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.

The Society for the Rule of Law (SRL) self describes as a group of conservative and libertarian lawyers. SRL presents center-right opposition to Trump’s authoritarian power grabs using traditionally conservative constitutional arguments.

This week, the SRL filed an amicus brief against Trump’s Executive Order 14399, “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.” Trump’s ostensible goal in EO 14399 is to prohibit non-citizens from voting, a problem repeatedly debunked as non-existent. The real goals are to disenfranchise non-MAGA voters, intimidate election officials, and cast doubt on Republicans’ widely predicted trouncing in the midterms, lest results be construed as a rejection of Trump.

Read plainly, Trump’s EO repurposes the United States Postal Service into a partisan regulatory tool controlling federal elections, directing USPS to screen and deliver mail-in and absentee ballots only to addressees included on Trump-approved voter lists. It requires the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Social Security Administration (SSA) to prepare and send a list of U.S. citizens eligible to vote in federal elections to state elections officials. Under the EO, all outbound ballots must use Intelligent Mail barcodes for tracking; envelopes must be marked with the “Official Election Mail” logo, and USPS is instructed to maintain an approved Mail-In and Absentee Participation List to cross-reference Trump’s list of ‘eligible voters’ with transmitted ballots.

To be clear, Trump has no statutory or constitutional authority to regulate elections; that power belongs primarily to the States. USPS, in particular, has no statutory authority to have any role in administering voter lists. EO 14399, only one piece of Trump’s election-rigging agenda, complements his push to nationalize elections, his insistence that red states gerrymander their congressional maps, and his SAVE Act, which would disenfranchise up to 83% of eligible voters.

An autocrat’s solution in search of a non-existent problem

Anyone kicking the tires on Trump’s nonstop rejoinder blaming immigrants for his election losses knows it’s absurd. Federal law already prohibits noncitizens from voting, and has done so for over 100 years. As of 1924, all states had banned noncitizens from voting in federal elections, and by 1996, Congress had added criminal penalties. Facing up to five years in federal prison and immediate deportation for even registering to vote, no immigrant in his right mind would try.

To become U.S. citizens and thus be eligible to vote in federal elections, immigrants must first receive legal permanent residence (aka getting a green card) and typically spend five years in that status before becoming eligible to naturalize. In the case of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, they face a complicated path of a decade or longer to U.S. citizenship and may never find a pathway.

Statistics reflect the hurdles. A Brennan Center for Justice study of the 2016 election found just .0001% suspected noncitizen voting out of 23.5 million votes cast, while forty of 42 surveyed jurisdictions reported no known incidents of noncitizen voting whatsoever. Even the Heritage Foundation, committed to an illiberal interpretation of the U.S. Constitution (and the architects behind Project 2025), scoured the nation for immigrant voting fraud and found only 24 cases of noncitizens voting between 2003 and 2023. Other analyses found similarly low numbers depending on the date range, identifying 77 confirmed cases from 1999–2023, and only 68 total cases dating back to the 1980s.

The law as it exists, not as Trump wants it to

The Society for the Rule of Law argues that using the USPS to manage voter lists and regulate ballot delivery both exceeds Trump’s executive authority and violates constitutionally mandated separation of powers. These are largely the same legal impediments identified in over 700 pending cases challenging Trump’s other power grabs, almost all of which invoke wild presidential powers that do not exist, and disregard Congress as the executive branch’s co-equal.

The federal laws relevant to Trump’s EO 14399 charge state agencies—not federal agencies—with the administration of voter registration for elections for federal office. The only two federal laws dealing with voter lists, the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), are statutorily limited in scope and do not provide Trump with the authority he claims.

Under the NVRA, federal authority to issue election regulations is limited to two subjects – a mail voter “registration application form,” and reports required to Congress every two years assessing the impact of the NVRA and recommending improvements that Congress—not the president— might enact.

HAVA, the other law that would be modified under EO 14399, was passed in 2002 by the United States Congress to make sweeping improvements to voting systems and voter access. HAVA as enacted emphasizes that voter lists are to be “defined, maintained, and administered at the State level.” It also mandates that the “specific choices of methods of complying with the requirements of HAVA” shall be left “to the discretion of the State.”

It’s good to see conservative pushback

Federal law as it currently exists does not authorize any federal agency to compile, provide, or administer voter lists. Trump’s grubby fingers notwithstanding, under existing federal law, voter lists are compiled and maintained by the states where voters live, not the federal government.

Trump has demonstrated that he will do anything to stay in power, including mass violence, including breaking the law. (See: J6.) As one Secretary of State recently put it, “I don’t think we can put anything past this administration.”

It’s increasingly obvious that Trump is headed for a belated reckoning with American voters. What has not been so obvious is that dedicated conservatives are also fighting back. As Republican lawmakers demonstrate obeisance, compliance, and intimidated alignment with Trump’s plan to trample the Constitution, it is comforting to welcome conservative lawyers like SRL to the resistance.

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.

With all the ruin emanating from the Oval Office on a daily basis, it’s easy to fall into quiet despair. Following the news feels like monitoring a malignant tumor as it spreads outward from the epicenter of the free world, jumping oceans, URLs, and psyches, threatening the globe on macro and micro levels simultaneously. Only this sickness, this decidedly opportunistic cancer, has never been seen before. Certainly this level of rot has not been diagnosed in our 250 year history.

Trump’s singularly corrupt and destructive appetite, both fed and insulated by the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, is hard to stomach. After SCOTUS handed criminal immunity to a psychopath, despondency set in as the world resentfully assumed that Trump would get away with his crimes against humanity forever.

Then, just there, on the unlit edge of the blackest cloud to have darkened the world in a very long time, a glimmering trace of silver peaked out. In a development that should have streaked across the headlines, but barely got a mention, a federal judge ruled that Trump will pay for at least one of his crimes: J6.

Trump will likely lose his ill-got gains

Measuring the amount of corruption lining Trump’s pocket is like shoveling on a snowy day. As of late January, Trump had pocketed upwards of $4 billion from untraceable crypto currency ventures, suspicious market manipulations, and outright bribery from foreign and domestic sources during his first year back in office. He’d better be thinking on how to hide it, because on March 31, 2026, U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta ruled that Trump. Is. Civilly. Liable for the damages he caused on January 6, 2021.

Judge Mehta’s cautious 79 page ruling (found here) denied Trump civil immunity through a careful analysis largely devoted to distinguishing between Trump’s criminal actions as an office-holder (official-acts immunity), and his actions in seeking office, which were not official acts and therefore are not immune. The decision carefully followed the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, and will allow claims against him from members of Congress and capital police officers to proceed to trial.

After a prior ruling that Trump’s speech on the Ellipse plausibly amounted to incitement, which is not protected under the First Amendment, Trump’s legal team sought to substitute the United States as the defendant under the Westfall Act, arguing that Trump’s acts fell within the scope of his employment as President. That motion was denied. The critical contextual question, following the 2023 decision in Blassingame v. Trump, was whether Trump was speaking or engaging in conduct “in an official capacity as office-holder or instead in an unofficial capacity as office-seeker.”

Applying the immunity ruling, the court observed that “many uses of the presidential bully pulpit fall comfortably within the outer perimeter of [the President’s] official responsibility” and are therefore immune. “The Court’s approach recognizes that presidential speech on matters of public concern will very often be official—and thus immunized.” But the immunity decision itself recognized that there may “be contexts in which the President, notwithstanding the prominence of his position, speaks in an unofficial capacity—perhaps as a candidate for office or party leader.” Trump, 603 U.S. at 629. Acting or campaigning to attain the Office of the President, is not an official function of the office.

Proving damages will be easy

The cause-damages link on J6 is obvious.

On December 19, 2020, Trump sent out a tweet targeting extremist groups, urging them to come to the U.S. Capitol to make their anger known about a “stolen” presidential election. In follow up communications, he teased a “wild” rally, and convinced 74 million supporters who had voted for him that their votes weren’t counted, which, predictably, angered them.

On Jan. 6, 2021, on the White House Ellipse where his summoned supporters gathered, Trump gave a fiery speech telling those in attendance, “We fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” He then urged them to “walk down Pennsylvania Avenue” to “take back our country.”

Following Trump’s instructions, the summoned people then marched to the Capitol Building, which they breached with unprecedented political violence seen around the world. Although many people pleaded with Trump to stop the violence, he safely enjoyed it on TV for over three hours before he told rioters to stop.

At least seven people died from the attack.

