President Donald Trump has a vendetta against the Presidio, a San Francisco national park site with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge that is supported by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Trump already fired the federal workers who maintain the site — and now one of his longtime lobbyists, a self-described “dirty trickster,” may be helping a Native American group get it.

“In a lobbying disclosure form filed on Monday, Stone’s firm, Drake Ventures, reported that the [Muwekma Ohlone Tribe] had paid it $30,000 for services in the first quarter of this year and another $20,000 in the fourth quarter of 2025,” according to public records obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle on Tuesday.

The report added, “The filing, which doesn’t have any specific information about what the lobbying efforts consist of or whether it’s related to the Presidio, comes nearly two weeks after President Trump terminated the national park’s Board of Trustees.”

The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe has fought for 45 years to be added to the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ official list of recognized tribes, and has called on Trump to “return the Presidio to indigenous care.” The tribal leaders explicitly argue the Presidio should be turned over to them.

“As the current administration works to eliminate the Presidio Trust as part of its effort to streamline the federal workforce, we stand ready to offer a cost-effective, environmentally responsible solution to filling the stewardship void,” tribal chairwoman Charlene Nijmeh stated in March.

“It’s possible that the hiring of Stone could be part of the tribe’s aggressive efforts to obtain federal recognition, a campaign that prompted a confrontation with members of Congress in January 2023 and has generated conflict with other local tribal leaders,” the San Francisco Chronicle wrote. “Recognition would give the tribe’s members new legitimacy, access to federal funds, the ability to purchase land and potentially even lucrative gaming rights.”

Trump holds a grudge against the Presidio because of Pelosi’s involvement with it, including refusing to appoint a seventh member to the Trust’s board of directors and then firing the six remaining members.

“The 1,500-acre recreation hub is one of the country’s greatest public parks,” the SFGate’s Travel Editor Silas Valentino opined about Trump’s policies toward the Presidio Trust. “It deserves better than neglect from its federal leaders, who now stand to answer for any service disruptions impacting the more than 9 million people who visit each year.”

While it would make sense for Stone to support Trump in a vendetta against the Presidio, he has previously affiliated with the white supremacist Proud Boys group and flashed a white supremacist hand signal. (The Proud Boys, which helped Trump in his 2020-2021 coup attempt, denies being white supremacist despite their racist rhetoric and ties.) When this journalist contacted him about those two issues for Salon in 2019, Stone used an expletive to describe claims that the hand signal is white supremacist, even though he later also said “the gesture is used often by President Trump and is used to connote support for the president in photos of the proudboys [sic] nationwide.”

Prominent conservative journalist and author Mona Charen says President Donald Trump invited the high risk of assassination and violence that dogs him today.

“Look, when you incite violence and, and normalize violence, you can't be surprised if there's blowback on you too,” Charen told a panel including MS NOW anchor Katy Tur. “I mean, that is the culture that has been created. And, you know, I think back to the 2015 2016 era where a lot of conservatives consoled themselves, choosing Trump by saying, well, we're not electing a pastor. You know, I don't approve of his personal morality, but, you know, we need a fighter and all of that sort of language. And the fact is that his character did matter.”

Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in particular, delivered a personal plea for additional security funding for the Supreme Court on Tuesday, with Barrett using a hearing before Congress to address personal threats directed against herself and her family.

Tur asked Charen to square that moment with Trump being the target of people “who have tried to kill him now multiple times.”

In the wake of new reporting showing that Iran was plotting another assassination attempt against Trump, Charen brought up incidents of Trump and his family encouraging the kind of violence that Trump now fears.

“One of the most horrific moments in recent American politics was when (former speaker) Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked by a hammer-wielding assailant, and Trump's sons made fun of him online,” said Charen. “I mean, any sense of decency, any sense of — ‘you know our hearts go out to the Pelosi family. None of that. I mean, it was the most grotesque kind of celebration of violence. And, and, and it's true that when it comes from the top, when it comes from Trump, it definitely has a more corrosive effect on the culture.”

