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President Donald Trump is growing increasingly desperate, one international relations expert cautioned, and it's only growing worse as he remains stuck in a "geopolitical trap."

Speaking to Greg Sargent at The New Republic, author and University of Illinois Professor Nicholas Grossman explained that the world is inching closer to "a very serious crisis" in the oil markets "because of reserves running down and the ships not leaving the [Strait of Hormuz] in time to replenish that.”

Meanwhile, Trump is attempting to claim that the strait is open and that there are no tolls. In an all-caps Truth Social post, he promised that all was well and that Iran made it clear to the U.S. that everything was open. Last week, when Trump claimed that there is a "deal" and that negotiations are yielding positive results, Iran responded with its own message to the contrary.

"The Strait of Hormuz is ‘open’ — but it’s mined, half-empty, and subject to tolls both sides say they might charge," an Associated Press report in Fortune said on Monday. After Trump's comments on Truth Social, the Wall Street Journal reported that for the first time in decades, Iran is selling oil using the U.S. dollar.

Grossman explained that Trump's challenge is that the things he says don't match "the facts on the ground."

"And this is the type of big-scale supply-demand, hard physical reality that he can bulls—— his way through for some time, kind of delay for a time, but cannot totally manage to hoodwink people when there are ongoing economic problems, when costs are rising, when we saw recently inflation numbers, in large part due to the war, getting back to levels that we haven’t seen in a few years," Grossman said.

These are the kinds of things that people notice, he told Sargent.

"And he really seems desperate about it — where usually he’s able to either bully people into saying that it’s going well, or turn it into a domestic political he-said-she-said back and forth, or just somehow bulls—— his way through it, change the subject. And this one is just stubbornly not doing it because the reality of it is too big," he said.

Congress is working toward funding the war as well as Trump's other demands, but continuing to sell the Iran war to the public is another matter.

"That’s not going to work at all. People can see the economic effects, and those are likely to get worse rather than better as the effects really reverberate out. And they never supported the war in the first place," Grossman also said.

Sargent said Trump has created a kind of "triple wammy" with the cost of the war, his request for even more money and his approval. The host began the show by citing a devastating segment in which a Fox News anchor pointed to a new poll showing that Trump has a lower approval rating than former President Joe Biden ever did at any point in his presidency.

The pandemic caused a global economic crisis, but Americans appeared to understand why the economy was in rough shape. That isn't the case during the second Trump term, where voters link economic issues to Trump's tariffs and the Iran war, polls show. It's all a trap of his own making, the men discussed.

Clarence Thomas went more than 10 years without asking a single substantive question from the bench. His silence between 2006 and 2016 prompted commentators to call his courtroom quietude embarrassing, a sign of fatigue and a lack of intellectual candlepower. Even earlier in his career, he had earned the nickname of “Scalia’s Puppet” for his habit of joining majority opinions written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the outspoken and reactionary “originalist” who shared the dais with him until his death in 2016.

But the characterization of Thomas as an inattentive echo of Scalia is wrong. Thomas has always been more extreme and dangerous than Scalia, and his influence has never been greater.

After his bruising 1991 confirmation hearing, Thomas set his eyes on the goal of moving American law backward to the laissez-faire era of the Gilded Age, undoing the regulatory state of the New Deal, weakening the civil rights legislation of the 1950s and ’60s and undermining many of the forward-looking precedent decisions issued by the Warren Court. As Thomas reportedly told two of his law clerks in 1993, he planned to serve until 2034, and until then would continue to make the lives of liberals “miserable.” He has already made good on that pledge: He is now the second-longest serving Supreme Court justice in history.

Thomas has always been more extreme and dangerous than Scalia, and his influence has never been greater.

Thomas is best known for concurrences and dissents that seemed culled from the lunatic fringe when he wrote them, but were later embraced by the majority as the court moved hard right.

