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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.

President Donald Trump is desperate to avoid the historical fate of President Jimmy Carter, whose administration is remembered for struggling with a bad economy and a hostile Iran.

“It was Good Friday afternoon in a nearly empty West Wing soon after the president learned that an American jet had been shot down in Iran, with two airmen missing. Trump screamed at aides for hours,” reported The Wall Street Journal’s Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey. “The Europeans aren’t helping, he said repeatedly. Gas prices averaged $4.09. Images of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis—one of the biggest international policy failures of a presidency in recent times—had been looming large in his mind, people who have spoken to him said.”

The reporters quoted Trump saying in March about Carter's Democratic Party that “if you look at what happened with Jimmy Carter…with the helicopters and the hostages, it cost them the election. What a mess.” The current president was referring to how his predecessor was not able to free 52 Americans held as hostages by Iran until the very end of his administration, even losing US helicopters and servicemen during a failed rescue attempt.

“Speaking to Republican lawmakers in Doral, Fla., a little over a week into the [Iran] war, Trump ticked through Democratic presidents who oversaw foreign policy debacles, including the withdrawal from Afghanistan under President Joe Biden,” The Wall Street Journal reported. He then dwelled on Carter’s failed attempt to rescue U.S. hostages held by the same Iranian regime he was bombing.

Speaking with AlterNet, historian Rick Perlstein — whose 2020 book “Reaganland” chronicled Carter’s single term as president and how it laid the foundations for the empowerment of the far right through Ronald Reagan’s victory in the 1980 election — explained that to the extent Carter can be compared to Trump, the analogy consistently redounds to Carter’s favor… despite the Democrat’s shortcomings as a president.

"Carter was very self-aware when it came to questions of humility,” Perlstein told AlterNet. I'm not saying he was humble—in fact, he had a very paradoxical relationship to humility—but he also understood his greatest flaw. He prayed for humility. He talks about how, when he prays, he prays for more humility. So I think that he had this kind of self-awareness that is 1000% different from Trump."

Carter himself seemed to agree that Trump was an inferior president. Speaking to this author for Salon in 2018, Carter said that “I think that under Trump the government is worse than it has been before. This is the first time I remember when the truth is ignored, allies are deliberately aggravated, China, Europe, Mexico and Canada are hurt economically and have to hurt us in response, Americans see the future worse than the present, and immigrants are treated cruelly."

After Carter died in late 2024, Trump refused to keep the flags at half-staff to honor his passing, as is traditional. Even though First Lady Melania Trump devoted part of her documentary to attending Carter’s memorial service, neither she nor the president discussed Carter’s legacy at all. When AlterNet reached out to the White House for comment on this story, they declined to reply.

President Donald Trump likes to claim that his administration has been a radical departure from the past, but one conservative commentator has statistics which tell a very different story.

Simply put, Trump has continued a pattern that began under Republicans like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush of running as fiscal conservatives and then continuing the high-spending policies of their predecessors Nick Gillespie, editor at large at Reason Magazine, wrote on Sunday. Indeed, each president has actually spent more than the one before him.

“But what about Donald Trump and Joe Biden?” Gillespie added. “Surely, here is a major rupture! If nothing else, it's widely assumed that the return of Trump to a second, nonconsecutive term augured a ‘vibe shift’ that either saved America or destroyed it, depending on your partisan affiliation. But even here, I'd argue, there's more continuity than not.”

First, Gillespie slammed Trump and Biden for being part of a “gerontocracy” in which his feeble performance during the June 2024 presidential debate compelled him to drop out of the election.

“Even the most die-hard Trump supporter must suspect that the Republican incumbent is losing at least some of his marbles lately,” Gillespie said of the Republicans. “His apocalyptic statements warning that ‘a whole civilization will die’ due to his Iran war policies don't suggest he's in great mental shape; neither does his insistence that he stopped a nonexistent war between Cambodia and Armenia. His odd defense of posting an image to Truth Social of himself as a very Jesus-like character ministering to a sick man didn't help anything. In explaining his goal in sharing the since-deleted and much meme-ified picture, he said, ‘I thought it was me as a doctor.’ He's either lying (which is not good) or really, really out of touch (even worse).”

Yet Gillespie’s primary complaint about Trump and Biden isn’t their respective states of cognitive decline, but their similarly profligate spending policies.

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

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

In addition to increasing spending, Trump has issued massive cuts to social welfare services on which his low-income supporters rely while increasing benefits to his wealthy donors.

“The message to everyday Americans is: beware,” wrote The Guardian's Eduardo Porter earlier this month, who added that “to the average American, however, it must be hard to understand Trump’s budget proposal as anything but a betrayal. He won the presidency twice, largely by promising help for America’s beleaguered working stiffs, forever ignored by cosmopolitan elites in power, invested in foreign trade agreements and open borders policies. The budget proposal confirms that, if it ever was sincere, this commitment has by now been forgotten.”

As examples, Porter included “the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) could see its budget cut by over $15bn, 12% less compared with this year,” while his “Big Beautiful Bill” includes so many cuts to health programs that it is expected to “push 15 million Americans to lose health insurance, according to some analysts.”

Similarly Fortune’s business editor Nick Lichtenberg noted in March that under Trump the United States national debt crossed $39 trillion for the first time, meaning Trump had added $1 trillion to it since October.

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

Lichtenberg also cited a Peterson Foundation study which projects the debt will exceed $40 trillion before the 2026 midterm elections.

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

President Donald Trump has done his best to curry the favor of Europe’s far right, but after seeing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán go down to humiliating defeat despite Trump’s support, the far right now wants to put daylight between itself and America’s leader.