Charen also referenced the death of a pharmaceutical company leader allegedly by Luigi Mangione.

“There was a lot of cheering also for him and people saying, ‘well, the guy had it coming,” said Charen. “That, too, is an example of how we're defining deviancy down in our society and saying that if the if the right victim is chosen, then you can applaud political violence.”

She said Trump has changed American and made it more brutal since the time of John McCain.

“Look at the contrast between the clip you played of John McCain, who you can have your disagreements with him, with the man, but he was a decent person who upheld certain standards,” Charen insisted. “He was a leader. Okay? He grabbed the microphone away from that woman when she started expressing racist ideas (About Barack Obama) and contradicted her. Now, in the Republican Party, she'd be a speaker at the RNC.”

- YouTube youtu.be

President Donald Trump is drawing a great deal of criticism from a combination of Democrats and Never Trump conservatives for mixing the federal government with his private business ventures — which, detractors say, is a blatant conflict of interest. And a CNN panel went off the rails on Thursday night when Trump supporter Ben Ferguson went out of his way to defend the president.

Ferguson argued, "We have a president that was really wealthy when he came in, and keeps doing business with his family. There's nothing wrong with it."

But host Abby Phillip and others on the panel pushed back against Ferguson's argument.

Phillip told Ferguson, "You would have been fine with the so-called Biden crime family if Biden had just been transparent — if Hunter Biden had just been transparent? If he had just been transparent and said, 'I'm using my dad's name to make money,' you would have said, 'Totally above board?'"

Ferguson, however, doubled down on his defense of Trump, saying that "Burisma was massive corruption" and insisting that Hunter Biden's business activities couldn't be compared to those of President Trump or his son Donald Trump Jr. Ferguson also mentioned stock trades made by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California). But when CNN's Bakari Sellers jump into, he argued that Ferguson was jumping through hoops to defend the Trumps while making a point of demonizing Democrats.

Sellers told Ferguson, "You ask, what did he do that was unethical or illegal? And I wanted to answer that plain and simply. I take…. yoga, and I feel like you're doing a little yoga too for that pretzel that you got yourself into…. To utilize your phrase, the president makes $400,000 a year. This quarter, he's made over $1 billion — $1.2 to $1.4 billion — on crypto alone…. What I want to tell you that's unethical is the fact that when you make 3500 trades in one year, and you go up and you invest in a company, and then you sit in the Oval Office and you tell people, 'Wow, this company is great. This company is going to do X, Y, Z' or you ease regulations on this company and you trade and purchase stock in that company. That fundamentally is unethical. You can call it what you want."

A Republican politician was given a slap on the wrist for abusing her office to silence a critic of Charlie Kirk.

"[Alaska state] Rep. Sarah Vance — one of the state’s leading Christian Nationalist lawmakers — likely violated state ethics laws when she used her legislative office to threaten the Homer News over its coverage of a memorial she helped organize for Charlie Kirk," wrote The Alaska Current's Matt Acuña Buxton on Wednesday. "Her letter to Carpenter Media, sent on Alaska State Legislature letterhead, sparked a firestorm in local media last fall, with reporters and editors resigning after ownership gave in to Vance’s threat that 'the consequence will be financial as well as reputational' if they didn’t soften the story."

“Vance — who made headlines for, among other things, complaining that a hearing on Missing Murdered Indigenous Women didn’t include the experiences of white women — wrote the letter to corporate ownership, complaining about the Homer News and its local born-and-raised reporter for describing Kirk as espousing ‘often racist and controversial views,’” wrote Buxton on Wednesday.

Despite Vance using her Alaska State Legislature Letterhead to suppress the story, the House Select Committee on Legislative Ethics decided Vance should simply be warned not to do it again.

Vance has consistently complained that attempts to hold her accountable violate her First Amendment rights. Ironically, her letter seemed to have violated the reporter’s rights, as “the story not-so-mysteriously disappeared in the following days, replaced by a rewritten version that sanded off the uncomfortable edges of Kirk’s legacy, without the input or even notification of the local reporters and editors.”