Trump will bring this same contempt to the courtroom when he is personally sued for billions over J6, when he falsely brays, again, that he won in 2020. Juries don’t like him, most Americans don’t like him. He has assaulted women, stolen from our nation, and put our fragile democracy on life support. No verdict will be too high, and Americans are here for it.

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.

Hungary’s outgoing Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was hailed by the U.S. right as a Trump-like authoritarian. Orbán, an anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-feminist macho man who self-described as “illiberal,” was the Heritage Foundation’s darling. As foundation president Kevin Roberts described Orbán’s ‘soft dictatorship,’ Hungary was “not just a model . . . but the model,” presumably for turning the U.S. into full-fledged fascism following Project 2025’s blueprint.

As Steve Bannon put it, Orbán was “Trump before Trump.” In power for 16 years, Orbán was called a “21st-century dictator,” a populist strongman, and an authoritarian capitalist. Deliberately pulling Hungary’s “illiberal state” model away from Western European dogmas Orbán considered too egalitarian and liberal, he drew inspiration instead from the oppressive dictatorships of Turkey, Russia and China.

Trump, Vance and the architects of Project 2025, in turn, drew inspiration from Orbán.

Similarities between Orbán and Trump are no accident

Orbán deliberately eroded free markets and the rule of law, goals Trump has adopted with uneven success. Orbán damaged the Hungarian economy through crony capitalism and corruption. He, like Trump, concentrated economic power by empowering and enriching loyalists while weakening the judiciary. Like Trump’s latest moves to ‘own’ equity stakes in corporations seeking regulatory approval, Orbán also created a high-corruption environment that concentrated power among loyalists, widening the gap between Hungary’s haves and have-nots.

Orbán also used the weight of a fascist state, including financial and regulatory measures, to silence critics and kill Hungary’s independent media. Trump flexes similar strongman tactics in the U.S. on a near-daily basis. From direct funding cuts, to FCC/ regulatory ‘investigations,’ to physical restrictions on journalist access, Trump has shown unprecedented aggression in seeking media control.

Critics also describe how Orbán routinely created “imaginary enemies” to distract voters, another Hitlerian maneuver perfected by Trump. From falsely depicting immigrants as violent criminals, to accusing DEI programs of ‘white bashing,’ Trump constantly stokes social division by creating then perpetuating imaginary enemies. Even during his infamous DoorDash delivery this week, Trump clumsily interjected “men playing women’s sports” into a staged conversation about taxes on tips. The forced non sequitur was awkward for its obviousness.

Let the repairs… begin!

Orbán’s delicious comeuppance—a real landslide, unlike Trump’s claimed landslide—will help restore Hungary’s ties to Europe, after years of Orbán efforts to sever them. It will also help Ukraine survive Putin’s illegal invasion.

Newly elected Prime Minister Peter Magyar has already said that Hungary will stop being Putin’s puppet, and will no longer block EU aid to Ukraine or sanctions on Russia. For his part, Zelenskyy hailed Magyar’s win as ‘the victory of light over darkness.’

The website Direkt26, a rare independent outlet still functioning in Hungary, documented how Orbán colluded with Putin over the years, with Orbán describing himself as a ‘mouse’ to Putin’s ‘lion.’ Just before the election, at a Budapest concert, thousands of concertgoers chanted “Russians, go home!”—a public acknowledgement of the problem and the same chant their grandparents used when Russia invaded Hungary in 1956.

Trump, Vance lose their poster boy

As positive as Orbán’s defeat is for Hungary, Ukraine, and the EU, the sweetest reverberations are yet to come— in the U.S.

In the last weeks of Orbán’s campaign, Trump, Vance, Putin, and other authoritarians formally endorsed him. Vance, who broke with longstanding US diplomatic precedent by campaigning for him in person, spoke at a rally in Budapest and declared, "We have got to get Viktor Orbán reelected!"

Double blind to irony, Vance urged Hungarians to act “with no outside forces pressuring you,” despite his own outside pressure on them. Vance seems to assume Orbán voters are as intellectually impaired as Trump’s supporters.

Best of all, Vance’s appearance helped the opposition. Magyar was able to use Vance’s 11th hour appearance as evidence of Orbán’s open embrace of foreign interference, contrary to Orbán’s constant harping against the foreign influence of Brussels, or the EU. Magyar, decidedly not blind to irony, used Vance to flip Orbán’s rhetoric against “Brussels bureaucrats” back onto him, using it to highlight Orbán’s own reliance on Trump/Vance/ Putin’s political backing.

Democracy: 1, MAGA: 0

The Conservative Political Action Conference (C-PAC), an amalgam of populist and far right activists undecided on women’s suffrage, converged on Budapest for four consecutive years to foster ties between America’s far right politicians and those in other countries. Perhaps, with Orbán gone, C-PAC will meet instead in Moscow. Good riddance.

Trump’s domestic agenda so obviously follows Orbán’s that someday, if Fox News ever decides to report the truth, voters in MAGA will eventually catch on. Orbán used consolidated cronyism and corruption to stay in power for 16 years. The parallels with Trump are obvious.

Come November, the parallels in their political fates will also emerge. As Ian Bassin of Protect Democracy put it, the most important lesson from Orbán’s landslide loss, despite Orbán controlling Hungary’s media and judiciary, is that “(E)ven a guy who rigs the system can be defeated when the people unite and turn out against him.”

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.

Trump’s Armageddon insanity in Iran reminds me of an old funny-not-funny joke:

‘When it’s my time to die, I want to go peacefully and in my sleep, like my uncle. Not screaming in terror like his passengers.’

The world is careening as an indulged manchild sets the world on fire, while Republicans in Congress dishonor their Constitutional oaths by refusing to stop him. From burning hellscapes in the Middle East to the earth’s rising temperatures, Trump is the quintessential arsonist with a hose: Douse the flames with gas, brandish a spigot, then demand adulation for putting out the fire.

The new ceasefire in Iran, like the one in Gaza, is already shaky. On Monday Trump threatened the world with his own deranged ramblings about the stone age, on Tuesday Americans ate tacos Fox News called ‘victory,’ and by Wednesday bombs were falling again as the Strait of Hormuz was decidedly not open. To Trump’s credit, no one was talking about the Epstein files.

Turns out Trump can’t control Netanyahu, who, continuing the bombing campaign, is as concerned as Trump about staying in power, but isn’t as concerned as Trump about the price of gas. Maybe Trump should have considered the trajectory of Bibi’s political motivations before he let him drag us into Israel’s forever war.

Nah. Just kidding. Anticipating global consequences exceeds Trump’s capacity. But even as we inch ever closer to 12 on the Atomic clock, signs of intelligent life are beeping.

Military brass understands the assignment

Last November, after Trump and Hegseth released one snuff video after another bragging about murdering people on the high seas, Senator Mark Kelly and five other veteran lawmakers released a video reminding U.S. service members that they must refuse illegal orders, citing canned, non-controversial military code. Even though they were announcing the law as it is plainly written, the video got under Trump and Hegseth’s skin, and led them to “investigate” to try to silence Kelly, a retired Navy captain.

Hegseth claimed that Kelly citing the military code of conduct—which Hegseth considers “woke”—was somehow ‘conduct unbecoming an officer.’ Setting aside the scary optics of a Secretary of Defense (not War, sorry, until Congress says so) openly rejecting civilized laws of war, it seems Kelly’s public service announcement may have hit its mark.

Because on Tuesday, MSNBC aired an interview suggesting that military officers were rejecting Hegseth’s civilian targets.

When a dry drunk tells you to bomb civilians, JUST SAY NO

Trump and Fox News may have sold Trump’s surrender to Iran as victory, but hope lurks yet beneath the surface. Because while our Commander in Chief has been tanking 80 years of post-WWII diplomacy, there’s evidence that military brass has been pushing back.

On Tuesday, April 7, Retired Army Major General Randy Manner appeared on MS NOW, where he told Nicolle Wallace that he had secondhand knowledge that military officials were saying “no” to Pentagon leadership. General Manner said in part:

The idea of attacking bridges that are clearly, overwhelmingly for civilian use would be a war crime, and the planners in CENTCOM would not permit that. I have indications that many targets recommended by the Secretary of Defense were rejected by CENTCOM (because) they were civilian targets… It’s secondhand knowledge, but I believe people are already saying no to the hierarchy.”

Because Trump and Hegseth fired JAGs as the first order of business, and excluded military lawyers from strike planning, mapping out the combat missions in Iran falls to CENTCOM, U.S. Central Command. Officers at CENTCOM are now the last line of defense against unlawful orders.