“President Donald Trump’s offensive behavior toward Christians and his unnecessary and unpopular war in Iran isn’t just splitting his political base at home — it’s also alienating his allies abroad,” wrote MS NOW’s Zeeshan Aleem on Sunday. “Right-wing nationalists in Europe are becoming more and more wary of association with Trump and growing inclined to keep him at a distance to protect their own political projects. The trend marks a blow to Trump’s aspirations of creating an international bloc of right-wing nationalist states that work in concert to quash the left.”

Aleem ticked off a number of prominent Italian conservatives who are denouncing Trump including Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a number of German lawmakers from the far-right Alternative for Germany party, Romania’s European Parliament member Diana Sosoaca and French far-right leader Marine Le Pen. Their criticisms have ranged from his meddling in European domestic politics, his invasion of Iran and his attacks on Pope Leo XIV.

“Those bold criticisms speak to how incredibly damaging Trump’s war on Iran has been for his standing within his movement,” Aleem observed. “The surge in global oil prices is politically radioactive; far-right leaders and parties in Europe affiliated with Trump risk becoming associated with the energy crisis unless they take steps to create distance from him.”

Indeed, as recently as last week, the United Kingdom’s Brexit champion Nigel Farage downplayed his relationship with Trump, who he once said was ushering in “the beginning of a golden age,” by instead saying “I happen to know him, but that’s by the by.”

Overall, this pattern speaks to how Trump’s brash approach to governance has alienated America’s European allies.

“Trump, for so many people, epitomizes the ugly American — somebody who is bumptious and vulgar and ignorant about foreign cultures,” former Time Magazine editor Rick Stengel said in a recent podcast appearance on The Bulwark with former Daily Beast editor-in-chief John Avlon on Sunday. “So I think people sort of have come to the end of their patience with America.”

Ironically, Trump has aggressively courted the European far right as his natural ideological allies. Trump appointee Susan B. Rogers was selected as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in large part to ingratiate herself to the far right, such as by describing German migrants as “barbarian rapist hordes,” falsely claiming Sweden’s immigration policy has caused sexual violence (“If your government cared about ‘women’s safety,’ it would have a different migration policy”) and incorrectly stating that “advocates of unlimited third world immigration have long controlled a disproportionate share of official knowledge production.”

Rogers even met with members of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) Party, which espouses an ideology widely perceived as neo-Nazi.

President Donald Trump’s belligerent rhetoric toward America’s allies may please his domestic political base, but it is harming America’s international standing — perhaps permanently.

“Trump, for so many people, epitomizes the ugly American — somebody who is bumptious and vulgar and ignorant about foreign cultures,” former Time Magazine editor Rick Stengel said in a recent podcast appearance on The Bulwark with former Daily Beast editor-in-chief John Avlon. “So I think people sort of have come to the end of their patience with America.”

Avlon replied to Stengel by noting that polls found presidents like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who engaged in positive diplomatic relationships with other countries, were far more popular than the bellicose Trump. Indeed, Stengel noted that America’s foreign standing has “plummeted” during Trump’s two terms.

“It always seemed absurd to me when Trumpists would say that we need to be respected on the world stage, when you could see in the data that America was not respected — was held in worse regard when Trump was president, even than Chinese president-for-life Xi,” Avlon told Stengel. “So I wonder now with Iran, though — we seem to have crossed a Rubicon, because it was a war of choice, because our allies are not with us. And tell me about the downstream effect of that as you see it.”

Stengel added that, even though Joe Biden tried to reverse the damage to America’s reputation caused by Trump’s first term, America’s allies were not convinced that Biden would remain in power long enough to keep those policies in place. Trump’s reelection in 2024 confirmed their fears.

“This seesaw in presidential politics is something that people don't really understand,” Stengel told Avlon. “And then this Iran thing — by the way, what was probably most popular about Trump on the world stage was his sort of isolationism: that this isn't about America invading foreign countries and this world of endless wars, that America would retrench globally in terms of militaries but increase their presence globally in terms of trade and globalization. In some ways, it's the exact opposite. The alliances are also part of this idea of soft power, because — and I hate that phrase we used to use — we're not the world's policemen. We weren't the world's policemen, but we were the kind of foundation of the global world order, that people could trust America to abide by the rule of law, to be a pretty fairly honest broker. Not to say we wouldn't do bad things, but that is completely out the window.”

He concluded, “And the kind of ‘America First’ which has now actually caused it to get into a war is something that makes us much more isolated and much less popular, to an extraordinary extent.”

In February the New York Times reported that Trump’s imperialist rhetoric toward Denmark about acquiring Greenland and his conquest of Venezuela had convinced America’s European allies to decouple their most valuable financial and digital assets from American corporations. His tariffs have similarly prompted talk among Europeans of a permanent “divorce” from the US, with a senior European official telling Politico that “there is a shift in U.S. policy and in many ways it is permanent. Waiting it out is not a solution. What needs to be done is an orderly and coordinated movement to a new reality.”

When conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated last year, President Donald Trump and his supporters vowed that his death would change things. In at least one tragic sense, this has been true — politicians are now spending campaign money on personal security.

“Since the assassinations of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and Democratic Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, more than 15 states have passed laws or approved rule changes allowing lawmakers to access campaign funds for personal security, a sign of growing concern about political violence in America,” Politico’s Natalie Fertig reported on Sunday. Since the start of 2026 Alabama, Nebraska, Oregon, South Dakota and Utah altered their policies so that state lawmakers can use campaign funds for personal security, while states like Tennessee are discussing similar laws.

“The suspect in Hortman’s killing, Vance Boelter, is facing federal murder charges, and authorities said he allegedly confessed in a letter in which he recounted a confusing and convoluted scheme to punish Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz,” Fertig wrote. “Boelter has pleaded not guilty. In Kirk’s killing, the suspect, Tyler Robinson, allegedly inscribed bullet casings with anti-fascist phrases and meme-culture phrases. A preliminary hearing in his case is scheduled to start this month.”

