Push Notification

Even after rattling off various positive measures of Donald Trump's health in various press conferences, White House physician Dr. Sean Conley has been adamant about not answering one of the most vital questions facing those exposed to Trump in recent days: When was the last time testing showed Trump was not carrying the pandemic virus that would send him to the hospital only a day after the White House admitted he was sick?

That's important, because it would allow those who came into contact with Trump during last Tuesday's presidential debate to know whether they spent 90 minutes in an enclosed space with a COVID-19 carrier shouting at them for most of that time—one of the precise scenarios that experts warn is most likely to result in pandemic spread.

It's also important because all evidence so far points to the White House knowing of Trump's illness at least as of Monday, before the debate. And it's important because the pattern of infections coming out of the White House do not appear to correlate with people who attended the Rose Garden celebration the previous weekend. They appear to more closely correlate with people known to have spent significant amounts of time in proximity to Donald Trump himself.

On Monday, we were treated to a rare sight at the White House: An outdoor press briefing in which Trump spoke at a podium alone, while all other speakers at the pandemic-related briefing used a podium set up on a separate platform well-distanced from Trump's own.

Tuesday's debate featured another unusual sight: Melania Trump alone, among the Trump family, followed debate venue rules and kept her mask on during the full event—only removing it when approaching Donald at his podium for the usual post-debate family visuals. But the Trump family arrived at the debate venue too late to be given COVID-19 tests at the venue, debate moderator Chris Wallace said afterward. "There was an honor system when it came to people that came into the hall from the two campaigns."

There are reasons to believe the White House is lying about the outbreak timeline, and it is absolutely certain that they are hiding key elements of that timeline, as White House doctor Conley did yet again on Monday. The first known illnesses from the White House outbreak are, for the most part, those immediately surrounding Trump himself.

• White House adviser Hope Hicks and assistant Nicholas Luna

• First lady Melania Trump

• Trump's debate prep team member Chris Christie and Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien

• White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and two assistant press secretaries

But what of the multiple Rose Garden guests who tested positive after the Saturday celebration held for Amy Coney Barrett, including Sen. Thom Tillis, Sen. Mike Lee, pastor Greg Laurie, Notre Dame president John Jenkins, and Kellyanne Conway?

All of them were seen in close proximity to Trump in the Diplomatic Room of the White House, during an indoors reception for Barrett that featured a much smaller group of people. Infections during the Rose Garden event were not, as far as we know, spread evenly throughout the outside crowd. They have appeared predominantly among the most important guests, the ones allowed to sit and the first few rows—and who were invited inside for a more personal meet-and-greet hosted by Trump.

The evidence, then, is that Trump himself may have been the source of infection for most of the COVID-19 cases in his orbit. Whether he was or wasn't, the outbreak was in full swing as of Saturday, during the Diplomatic Room event.

The White House, however, is flatly refusing to tell the public, the Biden campaign, the debate staff and others Trump met with when Trump, who is allegedly as president tested daily or near-daily, was last known to be free of the virus. They either don't know—because they haven't been doing the testing—or they're hiding it because they have a reason to hide it. The White House has also announced that it will not be doing contact tracing of Rose Garden guests, nor will they allow the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention to launch that effort itself.

They are quite insistent on not finding out either the true extent of the White House outbreak, or revealing its origins.

It's reasonable to question whether the White House knew Trump was infected, or suspected it, at least as of Monday, when Trump's press event was set up to have the unusual dual-podium arrangement. It's reasonable to question whether the Trump campaign avoided testing at the venue not out of lateness, but because they did not want testing to be done. It's not just reasonable to assume Trump, a malevolent narcissist, would willingly expose others to his illness for momentary gain: It's proven, both from Trump's pointless but self-celebrating joyride around Walter Reed, unnecessarily putting Secret Service agents in an airtight container with him at the likely height of his own contagiousness, and his immediate removal of his mask upon returning to the White House.

There are very good reasons to suspect that the White House knew or believed Trump to be infected with COVID-19 before the debate with Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden took place, and that the White House covered up his infection to allow the debate to go forward. It is possible that, had Trump not become so physically ill two days afterward as to require public acknowledgement, then hospitalization, the White House intended to hide Trump's infection from the public completely.

This would be unconscionable behavior by itself, but exposing a rival presidential candidate to a deadly disease on purpose brings it past unconscionable and into the realm of the unthinkable. But here we are.

This is not an idle, fringe supposition. Senate Democratic leaders are themselves demanding that the White House explain their secrecy around Trump's initial diagnosis, accusing the White House (correctly) of "deliberately" hiding this information. The press is focusing in on this question as well. It is entirely within the realm of possibility that this White House would cover up a presidential illness even if it caused the possible death of others, and even if it exposed Trump's immediate campaign rival to the same disease. On the contrary, it is the most plausible theory we have as to why the White House is refusing to clarify the timeline of Trump's illness.

White House physician Dr. Sean Conley is explicitly hiding this information—and endangering lives. This is not tenable. If the press cannot scrape an answer from him, Vice President Biden's Secret Service detail might need to go question him directly.

How much more blatant could Donald Trump’s abuse of office for self-interest be?

Trump Media & Technology Group, parent company of the microblogging platform, announced this week it will sell a data feed to Wall Street companies who want just milliseconds of notice on Trump’s Truth Social posts that may affect the economy. For a fee, Trump Media will offer the “fastest” access to posts “from the highest-ranking Truth Social accounts.”

Corporate traders should recognize this as sanitized “insider trading,” whatever euphemism is used. Voters should recognize this as an abuse of the Oval Office, a violation of the Constitution’s “emoluments” clause, and, more broadly, part of the Trump self-enrichment use of the White House.

Trump Media may be a private enterprise, but Trump is a public employee, subject to ethics rules even if not specifically barred by law from this action. It is Trump who chooses to make policy announcements for the government on his personally owned online chat service. Trump owns 41% of Trump Media through his revocable trust, so he would benefit personally.

It is Trump grift. Period.

Posts from Truth Social’s 10 most influential accounts would reach customers paying the extra bill — reportedly up to $100,000 a month — significantly faster than the usual push notification. Trump’s posts to 12.9 million followers already frequently touch off market reactions, and Trump or his family already have been found to make market investments just before policy announcements. Federal filings show hundreds of investments by Trump a day before tariffs were made public, for example, or before defense contracts or for semiconductors.

Companies and organizations generally offer application programming interfaces (APIs) for swift information transfer. Federal agencies, including Treasury and Labor large financial and economic data through APIs. But with this arrangement, Wall Street traders would have time to complete computerized trades before you or I could do so. That’s the heart of insider trading.

Moving Markets

Many presidential posts have upended markets. Last year, hours before Trump announced that he would pause most tariffs he imposed for 90 days, Trump posted that it was a “great time to buy.” Every announcement about Iran and the Strait of Hormuz moves oil markets.

Naturally, the “transparent” White House has had no explanation about ethics.

By contrast, Democratic critics have erupted, suggesting that it could be illegal. Sen. Adam Schiff, D-CA, said, “Hard to keep pace with the President’s corrupt profiteering off the presidency, but here’s yet another scheme, this time to save his failing social media business.” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., called it “another example of flagrant corruption, trading access to the White House for Trump’s self-enrichment.” California Gov. Gavin Newsom added, “Where is the investigation? And how are spineless Republicans okay with this? Disgusting.”

Recent White House filings show that Trump made more than $1.4 billion in 2025 from, cryptocurrency businesses alone, and they raised questions about other profiteering from his own policies. Federal law prohibits executive branch employees from participating “personally and substantially” in government matters that will directly or predictably affect personal or family financial interests, though Presidents and Vice Presidents are exempted.

“He’s selling expedited, privileged access to information about what he is doing as president,” Kathleen Clark of Washington University School of Law and an expert in government conflicts of interest rules told Fortune. “It’s yet more brazen corruption, an improper exploitation of government power to enrich himself.”