Buxton added, “Dramatically changing a story without a reporter’s and an editor’s input is taboo on its own, let alone the fact that it was corporate ownership bowing to political pressure, and the resulting exodus continues to reverberate across Alaska’s media landscape.” He pointed out that the article did not mention Kirk’s promulgation of COVID-19 conspiracy theories, the racist great replacement theory and climate change misinformation.

“According to the ethics report, Vance didn’t meaningfully participate in the investigation, other than requesting that the complaint be dismissed,” Buxton wrote. “Still, just by looking at the letter, the ethics panel could see that, yes, the letterhead was used, and the committee determined that the contents of the letter fell into the realm of partisan political activity.”

Vance claims that she is the victim.

“The irony is not lost on me,” Vance said in a statement. “The committee contends that calling out partisan bias somehow constitutes partisan political activity. Nor is it lost on my constituents that Charlie Kirk paid the ultimate price for exercising his constitutional right to peaceful free speech, losing his life in an act of political violence. Now, in defending his memory and speaking openly about issues that matter to my community, I find my own speech being scrutinized through a process that many view as an attempt to silence dissent.”

Buxton observed that “Vance’s threats were just one example in a larger conservative cancel culture war over what they felt was unfair treatment of Kirk in the wake of his assassination. People lost their jobs, including a teacher-of-the-year finalist (costing the district $300,000), a university professor in Tennessee (costing the system $1.7 million) and a Florida biologist (ending in a $485,000 settlement). Merely quoting President Trump, for example, was enough to put an ex-cop behind bars for 37 days (netting him a $835,000 settlement).”

Even though prominent Democrats from former President Joe Biden and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and ex-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) immediately denounced Kirk’s shooting, Republicans like President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Fox News commentator Jesse Watters blamed Democrats for the assassination and claimed they rejoiced in his death. This led to a wave of cancellations against individuals who said anything negative about Kirk in the aftermath of his death, and in turn organizations being required to compensate individuals whose rights were violated in the process.

For example, the Republican Oglethorpe County, GA paid $270,420 to high school English teacher Michelle Mickens and $17,080 to her attorney for accurately posting that Kirk had been a gun enthusiast after he was shot to death. It was determined that the district had violated her First Amendment rights.

Despite their many political differences, President Donald Trump and liberal economist Robert Reich have something in common: Both will be turning 80 in June (Trump on June 14, Reich on June 24). Reich, in a Guardian column, lays out some reasons why he believes that Trump is suffering from "diminished capacities" and should be removed from office for the good of the United States.

Reich and Trump, both born in June 1946, are in the older ender of the Baby Boom generation (former President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, all octogenarians born in the early 1940s, are members of the Silent Generation — not Boomers). Different people age differently; Sanders, at 84, still sounds very sharp and focused in speeches. But Reich argues that Trump is sounding increasingly "diminished."

"I do not wish Trump ill," Reich writes in The Guardian. "While he hasn't shown a shred of compassion for anyone other than himself, this doesn't justify any of us lacking compassion for him. It's also in the interest of the U.S. and the world that he be physically and mentally able to discharge the duties of his office. So, we have reason to be concerned about Trump's visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center last week for what the White House described as a 'routine annual dental and medical assessment.'"

Reich stresses that as someone who is about to become an octogenarian himself, he knows how much time can take its toll.

"Trump turns 80 next month," explains Reich, who served as labor secretary in the Clinton Administration. "I feel entitled to comment on the practical meaning of this milestone because I'll also turn 80 next month. He was born 10 days before me. Let's just say that reaching it doesn't mean altogether good things, unless you consider the alternative. Even in a healthy person, small things begin to break down as one approaches 80."

Reich continues, "Everything takes just a bit more time and effort. Joints ache. Energy isn't quite as abundant."

The liberal economist notes that Trump is experiencing "bruised hands, swollen ankles, bouts of drowsiness, exceedingly long blinks during official meetings…. and erratic, if not off-the-charts weird, behavior."