The newfound vigilance is not limited to politicians; even political activists have to be on their guard. Turning Point USA head Erika Kirk pulled out of a University of Georgia speaking event, where she would have been joined by Vice President JD Vance, because of “serious threats.”

“I take my security team’s recommendations extremely seriously,” Kirk explained in a post on X, with Turning Point USA’s Andrew Kolvet adding the threats against Kirk were “a terrible reflection on the state of reality and the state of our country.”

Trump himself has been accused of inciting violence against politicians who disagree with him. When he accused Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey of “domestic terrorism” for disagreeing with him, former Department of Justice's (DOJ) Civil Rights Division attorney Julia Gegenheimer told Slate legal writer Mark Joseph Stern that Trump’s rhetoric is designed to harm the Minnesota Democrats.

"It is profoundly disturbing. And the reason why this feels different to you is that it is a bit of a different flavor," Gegenheimer said. "It’s pitting the federal government against the states and creating tension where it doesn’t need to be. And frankly, it’s implicitly encouraging acts of political violence against these elected officials by turning them into the enemy." Indeed, Trump has issued subpoenas against Walz, Frey, St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison.

"We’ve seen this throughout history, even recent history: When you put people in opposition like that — when you portray them as the enemy, when you describe them as kind of threatening a person’s way of life or things that they hold dear — that creates the conditions under which people are more likely to resort to political violence, and it becomes more and more the norm," Gegenheimer explained.

Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2024, New School for Social Research history department chair and author of "A Brief History of Fascist Lies" Federico Finchelstein explained that Trump and his supporters engage in a "kind of dissonance between what Trump is saying and what is going on. And this has been the case with totalitarians and fascists for decades, that they say stuff that doesn't connect to reality." He described as “shocking” "the idea that the person that has promoted violence through rhetoric, and even sometimes the glorification of that violence, the idea that that person can complain about the 'rhetorical violence' of his enemies.” Finchelstein then added that Trump "does this kind of thing again and again, and that's why he reminds us of [Nazi Germany dictator Adolf] Hitler." The former and possibly future president "follows Hitler's playbook in projecting onto his enemies all his desires, fantasies, and aspirations. This includes, of course, as he said, 'retribution' and violence."

In response to Finchelstein’s comment to Salon, press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Salon that "it's been less 72 hours since the second assassination attempt [by Ryan Wesley Routh] on President Trump's life and the media is already back to comparing President Trump to Hitler. It's disgusting. This is why Americans have zero trust in the liberal mainstream media."

President Donald Trump may fear his own wife, First Lady Melania Trump, as she navigates the fallout of her longtime friendship with the late Jeffrey Epstein.

“Why had the presser been called?” wrote The Independent’s Sarah Beth Spraggins about the first lady’s surprising April 9th press conference. “There have been growing rumors that Paolo Zampolli – the modeling agent Melania credits with encouraging her to move to the United States – may have used his ties to the Trumps to have his ex-partner Amanda Ungaro deported.”

If true, this detail would fill in a lot of blanks in a life that has remained mysterious. Melania Trump is widely known to spend most of her time in New York City despite listing her legal residence as Palm Beach, Florida, and she has deliberately avoided providing details about her childhood or career. Even her documentary “Melania,” released earlier this year (and directed by Epstein associate Brett Ratner), avoided any of those subjects.

“She is the First Lady of the United States and nobody knows anything about her,” Michael Wolff, the journalist engaged in a lawsuit with Melania Trump that may have inspired the April 9th press conference, told The Independent. He also expressed doubt that Melania Trump has any empathy for Epstein’s victims.

“Zero, zero! My God!” Wolff replied. “I mean, you know, she has never shown an ounce of empathy toward anyone, ever. That is a cold, calculating, hollow person. That is the portrait.”

At the same time, because of the increasing attention on the Epstein files (and her litigation against those who attempt to shed light on her involvement with him), Melania Trump clearly feels a need to protect herself. With that in mind, Spraggins asked Wolff if the president is afraid of his own first lady.

“Well, I would be,” Wolff replied. “So who knows what he is. But I certainly would be. I think that she’s a wild card, if not, to switch metaphors, a loose cannon.”

Melania Trump is accused of using her influence with the White House to help Zampolli get Ungaro deported to Brazil so he could prevail in a custody dispute. As former President George W. Bush aide Steve Schmidt recently pointed out, “Melania claims it was Zampolli who introduced her to her soulmate at the Kit Kat Klub in Manhattan in 1998. That’s the story at least. Ungaro came to the United States via airplane at age 16 or 17 from Brazil. She arrived via private jet.”

In addition to the Ungaro theory, Wolff speculated at the time of the press conference that the first lady was reacting to an upcoming book linking the Trumps to the former prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor by historian Andrew Lownie.

“A new book was published yesterday in the US and UK, entitled ‘The Rise and Fall of The House of York,’” Wolff posted on X. “It's by a British journalist by the name of Andrew Lownie, and it's about the life of Prince Andrew. But it is also about his connection to Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, and Melania Trump.”

Wolff added, “In fact, it contains a passage in which Epstein is quoted — apparently from a 2007 interview — where he says that he had sex with Melania a full year before Donald Trump commenced his relationship with her.”

In addition to his wife’s links to Epstein, Trump himself was close friends with Epstein from the 1980s through the 2000s, when their friendship fell apart due to an unsuccessful business deal.

You can almost feel the change in the air we breathe.

It’s not just that Dems are winning special elections by wide margins (and even where they’re not, they’re “overperforming” in ruby-red areas by an average of 16 points).