It is reassuring, to put it mildly, that while Republicans are letting a lunatic destroy the global order that has protected America for 80 years, military leaders are taking their oaths of office seriously. Rejecting Trump’s blatantly unlawful orders, military brass is standing up where Congress won’t.

Even Tucker Carlson gets it

Trump’s profanity laden Easter message revealed his frustration at being sold a quick and easy war in Iran, which has turned out to be anything but. Threatening war crimes, he posted that, “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran…–JUST WATCH!” He ended his petition for involuntary civil commitment with a mocking, ‘Praise be to Allah!’

There’s no real debate about whether threatening to obliterate 92 million people is a war crime. Nor is there real debate, outside the Fox News propaganda network, about how insane, provocative, and dangerous it was.

Even rightwing firebrand Tucker Carlson was outraged. Carlson urged members of the administration and military to resign if given illegal orders to slaughter civilians. Taking severe umbrage at the mocking “praise Allah” part of Trump’s message, Carlson asked, “Who do you think you are?” Carlson told Trump, “(Y)ou are not God. And only if you think you are, do you talk this way… (We are) not a theocracy. We don’t go to war with other theocracies to find out which theocracy is more effective…”

Color me shocked. A broken clock strikes at just the right moment during one of America’s darkest hours. It reminds me of another favorite saying, this one of hope:

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”- Albert Camus

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.

From his first days back in power, Trump has set about remaking the nation’s capital in his own gilded image.

He paved over the 1903 Rose Garden, then matched the new patio to his Mar-a-Lago hotel, demolished the entire East Wing, and spray painted Oval Office fixtures in a

Let-them-eat-cake gold frenzy. The Kennedy Center, left alone until one artist after another refused to perform there following Trump’s rebrand, is now facing an unplanned two year “closure” for “comprehensive renovations.” Still in the works are Trump’s massive ‘arch de Trump’ between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial, the conversion of three historic municipal golf courses into private, luxury courses, and a 90,000 square foot ballroom styled after his Palm Beach bordello that will dwarf the White House.

The Commission of Fine Arts is an independent federal agency established by Congress to advise the President and Congress on aesthetics and design in order to preserve the quiet dignity of the nation's capital. After Trump packed its governing board with allies, the Commission voted to approve his gold-appointed ballroom, no notes. However, on March 31, 2026, in a delicious smackdown that got out-noised by Trump’s WWIII insanity, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon put a pin in it.

Addressing the planned ballroom, Judge Leon wrote that the President of the United States “is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families,” however, he is not the owner.

What gives Trump the right to redraw the nation’s capital?

Facing down Trump’s claims of foolproof authority to control what happens to the White House, Judge Leon belabored the historical context in which Congress —not the president— has always controlled construction at the White House. His opinion can be found here.

Leon started by noting that the original White House construction was directed and funded by Congress. The initial build was quickly followed by repairs necessitated by the War of 1812. From there Leon detailed how Congress appropriated funds for construction of the South Portico in 1823, the North Portico in 1829, and the East and West Wings in 1902. In the late 1940s, Leon noted, after the discovery of major structural issues, Congress appropriated funds for “the renovation, repair, and modernization” of the White House but prohibited any change of the “architectural appearance of the exterior of the mansion or the interior of its main floor.”

Despite the clarity of historical precedent, easily found on the White House’s own Historical Association website, the White House announced in August 2025 that, “President Trump, and other patriot donors, have generously committed to donating the funds to build” a 90,000 square foot ballroom, at “zero cost to the American Taxpayer!” (Cancer! Lobotomies! at zero cost!)

Less than two months later, photos circulating online confirmed that the East Wing had been entirely demolished to make way for Trump’s ballroom eyesore.

National monuments don’t belong to Trump’s oligarchs

Trump has claimed repeatedly that he, not Congress, possesses vast powers to control the nation’s purse strings. To construct his ballroom, he claimed the right to supplant Congressional funding with money donated by his wealthy donor class, as if centuries of American tradition could be restyled in Trump’s taste by simply paying for it. Trump’s ballroom donors wouldn’t have $400 million laying around to begin with if not for Trump’s $117 billion in tax cuts lining their pockets.

Issuing a preliminary injunction against the ballroom’s construction last week, Judge Leon ordered it to “stop until Congress authorizes its completion.” Under 40 USC. § 8106, in effect since 1912, “[a] building or structure shall not be erected on any reservation, park, or public grounds of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia without express authority of Congress.” The statute further instructs the Secretary of the Interior to protect the District of Colombia’s scenery, natural and historic objects “in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

Trump’s legal team tried numerous spins around these statutory hurdles, but Judge Leon rejected them in turn, ruling that “no statute comes close to giving (Trump) the authority he claims to have” to bypass Congress for such major alterations, regardless of who’s paying for them.

Ultra vires: ‘beyond the powers of,’ ‘unauthorized’

Letting Trump and his oligarchs pay to control the landscape of our nation’s 235 year capital is blatantly unethical. Donor entities such as Amazon, Apple, Meta, Google, and Microsoft, defense contractors, and cryptocurrency firms paying for the ballroom expect paybacks in the form of regulatory breaks, merger approvals, more tax breaks, and lucrative federal contracts. That’s why the Antideficiency Act restricts government agencies from accepting private funds without explicit authorization from Congress- to prevent people and corporations from donating to the government in order to buy influence.

Trump, above that law thanks to SCOTUS, is now freely and openly selling influence and accepting bribes. Aside from the obvious corruption of pay to play, by revising national monuments with private funds, Trump is also trying to transfer the power of Congress, a co-equal branch of government, to his own corporate donors. That Congressional Republicans are letting him do it suggests severe pathologies and hints at a flaw in our founding document.

Fittingly, as to Trump’s lamentations that the work had already begun on the ballroom, with the destruction of the East Wing now leaving an unsightly mess, Judge Leon called it “a hole of the President's own making.”

If that’s not a metaphor for this disastrous presidency, nothing 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.

The First Amendment strictly prohibits the government from favoring one faith over another, or from endorsing religion in general, whether through subtle or not-so-subtle means. As it evolved from Constitutional text into the canons of caselaw, that framework has protected the plurality for over 250 years by heeding our founders’ warnings to keep church and state separate.

In 1962, the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause for public school officials to sponsor or encourage prayer in school. State regulations in New York required public schools to open each day with both the Pledge of Allegiance and a nondenominational prayer in which the students recognized their dependence upon an un-named and unspecified God. Under that law, students could absent themselves from the prayer if they found it objectionable. A parent sued.

The Court found that the recitation of a state-composed, non-denominational prayer in public schools was a form of religious indoctrination, even if the prayer was not specific to one denomination, even if it was optional.

The rub then and now is that “optional” participation in a setting controlled by the government is never completely optional. The Jewish kid, the Muslim kid, the Buddhist kid, or the child taught to love God as nature instead of a vindictive creep in the sky has to set themselves apart from the other kids in order not to participate in the prayer. Even standing there silently while the popular kids mouth the prayer all around you can signal difference— defiance against the norm, even. Given stigma and peer pressure, the Court acknowledged that there are social ‘costs’ for not adhering to the group norm. That’s why reinforcing religion as a norm is a form of government indoctrination prohibited under the First Amendment.

Hegseth: First Amendment Who???

Despite the decades-long smacking clarity of the law, Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News bobblehead who renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War without permission from Congress, can’t stop imposing his own religion on the military.

Hegseth holds a monthly Evangelical prayer service at the Pentagon. He announces and promotes his monthly worship coven, what some have called “combative Christianity,” through formal announcements to the troops, and by encouraging attendees to spread the word.

Similar to the school prayer case, these ‘voluntary’ services aren’t entirely voluntary even though Hegseth says they are. They are held in the official Pentagon auditorium, and are broadcast on the Pentagon’s internal TV network, a system designed for maximum saturation at military installations available to over 1.4 million active duty personnel, 1.2 million National Guard/Reserve, 650,000 civilian employees, and thousands of military residents.

The First Amendment is woke now?

Hegseth also promotes his personal pastor who preaches that women shouldn’t have the right to vote, and has brought him to the Pentagon. Through this and other means, Hegseth is moving to advance white, male Evangelical troops by merging his brand of church with his brand of state.

The Pentagon says Hegseth is embracing America’s proud history as a “Christian Nation,” which reflects this administration’s appalling historical ignorance. It’s a problem, not just because it’s an ignorant violation of our most revered First Amendment, but because it divides the troops and is therefore dangerous.

