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President Donald Trump has dishonored America through the actions of his top armed forces cabinet officer, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who is openly denigrating Black soldiers.

“Black Americans fought to destroy a white supremacist regime overseas, while living under legalized segregation at home,” wrote Steve Schmidt, who served as an adviser to President George W. Bush, on Sunday. “Their courage exposed America’s contradiction. So did the Japanese American soldiers of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Their families lived behind barbed wire while they fought and died beneath the American flag.”

Yet under Hegseth, the Trump administration has worked to scrub military history of references to heroic individuals like General Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. and is denying promotions to qualified Black officers, thereby "dishonoring" the military, Schmidt argued. Hegseth has even fired people for seemingly no other reason than that they were Black, and has repeatedly implied that when Black officers only received these types of honors by denying them from more qualified white officers.

“The road from Normandy leads to Selma,” Schmidt argued. “The road from Monte Cassino leads to the Voting Rights Act. The road from the skies over Berlin leads directly to an American military where command would increasingly be earned through merit rather than inherited through race.”

He continued, “That transformation didn’t weaken the United States. It made America stronger — not because diversity became a slogan — but because excellence became the standard. The greatest military in the history of mankind became greater when it finally began drawing upon the talents of the entire American people.”

Hegseth’s actions, Schmidt claimed, put this heritage “at risk.”

“When accomplished Black officers are removed, marginalized or publicly disparaged under circumstances that create the appearance that race has become a defining factor, the damage extends far beyond individual careers,” Schmidt said. “Memory is wounded. History is distorted. The sacrifices of generations of Americans are diminished. That isn’t conservatism. It’s historical vandalism.”

He continued, “The United States military has never been great because it belonged to one race. It’s been great because it belonged to the Constitution.”

In addition to being a fierce critic of Trump’s administration, Schmidt has also often set his sights on Trump himself, in particular by pointing out his physical and mental decline in his 80th year of life.

“Vice President Harry Truman was an honest man, but he deceived the country after he had his one and only visit with the 32nd President of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” Schmidt told his podcast on Wednesday. “He knew that Roosevelt was a dying man and he did die on April the 12th, 1945. He was inaugurated for the fourth and final time on January 20th. This matters because Franklin Roosevelt wasn't seen in public every day quite like Donald Trump is. The images of Roosevelt at Yalta are shocking. The war etched onto his face, old before his time, falling apart. The burden of command weighing heavily.”

He also compared Trump to the Roman emperor Nero.

“Look at his decomposition physically,” Schmidt argued. “He can barely get out of a chair. He's lost with the European leaders who are redirecting him back into the photo. Does it remind you of anyone? A previous president off-derided by Donald Trump for getting lost in similar photo ops?”

He added, “Look at Trump's hands. Look at his ankles. The swelling is obviously attributed to a coronary condition. His words slur. He falls asleep. He is poked and prodded by 22 different medical specialists like he's ET at Walter Reed Army Hospital. All of this is to say, J.D. Vance, his fascist understudy, puppet to Peter Thiel, general weirdo and lover of the couch, may soon be commander in chief. We should talk about this more.”

President Donald Trump and his supporters are trying to claim the “Sesame Street” puppet Elmo as one of their own — but online commenters are not allowing them to get away with it.

“The GOP has been faced with their anti-Elmo history after trying to welcome him into the MAGA fold,” reported The Daily Beast's Katie Francis on Sunday. The story began with Elmo declaring, regarding the ongoing World Cup soccer event, that “Elmo loves you, and Elmo loves you, and Elmo loves you, and Team USA, and everybody who’s playing." Yet Elmo then concluded, “Elmo just wants to set the record straight... GO TEAM USA!”

He also clarified, “Just to be clear, Elmo wants Team USA to win, okay? But Elmo loves everybody!”

Notably, the Muppet predicted that his preference for Team USA might be exploited when he asked viewers to not “make this a thing.” Yet despite this warning, House Republicans quickly posted the video with the comment that "Elmo is a certified PATRIOT!”

They then added, “Meanwhile, Democrats are rooting for foreigners...”

What the House Republicans neglected to acknowledge was that Trump and his supporters have fiercely criticized “Sesame Street” and the TV station PBS for its supposedly “woke” culture. Social media users on X quickly reminded them of these facts.