Nor just that Hungary’s Viktor Orbán was overwhelmingly defeated after 16 years of authoritarian rule, with almost 80 percent of eligible voters turning out. (The victor, Peter Magyar, overcame Orbán’s rigged system by focusing on Orbán’s corruption and linking it to the economic difficulties facing average Hungarians.)

Or that Trump posted an image of himself as Jesus, revealing his God complex and causing even evangelical Christians in his MAGA base to question his religiosity and mental stability.

Or that Trump and Vance were dumb enough to pick a fight with Pope Leo, who has used it to explain his (and, for Catholics, Jesus’s) objections to war and to tyrants everywhere.

Or that Trump’s major ally in Europe (and the only European leader to attend his inauguration), Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Malone, described Trump’s attack on the pope as “unacceptable” (Trump responded by attacking her for “lacking courage” in refusing to join his war on Iran).

Or that Trump threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization — prompting even Tucker Carlson to call Trump’s threat “vile on every level,” Candace Owens to demand that the 25th Amendment be invoked to remove him from office, conspiracist Alex Jones to accuse Trump of threatening “genocide,” and Megyn Kelly to concede that Trump’s coalition is “completely fractured and in smithereens.”

Or that Trump’s war has been such an abominable failure that it’s demonstrated his dangerous ignorance and diminishing mental capacity.

It’s all these, together.

Add in Trump’s legal failures to prosecute his political enemies, to target universities and law firms, to impose his tariffs, and to mount defamation lawsuits — and you understand why the air around us is beginning to feel different.

I hesitate to say we’ve reached a turning point in this horrific time. But something profound seems to be changing.

America and the world’s democracies are beginning to win this overriding fight — against the forces of authoritarianism, corruption, bigotry, ignorance, lies, greed, and violence.

We are starting to win because Trump and the forces he’s unleashed are so deeply repulsive to the consciences of most Americans and much of the rest of humanity.

The more Trump and these forces reveal themselves for what they are, the more that decent people — whether they call themselves Republican or Democrat, conservative or progressive, right or left, American or non-American — are recoiling from them.

We have not yet prevailed, of course. But, my friends, we are making progress. And we will prevail.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom is unpopular with voters, but despite their opposition, Trump has mentioned it more than supposed policy priorities like health care, cheaper prescription drugs and affordability.

“Trump has invoked the ballroom on about a third of the days this year, according to a Washington Post analysis of his public remarks and social media posts, a pace that rivals and even exceeds his mentions of some major policy priorities,” wrote Clara Ence Morse and Dan Diamond on Monday. “He has mentioned the project on fewer days this year than topics such as tariffs and Iran but on about as many days as he has mentioned health insurance and ‘affordability.’”

They added that Trump has mentioned the ballroom “significantly” more often than his TrumpRx website, “which his administration introduced to help Americans shop for cheaper prescription drugs.”

Morse and Diamond add that Trump has paid more attention to public statements about the ballroom as 2026 has dragged on, particularly as various legal challenges have impeded its progress.

“In April, for instance, the president has issued more posts about the ballroom on his Truth Social platform than about tariffs — Trump’s signature economic policy,” Morse and Diamond explained. “On Thursday, the president took to Truth Social to complain about the federal judge who ordered a stop to the project until Trump receives congressional authorization, complain again about the judge, complain about the plaintiff, and then complain about the judge one more time — yielding nearly 800 words of invective, all told. Then, within minutes, Trump shared all four posts again.”

While one might assume that a politician would lean into an issue like the White House ballroom because it redounds to their political credit, The Washington Post noted that this is hardly the case here.

“The project is broadly unpopular,” Morse and Diamond explained. “Fifty-eight percent of Americans said they opposed tearing down the East Wing to build the ballroom, according to an Economist-YouGov poll in February. Trump’s political advisers have encouraged him to focus on topics such as lowering the cost of health care ahead of this year’s midterms.”

Indeed, when the White House compiled a 9,000-page book of public comments about the ballroom, they were almost unanimously negative. The complaints included "complete DISASTER,” an “eyesore,” an “abomination,” "NO GAUDY FAKE GOLD STUFF ALL OVER THE PLACE,” “no one wants to be in an adjunct building in a large crowd with lengthened security protocols” and “appalling.”

When denying the White House’s desire to build the ballroom, Judge Richard Leon (who was appointed by Trump’s fellow Republican president, George W. Bush) declared that “the President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!” Rejecting Trump’s claim to preexisting authority to destroy parts of the White House, Leon sided with the National Trust for Historic Preservation that there is almost certainly “no statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims to have. As such, I must therefore GRANT the National Trust's Motion for a Preliminary Injunction, and the ballroom construction project must stop until Congress authorizes its completion.”

Leon added, “unless and until Congress blesses this project through statutory authorization, construction has to stop!"

The ballroom is being constructed over the ruins of the White House East Wing, which Trump destroyed without permission. The Republican also announced he would rip out the Thomas Jefferson-installed Tennessee Flagstone pavers with black granite.

I’ve long assumed that Samuel Alito was the worst.

Alito — who authored the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), the case that ended constitutional abortion rights by merely asserting that the high court’s prior opinion in Roe v. Wade (1973) was wrongly decided; who accepted a 2008 luxury fishing trip to Alaska, including private jet travel, from hedge fund billionaire and GOP donor Paul Singer yet failed to disclose it on Alito's financial forms and didn’t even recuse himself from decisions involving Singer’s subsequent business before the Supreme Court; who hoisted an inverted American flag outside his Virginia home shortly after the January 6 Capitol riot, a symbol of support for Trump's false claims of a stolen 2020 election — has the moral and intellectual stature of a poisonous toad.

But I’ve come to revise my view of the court’s worst Justice.