On affirmative action, in a 1995 case on government contracting (Adarand Constructors v. Pena), his concurrence denounced “remedial racial preferences” in federal hiring as a form of “racial paternalism.” This was an astonishing choice of words for the nation’s second Black Supreme Court justice, who overcame childhood poverty and after a brief flirtation with Black nationalism, became the beneficiary of affirmative action at Yale Law School. Twenty-eight years later, however, in a majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard), the court ended affirmative action in higher education.

On abortion in a 2000 case (Stenberg v. Carhart) that invalidated Nebraska’s late-term abortion ban, Thomas dissented, arguing that the Roe v. Wade decison was “grievously wrong,” and that nothing in the Constitution “dictates that a State” must legalize abortion. Twenty-two years later, Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization adopted Thomas’ view.

Ditto for the Second Amendment. In Printz v. United States, a 1997 gun-regulation case, Thomas contributed a concurrence arguing that the amendment encompassed a personal right to keep and bear arms rather than simply a right connected with service in state militias, as prior case law had clearly held. Eleven years later, in District of Columbia v. Heller, the court recognized the personal right in an opinion authored by Scalia. Thomas went on to expand the personal right in 2022 with his majority opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, a decision that severely handicaps state and local authorities from enforcing gun-control laws.

Thomas is also on record advising the court to revisit its precedent decisions on the right to court-appointed counsel in criminal trials (Gideon v. Wainwright, 1963); the right of married persons to contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965); the right of adults to engage in private consensual sex (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003); and the right to same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015). He has also called for the court to reconsider 1964’s New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark case establishing First Amendment protections in defamation cases involving public officials and public figures, which is widely considered the lynchpin of freedom of the press in America.

In a recent column published by the influential Scotusblog website, constitutional law scholar Erwin Chemerinsky noted that “Thomas is the only justice … who has openly said that precedent deserves little weight in constitutional law.”

Despite his laid-back courtroom demeanor, Thomas has also been an active and loquacious speaker out of court on the right-wing banquet and convention circuit, especially in meetings of the Federalist Society and events hosted by Hillsdale College, the Michigan-based private Christian institution long recognized as a hub for conservative thought leaders and a breeding ground for the right-wing’s ever expanding culture wars.

Supreme Court justices typically attend academic, judicial and bar-related conferences, and initially, Thomas’ public remarks were fairly judge-like, focusing on time-honored topics like judicial independence. But as his stature grew and the court’s lurch to the right accelerated, he shed whatever inhibitions he once had about voicing his personal beliefs, becoming in time a full-fledged and open culture war combatant.

Thomas is now unbound and unrestrained.

In a 2011 address at a law student symposium sponsored by the Federalist Society in Charlottesville, Virginia, he devoted most of his time not to expounding on legal doctrine but to defending his tea party activist wife Ginni against adverse press coverage. He also exhorted his young audience to be wary of the “fundamental changes” wrought by the left that aimed to distort the original meaning of the Constitution. In a 2016 commencement speech at Hillsdale, he went further, urging graduates “not [to] hide your faith and your beliefs under a bushel basket … in this world that seems to have gone mad with political correctness.”

Thomas is now unbound and unrestrained. In a speech on April 15 at the University of Texas, he went “full Monty” in an unhinged broadside against liberals and progressives. “Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government declaring,” he declared, continuing:

It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God but from government. … [Progressivism] was the first mainstream American political movement — with the possible exception of the pro-slavery reactionaries on the eve of the Civil War — to openly oppose the principles of the Declaration.

He went on to blame progressives for the 20th century evils of racial segregation and eugenics, insisting that “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Mao” were “intertwined with the rise of progressivism.”

All this from an angry and embittered ideologue who is also arguably the most corrupt justice in the Supreme Court’s history, having failed for 13 years to report his wife Virginia’s earnings on his annual financial disclosure forms, and who has been on the gimme end of lavish vacations funded by billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow.

Thomas celebrated his 78th birthday on June 23. He may not make it to his projected retirement date of 2034, but until he actually steps down, whether voluntarily or post mortem in the fashion of Scalia, there is no telling how much more jurisprudential carnage he will cause or how much more disgrace he will bring to the reputation of the world’s most powerful judicial tribunal.

