aimed at them, rogue ICE is back, pushing mass deportation levels up to where Stephen Miller wants them.

Although Trump officials are trying to block independent investigations into ICE killings, the truth will eventually come out, as it just did for Renee Good. When all the evidence is finally released, ICE agents will learn that they are not as free to kill as Stephen Miller would have them believe.

Not only can ICE agents be prosecuted, tried by jury, and sent to prison (or worse) for murder, but Trump can’t pardon them. Anyone convicted of murder under a state’s criminal code is stuck with state justice as they languish in that state’s penitentiary.

Federal agents are not immune from state prosecution and never have been

Under state and federal law, a federal agent acting outside the scope of his duties is not immune from state prosecution for murder, manslaughter, or any other crime under state law. Since 1890, the Supreme Court has held federal officers immune from state prosecution only if 1. they were acting within the scope of their official federal duties, and 2. their actions were objectively reasonable.

If an ICE agent is prosecuted in state court, he does have the right to remove his case to federal court, but a case removed to federal court is still prosecuted under state law. Federal procedural law applies, but so what? The state’s substantive law still governswhether or not a crime was committed.

Federal courts apply this strict two-pronged test to determine whether Supremacy Clause Immunity exists in each case, given all the facts in evidence. It is never automatic.

Trump officials are lying to agents about immunity

Steven Miller has claimed on Fox News that ICE agents operate with “complete federal immunity,” and that state prosecutors cannot independently investigate or charge federal agents with state crimes. In Renee Good’s killing, they boldly declared that Minnesota had no jurisdiction to investigate. Whether their position was the product of ignorance, bad legal counsel, hubris, or all of the above, the administration finally conceded error and submitted investigation evidence to state officials this week.

Stephen Miller frequently claims ICE agents have “federal immunity,” insinuating both license and encouragement for them to commit crimes in pursuit of his detention goals. But Miller’s bloodlust must be clouding his legal judgment, because he is demonstrably wrong, and he is risking future incarcerations of federal agents by lying to them.

Federal agents do not have absolute immunity of any kind, and never have, since 1890. Anyone reading this who knows an ICE agent, tell them to watch something other than Fox News, because ignorance of the law will not save them.

This week, masked men in two unmarked vans aggressively chased the wrong targets. They sped, cut them off, then got out of unmarked vans and ran toward them, guns drawn. When the terrorized victims got confused or scared or both and pulled away, officers ran after their vehicles, on foot. When they got closer, in a testosterone-spiked rage, they shot two innocent men, in two separate states, to death. Whether those actions were reasonable, necessary and proper, and within the officer’s official duties, won’t be up to Stephen Miller to determine. It will be up to a jury.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

In May of this year, Todd Blanche signed a one-page order under seal of the U.S. Department of Justice, declaring that the U.S. government hereby “FOREVER DISCHARGES” Donald Trump and his family from pending and viable federal tax claims, and that the federal government is “FOREVER BARRED AND PRECLUDED” from pursuing those claims. Blanche’s order, if a federal judge hadn’t just voided it, would likely have cost taxpayers up to $650 million in lost penalties and back payments.

Although Blanche’s order would have allowed a sitting president to defraud the U.S. treasury with impunity, the outrage quickly passed. It’s just another episode of corruption under the most corrupt administration our country has ever seen, what’s another few hundred million between friends?

But the legal contortions behind Blanche’s order, the unethical legal jujitsu that brought it into existence, are lasting. By orchestrating this deal, Blanche acted in his former client's personal interest, at great cost to his current client—the American public. What Blanche tried to rig up for Trump was a major ethical violation under any legal code of ethics. Even during his confirmation hearings on Wednesday, Blanche seemed confused about who his client was, explaining that, as part of the Executive branch, he serves the president. The U.S. Attorney General, for the record, serves the people, and was created to do so by the Judiciary Act of 1789. Blanche’s confusion over this most fundamental aspect of his role as AG could not be more corrosive to the rule of law Blanche has vowed to uphold.

Blanche’s brazen attempt to hijack the justice system

In overseeing the Department of Justice, any US Attorney General is legally entrusted to enforce our laws in a fair and evenhanded manner, and to use its “investigatory and prosecutorial powers” in a manner that is “free from partisan consideration.” This duty requires, above all else, an Attorney General’s commitment to honor and protect the law above both his personal interests and those of the President who nominated him.

Blanche, after blatantly protecting Trump’s personal, illegal interests over the public’s legal interests, perjured himself when he testified Wednesday in his Senate confirmation hearing. When directly asked if he would resign rather than carry out an illegal or unethical order from Trump, Blanche answered ambiguously, "I'm not going to violate my oath to the Constitution." But he already has, and not just by trying to gift Trump $650 million in waived tax penalties, along with $1.8 billion to reward J6 rioters.

Far worse than the amount of the attempted theft was the way Blanche tried to go about it: by contriving a completely fake federal lawsuit, then trying to hoodwink a federal judge by dismissing the suit after she questioned how one party could be on both sides, then defrauding the American public by claiming there had been a “settlement” of a case that never existed. On July 13, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams issued a scathing order concluding that the whole scheme was an attempt to “manipulate the judicial process” in an effort to lend the “court’s legitimacy” to collusion between Blanche, the IRS, and Trump to enrich the Trumps. She slammed Blanche for abdicating his responsibility to the public, and referred him for formal sanctions by the commission holding his law license.

The New York Bar Association’s warning

Blanche was admitted to practice law before the Attorney Grievance Committee of the State of New York. That means New York— not the federal government, not Trump— holds his law license. If he loses his license, he loses the ability to practice law anywhere in the country, and he could not supervise the work of other DOJ attorneys without engaging in the unauthorized practice of law.

On July 13, 2026, the New York Bar Association submitted a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee holding hearings on Blanche’s nomination to become AG. They vehemently oppose his confirmation, stressing the systemic damage Blanche has already inflicted on the legal system. They point out five distinct areas where Blanche has already violated his oath of office by elevating Trump over the rule of law, and by engaging in conduct contrary to the Rules of Professional Conduct and the DOJ’s own Justice Manual.

The NY Bar Association letter came after 101 former judges filed an official complaint with the New York Commission to “initiate an investigation into Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche (Registration No. 4192456) for violation of the New York Rules of Professional Conduct.” In addition to the same ethical breaches identified by the NY Bar Association in its letter to U.S. Senate, the judges’ formal complaint strongly encourages disciplinary action against Blanche for his blanket abuse of authority in using the DOJ to pursue politically motivated investigations and lawsuits against Trump’s personal and political enemies.

The judges also questioned Blanche’s “personal involvement in overseeing the Department of Justice’s botched and incomplete release” of Epstein documents under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and raised “serious concerns” about Blanche’s interview of Ghislaine Maxwell. The judges point out the obvious: that Blanche remains “burdened” by his conflicts of interest, which “reflect adversely on his fitness as an attorney.”

Republican Senators, fearful of Trump’s promised retribution, are likely to confirm; Senator Cornyn will likely cave and vote with his party. But the Attorney Grievance Committee of New York is equally likely to disbar him, which will make Blanche only the 2nd U.S. AG to be disbarred.

Etched into the limestone exterior of the DOJ headquarters are the words, “Where law ends tyranny begins.” It is not possible to write a more apt warning about what lies ahead.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Thursday night on prime time, Trump called for bolstering election protections he has systematically and deliberately dismantled. Ask yourself why. He obviously thinks MAGA is stupid ("I love my uneducated voters"), but he's acting like the whole country is full of idiots with no attention span and no memories.

Trump destroyed election integrity agencies on purpose

Trump spent the first part of his second term dismantling the entire election protection apparatus, the thing he now insists we need for accurate election results. He’s the boy who cried wolf, only he is the wolf.

Under Trump, the F.B.I.’s task force on foreign influence was shut down. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence got rid of the national task force that tracked foreign meddling in our elections. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has been gutted. After the Supreme Court told him he could fire anyone he wanted, he gave pink slips to the entire bipartisan federal agency created to help run fair elections.

And he has appointed a billionaire heir to a housing fortune with no relevant intelligence experience as the new director of "national intelligence."

Trump’s attacks on election-security measures

The Cybersecurity Agency had been a lead federal partner for states on election security efforts since the 2016 election, sharing cybersecurity data, best practices and intelligence concerning foreign interference in U.S. elections. But because director Christopher Krebs validated the integrity (and thereby, implicitly, the results) of the 2020 election, Trump fired Krebs and significantly scaled back the agency’s workforce, funding, and core operations.

The F.B.I.’s task force on foreign influence was also disbanded, along with scaled back enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, despite years of warnings by U.S. intelligence agencies that foreign malign influence operations spreading dangerous disinformation were a growing and dangerous threat. Trump curtailed criminal charges for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which required people to register when lobbying on behalf of a foreign nation, directly and significantly aiding foreign interference in our elections.

Finally, Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, Jay Clayton, lacks the ‘extensive national security expertise’ required by law under the federal statute that created the role. Clayton has scant national security experience; most of his career he’s represented big money/major investment banks in international deals. If there are conflicts between corporate financial interests and national security priorities, which side do you think Clayton will be on? Worse, Clayton has publicly defended Trump’s worst and least supported election initiatives, appearing on television airwaves to promote conspiracy theories about states’ primary election results, proving Trump chose him for loyalty, not expertise.

Trump keeps lying

The NY times reported on Friday that none of the documents Trump released during his speech to support his election claims say what Trump says they do. The documents were released during Trump’s primetime address to convince Americans that they should doubt the legitimacy of U.S. elections, but the print doesn’t match the hype.

He argued in his speech that China helped Biden win in 2020, even though US intelligence concluded it was Russia who interfered to help Trump. The documents he posted online show the opposite: that both China and Russia targeted former President Joe Biden's campaign during the 2020 election.

Trump called for fixing vulnerabilities in our electronic voting system so that “we can never watch a stolen election again.” Perhaps he meant the 2024 results were stolen, because all of his legal challenges to the results of 2020 were laughed out of court due to lack of supporting evidence. Those courts told Trump the same thing he needs to hear after his absurd “stolen election” claims last night: Your personal opinions, Sir, are not evidence.

Trump plans to take over federal elections

To anyone following closely, the purpose of Trump’s speech was to sell a pretext. Trump is laying groundwork to declare a national emergency at or around the time of the midterm elections. He’s desperate to sow doubt around the security of our elections because he knows he will need a strong justification for sending in federal troops.

By now, analysts are warning that Trump will deploy ICE agents to polling places. Whenever asked, Trump has signaled that that is his plan. The National Guard is likely to follow suit. Asked directly, Trump himself refused to rule it out, saying he would “do anything necessary.”

Trump said in his speech, “If you look at voting today, it’s in such bad shape in so many states,” “And we are committing to fix it… before the midterm elections.”

There is no evidence that our elections are flawed, and Trump knows it. So he used his primetime speech to tell us that he is gearing up to put armed ICE goons at polling places to intimidate women and minorities into staying away. Let’s hope it backfires and keeps MAGA at home while everyone else turns out. If 90 million voters stay home again this year, we’ll get the Nazi government we deserve.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

House Democrats on the Natural Resources Committee have released a report describing how the White House cheated the American public on its 250th birthday. It outlines interim findings that the Trump organization put together a shell company to supplant the Congressionally-created commission, America250, with a partisan one, Freedom 250, defrauding donors and pilfering donations along the way.

In 2016, ten years in advance of the country’s 250th birthday, Congress created a nonpartisan commission called America250 to plan and orchestrate the largest commemoration in U.S. history. Its mandated purpose was to encourage all Americans to ‘remember the nation's past, celebrate the present, and look forward to building a promising future.’

America250 spent ten years organizing events, volunteer campaigns, and educational initiatives across all 50 states to celebrate our Semiquincentennial. America250’s slogan, “350 for 250- Engaging all 350 million Americans in celebrating our nation’s 250th anniversary,” stresses civic inclusivity devoid of politics.

But last year, after his attempts to pack America250 with loyalists were unsuccessful, Trump created a competing commission, Freedom 250, via executive order. Falsely describing Freedom 250 as the “national, non-partisan organization leading the celebration of our Nation's 250th birthday,” Freedom 250 was incorporated as an LLC in October 2025. Under the National Park Foundation, governed by a board of Trump loyalists, Freedom 250 solicited pay-to-play donations from companies with major federal contracts pending— including Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Oracle —to financially support Freedom 250 instead of America250.

Defrauding the nation on its 250th birthday

The report describes how Trump demanded that his name and name-branded politics should dominate the historic celebrations. When America250 pushed back on Trump’s plan as too partisan, he supplanted the commission by creating his own.

After Freedom 250 hijacked federal planning activities, most scheduled performers withdrew from the celebration. They had agreed to perform at a national, nonpartisan concert, but cancelled when they found out it was overtly partisan. Other activities planned by Trump’s Freedom 250 included the very on-brand Military Parade for Trump’s birthday and this year's White House UFC cage fight, along with the controversial Great American State Fair. The latter featured partisan exhibits complete with a confederate flag; the 16-day event caused extensive damage to the lawns and the National Mall. Meanwhile, Freedom 250 continues the Trump-centric assault, planning construction on his 250-foot-tall “triumphal arch.”

Trump illegally billed his July 4 culminating speech on the National Mall as a “TRUMP RALLY”, making himself—not the nation, not our history— the central figure of America’s only 250th birthday celebration. Trump’s rally, replete with partisan rhetoric and fearmongering about Democrats, concluded with “the largest fireworks display ever,” costing taxpayers an estimated $45 million.

Millions for Trump’s cronies

A separate report from Public Citizen describes how a “Trumpified series of events at the public’s expense” awarded over $100 million in no-bid contracts to celebrate our 250th birthday to a network of Trump-affiliated political allies. One of those contracts awarded tens of millions of dollars to Event Strategies, Inc., the same firm behind the J6 attack on the U.S. Capital.

Out of $120 million in public funds Congressionally earmarked for America250 planned celebrations, over $100 million was funneled directly to entities with political ties to Trump, essentially turning it into Trump’s slush fund with little or no transparency, accounting, or public reporting. Overall, Trump’s Freedom 250 received between $65 and $80 million of the funding Congress allocated to America250.

Alas, the fraud and self-dealing didn’t stop there. Aside from the deceptive rebrand, awarding hundreds of millions in no-bid contracts to Trump cronies, inviting pay to play federal contractor donations, and diverting Congressional funds to Trump’s partisan commission, public donations intended for America250 were purposely diverted to Trump’s organization.

Wire fraud and deception are not Presidential activities entitling Trump to criminal immunity

According to interim findings, donors who tried to send money to America250 were misled and given Freedom 250's banking information, meaning contributions solicited in the name of the Congressionally mandated commission were routed instead to the President's substitute entity. As yet unverified, the facts suggests that America250 donors were defrauded through wire transfer instructions, bank account numbers, and routing numbers that funneled their donations to Trump’s Freedom 250 commission.

Trump converted America's once-in-250-years celebration into a parade of self-regard and personal enrichment, embodying our founders’ warnings about men like him. Assuming the evidence matches the allegations, his tactics constitute criminal fraud, and the evidence won’t be hard to track down. Electronic records of online donations and routing can’t be erased; metadata will prove what was sent, by whom and when, and how it was diverted to Freedom 250. Such deception also likely constitutes wire fraud as well as charitable solicitation fraud.

Democratic lawmakers are now demanding a full accounting of diverted donor records and contracts, while Republican leadership has largely blocked information, shielded people involved, and refused to hold hearings on the matter. Democrats, in the minority, have diminished subpoena power, but that is likely to change in November.

Trump’s criminal immunity will be challenged after the midterms; even now, it only applies to “presidential acts” arising from core constitutional duties. Establishing an entity to compete with the Congressionally mandated America250 commission was illicit, extra-judicial, and purely partisan, and very likely exceeds any official, constitutional, or statutory authority. Trump billing our 250th July 4 celebration on the national mall as a TRUMP RALLY sealed the deal.

Trump robbed Americans of a sacred commemoration that won’t come again for many generations, if ever. He wanted to make our nation’s 250th birthday all about him. History books will likely oblige.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Trump’s July 3 anti-communist rant from Mt. Rushmore was pure McCarthyism. In the 1950s, Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare ruined thousands of American lives through politically motivated accusations of communism. Hundreds of innocent people were sent to prison, thousands suffered witch hunts and ruined reputations; some were tormented into suicide.