“You clowns literally defunded elmo,” one person posted.

“You a-----es voted to defund PBS and called Sesame Street woke,” another wrote. “You couldn’t be more hypocritical, loud, wrong, or clueless.”

Trump’s vendetta against “Sesame Street” may be personal as well as ideological. Last year The Daily Beast reported that after the president signed an executive order to immediately halt all federal funding to PBS, “almost immediately, people began to suspect that Trump’s vendetta against the network wasn’t because of its 'woke programming.' Instead, it’s all to do with a certain puppet show that has been trolling the man since the ’80s.”

Ronald Grump was a periodic but long-running spoof of the then-hotel magnate that began in the 1980s, as The Daily Beast reported. With song lyrics like “he’s got so much trash it spills out of his can,” locations like “Grump Tower” and occupations like “famous Grouch builder,” Ronald Grump was an undisputed antagonist who tried to do nefarious things like force Oscar the Grouch to give up his garbage can (where he lives) and pave over all of “Sesame Street” so he can turn it into “Grump World.”

After Trump became a reality TV star, the spoofing continued. In a later episode, “Sesame Street” mocked Trump’s NBC reality show “The Apprentice.”

President Donald Trump is literally isolated, according to a Trump biographer, in large part because he is on distant terms with both First Lady Melania Trump and his daughter Ivanka Trump.

“An old-time monarch could only dream of the total absolute isolation on display inside the gilded fortress of the executive mansion,” explained The Daily Beast’s Michael Wolff on Sunday. “Now at eighty years old, Donald Trump sits utterly alone.”

On an immediate political level, Trump is isolated from much of the government he purportedly runs, from avoiding important meetings and spending long periods of time away from senior staff to weakening relationships with key US allies.

"Melania remains vacant, Ivanka Trump has distanced herself, and the remaining children function more like his elite corporate employees," Wolff said. "The daily court is populated solely by professional sycophants, retainers, and parasites whose closeness is strictly transactional."

He added that Trump’s children behave more like employees at a corporation than like kids interacting with a parent. Specifically he said that the adult children who remain close to Trump, including Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, act “more like his elite corporate employees” who depend on the president for transactional rather than emotional reasons.

The author added that sometimes Trump has even weaponized family estrangements to his advantage. He alleges that, when Trump decided to divorce his first wife Ivana, he kept that development in the news in order to make sure he would not lose fame he had acquired as a tabloid celebrity. Wolff has not independently corroborated that claim.

Others have pointed out Trump’s unusual family relationships. Ex-Republican presidential adviser Steve Schmidt wrote in April that First Lady Melania Trump — despite being notoriously cold toward her husband — decided to defy the First Amendment by calling for a comedian who criticized the president to be fired.

“Melania Trump’s demand to fire Jimmy Kimmel seems unsurprising from the first third wife to become an American First Lady in our 250-year history,” Schmidt said on Tuesday. “Severe, unsmiling and brutally indifferent Melania is a perfect match for her husband, who recently declared that he isn’t a rapist or pedophile on ‘60 Minutes.’”

The First Lady demanded Kimmel’s firing after he joked about their marriage and the president’s age in a comment made prior to, and which had no relationship with, an assassination attempt on the president. Schmidt’s “rapist or pedophile” comment involves Trump’s longstanding friendship with the late child sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein.

“Melania Trump’s demand is un-American,” Schmidt wrote. “The former model, who was reared in a Slovenian backwater under a communist government, seems ill-acquainted with the First Amendment to the Constitution.”

According to a former pro-Trump lawmaker, President Donald Trump’s greatest legacy is being a sore loser — and by spreading that mindset to most Republicans, he has eroded American democracy in the process.

“I've said repeatedly — ad nauseam — that Donald Trump's greatest legacy is the destruction of truth,” former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) said in a podcast posted on Tuesday. “Not a surprise, right, when this good, great, decent country puts into the White House twice somebody who lies every time he opens his mouth.

Walsh continued that Trump’s “greatest legacy is not winning twice and not getting to the White House twice. His greatest legacy — you want to understand Donald Trump's greatest legacy?

Here it is: Sixty — depending on the poll you look at — 60, 70, 80, 90 percent of one of our two major political parties believes right now that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. That right there is Trump's legacy. That right there is Trump's greatest legacy.”

