laverne cox

President Donald Trump prompted a firestorm of commentary and speculation after he stormed out of a major interview, but as one certified psychologist argued, his body language also exposed things about his agitated mental state.

On Sunday, NBC News's Meet the Press aired an interview with Trump conducted by Kristin Welker, in which, among other things, she pressed him about the lack of evidence for his longstanding claims that elections in the U.S. are rigged against Republicans. Trump, after growing increasingly frustrated over the tough questions, cut off the interview early, saying that Welker was either "crooked" or "stupid" before storming out.

Much has already been speculated based on this blow-up from Trump, including from Dr. John Paul Garrison, a licensed clinical and forensic psychologist, who maintains a popular YouTube account, "Dr. G Explains," where he gives forensic breakdowns and body language analyses for over 700,000 subscribers. While he typically focuses on true crime stories, he also delves into politics, and recently released a video breaking down Trump's body language during his interview with Welker.

At the start of the interview, Garrison noted that "most" of Trump's visible behaviors were "pretty standard" and in line with his typical demeanor. He did note one brief movement of Trump's mouth that could potentially indicate a change in the president's motor control, but said that not much could be made of it for now. What he did put particular emphasis on, however, was the sound of rain during the interview, as it was being conducted in a Wisconsin barn during a period of extended downpours.

Garrison argued that as the noise from the rain picked up and became more intense, Trump had a harder time focusing and concentrating on the questions from Welker. While stressing that nothing could be said for sure, he argued that Trump having a greater difficulty dealing with background noise could be a sign that he suffered a neurological episode at some point.

From that point, Garrison noted numerous signs that Trump was growing more and more agitated, including him furrowing his brow, bearing his teeth and putting extra emphasis on certain words, eventually escalating to the point of "real anger" and "real fury." While he concluded that it was typical for Trump to be testy with the press, Garrison argued that he showed an "unusual" level of anger during the interview, and suggested that he might having "a harder time than he used to" dealing with things like the background noise from the rain.

Another medical expert and content creator, speech and language pathologist "Hilary M.A. CCC-SLP," also argued that the weather might have been having an outsized effect on Trump's mood, suggesting in a recent video that he was exhibiting symptoms common in dementia patients, who struggle to keep track of the time of day during periods of extended gloomy weather.

Many U.S. Supreme Court rulings of the 2020s are coming down along strict partisan lines, with the six GOP-appointees justices on one side and the three Democratic appointees comprising the dissent. But in Pitchford v. Cain, a 5-4 ruling handed down on May 28, the majority united the three Democratic appointees (Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson) with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, while the conservative dissenters were Justices Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett and Clarence Thomas. And according to Reason's Damon Root, the decision showed a major disagreement between Donald Trump appointees Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

"On the surface, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh share much in common," Root explains in the libertarian-oriented Reason. "They are both judicial conservatives, both self-professed originalists, both former federal appellate court judges with respected records, and both were appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by the same president. Yet there are certain legal issues that have brought out notable differences between them. The Supreme Court's recent 5-4 decision in Pitchford v. Cain offers a fascinating case in point."

In Pitchford, the Roberts Court examined the precedent in 1986's Batson v. Kentucky, which said that prospective jurors cannot be excluded from juries solely on the basis of their race.

"In Pitchford, the Supreme Court was tasked with deciding whether Terry Pitchford's rights were violated when a lower court decided that his defense lawyer had waived the right under Batson to challenge the prosecution's supposedly race-neutral rationales for peremptorily excluding four out of five prospective black jurors in the case," Root notes. "Writing for the majority, Kavanaugh, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, held that Pitchford's constitutional rights had indeed been violated…. Writing in dissent, Gorsuch, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Amy Coney Barrett, denied that any such injustice had occurred."

Root argues that Pitchford wasn't the first time that Kavanaugh and Gorsuch disagreed on criminal justice matters.

"Normally, when it comes to matters of criminal justice, Gorsuch is the one with the reputation for being more sympathetic to criminal defendants," the libertarian journalist observes. "Kavanaugh, meanwhile, generally has a reputation for being the more reliable vote in favor of law enforcement. But this case flipped the script. Here, thanks to an opinion by Kavanaugh, written over Gorsuch's dissent, a Death Row inmate's conviction and death sentence were tossed out. This time around, it was Kavanaugh, not Gorsuch, who gave the civil liberties side the win."

President Donald Trump's blowup at "Meet the Press" host Kristen Welker on Sunday signals something far darker than his usual outbursts at female reporters.

Trump stormed off the set of an interview in Wisconsin after he was pressed for "evidence" that the California primary elections were rigged. Trump had claimed that clearly they were rigged because Los Angeles County continues to count ballots. Once Welker asked Trump for evidence, he quickly asserted she simply had to "look" to find it.