McCarthy made baseless and sensationalized claims, such as waving a fabricated ‘list’ of 205 alleged communists in the State Department, to elevate himself from a little-known politician into the most feared figure in Washington. Like Trump, McCarthy employed aggressive, evidence-free tactics to intimidate political opponents, silence critics, and consolidate power.

It was one of our nation’s darkest times, and Trump wants a re-enactment for the midterms.

At Mt. Rushmore, Trump tested midterm campaign slogans meant to scare voters into equating recent primary victories for the Democratic Socialists of America with a “communist takeover.” Never mind that socialism and communism are not the same; never mind that many federal programs like Social Security, Medicare, child labor laws, and subsidies are types of socialism in action. “We don’t want communists in our country,” Trump bellowed, warning of “a resurgence of the communist menace in our land,” “a mortal threat to American liberty,” and calling communism “the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.”

Trump is the one pushing state-ownership of industry

Trump has repeatedly characterized the Democratic left as ‘hardcore, godless communists,’ an ‘evil’ that threatens the very existence of the United States. Because they have nothing else to run on, the GOP is preparing to double down on false claimsthat the modern Democratic party has capitulated to communism. Speaker Mike Johnson is all in, warning that if democrats win the midterms, the country will “go down some road toward a communist utopia.”

Lucky for Republicans, MAGA doesn’t understand what communism is. Under a communist system, the state owns all industry, and all resources belong to the government. The choke-worthy irony of Republicans’ new red scare is that the only U.S. leader pushing for state ownership of private industry is Trump himself.

It’s not an original observation to note that most Trump accusations are confessions; it’s pattern recognition. Trump accuses adversaries of his own malfeasance so often it’s become a reliable tell. After claiming without evidence that the 2020 election was stolen, for example, Trump’s attempts to rig the 2026 midterms have become legion. His accusations of “communism” should be understood the same way: as a confession.

Trump’s unprecedented federal acquisition of private interests

The Trump administration’s pursuit of direct government equity stakes across U.S. business sectors is both unprecedented and under-reported.

Unlike past instances of government seizure or ownership during crises or wartime, this administration is strategically acquiring ownership to generate “public revenue” and to exert government control over corporate decision-making. Trump has already secured government ownership shares in the following sectors:

• Intel Corp.: Trump negotiated a $8.9 billion deal to take a 10% stake in the semiconductor giant’s business, using previously promised CHIPS and Science Actfunds as leverage. Trump insisted on the U.S. government acquiring 433.3 million shares, resulting in partial-nationalization of the semiconductor giant.
• Trump acquired stakes in critical mineral and nuclear firms, including an 8% stake in the nuclear power company Westinghouse. Trump’s Department of Defense secured a 15% equity stake in MP Materials by purchasing $400 million in preferred stock, solidifying Washington’s position as the largest shareholder of the only operational rare-earth mine in the United States.
• Trump’s Commerce Department has acquired a 10% stake in USA Rare Earth—receiving 16.1 million shares—as part of a $1.6 billion debt-and-equity investment package to develop a domestic mine and magnet facility.
• Critical Minerals & Energy: The government acquired a 10% equity stake in Lithium Americas Corp., and 10% of minerals exploration company Trilogy Metals In.
• U.S. Steel Corporation- Rather than a direct economic or financial equity stake, the federal government negotiated a governance stake known as a ‘golden share,’ granting the president substantial control over the steelmaker’s operations.

While these private interests have already been converted to partial state ownership, Trump has also expressed an intention to take ownership stakes in major defense contractors. Trump is pushing partial federal ownership of contractors that rely heavily on federal budgets, such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, to ensure that the corporate strategies of top military contractors—who rely on the Pentagon for the vast majority of their revenue— align with Trump’s policies.

It is painfully obvious who the real communist is.

Trump’s oligarchy blends Putin’s Russia with Xi’s China

Trump is fast imposing authoritarian crony capitalism, where major industries and wealth are partially owned by the government, ala China, and partially controlled by a handful of corrupt oligarchs, ala Putin’s Russia. What Chris Christie recently called a “Putin-esque type of corruption and self-enrichment” is making Trump exceedingly wealthy along the way.

Trump’s unprecedented and growing acquisition of government ownership stakes in key industries proves that he is the one marching the U.S. economy toward state control. His and Johnson’s new mid-term slogans about the ‘cancer of communism’ are just more ironic self-owns with vast economic implications lost on their supporters.

Scott Bessent argues that, in grabbing shares of key industries, the administration is reducing U.S. dependence on China. To private industry leaders, and anyone outside the Fox News propaganda bubble, it looks like Trump is trying to beat China by copying it.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Trump embarrassed the US again at the July 2026 NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. The world is watching—our enemies as well as our allies— which means it’s not just embarrassing, it’s dangerous.

Here’s how White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt described the NATO summit: "President Trump delivered a marathon, high-energy performance at the NATO summit, holding four separate press availabilities plus a solo press conference and taking unscripted questions from reporters on a wide range of topics. The President commanded every room, gave our allies some much-needed tough love, and left the summit with a stronger NATO and more united free world.”

Leavitt, Fox News, and rightwing media reported this fawning pablum and little else, which explains how 38% of the country still supports a corrupt felon who is openly robbing the country while he stives to start WWIII. To the rest of the world, Trump’s conduct was widely viewed as a highly embarrassing showcase of verbal stumbles, erratic behavior, and mental illness.

What the rest of the world reported

Trump tried to turn the NATO summit, like the nation’s 250th birthday, into a story centering around Trump. He committed repeated errors in the process:

Trump said Spain is ‘worthless’ and he wants to “cut off trade with Spain.” We don’t trade with Spain, we trade with the EU, of which Spain is a member. Trump appears not to understand the difference, or what the EU trade bloc actually does.

He called Zelensky President Putin. Twice.

He referred to the Islamic Republic of Japan.

He couldn’t recall the name of the Iran nuclear agreement hammered out and signed during the Obama administration, calling it "JC P," even though he started a war over it.

He trotted out, once again, his threat to take Greenland. Danish Prime Minister made it clear nothing of the sort would happen.

He praised Turkey’s president, a fellow corrupt authoritarian, and China’s Xi, a communist, but pointlessly insulted previous presidents of the United States. He can’t stop attacking Biden and Obama, whom he has called O-Bum-A. Such a clever guy. He has no idea that these childish insults and jabs at former US presidents paint our nation in a negative light, hurting our standing among peers and adversaries alike.

The worst and most dangerous thing is that Trump keeps demonstrating his fundamental ignorance of the NATO alliance. He has said, repeatedly, that NATO should have helped the US when he attacked Iran, because he is losing that ill-fated war and needs someone else to blame. Trump has called his requests to back his war in Iran a "loyalty test” in a fit of retaliation over their failure to join his attack. But NATO is a defensive alliance, not an offensive one. It is meant to deter aggression, and defend members when someone attacks; it does not attack but exists to deter attacks and Trump can’t seem to comprehend the difference. Trump attacked Iran without consulting NATO allies, can’t understand why most refused to help, and now wants to punish them for his own mistakes even though our allies were following our own defensive charter.

Insulting Italy’s Prime Minister

Beyond the personal gaffes, Trump’s outbursts deeply strained diplomatic relations by insulting and frustrating America’s long-standing allies.

Before he left for the summit, he posted a juvenile meme of Italy’s Prime Minster Giorgia Meloni, falsely depicting her looking up at him with adoring, fawning eyes. Above the photo he wrote, in all caps, “RESTRAINING ORDER NEEDED” as if Meloni is stalking him when in fact he makes her want to vomit. Trump is continuing the sophomoric spat he started with Meloni after she called him out as a lying liar who lies for claiming she “begged” for a photo with him at the G7 summit in France.

Trump stated during an interview that Meloni “desperately wanted the picture” with him and that he only agreed to it because he “felt sorry for her.” Meloni swiftly and strongly rejected that assertion as a lie. She fired back on Instagram that Trump's account was "completely made up" and that, "I and Italy never beg." Trump’s absurd dispute severely strained diplomatic ties with Italy and all of the EU, and prompted Italy's Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani to cancel a planned official visit to Washington.

Trump has turned most of the NATO alliance's major meetings into chaotic spectacles by insisting that the cameras focus only on him, then stumbling over facts, history and strategy he delivers in third grade English.

Global condemnation intensifies

Although Trump later reversed his tone behind closed NATO doors to claim a state of complete "unification," his bizarre statements and erratic performance left European heads of state visibly exhausted, and reinforced worry about his unstable approach to international diplomacy and his mental instability in general. Global condemnation has intensified across the world stage, with foreign leaders, foreign media, and mental health experts increasingly admitting that his erratic behavior is a direct threat to international security.

International alarm had already spiked following previous high-stakes summits where he exhibited similar cognitive slips—such as repeatedly confusing Greenland and Iceland, and mistaking the nation of Iran for Japan. Diplomatic circles were further rattled when Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico openly shared his Trump anxiety with The New Republic regarding Trump's volatile "psychological state." Fico told European Union leaders that he was worried about Trump’s mental health, saying that the president came across as “dangerous” during a meeting the pair had in January at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Fico made the comments at an emergency EU summit over Trump’s threats to annex Greenland. French far-right leader Jordan Bardella similarly described Trump’s foreign policy as "erratic" and "extremely unsteady" and "constantly shifting.’

As reported by global publishers like The Guardian and France 24, foreign media has stopped analyzing Trump’s ‘unorthodox political strategy’ and has instead pivoted to directly and explicitly questioning his mental acuity. The growing international consensus is that Trump’s escalating impulsivity, unnecessary public feuds with global figures like Meloni and the Pope, and cognitive confusion is not so much eccentric showmanship as a display of cognitive decline that endangers the world.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

The most beautiful human experiment in the world is turning 250. Democracy lasting this long is cause for celebration, but an alarming drop in intelligence suggests its future birthdays are numbered.

For nearly a century, average IQ scores in the U.S. rose consistently, but recent evidence flips this trend on its head.

Studies now show a measurable decline in cognitive scores among Americans across most fields. Northwestern University researchers report that test scores in three out of four cognitive domains have gone down. Another confirmed a steady decline in average IQ scores — with each new generation scoring about five points lower than the one before.

Neil Postman, in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, explores this dumbing-down process. Analysts today note how it culminated in the election of a functionally illiterate reality TV host as president, an ignorant man who reduces complex problems to binary oppositions: us versus them, black vs. white, patriots vs. scum, opinion vs. science, etc. No doubt our lowered intelligence led 77 million Americans to vote against their own interests; polls before the 2024 election suggested half the country, lied to by Fox News, was about to engage in self sabotage.

Trump’s base today is comprised of Christians who defend Trump’s debauchery; poor people who donate to a billionaire’s Ponzi schemes while he illegally pocketed nearly $2 billion in profits; and pensioners who still don’t grasp that tax cuts for the 1% threaten their own entitlements.

Trump has done nothing for the common man and everything for his wealthy donors, yet somehow, that fact doesn’t seem to compute. To misquote Jesus, the stupid will always be among us. But stupid seems to be spreading in the U.S., and data suggest that excessive sensory stimulation may be the reason.

Our politics reflect a cognitive decline, but what is causing the decline?

Trump’s declaration, “I love the poorly educated” is a self-own as the U.S. slumbers toward Idiocracy, a funny-not-funny satire about Americans in the year 2500 who have lost the ability to think. In the movie, Americans elect as President a dimwitted pro-wrestler- President Camacho- because he is loud and manipulative and they don’t know any better. The Trump sequel writes itself.

Funny as that movie is, America’s declining cognition, reflected in falling logic, language, and reading comprehension levels, is serious. In 1850, unwashed kids aged 6 to 18 were crammed into a smelly one-room school house with no AC and no technology- and often no books- yet still emerged well-versed in Latin, French, humanities and trigonometry.

Today, with whiteboards, laptops, separate rooms for each grade, and teacher/student ratios historically unheard of, student comprehension levels are falling instead of rising. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, math and reading scores for 13 year-olds hit their lowest scores in decades.

It’s our hand held devices, stupid

The explanation may be found in a growing reliance on smart phones, social media and electronic devices that offer addictive and excessive visual and audio stimulation, dulling the brain’s ability to think critically and organically.

Observational studies in human learning have shown a direct link between a child’s exposure to fast-paced television in the first 3 years of life and his subsequent attentional deficits as he gets older. Excessive sensory stimulation (ESS) during childhood has been shown to increase cognitive and behavioral deficits overall. Even rising levels of ADHD among older children and college students are correlated with subjects’ early exposure to excessive electronic media.

More studies are needed on how excessive online stimulation affects cognition and mental health, regardless of age, and Congress may (shockingly) do something about it. In 2023, legislators introduced a bipartisan bill to study how cell phones affect mental health and cognitive development, but it did not advance to a vote.

Over-stimulation, overall, reduces our ability to think

It seems logical that over-stimulating the human brain with loud colors and noises would, over time, reduce our capacity for nuanced and critical thinking. Just as over-reliance on crutches can cause leg muscles to atrophy, over-exposure to electronics and addictive but thoughtless social media can atrophy the learning centers of the brain.

Smart phones aren’t the only culprit. Recent studies have also shown that high levels of noise, including exposure to high-decibel music at home or in the car, and loud, omnipresent television, also leads to cognitive impairment and oxidative stress in the brain.

It’s been reported that 100 million people are exposed to dangerous environmental noise due to traffic, personal listening devices and other sources. Noise pollution has emerged as a risk factor for depression, cognitive impairment and neurodegenerative disorders of the central nervous system leading to emotional stress, anxiety, cognitive and memory defects.

It seems the entire nation could use a long walk in the woods, or an extended visit to one of our 429 national parks — sans devices.

Education levels are affecting U.S. politics

America’s growing political divide may have more to do with education and cognition levels than policy differences. By wide margins, the mostly highly educated Congressional districts in the U.S. elect Democrats, while the least educated districts elect Republicans.

According to data compiled by Politico, Democrats control 77% of the most highly educated Congressional districts, while Republicans control 64% of the least educated districts. The rural poor love Trump even though Democrats deliver kitchen table results that benefit them most: jobs, infrastructure, broadband, healthcare, and industry regulations so trains don’t derail and parts don’t fly off aircraft at 16,000 feet.

Maximilien Robespierre, one of the most influential figures of the French Revolution, was known for his attacks on the monarchy and his advocacy of democratic reforms.

As he astutely observed, “The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.”

Even though Trump’s former advisors widely regard him as an undisciplined moron, he has a preternatural skill: the manipulation of ignorance.

Call it a conman’s intuition.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

In a 6-3 decision breaking on partisan lines, the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Slaughter that Trump can fire Federal Trade Commissioners and other federal agency directors without cause. The ruling overturns longstanding Supreme Court precedent and express statutory instruction that combined to protect the political independence and subject matter expertise of federal agencies for over 90 years.

The ruling presents a novel reading of a president’s Constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” expanding that power for a rogue president hellbent on breaking laws instead of executing them. As Justice Sotomayor put it, “The Court… is elevating (Trump) above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”

An activist Roberts Court has now written into existence an all-powerful unitary executive despite elaborate instructions in art. I, II and III to keep the three branches of government separate and equal. Rejecting federal laws that restrict a president’s removal of agency directors to for-cause removal, SCOTUS has made the president all powerful and Congress less relevant, while arrogating scientific and technical questions to itself.

Trump’s corporate donors can now choose their own regulators

Before republicans on the bench rewrote it this week, the Federal Trade Commission Act stated that a President could only remove a commissioner for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” That statute clearly and intentionally barred presidents from firing directors for partisan or corrupt reasons, and from punishing regulators who rule against a president’s corporate donor(s). Vesting a singularly authoritarian executive with unprecedented, expansive powers, the Supreme Court re-wrote federal laws to advance their own political narrative.

Over two dozen federal agencies will be affected, covering everything from the financial markets, the commodities markets, and nuclear power. Agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission were all Congressionally designed to be independent watchdogs, enforcers insulated from partisan whims. Now Trump can remove any commissioners who threaten to rule against his allies, assuring that his political supporters will be afforded preferential review, licensing, merger approvals and other rulings.