Veteran television producer, writer and comedian Larry David, well-known for his work on the hit sitcom "Seinfeld" in the late 1980s and 1990s, has been a blistering critic of U.S. President Donald Trump. And now, he is speaking out against an event that Trump used to celebrate his 80th birthday on July 14: the widely publicized Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event at the White House.

Variety asked David, now 78, to weigh in on the UFC gathering at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and he didn't mince words.

David told Variety, "It was a travesty. What else can you say about it? It was embarrassing."

The former "Seinfeld" producer made it clear that he considered Trump's UFC event highly unpresidential.

"I was embarrassed to be an American," David bluntly told Variety during the interview.

David has a long resumé in U.S. television.

After working briefly on "Saturday Night Live" during the 1980s, the producer and writer went on to create the popular "Seinfeld" (starring Jerry Seinfeld) in 1989. And the show lasted almost a decade before concluding in 1998. David went on to star in another popular series, "Curb Your Enthusiasm," on HBO from 1999-2024.

David is a longtime supporter of liberal causes and the Democratic Party, vehemently criticizing Trump during the United States 2024 presidential election and continuing to criticize Trump after his return to the White House on January 20, 2025.

David was hardly alone in criticizing Trump's UFC event on July 14. Quite a few Democrats attacked it as unpresidential, and many Never Trump conservatives saw it as a metaphor for Trump's MAGA politics — which they view as style over substance and bad for the conservative movement.D avid has also been feuding with "Real Time" host Bill Maher, who is also a frequent critic of Trump.

After Maher had dinner with Trump inside the White House, David criticized the "Real Time" host for meeting with him. Maher countered, however, that he wasn't endorsing Trump's ideas — only trying to have some type of dialogue with a political figure he has major disagreements with.

One of President Donald Trump's longtime biographers, Michael Wolff, is warning that the obsessive focus on the Reflecting Pool reveals something much deeper about the 80-year-old leader.

Speaking on the Daily Beast podcast, Wolff explained that, according to his sources, Trump is spending as much as 80 percent of his time on things like the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.

Chatting with those he said are close to Trump, Wolff said that the Reflecting Pool failure is drawing "All of his anger, all of his rage, all of his demands — and now his need for vengeance: someone must be responsible."

The pool disaster has largely been a joke online, with mocking memes and comedy ranging from social media accounts championing the pool algae, along with "make algae great again" merchandise. For political analysts, it is described as a metaphor for Trump's entire presidency: big promises, overspending and, ultimately, a failure to deliver.

Trump is seeing it all as "an insult to the country and a challenge to him personally," Wolff said.

“The discussion that I’m having with people is that, you know, 60, 70, 80 percent of his time — and remember, he doesn’t work that much — is devoted to the Reflecting Pool,” Wolff explained.

“But he is focused on the Reflecting Pool,” Wolff told the Beast.

“Now we can obviously make a little nod here to Narcissus and his reflecting pool... It is, even for people who work with Donald Trump every day, a weird moment.”

Co-host Joanna Coles was curious whether the obsession stems from Trump's image of himself as a "builder."

Wolff questioned if it was “one of those dementia things.”

"I'm against diagnosing people," he explained. "But you know, Jesus, for anybody who has seen this before, and I have seen this before and so many people have."

"You close out the rest of the world and you just and you focus on these problems which are, which are really minor, and you turn them into obsessions.

"I mean, this clearly has become, in his mind, and hence in the White House, an obsession," he added. "What is the largest problem in the world today? It is apparently the Reflecting Pool."

"... I think he obviously has signs of dementia," Wolff corrected. "I'm just not comfortable with moving that to a diagnosis. I mean, you have that guy on 'Doctor John Gartner.' He says that because Trump's been in plain sight for so many years, you can actually diagnose the decline of his language, which is key to understanding someone's mental state. That's what all television doctors say."