Military safety requires troop cohesion, which is why, throughout history, enemies frequently try to divide opposing troops. Hegseth, now in command of the world’s most powerful armed forces, doesn’t seem to grasp this basic, fundamental, ‘War for Dummies’ military logic. A scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs said it best: “The ideological consolidation of the military is something that we have historically not wanted. We want the military to be diverse. We want the military representative of the American people.” To be obvious about it, would you want your son in the trenches with someone he doesn’t fully trust, or who doesn’t fully trust him, because their religious differences have been amplified?

The Pope to Hegseth: God doesn’t like your hateful ways

In promoting Trump’s illegal war in Iran, Hegseth recently invoked Christ’s name in wishing for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.” Setting aside the blatantly anti-Christian message of “violence” and “no mercy” for human beings, which also violates international laws of combat, Hegseth’s prayer lusts shamefully for violence. Pope Leo XIV isn’t having it.

Pope Leo, in an indirect but pointed rebuke, said during his Palm Sunday Mass in St. Peter’s Square that “God doesn't listen to the prayers of those who make war, or cite God to justify their violence.” Opposed to Trump’s war in Iran, he then prayed for the Middle East, tacitly acknowledging that civilians, as well as troops under Hegseth’s command, are in danger given Hegseth’s obsession with “killing” people without regard to law.

The chilling effects of Hegseth’s attempt to impose Christian Nationalism on the troops are real. One senior Army civilian who has worked in the Pentagon for decades told the Washington Post that, “people who work there are afraid to talk to one another or their superiors about concerns over Hegseth’s actions…limits that used to exist around proselytizing have evaporated under Hegseth.” The situation, the person said, is “terrifying: If troops are trained to believe that God is on our side, what precludes us from doing anything we want to win? The strength of our military is our people, and their sense of belonging to their unit and their service.”

Advancing Christian Nationalism among the troops is not just an affront to U.S. history and the most revered First Amendment to the Constitution, it puts soldiers at risk. Here’s hoping the Generals are talking amongst themselves.

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.

As the price of oil explodes, Trump is doing everything he can to kill cheap energy alternatives. The administration just announced that the U.S. is paying one billion dollars to a French company, TotalEnergies, to cancel wind farm projects already underway, in exchange for new investments in oil and gas. Darwin posted a cryptic ‘SMH’ in response to the news.

Doug Burgum announced the deal, claiming, “the era of affordable, reliable and secure energy is here to stay.” Someone might want to tell Burgum that we’re in the middle of a war proving just the opposite. With crude oil prices skyrocketing, and WWIII looming over the Strait of Hormuz, there’s nothing reliable or secure about fossil fuels except for campaign donations to Trump.

Trump’s war on alternative energy has led to an extraordinary transfer of public money to prop up fossil fuels, the main driver of climate change, which Trump still calls a “hoax.” Trump’s fight to overrule science and abandon all climate protections seems more like a compulsion to destroy than to govern; Trump likely assumes he’ll be pushing up daisies before Big Oil ever compensates victims for over $3.1 trillion in climate damages to date.

Courts are stopping Trump’s war on cheap energy

In December, in continued service to Trump’s fossil fuel donors, the Interior Department ordered all work to halt on five wind farms, claiming the projects were a “national security” threat. But a Reagan-nominated judge, after reviewing the classified security report under seal, didn’t see any claimed threat, and ruled that the administration's order halting the wind projects was pretextual and unlawful.

It was the fifth consecutive court victory for wind developers, and it allowed all halted projects to resume.

In an earlier ruling, after the administration issued a stop-work order against another wind project that was already 90% complete, the same judge found that Trump was “vocal in criticizing offshore wind farms for reasons unrelated to national security.” As of two weeks ago, that project was back up and running, delivering enough power to New England’s electric grid for 350,000 homes, saving residents $500 million a year. Trump, now paying companies not to produce wind energy that saves Americans money while saving the climate, again looks like a force of deliberate destruction.

The earth is cooking. Only an idiot would turn up the heat.

Last Friday, four different locations in Arizona and California hit 112 degrees, passing the continental U.S. record by 4 degrees for the hottest day in March. The record-breaking heat is expected to continue with a huge heat dome spreading across the country. As it moves eastward, the dome may unleash one of the most expansive heat waves in American history.

On March 23, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO), reported that the 11-year period ending with 2025 was the hottest in recorded human history. 2024 was identified as the hottest year ever, followed closely by 2025, confirming an accelerating climate crisis. Despite climate damages already topping $150 billion annually, Trump continues to lie about the causal connection between burning fossil fuels and climate change.

Instead, on brand, the administration is erasing the evidence. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which formerly tracked the cumulative and rising costs of climate-charged weather events, now displays an ominous message on its public website: “In alignment with evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) will no longer be updating the Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters product.”

Trump clearly doesn’t want taxpayers to know how much they are paying for local climate damage as they subsidize his wealthy fossil fuel donors.

A scorched earth war in Iran continues the pattern of destruction

While Trump is busy dropping bombs and threatening power plants in Iran, the high-tech munitions in use by all sides are scorching the earth with irreversible deep-soil chemical runoff and chemical saturation. When warhead toxins and heavy metals like lead, antimony, chromium, and arsenic burrow into the soil and penetrate the deep earth, the region’s capacity to grow food and support wildlife is damaged for generations. These pollutants also leach into groundwater where they are absorbed by any crops that do manage to grow. Meanwhile people in the region are being warned that the air is not safe to breathe, as sooty rain falls from a black sky.

The Guardian reports that the war in Iran is not only causing severe environmental damage, it is also accelerating climate destruction, with the emission of 5 million tons of CO2 in just the first 14 days. The soil where the missiles land will not grow food again in our lifetimes.

Sometimes when I’m trying to make sense of the world, I wonder whether Trump is a death force meant to accelerate our species’ removal from the planet. Random cell mutations that serve no purpose other than the destruction of life sometimes form in our bodies. Maybe the planet, also a living organism but of unfathomable intelligence, is hastening our demise so it can get back to healthy trees, clean mountain air, and streams full of salmon. If Trump is but a malignancy meant to usher us off the earth more quickly, maybe MAGA is right, he really is ‘chosen.’

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.

On March 21, at 7:44 pm, Trump threatened to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants if Iran didn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours. He posted his threat on social media (so transparent! so strong!), promising that if Iran didn’t open the Strait “within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time,” the U.S. “will hit and obliterate” their power plants. And, because the world is his subordinate, he thanked it for its attention to this matter.

Iran relies on 130 thermal plants across the country for more than 95% of its electricity. Targeting all those plants would be a war crime. (This is my own legal opinion so I’m skipping the favored punt, “likely,” as in, it would likely be a war crime. Those lawyers are likely afraid of being sued; this one likely is not.) Intentionally bombing any non-military infrastructure essential to the survival of civilians, like power plants, is a violation of international humanitarian law.

Why? Because when power plants collapse, water pumping and desalination stations stop functioning. With no water, civilians die from dehydration and organ failure, some within days, some within hours. Children and the elderly die first. When hospitals lose power, life-support machines shut down, and surgeries are cancelled. Food production and distribution also collapse without power. Amnesty International observed that, “By threatening such strikes, (Trump was) effectively indicating willingness to plunge an entire country into darkness, and to potentially deprive its people of their human rights to life, water, food, healthcare and adequate standard of living, and to subject them to severe pain and suffering.”

TACO, anyone?

Instead of immediately capitulating, Iran was immediately defiant and threatened war crimes of its own, again against energy and desalination facilities. It’s like watching a cage match of hairy fisted cavemen, only with forced audience participation. We’re paying $8 billion a week for Trump’s war instead of subsidizing healthcare, but we’re getting off relatively easy: Iranians are getting bombed and their children are dying.

Iran told Trump to pound sand and raised him one, promising to close the Strait completely if Trump carried out his threats. Just when the barrel he’d voluntarily jumped into was about to go over Niagara Falls, Trump jumped out. He announced that the U.S. and Iran had suddenly engaged in “constructive” talks and that he was, therefore “pausing” his 48 hour ultimatum.

While Trump managed to save face for now, Iran said there were no such talks, and vehemently denied his claim. Their foreign ministry said there had been “no direct or indirect contact” with Washington whatsoever. So either Trump fabricated an off ramp from his own jump, or the talks are so secret only Jared Kushner knows about them. Trump didn’t say who was doing the talking (strategic ambiguity? or obviously lying?). Perhaps Trump and Jared are sending “constructive” texts to each other.