With Trump’s new latitude to fire any agency head who threatens meaningful regulation, his corporate donors have been effectively empowered to choose their own regulators. Federal laws passed to protect human health, finance, banking, communications, workplace safety, and clean air, soil and water have been rendered functionally meaningless.

Replacing science, expertise and merit with political fealty

Congressionally created and funded federal agencies serve express, statutory purposes written to safeguard the American public. The Supreme Court had protected agency autonomy and expertise dating back to 1935, ruling that some degree of autonomy was necessary for federal agencies to meet specific scientific, economic, communications, trade, health, and environmental mandates. Federal agencies were never meant to be a president’s personal toys with which to reward donors and cronies.

For a president in the habit of accepting lavish gifts and cash from foreign governments, along with hundreds of millions from domestic supplicants, finding even more room for self-dealing, corruption and political favoritism must be heady. For the rest of us, it’s dangerous. We actually need competent people to run the federal government, even in its post-DOGE watered down state.

If Trump declares that every home must be heated by dirty coal, the head of the Energy Commission must try to effectuate that command no matter the harm to Americans’ lungs. If Trump declares that particulate matter, fossil fuels and the widespread use of Monsanto is good for the environment, any EPA director who contradicts him with cancer and death statistics will be silenced through removal. It’s governance by full Idiocracy.

A know-nothing, anti-science president can now follow his gut

To every American outside the Fox News propaganda bubble, Trump has demonstrated astonishing incompetence on all fronts. From economically illiterate tariffs to our defeat in Iran, sprinkled with comically disastrous results in between, an ignorant and arrogant “I follow my gut” Trump revels in rejecting science and expertise as Americans pay the price.

The only thing saving the nation from complete chaos and disaster to date is that several federal agencies had retained some level institutional competence despite Trump (and Musk’s) best efforts to dismantle them. The people Trump brought in to destroy federal institutions were expressly chosen for their lack of competence, which tracks for an administration dismantling the entire federal government to advance an oligarchs’ coup. Trump’s cabinet has widely and apolitically been described as the least competent and least qualified Cabinet in US history, and any federal agency left standing is about to morph into a Trump-affiliated, for-profit private scheme.

Trump has said that Article II of the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want.” The same six justices who handed him immunity for crimes committed in office just agreed with him.

The rest of us can kiss health, safety, banking, and environmental regulations goodbye. The best advice I can give anyone is to 1. Vote, and 2. Buy a damn good oxygen mask.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth just hijacked more promotions of high-ranking service members, this time blocking career professionals with exemplary records who were on track to become one-star generals and admirals. Not only is Hegseth’s behavior unusual, there is no clear legal authority for what he is doing.

Congress entrusted military promotions largely to the respective promotion boards and Secretaries of the Military Departments, not the Secretary of Defense. Although 10 U.S.C. § 629 empowers the President with removal authority, a longstanding executive order limits the Secretary of Defense’s removal authority to grades below colonel or captain, not the general or admiral promotions Hegseth has blocked. The Pentagon’s own regulations restrict grounds for removing an officer from a promotions list to specific circumstances like moral, mental, or professional deficiencies, none of which were present in Hegseth’s removals.

It’s obvious that a disproportionate number of Hegseth’s blocked, delayed, or demoted officers are women and people of color. However, while mainstream headlines suggest Hegseth is motivated by race and gender animus, an even worse—and more dangerous— likelihood is that he is weeding out those he deems “ideologically incompatible” with how he and Trump plan to use the military.

Hegseth likes to emphasize that “every officer serves at the pleasure of the president,” arguing that Trump’s policy goals require removing commanders “tied to the culture” of previous administrations. He argues that past promotions were based on race and gender instead of qualifications, but military records dispute those claims, and there is no evidence that any promotions he blocked were attributable to anything other than merit.

An unqualified hack defends his own

Hegseth, a former Fox News bobble head, is notoriously unqualified to serve as Secretary of Defense, which seems to have been Trump’s point in naming him. He was a mid-level National Guard officer, had no senior leadership role in the military, and had no experience anywhere that qualified him to oversee three million personnel and an annual budget of $800 billion.

More dangerous than his lack of qualifications is his bloodlust. As a media commentator, he lobbied aggressively for presidential pardons for service members convicted or accused of notorious war crimes, including Army Lt. Clint Lorance, convicted of murdering two Afghan civilians, and Maj. Matt Golsteyn, who admitted during an interview for the CIA that he and another soldier took an alleged Taliban bomb-maker off base in 2010, shot him, and buried his remains. Trump granted full pardons to both.

In Iraq, Hegseth’s own unit was nicknamed “Kill Company” and he kept a ‘kill board’ that tallied kills, including dead civilians, expressing daring contempt for the military's strict rules of engagement. It’s anyone’s guess what gruesome deeds he got up to. Today, he barks a constant mantra about “war fighters” and “lethality” and sees violence and unrestrained power as a distinct virtue.

Ineptitude with a platitude chaser

Hegseth’s tenure has been marred by a series of high-profile blunders, including the SignalGate security breach, his ‘dirty line’ Pentagon internet setup, and unforced diplomatic errors such as upbraiding NATO allies without understanding the subject matter. Just as Trump governs by spectacle over substance, Hegseth manages by platitude. His attempts to project authority through chest thumping—“Maximum lethality not tepid legality”— like his sophomoric speech to the Generals at Quantico, routinely fall flat and inspire parody.

Hegseth’s embrace of violence over circumspection (“Lethality is our calling card”) while rejecting what he calls ‘stupid rules of engagement’ reveals an almost pathological immaturity. While pushing back against operational restraints, i.e., military rules of engagement, and weeding out generals who don’t suit him, he insists that, under him, there will be “No politically correct wars.”

What he’s really weeding out are legal protocols in order to elevate ‘maximum lethality’ in pursuit of politically incorrect and illegal wars: Trump’s.

History is clear on why the military should never be politicized

Throughout history, authoritarian regimes have tried to put professional militaries under the direct control of their own political movements. Recognizing that an independent officer corps poses an existential threat to one-party rule, in Nazi Germany, Hitler systematically dismantled the autonomy of the traditional Wehrmacht, and required all soldiers to swear a personal oath of loyalty to him rather than to the state or constitution.

In the former Soviet Union, Stalin subjected the Red Army to the Communist Party's political commissar system, embedding party officials at every level of command to monitor ideological conformity. From 1937–38, Stalin’s purges decimated the senior officer corps, to ensure political fealty, even at catastrophic cost to combat readiness on the eve of World War II.

Historical clarity is not confined to Europe. In Maoist China, the People's Liberation Army was not a conventional national military but was the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party. Mao's dictum that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" led to political loyalty campaigns purging those deemed insufficiently loyal. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein constructed an elaborate system of Republican Guard formations and tribal loyalties to prevent any single military institution from possessing enough power to threaten him. Officers were promoted based on personal loyalty rather than merit, and suspected disloyalty was met with execution.

Throughout history, subordinating military professionalism to political fealty, which is what Hegseth is really doing, has produced armies that were reliable instruments of internal repression but dysfunctional when facing real external threats. Since Hegseth and Trump are both fixated on fighting domestic “enemies within” and hope to deploy the military against Americans (internal repression), it’s likely Hegseth’s promotions are less about demographics and more about fortifying top brass willing to break the law, by removing from the ranks those who are likely not so willing.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

A president, by Constitutional design, has no legal authority or direct role in administering, altering, or conducting elections. Authority over the mechanics of elections is legally split between state governments and Congress, leaving no constitutional role for the executive branch.

That did not stop Trump from commandeering the US Post Office with instructions to deliver mail ballots only to people on Trump-approved, Trump-purged voter lists. Trump’s “ENSURING CITIZENSHIP VERIFICATION AND INTEGRITY IN FEDERAL ELECTIONS” Executive Order, issued March 31, 2026, is his bold scheme to wrest election control from the states, which are Constitutionally vested with that authority, to transfer it to the federal government, which is not. On May 29,an eagerly compliant United States Postal Service issued proposed rules to effectuate Trump’s EO. On June 25, a federal judge ruled that “no federal law permits (Trump) to control mail-in voting through U.S.P.S.”

Trump’s fear of the midterms and the accountability they threaten is palpable. Alongside his unprecedented post office ploy, he has ordered FBI raids and DOJ investigations of democratic voter outreach organizations, as he teases the deployment of armed federal agents to polling places. Sending armed troops to intimidate voters is, for obvious reasons, forbidden by federal law, and has not been done by any US president since the Civil War era.

Trump is complementing these nefarious efforts with an all-out appropriation of state voter rolls, from which he has extracted data to build a master federal data base which has also been ruled illegal.

A federal judge blocks Trump’s Orwellian database

Threatening to cut funding to states that refuse to turn over their rolls, he has already sent federal agents to seize voter records in Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan. It’s plain extortion: To avoid losing federal resources they have already paid into, states must agree to run their voter rolls through the administration’s SAVE database (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, not to be confused with Trump’s SAVE America Act), to verify citizenship. The SAVE database has been expanded, widely tested, and determined to be deeply flawed. In St. Louis County alone, for example, roughly 35% of the people labeled noncitizens were citizens who registered to vote at naturalization ceremonies.

Trump has been using states’ voter roll data to build an illegal, nationwide database of Americans’ private information including home addresses, social security numbers, and other confidential “data-mined” information extracted by Palantir Technologies, a data mining and analytics firm co-founded by JD Vance promoter Peter Thiel. On Monday, a federal judge put a stop to it.

In League of Women Voters v. DHS, US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ruled that the federal government “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote” by utilizing an unauthorized voter-screening database. The court found the administration’s actions presented “major violations” of the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act.

A closer look

In her landmark 75-page ruling, Judge Sooknanan excoriated the Trump administration for ignoring federal privacy laws as it overhauled and expanded the SAVE system into what she characterized as a “faulty citizenship checker.” The worst of her criticism was reserved for how recklessly the administration handled Americans’ personal data to expand the program. She wrote that “agencies were scrambling to comply with (Trump’s March 31) Executive Order aimed at reshaping federal elections, which directed them to create a system for mass voter verification,” and that in doing so, they “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”

She found that the system specifically violated the Social Security Act’s prohibition on disclosing Social Security numbers. The judge sharply condemned real-world consequences, noting that (Republican) states had “partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information.”

She pointed to concrete examples from Texas where naturalized citizens were wrongly flagged and had their registrations canceled or placed under review, but citizens in Texas are not alone. The SAVE system merged Social Security data with immigration files extracted across multiple state and federal platforms, resulting in widespread data flaws and false positive matches. System studies revealed faulty data matching, outdated records, and user compliance failures resulting in high rates of false positives. These flaws are systemic, flagging citizens as non-citizens across dozens of counties in multiple states.

Big brother by any other name

In June of last year, NPR first reported on the federal government’s massive expansion of SAVE into a Big Brother tool; they also reported that DHS, in partnership with DOGE, had not followed public notice protocols required under the Privacy Act before it expanded the system. Such data integration, resulting in a federally sanctioned, nationwide master list, has never before existed.

A centralized national database of Americans’ personal information has long been opposed by privacy advocates. Although political conservatives traditionally oppose mass data consolidation by the federal government, they set aside such objections for Trump. Conservative legislators strongly supported Trump’s expansion of the SAVE program as a tool to prevent non-citizens from voting after Trump and Fox Newsfalsely convinced them that fraudulent voting was widespread. It wasn’t, and never has been.

Judge Sooknanan rejected the Justice Department’s argument that only a small number of voters might be affected, calling it a “red herring.” She reiterated that the APA mandates that a “reviewing court shall. . . hold unlawful and set aside agency action” that is in excess of statutory authority, contrary to law, unconstitutional, arbitrary and capricious, or procedurally defective. Trump’s unauthorized expansion of the SAVE program was all of those things, leading the judge to set aside and nullify the entire system.

Her ruling concluded with a pointed moral declaration: since the federal government is using an unauthorized, faulty-by-design federal database to attack the sacred right to vote, courts should decline to ‘stand idly by’ while that happens.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

On Monday, Trump announced beginning concepts of a plan to discuss an outline of understanding on how to end the war in Iran. It was Trump’s 39th such announcement since he started the war.

Israeli leaders, ostensible partners in Trump’s war, are now convinced that Trump’s MOU with Iran makes Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal look perfect in comparison, after Trump tore that deal up, calling it "a deal at the highest level of incompetence" and "the worst deal ever negotiated." Obama’s 2015 deal featured highly detailed, multi-decade uranium enrichment caps and verification protocols, while the core mechanisms of Trump’s MOU remain unfinalized and deferred for 60-days. Although Trump’s MOU may pause the fighting he started, it has not established any permanent, legally binding nuclear dismantlement or the long-term inspection protocols Trump initially demanded, and it includes a plan to hand Iran up to $300 billion in damages. The biggest achievement will be the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which, of course, is simply a return to the prewar status quo.

Fox News, after promoting Trump’s attacks on the 2015 Iran deal, reported the MOU saying, Trump “deserves credit for bringing this conflict to this point.”

Fox News manipulated Trump into Iran

Fox may be reluctant to criticize an end to a costly war it encouraged. Fox News and its hawkish hosts played an aggressive role in pushing Trump toward greater military force in Iran — a troubling dynamic critics call a "doom loop" between the White House and the network, a self-reinforcing feedback cycle where the administration's grievances and policies prioritize media spectacle over governance, which in turn shapes presidential policy and messaging.

As early as June 2025, Fox talking heads pushed for war with Iran, encouraging Trump into open conflict. Mark Levin reportedly helped push the June 2025 U.S. strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities by convincing Trump over lunch that the country was just days away from getting a nuclear weapon. When a fragile ceasefire was declared in April 2026, rather than celebrating, many Fox voices including senior security analyst Jack Keane and host Brian Kilmeade demanded it be broken. These voices agitated for the Trump administration and Israel to resume aggressive bombing campaigns rather than continue diplomatic negotiations, demanding Trump restart the war and, in their words, "finish the job." Host Ainsley Earhardt even told Trump that Americans were supportive of escalating aggression in Iran, which was not true.

Sean Hannity, Brian Kilmeade, and Jesse Watters all floated the idea of flooding Iran with small arms to provoke an uprising. Kilmeade, one of the network's most prominent hawks and co-host of Fox & Friends, proposed relentless U.S. strikes against Iranian targets to "open up the strait," "grab the uranium," and "target bad actors," an apparent embrace of assassination. Other Fox News hosts also pushed Trump to seek regime change in Iran, hosting retired Gen. Keith Kellogg, who called for "putting boots on the ground" and for the U.S. to seize Iranian territory.

This was not commentary or news, it was Fox television personalities directly shaping foreign policy at the highest level.

The doom loop is dangerous

What makes this dynamic especially fraught is the structural relationship between Fox and the Trump administration. Trump has appointed more than two dozen former Fox News hosts into administration positions, blurring the line between media and government in an unprecedented way. When Trump calls into Fox & Friends, he is not just doing an interview — he is engaging a network with an inherent interest in promoting conflict and spectacle. Fox hosts also manipulate Trump with hyperbolic praise: when Trump ordered military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, Sean Hannity said the strikes would "go down in history as one of the greatest military victories," while other hosts claimed Trump deserved "six Nobel Peace Prizes" and a spot on Mount Rushmore. Trump went on to demand—and expect— both honors.

Fox's lockstep promotion of Trump's war reflects the network's calculated plan to keep MAGA enraged and engaged. War framed as a righteous confrontation with a Judeo-Christian undertones is good television. It generates ratings, emotional investment, and brand loyalty. It is what happens when the line between journalism and political advocacy dissolves.

A network that functions as an echo chamber for a sitting president, with hosts who propose military strikes rather than analyze them, and treats war as a network ratings strategy, has abdicated its responsibility to the public and should be held to account. The feedback loop between Fox and the White House helped produce a war that cost American lives, roiled the global economy, and left our allies disgusted. Even if Trump’s MOU miraculously holds, analysts predict the global economy will take months and even years to recover. As the NYT Editorial Board assessed the MOU, “Mr. Trump made a terrible mistake starting this war... The United States is emerging weaker — militarily, diplomatically and economically — and will pay strategic costs for years to come.”

