vijay prashad

President Donald Trump spent six hours on late Saturday seemingly doing nothing but posting on his Truth Social account — and many of those posts seemed to reinforce the notion his priorities are out of whack with those of the American public.

“President Donald Trump spent much of Saturday flooding Truth Social with a torrent of memes, AI slop, political attacks, and fan-made tributes,” reported The Daily Beast’s Olivia Ralph on Sunday. “The six-hour posting marathon unfolded on a day when the only item listed on the president’s public schedule was ‘Executive Time.’”

The more than 50 posts were described by Ralph as “ranging from patriotic fantasy art and self-congratulatory graphics to crime memes, military imagery, celebrity tributes, and attacks on political rivals.”

The journalist added that “among the more unusual posts were separate images showing Trump riding horseback beside George Washington on a dirt road next to a NASCAR race.” Ironically experts have noted that Washington opposed having his face on currency during his own lifetime because it was perceived as monarchical, insisted all electorally defeated presidents had a moral obligation to peacefully give up power and only sought two terms to avoid concentrating power in his hands. By contrast, Trump is trying to put his face on a new $250 bill, was the first president to attempt a coup when he lost an election and has argued (incorrectly) that the 22nd amendment does not bar him from seeking a third term.

Perhaps Trump’s other most notable post was a repeat, depicting a giant version of his face eyeing the Danish province of Greenland along with the words “Hello, Greenland!”

“Trump has repeatedly argued that having Greenland as U.S. territory is vital for national security, though both Greenlandic and Danish leaders have forcefully rejected any suggestion that the territory could be acquired by the United States,” Ralph wrote.

This is not the first time that The Daily Beast has chronicled Trump’s late-night postings. Earlier this month, The Daily Beast’s Josh Fiallo reported that he is posting so much, it suggests the president may not be getting enough sleep.

“Donald Trump’s late-night and early-morning posting habit is now so prolific there were only five days in April when he could have had a full night’s sleep,” Fiallo wrote. Describing a “breathtaking scale” to the president’s posting during April, Fiallo broke down how “at this point in his first term, the president had posted 250 times in April 2018. This April, he made 565 posts on Truth Social—an average of about 18 a day.”

Fiallo added, “It is not just the number of Trump’s posts that the Daily Beast analyzed, but also their timing and nature: A third of his social media output now comes during the night.” In total the president posted on Truth Social on 189 occasions between 9 AM and 6 AM local time throughout April, indicating that Trump posted at least once at night on more than four out of five nights that month.

You may have thought the dog-killing Kristi Noem was the worst that the Trump administration could get for Homeland Security Secretary.

But here is former Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin and current DHS secretary, who doubled down last week on Fox on a threat to shut down Customs and Border Patrol processing of flights at major international airports located in “sanctuary cities”—in other words, cities that direct their local law enforcement not to engage in immigration and detention efforts by working with federal agents.

It’s not, however, just about working with local law enforcement on immigration. Mullen—and Trump—want cities and states to agree with them completely on mass deportation to the point of shutting down protest. We’ve been here before, when federal agents tried to shut down protests in Minneapolis and executed two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in the streets.

Now they’re putting a gun to the heads of entire cities and states. Mullen was angry about a protest in New Jersey at a detention facility in Newark, where dozens of demonstrators—including U.S. Senator Andy Kim—were cruelly pepper-sprayed. Basically, Mullen wants the protests stopped, and if they’re not, he’ll stop the processing of travelers on flights into cities that don’t collaborate with Trump’s fascistic actions.

Though Mullen says CBP agents “process immigration,” CBP’s job at airports is actually to make sure only U.S. citizens or foreign visitors with visas—tourist visas, work visas, or permanent residency visas—are entering the country. They’re not “processing” anyone’s “immigration” but rather processing travelers arriving on international flights.

This could all be a lot of bluster, or the Trump regime may just be stupid enough to believe that by not processing visitors on international flights to certain cities—causing chaos and sending many flights to other cities while canceling many others—it will only economically harm blue cities in the blue states they’re targeting. That would be a gross misunderstanding of the global economic ecosystem. But then again, Trump and his aides didn’t think about that when it came to tariffs, so maybe they are in fact that stupid.

Airlines would be canceling flights, and havoc would play out all across America, affecting everyone in every red state as much as anyone in any blue state. An economy that is already teetering would come crashing down into a recession.