The war will go on, even if Trump withdraws

In front of audiences that don’t ask hard questions, Trump has repeatedly claimed that the war is “already won” and “very complete.” He told Fox News that he would end the conflict in Iran whenever the hell he felt like it. “It’ll end,” Trump said, when “I feel it in my bones.”

Someone in Trump’s orbit must have figured out by now that Iranians have bones too. The U.S. can’t unilaterally stop Iran from attacking Israel, U.S. assets or the Gulf states. After Trump intentionally alienated allies and started a war without consulting them, the U.S. and Israel stand alone. Even if the U.S. withdraws altogether, Iran is now issuing demands including massive reparations.

Multiple analysts report that Iran is better positioned for a protracted war on its own terrain than the U.S. will ever be. Even though the U.S. enjoys overwhelming conventional military superiority, a protracted conflict would favor Iran’s “asymmetric strategies” including proxy militias, drone swarms, and missile attacks.

Trump made Israel’s problem America’s problem

Just before the bombing started, it looked as if U.S. and Iranian negotiators might have struck a deal. Oman's Foreign Minister, Badr al-Busaidi, acting as a mediator in the talks, reported a potential breakthrough on Feb. 27. He announced that Iran was willing to stop stockpiling uranium, and that a deal on inspections was “within reach.” Unlike his fabricated ‘constructive’ talks, Trump didn’t give the real negotiations 5 days but instead started bombing the next day, on February 28.

Israel had lobbied for US military action against Iran for decades, claiming Iran posed an existential threat to Israel, but other presidents could not be persuaded. Presidents Bush and Obama routinely rejected Israel’s requests because they wanted to avoid another unpredictable Middle Eastern conflict that would exacerbate regional destabilization and bring high U.S. casualties.

Both presidents opted for diplomatic solutions instead. Under the JCPOA, which Trump killed, Iran agreed to constrain its nuclear program by limiting its fuel cycle activities and the production of weapons-grade uranium or plutonium. Iran also agreed to unannounced inspections. But in 2018, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the JCPOA, claiming not that Iran had violated it, but that it was a ‘bad deal.’ Trump argued that the deal's expiration dates or ‘sunset dates’ on some restrictions could eventually lead Iran down a "legitimate" path to a nuclear weapon. Sounds familiar. Also sounds like he killed the deal, and we are at war for Trump’s ego, because it was an Obama achievement.

No one knows where, when, or how this war will end, least of all Trump. In war, nothing is ever certain. But I feel confident I can offer at least this one guarantee: Whatever happens, no matter how many more Americans, Iranians, and others die, Fox News will declare Trump victorious, and 38% of the nation will blindly celebrate him as a hero for it.

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.

After WWII showcased the horrors of unchecked aggression, “War Departments” around the civilized world became “Departments of Defense.” Following the deaths of 60 million people, leaders of democratic-led nations embraced a shift from offensive victory to integrated deterrence and unified defense.

The pivot in both strategy and messaging was adopted to stop future Hitlers. The U.S. led the way as free nations embraced the United Nation Charter with international laws of war, mutual security, and human rights. In 1947 the U.S. War Department became the National Military Establishment, then all branches of the U.S. military were consolidated into the Department of Defense two years later.

Dismissing the lessons of that era as if human nature had somehow fundamentally changed in eighty years, Trump renamed the DOD the Department of War last September. The shift in messaging was not subtle: Trump considers warlike aggression a brandable asset. Consistent with his rebrand, Trump now uses the most vitriolic war-mongering language ever used by a sitting president.

Trash talking the enemy

There’s a reason world leaders practice restraint in war messaging. To garner respect and military alliances, raw military power must project sobriety, caution, and respect for international laws of combat. Excessive bellicosity and the rejection of restraining norms suggests a lack of maturity or worse—that the leader has gone rogue. No peaceable nation wants to align with a nakedly destructive force; no citizen takes comfort in knowing unhinged toddlers have access to nuclear weapons.

Trump, nevertheless, mocks moderation. A little more than a week ago, Trump announced that he would hit Iran “twenty times harder” and make it “virtually impossible for Iran to ever be built back as a Nation” after “death, fire and fury (rains) upon them.” Last week he suggested he might bomb Iran’s Kharg Island oil export hub “just for fun.”

Trump spews low-intellect bellicosity like a WWE fighter with too many blows to the head. But query who—and what— this kind of talk incites. Debasing foreign nations, threatening their citizens with non-existence, sows deep-seated hatred and long memories. It may make Trump feel powerful today, but U.S. citizens will eventually pay the price.

Inciting terrorism

Trump’s base loves his war-like rhetoric because they are oblivious to consequences. Studies show direct links between hateful speech, terrorism, and mass atrocities; aggressive rhetoric makes it more acceptable to dehumanize other groups of people. This effect is not limited to domestic actors; the internet carries Trump’s nonstop social media posts of hateful aggression around the world and lands them on terrorists’ hand-held devices.

While tracing direct causation can be difficult, research shows that the cumulative effect of anger rhetoric from a world leader is the creation of an international climate that both legitimizes and increases the likelihood of terrorism. Trump’s use of such rhetoric has already triggered more anti-American sentiment, decreased tourism, and raised safety concerns for American travelers abroad.

The administration knows the way Trump talks could attract another 9-11, which has led some analysts to conclude it’s intentional. The theory, whether paranoia or pattern recognition, is that Trump will parlay any terrorist attack into expanded presidential authority to keep himself in power.

“Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic” news organizations

To drive it home, the administration is trying to force main stream media to adopt Trump’s preferred narrative on Iran, or what FCC Chair Brendan Carr calls “pro-America” content. Trump rails against “truly sick and demented people” in the media who report unflattering accounts of the war. Last Sunday, he attacked a reporter as “a very obnoxious person” for asking, very simply, why we’re sending 5,000 US troops to the Middle East.

Carr, meanwhile, is ratcheting up public threats to revoke broadcast licenses from television networks deviating from the preferred narrative. When CNN detailed how Trump underestimated Iran’s ability to close the Strait of Hormuz, then confirmed that the U.S.—not Iran— deployed the Tomahawk that killed 175 children, Hegseth hissed, “the sooner David Ellison takes over (CNN), the better.”

It’s obvious to anyone paying attention that Trump started a war in Iran without considering the consequences. It’s also obvious, thanks to Hegseth’s admission and the right wing capture of CBS, that Carr is trying to outlaw criticism. As Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) put it, “This is the federal government telling news stations to provide favorable coverage of the war... We are not on the verge of a totalitarian takeover. We are in the middle of it.”

A war that focuses on… messaging?

Trump and Hegseth spent last week attacking the news media over polls that show low public support for the war. As Trump tries to thwart Iran’s efforts to block the oil route amid skyrocketing global oil prices, his messaging gets harder.

Trump/Hegseth/Carr’s focus on media coverage suggests that the problem in Iran isn’t the ill-conceived war, the destruction, the economic fallout, or the humanitarian disaster Trump single-handedly created. The problem, to them, is narrative control.

It tracks. Trump became president by selling fantastic claims to a gullible public; he’s just continuing the strategy. After Carr establishes state-run media, modeled after Hungary and Russia, Americans will stop hearing bad news about Iran altogether. When the next 9/11 strikes, we will hear only praise for Trump, who attacked a nation that did not attack us first.

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.

When the U.S. sent troops into Iraq, 76 percent of Americans approved, after the President spent a year explaining why: First, Bush/Cheney sold the belief, even if contrived, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Second, intelligence claimed that Iraq had close ties to al-Qaida, which was responsible for 9/11.

In Afghanistan, even more Americans—92%— approved of military intervention. Bush communicated a strong national security drive to destroy al-Qaeda training camps, remove the Taliban from power, and assist in creating a regime that would not incubate or harbor terrorist cells hellbent on harming Americans.

Throughout messaging on both campaigns, Bush skillfully showcased U.S. alignment with foreign allies. Bush brandished a coalition of more than 70 nations offering military assistance for both wars, including intelligence, airspace access, and troops for combat operations.

To the American public, solidarity among democratic allies signaled rightness of cause.

Trump didn’t bother with any of that

Fast forward to 2026, Trump, and the war-not-war in Iran.

On February 28, 2026, in the middle of the night, Trump released an 8 minute video announcing that the U.S. had already begun ‘major combat operations’ in Iran. He hadn’t pre-sold his war to Americans, suggesting disinterest in their buy-in. He hadn’t tried to sell the war to Congress either, suggesting fear of scrutiny.