What will Fox News pay? Fox has inflicted lasting damage on our democracy by selling Trump propaganda as news, directly profiting from falsehoods in a classic case of consumer fraud. Fox paid nearly $1 billion for lying about the 2020 election. One wonders what they’ll pay the families of 13 soldiers who died for nothing other than their ratings.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

The Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, passed in 2015, is a federal law that requires the President to submit any nuclear agreement with Iran to Congress, prevents the President from lifting statutory sanctions during a review period, and establishes ongoing congressional oversight. Several Republicans and Democrats have called on Trump to follow the law on the Iran MOU, but Trump plans to skip it after alienating voices he’d need to defend it.

Trump’s personal thirst for revenge at home is hurting him on Iran. Congressmen he attacked in pursuit of personal retribution, and who lost their primaries as a result, have no Effs left to give and can now criticize him openly.

Republican Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, and John Cornyn of Texas represent precisely this threat, and they came out swinging at the MOU. Senator Cassidy called the deal "the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.” Cassidy noted that, “Iran's nuclear ambitions were not curbed, and they have learned that threatening the Strait of Hormuz works and will undoubtedly leverage it in the future." Senator Thom Tillis noted the cost of the war, to date: $100 billion. Rep. Thomas Massie criticized the figure as five times what Congress spends on roads and bridges annually. Even Mike Pence said the MOU, "smacks of appeasement," while Sen. Ted Cruz called the reconstruction fund giving "billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us."

Making JD Vance cling to the bottom of the bus

Fifteen weeks ago, Trump declared in all caps that, “there will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.” He sought the fall of the regime, total destruction of Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, and American control of Iran’s oil. But under the terms of the MOU, Trump is basically paying Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz, financially propping up the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Before talks in Switzerland were cancelled due to continued bombing in Lebanon, Trump tried distancing himself from the MOU by having JD Vance become its face. When a reporter suggested Trump was setting JD Vance up for a fall by sending him to Switzerland, Trump tried to turn the reporter’s comment into a joke, but he didn't deny it.

After Vance made his opposition to the war known, Trump forcing him to publicly “conclude” a war he opposed— on embarrassing terms— looks like a political hit job. Flexing a psychopath’s instinct to blame victims, Trump laughed as if war were a joke and announced that, "If (the MOU) works out, I'm going to take the credit. If it doesn't work out, I'm blaming JD.”

The devil in the details

The White House spent four days attacking leaked drafts of the MOU as pure Iranian propaganda and misinformation. On Wednesday when Axios published the entire text of the MOU, it contained the exact language as leaked. The administration framed the MOU as a “major win” for the US, while nearly everyone outside of Fox News calls it a disastrous foreign policy blunder, one that compromises long-term security in exchange for short-term concessions.

Trump was so eager to get oil flowing through the Strait and stop the slide into another Great Depression, he agreed to:

• Premature Sanctions Relief: The MoU immediately waives U.S. sanctions and allows Iran to resume oil exports and unblock restricted assets on "day one." Critics, like former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, warn that this trades away vital economic leverage before hardline nuclear and regional negotiations even begin.
• Rebuilding the Iranian Threat: Analysts warn that the estimated $300 billion reconstruction and financial package will be funneled directly to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to finance terrorism and accelerate nuclear ambitions.
• Compromised Lebanon Strategy: The agreement's ceasefire provisions require de-escalation in Lebanon without involving Israel or Hezbollah in the negotiations. Israel has already rejected this as giving Iran veto power over Israeli self-defense.
• Bribing Over Shipping Lanes: The deal immediately lifts the U.S. blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, with Iran only temporarily allowing toll-free passage for the 60-day negotiation period. Critics point out that the U.S. is effectively paying Iran to stop threatening international shipping, while Iran has already signaled its long term intent to charge “fees” for passage.

So, no unconditional surrender. No nuclear disarmament. No permanent agreement to open the Strait of Hormuz without tolls; Vance said on CNBC that those details remain to be "figured out." But Iran will get a $300 billion reconstruction fund and all sanctions lifted, even without those concessions, which is hard to spin as anything other than US surrender.

Poor J.D.

This is the PR trap Trump pushed Vance into: chief defender of an agreement Trump can’t explain. Trump even admitted that the MOU might “not be the kind of document that I should be signing.” The dynamic is vintage Trump: deliver ambiguity instead of details, spectacle over substance, and proclaim victory while reserving blame for everyone else.

Vance, now clinging to the chassis of the bus, made his own bed. After calling Trump America’s Hitler, he joined forces with him anyway. Vance, along with Trump’s Heinrich Himmler, Stephen Miller, pushed to suspend habeas corpus, the legal foundation of democracy itself, and urged Trump to deploy the US military against US citizens in an effort to shut down mass protests in Minnesota.

Vance struck a deal with the devil in pursuit of raw power and now he’s eating it. He can't criticize Trump, or the MOU, and he can’t remind the country of his own opposition to the war. He can only smile through the embarrassment, putting his own face on the catastrophic loss, while Trump moves on to the next shiny object.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

“It was a bright cold day in April, the clocks were striking thirteen, and the powers in charge of (a State) public university system have declared the State has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of ‘freedom’….”

So begins a federal court order striking Trump’s Third Reich-inspired “Stop WOKE” Act in Florida, variations of which have spread through the US like a nasty airborne disease.

Invoking George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Walker slammed Stop WOKE, the authoritarian movement afoot in many US states to forcibly impose the tenets of far right, white nationalism on classrooms, universities, and corporate boardrooms. Since then, a total of 14 states have successfully passed 20 anti-DEI laws, part of Trump’s broader nationwide push; over 80 anti-DEI bills and hundreds of educational gag orders have been introduced across the country since 2023.

What’s this 1st Amendment you speak of?

In addition to book banning, Trump’s anti-WOKE initiatives impose state mandates on speech, dictating how certain topics must be discussed in academic and employment settings as well as in national parks.

In education, anti-WOKE laws impose state control over classroom instruction about gender and race, including America’s history of slavery, the Jim Crow era and its aftermath, and other systems originating in an assumption of racial inferiority long since passed. In employment, stop WOKE laws prohibit corporations from conducting diversity training, seminars, or discussions to promote equality.

Stop WOKE laws in the corporate setting do not just denigrate affirmative action, they endorse white male superiority by banning discussion of any counter-narrative. All such initiatives will be struck down, nationwide, wherever they are challenged, by long standing First Amendment jurisprudence.

Trump’s shameful national park initiative

In national parks, a federal judge just ordered the Trump administration to restore all national park signs that were altered or removed under Trump’s directive aimed at purging "woke" historical and scientific content. In a ruling issued by U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley, the court gave the Department of the Interior until July 3, 2026, to reinstall the original materials.

Criticizing the administration's actions as censorship that shared a "limited history" through "half-truths,” the judge didn’t hold back, writing that:

• Trump tried to use a "white-out pen” in an attempt "to rewrite the Nation's history” into a fake narrative perpetuated throughout the nation’s vast national park system.
• Trump tried to promote half-truths, by sharing a "limited history" that removed park signage, educational materials and displays that did not align with Trump’s made-up history reflecting his false, preferred narrative.
• Trump tried excluding vital experiences of women, native Americans, enslaved people, and minorities, erasing entire communities whose contributions, struggles, and achievements form an important part of our Nation's story.

It is difficult to conceive of more ominous state controls than mandates on how history must be taught in national parks and schools, or how corporate trainings must be conducted, contingent entirely on how words could make listeners feel.

Mandating hatred won’t end well

All children of normal empath feel some level of anguish, or some level of distress, when they learn about the worst and most violent episodes from our past. Our nation was borne from a violent and bloody revolution from which oppressive systems emerged. It is a fact, and it is our history, just as it is of many great nations. Teaching complexity instead of avoiding it should be any educator’s goal. Pity the parents (and neighbors) of any child- black, white, or other- who learns about cruelty and violence without feeling any kind of empathic response; a child who learns about the horrors of slavery or the Trail of Tears with no emotional reflection whatsoever should be kept away from pets and small animals.

Trump’s doublespeak for “Freedom”

Anti-WOKE laws also target the LGBTQ community, relentlessly. Despite the fact that no known public K-3rd classroom has ever taught sex education or ‘gender identity,’ intentionally vague ‘Parental Rights’ laws spawned by Trump are proliferating. These laws prohibit K-3 teachers from acknowledging the very existence of gay people, by prohibiting teachers from saying anything about gender or sexuality in any manner that could be deemed not “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with (ambiguous, amorphous, undefined) state standards.”

So what happens when a second grade student finger paints a picture of his family complete with two siblings, two dogs, and two mommies? If his teacher comforts him, protects him from bullies, acknowledges his family positively or says anything that could be construed as affirming that kid as he is, the teacher faces state investigation and could be sued and/or terminated. Small wonder there is such an acute teacher shortage.

Trump is the chief architect of vicious culture wars now infecting the country. Governors under his thumb force women to give birth against their will, control parents’ medical decisions if their minor child seeks gender care, suppress and arrest black voters, villify gays, and controls the speech of college professors, state-wide.

As Judge Walker ruled, “The law officially bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints. Republicans argue that, under these Acts, professors enjoy “academic freedom” so long as they express only those viewpoints of which the State approves. This (position) is positively dystopian.”

A pall of orthodoxy

First Amendment scholars recognize the danger of a president and republican governors who would dictate state-mandated speech in schools, corporations, and national parks, while using state power to silence detractors for daring to disagree.

Supreme Court rulings have long shielded academic freedom and corporate speech from similar government encroachments. SCOTUS has consistently blocked state attempts to “cast a pall of orthodoxy” over classroom instruction since at least 1967. As long as the First Amendment stands, a state cannot “muzzle its university professors, impose its own orthodoxy of viewpoints, and cast us all into the dark.”

Stop WOKE efforts, Judge Walker observed, are “like the thirteenth chime of a clock: you not only know it’s wrong, but it causes you to wonder about everything you heard before.”

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

I just toured the opulent Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC. I love beautiful homes as much as anyone, but this tour didn’t land as intended.

To me, America’s largest private residence, one that took 1,000 laborers six years to build, is a testament to inherited wealth and inequality. The lavish indoor swimming pool was built at a time when most homes didn’t have plumbing. As I walked through the gardens and imported Italian tapestries, I couldn’t stop thinking about how the laborers who built the estates of Gilded Age scions lived in squalor themselves, and could barely afford to eat.

The warning was also deafening: Trump and his corporate backers, pushing an economic regression most supporters can’t even recognize, are taking us back to that era. MAGA keeps buying the same robber-baron con job the working-class finally defeated over a century ago, even as they bear the brunt of it.

Fast foward only a hundred years and we are watching the same well-planned, deliberate, and coordinated effort by a handful of tyrants to dismantle the regulatory state, enrich themselves at taxpayers’ expense, and erode the rule of law. The parallels to the late 19th century are disastrous and obvious.

Robber barons then and now

During the first Gilded Age, robber barons like John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Andrew Carnegie operated under laissez-faire capitalism where laborers were expendable and civil rights were non-existent. The man who built the Biltmore, a 175,000 square foot monument to extreme wealth, inherited his massive fortune from Cornelius Vanderbilt, his grandfather, who built railroads on the backs of starvation wages.

The Gilded Age top 1% claimed that their hyper-monopolies were the natural result of a free market, but in truth those monopolies were protected by corruption: oligarchs openly bribed legislators, crushed labor unions with brutal force, and treated the working class as disposable. Trump’s grid of exploitation, anti-regulation, and legal evasion follows the same formula.

Trump’s entire political apparatus models the 19th-century political machine where Trump is the Tammany Hall boss and the presidency is a vehicle for transactional profits lining his family’s pockets. With the help of corporate-aligned Supreme Court justices, US health and environmental protections have been dismantled to favor big oil and corporations, while education, health care, and food assistance have been gutted to finance another massive tax giveaway to the rich.

This isn’t conservatism; it is an oligarchs’ coup, a return to the robber baron past where laws applied only to the poor.

Trump, Musk and Bezos’ deliberate dismantling of institutions that could check them

Trump’s constant attacks on the judiciary and the press are meant to weaken the only institutions capable of checking his lawlessness and the concentration of wealth it affords his family and donors. His anti-regulation, pro-corporate policies even drive US foreign relations, with his latest National Security Strategy pledge to push “Europe… to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.” Escaping regulations and laws altogether, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are building a private resort on Albanian protected land. Don Jr just married Epstein’s banker’s daughter, with a record $620 million Pentagon loan for his start up to boot. Eric is taking an Israeli drone company public for $1.5 billion, directly profiting from Trump’s war in Iran.

Elon Musk is the modern equivalent of a railroad tycoon, contemptuous of the laws of nations where he operates. Musk has utilized his massive wealth, much of it accumulated through taxpayer-funded government subsidies, to build global communication networks only to weaponize them against democratic institutions. Why? To end corporate regulations/ environmental protections, labor laws, and fair taxation. By bankrolling political disinformation campaigns and turning Twitter into a right wing echo chamber, Musk helps distract voters with manufactured culture wars so they won’t notice their economic rights being stripped away. Gilded Age tycoons controlled the printing presses; Musk controls the algorithms.

Jeff Bezos completes the triumvirate. Much like Gilded Age factory owners who locked workers in unsafe facilities for starvation wages, Bezos built an empire that invades the privacy of its employees and tracks their bathroom breaks while spending tens of millions to fight workers’ unionization efforts. He, like the Robber Barons, also pays Amazon warehouseand delivery staff sub-standard wages. While his employees rely on federal assistance programs just to survive, Bezos builds himself mega-yachts and finances space tourism projects for the rich. The Biltmore would have been right up his alley.

If past is prologue, we’re going to be ok

The central tragedy of our moment is how easily millions of Americans were conned into voting against their own self interests, and remain conned, with the help of Fox News. Informed only by propaganda, working-class supporters defendTrump’s policies because they can’t see that they are directly aimed at their clean water, safe workplaces, and economic survival.

As we drove away from the Biltmore grounds, I looked up the Progressive Era on my phone, America’s response to the Gilded Age. The good news is that gross inequality during the robber baron era led to the rise of organized labor, legal reform, political resistance and antitrust enforcement. If things get bad enough under Trump—SNAP and Medicaid will begin to disappear in October— anger and hunger will morph into political will. If that happens, in 2028, we will balance the high court, reverse Citizens United, and pass a real wealth tax so that we can fix our broken systems.

US history has shown what happens when a handful of corrupt tyrants dictate the laws of the land; it has also shown what happens when voters get fed up.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

On Wednesday, Chief Justice John Roberts, in a not-so-veiled swipe at Donald Trump, stressed that the U.S. Constitution’s “main innovation” was the creation of an independent judiciary. Our Constitutional system of government only works, he emphasized, if power shared between the three branches of federal government remains equal and balanced, and it is up to the Courts, not Trump, to decide what makes it so.

Roberts’ remarks followed the Trump regime’s astonishing flurry of attacks against the judiciary. On April 25, Attorney General Pam Bondi called judges who refused to legitimize Trump’s power grabs “deranged,” then, with characteristic bombast, warned the judiciary, “we will come after you and we will prosecute you.” That same day, Kash Patel had a Wisconsin Judge perp walked out of the courthouse in handcuffs because she allowed a defendant to exit from a side door to the main hall where everyone else, including the FBI, was waiting. Three days later, Karoline Leavitt intimated that Trump could have Supreme Court justices arrested.

Roberts can well see that Trump’s henchmen are attacking the judiciary as the last line of defense against an authoritarian coup. Perhaps more difficult to see is that Trump’s attacks, in concert with his deliberate weakening of national security, are acts of sabotage. He is wrecking our constitutional form of government in an effort to replace it with something else. From this perspective, it is difficult to see Trump’s strategy as anything short of treasonous.

A president who projects his own criminality

Throughout his first 100 days, Trump engaged in wild and unprecedented acts of retribution against the rule of law and anyone who tried to make him answer to it. Last week, describing Trump’s EO to punish and extort lawyers who represented his political adversaries, a federal judge noted that, “No American President has ever before issued executive orders like the one at issue” in an attempt to march the country toward totalitarianism.