Coles said that it's the first time she's heard Wolff acknowledge that Trump may have such a problem.

Wolff explained that what can be confirmed is that "something is unusual. Something is not as it should be. Something is weird. The president of the United States of America, in all kinds of crises, which again, larger and larger, has chosen for the past week and a half at least, to focus almost exclusively on the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. That's odd, is it?"

Since returning to the White House 17 months ago, President Donald Trump has used the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to target his political adversaries while pardoning his allies. And according to CBS News, "business is booming" for an Indianapolis-based lobbying firm pushing for presidential pardons from Trump.

The firm is Mo Strategies, which, according to CBS News' Gabe Kaminsky, includes former Trump campaign and administration officials and is successfully "expanding into the newly-lucrative world of pardons."

"The Trump-linked firm has signed on to lobby for the law firm Blessinger Legal in Northern Virginia for 'immigration and pardon-related discussions,' federal lobbying disclosures in late May show," Kaminsky reports. "The engagement has already yielded the firm $500,000 in income, and more work is expected, Marty Obst, president of Mo Strategies, said in an interview."

Obst told CBS News, "We're one of the fastest-growing firms in D.C., and are helping them navigate the landscape and process. What I've tried to do is provide guidance of what the process looks like, and what types of cases would appeal to this White House. There's a legal process and a political process for pardons and clemency."

Mo Strategies' work, according to Kaminsky, shows that a "cottage industry" of "well-connected lobbyists, lawyers and influencers who advocate on presidential clemency" has "flourished during Mr. Trump's second term." And Obst, according to the CBS News reporter, is a veteran conservative strategist who worked on Trump's 2016 and 2020 campaigns and was also a senior adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence."

The Mo Strategies filing that listed $500,000 in income, according to Kaminsky, lobbied the Trump White House as well as DOJ this year.

A DOJ spokesperson, quoted anonymously, told CBS News that its pardon office has received a "record number of applications for clemency" and will "make recommendations to the president that are consistent, unbiased and uphold the rule of law."

Blessinger Legal, Kaminsky notes, was founded by attorney Eileen Blessinger — who is known for her extensive work in immigration law.

"As Mr. Trump's administration pursued an immigration crackdown, Obst said Blessinger contacted him for guidance on new policies and to have him review dozens of her clients' cases to determine which might be viable for a potential pardon," Kaminsky reports. "Some of Blessinger's cases have a criminal court component, including green-card holders who were convicted of a crime, though some of the pardon work could be for non-immigration-related cases, he added."

Obst told CBS News, "The Biden administration really expanded government reach, sometimes unfairly. In some cases, there were very aggressive prosecutions that seemed highly political. There are cases that qualify as needing further review. Whether or not they get a pardon — there are no guarantees to that."

President Donald Trump claims that his Reflecting Pool renovations failed because third-parties vandalized the institution — but a new story based on internal documents provides a different version of events.

“President Trump says the peeling blue coating and algae blooms that mar his $16.4 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool are the fault of vandals working with ‘knives’ in the ‘dark of night,’” in a story broken by The New York Times’ Maxine Joselow and David A. Fahrenthold on Tuesday. “But government documents obtained by Times show that while National Park Service workers found two cuts in sections of foam between the pool’s expansion joints, those were not directly related to the ‘American flag blue’ coating that is now peeling, or to the algae that has turned the pool a bright shade of green.”

They added that the documents show workers struggling to deal with problems in their renovations even as officials in the Trump administration insisted the pool was in excellent condition.

“The pool had been drained, resealed and then refilled by June 5,” the Times reported. “Four days later, Park Service workers discovered holes, cracks and peeling caulking in parts of the pool, along with cuts in sections of the foam, according to the documents.”

Yet there is no evidence the cuts were put there by saboteurs. Instead their provenance is “unclear.”