Clarence Thomas is 77 years old. He has now served on the Supreme Court for over 34 years, making him the longest-serving member of the Court. He is a bitter, angry, severe hard-right, intellectually dishonest, ideologue. After reading his latest thoughts on America, I’ve concluded Thomas is even worse than Alito.

Last Wednesday, Thomas gave a rare public address at the University of Texas in Austin that began as a banal tribute to the Declaration of Independence before degenerating into a misleading screed against progressivism.

“At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream,” Thomas intoned. “The proponents of this new set of first principles, most prominently among them the twenty-eighth president, Woodrow Wilson, called it progressivism.”

Thomas went on to blame progressives for the worst crimes of the 20^th century, insisting that “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao” were all “intertwined with the rise of progressivism,” as was “racial segregation,” “eugenics,” and other evils.

This is pure rubbish.

In reality, America’s Progressive era emerged at the start of the 20th century from the corruption and excesses of America’s first Gilded Age (we’re now in the second, if you hadn’t noticed) — its record inequalities of income and wealth, its “robber barons” who monopolized industries and handed out sacks of money to pliant legislators, it’s dangerous factories and unsafe working conditions, its violent attacks on workers who tried to form unions, its corporate control over all facets of government, its widespread poverty and disease, and its corrupt party machines.

In many ways, the Progressive Era — whose most prominent leader was Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, not Woodrow Wilson, by the way — saved capitalism from its own excesses by instituting a progressive income tax, an estate tax, pure food and drug laws, and America’s first laws against corporate influence in politics.

Then, under Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth cousin (Franklin D.), came Social Security, the 40-hour workweek (with time-and-a-half for overtime), the right to form unions, and laws and regulations that limited Wall Street’s ability to gamble with other people’s money.

Clarence Thomas got it exactly backwards. Had we not had the Progressive Era and its reforms extending through the 1930s, America might well have succumbed to fascism — as did Germany under Hitler, and Italy under Mussolini, or to communist fascism, as did Russia under Stalin. Progressive and New Deal reforms acted as bulwarks against the rise of fascism in America.

In fact, it’s been the demise of such reforms since Ronald Reagan that have opened the way to Trumpian neo-fascism.

Over a third of American workers in the private sector were unionized in the 1950s, giving them bargaining leverage to get higher wages and better working conditions. Now, fewer than 6 percent are unionized, which has contributed to the flattening of wages, a contracting middle class, inequalities of income and wealth rivaling the first Gilded Age, and an angry and suspicious working class that’s become easy prey for demagogues.

Wall Street has been deregulated — allowing it to go on gambling sprees such as the one that produced the financial crisis of 2008, which claimed millions of working peoples’ homes, savings, and jobs.

America’s social safety nets have become so frayed that almost a fifth of the nation’s children are now in poverty. Yet Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump have slashed taxes on the rich and on big corporations and have allowed giant corporations to merge into giant monopolies rivaling the trusts of the first Gilded Age. And Trump has ushered in an era of corruption the likes of which America hasn’t seen since that earlier disgraceful era.

Thomas claims that “The century of progressivism did not go well.” Baloney. It helped America create the largest middle class the world had ever seen, while also extending prosperity to millions of Black and brown people.

The tragedy is that America turned its back on progressivism and on social progress, in part because of the Supreme Court and Justice Clarence Thomas.

Flashback: I was in law school in 1973 when the Supreme Court decided Roe, protecting a pregnant person’s right to privacy under the 14th amendment to the Constitution.

Clarence Thomas was in my law school class at the time, as was Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Clinton) and Bill Clinton.

The professors used the “Socratic method” – asking hard questions about the cases they were discussing and waiting for students to raise their hands in response, and then criticizing the responses. It was a hair-raising but effective way to learn the law.

One of the principles guiding those discussions is called stare decisis — Latin for “to stand by things decided.” It’s the doctrine of judicial precedent. If a court has already ruled on an issue (say, on reproductive rights), future courts should decide similar cases the same way. Supreme Courts can change their minds and rule differently than they did before, but they need good reasons to do so, and it helps if their opinion is unanimous or nearly so. Otherwise, their rulings appear (and are) arbitrary — even, shall we say? — partisan.

In those classroom discussions almost fifty years ago, Hillary’s hand was always first in the air. When she was called upon, she gave perfect answers – whole paragraphs, precisely phrased. She distinguished one case from another, using precedents and stare decisis to guide her thinking. I was awed.

My hand was in the air about half the time, and when called on, my answers were meh.

Clarence’s hand was never in the air. I don’t recall him saying anything, ever.

Bill was never in class.

Only one of us now sits on the Supreme Court. And he has shown no respect for stare decisis.

Nor has he respected judicial ethics.

A federal law — 28 U.S. Code § 455 — requires that “any justice, judge, or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Thomas’s wife, Ginni, actively strategized with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on overturning the election results. Between Election Day 2020 and the days following the January 6th attack on the Capitol, she exchanged 29 text messages with Meadows, in which she spread false theories about the election, urged Meadows to overturn the election results, and called for specific actions from the White House to help overturn the election. She also served as one of nine board members of a group that helped lead the “Stop the Steal” movement and called for the punishment of House Republicans who participated in the U.S. House Select Committee investigating the January 6th attack.

Yet Clarence Thomas has repeatedly participated in cases that have come to the high court directly or indirectly involving the 2020 election results, refusing to disqualify himself.

In addition, he failed to disclose his wife’s income from her work at the Heritage Foundation, in violation of the Ethics in Government Act.

Finally, there’s his speech last week in Austin. How can Americans be expected to believe in the impartiality of the Supreme Court in general and Clarence Thomas in particular when he condemns an entire philosophy of government — progressivism — and all the people who continue to call themselves progressives, in effect labeling them neo-fascists?