Aside from metastasizing power grabs, the most common thread running through Trump’s EOs-- announced through a series of White House propaganda papers issued every other day-- is Trump’s projection of his own crimes and misdeeds onto others. Anyone trying to map Trump’s elusive plan of governance need only look at what he purports to attack in his orders, because those are his true intentions. On his first dayin office, for example, Trump issued an EO “Ending the weaponization of the federal government,” dialing weaponization of government power to levels not seen since King George.

Freighted with propaganda, the White House memo regurgitated Trump’s grievances about efforts to hold him legally accountable for his actions, falsely proclaiming as “fact,” under seal of the White House, that, “The prior administration and allies throughout the country engaged in an unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power.”

Trump then turned these accusations into a plan of action never before seen in American history, ordering the AG, DOJ and FBI to conduct political investigations, arrests and prosecutions.

On brand, Trump accuses others of treason

Determined to rule by fiat in order to bypass both legislative and judicial branches, Trump has issued a slew of incongruent declarations and EOs too wide ranging to list. To squelch dissent and criticism of those orders, he describes critics as ‘enemies of the state,’ and accuses them of treason.

Trump’s presidential memorandum about “leakers” of government information describes as “treasonous” any disclosure of sensitive information for the purposes of undermining foreign policy, national security, or government effectiveness. ‘Undermining,’ of course, is whatever Trump says it is, which means any criticism can be deemed ‘treason.’

It’s a bold intimidation campaign meant to facilitate prosecution and imprisonment of critics in the near future, modeling authoritarians like Russia’s Putin, El Salvador’s Bukele, and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. While his left hand attempts to silence critics Putin style, Trump’s right hand is actively sabotaging national security, by:

• Exposing secrets of the US intelligence community on easily hacked commercial messaging apps;
• Making threats to NATO that serve and align with Russian interests;
• Purging career civil servants and replacing them with incompetent loyalists to destabilize the government;
• Pausing or ceasing federal enforcement of foreign bribery laws;
• Trashing security alliances by threatening allies; and
• Ending the Justice Department’s task force on covert foreign influence even as threats from foreign influence are rising.

Step by step, agency by federal agency, Trump is systematically disabling institutions that could interfere with his acquisition of domestic power, while at the same time inviting a foreign attack. Standing alone, each act weakens national security in ways that can’t be measured because the consequences have not yet materialized. Taken in concert, they reflect Trump’s intentional subversion of our national security interests.

Treason

Treason, a federal crime, is defined by the Constitution as ‘levying war’ against the nation; it also includes “giving aid and comfort” to our enemies. Trump credibly has been accused of treason for aiding Russia’s interests over our own. In 2023, his actions in fomenting the J6 attack were also deemed treasonous when the Colorado Supreme Court found that he engaged in insurrection, a decision with roots in the Constitution’s definition of treason. The Supreme Court found a workaround to avoid Colorado’s application of the 14th Amendment on grounds that had nothing to do with—and did not disturb—Colorado’s finding of insurrection.

Treason is defined as the betrayal of one’s country; it is hard to imagine a deeper betrayal than an American president questioning the basic rule of the US Constitution while he actively subverts it.

I have no illusion that the spineless Republican party is prepared to rein Trump in at this juncture; as one Senator admitted, they are all too “frightened” of retribution to do their Constitutional duty. So for now, thanks to a partisan Supreme Court and cowardly federal legislators, we are a nation held hostage by a lawless president of questionable sanity and his power-drunk sycophants.

As America wonders how bad it will get before he is stopped, at least we are learning a shared civics lesson: we are learning why the Constitution prohibits traitors from being elected into federal office.

Sabrina Haake is a 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

Today’s South Lawn of the White House features a huge, brightly lit metal cage called “the Claw.” It is a stage erected to showcase men beating each other bloody, Caligula style, to entertain a wannabe Roman Emperor on his 80th birthday.

After musical performers refused to sing at the nation’s 250th birthday party Trump made about himself, the UFC cage match has taken top entertainment billing. The Claw complements golden Trump statues, illegally-minted gold coins bearing Trump’s likeness, commemorative passports featuring Trump’s photo, and huge Nazi chic banners of Trump draped on the edifices of the DOJ, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Agriculture buildings.

A former FBI Director called the banners ‘sickening’ for their authoritarian symbolism.

An arch for one

Monument by revered monument, Trump is painstakingly desecrating the U.S. capital. Last week, Trump said that the 250 foot arch he is demanding as a monument to himself would be, “along with the White House Ballroom, the Greatest Structure in Washington.” His drive to overshadow national monuments to Presidents Washington and Lincoln reflects a level of delusion best described by the DSM: “Grandiosity presents an exaggerated sense of self-importance, entitlement, a constant need for admiration, and a lack of empathy …” It also presents profound disrespect for our nation’s history.

Trump’s ‘Triumphal Arch’ would obstruct the historically significant sightline between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington House at Arlington National Cemetery. Historical preservationists emphasize that the Lincoln Monument was designed so that it would forever gaze at the final resting place of over 400,000 veterans, a somber reflection on the cost of freedom. The sightline also connects Lincoln to the Robert E. Lee Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery to symbolize national unity, the post-Civil War reconciliation between North and South.

The massive scale of the arch, which will be more than double the height of the 99-foot Lincoln Memorial, would block the views along the Memorial Avenue Corridor and across the Arlington Memorial Bridge. When viewed from the Arlington House, the arch would obscure much of Lincoln’s Memorial, like someone walking in front of a movie screen and just... standing there.

To Trump, historical symbolism is noise. According to recent National Park Service documents, Trump is planning year-round, 20-hours-per-day construction on his arch, for projected completion within three years. Several years of construction all day and night, diverted traffic, and marred sightlines is extremely aggressive; one intuits that the completed arch will take less time to tear down.

Branding a nation

Trump’s handiwork on Lincoln’s Memorial Reflecting Pool isn’t much better. Trump posted a video on Truth Social showing workers draining and cleaning it, as Trump’s voice talks about “Biden filth and incompetence.” The Reflecting Pool, built in 1922 and restored in 2012, has nothing to do with Biden, who clearly competes with Trump in the rent-free occupation of Trump’s own head.

The Reflecting Pool was originally designed with a reflective surface intentionally subordinate and solemn, a dignified spatial connection between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Trump had it repainted in circus blue, again missing the historical significance of solemnity.

The work was also performed by another of Trump’s overpaid no-bid contractors. Trump said he handpicked Atlantic Industrial Coatings because they had done work on his personal swimming pool at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia. Shortly thereafter, perhaps realizing that ‘I hired my pool guy’ was not the best justification, Trump did an about-face and claimed he had never used the firm's services before. After the contract was awarded, bypassing standard competitive bidding channels, the cost ballooned from initial estimates of under $2 million to $13.1 million.

What will the future say?

Trump lawyers recently argued in federal court that they could bulldoze the Statue of Liberty and the courts couldn’t do anything to stop them. A man who slapped his name on steaks, vodka, a fake university, candles, soaps, NFTs, casinos, and an airline that went bankrupt has now upgraded to more durable media on the public dime: marble, federally funded, and gold, omnipresent. Trump has redecorated the Oval Office with heavy gold filigree, including gold cherubs, gold trim, and gold furniture. His gold overkill aesthetic, reminiscent of Versailles just before the French monarchs were beheaded, proves that Trump’s historical ignorance isn’t confined to American history.

Congress, not the president, controls federal property, but Trump doesn’t want to work with Congress, preferring to rebrand DC in his own personal, bawdy image. The National Trust has sued, arguing that the White House grounds, a designated national park, cannot be updated without congressional approval and that the park, like Yellowstone, can’t simply be repurposed at one man’s whim. That suit is pending.

Future generations will study this era and learn many things. They will learn about the fragility of democracy, and the extraordinary load-bearing capacity of our capital’s foundation, now bearing the weight of history, the republic and Trump's self-regard.

E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one. And that one would really like his own monument.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Trump didn’t drop his $1.8 billion slush fund because of political backlash. Worshipped by the nation’s lowest IQ foot soldiers and propped up by tax-and-regulation-averse donors no matter his crimes, Trump doesn’t care about the midterms because he doesn’t have to. If his suppression efforts fail, he’ll switch to intimidation. If masked goons don’t work, he’ll claim the results were ‘rigged.’ He may even succeed in manufacturing grounds for declaring martial law and cancelling the midterms entirely.

Elections don’t vex a man who uses force to erase them, which suggests most analysts got his slush-fund reversal wrong. As I see it, Trump didn’t drop the looting to soften the results in November. He dropped it to avoid having to name his third AG.

Trump and Todd Blanche quickly repackaged Trump’s IRS case without the ‘anti-weaponization fund’ because of an extremely unusual intervention in the case by 35 retired federal judges. Even Trump understands how a finding of ‘fraud upon the courts’ paired with larceny would tar his legacy, especially if his own AG is permanently disbarred over it.

Thirty-five federal judges express shock

On May 27, 2026, thirty five retired federal judges of all political stripes filed a motion to reopen Trump’s IRS case on suspicion of fraud against the court. The significance of what they wrote cannot be overstated.

The motion suggested that the DOJ had “deceived” U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams by announcing a settlement to the public after failing to mention it to the court. It was an “extraordinary” deception, the judges wrote, where (Blanche) “dismissed this case before the Court could complete its inquiry into whether there was an actual case or controversy, and then cited the ‘settlement’ of this case as the legal justification for looting the federal treasury of $1.776 billion dollars and purporting to release all possible federal claims against President Trump, his family, and his businesses.”

The judges aren’t just frothing over the larceny. The fraud, they noted, is bigger and more consequential. Trump/Blanche tried to manipulate and defraud, then circumvent and forever silence a federal court. Blanche tried to orchestrate that court’s imprimatur on an unprecedented theft of taxpayer funds, knowing full well that the court had no jurisdiction and never could because there was no case or controversy. If Trump sits on both sides of the same case, both controlling the outcome and financially benefitting from it, there is no legal controversy. There is no case. There is only theft, and claiming otherwise is fraud.

“Most egregious conduct”

The judges didn’t hold back, suggesting that this case demonstrated “most egregious conduct involving a corruption of the judicial process itself.” The parties “used the proceedings before this Court as a legal pretext,” they wrote, “while trying to deprive this Court of the opportunity to determine whether this was a real case or controversy in the first place. To (allow it) would be, in effect, to reward and immunize such collusion from judicial scrutiny, since the parties to such a scheme will obviously never challenge” fraud that benefits them personally.

They argue that Blanche corruptly sought judicial cover for collusion. “Indeed, the corruption of the judicial process is exactly what happened here. The parties have used this lawsuit—which was never an adversarial proceeding over which the Court even had jurisdiction—as a means to allow a “commission” controlled by the President to dole out $1.776 billion in taxpayer dollars without constitutional or congressional authority to do so, and to confer unlawful private benefits to the President and his family by purportedly prohibiting the United States from prosecuting any and all claims against them.”

Blanche “plainly tried to shield (his) conduct from necessary judicial scrutiny by short-circuiting this Court’s inquiry into whether the lawsuit is in fact an actual case or controversy by filing (the dismissal) before they announced the “settlement” —clearly in hopes of preventing the Court from ever completing that inquiry, which, if it comes out against the parties, will undo their collusive “settlement.”

How Blanche and Trump tried to do it

As I wrote on May 21 in ‘Todd Blanche should be disbarred for this,’ Blanche moved to dismiss the case two days before his brief outlining the court’s jurisdiction was due. Blanche’s orchestrated ‘settlement’ purported to “bind the United States to a stunningly broad release of potential claims” against Trump for tax evasion, and to pay billions of dollars, without even trying to defend against Trump’s underlying claims.

Blanche failed to assert the most basic defenses to Trump’s IRS claims, defenses Blanche was legally obligated to assert, and which the DOJ has previously asserted in prior claims. There was even a prior IRS case involving the same IRS contractor as the one who released Trump’s tax returns, Charles Littlejohn. The government sought dismissal of that exact same case on grounds that a contractor was “not an officer or employee of the IRS,” yet for Trump it was worth $1.8 billion dollars.

Blanche’s failure to mount any defense at all to Trump’s claims, the judges note, “only emphasizes the fraudulent nature of the ‘settlement’ reached here” and “strengthens the conclusion that the litigation was collusive from the start.” Blanche seemingly “perpetrated a fraud on the judicial machinery itself, by fostering an appearance that the litigation involved adverse parties, when, in fact, it did not.”

Judge Williams ordered the DOJ to respond to the judges’ accusations of fraud upon the court by June 14. Blanche will edit that brief knowing that in New York, where he is licensed, committing a fraud upon the court is considered egregious conduct that supports immediate suspension or permanent disbarment. Removing larceny from the mix won’t save him.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

In its landmark 6-3 immunity decision, the Supreme Court created a three-tiered framework under which presidents are absolutely immune from claims arising from their exclusive constitutional authority. They are entitled to presumptive immunity for all other official acts within the ‘outer perimeter’ of their duties, but have no immunity for unofficial, private acts committed while in office.

Trump’s personal lawsuit against the IRS seeking a preposterous $10 billion in personal damages, his negotiated “audit immunity” forgiving his personal tax evasion, and the $1.8 billion he’s snatching from taxpayers to pay J6 criminals who broke the law in his name were unofficial, private acts merely cloaked under presidential seal. Suing an agency you control, seeking larcenous damages, does not flow from any ‘core constitutional functions’ of the presidency or their outer perimeter; they were undertaken to benefit Trump and his family personally.

After Trump’s personal IRS lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice, his “anti-weaponization fund” was created outside the law and outside the case he claims it arose under. No court approved the ‘settlement,’ rather, the federal judge overseeing the case said there was no there there because parties can’t be both plaintiff and defendant in the same case. In short, Judge Williams asked the litigants to brief how any federal court could even touch what Trump was trying to do: loot a federal agency he controlled. Trump moved to dismiss the case just before the deadline for submitting legal briefs on the judge’s Article III case and controversy concerns, and the slush fund was created after dismissal, which means it was not authorized by any case, judgment, or law.

Immunizing himself from criminal tax liability is not a core presidential function

Trump also tucked a hidden addendum into his “settlement.” The settlement addendum declares that the U.S. is “forever barred and precluded” from auditing, examining or prosecuting Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization for tax evasion: "The United States RELEASES, WAIVES, ACQUITS, and FOREVER DISCHARGES each of the Plaintiffs from, and is hereby FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing, any and all claims, counterclaims, causes of action, appeals, or requests for any monetary relief,” that “have been or could have been” asserted by the IRS against Trump, his sons and their Trump Organization.

Readers will recall that a New York jury previously found the Trump Organization guilty on 17 counts of criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records in December 2022. In a separate case, the Trump Organization was also convicted of business fraud under the statutes of New York. Although some financial penalties were later reversed as excessive, an appeals court upheld key provisions of the fraud finding, including a ban preventing Trump and his two eldest sons from holding executive roles in any New York business, and a ban on Trump and his companies from obtaining loans in the state, which Trump is appealing.

Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal criminal defense lawyer, signed the one-page audit waiver, presumably at Trump’s behest, to end the Trump family’s exposure to criminal federal tax law. The addendum was hidden inside a hyperlink in a press release, and is Trump’s clear attempt to grab blanket immunity for criminal tax evasion.

Negotiating an illegal, personal contract is not a core function either

Trump’s DOJ has provided him with audit immunity from the IRS, a separate agency over which the DOJ has no authority, which also violates standing federal law. Under 26 U.S.C. § 7217, ‘Prohibition on executive branch influence over taxpayer audits and other investigations,’ it is illegal for executive branch officials such as the President or his political appointees to request the termination of an audit. The statute provides:

(a)Prohibition- It shall be unlawful for any applicable person to request, directly or indirectly, any officer or employee of the Internal Revenue Service to conduct or terminate an audit or other investigation of any particular taxpayer with respect to the tax liability of such taxpayer.

Trump’s IRS waiver addendum is, on its face, the exact conduct 26 USC 7217 was written to prohibit. The statute declares it unlawful for the president or senior executive branch officials to request that any officer of the IRS conduct or terminate an audit or investigation of any particular taxpayer, so it is ultra vires, or beyond any law.