Trump Media has had financial troubles. Stock in Trump Media & Technology has plunged more than 70% since the president took office last year, erasing $6 billion in shareholder wealth. The Truth API is expected to become a meaningful recurring revenue source as the company expands beyond social media into cryptocurrency, streaming and a proposed nuclear fusion merger.

Mark it as another move that helps Trump and billionaire traders but does nothing for you and me.

Terry H. Schwadron retired as a senior editor at The New York Times, Deputy Managing Editor at The Los Angeles Times and leadership jobs at The Providence (RI) Journal-Bulletin. He was part of a Pulitzer Gold Medal team in Los Angeles, and his team part of several Pulitzers in New York.

“‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’”

That’s how federal judge Mark Walker began his 2022 injunction blocking enforcement of Ron DeSantis’ “Stop Woke Act” in Florida institutions of higher education.

In case you don’t recognize the quotation, it’s from George Orwell’s “1984:” You know, the novel where the Ministry of Truth rewrites history and forbids free enquiry.

Certain words are banned; wrong thinking is punished. Even hearing about disfavored ideas is considered an attack on decency and order.

As defendant in the case, the State of Florida argued (apparently with a straight face) university professors have the right to free speech, sure, but only if the state approves of that speech.

The law forbade teaching anything that explores racial or gender injustice.

You weren’t allowed to say, given how we still struggle to overcome discrimination against minorities, women, and the disabled, that maybe diversity, equity and inclusion programs helped a lot of people; you must embrace color-blindness in all things (because we all know race doesn’t matter in America!); yet, woe betide you if you ever made a white person feel “guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the person played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex.”

Like many of us teaching in the state university system, the judge was unimpressed.

DeSantis and the legal team from his Ministry of Truth appealed up the food chain to the 11th Circuit, and what do you know?

They lost again.

‘Breathtaking assertion of power’

The majority opinion, by a Trump appointee, is unsparing.

Judge Britt C. Grant wrote, “If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it.”

She called the Stop Woke law “a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse.”

Naturally, the governor pitched a little hissy fit, taking to social media to say, “State universities are funded by taxpayers and directed by elected officials and their appointees. The state has both a right and a responsibility to ensure instruction at these universities is consistent with the underlying mission and to exclude indoctrination and ideological agendas.”

He called the decision “judicial overreach.”

Let’s talk about gubernatorial overreach. Or, to put it another way, what is this guy’s problem with education?

Is he really that frightened of ideas?

If he and his education appointees are so convinced their positions — slavery had an upside, gender is 100% biological, capitalism is divinely ordained, a woman’s highest destiny is to be a mother, vaccines are unnecessary, climate change isn’t real — are valid, surely they’d welcome testing them with historical records, expert reports, and empirical evidence.

Facts, even.

Reading books by and about, say, gay people, teaching the history of Stonewall, or examining central Supreme Court decisions such as Obergefell v. Hodges, do not mean straight people will somehow become gay, any more than studying Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” will necessarily inspire you to assassinate any official you think has gotten too big for his britches.

Gender studies will not destroy heterosexuality; it’s simply a way to talk about the ways people understand who they are, how they present themselves, how other people see them.

Snowflakes

Universities are supposed to be where you encounter people who aren’t like you, unfamiliar, maybe upsetting, points of view, tricky topics, and ideas your parents don’t approve of.

Intellectual freedom means we should be able to discuss almost anything.

Yet the DeSantis administration act like snowflakes, hypersensitive, unwilling to contemplate anything outside their very white, very Christian, pathetically nationalist, bubble.

DeSantis is especially nervous America’s racial history, trying to outlaw “The 1619 Project,” a brilliant collection of writings about how the arrival of the first slaves on the Virginia shore has informed and shaped our country, shutting down or crippling African American Studies programs.

I guess white people are so used to considering themselves the “real” Americans who had all the good ideas, invented all the good stuff, and “built this country,” the reality that Africa is as central to our identity as Europe is scary.

The governor and his crew seem especially freaked out by the possibility students might encounter Critical Race Theory. Listening to them, you’d think CRT is to blame for everything from high gas prices to the common cold.

CRT is pretty simple: Race is socially constructed (not biological) and racism is not merely a product of individual bias (though that’s part of it) but embedded in our legal, educational, medical, and financial systems.

Say a white person and a Black person commit the same crime. It would make sense if they got the same sentence, right?

But in most cases the Black person will get a longer sentence.

‘The perfect villain’

The Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health policy think tank, has repeatedly shown structural racism (conscious or not) in the medical profession means doctors and nurses misdiagnose Black, Latino, and members of other ethnic communities far more often than they do whites, and, unlike with white patients, tend to dismiss their pain.

Infant mortality among people of color is at least twice as high than it is for whites.

There’s nothing sinister or anti-American in acknowledging, as Justice Thurgood Marshall said, the original Constitution was “defective from the start,” given that it upheld slaveholders’ rights in their human property and protected the slave trade.

Slavery was at the heart of our republic since its beginning.

It still reverberates in our culture.

There’s nothing anti-white in pointing this out. The Founders installed in the Constitution ways to amend it, fix social problems, even change American society.

The country is an ongoing project: We’re still striving for that “more perfect union,” and acknowledging the blindingly obvious ways in which our deals don’t match up with our reality is not a heinous assault on patriotism.

CRT was developed by legal scholars, and has long been part of law school curricula. Nobody much noticed it until 2021, when a right-wing activist called Christopher Rufo kicked off a national moral panic.

You might remember Rufo from the 2024 presidential campaign, amplifying J.D. Vance’s lies about Haitians in Ohio eating cats and dogs.

Before that, Rufo had made a name for himself as a warrior against anything he saw as “woke,” especially in higher education.

DeSantis appointed Rufo to New College’s Board of Trustees (he’s since left) to help destroy what once was an admired, creative, and tolerant liberal arts school, labeling any teaching he didn’t like “Critical Race Theory.”

CRT, he said, is “the perfect villain.”

Army of lefties

Having tried to banish CRT along with sociology, the unpleasant parts of American history, the novels of Toni Morrison, and any science that might reveal things are more complicated than they’d like, DeSantis, the various mediocrities running Florida’s Department of Education, and fellow travelers such as Moms for Liberty, have convinced themselves universities are hotbeds of “Marxist indoctrination.”

Apparently, professors — especially in the Humanities and Social Sciences — are not merely “woke,” we’re a bunch of commies, determined to brainwash the Youth of Florida into hollering “Workers of the World Unite!” — assured they have nothing to lose but their chains.

Or something like that.

Alas, all my colleagues and I must be really lousy at indoctrination. I don’t know anybody who’s been successful in producing even one committed Marxist.

But DeSantis et al. are convinced higher education is a plot to produce an army of lefties.

Not that they can produce much evidence of this.

They’re more ideologically rigid than the most committed Trotskyite, and less logical than the American officer who, standing in the ruins of a Vietnamese provincial capital in 1968, told reporter Peter Arnett, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

Maybe the administration’s idea is to destroy higher ed in order to save it.

Hypotheticals

No doubt DeSantis took some comfort from the dissent in the 11th Circuit’s ruling.

Judge Barbara Lagoa, a former member of the Florida Supreme Court, (indeed, a DeSantis appointee and often mentioned as a potential U.S. Supreme Court justice), argues, what if “a professor who says that Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel was ‘exhilarating’ and something to be celebrated and encouraged?”

She goes on to say, “Florida acts well within its authority to curb professorial endorsements of that kind within its own classrooms.”

First of all, if someone were stupid enough to say such a thing, that professor could be disciplined for creating a hostile educational environment.

But taking a hypothetical case of poor judgment and concluding somehow professorial speech must always be equivalent to the views of the state violates the First Amendment.

The First Amendment protects offensive speech — even hate speech.

In George Orwell’s essay “Freedom of the Press,” he writes, “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Or to quote again from the majority opinion, the university’s mission is to get students to “puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth.”

Professors call this “teaching.”

Huge international sporting events on the level of the FIFA World Cup are a prime opportunity for a country to make a good impression on the world, but as a new piece from MS NOW argued, President Donald Trump took the perfect chance for the U.S. to do so and "blew it."