Speaking to tech writer Gil Duran, author of The Nerd Reich, The New Republic's Greg Sargent said it puts Trump's actions into perspective and explains why he was so furious when his reality was questioned.

California allows any ballots postmarked on Election Day to be counted. So, it typically takes about a week for all mailed-in ballots to arrive at the election location, plus a few more days for processing.

"This is typical Trump," said Duran. "He’s been doing this for years and years. He tries to create his own version of reality and insist that other people agree with it. The main enemy, the main challenge that Republicans have in California, is called simple math."

Trump thinks that Republican Spencer Pratt should have won the race, but there are fewer than 20 percent of registered voters in Los Angeles County. They're only 25 percent of the state. Pratt has already outperformed that number, but it doesn't mean he is anywhere close to a win.

Meanwhile, Steve Hilton's numbers actually look good when it comes to making it through the primary.

"But this is important to Trump because Trump’s brand is about winning," said Duncan. "He can’t accept that his party and his politics are so unpopular in California. So in order to maintain his winning image, he creates this counter-reality in which it’s all because of fraud on the part of the Democrats and that he would have actually won. He said, actually, in 2020 that he would have won the race if Jesus had been allowed to count the votes, whatever that means."

Trump and other Republicans have long claimed that California is only a Democratic state because of cheating. There's no evidence to prove it. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger said in 2007 that the California Republican Party was dying at the box office, Duncan recalled.

Sargent thinks that Trump's anger is coming from the fact that someone he endorsed, like Pratt, is losing. Durant affirmed that the early votes always break for Republicans because they vote in person. About 80 percent of California voters cast mail-in ballots. So those ballots coming in after the fact are more likely to break for Democratic candidates.

"And so what Trump is doing is exploiting this simple, very well-known mechanism. We all knew that the Republican numbers go down. [He’s exploiting it] to create a false narrative for the MAGA audience, to continue this kind of complaint of fraud and thievery that he’s so fond of. That’s all it is. It’s a very simple mechanism. You take the early returns, you claim that any deviation from those early returns is evidence of a crime of some kind. And that’s pretty much it," Duncan said.

As of Tuesday morning, about 81 percent of the votes have been counted in Los Angeles County.

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US economic growth is picking up again after a slowdown towards the end of 2025. According to price data released on May 28, US GDP grew by 1.6% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026. This is despite energy prices rising and consumer confidence falling since the US president, Donald Trump, went to war with Iran in February.

Democrats hoping for a blue wave to help them take over the House majority in November may want to examine more than polling data. According to a study by the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), Democrats lost more than 275,000 registered voters across 28 key swing districts, NOTUS reports.

“The battleground map keeps moving in Republicans’ direction, and this data shows House Democrats are running out of places to hide,” NRCC spokesperson Mike Marinella told NOTUS in a statement. “Republicans are welcoming voters with open arms, expanding the electorate, and building long-term strength in swing districts while Democrats continue losing ground cycle after cycle.”

Democratic Party strategists disagree.

“Republicans are being rejected in election after election since Trump returned to the White House — and Democrats are overperforming by double digits,” Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesperson Viet Shelton told NOTUS. “In primaries across the country this year, Democrats are turning out at levels consistently dwarfing the turnout in Republican primaries.”

Shelton called the NRCC’s report “cherry-picked data by the delusional hacks at the NRCC,” that “won’t change the reality on the ground: Democrats have the momentum, formidable candidates with cross-party appeal, and — most importantly — the American people on our side.”

“We will take back the House majority in November,” he vowed.

In the six years since the 2020 election, Democrats have lost 737,000 registered voters, NOTUS reports, giving the GOP a 4,000-vote advantage.

The report does not specifically state whether those Democratic voter registration losses became independent voters or Republican Party voters. Nor does it identify whether those voters left the party or moved out of the district.

NOTUS suggests that there is a “rightward lean” in those swing districts where the Democratic Party is losing registered voters. It also notes that party registration is not necessarily indicative of how voters vote in a specific election.

According to VoteHub, Democrats currently have a 75 percent chance of winning back the House of Representatives.

President Donald Trump continues to draw a great deal of criticism on both the left and the right for picking Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) Director Bill Pulte for acting national intelligence director despite his lack of national security experience. But Trump considers Pulte a true MAGA loyalist. And according to Salon, he has another credential that makes him appealing to MAGA: his family's connection to The Family, a secretive Christian group that has been active in Washington, DC for 91 years.

Journalist Jonathan Larsen, in Salon, reports that Pulte's family "has had extensive ties over two generations to leaders and financial backers" of the Fellowship Foundation, AKA The Family — which "conducts shadow diplomacy around the world, according to public records and documents I obtained."