Had a Constitutionally-required debate taken place, complexities involving the Strait of Hormuth, the logistics of global energy, and how attacking Iran would increase the price of oil would have surfaced. Instead, three weeks later, Trump has still not articulated non-contradictory reasons, or specific military objectives, for the war. So no one should be surprised that only 20% of Americans support sending in U.S. troops.

Trump insults allies then expects their support

Trump’s messaging failure at home is even worse among our allies. Just in January, Trump said NATO troops “stayed a little off the front lines” when helping the U.S. in Afghanistan, an outrageous insult not only to our allies, but to the memory of soldiers who perished there.

Trump, while consistently praising Putin, has a well-documented history of publicly insulting America’s allies: France’s Emmanuel Macron is “nasty,” and “nobody wants him;” Angela Merkel “ruined Germany;” Canada’s Justin Trudeau was “dishonest and weak,” then Prime Minister Mark Carney was the “future Governor of Canada.” He called Denmark’s Prime Minister “nasty” for rejecting his plan to purchase Greenland, and claimed he instructed the UK’s Theresa May “how” to effectuate Brexit, which proved disastrous for the UK’s economy.

The jabs and insults flew during his first term then morphed into an economically illiterate tariff diplomacy in his second term. He is now trying to alpha the world by imposing tariffs on American consumers.

Following his sophomoric and self-defeating attacks on our allies, Trump now “demands” their help in Iran.

The bully needs a favor

Now that oil has topped $100 a barrel, Trump needs our allies—the ones he harmed economically and insulted like an 8th grade bully—to send back up warships to the Strait of Hormuz, the passage for 20% of the world's oil. On March 14, Trump declared that other countries should secure the Strait even though he endangered it without first consulting them; he reiterated his petulant cry on March 16.

Trump also promised that the U.S. Navy would guarantee the safety of all maritime traffic in the Strait. Since the Strait remains closed to the US and our allies, it’s pretty clear the U.S. Navy can guarantee no such thing.

By Sunday night, Trump signaled that the U.S. could not go it alone, and threatened repercussions for countries that refused to help, telling reporters, “I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory, because it is their own territory.” He added the next day that, “The United States should not be very much involved” in the strait, asking illogically why we aren’t being reimbursed for the effort and the economic fallout he unilaterally foisted on the world.

Insulted allies are not moved

Most U.S. allies have responded to Trump's request for help in the Strait of Hormuz with yeah, but no.

Germany’s Defense Minister stated, “This is not our war; we did not start it.” Throwing Trump’s endless chest beating back in his face, he added, “What does Trump expect from, let’s say, one or two handfuls of European frigates in the Strait of Hormuz that the “powerful American Navy cannot accomplish?”

The UK’s Prime Minister said the UK “will not be drawn into the wider war” with Iran. The French foreign ministry said much the same, while the Polish foreign minister said that Poland had also “ruled out” sending forces into the conflict. Japan’s Prime Minister said there were no current plans to dispatch warships; Australia’s Transport Minister noted that Australia ‘is not contributing to this specific military effort.’ Spain also declined participation, labeling the conflict “illegal” while also banning U.S. aircraft from using joint bases in the war.

Consequences

Allied responses to Trump’s request hit home how grievously Trump has injured America’s standing in the world. Our relationship with NATO and other allies may never recover.

As the EU foreign policy chief put it, “This is not Europe’s war. Nobody wants to go actively in this war, and of course everybody is concerned what will be the outcome.”

It’s a shame Trump didn’t anticipate the predictable volatility of energy prices before he attacked Iran; it’s a shame he didn’t consult allies first. Mainly, it’s a shame Americans elected a president who doesn’t understand that a pugnacious bully will never have friends when he needs them.

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 recently told reporters he’d have “no problem” releasing video of US strikes off the Venezuelan coast where two survivors clinging to the shipwreck were shown no quarter — executions that violated federal law, the US Code on War Crimes, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice prohibiting murder.

But when asked about the video three days later, Trump denied ever agreeing to release it, claiming, “You said that, I didn’t say that. This is ABC fake news,” before pivoting to “whatever Pete Hegseth decides” to release to the media will be fine with him.

It was a safe punt. The Secretary of Defense has fought media access to the Pentagon like no secretary before him. Hegseth will keep spinning his “kill everyone” strikes, his Signalgate publication of war plans, and every other military crime he can get away with until he is stopped.

Ministry of Truth

Hegseth, a former Fox News bobblehead with barely-there military credentials, fights the release of any Pentagon information that he hasn’t choreographed.

In September, Hegseth announced a new DOD policy that essentially required journalists to get his permission before they publish. Journalists were required to sign pledges acknowledging that if they ask the wrong questions, or probe into department employees in any way that could elicit the wrong kinds of information, they could be labeled a national security risk, lose their Pentagon press badges, and be blocked from the building.

When Hegseth announced the change, credible media outlets cried foul.

The New York Times called it an attempt to “constrain how journalists can report on the US military, which is funded by nearly $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars annually,” adding that the public has the “right to know how the government and military are operating.”

The National Press Club echoed that with, “For generations, Pentagon reporters have provided the public with vital information about how wars are fought, how defense dollars are spent, and how decisions are made that put American lives at risk. That work has only been possible because reporters could seek out facts without needing government permission.”

Last week, the NYT put teeth into their criticism, and filed suit to restore media access.

Illegal 'prior restraint'

Hegseth’s reach for a “media oath” smacks of prior restraint, a type of government censorship before publication that has long been deemed unconstitutional. Several early cases examined when national security interests were strong enough to overcome First Amendment freedoms in times of war; during WWII, “Loose lips sink ships” reflected an awareness that advance public disclosure of military secrets could be dangerous.

But in 1971, the Supreme Court held that prior restraint on speech by the government is unconstitutional, requiring an "exceptional" showing of "grave and irreparable" danger.

In The New York Times vs. the United States, the Nixon administration tried to block publication of the Pentagon Papers by arguing that publication of classified documents about the Vietnam War would endanger national security, necessitating prior restraint to protect vital security interests. The Supreme Court ruled that the public’s right to know outweighed the danger of publication, and that vague security claims aren't enough to censor the press.

In order to support an issuance of prior restraint today, the government must prove that publication would cause inevitable, direct, and immediate danger to the United States. In Hegseth’s “kill everyone” bombings, it’s hard to fathom how releasing video after the fact would jeopardize anything other than his own spin, as all victims are dead, their ships obliterated, and Trump himself repeatedly posts snuff videos of the violence.

National security risk

Blind to irony, both Hegseth and Trump have personally modeled why some military secrets should not be published, at least not in advance of the act.

In March, Hegseth’s Signal chat published US plans of attack in Yemen, including the exact time and location of the planned attack, which easily could have led to ambush or counter attacks costing American lives.

In June, Trump posted that the US knew where Iran’s enriched uranium was stockpiled, giving Iran advanced warnings to move it before the bombing began, which Iran did.

Both Trump and Hegseth seriously jeopardized national security by releasing US military plans of attack in advance, which no media outlet has sought the right to do.

Nonetheless, Hegseth’s new media restraints require Pentagon approval before public release of even unclassified information, because “unauthorized disclosure … poses a security risk that could damage the national security of the United States and place personnel in jeopardy.”

Press in MAGA hats

After 80 years of free press access to the Pentagon and military professionals who work there, Hegseth has granted himself sole authority to determine when journalists pose “national security risks.”

Based on a journalist's “receipt, publication, or solicitation of any ‘unauthorized’ information,” Hegseth has unbridled discretion to block, eject, and blacklist them. This amounts to authority to revoke reporters' access to the Pentagon for engaging in lawful newsgathering, which is an illegal, prior restraint to stop speech before it happens.

Hegseth has now replaced all credible media outlets with MAGA content creators, whom he welcomed to the Pentagon earlier this week for press briefings. These MAGA influencers, despite their lack of reporting or military beat experience, are the “new Pentagon press corps.” They include the My Pillow guy, nutjob Trump whisperer Laura Loomer, and Tim Pool, who was paid to produce videos for a company secretly funded by the Russian government.

All of them signed Hegseth’s required pledge.

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

On November 26, 2025, in a quiet northern suburb of Hong Kong, an aggressive fire broke out in the middle of the day. The fire was unusual in its intensity and duration, consuming 7 of 8 high rise towers in a residential complex. Despite the quick response of well-equipped fire trucks, the blaze spread quickly and burned for more than 43 hours.

Although the death toll is not final, at least 160 people suffered the most horrific deaths imaginable, with dozens so charred they may never be identified.