In the Sunday piece, MS NOW's Zeeshan Aleem shared his own experience visiting Russia for the 2018 World Cup, calling the experience a "breeze" that left him rooting for Russia throughout the game and lamenting "the rich Russian culture that rarely gets covered in the Western press." This trip, one of the greatest of his life, was a prime example of "sportswashing," he explained, a phenomenon that involves "governments staging sports events to launder their reputation and divert attention from their misdeeds."

"President Donald Trump was handed a golden opportunity to boost America’s image to international visitors here for the 2026 World Cup," Aleem wrote. "He is the reason, after all, the world is suffering from higher oil prices. He can’t find his way out of a mortifying war he’s clearly losing, tourism is plummeting, and his international reputation is in swift decline. But he blew it."

He continued: "Trump achieved the opposite of sportswashing. His policies were hostile to visitors, he injected politics into the tournament, and he even brazenly meddled with what was happening on the pitch. In sum, his style of hosting cast the U.S. in an unusually negative light during the most widely watched cultural event in the world. Trump’s inability to see beyond his most reflexive impulses to throw red meat to his base sabotaged the larger opportunity to impress the world and soften his image. His failure to be the welcoming, gracious tournament host mirrors the way he operates with increasing frequency in domestic politics — blinkered, self-defeating. Trump’s modus operandi is one own goal after another, and an embarrassment for the United States."

Trump notably broke the trend of countries relaxing their immigration policies in order to welcome foreign World Cup spectators with open arms. Aleem noted that this was even true for past host countries like Russia and Qatar, which have similarly restrictive tendencies with their immigration laws. Instead, the U.S. made the trip "hellish, if not impossible" for many, with visiting fans from over a quarter of the event's participating nations running into bans, high rates of visa rejections or restrictions."

"A Somali referee was not allowed in the U.S. to do his job," Aleem detailed. "A number of individual players, including team members from Iraq and Haiti, struggled to get visas or were detained in airports. Many sports journalists from the Middle East and Africa were denied entry. The Iranian soccer team got treated like a band of murderers instead of elite professional athletes. Many members of the team’s support staff were barred from entering the U.S., and the team was forced to move its base training camp from the U.S. to Mexico."

He concluded: "None of this is to say that most fans who made it to the U.S. didn’t have a grand time and experience some heart-warming cultural exchanges. But the good feelings of our visitors happened despite Trump and his myriad offenses. The tournament succeeded in generating joy despite Trump’s unholy alliance with Infantino. Instead of allowing those visitors to focus on the best of America, he showed them the worst of himself

The Trump administration this week released new rules pertaining to the Endangered Species Act, and as one nature photographer warned for MS NOW, it could very well be a "mortal blow" to the protections that have done much to bring certain animals back from the brink of extinction.

Derrick Z. Jackson is an acclaimed and award-winning nature photographer, as well as a fellow in climate and energy at the Center for Science and Democracy's Union of Concerned Scientists. On Sunday, he published a new piece for MS NOW, sounding the alarm about changes implemented this week by President Donald Trump that are bound to imperil endangered animals.

"The administration’s new rule, which was issued by the Interior and Commerce departments and becomes effective Sept. 14, deletes a critical definition of what constitutes 'harm' to species on the brink of extinction," Jackson explained. "Under the old definition, harm wasn’t limited to actions that directly killed or injured wildlife. Developers, industrial polluters and landowners were also prohibited from rolling out bulldozers and backhoes and causing 'significant habitat modification or degradation' that damaged or destroyed endangered species’ 'breeding, feeding or sheltering' areas."

He added later: "It is obvious who benefits from this outrageous change. Oil and gas drillers, building contractors, mining companies, road construction groups, ranchers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have all chafed at the appropriately broad interpretation of 'harm.' In one statement, the Independent Petroleum Association of America claimed the Endangered Species act was “destroying economic growth and job creation.” In a bald-faced press release hailing the change, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum called the old rules a 'regulatory trap.' The new ones, he said, will 'reduce unnecessary permitting, cut compliance costs, and eliminate confusion for landowners, small businesses, energy producers, farmers, ranchers and local governments.'”

With this rule change in place, Jackson warned that companies have been given a "neon green light inviting developers to plow through the wetlands that are left, cut down more forests, build along sensitive coastlines, cast fishing nets into precious feeding grounds for migratory birds and whales, and dump more pesticides and chemicals."

Environmental groups have already sued the administration to block this change, but Jackson said that these cases are unlikely to do much in the face of the extremely Trump-friendly Supreme Court, which he also noted has been "robotically" slashing away wildlife protections in particular.

"In 2023 the Supreme Court drastically limited the definition of a wetland," Jackson explained. I"n more sane days, the Environmental Protection Agency called wetlands a 'biological supermarket.' More than one-third of all the nation’s endangered and threatened species live full time in wetlands, and more than half of such species spend some time in them. The court ruled against a generous definition of a wetland even though between 2009 and 2019, according to the Interior Department under the Biden administration, the nation lost an area of vegetated wetlands larger than the size of Rhode Island."

One of the Trump family's companies this week unveiled the latest in their long line of moneymaking schemes, and according to the D.C. insiders at Pod Save America, it constitutes "truly one of the most wildly corrupt things that has ever happened."

President Donald Trump, his family and their many business holdings have been doggedly determined to milk as much money as possible out of his second term through an unending parade of schemes and grifts. As Trump himself admitted in a recent interview, he has felt no compunction about profiting off his station after realizing that no one would stop him if he did.

Earlier this week, the Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns Trump's Truth Social platform, announced its intention to sell early access to "market-moving" posts on the platform from some of its "highest-ranking" accounts. The president is by far and away the biggest account on Truth Social, with his continued use of it over other social media sites being essentially the only reason it still exists. In effect, the plan appears to be selling early access to Trump's posts so that banks and traders can take advantage of how they will impact the stock market.

In one of the most recent episodes of the podcast, the former Obama administration officials at Pod Save America dug into the news, calling it an alarming new low for Trump's corrupt second-term pursuits.

"Why don't they just start asking the Treasury to print money for the Trumps?" co-host Jon Favreau, the former head speechwriter for Barack Obama, said. "That is, I don't know why we're going through all of these schemes and this and that. Everything's so complicated. Just go to [Treasury Secretary] Scott Bessent, ask him to start printing money, put it in your pocket, walk away."

The other co-host, former senior Obama comms advisor Dan Pfeiffer, did not mince words with his reaction to the news.

"This is truly one of the most wildly corrupt things that has ever happened," Pfeiffer said. "And that's saying a lot."

Pfeiffer also stressed that, despite the fact that Truth Social is a "stupid platform" that few people outside of political circles pay attention to, Trump's posts there are legitimate presidential statements. In effect, he said, this new plan from the Trump Media & Technology Group would be akin to past presidential administrations giving Wall Street early access to official speeches or press releases.

"Example: president announces a new ceasefire with Iran, you can use that to buy oil futures," Pfeiffer explained. "He says the end of the ceasefire, you can sell your oil futures faster than anyone else because you have paid money to the president to get access to that market-moving information before everyone else in this country."

He further suggested that the move represented an "abuse of power" from Trump, as well as an example of "a high crime and a misdemeanor," referring to the sorts of offenses for which a president could be impeached.

Ahead of the pivotal 2026 midterm elections, Politico reports that a consistently red state is being pushed away from Republicans, all because of a longstanding environmental crisis resulting in cancer-causing water.

Once considered a swing state, in the last several election cycles, Iowa has emerged as a solid red state, breaking for President Donald Trump in all three of his races. Despite that trend, there remains a hope among Democrats, backed up by recent polling data, that they might be able to pull off wins in the state this November, given how toxic Trump and the Republican Party are becoming with voters. This is especially true in Iowa, where the president's economic agenda has caused major pains for the state's many farmers.

On top of all that, Politico on Sunday released a report revealing that a long-term ecological crisis is also triggering a "political reckoning" in the Hawkeye State, and it could end up being a disaster for Republicans.