At the start of his speech last week in Austin, Clarence Thomas noted that “My wife Virginia and I have many wonderful friends and acquaintances here, and it is so special to have our dear friends Harlan and Kathy Crow join us today.”

He was, of course, referring to the Republican mega-donor who has spent the last twenty years lavishing Thomas with personal gifts, luxury yacht trips, fancy vacations, and funding for Ginni Thomas’s political organization.

Small wonder that Clarence Thomas prefers the Gilded Age over the Progressive Era. He’s the living embodiment of The Gilded Age’s public-be-damned excesses.

Hence, he’s my nominee for the worst justice in modern Supreme Court history.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

Editor’s note: The following remarks were delivered during an emergency press conference in New Haven, Connecticut on Tuesday, April 14, 2026 in response to recent comments and actions by President Donald J. Trump.

“You shall have no other gods before me.” —Exodus 20:3

“All who make idols are nothing, and the things they treasure are worthless.” —Isaiah 44:9

“Therefore, since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill.” —Acts 17:29

“God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship him in Spirit and in truth.” —John 4:24

There are times that compel people of faith to speak, servants of Jesus to speak, proclaimers of the gospel to speak and engage in truth-telling and forms public exorcism rooted in deep radical love with the hope of repentance and a commitment to faithful witness—without fear of what any man or woman administration can do to us.

Two weeks ago the Moral Monday movement held Moral Monday gatherings in Washington, DC, 16 states, and Canada to denounce this war and the President’s declaration that if another country didn’t do what he said, he would “reign” down Hell on them and wipe out their entire civilization.

Why has he been talking about “reigning” down hell? Why does he write “reign,” not “rain”? What authority is he claiming to serve?

Why was he so threatened by Easter that he had to try to make it about him?

Why is the Pope teaching what Jesus and the church have always taught getting under his skin? The religious nationalist movement for so long has been saying he is an imperfect instrument being “used by God.” But he’s not satisfied with that. He wants to be God.

The AI image of him as Jesus is so bad that some of his own people have called it blasphemy. So now he’s trying to walk it back and say he thought it was a portrayal of him as a doctor.

This is exposing the madness that we’ve seen in policy. He wants to be some kind of God like messianic figure—to decide who lives and who dies; who gets citizenship and who doesn’t; which parts of the Constitution still matter and whose rights have to be respected.

Just 10 days ago, on the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. King, Trump told Russell Vought, the director of the federal Office of Management and Budget, “Don’t send any money for day care, because the United States can’t take care of day care. That has to be up to a state. We can’t take care of day care. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We’re fighting wars.”

And then during Holy Week, he went to the Supreme Court to seemingly intimidate them to support undoing birthright citizenship for babies.

Not only is war unholy, but when any human or president acts in word and deed as though they can determine who lives and who dies—who has citizenship and who can “reign” down hell and wipe out an entire civilization—assuming God-like authority, represents a war on divinity.

We live in a nation that has declared some things are inalienable, endowed by our Creator. And for people of faith, even if the nation didn’t say it, we believe and know that some things are only God’s authority, and to violate them is sin because the gospel of Jesus says so.

This AI pic represents idolatry—a false image offered for us to bow down to, and it is blasphemy and heresy and an affront to Jesus Christ. To do it represents a kind of demonic madness, no matter who would do it—Democrat or Republican. To equate Jesus with a person, a flag, bombs and war planes—and to say that’s what heals us and saves us: this is sin and attempts to exalt a person above God. It is a dangerous war on divinity that is a turn from the God of the gospels, the truths of the gospel.

This is why Pope Leo said: “I have no fear, neither of the Trump administration nor of speaking out loudly about the message of the gospel.”

And he said this even after the reports of the Trump administration calling the ambassador of the Vatican to the Pentagon earlier this year.

I’m not Catholic, but as a bishop in the Lord’s church, in this moment, Pope Leo is my pope.

As much as Pope Francis was, as I had the opportunity to respond to his encyclical on the environment and address the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences as addressed the moral issue of poverty and people’s movements around the world.

But we must be careful in this moment to act as though this is the first moral and spiritual violation by Trump and religious nationalism. His embrace of a Messianic-type role has been pushed by the delusion of Franklin Graham and others.

When he allows people in his administration to say empathy is the cause of the decline of Western civilization.

These are deep, sinful contradictions of the gospel which says a nation will be judged by how it treats the least of these.

His constant demeaning of other nations and cultures and his constant claim that no one ever did anything as great and wonderful as him before him—the constant self-congratulation and adoration—is idolatry that, when unchecked, has led to where we are now.

Some of the church must repent of far too much silence in the public square confronting these thing public sins and idolatries and other policies with the truths of the gospel and our response to this image and his ridiculous attacks on the Pope cannot be one off.

This must be a moment of entering the public square with the truths of the gospel, with love, the truth of the prophets, and the courage to say we are not afraid of this administration or any, and we won’t be silent any more. We must lift a clear call that this nation and any nation in its words, deeds, and policies must work to have good news for the poor, healing of the broken hearted, deliverance to the captive, recovery of sight to the blind, and a declaration of acceptance to all who have been marginalized if we even hope to be pleasing to God.

“The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism,” Reinhold Niebuhr wrote. This is why when we as people of faith enter into the public space, we do so not with partisan facts and focus, but with the truths of the gospel.

This is why we have been here in New Haven. More than 400 public theologians are returning to their communities later today with a renewed sense that we have a responsibility to help the nation make this choice and build a movement that can take back our government and insist that it serve all the people.

Massachusetts local news Mass Live reports President Donald Trump is taking a victory lap over a state poll showing respondents approve of him more than one of his latest critics, MAGA podcaster Tucker Carlson.