“While a June 9 report by the U.S. Park Police described the cuts as ‘razor blade slashes’ made along a 20-foot-long stretch of the foam, the administration has yet to present evidence supporting that assertion,” the Times reported. “The documents reviewed by The Times described them as two 171-foot blade cuts but did not address how they were made.”

He added, “By June 16, workers had noticed that chunks of blue sealant that covered the pool’s bottom were peeling and floating to the surface, the documents show. That sealant was separate from the foam in the pool’s expansion joints, which allow its concrete slabs to expand and contract.”

Additionally, the workers found that they could not succeed in killing the algae that was blooming in the pool, and turning it swamp green instead of clear blue, despite installing devices for that purpose.

It was also recently reported by Politico/E&E reporters Kinnia Cheuk and Heather Richards that the Reflecting Pool will not be ready by the 4th of July celebrations as Trump promised.

"President Donald Trump's beloved Reflecting Pool liner — now peeling and cracked — won't be fixed before Independence Day celebrations, according to the California company that supplied the waterproof coating,” Cheuk and Richards reported. “That news will sink Trump's wish to have the pool looking pristine for celebrations of the nation's 250th birthday."

The revelatory book “Regime Change,” by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, is the gift that keeps on giving, said MS NOW journalist Paul Waldman. But he said it’s also revealed a “sinister” relationship between Trump and his aids that have created a “cocoon of sycophancy Trump has built around himself, with dire consequences for the country.”

“The president has finally created an administration that works exactly how he wants it to, and the result is a vicious cycle of incompetence and moral corruption,” said Waldman, citing the new book’s insights. “In short, everything about how the White House operates exacerbates Trump’s most pernicious instincts and character flaws. His aides enable him to be the worst version of himself, and in turn he makes them the worst version of themselves.”

His cocoon was being constructed from the moment Trump began staffing up his second administration, according to Waldman. We know how much Trump has always valued loyalty, but as Haberman and Swan report, “there was a new acid test: January 6.”

“Anyone seeking a place near the center of power had to say it was the act of patriots who were subsequently abused by the Biden administration,” said Walkman. “That weeded out anyone with a real commitment to American democracy. And it forced everyone to publicly proclaim a lie. When you abandon your integrity in that way, you become much more willing to do terrible things in the future.”

Occasionally someone raises a doubt or gently suggests a different course for Trump to take, such as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urging the president to say publicly he had no intention of firing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell in order to calm markets. Former deputy AG Todd Blanche told Trump there were no grounds to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James. But the authors note those moments of moments of dissent are few and far between, and Trump can only be constrained for a moment.

“He did get his bogus indictment of James, for instance, a case that quickly fell apart,y fell apart,” said Waldman. “… The result is an administration full of people who either agree with Trump’s most self-destructive impulses or know that objections are all but pointless.”

Few Trump aides called out the danger of sending in the National] Guard to American cities to enforce immigration law, wrote Haberman and Swan report, and the results were deadly disaster. And when Trump suggests the U.S. take possession of Gaza — a self-evidently ludicrous notion — no one disagrees.

“It’s a strong move,” Communications Director Steven Cheung told Trump, when asked about the prospect, even though Trump aides privately conceded the suggestion was “legitimately nutso.”

What comes of this are disasters like the Iran war. Vice President JD Vance expressed misgivings about the war, said the authors. “But with the exception of the vice president, nobody on the senior team — not his secretary of state, not his chairman of the Joint Chiefs, not his chief of staff — had made a real effort” to talk Trump out of it.

“This is a portrait of an unserious president surrounded by unserious people, all bringing out the worst in each other,” said Waldman. “Most frightening of all, there are still 2 1/2 years left.

One of President Donald Trump’s top economic advisers, Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent, recently compared the Republican leader to an American founding father — and experts cannot stop laughing at the comparison.

“Economic security begins with national capacity,” Bessent wrote for The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. “We have rediscovered at great cost what Alexander Hamilton taught us: that every nation ‘ought to endeavor to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply.’ Our strength is derived from what we can build, for the nation that can’t produce what it needs isn’t truly secure. The nation that depends on its adversaries for critical inputs isn’t truly sovereign. And the nation that reduces its economics to consumption isn’t truly prosperous.”