"Pulte's grandfather, at one point one of the wealthiest men in the world, built a Fortune 500 company and gave tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to charity before his 2018 death," Larsen reports. "He was also friends with Doug Coe, died in 2017 after decades leading the secretive, controversial Fellowship Foundation that built and sustained a global right-wing network including dictators, lobbyists, and corrupt millionaires largely united against labor, LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights. Better known as The Family, The Fellowship runs the National Prayer Breakfast and the congressional residence on Capitol Hill called C Street."

The Family was formed in 1935 during the Great Depression by Abraham Vereide, a native of Norway. Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was serving his first term at the time, and The Family was decidedly opposed to FDR's New Deal. Although Vereide was a Methodist/Mainline Protestant minister, evangelicals have become increasingly prominent in The Family over the years.

Larsen notes that he "found no public indication that Pulte has direct, personal ties to The Fellowship," but members of his family clearly do.

"If Pulte is personally connected to The Fellowship," Larsen explains, "he'd hardly be alone in the administration's upper ranks. Secretary of State Marco Rubio used to live at the C Street townhouse, as did Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.). President Donald Trump's special envoy to the United Kingdom, former 'Apprentice' producer Mark Burnett, is a regular at The Fellowship's National Prayer Breakfast….

It's not surprising that the Pulte family, based in Michigan, has ties to Fellowship insiders and funders. The Fellowship has had a strong presence among Michigan's wealthy for decades…. But, especially in Pulte's new position, The Fellowship could be just a phone call away, given its intense focus on relationships with global leaders, and given Pulte’s ostensible closeness to his grandfather. The Fellowship already has a history of working with and inside the State Department."

Last week, President Donald Trump's lawyers argued that he has the power to tear down whatever public buildings he wants, and few, if any, could sue over it. The judge asked whether that meant the president could bulldoze the Statue of Liberty. The Trump lawyer agreed.

The debate is over Trump's tearing down the East Wing of the White House. Legal analyst Harry Litman explained in a column for The New Republic that it began because Trump refused to obtain any legal or congressional authorization for his fantasy project, which he's pursued for decades.

"The administration simply got up one day last September and started taking a wrecking ball to the East Wing. It was only days until the structure was completely demolished. By the time the National Trust for Historic Preservation sued in December, the East Wing was gone, and large-scale excavation for the 90,000 square foot ballroom was well underway," recalled Litman.

He recalled the question from Judge Patricia Millett: “If this were the Statue of Liberty, the people whose ancestors — that was the first thing they saw coming to this country, but the government moved too fast — nothing can be done by them to challenge it?”

“I think that’s right, yes," replied Justice Department Lawyer Yaakov Roth.

Litman explained that Millett simply followed the administration's logic to its conclusion. Roth's argument was that the only entity that could stop Trump is Congress, which would be forced to pass a law blocking him, which Trump would then veto, and Congress would have to override it with a two-thirds majority. So, is it possible? Somewhat.

It's part of a "move fast and break things" strategy, Millett said, citing the often-used philosophy from Silicon Valley. It has been embraced by Trump since the start of his second administration.

It's the same philosophy used on Jan. 6 or even the $1.8 billion slush fund. It's reminiscent of the million-dollar settlements for Mike Flynn and Steve Bannon.

"Not that they acted lawfully, and not that they aren’t injuring the interests of the American people — but that nobody can do anything about it," wrote Litman. "In each of these examples, the administration follows the same two-step. First, neuter Congress: anything requiring legislation to stop faces a certain presidential veto, and the two-thirds override is a mathematical fantasy as long as enough Republican members remain terrified of Trump’s one remaining real weapon: the threat to come after them."

The second, he explained, is to do the same thing to the courts. That way, neither Congress nor the courts can step in. "The bulldozer rolls with no brakes," wrote Litman.

Trump has long claimed that Article III of the Constitution gives him the ultimate authority over all things.

"The constitutional design is that federal courts are not a substitute for legislative action," Litman made clear. "But the administration has taken its reliance on standing to a new low..."

He alleged that the administration is using it as a way to "bypass legal accountability" for things that the public finds abhorrent. It has left only the public as the means of expressing outrage so powerfully that it can't be ignored.

"The power of the Millett hypothetical is that it smokes out where the administration’s argument leads," Litman said. "Can the executive lay waste to the Statue of Liberty? Damn right, says Roth — and even if it’s a rank violation of the executive duty to take care, nobody can stop it because nobody has standing."

He closed by saying that there's something "un-American" about the Trump ballroom. "He is in effect trying to crown himself Emperor — cowing Congress and parrying court action with aggressive standing arguments pressed all the way to the Supreme Court." It shows a contempt for the United States while upholding his own image as supreme.