"What's he afraid of?" Reich writes. "Probably that the American public will catch on to his diminishing capacities…. But if Trump can't remember where he put, say, a top-secret memo or why he entered the Situation Room, or if he expresses bizarre impatience, it's a potential risk to the nation and world…. The evidence continues to mount: Trump is clearly incapable of satisfactorily discharging the duties of president of the United States."

Reich adds, "The sooner the 25th Amendment is invoked, or he is impeached, the safer are America and the world."

If there is one lesson that has emerged from the 2026 midterm election primaries, it is that Democrats and Republicans react very differently to ultra-rich candidates.

“Tom Steyer ran for governor of California as a climate crusader endorsed by Bernie Sanders’ political organization, Our Revolution,” wrote MS NOW’s Armand Manoukian on Thursday. “He also spent at least $216 million of his own money on the race — and in the end, that was the only thing voters seemed to remember. With nearly 58 percent of the vote counted, he is running third.”

“The timing is unkind to the ultrawealthy,” Manoukian wrote. “In a March YouGov survey, 77 percent of adults said the wealthy have too much political power, and 52 percent said the government should try to reduce the share of wealth held by billionaires. More than half of adults told a May Politico poll that cost of living is the ‘worst they can remember.’ Against that backdrop, self-funding candidates — once a recruiter’s dream — have become a harder sell.”

Steyer is not alone in falling prey to this problem. In San Francisco, Saikat Chakrabarti fell short in seeking retiring speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi’s House seat. Former venture capitalist Eric Jones similarly fell short in California’s 4th congressional district. By contrast, Republicans still reward candidates with deep pockets.

“In South Dakota, political newcomer Toby Doeden, a car dealership owner, steered $4 million into his own campaign and outpolled the sitting governor in the GOP gubernatorial primary,” Manoukian wrote. “In Georgia, Rick Jackson, a billionaire healthcare executive, jumped into the Republican gubernatorial primary as a political unknown, pledging to spend $50 million of his fortune, then spent closer to $80 million.”

Manoukian added, “Running on the slogan ‘From Foster Care to Billionaire,’ he blanketed local television and advanced to a June runoff, knocking out Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. He’ll face Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who has funded his own campaign to the tune of $17 million.”

MS NOW’s Ja’han Jones similarly reported on the waning influence of Big Tech executives on Wednesday.

“Multiple candidates backed heavily by Big Tech executives floundered in Tuesday’s primary elections, as concerns about the corrosive effects of new technologies such as artificial intelligence tools continue to mount,” Jones wrote. “The clearest examples came in California, where tech executives spent ungodly amounts of money attempting to make sure their chosen candidates emerged victorious.”

To illustrate his point, Jones listed California gubernatorial candidate San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who lost despite being funded by tech executives like Google co-founder Sergey Brin and pro-Trump Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, as well as Ethan Agarwal, a tech investor funded by pro-Trump Silicon Valley executive Marc Andreessen and who challenged Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) by opposing Khanna’s proposed one-time 5 percent wealth tax on billionaires.

Rarely does President Donald Trump evoke bipartisan applause while delivering a State of the Union address, but he inspired just such a moment last February — when he called out former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over her husband's history of stock trading.

"As we ensure that all Americans can profit from a rising stock market, let's also make sure that members of Congress cannot corruptly profit from using insider information," said Trump as members of both parties stood to applaud.

While Republicans and Democrats in both houses have long invested in markets, with some banking huge profits from such dubious trades, it is Pelosi who has endured the most flak. Republican members named a bill to restrict congressional stock trades after her: the Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments, or PELOSI, Act. During that speech, a smirking Trump urged the former speaker to stand up and demanded that Congress "pass the Stop Insider Trading Act without delay."