Bessent added, “As Hamilton put it, we must enlarge ‘the sphere of our domestic commerce.’ Economic security begins with the capacity to build, invent, finance and scale the industries that will define the next century, among them semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, advanced manufacturing, shipbuilding, critical minerals and pharmaceuticals. More than economic sectors, these are sources of national power. The U.S. must lead in all of them.”

Hamilton is best known for co-authoring The Federalist Papers, which helped convince the American states to ratify the Constitution, and for serving as America’s first Secretary of Treasury under President George Washington. Under Washington, Hamilton laid the foundations for America’s capitalist economic system, and is widely regarded as one of the seminal thinkers in economics and political science in modern history.

Scholars have noticed the discrepancy between Bessent’s glowing praise of Trump and the reality of a Trump-Hamilton analogy.

“The most glaring historical issue is that while Hamilton’s goal as a statesman was to build a new national marketplace and a federal government to govern that market and the nation,” Gautham Rao, a historian at American University and Editor-in-Chief of Law & History Review, told AlterNet. “Trump’s central goal is to enrich himself by extracting wealth from the nation—the people—while using privileged access to the state to leverage the market for further self-enrichment.”

And Rao was not the only expert who scoffed at the analogy.

“I can't think of a favorable comparison between Trump and Hamilton,” Karl Widerquist, a philosophy professor at Georgetown University-Qatar who specializes in economics, told AlterNet. “Hamilton was an intellectual who co-wrote the Federalist Papers, who really thought about how to design good institutions. Whether you agree with them or not, he was a thoughtful person who was thinking about, ‘How do we make these institutions work for a republic?’” Even though Hamilton had his bias toward “a republic of upper-class white men,” he still wanted to create a working republic. Just as importantly, Widerquist asserted, Hamilton was an expert on finance and banking systems, while “Trump is just a bully who's trying to get money out of people.”

Widerquist conceded that Bessent has a case in terms of Trump’s "argument for self-sufficiency," but qualified that concession by pointing out a glaring difference between Trump’s approach and Hamilton’s philosophy.

“It's framed wrong,” Widerquist said about Bessent. “He says the United States must lead in all of these things. That's not how cooperation among nations works. No one can lead in everything. And being prepared against getting cut off from another country doesn't require you to lead in everything — it just requires you to have a decent amount of everything.”

He concluded, “I do think we should have some shipbuilding, and we should have some semiconductor manufacturing here, and other things. But the kind of ad hoc tariffs that Trump has been putting on and taking off and putting on and taking off are not likely to lead to this.”

In general scholars tend to scoff at the notion that Trump is anything like America’s founding fathers. Speaking to The New York Times in May, University of Virginia law professor Saikrishna Prakash said they would have been deeply disturbed by Trump’s expansion of executive power.

"I think they'd be astonished, not merely by Trump, but by the breadth of the executive power in the modern era…. They expected that impeachment would deal with scoundrels,” Prakash said.

He added, regarding Congress, "They have a lot of authority. It's just that, in the modern era, it’s very hard for them to flex it, because half the Congress is in the president's pocket and the president has a veto."

One of President Donald Trump’s most loyal lawmakers, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), is accused of lying about donating money to veterans’ charities.

“Tommy Tuberville promised Alabama voters he would donate ‘every dime’ he made in Washington, D.C., to Alabama veterans — and even present checks on a monthly basis,” reported Lagniappe Daily's Scott Johnson on Tuesday. The news outlet serves Mobile, AL and Baldwin County. “Six years later, tax records and his own nonprofit show no evidence that ever happened.”

Instead Johnson reported that Tuberville’s tax returns in the seven years since taking office do not “show in-kind charitable gifts. The returns list $35,672 in what appears to be interest paid or charitable gifts in 2021, no listed amount in 2022, $2,500 in 2023 and no listed amount in 2024.” If all of that money went to causes that support veterans, “the total is only $38,172 over four tax years. Tuberville’s wages reported in Alabama were $529,419 over that same span. He reported income of more than $2.9 million when factoring in real estate and investment earnings.”