Walsh pointed out that it imperils democracy for a “vast majority” of one of America’s two major parties to believe that whenever their candidate loses, it means the other candidate was cheating.

“When you look at what's happening in California since their primary election last week, it just reaffirms this point,” Walsh explained. “It expands Trump's legacy. Not only is Donald Trump's greatest legacy — and none of this is good — his greatest legacy is the destruction of truth. His greatest legacy is that he has turned the Republican Party into a party of sore losers, into a party of election deniers, into a party of democracy haters. Trump's greatest legacy is convincing Republicans not to accept the results of elections where their candidate loses. His greatest legacy is convincing Republicans that every time their side loses, it was rigged, it was stolen. Trump did that. Trump turned the Republican Party into that. A party that, when they lose now, never lost — it was stolen.”

While he added that “this is so easy to make fun of,” Walsh finds it difficult to do so “because I can think of nothing more destructive that Trump has done than convincing one of our two political parties not to accept election losses. I can't think of anything more destructive to our democracy that Trump has done than that.”

Prior to Trump, every president who lost an election peacefully relinquished power, tracing all the way back to President John Adams in 1800. Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2019, Harvard law professor and Trump impeachment defense attorney Alan Dershowitz cited this precedent in denying that Trump would try to overturn the 2020 election if he lost.

“No president will refuse to step down if his opponent is elected in his place,” Dershowitz told Salon at the time. “It just will not happen, and the American public would never tolerate it.”

Despite Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen, conservative commentator and former presidential adviser George F. Will broke down in February how Trump’s claims have been thoroughly debunked, including by many Republicans such as his own attorney general, Bill Barr, and his own vice president, Mike Pence.

“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will explained. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will continued, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

In May, discussing Trump’s being a sore loser, Walsh said that he believed the president became unforgivable “the very first time in American history, a sitting American president lost an election and refused to accept the result. I still believe to this day the American people, all of us, no matter anyone's politics, should have turned their backs on him — all of us — and told him to just get the hell out of our lives. We're done with you. That's the one thing. Because it's the thread by which this representative democracy hangs together, keeps it together.”

Walsh added, “Six years later, what still saddens me more than anything else is that the American people did not make him pay for that. The American people did not hold him accountable for that. The American people did not stand up and say: ‘oh my f — — God, this doesn't happen in America. You're running for Congress, you're running for the Senate, you're running for mayor, you're running for dog catcher, you're running for president — man, woman, whoever you are, you accept the result. You lose, you accept the result.’ Get out of here!”

He concluded, “That the American people did not say — of everything Trump's done, that with that one, not accepting an election result, that the American people, no matter our political divide, did not stand up and say: ‘Get lost. How dare you. How dare you attack this representative democracy?’ It's a — I don't mind saying it, and if it offends people, I don't care — it will be the one thing that I will never forgive the American people for.”

The National Trust for Historic Preservation is blasting the Trump administration’s claim that a foiled plot at the White House’s “open air” UFC event justifies President Donald Trump’s ballroom — noting the 4,000-person event would not have fit inside the structure, and that law enforcement had disrupted the plot four days before it took place.

On Tuesday, the Department of Justice announced “charges against five men for an alleged plot to carry out an attack to kill government officials and others attending the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Freedom 250 event held at the White House last Sunday.”

Reiterating that it “takes the President’s safety and security seriously,” an attorney for the National Trust wrote that the Trump administration “repeatedly advanced national security arguments to the District Court—including on remand from this Court, when such issues were the sole focus.”

“Last Sunday’s event, with 4,000 attendees, would not have even fit in the proposed ballroom,” attorney Thaddeus A. Heuer wrote. Heuer noted that the alleged plot had been “‘detected and disrupted’ four days” before Sunday’s UFC event at the White House.

“Nothing in the injunction halting above-ground ballroom construction limited the security options available to law enforcement for the President’s open-air UFC event,” he wrote. “Indeed, the President, the Vice-President, and Speaker Johnson all attended, with full Secret Service knowledge of the alleged plot that was ‘detected and disrupted’ four days earlier.”

Heuer added that the U.S. Supreme Court “could not have been clearer.” The Constitution, he wrote, “forbids the President from exercising powers vested solely in Congress, even when he asserts that a ‘national catastrophe’ ‘endanger[ing] the well-being and safety’ of the country and ‘immediately jeopardiz[ing]’ national defense requires it.”