Yet neither that bill nor any other reform legislation would have stopped the eye-popping orgy of recent stock trades by none other than Trump himself, with thousands of individual market transactions on his account revealed this week in disclosure documents. A new filing with the Office of Government Ethics, released on May 14, showed more than 3,500 specific trades in Trump's name during the first quarter of 2026, with a value between $220 million and $750 million. This represents by far the largest series of securities transactions by a sitting president in American history.

As one observer noted on X, it adds up to 60 trades per day, while he issues executive orders, talks with foreign leaders, shifts tariffs, and gives policy directives that directly affect the value of his holdings.

Former White House ethics counsel Richard Painter told Forbes magazine that he had researched the financial history of every preceding chief executive. "I don't think we've had any president trade in the stock market," he said. Previous presidents had blind trusts with index funds, if they owned any stocks at all.

What outraged ethics experts was not just the volume of Trump's market activity but the obvious overlaps between his actions and policies and the equities that he bought and sold. Although it is impossible to determine exactly how much he may have profited from what looks suspiciously like insider trading — exactly the crime he accused the Pelosis of perpetrating — there can be little doubt that he has made millions.

The Dell Deal
Not long before he delivered that State of the Union slap at Pelosi, Trump bought somewhere between $1 million and $5 million in Dell Computers stock. Then on May 8, less than three months later, he gave a public speech at the White House where he urged "everyone" to "go out and buy Dell," driving the company's stock to an all-time high. Since he bought Dell stock in February, it has gone up a whopping 96%.

Nvidia and Defense Deals
Around the same time, Trump bought a big chunk of Nvidia stock, just before that firm announced a big chip agreement with Meta, and then he purchased still more Nvidia a week before the Commerce Department permitted the sale of the company's chips to Saudi Arabia. Ironically, Nvidia was among the stocks whose purchase by Paul Pelosi provoked Republican outrage; he later sold it before its value rose astronomically.

Trump praising such companies as Palantir and Intel on his social media platform has similarly inflated their stocks after he bought chunks for his account.

The Palantir Pattern
Trump increased his Palantir holdings just as the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security were awarding billion-dollar contracts to the company, whose principal shareholder is the fascist-curious, Trump-backing billionaire Peter Thiel. So now the president too can profit from the company's Orwellian surveillance technologies.

Robinhood and Federal Programs
During the same period, Trump invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in Robinhood, the financial technology firm. News reports indicate that those purchases occurred as the Treasury Department named Robinhood as the brokerage and trustee for the federally funded "Trump Accounts" to be set up for American kids. Those children don't stand to earn much, but never mind — Trump will do very well.

The list of sleazy transactions goes on and on, with many more examples no doubt to be unearthed in months to come. The response from the White House and the Trump family echoes their usual "move along, nothing to see here" refrain. Don Jr. recently complained that charges of rampant corruption against his father were "getting old." And it is true that the crooked misconduct dates back to the first Trump administration; it is simply more widespread, more encompassing and more brazen now.

Contradictory Explanations
At least it would be better if the family and the administration flacks could get their stories straight. Eric Trump says his family's stock holdings are exclusively in broad market indexes like the Schwab 1000, a claim belied by Donald Trump's own filings, which show thousands of individual trades. Meanwhile, a White House spokesman told Fortune that all of Trump's assets are in a trust "managed by his children" with no conflicts of interest, another obvious contradiction.

A Pattern of Deception
The Trumps — and the Kushners, and many others associated with the first family — have gaslighted the American public with such bogus "explanations" of their grift-gorging for many years. Everyone in the Trump circle, including Cabinet officers such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has long known that the president is a crook. Out of cowardice and personal ambition, and sometimes greed, they have turned away from challenging his self-enrichment. The public, too, has largely ignored Trump's corruption, believing that "both parties do it," and there is plainly some basis for that cynicism.

But the scale of Trump's exploitation of public resources, his incessant stealing with both hands, is exponentially worse than any theft previously perpetrated by Democrats or Republicans. At a time when voters expected this president to look out for their pocketbooks, he does nothing but stuff his own, plundering them and profiting hugely. Polls suggest that they have at last begun to notice — and don't like what they see.