The only options available to stop it are public pressure, judicial accountability and voters at the polls, he reaffirmed

President Donald Trump's most aggressive tariffs suffered a knock-out blow from the Supreme Court, but according to Politico, the administration is digging in for a bitter fight to hoard billions in tariff revenue that it should be refunding.

After nearly a year of tariffs causing uncertainty, chaos and runaway inflation, the Supreme Court ruled that the authority under which Trump imposed his most severe and impulsive import taxes was illegal, putting one of his favorite policies in a bind and forcing his administration to begin planning refunds. However, in a report Tuesday morning, Politico revealed that while the Trump administration has processed around half of the $166 billion in tariff refunds it now owes, it is preparing a new legal battle to claim it is "not required to pay all of those duties back."

"Though they are processing refunds for thousands of importers, they are arguing they are doing so voluntarily," the report explained. "And they are digging in on other tariff payments that have already been finalized by the government, which legal experts say could add up to tens of billions of dollars."

“The message from the government is pretty straightforward: we don’t have the authority to issue these refunds, and unless a court orders us to repay a specific company, we’re not going to do it,” an anonymous former Trump administration official and trade lawyer told Politico. “They’re ready to claw back what they know they legally can.”

The Supreme Court's ruling from February did not have anything to say about what should be done with the revenue collected from Trump's tariffs, instead leaving the issue for lower courts to handle. In April, the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York ruled that the administration had to pay back the money it had received from the tariffs shot down by the Supreme Court, and initially, it seemed willing to comply with that order.

"As of May 22, they have approved more than $85 billion in repayments, according to the government’s court filings," Politico explained. "But it is limiting eligibility to specific types of tariff payments, despite growing impatience from the judge. After weeks of increasingly contentious court filings, the Justice Department officially appealed Eaton’s April order last week, arguing the CIT exceeded its authority when it ordered universal refunds, and that the government cannot refund payments that have already been finalized by CBP."

Politico further noted that the final word on the matter now sits with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and spoke to legal experts who suggested that there is reason to believe that Trump will prevail in the fight, given a prior Supreme Court ruling barring federal courts from issuing nationwide injunctions against anyone not party to the lawsuit before them.

“That issue could really go both ways,” James Kim, an international trade partner at ArentFox Schiff, told Politico. "[The] DOJ has good arguments... Despite what Judge [Richard] Eaton [of the CIT] has said on that — it’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out.”

“It was inevitable that the government would appeal [Eaton’s April order requiring universal tariff refunds] and win," Matthew Seligman, founder of Grayhawk Law and a lawyer representing importers seeking tariff refunds, added. "The lasting effect of the universal refund order will be that importers have needlessly been kept in the dark for months about what exactly they need to do to get the refunds to which they are legally entitled."

President Donald Trump is struggling to pass one of his most important nominations because of staunch opposition from Senate Republicans.

Because Democrats oppose the nomination of Bill Pulte as Director of National Intelligence, they are opposing the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is making it harder for Trump to conduct basic intelligence missions.

“Congressional Republicans are largely leaving it to the administration to figure out a path forward after Trump’s decision to tap Pulte as Tulsi Gabbard’s temporary successor derailed an earlier agreement to extend the key spy authority for three years,” Politico reported on Monday. “But they are also nudging the administration to pick a different nominee to fill the role in a permanent capacity. Pulte is among the subjects Speaker Mike Johnson is expected to discuss with Trump at the White House Tuesday, according to two people granted anonymity to disclose plans for the private meeting.”

In addition to House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA) told Politico on Monday that “I’d like to be involved in the middle of it, but I think it’s strictly — the way things are going — between the Democrats and the White House. It’s all got everything to do with Pulte.” He also told reporters that Pulte is “temporary” and instead of him “the sooner the president gets somebody nominated, the sooner we’re going to be able to get 702 through.”

Similarly Senate Majority Leader John Thune told Politico on Monday that “at some point is going to have to come up with a nominee … that will be viewed by at least enough Democrats as sufficient to get their support.” Section 702 allows Trump to spy on targeted foreigners overseas, yet both Democrats and Republicans are worried Trump will use it to spy on fellow Americans.

“I’m familiar with some of the conversations that are happening around that,” Thune said about Pulte’s future. “I think I’ll let the White House speak to whatever the next plan might be there, but we can’t pass this on the floor without Democrats.”

Democrats oppose Pulte because they, as The Wall Street Journal reported, Pulte was chosen by Trump because of his reputation as someone who "moves fast and breaks things." Trump also told the Journal that he believes the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is “unnecessary and or too big” and wants Pulte to fire people who are linked to President Barack Obama’s and President Joe Biden’s administrations.

“I’d like to see it smaller,” Trump told the Journal. “I think there are a lot of people in there that shouldn’t be there.” He added he wants Pulte to “start the process” and that "his eventual nominee to serve in the role permanently should continue that work."