Chris Jones, the Democratic nominee for Iowa's secretary of agriculture, told Politico that his "decade as a research engineer, monitoring the state’s rivers and streams," led him to pursue public office, to address the alarming things he discovered about the state's rivers and lakes. As the report explained, "Iowa’s lakes and ponds are often murky and fetid from algae blooms fed by fertilizer runoff, a byproduct of the state’s vast agricultural industry’s reliance on farming chemicals."

"Iowa has a long-simmering water problem that has finally begun to boil over — and it’s changing Iowa politics," Politico explained. "People are angry and worried about the quality of the state’s water, the health risks it poses and its increasingly undeniable tie to the state’s signature industry: agriculture."

It continued: "In recent years, Iowa’s cancer rate has climbed significantly above the U.S. average. It now stands as the nation’s second highest, and Iowa is one of only three states where the rate is rising. The situation has put a spotlight on nitrates, which are linked to a growing body of science to kidney, brain and ovarian cancer. Nitrates are a key component in the deluge of chemical pesticides and fertilizers used by the state’s farmers, some of which washes off farm fields and into waterways. A second culprit is glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, the world’s most common weedkiller, which the International Agency for Research on Cancer declared 'probably carcinogenic' in 2015, an assessment rejected by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency."

While candidates on both sides have long been wary of tackling issues stemming from Iowa's all-important farming industry, things are different this year. Voters are "steaming mad" about the impact these chemicals are having, and as a result, candidates from both parties have taken aim at the industry, and found success doing so. In a development that is "scrambling" the common understanding of Iowa's politics, "some of those winning candidates are Democrats."

"In the Republican primary for governor, a businessman, farmer and political operative named Zach Lahn shocked the political establishment by edging out Trump-endorsed Rep. Randy Feenstra for the nomination," Politico explained. "Lahn won, in part, by openly acknowledging the state’s water crisis and connecting the dots between agriculture and cancer. Lahn was also the first candidate for statewide office endorsed by MAHA Action, the main PAC supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement. MAHA voters supported Kennedy and President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential elections, but have since rebelled against some of their moves, especially the Trump administration’s open support for glyphosate."

It continued: "As for the Democrats, they have their best shot in a decade or more of winning statewide offices in November’s election. Democrat Josh Turek is neck-and-neck in recent polling with Republican Ashley Hinson in the open race for U.S. Senate. And Lahn’s Democratic opponent, Rob Sand, bested him by one percentage point, within the margin of error, in recent polling in the governor’s race."

President Donald Trump delivered a widely-maligned speech on Thursday night claiming without evidence that China had stolen the 2020 election for Joe Biden. Even as he attempts to use this to justify having the Department of Homeland Security order states as to who can vote, a Wall Street Journal columnist argues that his spreading of the China lie promotes a double standard that undermines his administration in other ways.

“President Trump during his prime-night speech on Thursday broke the non-news that China has sought to interfere in U.S. elections,” Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley wrote on Sunday, referring to the fact that it has long been widely known that nations like China and Russia have tried to alter presidential election results. “Xi Jinping must have chuckled at the president’s professed outrage.”

From there, Finley pointed out that Trump’s actions as president are not those of a man who views China as a threat to US security.

“On his first day in office, Mr. Trump gave the Chinese Communist Party a license to spy on Americans and meddle in U.S. elections when he issued an executive order that suspended enforcement of a law requiring TikTok to separate from its Chinese parent, ByteDance, or be banned in the U.S,” Finely wrote. “The TikTok reprieve may be the biggest blunder of Mr. Trump’s presidency, and it is coming back to bite him as the platform fuels the rise of socialism and opposition to the war in Iran.”

She added, “A recent study found that TikTok’s algorithm systemically suppressed pro-U.S. content on the war and amplified anti-U.S content. Odds of such a skew occurring by chance are about 1 in 6.5 million. Is this Beijing’s invisible hand at work? It’s impossible to know, which is the problem.”

As one example, Finley described how TikTok seemed to help the candidacy of a Colorado Democrat running for Congress, Melat Kiros, who defeated 15-term incumbent Diana DeGette in part because of Kiros’ popular TikTok video. At the same time, Finely did not attribute possible amplification of Kiros to the Democrat being associated with the political left, noting that TikTok also seemed to boost Trump’s content during the 2024 presidential election.

“Mr. Trump granted TikTok a reprieve, convinced that the platform helped him win the election,” Finley argued. “He may be right. A study found that TikTok’s algorithms favored Republican content during the campaign. Might TikTok engineers have tweaked the algorithms to help Mr. Trump in hope that he would suspend its death sentence?”

She added, “Mr. Trump charged Vice President JD Vance with brokering a deal to save TikTok through a sale to U.S. investors. The ultimate deal was as lousy as Mr. Vance’s memorandum of understanding with Iran. lt allowed ByteDance to retain a 19.9 [percent] stake in TikTok—the largest of any investor—and control over TikTok’s algorithms.”

Overall, Finley concluded that Trump’s own actions regarding TikTok undercut his claims to be alarmed at Chinese influence over American politics.

“It’s no small irony that Mr. Trump’s TikTok reprieve has helped socialists like Zohran Mamdani, whose 2025 campaign for New York mayor caught fire on the platform, where his videos received 307 million views,” Finely argued. “You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder whether Chinese Communist Party wizards behind the screen abetted his success.”

She added, “Beijing wants nothing more than to poison American politics by fomenting discord and distrust in its institutions, including its capitalist system. Could the Communist Party be covertly amplifying the rancorous voices like Mr. Mamdani and Tucker Carlson? It deserves investigating.”

President Donald Trump is able to stay in power because of a “structural” problem in American democracy — at least according to a former Trump adviser who has previously warned about the nation losing its sense of shame regarding the Republican leader’s conduct.

“America has a structural problem,” Anthony Scaramucci, a Wall Street worker and former Trump communications director, posted on X on Sunday. “When you gerrymander your district and screen out everyone who doesn’t already agree with you, you never have to modify your positions. You never have to meet anyone in the middle. You just keep winning by playing to your base.”

Yet in the process, Scaramucci observed, politicians are not required to compete in the marketplace of ideas against individuals who might effectively push back on them, both philosophically and politically.

“But imagine if we drew districts that actually reflected the demographics of the area, regardless of party,” Scaramucci wrote. “Suddenly candidates are in a marketing competition. They have to appeal to moderates. They have to move toward each other.”

He concluded that, because this does not happen, members of both parties are encouraged to become increasingly extreme.

“The system used to produce that naturally,” Scaramucci wrote. “Members of Congress used to go to lunch together, socialize, build relationships across the aisle. The system is now designed to prevent that.”

Scaramucci has been an outspoken opponent of Trump during his second term. For example, he recently appeared on MS NOW to tell host Nicolle Wallace that the teleprompter operator accused of insider trading based on the president’s speeches erred by believing someone like him — who is not wealthy — would be protected just like Trump’s wealthy insiders.

“He doesn't qualify, the poor kid, because he doesn't make enough money,” Scaramucci said. “He's not influential enough, and his last name isn't Trump. So the kid's obviously in a lot of trouble, and he's going to pay the price while the president's going to go on to make several billion dollars for himself.”

He added, “He sees it as incredibly smart: ‘Look how smart I am. The other people that held his position, they couldn't do this. Look how great I am.’ While Barack Obama had a seven- or eight-page financial disclosure, he had a phone book of 927 pages. And, oh, by the way — you pointed this out — he thinks it's peanuts compared to what the tech blogs make, etc. He also thinks a lot of the stuff that he's doing is legal.”

Scaramucci concluded, “And if you look through the financial disclosure, where he was actually breaking the disclosure law, he's paying the $200 requisite fine. So he's laughing his way to the bank. His attitude is, ‘You know, this is what all presidents should have been doing. Look how smart I am.’”