“Only 31 percent of Republicans had a favorable view of the former Fox News host in the UMass Lowell poll, compared to 24 percent who viewed him unfavorably,” reports Mass Live.

That same poll showed 77 percent of Republicans and 3 percent of Democrats indicating a favorable view of Trump. Trump was quick to suggest why.

“It’s easy! Tucker is a Low IQ person - Always easy to beat, and highly overrated!!! So are Megyn Kelly,” Trump posted to Truth Social. “‘Candace’(Really Dumb and mentally ill!), and Bankrupt Alex Jones, who is completely ‘fried.’”

“There are others, also!” Trump added. “Then we have some that are VERY GOOD, true MAGA all the way, and smart. I should do a list of good, bad, and somewhere in the middle. Wouldn’t that be fascinating???”

Trump’s targets in the rent also included MAGA blogger Candace Owens, who responded to his taunting saying: “It may be time to put Grandpa up in a home.”

Another Trump MAGA target, Alex Jones responded by calling Trump “a rotting husk” of his former self.

The number of exclamation points in Trump’s post suggest the president considered the poll results a much welcomed boost after all the bad surveys dogging him and showing him underwater with nearly every demographic, except for a shrinking pool of dedicated Republican loyalists.

But even that poll was far from good news for Trump, reports Mass Live. Just 39 percent of 1,000 respondents said they approved of the president’s job performance. And 57 percent said they believed their lives had become somewhat or much more difficult over the past six months.

Additionally, that same poll identified that 65 percent of respondents believed the U.S. is spending too much on Trump’s war with Iran, and an overwhelming majority — 87 percent — support pursuing criminal investigations of American individuals named in the Epstein files.

Trump’s name peppers the Epstein files, with more than 38,000 total references through the documents.

Futurism reports “a tranche of psychological studies found something startling about Donald Trump’s most loyal soldiers: they each turn to a grim coping mechanism to make sense of the real estate mogul’s laundry list of lies and documented sexual abuse.”

Three separate research papers, published together in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology, each point to the same conclusion, say analysts. Psychologists surveyed 128 U.S. adults in October 2019, who indicated a preference for Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Asked how they justified their support for the GOP candidate given allegations of his sexual misconduct, over half the group said they relied simply on denial and chose to not believe the charge.

“Those results were reproduced in a second study, started in December 2019, two days after federal lawmakers voted to impeach the president,” reports Futurism. “This time, 173 MAGA diehards largely either denied the accusations, or demurred by changing the topic to Trump’s policy decisions. In that study, the majority of supporters denied the accusations outright, while 15 percent declared they simply don’t care.”

Meanwhile, the most recent study, a 2022 survey taken immediately after Trump was arraigned for his role in the January 6 riots, found that of 187 participants, over 60 percent felt the accusations against the president were a lie, despite video footage of the violence at the Capital being readily available.

“While each study is highly complex in their own right, together they reinforce the finding that denial of factual information — Trump’s seedy misdeeds, basically — is a direct response to anxiety caused by cognitive dissonance,” said Futurism.

“I was motivated by real-life experiences,” said study author Cindy Harmon-Jones, senior lecturer in psychology at Western Sydney University. “I’ve been puzzled and confused by the continuing support and admiration that Donald Trump’s supporters hold for him, despite the many accusations that he has engaged in sexual assault, corruption, and other immoral and illegal activities. I wanted to give those supporters a chance to explain in their own words why they support him.”

Harmon-Jones says she is also interested in cognitive dissonance outside the Trump-related breakdown.

“Would supporters of Barack Obama or Bill Clinton react similarly if they learned of similar accusations against them? That remains to be tested,” she said.

Catholic Trump voters graded Pope Leo XIV more harshly for criticizing war than they graded President Donald Trump for committing the blasphemy of presenting himself as Jesus.

While the general public is reacting harshly to Trump’s recent AI calamity, unscientific surveys conducted by Bulwark staff last week reveled that Trump-voting Catholics imposed a higher standard upon Pope Leo that they did not apply to the president.

“The one thing that we don't like about him is also the one thing that we do like about him,’ said one 2024 Trump voter who presented himself as Catholic. “[Trump] doesn't ask for permission. He doesn't take prisoners. He says what he wants and then he does what he wants. And that's one of the things that we like about him that makes him not a politician.”

“I'm not so upset about what he said to Leo because he has every right,” said another Trump voter, defending the president for proclaiming the Pope “WEAK on Crime.” “Leo has his own house to clean, … and he needs to worry about the Catholic church and let [Trump] take care of business.”

Among the Catholic Trump voters who responded to the survey, Bulwark Editor Sarah Longwell said five awarded Trump A's, three B's and one C.”

“These were the highest grades I have seen a group [of Trump voters] give Trump,” said Longwell, adding that most Trump voters in most surveys these days awarded Trump “B's and C's.”

“I haven't seen him get an ‘A’ in a really long time. And this was a group full of A's,” said Longwell.

Bulwark editor Jonathan Last, however, could not bear what he called the double standard, and he blasted one respondent for saying “I just think the Pope's trying to become very judgmental on something that's not his realm.”

“How dare a Catholic Pope be judgmental.” Last said, mockingly. “… Only six of them were upset, and of the six, I think all of them gave some version of, ‘But, you know, yeah, I didn't love [the Jesus meme]. But also, I love that he does stuff like this. And this is kind of why we like him. I just wish he didn't do this one.’”

Last went on to complain that one Catholic Trump voter said sometimes Trump’s “delivery is off, but he's truthful,” and pronounced it “important that somebody has those values.”