The U.S. Travel Association told PBS News that Mullin warned the group in a meeting that he is considering withdrawing CBP officers at the airports in question. The group immediately condemned this crazy scheme, as did all of the major airlines.

Even Trump’s own transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, wasn’t on the same page:

Duffy told a Congressional hearing earlier this week that…it would be a bad idea to start restricting travel based on political views. After all, at some point Democrats will be in charge and “you will all switch spots at one point — hopefully not too soon Mr. Chairman,” Duffy said.
“We have people from around the world and around the country that need to be able to fly into all different kinds of places. We shouldn’t shut down air travel in a state that doesn’t agree with our politics,” Duffy said.

This wouldn’t be the first time, however, that the Trump Transportation Department would be in conflict with Homeland Security. Back in February, the El Paso airport was shut down briefly after a dispute between the FAA (which is part of the Transportation Department) and DHS (and the Pentagon) when DHS and the Pentagon went ahead with testing high-energy, anti-drone laser technology at nearbly Fort Bliss against the FAA’s warnings, leading to the shutdown of the airport.

Airline trade groups warn that if Mullen moved forward, there would be a devastating economic impact, including disrupting billions of dollars in cargo shipments. We’d be back to the supply chain disruption of the pandemic—which drove inflation to 9%.

As Nick Miroff at The Atlantic reports, millions of passengers would also be stranded, and there would be a ripple effect all through the country, to airports in deeply red states.

Mullin’s proposal appears to reflect a thin grasp of global-travel logistics, as well as an inflated sense of the government’s ability to impose economic pain on specific cities, according to industry executives and former DHS officials I spoke with.
The U.S. airports where international travelers and cargo first arrive are often not their final destination. A German business traveler flying into JFK may be en route to a meeting in Cincinnati.
A Korean family landing at Los Angeles International Airport could be headed for Disney World. The proportion of economic pain imposed on sanctuary cities might be relatively small compared with the wider ripple effects on the U.S. travel industry.

A massive economic hit for the country—and global travel—but also for the GOP, as if the party doesn’t have enough problems heading into the midterms. On top of everything else, disrupting air travel domestically and internationally, upending cargo and deliveries in addition to vacations and business travel, would enrage voters. And then we could see the economy plummet as inflation spikes way higher than it has in recent months under Trump.

But this administration has done so much to harm itself and the GOP while thinking they’re only hurting their opponents that none of us should immediately assume it’s all a bluff.

Colorado Governor Jared Polis popped up on a Colorado Democratic Party Zoom call this week with black tape plastered over his mouth. While Polis dodged reporters’ requests for comment on what the hell he was thinking, he appeared to be smarting from overwhelming censure by his own party for commuting the sentence of election-denier Tina Peters. Peters was serving a nine-year sentence for leaking county election data to Mike “My Pillow” Lindell in a bid to prove the Big Lie of a stolen 2020 election. Thanks to Polis, Peters will walk free on parole on June 1.

The gag is Polis trying to cast himself as a free-speech martyr rather than a sucker. He claims he commuted Peters’ sentence because the trial judge improperly punished her for her election denial ideology, over and above her criminal actions.

The judge brought up her beliefs in order to illustrate her complete lack of remorse, but an appeals court agreed with Polis.

“You are no hero, you abused your position, and you're a charlatan who used and is still using your prior position in office to peddle a snake oil that's been proven to be junk time and time again,” Judge Matthew Barrett said at her sentencing. “Your lies are well-documented, and these convictions are serious. I'm convinced you would do it all over again if you could. You're as defiant as a defendant as this court has ever seen.”

The appeals court ordered Barrett to re-sentence Peters without taking her ideology into account. Peters’ free speech rights had already been vindicated, but instead of letting the process play out, Polis foolishly tried to earn some credit with Trump by commuting her sentence.

Polis acquiesced to Trump's ruthless and unconstitutional pressure campaign to free Peters. Polis has proven that Trump can bully governors into springing maga criminals from state prison. Trump can pardon federal crimes and now he's dangling $1.8 billion taxpayer dollars in front of the goons who stormed the Capitol on J6. State prison is the last bulwark against maga crime and Polis foolishly set the precedent that governors can be bullied into short-circuiting justice for Trump’s cronies.