President Donald Trump appears to be more and more consumed by his obsession with the 2020 election and his false claims about election fraud, and according to his one-time biographer, this fixation seems to be the result of a genuine "mental illness" separating him from reality.

Trump's 2020 obsession entered a new phase this week, as he used a primetime address on Thursday to claim that newly uncovered documents proved that there was outside interference in the election that he lost to Joe Biden. Closer examinations of these materials by reporters, however, showed that they proved nothing of the sort. Trump also seems stuck with no way to push his election fraud obsession forward, given that the SAVE America Act remains stalled in the Senate without enough votes to pass.

Michael Wolff is a longtime reporter and author, best known for his extensive insider-sourced coverage of Trump's political career. In the latest edition of his Daily Beast podcast, "Inside Trump's Head," he touched on Trump's unending 2020 fixation, claiming that it is by no means a bluff from him to try and create the pretense for election rigging, but rather a genuine belief that the race was stolen from him.

“I think everyone around him understands, in fact, that he absolutely believes this,” Wolff explained to his co-host, Joanna Coles. “No one else believes it. No one else believes that he won the 2020 election. But he does believe it.”

He added further: “And that to me is actually the kind of the scarier thing, the larger thing than that. This is another way for him to try to manipulate the election, or another way for him to set up a rationale for losing the election. There is mental illness here, and it’s kind of a result of his paranoia, his resentments, his insecurity, his inability to appreciate reality, I think you might most accurately say.”

When pressed by Coles about why Trump would bother "reopening this wound" when there are so many other pressing concerns at the moment, Wolff said that it is "because he’s a nutter," and the election fraud idea is "an obsessive thing in his mind." This obsession with something that has no political upside at a time when he and the GOP overall are floundering, Wolff argued further, is more proof that Trump is mentally unwell.

“Again, this is another description of why you have to see this as an illness: that he can’t get away from this,” Wolff said. “This does no good for him, and I think we’ve seen in the reaction of other Republicans, this is a political negative for him. And yet he pursues it because he can’t not pursue it.”

In a recent post to Substack on the same topic, Wolff detailed personal encounters with Trump that drove home how much his thinking about 2020 is driven by a kind of "delirium."

"On two occasions I’ve sat with him as he has outlined his case for the stolen election. All his hurt on display,” Wolff wrote. “It’s an obsessive recitation of numbers that he’s been told and then revised to his own specifications of strange things that happened. He’s been told in the night of fragments of information that might easily be disputed or corrected, but have long since lodged in his head. It’s a kind of delirium.”

The Iran war is already controversial, as it has taken a toll on the US economy and was opposed by most Americans from the beginning. President Donald Trump has blood on his hands by waging the Iran war without any seeming purpose, at least according to a Republican who advised the previous GOP president, George W. Bush.

“Two more Americans are dead,” Steve Schmidt, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, wrote on his Substack on Sunday. “That fact stands apart from politics. It can’t be explained away by speeches, obscured by patriotic slogans, or redeemed by presidential bravado. Two American families have entered a fraternity of grief that no one chooses to join. Their loss is permanent. The decisions that led to it demand scrutiny.”

He added, “This is Donald Trump’s war. No one compelled him to widen this conflict. No one forced him to make the judgment that military escalation best served the national interest. Those were presidential decisions. In the American system, the authority to commit military force carries with it the obligation to answer for the consequences. Every commander in chief owns the wars he begins, and every commander in chief owns the burden of explaining why Americans are asked to fight, to bleed and, sometimes, to die.”

Schmidt went on to accuse Trump of waging the war in Iran without any clear mission or plan for victory. As a result, he characterized the loss of American lives as immoral rather than merely tragic.

“The office of the presidency is the greatest public trust ever bestowed by a free people,” Schmidt argued. “It grants one individual the authority to send young Americans into mortal danger. No responsibility in our constitutional system is more profound. None requires greater humility. None permits less vanity.”

He added, “History is unmoved by rhetoric. It asks only a handful of questions. Was the country safer? Was the cause necessary? Were the sacrifices justified? Could wiser judgment have prevented the loss? Those questions aren’t answered at campaign rallies. They’re answered in military cemeteries. They’re answered in rehabilitation wards. They’re answered in the quiet grief of Gold Star families. Two more Americans are dead. The burden of proof belongs to the men who led them into this war.”

Schmidt concluded, “Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth have yet to carry it.”

Ever since the Iran war commenced, Schmidt has been one of the most prominent conservative voices denouncing it. For example, in April, he noted that the war is directly responsible for many of the economic problems facing Americans.

“The economy is in free fall — it's in a state of collapse,” Schmidt posted on X at the time. “There are fuel shortages all over the world, and diesel is $7 a gallon. In California, there will be food shortages because fertilizer can't make it through the Strait of Hormuz, and neither can hydrogen or helium, or dozens of other precursor agents that are necessary to sustain the global economy.”

He added, “This is a lost war led by a fool.”

Multiple experts are warning that President Donald Trump is gradually eroding American democracy through his actions since resuming office in 2025. Now, a new study from the American Journal of Political Science explains how so many Americans are willing to go along with his authoritarianism.

To learn this, researchers turned to Norway in order to assess how ordinary people reacted when surrounded by individuals with authoritarian ideologies, reported PsyPost's Eric W. Dolan on Sunday. In a paper co-authored by Sirianne Dahlum, Torbjørn Hanson, Åshild Johnsen, Andreas Kotsadam, and Alexander Wuttke, the scholars conducted a “field experiment [which] randomly assigned soldiers to different rooms during boot camp, so soldiers lived among peers with varying levels of openness to authoritarian rule. We found that many individuals adjusted their privately reported support for authoritarian rule to align more closely with their peers.”

They added, “Further survey-experimental evidence among soldiers and the general Norwegian population confirms that learning about others’ level of support for authoritarian rule changes both perceptions and own support. Our results suggest that support for authoritarian rule can have a social basis and could potentially spread through social contagion in established democracies.”

As a result of their study, the researchers concluded that there are weaknesses in democratic cultures when it comes to combating authoritarian ideas.

“The social basis of regime preferences that we have identified could imply that support for authoritarian rule could quickly spread in a society when citizens realize that these attitudes are more widespread than previously thought,” the authors explained. “It also points to the potential for cascade effects, where initial shifts in attitudes—through exogenous shocks—can spread rapidly through social networks, potentially leading to widespread changes in political norms. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for identifying how authoritarian sentiments might proliferate even in seemingly stable democracies and for developing effective strategies to reinforce and sustain democratic values.”

The researchers learned this first by studying over 1,300 Norwegian military recruits and how their authoritarian views evolved based on whether they were placed in rooms with peers who held or did not hold authoritarian views. They examined how these recruits’ attitudes changed over a period of eight weeks based on those exposures. Then they did the same thing with people outside the Norwegian military.

“To test whether these findings apply outside the military context, the scientists replicated the survey experiment using a representative sample of 1,500 general Norwegian citizens,” Dolan wrote. “The participants received similar prompts about the popularity of strongman leadership in a recent public opinion poll. A control group answered the questions without receiving any prior information about the views of others.”

Dolan added, “The findings in the general population closely mirrored the results from the military recruits. When ordinary citizens were informed that authoritarian views were widespread, they reported higher levels of personal support for strong leaders. The researchers then conducted a final replication using a massive cross-national sample of over 25,000 respondents from more than 29 different countries, which yielded the same pattern of social influence across diverse cultural contexts.”

As Kotsadam told PsyPost, “The field experiment shows that attitudes can converge among people who actually live together, while the survey experiments indicate that simply learning what other people believe can itself alter stated preferences. More broadly, the findings suggest that the stability of democracy depends not only on what citizens privately believe, but also on what they think their fellow citizens believe.”

If there is any silver lining to the study, it is that these views are not set in stone.

“They can be influenced by the surrounding social climate,” Kotsadam told Doland. As such, “making support for democratic principles visible may help reinforce those principles.”

Writing for Zeteo in April, journalist John Harwood further identified how Trump has eroded democratic norms to turn America into a dictatorship.

