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Say this for Donald Trump: He sure knows how to rack up high-profile failures.

His name has been removed from the Kennedy Center. His Reflecting Pool renovation has become such a laughingstock that he took to surrounding the area with fencing and armed guards on the lookout for knife-wielding vandals, despite the fact that there’s no evidence anyone has caused damage to anything other than Trump’s ego.

Then there’s Trump’s “Freedom 250” Great American State Fair, which began on the National Mall this past weekend. It’s off to a shaky start. Attendance was sparse. And rain forced the cancellation of a concert by ’90s rapper Vanilla Ice, the lone performer who didn’t bail on the event once he learned it was a Trump-backed boondoggle.

As usual, Trump posted through it.

Make no mistake, though: Trump’s plans to reshape both the federal government and the physical landscape of our nation’s capital are moving forward even as he suffers multiple embarrassments on the national stage.

Changing How You Read the News: Here’s Why It Matters

Americans aren’t just disagreeing; we’re being shown completely different stories.

Every day, news outlets decide what to publish. In polarized media environments, audience demographics can split coverage. If you rely on only one side of the media spectrum, you could miss stories entirely, not because it isn’t credible, but because it doesn’t align with certain editorial priorities.

That’s why I’m often asked where I go to do research for my reporting. One of the main research tools I use is called Ground News. Ground News shows me how stories are being covered from different political perspectives, and it highlights “blindspots” where only left-wing or right-wing media is covering a story.

That kind of visibility is rare right now, and it changes how you understand the news. I’ve worked out a deal with them; if you want that level of insight every day, head to GroundNews.com/AdamK and subscribe to get 40% off the Vantage plan, the one I use.

Ground News is subscriber-funded, so they don’t rely on ads that could introduce bias. By subscribing, you support both our channel and their independent team working to keep the media transparent.

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On Monday, the Supreme Court, on a party-line 6-3 vote, sided in favor of the Trump administration over its decision to fire a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission without cause. The decision upends longstanding Supreme Court precedent that insulated about two dozen federal agencies from political pressure and influence. Basically, it was considered settled law that the president had to have a good reason other than partisanship to remove the leaders of these agencies. Now, Trump can install even more MAGA loyalists in even more government posts with significant influence over the economy and industry.

The FTC deals with consumer protection (think fraud and scams). Who might the dean of Trump University put in charge of that agency? The National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates plane crashes, train derailments, and other major accidents? Trump put a member of the cast of MTV’s The Real World in charge of the entire Department of Transportation. How about the Securities and Exchange Commission? One of Trump’s own appointees to the commission told The New York Times that, “at the SEC, independence is not a mere formality — it is the bedrock of expertise, stability, and predictability that our capital markets depend on.”

If “expertise, stability, predictability” were a Jeopardy! category, the answer would be “What are three things that Donald Trump is least known for?”

The court’s decision will reverberate long after Trump is dead and gone. It significantly changes the balance of power in the federal government in favor of the executive branch. The academic types who favor this “unitary executive” argue that a president is duly elected by the people, and that semi-autonomous federal agencies stand in the way of the people’s will.

Trump isn’t planning on stopping at the senior level of federal agencies. He will reach as far down into the bowels of the bureaucracy as he possibly can. An executive order Trump signed earlier this month would allow him to fire up to 10,000 civil service employees (time will tell if this move, too, survives legal challenges).

Unitary executive theory flies in the face of everything I was taught in civics class. Congress is the first branch created by the Constitution for a reason; it is closest to ordinary citizens. And let’s not forget that these agencies were created by Congress in the first place. The president’s job is to execute the law, and for close to a century, the court recognized that Congress designed these agencies to exercise some degree of independence as they deal with sensitive and technically complex economic challenges.

As with every other expansion of executive power under this presidency, Trump and his Supreme Court appointees are creating a government that would be unrecognizable to traditional conservatives, not to mention the Founders.