One former lawyer and political columnist is suggesting that President Donald Trump and members of his administration might be digging their own criminal grave.

Speaking to MS NOW's "Morning Joe," an animated David French said that the reason Trump's approval rating is so bad is that MAGA ran on the ideas around anti-corruption when it comes to Nancy Pelosi (D-Calf.) and Hunter Biden, not knowing that "behind the condemnation was the assertion that, well, the real problem is you just weren't grifty enough."

"I mean, this is the kind of stuff that the Gilded Age guys are all sitting there going, hey, we were born in the wrong century," French continued. "We had no idea of the level of corruption that was available to us and later on in American history. I mean, this is a this level of corruption is so severe that if in a new administration, if there are not wholesale pardons, that it's easy to imagine, just very easy to imagine, extensive criminal prosecutions related to insider trading, related to the kinds of tit for tat, quid pro quo corruption that we've seen. This is just an extraordinary moment in American history."

Joe Scarborough called it "a level of corruption we've never seen before." He compared it to MAGA world losing their minds over the idea that Hunter Biden sold one of his paintings for $85,000 from a private American. Under Trump, however, taxpayers are directly funding companies that Trump's children have invested in that now have government contracts and "possibly billions of dollars that the Trump family has enriched themselves" through cryptocurrency deals.

"This is again just the hypocrisy. It's just extraordinary," Scarborough added.

Co-host Willie Geist specifically cited the incident in which Trump invested in Dell, went to an event and urged people there to buy a Dell computer.

Former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo), who once served as a county prosecutor, commented that it's time to look down the road at ways to hold Trump accountable. However, she firmly believes, "Trump is going to pardon everyone in his circle before he walks out the door." Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court has given the president immunity "erroneously," she said.

"I don't think immunity on his personal financial stuff, but to get the votes to actually convict him after impeachment is very, very hard. And what happens here is the erosion of the criminal justice system, because Americans are so frustrated that the Trump family is getting away with this. How in America can you do this and get away with it? And he believes he's going to get away with it," said McCaskill.

President Donald Trump has so thoroughly intimidated House Speaker Mike Johnson, he practically comes across as lazy, at least if one conservative commentator is to be believed.

“Each House speakership ends up having its own unique character—forged through a combination of successes and failures,” wrote The Bulwark's Joe Perticone on Thursday. After reviewing the problems that afflicted past House Speakers like Nancy Pelosi, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy, he described Johnson as unique in his lack of productivity.

“Mike Johnson’s speakership is somewhat different from all these,” Perticone wrote. “His overriding project has been to cede whatever power and decision-making he can to the White House, and this has, in turn, given shape to an unusual legacy, one defined by impotence.”

He added, “In recent months there has been a strange spirit of bipartisanship among frustrated House members, who have relied on the previously rare tactic of discharge petitions to circumvent Johnson. The latest such bill directly pushes back on the Donald Trump administration in a policy area the MAGA movement finds particularly divisive: aid to Ukraine.”

Democrats were able to convince their Republican House colleagues to sign on to a proposal to force a floor vote on a new Ukraine aid package, but this had to happen while Johnson assumed a passive role.

“The Ukraine bill will now get a vote on the House floor,” Perticone observed. “If it passes and heads to the Senate, a much larger percentage of lawmakers should be willing to back it. But whether it receives a floor vote there is up in the air.”

He added, “It’s a remarkable moment, nonetheless. The second most powerful lawmaker in the land being reduced to the role of legislative bystander in his own chamber.”

Two Democrats confirmed these impressions to Perticone.

“I think when you’ve got a very weak speaker in Mike Johnson and a majority that he can’t govern, it’s no surprise that we’re having more discharge petitions,” Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) told Perticone. “We don’t have the same kind tools the majority has, but we’re still gonna force votes where we can. And the fact that Mike Johnson continues to lose some Republicans who are willing to stand with us for votes that are important—it tells me he’s weak, and frankly, it tells me that Republicans in competitive, tough districts, they see the writing on the wall.”