The whole sordid affair fails the sniff test

It’s no mystery why Trump wants a criminal waiver for tax evasion. His underlying suit arose when an IRS contractor embarrassed him by revealing that he, an alleged “successful billionaire,” paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017, and paid zero in federal income taxes for ten years before that.

What a difference a presidency makes. Now back in office and profiting wildly from what has been called the most corrupt presidency in U.S. history, Trump’s brokerage accounts alone executed 3,642 trades worth between $220 million and $750 million in the first quarter of 2026, largely through firms whose enforcement cases his administration has dismissed, and who rely on the laxity of rules Trump appointees write, while he engages in questionable crypto-related insider trading with similar firms.

Trump and Blanche claim that 31 U.S.C. § 1304 authorizes their $1.8 billion slush fund. That is inaccurate. Under the statute, such funds are statutorily limited to paying legal settlements and judgments against the United States, but this was neither a settlement nor a judgment, because there was no case in controversy, there was no judgment prior to dismissal, and no “settlement” was approved by any court. Without legal, settlement, or statutory authority, it’s simple theft, completely outside any core constitutional or ‘outer perimeter’ powers.

Trump’s IRS suit began and ended as a personal matter, with a personal audit waiver thrown in for good measure. Here’s hoping state prosecutors whose states paid into the $1.8 billion slush fund are sharpening their pencils.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Last week my neighbors brought me an envelope with a “MAGA priorities survey” enclosed. A solicitation for money disguised as a survey, it opened with a four-page cover letter from Trump.

The survey drills down on ‘Biden’s sky-high mortgage rates,’ and ‘reckless spending binge’ even though we’re 1.5 years into Trump 2.0. It blames Biden for ‘today’s affordability squeeze,’ despite Trump’s idiotic tariffs, his $94 billion war in Iran, and vanity projects projected into the billions. Trump, who still thinks exporters pay tariffs, single handedly triggered global inflation, turbo-charged the price of energy, and tanked consumer confidence at the same time, all while demanding that Americans disbelieve their lyin’ eyes.

Trump’s cover letter begins, “Dear America First Patriot, I put THREE LIVE POSTAGE STAMPS (all caps) on the enclosed Rush Return Envelope because I had to get your immediate attention… And because I need you to respond to me right away!” Four pages later, Trump urges True Patriots to make a True Patriotic donation of $2,026…. Or even just $47, by rushing back the MAGA survey using the enclosed TRIPLE-STAMPED Rush Return Envelope TODAY. (Combining all caps with bold, a triple-dog-dare-you maneuver that conveys urgency.)

The kicker is that the “triple stamped rush envelope” was the pre-marked, pre-paid, “No postage necessary if mailed in the United States” kind. Adding extra postage stamps to a prepaid postage envelope, according to the USPS, means Trump just wasted money (USPS bold, not mine). Trump, in one mailing, spent extra on an agency he accuses of waste, demonstrated his fiscal illiteracy, and declared his donors stupid. Another masterclass in Trump’s trifecta of incompetence.

Demanding respect without cause

While Trump’s ineptitude at home often skews absurd, it’s less funny on the world stage. Pitbull comms director Steven Cheung recently told Mike Pompeo to “shut his stupid mouth” on Iran because Pompeo had “no idea what the f— he’s talking about.” Cheung was telling a Harvard top-of-class West Point alum, a military officer who served with distinction and as Trump’s Secretary of State, that he lacked proper credentials to weigh in on Trump’s defeat in Iran. As Trump did a victory dance on Fox News for creating a far more dangerous Iran under an objectively worse deal than the one he tore up in 2018 due to personal jealousy, Cheung told Pompeo with a straight face he “should shut his stupid mouth and leave the real work to the professionals.”

With foreign policy professionals like these, who needs insurgents? Trump managed, unaided, to upgrade Iran’s asymmetric fighting capabilities, strengthen Iran’s financial and geopolitical position, and alienate NATO and other U.S. allies who reminded Trump this was his war—not theirs— and refused to bail him out. Trump’s staggering incompetence has not only strengthened one of the world’s most dangerous regimes, it looks like they’ll be left in possession of some 10 tons of low-enriched uranium.

Even if Pompeo wanted to leave Trump’s Iranian quagmire to the professionals, there aren’t any. In a childish ‘up yours’ to the world, Trump handpicked the biggest bloviators he could find to serve in his cabinet, an assembly critics call one of the least qualified and most inappropriately vetted in modern U.S. history. The only mandatory credential was a quick facility with Dear Leader sycophancy, a skill relentlessly paraded during televised meetings by a cabinet that functions more like an occupation force.

Trump’s incompetence is (relatively) safer at home

Trump wants to be regarded as omni powerful and untouchable. Targeting critics who criticize him, threatening punishment for their “seditious behavior”… “punishable by death,” Trump oozes Godfather mob boss because he lives in a delusional reality TV, alternative facts universe. But, even in our darkest hour, most Americans don’t fear incompetence. They ridicule it ala Jeff Tiedrich, as do our adversaries.

Iran has been trolling the US from the beginning with pop-culture driven critiques of a nation that would elect a moron like Trump. Other adversaries, including China, are watching. In the EU, where accuracy in the news is largely required, resentment and disbelief has morphed into outright condemnation. But, here at home, where maga-aligned corporate interests rule most media, the gaslighting continues.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, praising Trump’s loss in Iran, declared last week, “President Trump is the only one who could have gotten Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, to the negotiating table… Under President Trump’s leadership, our nation is stronger, more respected on the global stage, and safer than ever before.” Never mind that Trump’s war was pointless to begin with; never mind the uranium, the poor results, or the global condemnation. If Trump’s shenanigans in Iran aren’t an arsonist demanding praise for calling the fire department, nothing is.

Trump has received no Iran war approval whatsoever from Congress, which possesses the sole constitutional authority to declare war. It is the most significant military action ever undertaken in US history without some form of congressional assent. Although Trump keeps bragging that his war in Iran has been shorter than WWII and Vietnam, he fails to grasp that those wars were justified, Congressionally authorized and funded, and at least understood by the American public. Only an imbecile would equate them with Iran.

As Trump plans his upcoming Idiocracy-forward, lowest-common-denominator cage fight at the White House, and his IndyCar street race past landmarks like the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol, we should all hold our nose and breathe a collective sigh of relief. Trump focusing his genius on tacky tasteless pageantry may rightly inspire ridicule, but it is far safer than letting him continue to meddle with terror states. Even if we pulled out of Iran tomorrow, how long the U.S. will be exposed to heightened national security and terrorism risk after this idiot expires is anyone’s guess.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Pondering our nation’s upcoming Memorial Day, it’s hard not to get emotional. I still get a lump in my throat when we stand for the national anthem at Bears home games. I fidget, look down, or look away so people don’t see my tears and think I’m loopy. But when I hear ‘perilous fight,’ and ‘proof through the night’ I really do see the old yellowed flag: 15 stars and stripes, tattered and frayed, still standing against all odds for a new freedom the world had never heard of.

We were founded on a novel concept of liberty never before articulated: an intangible, deeply profound declaration that all men were created equal, endowed with the same right to pursue happiness. Not because those rights were bestowed by a king, but because people were born with them. They were inalienable.

Five hundred days into this administration, sensing the precarity of those rights, seeing the momentum of attempts to erase them, guts me. Not because we’re exceptional, not because we reached our goals. We never did, and we’ve recently begun marching so determinedly backward it’s easy to feel helpless, despondent, even. Then suddenly, and unexpectedly, I hear the song sung from an unexpected voice, and there’s that tattered flag again, still standing.

A light through the night from the right

On May 12, 2026, South Carolina State Senator Shane Massey made a singularly impassioned argument about why we are, and what we stand for. He is a Republican.

Massey took to the floor to reject Trump’s demand that South Carolina gerrymander itself so that, despite being having a statewide population that is 26% black, no black member of Congress can ever get elected again. South Carolina, a slaveholding state, has sent only one Black Democratic representative to Congress since 1897: James Clyburn.

Massey spoke of the evils of permanently silencing Clyburn, the citizens who elected him, and an entire opposing political party just because an ethically compromised Supreme Court, with a wink to their corporate backers, says you can. In a 45-minute address at the state’s capital, Massey rejected Trump’s redraw of SC’s congressional map and instead embraced American pluralism, now all but forgotten as Republicans do an about face on states rights to serve an unschooled master.

A Republican sees the peril of uni-party rule

First, Massey reminded his colleagues that our system was designed to divide power not only between the three branches of the federal government, but also, crucially, between the federal government and sovereign states.

Massey said Trump should not try to dominate the federal government to the exclusion of the judicial and legislative branches, and should respect the federal/state division of power as well. “The separation of powers may actually be the most important governmental doctrine that has been created in the history of man,” Massey said, astutely. “It is that important. And what the Congress has done to relinquish their authority to the executive is terrible. And we all see the results of that.” He didn’t say “abuse of power,” “despot,” or “corruption,” because he didn’t have to.

Instead, Massey stressed the founders’ “brilliant creation of federalism and the sovereignty of the states,” and said he didn’t want to participate in eroding federalism or diminishing the essential role of states. It’s obvious that Trump is destroying the federal government, but no republican before Massey has publicly acknowledged that he’s also trying to erase state boundaries and state authority, the very basis of federalism.

Healthy opponents make us stronger

Massey also recognized a fundamental human dynamic, a principle self-evident in free markets, commerce, education, scientific achievement, sports, and most realms of human performance: competition makes us stronger. He argued that Republicans should not seek to destroy Democrats just because they can, because the Democratic party makes Republicans stronger. In a truth rarely spoken by any politician, Massey declared, “I will tell my Republican friends: Republicans are stronger when the Democrat Party is vibrant and viable. We are. Competition makes you better, y’all.”

It’s a message for all factions. Healthy political parties make each other better. Without an effective opponent, they turn on each other. They infight. They lose the incentive to address what they were elected to address, to fix what they came to fix, and instead focus on how best to stay in power.

Specifically, Massey said, when facing criticism and accountability from democrats, republicans rise to the challenge because they have to. He boldly suggested that Republicans should stop and assess why they can’t now win a popular election without first rigging it. One-party rule, demanded by a corrupt executive and enabled by a partisan high court serving the same corporate masters, fosters mediocrity instead of competition.

The fading flag still waves in the South

Finally, Massey reminded the SC Senate that our nation — the most powerful in the world — cannot be conquered by an external foe, but it surely will destroy itself if it abandons the very principles and values it was founded on. “Maybe we become convinced that the only way to preserve the Republic is to implement policies that are contrary to the founding ideas of the Republic,” he mused. “Maybe we turn on ourselves. Maybe 250 years in,” (he said, triggering the lump in my own throat again), “we will no longer be able to keep our Republic.”

And then, Massey did something extraordinary: He told Trump and his colleagues ‘No.’ “If we’re going to lose this radical idea of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, a nation that in its Constitution guarantees to each state a republican form of government to ensure the debate of ideas — if that’s going to happen, Mr. President, by God, it’s not going to be because I surrendered it.”

“I’m voting no.”

Massey’s words ultimately did not carry the day, but they declared that the principles of the American Revolution set forth in our Declaration of Independence remain. Trump is doing his best to kill them, and he may succeed for a while as an exhausted public looks away. But Massey’s words proved that somewhere, in the night, even in the darkest and deepest south, we will see the flag again.

Sabrina Haake is an opinion columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche took an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, including domestic. He also took an oath to faithfully discharge the duties of office without mental reservation or purpose of evasion, meaning without trying to find loopholes to serve a different master.

Because Blanche served as Trump’s personal criminal lawyer prior to assuming the AG role, he explicitly swore during his Senate confirmation hearing that he would recuse himself from any case relating to Trump personally, if advised to do so by government ethics lawyers. Blanche was, in fact, advised to recuse by government ethics lawyers, who presented Blanche a PowerPoint presentation on DOJ ethics that explicitly detailed his recusal requirement.

Blanche did not recuse. Instead he fired the lawyer who so advised him, and continued representing the DOJ in Trump’s personal lawsuit seeking a preposterous $10 billion from the IRS. Trump filed the suit in his personal capacity, after a contracted IRS employee embarrassed him by revealing that Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017, and paid zero in federal income taxes for ten years before that.

Instead of following legal advice to recuse from the case, Blanche shot the messenger, “settled” a non-existent case, and orchestrated a $1.8 billion heist.

Blanche helped his client steal from taxpayers

Blanche, who is legally required to represent the public interest on behalf of the federal government, engineered Trump’s $1.8 billion theft of the U.S. treasury before a judge could stop it.

Trump filed his IRS complaint in January 2026. By April, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams had expressed obvious doubts about the merits of the case because Trump was both plaintiff and defendant. If a party sits on both sides of lawsuit, there’s no real case in controversy as required under Article III of the Constitution, and the court lacks jurisdiction to even hear the case. Seeing the obvious flaw, Judge Williams ordered both parties to file legal briefs addressing “whether a case and controversy” even existed by May 20.

Instead of submitting legally vacuous arguments, Blanche sought formal dismissal of the complaint, which was granted. Blanche then announced the “anti-weaponization fund” to “settle” a case that had already been dismissed on his request. It is important to understand that after a case is formally dismissed, there’s nothing left to settle. The court did not approve the ‘settlement,’ having never acceded to jurisdiction over the claim in the first place.

The $1.776 billion “resolution” was not authorized by any statute either. Blanche claims that 31 U.S.C. § 1304 authorizes it, but the Judgment Fund is statutorily limited to paying legal settlements and judgments against the United States, which this was not, because there was no case in controversy, no jurisdiction, the complaint was dismissed with prejudice, there was no judgment, and no “settlement” was approved by any court. The $1.8 billion fund is simply untethered from the law or case, Blanche’s own legal invention to hold open the treasury cookie jar while Trump dug deep.

Blanche mocks ABA ethics rules

The deal Blanche approved in Trump’s IRS lawsuit also granted Trump Audit Immunity through a highly controversial addendum that forever seals and ends any IRS investigation or audit into Trump, his family members, and his businesses. Blanche signed the addendum on behalf of the citizens whose interests he is supposed to represent.

Blanche is licensed to practice law in New York. All practicing lawyers, including those employed by the government, are bound by ethics rules, standards, and commitments. Under the American Bar Association’s model Rules, a lawyer cannot assist a client in breaking the law, nor can they advise a client how to commit a crime or fraud with impunity. They can explain legal consequences, including the scope and application of laws, but they cannot help their client get around them.

In pursuing money on behalf of a former client at the expense of a current client, Blanche is not only violating long-standing conflict of interest rules, he is also concocting another violation of the 14th Amendment. Blanche is obviously planning illegal payments to white supremacists and J6 insurrectionists who attacked the US capital. When asked to deny that plan, Blanche refused, repeatedly.

The 14th Amendment could not be any clearer that the US shall not “assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States…” but Blanche appears to be helping Trump get around it. The only reason to openly violate the 14th Amendment by paying J6 insurrectionists up to $1 million each is to reward them and publicly inspire others to do it again at Trump’s behest. Blanche not only helped Trump break the law with this IRS heist, but also seems to be paving the way for Trump’s future criminality.

Every accusation from Trump is a confession

In creating a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate people Trump claims were ‘victims’ of Biden’s DOJ, Trump is again accusing political rivals of criminal offenses he, himself, is committing. But Biden’s DOJ, unlike Trump’s, only prosecuted people who broke federal law.

Trump’s DOJ also attacks Trump’s accusers, and those who pursued prosecutions against him, in order to convince voters that Trump didn’t commit the crimes for which he was convicted. It is an ongoing effort to undermine American’s faith in the rule of law, to further enable Trump’s erosion of it.

Trump, with Blanche’s help, flexes corruption on steroids. Blanche must know how many lawyers assisting Trump’s illegal efforts have already faced disciplinary and disbarment proceedings, including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell.

Blanche surely realizes that ultimately, he will likely join that list.

Sabrina Haake is an opinion columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

As Trump was leaving this week for his trip to Beijing, where he will be outsmarted by the dumplings, a reporter asked him whether Americans’ financial pain might move him to make a deal with Iran. Trump responded, “Not even a little bit… I don’t think about anybody.” Anybody, he might have added, whose last name isn’t Trump.