The ferocity of the fire has been blamed on a private contractor’s use of highly flammable materials including polystyrene foam boards placed over windows, along with substandard scaffolding netting that failed to meet fire-retardant codes. The buildings were undergoing renovations when the fire hit, and numerous fire alarms also failed to warn.

The fire could have been prevented with government inspections

A tragedy like this gives pause, in part because it should have been prevented. Fire analysts say that more rigorous inspections, including thorough sample testing of materials used on higher floors, not just of easily accessible ground level floors, would have identified the use of non-compliant, cheaper materials before the blaze started.

Although the Chinese government will never admit any fault for the inadequate inspections and has instead jailed people for asking, it’s already clear that standard building inspections would have prevented the loss of life. Lapsed and loose inspections, and possible corruption, meant officials did not detect that flammable materials were used where they should not have been, or that fire safety systems were not functioning, despite residents alerting officials of these problems a year prior to the fire.

It’s also the kind of tragedy lying in wait in the US, ready to strike after Trump's all-out war on safety standards and regulations meant to protect the public.

The Trump administration has put Americans in danger

Since his re-election, Trump has rewarded his corporate donors by dismantling costly regulations they dislike. In the process, time-honored regulations and safety standards that quietly protected life have been gutted, setting us up for a Hong-Kong tragedy of our own.

Federal government regulations designed to protect health and lives include, in the broadest sense, workplace safety, transportation safety, food and drug safety, and environmental protection. Under Trump 2.0, each of these categories of protection have either been gutted outright, or are now so attenuated due to funding cuts they barely function.

Each federal agency with regulatory authority, including OSHA, the FDA, the EPA, and DOT, among others, has been significantly weakened with reduced investigations into wrongdoing and corruption, and fewer cases for failing to comply with safety and environmental standards. Trump has also imposed across the board budget cuts for regulatory enforcement, including inspector staffing across a wide spectrum of industries.

None of these changes will continue in a vacuum; other than ignoring climate change which is already wreaking havoc, we won’t know what other unenforced regulation will lead to tragedy until it strikes.

Trump’s attacks on regulatory agencies

Under Trump’s profits-first-people-last strategy, the EPA has launched the largest deregulatory action in U.S. history. Trump dismantled EPA regulations protecting air, water, and soil, relaxed emissions standards for power plants, increased toxic vehicle emissions, weakened water protections, limited scientific research into the risks, and rolled back greenhouse gas reporting and soot standards, all to boost industry profits at the expense of citizens who live and work in those communities.

Trump also shuttered 11 OSHA offices in states reporting unusually high workplace fatalities, most of them Republican controlled. Louisiana, for example, ranks the sixth most dangerous state for workers in the U.S. Louisiana is also home to more than 200 chemical plants and refineries dotting an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River dubbed “Cancer Alley” because of the high rates of cancer and birth defects linked to petrochemicals.

Former OSHA Director David Michaels said that with these closures, “enormous oil and petrochemical facilities with significant safety and health hazards will be inspected even less frequently than they are now.”

According to DOGE, the government will save $109,346 from the closures.

Statistics are only dry until you’re in them

If a Hong Kong-type tragedy strikes, Trump will first block information about it, Karoline Leavitt will call it fake news, and Fox won’t report it. Then, after the tragedy dominates mainstream media headlines, the whole administration will pivot to blaming Biden.

But the danger is real, it is now, and it is not about politics.

Americans have lived for generations with barely-there inspections, leading to Cancer Alleys, occupational disease, dangerous products, collapsing infrastructure, etc. But now Trump has expelled almost all regulatory watchdogs in service to his corporate donors. Because less regulation means higher profits, corporate America is rewarding Trump handsomely in what amounts to quid pro quo.

In a functioning democracy, this would amount to criminal recklessness. In a rule of law republic, the resulting tragedies, when they strike, would lead to charges of foreseeable homicide.

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

]The latest South Park episode nailed it: When “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth gets wind of a small Colorado town’s annual holiday race, he declares it an “Antifa uprising” and calls out the troops to crush it. While armed forces assemble their AK-47s, Hegseth struts around filming himself for well-coiffed social media content, unaware that his obsession with “lethality” looks unhinged.

South Park’s point, previewed during Hegseth’s shameful speech at Quantico, and his sophomoric tome championing war without rules, is that Donald Trump has reduced the US military to an absurdist prop so grotesque it raises questions of insanity.

After a series of US strikes in the ocean killed 87 people suspected of trafficking drugs, strikes properly assessed as murder regardless of whether people died in the first, second, or whichever strike, Congress is finally alarmed as calls for Hegseth's impeachment grow.

Strikes cannot be justified

Two days after the Washington Post first reported that Hegseth issued a command to “Kill them all” in a September attack on the high seas, which led to a second strike that killed survivors, Hegseth posted a juvenile cartoon making light of his own crime. Hegseth’s post depicted a chubby turtle standing on helicopter skids, laughing as he fires a bazooka close-range at boats below.

Aside from depicting the slaughter of humans as a children’s war game, Hegseth’s post also perpetuates a lie: Neither drugs, nor rifles, nor weapons of any kind have appeared in any of the snuff videos Hegseth and Trump keep posting to brag about the killings. To date, the administration has offered no intelligence or evidence whatsoever, other than Trump’s personal opinion, to support the claim that the destroyed boats were carrying drugs, arms, or illicit cargo. Even if they were, military law requires interdiction, seizure and process, not unilateral, on-the-spot executions.

Hegseth also claims the strikes are in compliance with the laws of armed conflict, and “approved by the best military and civilian lawyers, up and down the chain of command.” Except there weren’t any top lawyers left “up and down the chain of command” after Hegseth fired the top Judge Advocates General (JAGs) for the Army, Navy, and Air Force in February.

JAGs come back to haunt

The JAGS didn’t slink away quietly. After Hegseth fired them, they formed a watchdog. Former JAGs Working Group. now warning that Hegseth’s orders on the high seas “constitute war crimes, murder, or both.” They also echoed six Democratic lawmakers reminding servicemembers of their duty to disobey patently illegal orders, adding, “anyone who issues or follows such orders can and should be prosecuted for war crimes, murder, or both.”

After Hegseth and Trump appeared to throw commanding officer Adm. Frank Bradley under the bus, blaming Bradley, not Hegseth, for the second strike that killed the survivors, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt read a statement that Bradley’s conduct was “well within his authority and the law directing the engagement.” Except, of course, it wasn’t.

The administration seems to be arguing that the strikes are lawful, despite not knowing the identities of anyone onboard, because Trump has “determined” that the US is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels. But Congress has not declared any such war, and one-sided orders to execute suspects do not constitute an ‘armed conflict’ under any military code.

The State Department’s designation of drug cartels as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” does not provide legal authority to execute them because the “imminent threat” rule limits lethal force to immediate threats to life. Trump/Hegseth’s assumption that these small boats: 1. are carrying drugs; 2. are destined for the US; 3. will make it that far; 4. without sufficient fuel; 5. will eventually cause deaths; 6. of some Americans; 7. who choose to use the drugs, does not support an “imminent threat” analysis under any law, for reasons that should be obvious from the string-along assumptions listed.

Guilt (and execution) by association

After the first boat strike on Sept. 2, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the military could have interdicted the vessel, which is how the Coast Guard normally responds to drug vessels, but chose instead to kill everyone on board because Trump wanted to “send a message.”

Hegseth continues to parrot Trump’s “message,” posting recently, “Every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization,” and, “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.”

It matters little which strike ended the lives. Trump’s legally suspect campaign of executing people based on a suspicion that they are smuggling drugs didn’t start with Hegseth’s order to “Kill them all,” it started with Trump’s assumption that the presidency makes him judge, jury and executioner.

Legal authorities rejecting Trump’s assumption include the DOD’s Law of War Manual; the Hague Regulations; the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act; the Uniform Code of Military Justice prohibiting extrajudicial killings; the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and state and federal statutes prohibiting murder.

People disinclined to read the law but inclined to think the government can execute people suspected of committing crimes should consider: If a police officer thinks I am going to beat my wife when I get home, can he shoot me in the face before I get there?

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

In late November, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent instructions to US diplomats directing them to sell Trump’s immigration policies to allies who don’t want them.

In a barely reported move, Rubio instructed American diplomats serving Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada to start “raising concerns” about “immigrant crime” with foreign leaders, while encouraging them to adopt harsher entry restrictions.