The president, argued Heuer, is not permitted to “freely violate the separation of powers.”

What the president can do, said Heuer, is get congressional authorization.

He wrote, “if the President believes any particular security incident bears persuasively on the need for a White House ballroom, he has the same remedy as his predecessors: obtain authorization from Congress, the body in which the Constitution vests plenary authority over the nation’s property.”

This was not the first time the Trump administration had made similar arguments to advance its case for the need for a White House ballroom.

After the alleged assassination attempt during the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, the president argued for the need for the ballroom, The Guardian reported in April. The WHCA reportedly hosts roughly 2,600 people at its annual fundraising dinner, while Trump’s proposed ballroom is believed to be designed to seat about one thousand people

President Donald Trump is arresting people for supposedly vandalizing the Reflecting Pool, despite lacking any evidence, and ignoring the signs that it has turned algae green with peeling blue paint because of his own incompetence.

For doing these things, he is being roundly mocked on social media.

"Reflecting Pool story: Under Obama, responsible people carefully studied the problem, sought best solutions - and failed,” posted conservative journalist David Frum on Sunday. “Under Trump, irresponsible people imposed a hasty solution that enriched inept cronies - and failed even more spectacularly."

A prominent former government official also claimed that Trump has failed to fix the Reflecting Pool and is instead falsely blaming other people to deflect heat from himself.

"Like most things Trump touches, the Reflecting Pool is now in worse shape than before,” former US Attorney Barbara McQuade said on X on Sunday. “Adding cosmetic paint did not solve the underlying problem. And now he baselessly blames vandals for his failure."

A social media influencer named Jo (JoJoFromJerz), who has 1 million followers on X, received a lot of responses when she pointed out a double standard in Trump’s approach to criminal prosecution.

"If you beat the police during the insurrection Trump incited, you get a pardon,” Jo wrote. “But if you touch the peeling reflecting pool paint he created, you get arrested."

Another prominent social media personality, liberal commentator Harry Sisson, also observed that "Trump is treating people around the reflecting pool worse than the January 6th insurrectionists and that is terrifying."

Meanwhile Democratic strategist Christopher Webb denounced conservative media outlets like Fox News for going along with Trump’s inaccurate claims that the pool was vandalized.

"SHAME ON FOX, OR ANY NEWS OUTLET, FOR HEADLINES LIKE THIS,” Webb posted on X. “Everyone with eyes knows the Reflecting Pool wasn't vandalized, and every reporter knows it too. 📌 Former Olympian David Hearn was handcuffed after he picked up a section of the pool liner that was already peeling away. He says he didn't vandalize anything."

As Webb noted, the Trump administration targeted three-time Olympics canoeist David Carter Hearn, 67, as one of the so-called vandals of the Reflecting Pool. Trump’s $14 million-plus renovation project on the Reflecting Pool has been so unsuccessful, he has begun plans to partly drain the pool for “necessary repairs.”

“I was just a curious, concerned citizen,” Hearn explained regarding his own arrest. “I guess I was there at the wrong place, wrong time.” Trump said on Saturday that vandals “poured corrosive and destructive chemicals into the Pool,” even though he has no evidence of this.

A conservative is worried that President Donald Trump is delusional about the limits to his power — and that this may spark a global catastrophe.

“Donald Trump's latest claim that there are now 'no limits' to his power after launching war with Iran has alarmed political insiders and commentators in Washington, who warn his fixation on 'absolute power' risks catastrophic miscalculations abroad and deepening chaos at home,” reported the International Business Times’ Briane Nebria on Sunday. Trump made these remarks on the HBO program “Axios on HBO” and occurred after he said his ability to declare a war against Iran had proved there were no constraints on how he can use his presidential powers.

After the interview, CNN host Pamela Brown explained to viewers that Trump suggested he was more powerful than Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler and the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin, both infamous authoritarians in their own right. Jonah Goldberg, a conservative commentator who co-founded The Dispatch, actually agreed with the mainstream news network.

“There are only two possibilities,” Goldberg explained to Brown. “Either he believes it or he's just saying it. And I'm not sure which one is better.” He added that Trump is either refusing to accept that raw power alone does not confer moral legitimacy or is genuinely incapable of understanding that distinction.