But Trump isn’t content to radically change the face of our government. He continues to obsessively occupy himself with radically changing the physical face of Washington, D.C., too. You’ve no doubt heard of the Triumphal Arch, which would be so tall that it will need red safety lights to alert pilots flying in and out of Reagan National Airport, and the notorious White House Ballroom. Trump has run roughshod over every conceivable limit on the enumerated powers of the presidency. And recently we learned that he’s been ransacking money that Congress appropriated for National Parks to pay for these pet projects.

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His next target: a small strip of land in the capital where there’s currently a modest public golf course. Trump announced that on Sept. 1 he will move ahead with plans to demolish that course and build one that’s capable of hosting major PGA tournaments. The president claims this public course is “old and run down,” “dilapidated, worn out, and very dangerous and outdated.” (One reason might be that he’s been dumping dirt laced with toxic metals from the ballroom project there.)

The golf course project has all the hallmarks of Trump’s other construction projects. It was done unilaterally; his administration pulled out of a 50-year lease agreement that the National Park Service had reached with the nonprofit that runs the course. He has ignored a judge’s warning about razing the property and has already chosen an architect to design the new course, bypassing Congress and a commission that would have oversight over such plans.

No one other than Donald Trump wants golf courses or ballrooms or triumphal arches to be a national priority. What each of these projects and Trump’s effort to reshape the federal bureaucracy have in common is an inherently un-American desire to concentrate all power and glory in himself.

This presidency, as unpopular and ridiculous as it may often be, is nevertheless operating like a literal and metaphorical bulldozer to so many of the written and unwritten rules that have governed and guided our country for 250 years.

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It’s been a busy morning over at the Supreme Court, where Donald Trump was handed a string of big losses. The justices refused to let Republicans throw out mail ballots that arrive a few days after Election Day. And they let stand a jury’s finding that Trump sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll, which means he now has to pay her the $5 million that the jury awarded her.

We’ll also get into yet another example of the President’s family cashing in on his presidency. A GOP “election-integrity” operative landing a top intelligence job. The cruel hoax that dragged Pete Buttigieg’s kids into a police interview. And the President’s big birthday fair on the National Mall that nobody went to.

Do me a favor. Like this video, share it with someone who needs to see it, and subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Let’s get to it.

1. Brutal Morning for Trump at the Supreme Court

Let’s start with mail ballots. In a 5-to-4 ruling, the Court upheld a Mississippi law that lets officials count ballots postmarked by Election Day even if they show up a few days later. The Republican National Committee brought the challenge to wipe those grace periods out, and the President’s own Justice Department backed them up. They lost. The opinion was written by Amy Coney Barrett. That’s Trump’s own appointee, joined by the Chief Justice and the three liberals.

And this isn’t some fringe rule. Think about whose law this even was. A red state that passed this back in 2020 with both parties on board. And it was a Republican secretary of state in there defending it. Eighteen states and territories have grace periods like this. And the logic isn’t complicated. Once you drop your ballot in the mail, you don’t control when it shows up. Service members voting from overseas, they count on exactly that cushion.

This fits a pattern. Back in March, the President signed an executive order trying to force every ballot in the door by Election Day. Courts blocked it. And this whole push to choke off mail voting, it rests on a claim we’ve all heard before. That mail ballots are riddled with fraud. There’s never been any evidence.

And if you want to know where that claim lives now, listen to the man Republicans just nominated for the Senate in Georgia, Mike Collins, talking with CNN’s Manu Raju:

For the record, he did not. Joe Biden won Georgia in 2020. The vote was counted, then recounted by hand, then certified by a Republican governor and a Republican secretary of state. But that lie is the engine behind the entire effort to make your vote harder to count.

And the President responded to the ruling about how you’d expect. He posted that counting these ballots is part of a Communist movement more dangerous than both World Wars, Pearl Harbor, and September 11th. Where does he even come up with this stuff?

Then there’s the E. Jean Carroll case. The Court refused to hear the President’s appeal, and that means a New York jury’s verdict stands. That jury found he sexually abused Carroll in a department store dressing room back in the mid-1990s, and then defamed her by calling her a liar. Trump now owes her the 5 million dollars that the jury awarded.