Rubio’s directive suggests he is unaware that Canadian, and most European leaders, regard Trump as an undisciplined moron. Unable to read the global room, Rubio instructed American diplomats to “regularly engage host governments” on immigrant crime, and to ‘report back’ on allies who seem “overly supportive of immigrants.”

The goal, Rubio said, is to build foreign support for Trump’s “reform policies related to migrant crime, defending national sovereignty, and ensuring the safety of local communities.”

The result, most likely, will be a collective eye roll.

Rubio is exporting lies

Trump, Fox News, and hard right politicians like Viktor Orban have built their brands around fear mongering, portraying immigrants as dangerous criminals. But educated leaders outside the right wing echo chamber instantly recognize these claims as false.

In 2024, the National Institute of Justice released figures comparing arrest rates between undocumented immigrants and native born US citizens, tracked over a seven year period. The study found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born citizens for violent and drug crimes, and at a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes. For homicide, undocumented immigrants had the lowest arrest rates throughout the entire study, averaging less than half the rate of US-born citizens. Another multi-year study from Stanford shows the same, with immigrants 30% less likely overall to commit crimes than US born natives.

Studies in Europe show similar results. In Germany, where Elon Musk’s darling, the far-right Alternative for Germany party claims that “violent gang rapes” and “knife crimes” by immigrants are “skyrocketing,” media outlets' fact-checking teams showed those claims were false. In early 2025, researchers found no correlation between immigration and crime rates in Italy, Germany, the UK, France and Belgium. The same results were reported in August for Canada and Australia.

Most importantly, disinformation is more tightly controlled in Europe, and the news media is not allowed to fearmonger the way Fox News does, so when Trump tries to export his playground bully diplomacy, members of the public are more skeptical.

Trump is trying to export economic failures

Setting aside perceptions, foreign leaders are aware, even if Trump is not, that his anti-immigrant push has hurt global and local economies.

In the US, no sector has been hurt more by Trump’s anti-immigration push than farmers. American farmers today say their #1 challenge isn’t the weather, equipment costs, or even the mortgage- it’s finding enough labor. With over 40% of American farm workers lacking legal status, people who used to do the heavy lifting are now staying home in fear while crops rot in the fields.

When ICE started raiding farms earlier this year, a large California farmer told Reuters that around 70% of the migrant workforce stopped coming to work, which meant “70% of your crop doesn’t get picked.” She also said out loud what Trump refuses to admit: “Most Americans don’t want to do this (backbreaking) work.”

Although ICE’s effect on food supplies will take more time to assess, immigration policies that ignore regional labor requirements are a long-standing problem. Several years ago, the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association begged Congress to expand their accessible labor pool as the dairy industry faces “an acute national labor crisis” without immigrant labor. In 2025, farm labor, and the dairy labor crisis, have worsened.

Industry leaders in Europe say the same. Migrant workers are as crucial to construction, hospitality, and agriculture in the EU as they are in the US. Immigrants in Europe also comprise over 50% of the skilled workforce in technology. Overall, immigrant labor has become more crucial, not less, as Europe faces declining population trends.

Bad timing

Emphasizing foreign ‘sovereignty’ in their anti-immigrant efforts, Rubio and Trump somehow miss that exporting Trump’s xenophobia, and dictating its ignorant spread, doesn’t respect our allies’ sovereignty, it offends it.

Trump and Rubio seem to project their own Fox News-based myopia onto the world, assuming foreign audiences accept their fact-free propaganda as blindly as MAGA does. But they don’t. Fox couldn’t hack the UK’s accuracy-in-the-news legal requirement and stopped trying to broadcast there several years ago. In result, EU audiences are better equipped to discern fact from fiction than far right audiences in the US.

As the administration calls for a travel ban on entire countries full of “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,” Rubio’s timing could not be worse. He is pushing Trump’s hatred just when EU allies are credibly accusing him of blackmail, and South America leaders are accusing the administration of murder.

Rubio obviously misapprehends how little regard Europeans and Canadians have for Trump’s uninformed bellicosity. Poor timing on his immigration cable alone suggests our allies will soon start letting his calls go into voicemail.

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

Back in August, a publication written by and for US military members groused about the danger of National Guard troops performing lawn care in the nation’s capital.

Credibly ranked as having no political bias, The Military Times observed that the real threat to 2,300 troops deployed to D.C. wasn’t Trump’s imaginary “magnitude of violent crime” in war-torn domestic environs, but domestic assignments that rendered them sitting ducks.

Military analysts had warned for months that such deployments presented a “heightened threat environment” that was both wounding morale and risking the lives of enlisted soldiers. Uniformed troops gardening in the US capital also contradicted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s focus on “lethality” and his “warfighting ethos.” After Hegseth announced that any activities that distract from lethality “shouldn’t be happening,” his rake-wielding fighters were mocked by foreign media outlets as “Trump’s lethal landscapers.”

Trump’s use of the military as Made-for-Fox News video props alarmed critics and supporters alike. Aside from sending troops into cities where they are not wanted, Trump’s politicization and purging of the military prompted a rare rebuke from former defense secretaries including Lloyd Austin and Trump’s own first defense secretary, Jim Mattis, who submitted a joint letter to Congress warning about Trump’s recklessness.

Military is legally and functionally different from law enforcement

For more than 150 years, for reasons easily traced back to the founding era, using military troops for domestic law enforcement has been illegal under the Posse Comitatus Act. Unless there’s an insurrection or rebellion, two specific words denoting specific conditions on the ground, a president cannot deploy the US military to enforce federal, state, or local law. The Insurrection Act, widely understood to be an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, also requires specific conditions on the ground such as rebellion or an extreme level of violence necessitating military assistance.

Despite the clarity of federal law, Trump has sent military troops to US cities in the absence of rebellion, insurrection, or widespread rioting, using a revolving door of justifications from “quelling violence in Democratic-controlled cities” and “cracking down on crime” to “supporting deportation initiatives,” meaning, to help ICE, which is another form of domestic law enforcement.

Whatever excuse he trots out, Trump appears to be doing his level best to cause violent rioting in the streets so that there will be insurrection or rebellion. He’s counting on it, even though most Americans do not want cities occupied by troops.

The US military is not allowed to be used for law enforcement, because service members are trained to kill. The military’s primary mission is to defend the nation against foreign threats. Combat-ready military forces are trained to defeat adversaries through readiness and weapons training on lethality, resilience, and mission readiness in hostile environments, prioritizing skills like weapons proficiency, combat tactics, and survival. In obvious distinction, law enforcement officers exist and are trained to enforce domestic laws and protect civilian populations, which is best accomplished through de-escalation, proportionality, and the preservation of life.

Simply put, domestic law enforcement and the US military differ in terms of purpose, training, mission and goals, and it’s both disrespectful and dangerous to confuse them.

Attacking the truth

On Nov. 20, 2025, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s deployment of the military to the nation’s capital was illegal, and ordered an end to it. On Nov. 26, still deployed despite the court order, two members of the National Guard were tragically shot outside a D.C. Metro station while on foot patrol.

After one of the service members died, instead of offering introspection or comfort, Trump lashed out, doubled down, and blamed Joe Biden. Referring to the suspect's origins in Afghanistan, Trump told the press: “There was no vetting or anything. They came in unvetted. And we have a lot of others in this country, we’re going to get 'em out.”

A reporter then pointed out that Trump’s own DOJ Inspector General confirmed the vetting, so why, exactly, was Trump was still blaming Biden? Trump exploded: “Because they let them in. Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person? Because they came in on a plane along with thousands of other people who shouldn’t be here, and you’re just asking questions because you’re a stupid person.”

Trump attacked the question because it didn’t fit his narrative: The shooter, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was thoroughly vetted by both the CIA and the FBI because he previously worked with the CIA in Afghanistan, assisting in US combat missions.

Doubling down on lies won’t make us safe

Military advisers have long warned that putting American military members on city streets put them in increased danger. After the D.C. shooting, a member of the California National Guard texted the New York Times that he “knew that this would happen.” Having served six years in the Guard, the soldier said he and his commanders worried that the assignment “increased our risk of us shooting civilians or civilians taking shots at us.”

Instead of rethinking the obvious danger of putting military troops on US street corners, Trump has decided to double down by deploying 500 more troops to D.C., and stopping immigration entirely from poor nations. DHS announced further that, “The Trump administration is also reviewing all asylum cases approved under the Biden administration.”

Except, as Reuters pointed out, Lakanwal wasn’t granted asylum by Biden. He was granted asylum, this year, by the Trump administration.

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