"To state the obvious, Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler," Harwood wrote. "MAGA is not Nazism. No despot or movement in history compares to the Third Reich, and the nature and scale of evil it perpetrated. Moreover, Trump's handiwork appears less formidable today. Most of America recoils from his second-term grotesquerie. If permitted free and fair elections, voters will punish his Republican Party this fall — just as Hungarian voters have now punished Trump's authoritarian role model Viktor Orbán. But the lessons Rees identifies remain relevant to the crisis confronting 21st-Century America. And that is not merely because Trump and a disturbing number of his young fans have, at times, expressed admiration for Nazi strength and ruthlessness."

The bizarre new announcement out of President Donald Trump's Pentagon has effectively "kicked a hornet's nest," according to a new report from The Hill, with experts expressing grave concern about the lack of scientific backing and the dangers the new policy could create.

This week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a new policy whereby all military officers 30 and older would be required to submit to screenings of their testosterone levels, and any found to have a deficiency would be required to undergo hormone replacement therapy to correct the supposed issue. The policy, met with widespread confusion and mockery, fits the secretary's longstanding insistence that the military's shortcomings could be fixed with a greater focus on masculinity.

The scientific community, however, is not at all convinced by the idea. In a report published Sunday, The Hill spoke with experts who warned that Hegseth's rationale for the policy lacks sufficient scientific evidence and warned that trying to influence testosterone levels in military officers could lead to dire side effects.

"Hegseth argues the effort, to become part of the military’s periodic health assessment for troops over 30, will ensure the optimal performance and long-term health of warfighters," The Hill explained. "But medical experts say Hegseth’s rationale for the directive isn’t backed by science, warning of overdiagnosis and warning of side effects like heart problems and infertility. Coming amid the broader embrace of the hormone among White House officials, the move plays into Hegseth’s focus on appearances and masculinity, which one Democrat said this week borders on 'homoeroticism.'”

Speaking with the outlet, Derek Griffith, the director of the program for research on men’s health at the University of Pennsylvania, stressed that low testosterone is far from a common issue, noting that only around 2 percent of the male population is impacted by it. Given that the military is already staffed by "a group of relatively younger, fitter men and women," Griffith doubted that low testosterone would be anything close to a "major issue" there. He also noted that things like "heart disease, cancer, hypertension, diabetes, depression and alcohol abuse" were the actual major causes of health issues in men that the military ought to focus on.

“I don’t fully understand,” he said of the new screening guidelines. “I don’t know what they’re seeing or what data they’re using to say ‘this is where we need to really focus and put our energy.'"

He added: “It’s not what’s usually a major issue for healthy men. I imagine for most active-duty military, they’re pretty much at a healthy weight. So I would be curious what percentage they’re expecting to identify who have low testosterone and would be in need of a treatment.”

Adriane Fugh-Berman, a professor in the department of pharmacology and physiology at Georgetown University, warned of the side effects that increased testosterone doses could carry.

"Testosterone even in low doses increases heart problems, kidney problems, infertility and fractures, which hardly seems like a good way to keep soldiers in fighting form," Fugh-Berman said. Hegseth’s remarks seem to imply that testosterone increases longevity, and there is no evidence for that. It shrinks testicles, too. How manly is that? It’s ridiculous to screen a population for a questionable condition which has a treatment with unproven benefits and proven risk.”

Brooke Nickel, a public health researcher in the Faculty of Medicine and Health at the University of Sydney, also expressed worry about "Young, healthy men are being told that common experiences like tiredness, stress or changes in libido are signs that something is medically wrong and that testosterone is the solution."

Even as Christian nationalist views decline throughout the United States, one pastor closely linked to President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is gaining more power through his influence at the Pentagon.

“Pastor Doug Wilson gave a surprisingly dispassionate interview to NPR’s Leila Fadel last week,” wrote The Dispatch’s Michael Reneau and Hannah Anderson for The Dispatch on Sunday. “I describe it as ‘surprisingly dispassionate’ because in the interview, Wilson espoused repealing the 19th Amendment, ending no-fault divorce, and introducing religious tests for public office; yet his delivery of these radical ideas was decidedly unbothered—a marked contrast to the responses the interview elicited from evangelicals and beyond. The emotional gap between Wilson’s rhetoric and how people respond to it is one of the defining features of his public presence. It’s also a key to understanding his ideas and how he uses them.”

Wilson is an evangelical pastor from Moscow, Idaho, who is particularly influential with Hegseth and the Defense Secretary’s inner circle. Wilson was even invited to preach at a Pentagon worship service that the cabinet officer began last year.

“Given his proximity to power, Wilson has become the subject of national media coverage, which often focuses on his claim to want to establish the United States as a Christian theocracy,” The Dispatch wrote. “Such language conjures visions of a real-life Gilead, the authoritarian and patriarchal republic that is the setting for The Handmaid’s Tale, but it would be a mistake to read Wilson as an ideologue. In fact, he spoke pragmatically in the NPR interview, naming the work of democracy as the work of persuasion. Wilson’s demeanor, even if slightly awkward, was not forceful or aggressive. He was measured, friendly, playful. But that disconnect—between the weight of what Wilson is suggesting and how easily he suggests it—is what’s concerning. “

The Dispatch pundits identify Wilson as a dangerous theocrat precisely because he is able to present his ideas in a seemingly rational manner, and also knows how to pull them back when he arouses controversy. In that vein, he also knows how to make his critics seem like they are being uncivil when they object to what he says and does.

“One way Wilson distinguishes himself, however, is how he uses radical ideas,” The Dispatch explained. “Unlike those who might hide a radical agenda, Wilson speaks openly about it—almost performatively. Those familiar with his broader body of work know that he delights in the drama of it all in much the same way that President Donald Trump seems to. Wilson doesn’t reverse course so much as place responsibility for the drama on others. He courts outrage and then retreats to the abstract when others react. ‘Screamers,’ he called them in the NPR interview.”

They added, “Speaking with Fadel, Wilson suggested that previous interviewers just threw ‘mud at the wall. You’re a fascist. You’re a Nazi. You’re a thing, you know…’ but now, he’s ‘risen to the dignity of needing to be intelligently opposed.’ In other words, the problem isn’t what he said; it’s that you (mis)understood. You were too sensitive. Satire is a legitimate form of argumentation, and you don’t understand how rhetoric works.”

Even when Wilson treads on incendiary ground, like downplaying the horrors of American slavery or encouraging people to interact with child sex abusers, he does not seem to lose influence within the MAGA universe.

“Wilson’s ability to separate the theoretical and actual also explains how he could devote his first book to a philosophical exploration of American slavery, writing that it was a ‘normal sinful situation’ rather than an ‘apocalyptic evil,’” The Dispatch explained. “The cover image is of a ‘black and tan,’ a mixed drink made by pouring a darker beer over a lighter one. This same indifference explains how Wilson could guide a young woman who was a New St. Andrew’s student to marry a convicted pedophile who was a part of their church community (and who had abused children within the church as an NSA student himself). Not only did Wilson mishandle the previous cases of sexual abuse, he diagnosed the groom’s behavior as ‘temptation,’ with the theoretical cure being sexual expression in marriage. The groom was later removed from the home when a judge ruled he could not live with his infant son due to failed polygraphs and further violations.”

They concluded, “If being a pastor is akin to being a doctor, Wilson is the doctor willing to experiment on his patients. And now, it seems, the nation itself.”

Wilson’s rising influence speaks to how the Trump political structure is inextricably tied to Christian nationalism. In March, The New Yorker’s Rachel Monroe reported that “people not attuned to the evangelical world may have missed the growing prominence of hyper-politicized churches such as Mercy Culture, which have become a key wing of the MAGA coalition. Compared with the religious right of previous generations, this cohort of pastors, influencers, and self-described prophets offers up a version of worship that’s at once more mystical, with an emphasis on supernatural powers, and more militaristic, with heightened political rhetoric.”

Monroe continued, “Many adopt a Christian-nationalist framework, arguing that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and should be governed as such.”