Trump, who repeatedly promised to release his tax returns as all other presidents have done, is now suing the IRS because it kept his promise for him. He and his sons are seeking a cool $10 billion, which would be about two-thirds of the IRS’s entire budget. In an SNL skit that writes itself, Trump’s DOJ is “in talks” with itself to enrich the Trumps before a court can act. Trump is brazenly picking our pockets because a contracted employee leaked his tax returns, showing that Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017. For ten years before that, Trump paid zero in federal taxes, claiming his annual expenses exceeded his income year after year.

The con is that, despite failing at all of his various business, bankrupting six of them, Trump still sold himself as a successful businessman worth billions.

Trump’s corruption would shame Tammany Hall

In the late 18th century, New York City politics were famously corrupt. Entrenched political patronage, election fraud, and systemic grift were the levers of a powerful machine that lasted through the mid-20th century. Tammany Hall bought votes with essential social services, jobs, and legal aid, which insulated massive corruption. Politicians openly controlled municipal contracts for a cut, extorted local businesses, and embezzled public funds.

When it joined forces with industrialists during the Gilded Age—Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt were the Gilded Age’s Bezos, Musk and Zuckerberg—Tammany Hall was considered the most corrupt political faction in US history. Today Trump is giving it a run for its money.

As soon as he returned to power in 2025, Trump set about turning his wealth fantasies into reality. Trump, who earned so little over ten years that he paid no federal income tax, has profited from the presidency by staggering amounts. Twenty-five Trump-branded luxury real estate projects, complete with foreign licensing fees, are under development. Trump is also running cryptocurrency ventures like the World Liberty Financial scam, a decentralized finance platform into which the Abu Dhabi government invested $500 million. Then there’s his digital trading cards for idiots, or NFTs, featuring Trump as superhero, astronaut, cowboy, and race car driver, earning him $7 million and counting, all illegal under the Emoluments Clause. Cards featuring Melania as stripper, porn star, and botox rep have not yet been released.

The golden grift

After bankrupting six businesses and running dozens more into the ground, Trump is now worth between $1.4 billion and $6.5 billion, depending who you ask. It’s a formidable grift tracked dollar for dollar in “Trump’s Take,” a chyron tracker like the National Debt Clock running in Times Square that calculates how the Trumps are profiting from selling access to the U.S. presidency in real time.

When Trump officially launched his crypto ventures, he about-faced on his frequent criticism of crypto, while simultaneously deregulating the industry to increase his profits. Trump takes a cut in cash from all trades and sales of the family’s coins and tokens, and also earns stablecoin interest. Trump is also pushing a “gold card” visa program, offering fast-track residency to wealthy foreigners willing to pay up to $2 million. Immigration lawyers are warning their wealthy clients that it’s legally dubious, financially risky, and likely worthless. Meanwhile, after kicking 15 million Americans off their health plan, he launched TrumpRX.com to make up for the loss, another grift offering discounts on 43 medications out of approximately 24,000 drugs on the market that does nothing to close the insurance coverage gap.

When added to his hundreds of millions in illegal gifts from foreign governments, “settlements” of lawsuits of no legal merit, and income from other schemes highlighted here, Forbes sets Trump’s overall fortune at $6.3 billion as of April 2026, nearly three times his estimated worth of $2.4 billion at the start of 2024.

The golden phone that wasn’t, or, a metaphor for our time

Trump has marketed so much random junk under the Trump name it would make a trademark lawyer day drink. A quick perusal of Trump merchandise on offer today at the “Trump Store” (You! Sign up today for 10% off!) shows Trump pickleball paddles, Trump coffee, chocolate coins, decanters, room fresheners, speakers, tumblers, hats, blankets and diffuser sets, much of it made in China. But no Trump merch is as coveted as the Trump Mobile phone, because it doesn’t exist.

Judd Legum’s Popular Information reported this week how Donald Jr. and Eric Trump launched Trump Mobile in June of last year. They marketed “a sleek, gold smartphone engineered for performance” called the T1 Phone. Their press release claimed the T1 phone would be “proudly designed and built in the United States,” and would be available in August 2025 for $499.

The T1 website encouraged customers to deposit $100 to “pre-order” the phone, and collected an estimated $59 million from 590,000 purchasers. But the phone wasn’t available in August. It’s still not available today.

Last week, Forbes announced that the $100 deposit was amended to a ‘conditional’ opportunity: “T1 does not guarantee that a Device will be produced or made available for purchase. A preorder deposit provides only a conditional opportunity if Trump Mobile later elects, in its sole discretion, to offer the Device for sale.”

The legal-speak translates, verbatim, to “Trump scammed you again, sucker, and he’s keeping your money.” Is there a more fitting descriptor for this presidency?

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Whenever a new poll comes out showing Trump’s abysmal ratings, public reactions follow a pattern. Public comments don’t question Trump’s disapproval rating. Rather, millions of people question the flip side: how does 38% of the nation still support such an obvious charlatan? Are supporters delusional? Suicidal?

Specifically, does MAGA not know that 15 million Americans, mostly their own, have now lost health insurance because of him? Can they not read the Walmart price tags they hold in their own hands? Do they not know he’s weakening the NATO alliance their granddads fought for, or that he single-handedly empowered one of the most dangerous regimes in the world?

The answer is ‘No, no, and no.’ Nearly 40% of the country—38%, to be exact— can’t connect the dots on who’s making their lives harder. We don’t need another study to figure out why, because it couldn’t be more obvious: As of May 12, 2026, 38% of the nation still supports Trump because 38% of the nation watches Fox News, purveyors of pure Trump propaganda. And compared to other consumers, Fox News viewers do not diversify their sources.

After the 2020 election, the Pew Research Center did a deep dive to learn what Americans heard, perceived and knew about it. Researchers found, for example, that 63% of Fox News viewers had given Trump an “excellent” rating on Covid. Trump suggested injecting bleach into unspecified orifices while over 1 million Americans died, yet Fox viewers thought he did an excellent job??

More accurately it was a con job, perpetrated by Fox News.

Fox News propaganda

Coming into the present news cycle, the Pope-Trump conflict illustrates the con in real time. Pope Leo XIV criticized Trump’s war with Iran by condemning leaders who manipulate religion for military gain. Trump, manifestly devoid of impulse control, immediately shot back on Truth Social that the Pope was “weak on crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy” as if he were a political adversary. In follow up Fox News Digital interviews, Trump doubled down and refused to apologize as Fox hosts clapped like seals.

While most media outlets questioned Trump’s sanity for attacking the spiritual leader of 1.4 billion people, Fox dissembled with headlines like, “60 Minutes accused of using left-leaning Cardinals to bait Trump into feud with Vatican” and “Pope Leo says remarks about world being ‘ravaged by a handful of tyrants’ were not aimed at Trump. When Trump dispatched Marco Rubio to patch things up with the Pope last week, most media reported that it didn’t work, but Fox called it a big success and applauded what a great job Rubio did.

Fox News even tried to accuse other media networks of intentionally ‘baiting’ a response from Trump. They invited Elise Stefanik onto the network to tell Pope Leo XIV to “stay out of politics,” while other guests labelled the Pope’s foreign policy views ‘wrong’ and ‘liberal.’ Sean Hannity questioned whether the Pope fully understood the Iran conflict, and several other Fox commentators questioned whether the Pontiff had “read the Bible” about geocomplexities in Iran. To be clear, not one Fox host questioned whether Trump had “read the map” before he delivered the Strait of Hormuz to the mullahs.

The First Amendment protects political speech but it does not protect fraud

The Pope example alone illustrates how MAGA is being lied to on a daily basis, but it’s just one example. Fox News serves up daily falsehoods about climate change, immigrants, public education, NATO, black crime, ICE, and the war in Iran to craft a pro-Trump narrative, assuming their lies are legally protected by the First Amendment as “political speech.”

Enough damage is now evident to challenge that legal assumption.

In 2010, Supreme Court republicans fast-tracked America’s slide into oligarchy when they ruled in Citizens United that corporate political donations were a form of free speech. Citizens United further clarified that, under the First Amendment, political speech warrants the “highest level of protection against government regulation” following the New York Times Co. v. Sullivan’s restatement, and an earlier ruling that any regulations on political speech must withstand the highest level of strict scrutiny.

But while First Amendment protection for political speech is old news, there’s another long-toothed maxim: The First Amendment does not protect fraud. In 2012, under United States v. Alvarez, the Court confirmed that fraud is a ‘narrowly limited class of speech’ not entitled to First Amendment protection. In Alvarez, the Court struck down the Stolen Valor Act, a law that made lying about military medals a crime, because no one gained a ‘material advantage’ from the lie. Unless someone is profiting from their false speech, the court ruled, there’s no actionable fraud—they’re simply lying. But false speech connected to economic gain on one side and economic harm on the other is fraud, legally unprotected under the First Amendment.

Under this definition, Fox News is engaged in classic consumer fraud. Fox admitted in the Dominion case that they lied to their viewers for profit, and paid out nearly $1 billion in settlement as a result. But their lies didn’t stop after that case, they continue to sell 24/7 Trump propaganda as ‘news.’ They are perpetrating the same fraud, one that hooks viewers, profiting Fox and their corporate backers, while materially harming victims by convincing them to vote against their own economic interests.

Under Supreme Court precedent, Fox News isn’t engaging in protected political speech. It’s engaging in commercial fraud. And the victims aren’t just Fox viewers, even though studies show they are harmed the most: the entire nation is enduring political violence, extreme division and rumblings of civil war because 38% of the country is being lied to.

Albert Einstein once said, “A people that were to honor falsehood…would be unable, indeed, to subsist for very long.” Is mere national survival a sufficient justification to return to requiring accuracy in the news? Is it legally sufficient to pass strict scrutiny? If it is not, after a Democrat-run Congress returns to the Fairness Doctrine, this high court will have elevated partisan interests to the point of national suicide.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Subhed: Evergreen, because over 100 years later, the personal is somehow still political

My mom died from Covid in 2020, just after Mother’s Day. I couldn’t write about it until I could be honest about who she was, a feat complicated by my then-pending Congressional race, which served my own a-- to me on an unceremonious platter. Apparently climate change wasn’t at the top of voters’ concerns then; today it seems the GOP is deliberately accelerating it.

Every time I tried to write this Mothers’ Day column, my simmering anger at how Trump mismanaged and lied to the country about the coronavirus percolated into a full boil that scalded my best intentions. Instead of honoring my mother’s truth without deflection or self-pity, I kept churning out bitter screeds about how elections have consequences, and our democracy wouldn’t be on the brink if only- if only- everyone who cares actually bothered to vote.

My mother was extraordinary in many ways, including her disdain for a woman’s ‘fate’ to be stuck in the house, raising children, while men got to ‘see the world.’ The man whose ticket out of Southern Indiana she co-opted- my father’s- would buy her passage to the west coast, where he served in the Navy in Oahu, Hawaii. It was also where he brutalized her, us, and anything that moved, repeatedly, with impunity, and without regard to audience.

Because of my father’s predilection for extreme violence, I became my mother’s caretaker from a very early age. After the final episode, complete with burst capillaries from her near-complete asphyxiation, we went into foster care. When my mom eventually got out of the hospital & rehab (what can be done, anyway, to ‘rehab’ someone who was oxygen-deprived long enough for tiny red capillaries to burst all over their face?), we moved back to southern Indiana.

My mother was so afraid my father would return from the Vietnam War and finish the job, she never sought child support- which meant years of dire poverty on top of whatever brain damage she sustained from the burst capillaries incident. Even in her compromised state, my mother knew that when a man promises to finish you off, he will keep his promise if given half the chance.

So we moved to Huntingburg, Indiana, to live with my mom’s equally poor sister- Aunt Maggie. My mom and her sister Margaret were small-town lookers whose beauty and ambition attracted the same kind of husband- one who needs to capture, then own and cage, a beautiful thing. Aunt Maggie was making her way as a newly single mother as well, and for the same reason.

Shortly after we all moved in together, Aunt Maggie’s escape- and her life- ended abruptly. Her story and violent ending would upstage even my mother’s.

Maggie’s death was a continuation of an unending rotation, a locked cycle of poverty and trauma. It was the same story played out across the country in the nightly news, only the names have been changed. In case anyone is unschooled in the ways of poverty, poverty causes trauma causes poverty causes trauma. After some years stuck on this decidedly American treadmill with one tragedy following the next, my mom eventually remarried a wonderful man, my stepfather Bob Hyde, who would stop to help a struggling beetle.

While we were fortunate to have a kind benefactor in our lives, neither of my siblings overcame their early origins. You hear that formative childhood years- one through five- pretty much set the tone, and I guess that’s true enough in our case. I'm pretty sure the only reason I became "successful" (whatever that means, here I mean financially) while my siblings floundered, was because my mom tapped me young to take care of her, which meant early financial responsibility and a non-optional work ethic. I started earning at 11, never stopped, and financially supported my mom and sister all my adult life. My brother Curtis, meanwhile, started his own poverty-trauma treadmill, probably because it was what he knew. He ran on it until, last December, he died of heroin-related dementia at 63.

My mother's situation left her entirely dependent on me, and over the years, her dependence developed into raging neediness over all things, large and small. I’ll never know whether my mother’s mental health challenges were organic, or caused by extreme domestic violence. On the campaign trail when I spoke about growing up with the effects of untreated substance abuse and domestic violence, I was talking about my father. When I spoke about growing up with untreated mental illness, I was talking about my mother. For sure, all three things in our household were interrelated, as they are in most every tragic, sad headline running in the evening news.

The only Mothers Day gift I can offer up now is full honesty and ownership of a story all too common in America. It’s a reality of extreme domestic violence, substance abuse, and untreated mental illness. It’s the American struggle of single moms so afraid of their abusers they live in poverty instead of seeking child support. It’s an American story that plays across racial lines, geography, and culture, one that state-forced births will only exacerbate, trapping more vulnerable women with their abusers.

My tribute to my mother and all mothers who are trapped in violence is a siren of agency and honesty, so others in the same situation know they are not alone. Stigma, and societal judgment, only make tragedies worse, which is why we should spare no time for them. Instead, we should salute the women and children who survive.

I miss my mother. She was a stone around my neck, but she was my heavy necklace.

It took me a minute to write this because the real tragedy wasn’t in how the country failed her at her death. The real tragedy is how our laws and our system failed to protect her- and hundreds of thousands of women like her- in life.

So I guess my screed survives, after all. Stripped of angst, anger, regret and sorrow, it boils down to one simple word: Vote.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake, is free.

Trump’s war in Iran has created the biggest energy crisis in modern history. The International Energy Agency describes the current shock as “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.”

The crisis can’t be spun, no matter how hard Trump, Fox News and Chris Wright try. Because the big take away, ultimately far more significant than any regime change or reshuffling of alliances, is that Trump has unintentionally kicked off a global race to renewable energy.

The irony of an uniformed charlatan who relentlessly calls green energy a con job causing it to proliferate is so, so sweet.

The crisis couldn’t have come at a better time, as the costs of solar, wind, and batteries have fallen dramatically. Battery storage costs have fallen 93% since 2010, solar photovoltaic (PV) costs have declined by 90%, and onshore wind by 70% in the same period, making them the cheapest energy sources in history. More than 85 percent of renewable energy sources now cost less than fossil fuel sources.

With Trump’s Iran war now in its third month, countries are scrambling to circumvent the geopolitical tug of war by transitioning more quickly to renewables. Climate change almost seems like an afterthought as calls to speed the transition are now framed as a matter of security and economics, a strategy to avoid the war-driven upheaval of global oil markets. Wind and solar energy, produced entirely within national boundaries, insures against war-driven supply upset. It also insulates allies from future trade sabotage threatened by a psychopath hell-bent on retribution.

The world is leaving Trump’s America behind

In the Trump administration’s unwavering assault on science and fact, climate information has all but disappeared. Trump has taken unprecedented steps to halt climate progress and bolster his fossil fuel donors. More than 1,500 scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency have been laid off, reassigned or pressured to retire. Today, only 124 remain at the EPA, none of whom are assigned to climate science.

It’s no secret that Fox News and the oligarchs pushing Project 2025—think Koch Industries— are financially aligned with big oil. But Trump’s promise to fossil fuel donors that he’d kill environmental regulations if they donated $1 billion to get him re-elected is not aging well, for him or for them. In fact, it is backfiring, dusting the world in optimistic, spring-flower pink schadenfreude.