If Tuberville did not donate his salary to veterans, it could hurt him as he campaigns to be Alabama governor. In February 2020, during his first Senate campaign, Tuberville told Talk 99.5 in Birmingham that “I’m going to come on your show once every few months, and I’m going to give my salary, a check, to a veteran or a wife that has lost her husband, or their kids to go to school. I’m not taking one dime, and I’m giving it to the veterans. I stand and put up when I talk.”

He later reiterated that pledge, saying in March 2020 that “I stand with our veterans and I’m going to donate every dime I make when I’m in Washington, D.C., to the veterans of the state of Alabama. Folks, they deserve it. They deserve it a lot more than most of us.”

This is not Tuberville’s only major controversy as he seeks to replace Gov. Kay Ivey in the Alabama governor’s mansion. Earlier this month it was revealed that a lawsuit from "Brooke Lynn Dorgan and Justin Jude Le Blanc, as Realtors" alleged that Tuberville is not even a legal resident of the state he wishes to lead as governor. As broken by MS NOW legal analyst Joyce Vance, a former Alabama prosecutor, the litigation blatantly claims that Tuberville has admitted he is not an “everyday resident” of the state.

“At a meeting of the Shoals Republican Club on August 3, 2019, Tuberville candidly conceded that he ‘has property’ in Alabama but is not an ‘everyday resident of Alabama,’ describing himself as a ‘carpetbagger,’” the suit alleged.

Politico reporter Josh Gerstein says a DC Circuit court has declined to stay a ruling against former Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge, meaning Herridge is now staring down the barrel of an $800-a-day contempt fine and possibly jail.

As president, Politico reports President Donald Trump will “lack the power to directly waive the fine or potential jail time that Herridge faces, but he could order the Justice Department to settle an underlying lawsuit filed by the woman, Yanping Chen.”

Settling the suit would wipe away the fines and any other punishment against Herridge.

“Herridge relied on one or more anonymous sources for several 2017 stories about potential national security risks related to a Virginia school that was founded by Chen and attended by many members of the U.S. military whose tuition was paid by taxpayers,” reported Politico. “Herridge published details about an FBI investigation into Chen, including photos of her in a People’s Liberation Army uniform.”

But Chen argued that leaks about the probe damaged her reputation, and she sued several federal agencies over the disclosures. As part of that lawsuit, she issued a subpoena to Herridge to try to force her to disclose her source, but Herridge refused. Chen sued the FBI, DOJ, Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security in 2018 for monetary damages and an admission of wrongdoing from the government that leaked about her violated the Privacy Act. But after her depositions failed to reveal the leaker, Chen turned her lawyers loose on Fox News and Herridge.

Last year, U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Cooper ordered Herridge to pay the $800-a-day fine for her defiance of the subpoena, but he delayed enforcement of the fine to allow Herridge to appeal. Now that she has lost her appeal, Chen’s lawyers could ask the judge for stiffer fines or even to jail Herridge if she refuses to surrender her source.

“Judge Greg Katsas, a Trump appointee, and Judge Harry Edwards, an appointee of President Jimmy Carter, both sounded dubious of Herridge’s legal argument that Cooper should have balanced the public interest in news reporting against Chen’s desire to be compensated for damage to her reputation,” reported Politico last year.

“What is this balancing test? … What does that mean?” Edwards asked in arguments, while Joe Biden appointee Judge Michelle Childs was even less supportive in her comments about who exactly qualifies as a journalist — complete with journalistic protections.

“We’re now in this social media age where people hide behind Twitter, people hide behind other social media outlets. Who are you really protecting?” Childs asked.

Herridge was an investigative TV reporter, Politico reports she left Fox News for CBS in 2019, before being laid off by CBS in 2024. She now publishes her work on Substack.