This philosophy directly contradicts the ideas of America’s key founding fathers, including President Thomas Jefferson, who was the chief author of the Declaration of Independence.

"His 'empire of liberty' offered the potential to dismantle the artificial hierarchies inherited from the past and imbue all aspects of life with the promise of freedom and happiness," Dean Caivano, an assistant professor of political theory at Lehigh University and author of "A Politics of All: Thomas Jefferson and Radical Democracy," explained to this author for Salon Magazine in 2024. "Although this idealized image of a free and harmonious American society is undeniably marred by the institution and legacy of slavery, overlooking the role of education and science as prerequisites for freedom and equality diminishes our ability to assess the historical and contemporary limits of American democracy critically."

Donald Trump cruised back to the presidency thanks to "an informal court of influencers, podcasters and self-appointed power brokers," but now, a new piece from Salon argues that his power is crumbling thanks to those very same people.

"During his presidential campaigns and midterm election cycles, that ecosystem amplified Trump’s message and bypassed traditional Republican institutions," Salon's Sophia Tesfaye wrote. "Now it’s colliding with the basic mechanics of governing and embarrassing the administration by creating a parallel power structure of clout chasers around the presidency. This week alone offered multiple remarkably different examples of the same phenomenon."

She continued: "In one, alleged pardon brokers sold access to Trump’s orbit as a luxury service. In another, one of Trump’s most influential MAGA personalities allegedly converted that proximity into a payday on the prediction markets. And in another example, a freshman Republican congressman threatened to derail House business over a feud with one of Trump’s favorite influencers. "

This class of media figures, Tesfaye argued, who deduced "that proximity to power is the only product worth selling," and now they are cashing in on it. In doing so, they threaten to "blow up their own party’s agenda."

Things are particularly stark when it comes to the MAGA sphere's treatment of key information. Tesfaye explained that, "In MAGAland, insider information is something to be teased, reposted and traded on."

"On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal reported that over lunch at a members-only social club in Tampa, Florida, GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna confided in associates that she already knew Trump would pick JD Vance as his running mate in 2024. According to a person familiar with the conversation, she revealed she had passed the tip on to Rogan O’Handley, the MAGA influencer known to millions of followers as “DC Draino,” so he could place a winning bet on Polymarket, and she later teased him for not placing a bigger wager. O’Handley had reportedly been quietly campaigning on social media to get Trump to consider Luna herself for the ticket, and when she told him Vance had gotten the nod instead, he cashed in on the correct pick anyway."

She continued: "Another account described a former investment banker saying he received the same kind of early tip through a conservative Heritage Foundation associate and used it to profit as well. Both Luna and O’Handley deny any wrongdoing, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is reportedly examining the allegations."

Tesfaye also detailed the story surrounding Alex Bruesewitz, who works as an "outside political adviser" to Trump, and has sparked a feud with Rep. Randy Fine, a Florida Republican, who has pledged to vote against every piece of legislation until Bruesewitz is fired. This animosity appears to trace back to an appearance Brueswitz made on Tucker Carlson's podcast in which he called the congressman "that creepy fat guy from Florida who endorsed genocide," while discussing Trump's endorsement of him.

"That a sitting member of Congress was willing to shut down his own party’s legislative business over a personal and ideological vendetta involving a Fox News alumnus and an outside political adviser is landing at the worst possible moment for House Speaker Mike Johnson, who needs something close to unanimity just to function," Tesfaye explained. "He’s already seen what a handful of defections can do: Weeks earlier, a separate bloc of conservative holdouts, several of whom had signed Fine’s own SAVE America letter, tanked a defense authorization rule. Suddenly Johnson was faced with a member willing to burn down the floor schedule indefinitely because the party’s most influential unofficial adviser called him fat on a podcast."

She concluded: "When clout brokers can provoke lawmakers into obstructing their own party’s agenda, the White House is no longer directing the coalition — it is being dragged around by it. It’s clear that Donald Trump’s unofficial MAGA court is becoming a liability."

When rapper Boosie Badazz — a.k.a. Torence Ivy Hatch Jr. — announced he was suing a lobbying firm that he paid to get him pardoned by President Donald Trump for alleged unlawful firearm possession, the music star did more than air his own grievances. According to a recent report, Hatch also shed light on how Trump has systematically used his pardoning authority to enrich his allies and consolidate his power.

“$600,000: That's the amount rapper Boosie Badazz reportedly paid a Washington lobbying firm to secure a presidential pardon,” NPR's Ayesha Rascoe told NOTUS reporter Jasmine Wright in a Sunday interview. “The rapper, whose real name is Torrence Hatch, was looking to overturn a federal conviction over the unlawful possession of a firearm. But the pardon hasn't happened. Now Hatch is reportedly looking to recover half of what he paid through arbitration. The rapper's case represents a growing industry in Washington, D.C.: wealthy clients paying to try to secure clemency from President Trump.”

As Wright explained to Rascoe, “There was an impetus by folks around the President, and the President himself, to do more of these pardons,” with the Justice Department’s pardon attorney Ed Martin losing much of his authority to the president and his inner circle.

“I've talked to a lot of different pardon attorneys, pardon lobbyists, folks who are involved in this business, and they say that their number one piece of advice to their clients is, one, call who you know,” Wright said. “If you know anybody remotely close to the White House, let them know that you're looking for a pardon. And two, try to get in front of the President. I've talked to people who say they have advised their clients to go to Mar-a-Lago, the President's resort residence in Palm Beach, Florida. Any way that you can get your application — your reasons for why you deserve clemency — in front of the President, they say, is an easier way to get closer to a pardon.”

Regardless of the ethical controversies surrounding this process, Wright emphasized that it is also entirely legal.

“This is legal,” Wright told Rascoe. “To be fair, people have always paid attorneys and lobbyists for pardons. You're not paying for the individual pardon; you're paying the person to go advocate on your behalf to get you a pardon or commutation.”

She added, “What's happening now is that, because of the normal barriers that used to exist to obtaining a pardon, it is now easier for people with some sort of association — they don't have to have a law degree, they don't even have to be an actual registered lobbyist — to go advocate to the White House to get their clients pardoned. And so this has created and normalized a new economy in which people are paying up to $5 million in some cases to individual lawyers or lobbyists to advocate on their behalf in hopes of getting a pardon. Now, not everybody who is doing this is getting a pardon, as we can see from this case.”

Not all of Trump’s pardons occurred because of lobbying efforts. Trump also used his power to help roughly 1,500 rioters who helped him attempt to overthrow the government on Jan. 6, 2021 after he lost the 2020 presidential election. Ever since, many of the Jan. 6ers have gone on to engage in serious crimes.

"At least 12 of the pardoned rioters have since been charged with other serious crimes, including child molestation, assault, harassment, murder plots and charges related to a vicious dog attack," The New York Times editorial board wrote in June. "The outcome was predictable. Critics, including this board, had warned that Mr. Trump’s pardons would embolden the rioters by signaling that crime has no consequences. One does not have to be a criminologist to predict that people who commit a violent act and are absolved of any punishment might become repeat offenders."

President Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, his former attorney Todd Blanche, has been widely criticized for admitting that he primarily views himself as Trump’s attorney and not doing enough for the victims of Trump’s longtime friend, the late Jeffrey Epstein. Yet even as Blanche gets in trouble for things such as saying Epstein’s victims should “do the legwork” for prosecuting Epstein and his associates, conservative critics of Trump have another observation — namely, that Democrats are not doing nearly enough to hold Trump and the other Epstein associates legally accountable.

“That's where Chuck Schumer, you know, should be choosing people to be on that committee who have that skill set, right?” Andrew Weissmann, a New York University law professor, explained on a podcast for The Bulwark posted on Sunday. Weissmann referred to how the New York senator and Senate Minority Leader has refrained from assigning lawmakers with a habit of asking tough questions to interrogate Blanche. “I mean, you have a bunch of people to choose from. And so that's where, you know, people — I feel like they don't do the hard work — but I agree with you.”