“She's talking about the values of just saying what's on your mind,” said Last. “But notice that doesn't apply to the Pope. The Pope can't just say, ‘I do think war is bad.’ When that happens, all f—— hell breaks loose. But when Donald Trump says, ‘look at me, I might be like the late great Jesus, or even better: He rose on the third day. I could have done it in two. And they're like, ‘well, you know, it's a little out there, but I do like that he's honest — these f—— people! The Pope has a line he can't cross or they will turn their back on the teachings of the Catholic Church. But the president? No lines.”

“Yep. That is the takeaway,” said Longwell. “In the battle between Trump and the Pope, these Catholics take Trump.”

The men in President Donald Trump’s circle appear to be primping for their leader and reaching Mar-a-Lago levels of vanity, says New York Times columnist Jesse McKinley,.

“For the men of the Trump administration … the concentration on their appearance is a constant, with policy pronouncements and social media feeds suffused with displays of physical strength, tough-guy talk and masculine mojo,” said McKinley. “At the same time, those traditional tenets of masculinity have been accompanied by flashes of vulnerability about how the men look and dress.”

Men like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and especially Trump, frequently fuss at media for not helping them present their very best face. Trump complained that Time Magazine made him look bald. Rubio castigated a raft of Vanity Fair photos for allegedly being “manipulated” to look less awesome, and Hegseth has barred reporters from Iran war briefings because he found photos to be “unflattering.”

“It’s constant attempts at trying to cultivate a persona that in their eyes seems strong and powerful and dominant and stoic,” said Zac Seidler, a clinical psychologist and the global director of research at Movember, a men’s health charity. “But once you scratch the surface of that, all you see is fragility.”

Trump, who is known for thick makeup, has normalized critiquing men’s appearances, which McKinley says “is ushering in a new era of fawning assessments and regular commentary about the appearance of his cabinet members and others.”

Trump’s obsession with outward appearance is echoed by his staff, said Fairleigh Dickinson University government and politics professor Dan Cassino. “Men in the Trump administration are performing a very specific type of masculinity in order to try and appeal to Trump,” said Cassino.

But Seidler said all the focus on Trump’s men is triggering insecurity with the “overarching belief that you must look and appear a certain way or you have failed.”

“[Trump’s] surrogates frequently tout his vitality,” said McKinley, “and the president often connects himself with men who evince masculine traits, including musclebound influencers.

Masculinity is a constant evaluation among men in the Trump community, but that process of evaluation has been “supercharged,” said “Manhood in America,” author Michael Kimmel, adding that many male members of the Trump administration are seemingly “cosplaying their Rambo-ness” to impress the president.

Critics say President Donald Trump is a walking example of projection. If so, the president’s description of Iran’s leaders over the course of his war with that nation may be telling, considering a steady rollout of claims recorded and presented for MS NOW’s The Weekend on Saturday.

“I think Iran looks like they want to make a deal very badly,” Trump said February 6, in the weeks leading up to the February 28 joint U.S./Israeli attacks.

“They want to make a deal,” he said March 16, weeks after the attacks. And then: “They want to make a deal very badly,” on March 23 in Palm Beach, Florida.

“They want to make a deal so badly. You have no idea how badly they want to make a deal,” he repeated on March 24 at the White House.

“They want to make a deal so badly, but they're afraid to say it because they figure they'll be killed by their own people,” Trump claimed on March 25.

“They are begging to make a deal — not me. They're begging to make a deal very badly,” he insisted yet again March 26.

“They want to make a deal,” he proclaimed on March 27, followed by: “They’re begging to make a deal. They’re begging to make a deal” that same day at a new location.

“They want to make a deal. They want to make a deal more than I want to make a deal,” he claimed in the Oval Office on March 31.

“They’d like to make a deal very badly,” he repeated yet again April 13 at the White House.

Former CIA Director John Brennan told Weekend anchors that he doubted Trump had any credibility left to squander at this point.

“I don't think he's ever had credibility on this issue because he has consistently misrepresented and lied about the situation. And the Iranians know that,” said Brennan. “And that's why when we're talking about the Strait [of Hormuz] right now, it's absurd to think that the Iranians would allow the strait to remain open if the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports continues.”

“So, he's making all these claims about they've agreed to suspend uranium enrichment and, open up. And the Iranians know that he is lying. And why should they believe anything that he might be saying that has an element of truth in it?” Brennan added.

- YouTube youtu.be

President Donald Trump's recent social media posts, including an AI-generated image depicting him as Jesus Christ, have ignited debate within evangelical Christian circles about his relationship with religious values and his base.

The controversial posts — which included a profanity-laced Easter message and mocking references to Islam — prompted conservative author Rod Dreher to suggest Trump is "radiating the spirit of Antichrist," though he stopped short of calling Trump the Antichrist himself.

Speculation about the Antichrist's identity has long been a feature of Christian thought. Historical candidates have included Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and more recently, Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin, according to an analysis featured at Religion News Service.

What distinguishes Trump's posts is the division they've caused within his own evangelical support base, notes RNS. Calvin University professor Kristin Kobes Du Mez noted that the image "caused some real division within his religious base," marking a rare moment when Trump's supporters rejected rather than embraced his social media content.

Matthew Sutton, a religious history scholar at Washington State University, traced modern evangelical Antichrist speculation to early 20th-century fundamentalism and end-times theology. While some theological elements of Trump align with evangelical Antichrist expectations — such as his charismatic communication through Truth Social — traditional interpretations suggest the Antichrist will oppose Israel, a position Trump does not hold.

Rev. Franklin Graham defended the image, arguing Trump had no intention of depicting himself as Jesus. Trump later claimed it was meant to show him as a doctor with the Red Cross.

Religious technology scholar Heidi Campbell emphasized how AI-generated images reflect and shape contemporary religious consciousness, particularly on social media platforms.

Sutton suggested this moment may represent a turning point in Trump's relationship with his evangelical base, noting that while previous controversial acts seemed to carry no consequences, this image has struck a different chord.