Trump fake-pardoned Peters late last year and demanded that Polis release her from prison. Colorado’s attorney general shrugged off the stunt, because it was devoid of legal merit. The president has no power to pardon state-level crimes.

Polis tried to minimize Peters’ misdeeds. “This was after the 2021 — it was a small municipal election in the town,” Polis told CNN.

Here’s what happened.

In a bid to prove the Big Lie, Peters conspired with another elected official and a clique of conspiracists to leak her county’s most sensitive election data. She smuggled one of Mike Lindell’s minions into the facility to copy the data, which ended up online.

It was gross official misconduct. The compromised voting machines had to be replaced at a cost of over a million dollars. Peters also defied subpoenas issued to investigate her crimes and even kicked a cop while resisting arrest.

“If [Peters] is not released, I am going to take harsh measures!!!” Trump threatened last summer.

A campaign of vengeance ensued. Trump slashed transportation funding, relocated Space Command, and killed the world-renowned National Center for Atmospheric Research, which supported hundreds of good jobs in Colorado. Trump vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have provided clean drinking water for part of Colorado. “We were told that Tina was the reason we couldn’t get water,” Congresswoman Lauren Boebert of Colorado said. Trump threatened to kick Colorado out of the federal food stamp program, a move a federal judge deemed unconstitutional because it was a blatant attempt to punish the state for Peters’ incarceration.

Trump ordered the Department of Justice to “take all necessary action” to get Peters out of prison. “We did it in a way that puts the right kind of pressure on them,” Justice Department official Ed Martin boasted, adding that “if you’re Colorado … if the feds say we want something, you change your tune.”

A senior White House official, who declined to be identified sounding like a mafia underboss, told the Times in response to the research center closure announcement that Coloradans would be better served if Governor Polis wanted to work with the president.

Everything Peters has done since her commutation seems calculated to make Polis look as foolish as possible. Polis claimed that Peters had taken responsibility for her crimes and had shown “a commitment to follow the law going forward." Whereupon, Peters accused the Colorado secretary of state and the attorney general of being part of a vast conspiracy. In an appeal filed last week, the unrepentant Peters argued that the 2020 election was stolen and that Trump should have been able to pardon her for a state crime, because she was acting on his behalf when she leaked Mesa County’s election data.

Even Polis’s claim that Peters is non-violent is a stretch. She kicked a cop while resisting arrest. She was later caught on prison CCTV throttling a fellow inmate.

Vice president JD Vance floated Peters as a potential beneficiary of Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund for pedophiles, insurrectionists and white supremacists. The fund is supposedly to compensate people who were wrongly convicted or excessively sentenced by Joe Biden’s Justice Department. Yet Peters never caught a federal case. Instead, she, like Trump, was convicted of multiple state-level felonies. If Peters can get federal taxpayer cash for her state case, what’s to stop Trump from demanding cash for his 34 felony convictions in New York?

Trump pardoned all the January 6th insurrectionists on his first day in office. Now he’s promising to make them rich beyond their wildest dreams with our tax dollars. Between the power of the pardon and the power of the purse, Trump has powerful tools to induce his followers to commit crimes on his behalf. Only the state justice systems remain nominally beyond Trump’s reach.

Trump bullied Polis by withholding federal funds until Polis let Peters out of prison. Peters has already vowed to keep fighting for “election integrity” upon her release. The White House has all but promised to pay her for her trouble with our tax dollars.

Jared Polis made it all possible.

I can’t overstate the importance of Judge Kathleen Williams’s decision on Friday to reopen Trump’s $10 billion case against the I.R.S.

She said she wants to investigate “grievous allegations” that the hasty deal to resolve it was “premised on deception,” and she ordered Trump’s lawyers to tell her by June 12 whether the lawsuit should be formally reopened because “the court was the victim of a fraud.”

The “deception” and “fraud” Judge Williams refers to were allegedly carried out by Trump and his Justice Department.

This is a big deal.

Judge Williams’s decision came in response to court papers filed on Wednesday by a bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges who urged her to revive the case and dig into the details of the agreement to settle it.

The judges’ brief is also a big deal. They call it a motion for relief from judgement or order or, alternatively, “leave to appear as amici curiae by thirty-five former federal judges.”