He added, “The other thing is, you know, get the person talking. You shouldn't be afraid of that. If you are right, and the whole thing is not a ‘gotcha,’ it's not a sort of game — this is where I think it helps that I was mainly a prosecutor.”

Weissmann said that, for example, a Democratic senator could have asked Blanche after the latter said he took responsibility for mistakes in producing the Epstein documents, “Just say, ‘Mr. Blanche, what's the first time you have ever said that? Isn't it today? Prior to today, wasn't your position that everything was fine?’” He added that they could similarly hold Blanche accountable for botching the investigations into the ICE murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

“The victims have come out from that meeting and said one of the things Todd Blanche said at that meeting was, well, you know, you need to go to the FBI and talk to them — which, by the way, point one, they have,” Weissmann pointed out. “They're like, ‘What are you talking about? We've already been to the FBI.’ And then he says, well, the reason you need to do that is that he, as the acting attorney general, cannot open an investigation.”

Weissmann’s observations were similar to those of Longwell, who shared his views that Democrats have not been aggressive enough in holding Republicans accountable for their actions regarding Trump and Epstein.

“The word I think you're looking for is ‘conviction’ — or maybe you're not, but it's the word I was looking for. I don't think you can sort of prosecute a case here, whether it's to the public or to actually move [something],” Longwell told Weissmann. “I think I came from the place that I'm not sure it's realistic that you're going to get the Republicans to vote against him. And so, for me, I was like, how do you — how do you at least make this about an issue that's going to be really complicated for him? And how do you get answers on Epstein, and sort of push that back into the news? You never know.”

This was similar to Weissmann’s complaint about Democrats in the Senate and how they handled Blanche.

“I think the more interesting question is not so much how did Blanche do in terms of his tone, but rather, how did the Democratic senators do in terms of their tone?” Weissmann said. “And that, to me, from the moment it began with Senator Durbin, who is obviously a lovely person, a smart person, and I think trying to be fair and wasn't engaged in a ‘gotcha’ — and that's true for many of the senators, you know — but there was zero sense of passion. There was zero sense of wrong. And, by the way, I'm not saying that you have to be rude or vitriolic. I'm just saying there was — I can understand why young people could be totally turned off by politics seeing that, and this sort of sense of the game that's played.”

When President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement regained control of America’s government in early 2025, there were multiple reports of them having fun as they laid off thousands of government workers and implemented the Project 2025 agenda. Yet between Trump’s underwhelming Great American State Fair, his desperate attempts to preemptively claim the midterm elections were stolen, his unpopular war against Iran and America’s ongoing economic problems, that sense of fun has now seemed to have mostly disappeared.

“The worst part about living in Donald Trump’s Washington has been seeing just how much fun he and all the MAGA vandals he brought to power have been having sacking and pillaging the place,” The New York Times’ Sally Quinn wrote on Sunday. “This while the rest of us longtime Washingtonians who abided by norms, shared values and even bipartisanship were filled first with shock, then a feeling of helplessness, and hopelessness. It could border on passivity. What could be done?”

Quinn referred back to an essay she wrote for the Times’ last year regarding the Trump administration’s attitude upon taking over Washington DC again.

“Nobody feels safe,” Quinn wrote at the time. “Nobody feels protected. This is a city where people seek and, if it all goes well for them, wield power. But today in Washington, those who hold — or once held — the most power are often the most scared. It is not something they are used to feeling.”

Reflecting back on those words in July 2026, Quinn argued that “sometimes it felt as if the Trumpists could smell our fear, and seemed to be enjoying it.” Yet because of the president’s multiple policy controversies and overall loss of popularity, she observed that this once-optimism has waned.

“Now they’re the ones in despair, fearful and losing hope,” Quinn wrote. “Even the true believers are questioning the MAGA theology. Why are we at war with Iran still? Our military is humbled, our reputation in tatters, and now gas prices are going up again.”

The columnist also pointed out that various Trump efforts to revive his approval ratings — including hosting a UFC fight on the White House lawn, leading the Great American State Fair and delivering a speech falsely claiming the 2020 presidential election as stolen — have failed to take off. As a result, even groups that normally stood by his side resolutely are now keeping their distance.

“Many Republican lawmakers are beginning to quiet-quit,” Quinn wrote. “The Wall Street Journal called it the G.O.P. ‘zombie Congress’ — not in open revolt, exactly, but not ready to take a bullet for the president and his self-serving crusades as the midterms approach.”

She added, “Then there’s Mr. Trump’s estrangement from some of his biggest allies: Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, Alex Jones and Ann Coulter, not to mention former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Even onetime Trump-skeptical Republican senators who had joined the bandwagon, like Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn, have, after being primaried by Trump-endorsed challengers, been more vocally critical. And even Joe Rogan has had his altercations with the president.”

With the cage fights serving as a “tipping point” in terms of Trump’s ability to be taken seriously even by his erstwhile allies, Quinn described how in advance of the fights one of Washington’s “hottest restaurants” hosted many Trump-world major players — but they could not successfully hide their ongoing concerns.

But the mood felt off,” Quinn said. “Less jubilant. As if they knew that the U.F.C. fights were really going to be the moment when MAGA jumped the shark.”

Leon Wieseltier, editor of Liberties magazine, told Quinn that “people are genuinely disgusted and they’re now combative. Like Popeye, they’re essentially saying, ‘That’s all I can stands, and I can’t stands no more.’ Before he eats his spinach to fortify himself.”

President Donald Trump has worked to accelerate America’s development of AI rather than regulate it, and the result is not just an epidemic of deepfakes and hallucinations being passed off as legitimate research. A new report reveals that some of the nation’s best-educated workers, who once were secure, are taking it on the chin.

“About one third of the total personal wealth in the United States is held by the top 1 percent of households, while the bottom half of Americans holds less than 3 percent, according to Federal Reserve data,” wrote The Washington Post's Elizabeth Dwoskin and Shira Ovide wrote on Sunday. This data includes former economic winners who are now finding themselves on the wrong side of layoffs and hiring freezes — tech workers.

“The sense of precariousness among America’s professional elite could be a preview of what’s ahead for the rest of the country as AI spreads,” the Post wrote. “Silicon Valley techies are ‘are guinea pigs for what tech dudes want to do to everyone,’ said Anil Dash, a technology entrepreneur.”

They added, “At tech companies, leaders obsessed with winning the AI race have tasked their workforces of coders, lawyers and HR professionals with becoming the front line of that transformation. They’re being measured by how quickly they can automate their own jobs while watching their colleagues get pushed out in successive waves of layoffs.”

The report continued, “Layoffs.fyi, which tracks announced job cuts, counts more than 800,000 tech workers laid off since 2022, including large staff reductions in recent months at Meta, Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon.” According to the Silicon Valley market research consultancy founder Oliver Raskin, whose company is called Signalcraft Insights, “there’s this whole tranche of people who’ve been quite used to being among the most upwardly mobile in society who are all of a sudden saying, ‘Now I’m the guy on the street.’”

In the mid-to-late 20th century, autoworkers were the group most likely to fall into the category of “entered a specialized field on the premise that it was well paying and stable, only to have the rug pulled out from under them.” Now that dubious distinction belongs to tech workers such as coders and engineers, whose positions are being outsourced to AI because the technology’s speed and without regard to notable dips in quality.

“There’s just a lot of uncertainty, a lot of fear, a lot of people feeling like, if they get let go from this job, they might not find another one,” Anneke Buffone, a psychology PhD who Meta hired to help employees’ well-being and safety but ultimately left in December, told the Post.

“She described getting pushback from managers when she tried to explain that a particular AI tool was a waste of time,” the Post reported. “The system had so many errors that she needed to redo its work.”

It continued, “But her bosses ‘were like, ‘No, keep using it more. It’ll just get better,’’ she said. ‘There’s a feeling among management that when you voice that AI has all these problems, they don’t want to hear it.” AI, she said, makes “everything go so much faster. It creates this illusion that you can get all this stuff done. Much of the time you’re just babysitting the AIs.’”