Last week, nearly 60 nations representing over one-third of the world’s economic power met in Colombia to accelerate their shift away from oil, gas, and coal in light of Iran. The summit, led by Colombia and the Netherlands, was organized outside normal U.N. channels and processes to avoid the kind of bottlenecking often orchestrated by petrostates. Participants met to draft individualized, national transition roadmaps away from fossil fuels; using more laid back Q and A information sessions, they made unusual progress. The United States was not invited.

That allies grasp the existential imperative to bypass Trump’s destructive impulses is reassuring; it confirms that other nations are not led by idiots.

Green energy dominance is Trump’s worst nightmare

Like a suicidal sadist, Trump is obsessed with increasing reliance on fossil fuels. His attempts to elevate coal are as economically illiterate and embarrassing as his now comical battle against wind energy. The rest of the world, thankfully, has stopped listening. Instead, reeling from oil and gas price aftershocks from Iran, the industrialized world is now running toward renewable energy, to wit:

• In China, President Xi Jinping has called for a rapid acceleration of a new energy system, emphasizing massive development in wind, solar, and hydropower to safeguard energy security.
• The EU has drafted new plans to accelerate clean energy deployment, specifically focused on accelerated investment in solar, wind, and heat pumps to reduce dependence on imported fuels, while also reconsidering nuclear power as a ‘strategic stabilizer.’
• South Korea has committed to a goal of 100 GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030.
• India is now focusing on rapid expansion in solar and wind to diversify its energy supply to reduce dependence on Middle Eastern oil.
• Saudi Arabia, despite being a major oil producer, has doubled its target to ensure 50% of its electricity generation comes from renewables by 2030.
• Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines are accelerating renewable projects with incentives, with private companies in Vietnam abandoning LNG projects in favor of renewables.
• Egypt is planning to transition its electricity supply, now 10% renewable, to 45% intwo years.
• Chile is now facilitating tax credits and supports for electric vehicle (EV) adoption to reduce foreign-sourced fuel dependence.

These developments should give everyone hope. Even if a ceasefire is announced tomorrow, analysts say damage to the oil industry will last for years. Most delicious of all, Trump put it in motion.

Fatih Birol, Director of the International Energy Agency, told The Guardian that Trump’s war in Iran has permanently damaged the industry. Almost overnight, Birol observed, foreign leaders lost faith in fossil fuels, which will cause “a significant boost to renewables and nuclear power and a further shift towards a more electrified future,” he said, which will “cut into the main markets for oil.”

As an anti-science, anti-information nihilism spreads its ignorant rot across the U.S., it is reassuring to know that other nations aren’t similarly afflicted. Idiocracy, it would seem, is not contagious.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

The barely- acknowledged silver lining in Trump’s war in Iran is that it has pushed 30% of the world’s economic power into a race toward renewable energy. Market volatility of fossil fuels, already complex, has become so intolerable due to the oil chokehold in the Strait of Hormuz that nearly 60 nations are mapping out their accelerated plan to abandon fossil fuels.

Legacy cities, built around heavily polluting industries from 1940-1970, inherited dystopian realities, including toxic brownfields, disappearing populations, poverty, declining birth rates, and diminished life expectancy from airborne particulates. Study after study has shown that people of color, many of whom live in legacy cities, face disproportionate health problems from pollution including benzenes, coal ash, airborne particulates, industrial waste, and lead. One study showed that a 10 mile difference in where someone lives can make a 33 year difference in life expectancy due largely to differences in air, soil, and water quality.

As we watch our coastlines sink while fires, droughts and floods increase in intensity, it is only a matter of time before courts begin to compensate victims of mass environmental injury. While legacy cities, comprised of poor and/or black majorities, would make ideal class-action plaintiffs, the best way to avoid a forced national restructuring of the energy map is for state lawmakers to relieve legacy cities from state-sanctioned monopolies that have harmed them for decades.

Republicans should not have a monopoly on energy

Enter the utility monopoly, comprised predominantly of white, mid-to-upper wealth, males. Thirty-four states have created regulated energy monopolies under which competition is eliminated in exchange for “heightened state control”; these controls are exercised to guarantee regulated utilities a certain rate of return on their capital investments, regardless of injuries and pollution caused along the way. The statutes guarantee that the more power plants utilities build, the more financial rewards for their investors, regardless of whether or not those projects injure public health. Even project overruns, where a projected $5 billion plant ends up costing $10 billion, results in greater profits to shareholders, while 100% of the overrun costs are paid for by the consumer.

There is no industry in the free market economy of United States — other than the energy industry — where a given, controlled, highly lucrative ROI is legally guaranteed.

Utility monopoly states have established public utility monopolies to control local electricity production and distribution. Through public utility commissions (PUCs), they govern and regulate monopolies conceived as vertically integrated businesses, meaning the monopoly provides service from front (generation) to end (the consumer meter.) The entrenched array of state-controlled monopolies throughout the U.S. resulted in increased reliance on coal and coke powered facilities that leach chemicals toxic to human life in predominantly black, brown, Asian, and poor communities.

Follow the Money

The Trump administration is fighting climate progress in unprecedented ways. This month, Trump’s Justice Department sued Minnesota to block a state-level lawsuit against oil companies, arguing that the well-pleaded lawsuit is an attempt to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. This action follows a 2025 executive order directing the DOJ to protect energy production from state-level climate lawsuits, and complements Trump’s relentless efforts to increase reliance on fossil fuels to enrich and protect his deep-pocket fossil fuel donors.

While litigation winds through the federal courts, states could take matters into their own hands by transferring green energy generation to legacy cities and away from monopolistic utilities. The policy change would bring a profound economic shift by offering sustained economic opportunity to poor people, people of color, and others who live next to industry that ravages its host. This is an economic restitution approach based on evidence that black, brown, and poor citizens are disproportionately harmed by industrial pollution, toxic brownfields, and airborne particulates linked to living in legacy cities.

Redress is not suggested — nor recoverable — for decisions made in the 40s and 50s about where to site polluting industry. Demographics have shifted, and many entities have engaged in corporate shell games designed to insulate them from misdeeds of their corporate forbears.

But today there is no shortage of alternative energy firms with green energy expertise to share with municipalities in exchange for a share of the profits, if only they were not barred by artificial market constraints of Public Utility Commissions. It’s not hard to draft a 30-year lease where the energy developer provides expertise and equipment, and the city provides land, tax and permitting incentives. Over time, shared profits would gradually shift to the city while private investment is recovered.

Environmental justice would benefit the planet

Bringing energy autonomy to legacy cities would present a viable and sustainable economic justice model. Exempting legacy cities from PUCs, or state restraint, as compensation for decades of pollution and diminished life expectancy seems like a win-win, especially compared to the potential devastation of a well-funded class action.

A simple exemption for legacy cities would free 48 cities to set up green utilities through public-private ventures of their own choosing, and would soon provide cash-strapped cities more than enough money to enhance city services and possibly pay dividends to residents. Instead of drowning in debt, legacy cities could soon pave roads, buy municipal EV fleets for police and fire, and provide the kind of early education that gives urban youth a real chance at succeeding.

The war in Iran hits home how absurd it is to extract limited fossil fuels and export them around the globe when wind and solar power exists in everyone’s back yard. Black, brown, and poor communities disproportionately poisoned by fossil fuels own the wind and sun as much as anyone else, and should not have to sue the richest defendants in the world just to get their fair share. As long as we inhabit a spinning ball that circles the sun, we will have all the wind and solar energy we will ever need.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

I just opened an online image so beautiful it stopped my thoughts, cut them off midstream so efficiently I forgot where they were going.

The image, captured in this glorious video from Renee Volpe, shows a bird constructing its home from young leaves she sews together with leaf thread. She suspends her architectural marvel from an attached leaf (almond tree?), a condo perched between branches, shielded from rain and hungry eyes. After she builds the walls, she lines the floor with softness, perfect for cradling her own belly and bellies soon to peck free from speckled eggs. I googled, ‘What yellow bird sews its own nest?’ and learned that it’s most likely a tailorbird, known for weaving natural materials into habitats.

The bird’s soft beauty speaks- white collar, yellow jacket, hat and pants in matching orange. But it was her purpose, her drive to protect and cradle life, that leapt from the screen and shook me. Her wordless mission said to stop staring at the destructive craziness du jour leaching from the White House and intuit, just for a moment, the real intelligence of life.

The bird’s quiet resolve somehow reminded me that the psychopath we’ve loosed on the world is only transitory. Even the concentration camps he’s building with critics’ names on them will eventually crumble. As horrific as this moment in America is, all of it will pass.

A bird builds a nest. A predator tears it down.

I write, too often, about what is wrong in the world. From where I sit, most roads to death and cruelty are built by emotionally stunted men too short on intelligence and too long on world-destroying power. On a good day I see them as a blip, a wrinkle, a mistake along our evolutionary continuum. Their self-preserving greed and wanton cruelty are nothing new; those traits have been with man since we first stood erect. Even today, despite the clear hindsight of history, the stupidest among us somehow still believe that naked aggression reflects superiority.

One of the deadliest Cro-Magnon predators to walk the earth has attacked ten different nations in as many years. Starting wars with no purpose other than to satiate an insatiable ego, he demands a prize for spreading peace, as if willing green to become yellow will make it turn. Despite his relentless attacks on science, he has unearthed one unwelcome truth: if he repeats a lie often enough, some not-insignificant cohort of the U.S. population will believe it is true.

The bird, our bird, is blissfully oblivious to a force so ravenous it took a wrecking ball to the White House, a force hellbent on destroying history because he knows history will not spare him. Our bird’s indifference reveals the glaring dichotomy of co-existing forces on earth: those that protect life, and those that destroy.

Intelligence can be deceptive

My mom tried hard to raise Catholic children. Her best efforts, thwarted by a hard life, began and ended with sending us to Catholic schools. When I was about nine years old, waiting in line for communion, I studied—really studied—the Stations of the Cross along the wall: violent whips, nails through bloodied hands, crowns made from thorns. Staring too hard or just hard enough, I suddenly realized I was being manipulated. This wasn’t a message of god, goodness, or the sublime, this religion wanted to control people, using fear.

For about the next thirty years I considered myself an atheist; researching “religious” cruelties through the ages delivered easy confirmation. Yet I still re-learned, whenever I walked in nature, that a vast intelligence lived there. How else to explain an acorn?

I’ve learned since then that trees and plants communicate with each other. Plants’ communication systems are composed of underground fungal networks, electric signals, and chemical signals. They don’t debate, they just work quietly to absorb sunlight and nutrients from the earth around them, making good use of what the stars sent us billions of years ago.

A bird? Or divinity?

One day, walking through the trees, my dearest friend Lois Osborn convinced me that I wasn’t an atheist after all. How can you sense the rightness of the universe and not believe in god? For someone so convinced of their own intelligence, how can you be so blind to deep contradictions? We agreed, finally, that god (“life force,” if you will) exists in the propulsion of life.

Lois, I’ll add, is an old school Christian. She believes there’s an evil force in the world akin to a biblical Lucifer. She believes in judgment—in another place and time, she might wear a MAGA hat. But she harbors an immense dislike for cruelty. She sees that MAGA Christians embrace cruelty as a form of governance that hurts others with no real thought of what Jesus would do. So I channel Lois as I watch the tailorbird video on repeat like it’s a drug.

Yes, an ugly annihilatory force is afoot in America, one that may reshape our nation for generations to come. We have no choice but to fight it. But along the way, we have to take breaks and touch grass. And we have to remember that even if this ugliness culminates in the worst possible outcome, some tailorbird, somewhere, will survive, peck through the ashes, and rebuild its nest.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Donald Trump, currently arguing on appeal that the 1st Amendment protected his right to incite the J6 mob, simultaneously claims the 1st Amendment does not protect a comedian’s right to insult him.

Two days after a man tried to enter the Correspondents Dinner armed with weapons, Trump took to Truth Social to blame Jimmy Kimmel. In his post, Trump relayed a Kimmel joke about Melania glowing “like an expectant widow,” then leapt to causation, claiming, “A day (after Kimmel’s joke aired), a lunatic tried entering (the Dinner) loaded up with a shotgun, handgun, and many knives… so many people are incensed by Kimmel’s despicable call to violence... Jimmy Kimmel should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC...”

The next day, Trump’s FCC ordered ABC to file early license renewals for all eight ABC-owned and operated TV stations. It was an unprecedented move, served under the pretext of ‘investigating diversity programs,’ but no one is fooled. Mimicking Nixon’s threats to TV licenses during Watergate, Trump is threatening broadcast licenses over political speech he doesn’t like, an obvious mob-boss challenge to longstanding First Amendment law.

Pot, meet kettle

In gaslighting lost only on the deliberately obtuse, Trump keeps blaming adversaries for the rise in political violence he has spent years orchestrating. A sore loser who launched a violent coup then teased a “bloodbath” if he lost four years later, a man who joked about a brutal hammer attack, who called for shooting protestors then justified the deed, who equivocates when Democrats are shot or firebombed, who posts snuff videos of murders on the high seas, a felon who has so frequently, so routinely encouraged political violence it’s the subject of online tallies and predictive markets, reflexively blames the victim. America, it seems, has married an abuser.

Since every accusation with Trump is a confession, his attempt to silence critics compels a closer look at the First Amendment butchery he keeps foisting on federal judges, who aren’t having it. Under two federal rulings, Trump now stands financially exposed for damages he caused on J6, despite his claimed First Amendment protection, for incitement. Under long standing Supreme Court precedent, incitement is speech “directed [at] producing imminent lawless action, and likely to do so.” That has been the legal definition, separating incitement from First Amendment protection, for over fifty years.

In a landmark 2022 ruling, the D.C. federal district considered Trump’s January 6 Ellipse speech in its entirety and context, and concluded that his statements were plausibly words of incitement not protected by the First Amendment. Instead, those words were implicitly “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and [were] likely to produce such action.” In the most recent J6 civil ruling, Trump again claimed his words were not incitement, because he didn’t specifically intend what came next. The judge disagreed. (Lee v. Trump, p. 62).

Trump incites political violence then hides from it

Trump claims that the one time he used the word “peaceful” during his fiery speech on the Ellipse outweighed the multiple times he exhorted followers to “fight.” After spending weeks fraudulently convincing supporters that the 2020 election was “stolen” from them, he told the gathered mob on J6, “We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” He uttered these words immediately before telling them to “march to the Capitol,” where 7 people died from the resulting violence.

Trump’s legal team insists that it can’t be proved that Trump “intended” to produce imminent lawlessness on J6, so the incitement exception to the First Amendment isn’t met. Even if that were somehow creditable, what he said during the violence confirmed his approval.

Trump’s first tweet while the capital was under attack was aimed at the Vice President. At 2:24 p.m., Trump tweeted while rioters brandished a noose with Pence’s name on it that, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution…” And that was it. Instead of stopping what he started, Trump spent the next three hours fully secure, safely enjoying the melee on TV in the White House dining room, where his silence also spoke volumes. Trump’s last tweet expressed solidarity, telling the rioters, “We love you, you’re very special…I know how you feel...”

Ordering the removal of magnetometers confirms violent intent

This month’s J6 ruling also discussed how Cassidy Hutchinson, then-assistant to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, was with Trump immediately before the Ellipse Speech. In her closed door testimony before Congress, she said she heard Trump complain about the Secret Service’s magnetometers (‘mags’) that blocked people with guns from the rally. Trump said, ‘You know, I don’t F’ing care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the F’ing mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here.” When told the magnetometers could not be removed, Trump said, ‘F-- the Secret Service. I’m the President.”

In short, Trump’s intent to incite political violence on J6 was corroborated by a first-hand account of his state of mind, moments before addressing the crowd. It may not amount to a criminal confession, but it proves that Trump’s J6 speech was incitement deserving of no First Amendment shield.

Escalating with ABC, Trump and Carr have armed their assault on free speech. They may be able to gaslight a public stupefied by Fox News, but the rest of us, including Kimmel’s six million fans, aren’t fooled. Now that federal courts have twice taught Trump what the First Amendment isn’t, maybe Kimmel will soon teach him what it is.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.