I don’t recall a similar instance of 35 former federal judges filing such a motion or amicus (friend of the court) brief.

In it, the judges argue that the parties’ — Trump and the Justice Department’s — so-called “settlement” agreement was made to circumvent the court ‘s possible finding that the case presented no actual controversy, since Trump is on both sides of it.

This, they conclude, constitutes a fraud on the Court.

Let me quote the remarkable brief filed by the 35 former federal judges:

“The parties have used this lawsuit—which was never an adversarial proceeding over which the Court even had jurisdiction—as a means to allow a “commission” controlled by the President to dole out $1.776 billion in taxpayer dollars without constitutional or congressional authority to do so, and to confer unlawful private benefits to the President and his family by purportedly prohibiting the United States from prosecuting any and all claims against them.
And the parties have plainly tried to shield this conduct from necessary judicial scrutiny by short-circuiting this Court’s inquiry into whether the lawsuit is in fact an actual case or controversy by [seeking to dismiss the case] before they announced the “settlement”—clearly in hopes of preventing the Court from ever completing that inquiry, which, if it comes out against the parties, will undo their collusive “settlement.” ….
Accordingly, because “[t]he parties’ ‘collusive’ activity perpetrated a fraud on the judicial machinery itself, by fostering an appearance that the litigation involved adverse parties, when, in fact, it did not,” the Court should void its prior dismissal and reopen the case to assess in due course whether a fraud occurred.”

In her order on Friday, Judge Williams said she wanted to investigate the circumstances surrounding Trump’s efforts to settle the lawsuit in a way that benefited him and his allies.

She added that a federal court rule requires attorneys to ensure that court filings are “not presented for any improper purpose” and that “a party’s decision to file a frivolous lawsuit for the sole purpose of forcing a settlement may qualify as such an improper purpose.”

She also noted that the settlement appeared to run afoul of Department of Justice policies that require any settlements to be “specifically limited to the immediate subject matter of the claim.”

Finally, Judge Williams pointed out that a settlement addendum that waives all tax claims the U.S. may currently have against Trump, his two eldest sons, and his businesses and trusts was signed only by Todd Blanche, the acting Attorney General.

This could result in questions being asked of Blanche. Ultimately, it could result in his debarment or even imprisonment. Recall that Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell, was convicted of conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice for his role in the Watergate break-in and cover-up. He served 19 months of a two-and-a-half to eight-year sentence in federal prison before being paroled. He was the first Attorney General in United States history to be incarcerated.

Let me just say that there are forces in this country — specifically, Judge Kathleen Williams and the bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges — bent on preventing Trump from exercising authoritarian power.

In so doing, they’re displaying extraordinary courage and commitment to democracy and the rule of law. They are in effect representing all of us — our system of justice.

We owe them a great debt of gratitude. (I’m awarding them this week’s Joseph N. Welsh Award for Courage in the Face of Tyranny.)

Robert Reich is a professor at Berkeley and was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. You can find his writing at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

What do you do when you’re a president with a birthday party being abandoned by all the entertainment? If you’re President Donald Trump you offer to fill the hole yourself.

“I understand Artists are getting ‘the yips’ having to do with their performance on Wednesday, so I am thinking about bringing the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World,” Trump posted on Truth Social with a long run-on sentence, “the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our Country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!), DONALD J. Trump to take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists,’ and give a major speech, rallying the Country forward like I have done ever since being President!”

“Third rate” artists — which Trump nevertheless saw fit to hire — have flown his Freedom 250 event, many claiming they were lied to about the nature of the celebration, while others were likely trying to escape the stain of Trump’s historically bad polls.

Sounding like the only kid to show up at his own birthday party, Trump insisted that his popularity was without peer on Truth Social.

“Two years ago, the United States was DEAD. Now we have the ‘HOTTEST’ Country anywhere in the World. I don’t want so-called ‘Artists’ that get paid far too much money, who aren’t happy. I only want to be surrounded by Happy People, Smart People, Successful People, and People that know how to WIN,” insisted Trump, adding that he was ordering “representatives to look at the feasibility of doing an AMERICA IS BACK Rally on Wednesday.”

“Only Great Patriots invited,” Trump added. “It will be a Wild and Beautiful Celebration of America! President DONALD J. Trump.”