He wanted the justices to throw the verdict out. But they refused. Not a single justice noted dissent.

Remember, this is a court with three justices Donald Trump picked himself. And it still handed him some big losses this morning. We’re expecting a ruling on birthright citizenship this week, so stay tuned.

The Kinzinger Report Podcast!

2. The Trump Family Found Another Foreign Government to Cash In On

Over the weekend, The New York Times published an investigation into a deal the Trump administration struck with Kazakhstan, and who stands to profit from it.

Last September, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick met the president of Kazakhstan in New York. President Trump joined by phone. Together they locked in access for a little known American company, now called Kaz Resources, to one of the largest untapped reserves of tungsten in the world.

Tungsten matters. It is a metal we need to build missiles. With China controlling most of the market, this is a real national priority.

Here is Lutnick making the pitch:

Within weeks of the meeting, a firm called Dominari Securities, which is housed inside Trump Tower and partly owned by Don Jr. and Eric Trump, took a 20% stake in an entity tied to the project. Before that deal was even signed, the administration had approved up to 1.6 billion dollars in federal financing for it. Taxpayer money.

Around the same time, Cantor Fitzgerald — the firm run by Lutnick’s own two sons — helped a lead investor on the deal raise 210 million dollars. The deal was eventually signed on November 6th. That was six days after the Trump sons’ investment, which, by the way, was never publicly disclosed at the time.

And this isn’t some one off that can be looked over. According to federal filings, one or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies working with the government on critical mining deals. The total federal money provided or under consideration for those companies tops 8.9 billion dollars.

The Commerce Department says neither Lutnick nor anyone there ever discussed the minerals business with the Lutnick family’s firm, and notes that the Commerce Secretary has sold his stake in the firm.

This is corruption, plain and simple. The Trump family, including the president himself, are benefiting from these deals, and the public only finds out through investigative work conducted by journalists months after the fact.

It isn’t the first time we’ve seen this and unfortunately it’s unlikely it’ll be the last, but it’s my job to call out each and every time we see this with the Trump administration. We can’t let this level of corruption go unannounced and become normalized in politics.

3. An Election Operative Just Landed a Top Intelligence Job. That's Not an Accident.

Bill Pulte took over as acting Director of National Intelligence just last week, replacing Tulsi Gabbard. Pulte, as I’ve said, has no background in intelligence. Zero. He ran the federal housing agencies, and he got the job the way most people in this administration get their jobs, through cozying up to the president.

This week, Pulte named his chief of staff for the nation’s top spy office. Her name is Christina Norton. And wait for it…just like her boss, she has never worked a day in national security or intelligence.

What is her hopefully robust background? Elections work for the Republican Party! In 2024, Norton was the party’s election integrity director, overseeing a massive poll watcher operation. That program leaned on a roster of activists who were still pushing the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, including Jack Posobiec, the man behind the fake Pizzagate child abuse story.

Trump has openly said he expects Pulte to work on “election security.” And remember, in his first days on the job, Pulte fired more than 50 intelligence officials, including the senior officers tracking Russia, Ukraine, China, and East Asia.

Look, you do not put a 2020 election denier in charge of the staff at the nation’s top intelligence agency because you are worried about Moscow or Beijing. You do that because you want to refocus the scope of national security to controlling your elections. Oversight of election security is common across the world. However, these bodies, at least in free democracies, are independent of the sitting president in order to prevent the weaponization of federal authority to influence elections.

Not in this country. This is the machinery of doubt being carefully constructed in advance, by the president of the United States of all people. And we should all be paying attention to it now, not after the fact.

4. Anonymous Hoax Triggers CPS Interview of Buttigieg's Children

Last week authorities came to the home of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and told him he could not be with his children until they were interviewed by Child Protective Services. Buttigieg waited a full day to be reunited with his family, a period he called “among the darkest hours of my life”.

The source turned out to be an anonymous caller with allegations of violent crime, which State police confirmed were completely fabricated. No merit at all. And one officer told Buttigieg he believed it was politically motivated.