A different Pennsylvanian echoed those views.

“I really wish these bills would just come to the floor on their own,” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) told Perticone in December. “It shouldn’t take a discharge petition. Leadership should be putting these bills on the floor when there’s that much support for it. A discharge is really forcing rank-and-file members to take matters into their own hands.”

On some occasions, Johnson has shown a willingness to stand up to Trump. Earlier this week, he delivered what Punchbowl described as “an explicit rebuke” to the president demanding that the House pass a housing bill that recently went through the Senate.

For many years, retired Judge J. Michael Luttig, now 71, has been a prominent figure in the conservative legal movement. But he infuriated MAGA Republicans when, in 2022, he testified for then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-California) January 6 Select Committee and described Donald Trump as a "clear and present danger to American democracy." Luttig clearly blamed Trump for the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building, arguing that he was unfit to ever serve as president again because he promoted an "insurrection."

During a late April appearance on Jim Acosta's show, Luttig warned that U.S. democracy is facing even more dire circumstances in 2026 than it was in 2021.

"It is exponentially worse today than it was in 2021, Jim. The president has forcibly collapsed the separation of powers in the United States of America," Luttig told former CNN host Acosta. "The Constitution itself is, of course, the greatest charter of government in all of human civilization. But the real genius of the Constitution was the separation of the respective powers in the United States."

Luttig added, "And for 250 years, that genius, that balance — that separation and balance and checks and balances of the other two branches — on the third, has worked magnificently."

Despite being an overwhelmingly Democratic state, a quirk in California’s election laws may result in California voters needing to choose between two pro-Trump Republicans in the upcoming governor’s race.

“The current system allows the top two candidates, regardless of party, to move on to the runoff,” reported Los Angeles Times' Dakota Smith on Monday. “That has led to instances in which two Democrats or two Republicans have faced off in the general election.”

Smith added, “The state's gubernatorial election, for example, has prompted concern that two Republicans could shut out the Democratic candidates. Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and former Fox News commentator Steve Hilton have polled high in various surveys and are facing a large field of Democrats.”

In an attempt to prevent a situation like this from happening in the future, political consultant Steve Maviglio filed an application to state officials on Friday arguing that California’s voting system should revert to a traditional primary. In Maviglio’s proposal, each party’s top candidate will appear on the ballot during the general election.

"It was extremely scary to envision the November ballot for governor with Republicans on it," Maviglio said.

Democrats continue to struggle with finding a single candidate to rally behind in the upcoming gubernatorial race. One initial frontrunner, Rep. Eric Swalwell, exited from the race in disgrace after multiple women accused him of various forms of rape and sexual misconduct. A number of other candidates remain, including billionaire Tom Steyer, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, former Rep. Katie Porter and former Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra. Californians who do not want a Republican governor, like Maviglio, are therefore concerned that the large field of well-known Democrats could split their party’s vote in such a way that the two finalists are Hilton and Bianco.

Further complicating matters is the fact that Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, Democratic Party Chair Rusty Hicks, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have all declined to endorse a candidate and thereby elevate them above the pack.

Bianco, though not endorsed by Trump, has closely embraced the Republican’s legacy of MAGA politics, particularly by arguing that he would be a tough on crime governor. Instead of Bianco, Trump endorsed Hilton, a former Fox News host who in 2019 told this journalist for Salon that he views Trump as a “fierce” patriot.

“In those days it was all about America: ‘We are being ripped off, America should be doing better,’” Hilton told this journalist at the time. “It’s a fierce kind of patriotism, and a belief in America, I think. ‘America First,’ therefore, is the closest thing I think you’re going to get to a defining idea of Trumpism. And that does connect trade issues and immigration issues.”

At the same time, Hilton argued that “I think the president himself would be the first to say that the notion of a sort of philosophical approach is somewhat alien for him. That’s not how he sees things. He really is, I think at heart, a pragmatist. He’s like, ‘OK, there’s a problem here. How do I fix it?'”