Predictably, critics on X mangled this latest, lowly hail mary to save his collapsing event.

“It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to, cry if I want to…” howled one critic on X.” But some of the worst hits came from Trump’s own MAGA element.

“Might be an unpopular opinion on here but replacing a concert with a speech is lame and boring,” said right-wing theocrat influencer and podcaster Matt Walsh on X. “Just go out and get real musicians to play. Don’t cancel the concert just because a bunch of washed up old has-beens canceled. There are hundreds of artists out there who might not be famous but would absolutely leap at the chance to play on a stage like this.”

“You all knew this was coming ... lol,” posted Red State conservative writer “Bonchie.”

Others were even less accommodating.

“Would like an apology from everyone who scolded me the other day for calling the Freedom 250 festival Trump’s ‘Celebrate Me’ festival,” said singer Brad Skistimas, on X. “It’s not about him!!” Yes it is. It’s always about him. And I wouldn’t put it past this admin to have announced a crummy line up just so everyone would cancel so Trump could book himself a speech.”

Another X heckler suggested Trump “get some technochuds to create an ambient track to play while he gives his speech for some Spoken Word.”

Bulwark founder Sarah Longwell and writer Jonathan Last say President Donald Trump’s Freedom 250 debacle is unraveling fast as nearly all big names on the playlist have leapt from windows to avoid the Trump stain. But both agree that this kind of chaos and collapse is par for the course in Trump’s ‘Ideocracy-style’ style America.

“[The artists] all said that the White House lied to them about what it was,” said Longwell. “... [T]hey tried to sell it to them that it was bipartisan, that this is just celebrating America. And then, of course, it was on the White House lawn – with a UFC backdrop and it's coming from Trump's personal thing. So, they all say, ‘well, we were lied to.’”

“Trump is having to lie to these artists to get them to say ‘yes’,” said Longwell, which, she said, is typical of things involving Trump.

“Of course, this is how Trump did it, right? I mean, instead of going to the acts and being like, ‘just so you know, the president is doing this giant thing on the White House lawn’ they sold it as an event called the Great American County Fair,” said Last. “… A con man is going to con, I guess.”

Another frame for the whole thing, added Longwell, is that the event amounts to Trump “just wanting to help out his buddy,” citing the fact that Trump bought between $15k and $50k worth of stock in UFC parent company TKO Holding Group weeks ahead of the event — possibly in expectation of a rise in stock prices once the White House event was announced.

“It's much more like crypto,” said Last. “UFC is the crypto of sports. There are people who are really into it. It's growing in popularity, but it's still niche. Your average American does not watch UFC And your average American does not own crypto.”

Last also described the UFC as “heavily male-coded in ways that even the NFL and football are not.”

“This really does tell … three-quarters of the women in America to ‘f—— off. Like, this is not for you.’ And it's weird to pick something [like that] for the 250th anniversary of America Celebration on the White House Lawn,” said Last, adding that “you only get one shot at” at something like this to pick so polarizing a niche.

Longwell said she had only recently seen the 2006 satirical sci-fi comedy Idiocracy, directed by Mike Judge, and finally noticed the similarity between the wrestling-obsessed imbeciles running future America and the Trump administration and its MAGA supporters.

“'Idiocracy' feels like a documentary,” Longwell lamented.

Social media critics were not quite ready to accept White House claims of President Donald Trump’s “excellent health” this weekend.

Citing the results of a recent examination, a Friday memo from Trump’s physician Dr. Sean Barbabella asserted that Trump “remains in excellent health, demonstrating strong cardiac, pulmonary, neurological and overall physical function.”

To some, the news came as a surprise considering Trump is the oldest person ever elected to the White House, with his 80th birthday arriving in June. To others, the claim was outright comedy.

“I would seriously doubt the rest of any report that still claims he’s 6’3” 238lbs,” said one critic on Bluesky.

“Did the North Korean propaganda team write this for him?” said another Bluesky user, referring to Trump’s history of nodding off in public, his late-night screeds and other obvious signs of pulmonary illness, including apparent tissue swelling of the ankles.

CNN medical analyst Dr. Jonathan Reiner described the severe edema in his ankles as Chronic Venous Insufficiency, despite a White House statement just three months before that he had no edema.

“If you believe those blood pressure numbers, you’re a fool lol,” howled one critic on X.