“He only measures things on the metric and the rubric of power,” Goldberg told Brown. Because the president has tremendous global influence, this refusal to distinguish between the two could have dire geopolitical consequences.

“I think [that delusion] is going to create more problems in foreign policy and maybe domestic policy going forward,' Goldberg said to Brown. “If Trump genuinely cannot see, or refuses to acknowledge, the constraints built into the American system, then 'he's going to make the same mistakes again.”

Goldberg, despite being conservative, has long opposed Trump’s presidency. In April he wrote an editorial for the Grand Island Independent in which he pointed out that the president’s double standard in expecting other nations to treat him with respect while he is disrespectful is hurting his foreign policy.

“The essence of this low-road-for-me, high-road-for-thee dynamic rests on the belief that Trumpism is a one-way road,” Goldberg explained on Wednesday. “Insulting Trump, deservedly or not, is forbidden, while Trump's antics should be celebrated when possible, defended when necessary, or ignored when neither of those responses is possible. But he should never, ever face consequences for his own actions.”

He added, “Trump has routinely mocked our allies. For efficiency's sake, let's forgive all of the petty jabs from the first term ostensibly intended to get them to spend more on defense. In Trump's second term, he claimed our NATO allies would never fight on our behalf, even though the only time NATO invoked Article 5 -- an attack on one is an attack on all -- was in the wake of 9/11.”

Goldberg concluded, “Back in January, in Davos, Switzerland, Trump revised this false claim, admitting some did fight in Afghanistan, but that ‘they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.’ This infuriated not just allied leaders, but their voters. Indeed, Trump is even unpopular with the populist right across most of Europe.”

President Donald Trump seems to be obsessed with the number 22 — and no one really knows why.

“Donald Trump may be the 80-year-old who is both the 45th and 47th president of the United States, but lately, his favorite number seems to be 22,” reported NBC News' Monica Alba and Caroline Kenny on Sunday. This includes falsely claiming that Washington DC has 22 fountains (it has 18), that he had proved wrong 22 Nobel Prize-winning economists and that the military recently destroyed 22 ships in Iran. He has also discussed a swimming pool he built 22 years ago, described meeting with 22 medical specialists and complained that a possible trip to Asia would take 22 hours.

“In June, we obliterated Iran’s nuclear capacity in Operation Midnight Hammer, you saw that. People have been waiting for 22 years to do that,” Trump said in January to a crowd in Iowa.

In March, describing another Iranian mission, he said that “they call ’em mine droppers, and the mine droppers, 22, all 22, are gone.”

Similarly, at a Hanukkah reception, Trump said that “we were practicing this, this. And the predecessors we were practicing for 22 years, they said, for 22 years they were practicing. And no president had the courage to let them go and do that. They wanted to do it for 22 years, and the predecessors being the young pilots at the time, but for 22 years, three times a year, they were practicing that run.”

It is unclear why Trump has fixated on this particular number. Many presidents have superstitions, such as President Franklin Roosevelt’s fear of the number of 13 famously prompting him to never attend a dinner where there were exactly 13 guests. In Trump’s case, however, the 22 obsession is causing him to do more than create logistical headaches for his event planners. Trump is saying things that are factually inaccurate, over and over again, to conform to his 22 obsession.

It is notable that Trump does have one 22 obsession that could have a direct policy impact — namely, his determination to repeal the 22nd Amendment so he can run for a third term.

“Maybe we do one more term. Should we do one more?” Trump told his audience at the Port of Corpus Christi in Texas at one point. “Do one more term. Well, we are entitled to it.” He argued that the 22nd Amendment should be repealed, repeating his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from and saying for that reason he is entitled to “my third term.”

President Donald Trump’s appointees reportedly terminated an early-stage criminal investigation into his controversial clemency for a convicted fraudster.

Five people with direct knowledge of the commutation claim that the Trump team did not want any probing into whether improper payments were made to commute a sentence to David Gentile, according to a report by The New York Times. Gentile was convicted of a $1.6 billion fraud against thousands of investors while running his private equity firm. By targeting low-income and middle-income investors, Gentile wiped out the retirement savings for many of his clients.

Because of Trump’s clemency, Gentile served less than two weeks of his seven year prison sentence and will not need to forfeit more than $15.5 million.