Other Trump critics are seeing the rashes on his skin and severe bruising on his extremities and declaring that the president is rotting away as the public watches.

“Trump is decaying, both in body and popularity,” said Left Hook podcaster Wajahat Ali. “The nearly 80-year-old vulgarian is a diminished man with historically low favorability ratings. He has dragged the GOP down with him. His actions are more reflective of a paranoid, weak King who knows his end is near and is desperately trying to sandbag against the vengeful wave that is about to topple his kingdom.”

After President Donald Trump completed a medical exam at Walter Reed on Tuesday, he posted on Truth Social that declare that “Everything checked out PERFECTLY.” But NBC News medical analyst Dr. Vin Gupta said there are lingering issues with Trump that just aren’t adding up, particularly regarding his inflamed skin and lingering rashes.

“To use a medical terminology, is there a bleeding diathesis [indicated by hand bruises] … impairing his blood's ability to properly form clots and is there a predisposition to bleeding,” Gupta said. “They claim that it is high-dose aspirin that's causing this, which, again, doesn't pass the sniff test.”

Social media hecklers apparently agree.

“They released this thing at 11pm on a Friday night, and it's a piecemeal mess that leaves out a vast amount of detail from the many specialists he's seeing,” said a critic on X. “He's 80. His cankles are huge, he falls asleep all the time, and he sounds like a maniac.”

New York Times columnists say the “you only live once” (YOLO) caucus of the Republican Party is preparing to upset Trump’s plans just as his beleaguered GOP Congress slides into a Democratic changeover in November.

“John Cornyn (R-Texas) is a member of the Senate Republican leadership team, but having lost his re-election bid, he’s now eligible to join the Louisiana Republican senator Bill Cassidy, who lost his primary in the … YOLO Republicans [caucus],” said retired radio journalist and NYTimes columnist Robert Siegel. “The idea is that you’ve been loyal to Donald Trump in nearly everything, but now that you’ve been defeated by a MAGA-backed opponent, you’re a lame duck. You can actually vote in accordance with your real principles, assuming you can remember what those were.”

Under this scenario YOLO Republicans might “actually influence events now that their spines are out of storage,” Siegel added.

Conservative columnist Mona Charen said already the so-called caucus, containing Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) are “making some pretty forthright statements” regarding Trump’s unpopular slush fund. And NYTimes columnist E.J. Dionne Jr., said if the three of them vote together it could pressure Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) to cast “no” votes that up to now had no real effect on Senate proceedings.

But even as this emerging caucus of Trump dissonance gears up to break the president’s iron hold on the U.S. Senate, Republican voters are getting discouraged by the president’s antics enough to stay home.

“In September 2022, only 38 percent of Republicans identified as MAGA Republicans,” said Dionne. “As of May, the proportion had risen to 62 percent, so this party is MAGA-fied. But in the electorate as a whole, the only people becoming MAGA are Republicans, so that Americans who call themselves MAGA rose from only 11 percent to 19 percent. So, MAGA’s a really small percentage, and what I would call the MAGA gap between the Republicans and the rest of the country has gone from 27 percent to 43 percent.”

Look no further than the “sharp turnout declines” in the Republican primary, Dionne said.

“In the first round of the Texas race, there were more people who voted in the Democratic primary than in the Republican primary,” said Dionne.

“Two hundred thousand more,” Siegel added.

“Yeah. And then, in this runoff, the total turnout was 1.4 million. Donald Trump got 6.4 million votes in Texas in 2024. This is a dispirited party, and the part that’s dispirited is the non-MAGA part, and I think this is a real problem going forward for the Republicans,” said Dionne.

Charen said controversial MAGA Texas senatorial candidate Paxton’s identical performance in the initial primary round and then in the follow-up runoff suggested MAGA people will stick with Paxton “no matter what.” But the primary also reveals that Republican candidates will be unable to wash off the stink of President Donald Trump’s unpopularity with less MAGA general election voters.

“In this party, Trump has managed to spray his musk over every single candidate, so that they cannot escape it,” said Charen.

Semafor political reporter Dave Weigel says President Donald Trump is exactly the kind of albatross a struggling Republican candidate does not need when trying to sell a message to voters for the 2026 midterms.