“Within a few months, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, where Mr. Gentile’s conviction had been secured, opened an investigation into how the commutation came about,” The New York Times reported. “Among the evidence they gathered was information about jailhouse communications in which Mr. Gentile discussed making payments of $2.5 million or more to people or companies to help facilitate his clemency, according to two people with knowledge of the investigation who were not authorized to discuss it.”

Among others, Gentile allegedly worked with a retired Queens Catholic priest, the Rev. Frank Mann, who is friends with Trump. Despite denying to The New York Times that he had anything to do with the clemency, individuals with firsthand knowledge of the prison communications in question told the Times that Mann and Gentile spoke about the former speaking to Trump about his case. Eventually, the commutation occurred, and by May any investigation into how it came about was abruptly halted.

“Natalie Baldassarre, a Justice Department spokeswoman, suggested that everything was done by the book,” The New York Times reported regarding allegations that they directly ordered local prosecutors to end the investigation. It quoted her as saying, “Our prosecutors always work within the bounds of our enforcement priorities to hold bad actors accountable and ensure the efficient use of taxpayer resources.”

This is not the first story to allege that the Trump White House has turned pardons into a profit-based industry. The New York Times reported in March that the “lucrative pardon industry” in the Trump White House is “based in part on the proposition that paying the right person to deliver a message tailored to Mr. Trump's politics or grievances is more important than demonstrating remorse or a low likelihood of recidivism.”

The report added, “A growing number of practitioners promise access in this murky enterprise, but some also may exaggerate their effectiveness to elicit payments from clients desperate to avoid incarceration. Pardon seekers routinely offer to pay as much as $1 million or more, often with bonus payments triggered by a successful outcome, according to lobbying filings and people familiar with the fees."

Indeed, the knowledge of Trump’s seeming willingness to help people get off from legal consequences if he is paid led to widespread support for him among convicted white-collar criminals.

"This transactional approach to clemency has been welcomed by white-collar offenders like those serving time at the Otisville camp, a minimum-security facility about 75 miles northwest of Manhattan,” The New York Times reported in March. “Many of its inmates cheered Mr. Trump's election, seeing him as a kindred spirit who shares their grievances about the unfairness of financial crime prosecutions like the one that led to his own conviction, according to four people familiar with conversations at Otisville."

The DOJ is now refusing the request of a federal judge to submit a sworn declaration that it's backing off from President Donald Trump’s controversial anti-weaponization fund. But legal observers say the White House had best get used to judges requiring signatures and receipts over the word of somebody like Trump.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and other members of Trump's administration have refused to file the statement U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema demanded in her judicial order last week.

AlterNet recently reported that Brinkema said she wanted to "avoid any further litigation in this civil action," and asked Blanche and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, Jr. and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent to submit a declaration they wouldn't take any further action to create Trump's slush fund. The deadline for that was June 19.

But administration leaders say the judge should “essentially trust all of the representations that they've made so far,” explained MS NOW legal analyst Lisa Rubin. “And those, according to a brief that they submitted, include [DOJ head] Todd Blanche’s congressional testimony. It includes court filings and includes what they say are twice saying so in open court. And they say there's no reason why the court needs declarations from members of the administration.”

However, Rubin added that “this administration is replete with examples of judges asking the administration to put in writing effectively that they have complied with directives from the courts.” But if the administration puts in a sworn declaration that they are not going to pursue the fund and take steps to compensate these people, she said it would expose the administration to judicially imposed penalties, including potential criminal contempt.

Legal reporter David Rohde said the administration’s leeriness means they most certainly have plans to pursue the fund despite Blanche’s claimed commitments.

The problem for the administration here, however, is that judges have caught on that the Trump administration likes to lie. And it lies a lot.

“This is a reflection of what this judge is doing in Florida, reflects what judges have recently done in Chicago and Rhode Island and Washington, D.C. here,” said Rohde. “They have caught DOJ officials withholding information or making demonstrably false statements to federal judges. That hasn't happened in the federal courts for years. It was sort of an accepted thing that just the justice department would not want to lie to judges just because it would slow down so many of their cases. But the second trump administration has done this repeatedly.”

“That's why you have this judge pushing back so aggressively saying, ‘no, it's not sworn testimony from Todd Blanche’. … And that's why they need sworn statements,” Rohde added. “It's an amazing moment to have judges so openly being distrustful of a justice department.”

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