“Donald Trump doesn't seem to care about winning the midterms,” said MS NOW “Weekend” co-host Eugene Daniels. “It seems for him it is about keeping his vise grip on the Republican Party. And there's evidence after evidence after evidence that is mounting that shows that that is probably true, that he doesn't seem to care.”

“If he cared, he'd probably spend a lot more time helping his party legislate and figure out a different bill, other than just the [unpopular] Big, Beautiful bill … for them to run on. He would probably not be endorsing people like [Texas AG Ken] Paxton. He probably wouldn't be telling folks to spend $33 million to take out [Rep. Thomas] Massie [in Kentucky] to just get another Republican in this primary. When you think about a leader of a party who cares only about [his] grip of the party and not the success of the party, where does that leave the party?”

“If Republicans had their way, … then this month would have been about tax refunds. And it wasn't because the president was talking about something else,” said Weigel. “This week would now have been about Trump [slush fund] accounts and [Treasury Secretary] Scott Benson’s presser. You saw the clips from that presser.”

“And if you're just scanning your phone … the news is about the $250 bill. They're about something that Trump wants for him, for himself,” Weigel added. “… [I]f you talk to Republicans, they have things they were planning to run on. They were planning to run ads … in their states and go after Democrats. But then you'll see the snap back where they have to message what Trump is messaging on, and it's much less effective.”

With the United States' 2026 midterms a little over five months away, Trump's low approval ratings in poll after poll are also a major source of angst for GOP strategists, even as Trump appears to ignore or outright deny the bad news. During a Cabinet meeting, Trump even denied that his war with Iran is unpopular, telling reporters that American voters "understand that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon."

Other political pundits grudgingly admit on camera that it ‘did not go very well” when past Republican presidents ignored the opinions of voters in pursuit of policy goals, such as George W. Bush’s war in Iraq.

- YouTube youtu.be

The New York Times reports Trump has no intention of making his presidential library a reservoir for review of his administration, as other presidents have done.

“In his determination to own and control every document in his future library, the president is working to shield his administration’s inner workings from public view,” reports Times writers Elizabeth Williamson and Minho Kim.

“Mr. Trump had said that the $1 billion project, the priciest presidential library yet, could include a hotel and retail sales outlets. But more disturbing to historians and government watchdogs is his determination to own and control every document a presidential library would contain,” said the Times. “Not since the Watergate era, when President Richard M. Nixon took his fight to control the incriminating White House tapes to the Supreme Court, has a president worked so hard to shield documentary evidence of his administration’s inner workings from public view.”

For 80 years, the Times said presidential libraries have served as public research centers orchestrated by the National Archives and Records Administration — which until recently served as custodian of presidential records that federal laws designate as belonging to the American people.

“But Mr. Trump, who was indicted on charges of hiding classified government documents in his Mar-a-Lago estate after his first term, views those records as his personal property,” reports the Times.

Justice Department policy bars prosecuting a sitting president, so after voters handed Trump the White House again in 2024 election, Jack Smith, the special counsel in the documents case, dismissed criminal charges against Trump for stealing the classified documents and obstructing the government’s efforts to reclaim them. Additionally, the Times reports voters handed Trump control of the items the F.B.I. seized from him in 2022 when he was a civilian.

But this April, the Times reports Trump and his Justice Department, operated by his former private defense attorney, “advanced a sweeping legal claim that he, not the public, owns his records. The opinion, written by a Trump loyalist in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, declares unconstitutional the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which was enacted after Watergate to require the safeguarding of all documents chronicling presidents’ official duties.”

Other aspects of Trump’s library are inherently fishy. Unlike past presidents, whose library foundations raised the brunt of money for their libraries after they left office, the Times reports Trump began fund-raising days after his second inauguration—and he made sure that four companies paying separate settlements in Trump’s lawsuits against them — ABC, Paramount, X and Meta — contributed millions to it. Plus, the library would be exempted from about $1 million annually in state and local property taxes s an educational facility, despite Trump saying the building would “most likely” house a hotel and sell Trump-themed merchandise “and other for-profit ventures.”

But as for the information the building will contain, Jason R. Baron, a former director of litigation at the National Archives, said that if Trump prevails in his legal efforts, he may try to block any future investigations involving subpoenas of his records by asserting personal property rights.

“There is no guarantee that those records will ever be made accessible to the public,” Baron told the Times.