While that has not been officially confirmed, it is clear that this did not come from nowhere. For years MAGA has spread dangerous lies about Buttigieg and his family, simply because he is a gay man raising children with his husband. Take a look at what Marjorie Taylor Greene alleged back in 2022:

And two years later, Trump whisperer Laura Loomer tweeted that the Buttigiegs “psychologically abuse” their own kids, telling her MAGA followers that “someone should call CPS”. Looks like someone followed through on that call to action.

This is what happens when you build your politics on hate and cast your opponents as predators. Four year olds are separated from their fathers and interviewed by strangers, without any clue why. If this country ever had a line that politics were never supposed to cross, MAGA has blown right past it.

5. The President's 250th Celebration Has a Crowd Problem

The Great American State Fair began last week, a sixteen day event on the National Mall leading up to America’s 250th birthday. The event is run by a Trump-created group called Freedom 250, instead of the bipartisan America 250 commission that Congress set up years ago. That part was pretty clear in Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s kickoff speech:

And if that wasn’t enough political embarrassment, sponsors pulled out of the event after the North Carolina booth managed to display a Confederate flag.

This absurdity is not what America deserves for its major milestone, and it seems like Americans have caught on. Crowds have been thin, as reporters describe empty benches and deserted walkways. A number of states refused to take part in the clearly partisan event, leaving empty stations. But on Fox News it still sounded like a huge success, even with no one in sight:

Look, the country’s 250th birthday was supposed to be a chance for all of us, left and right, to celebrate what we share. And it started out that way. The commission to plan it was created back in 2016, on a bipartisan basis, while I was in Congress. A Republican wrote the bill, a Democratic president signed it, and it passed without a single no vote.

But the President had a very different vision, and most of the country stayed home. And I don’t blame them.

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Some other stories that caught my eye:

• Last week, the White House formally notified Congress of a plan to sell Turkey more than $700 million in jet engines for its homegrown KAAN fighter. The State Department said it cleared the Turkey sale after weighing political, military, economic, human rights, and arms control concerns. The move drew bipartisan pushback, as Republicans Nicole Malliotakis and Mike Lawler of New York lined up alongside Democrats questioning the reliability of Turkey’s President Erdogan as a strategic partner. Officials cast it as a gesture to Erdogan ahead of next week’s NATO summit in Turkey, which now sits under the shadow of a US-Iran shattering ceasefire, with both sides trading fire again over the weekend before standing down on Sunday.

• The Supreme Court ruled this morning that President Trump cannot fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook for now, while it gave him broader power to remove officials at other independent agencies in a separate decision. Both opinions were written by Chief Justice John Roberts. In the 5-4 Cook ruling, Roberts called the Fed’s independence a “special arrangement sanctioned by history” and was joined by Justice Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberal justices. In the second case the court let Trump fire FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter and overturned Humphrey’s Executor, the 1935 precedent that had protected such officials from removal at will. Trump moved to fire Cook last August over mortgage fraud allegations she denies, and she says she was actually targeted for refusing to cut interest rates on command. Cook is the first Fed governor a president has ever tried to remove.

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Adam also digs into a New York Times investigation of the Trump family's stake in a Kazakhstan tungsten deal financed with taxpayer money, the election operative with no intelligence background now running staff at the nation's top spy agency, the fabricated CPS hoax that pulled Pete Buttigieg's children into a police interview, and the president's half-empty 250th birthday fair on the National Mall.

Go deeper at AdamKinzinger.com

Hey everyone, happy Good News Sunday. Let’s start the week right with some real hope.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what it looks like when democracy actually wins. Not just survives. Wins. Last week, I watched it happen.

Let me start at the beginning. After his return to power in 2010, Viktor Orbán remade Hungary in his own image. He tilted elections in his favor, packed government agencies and democratic institutions with his loyalists, leaned on the press, and bent every rule he could reach. And while the economy struggled and families fell behind, Orbán’s elite circle only got richer and richer. Sound familiar?

But after sixteen long years, Hungarians finally had enough. Even with Orbán’s thumb on the democratic scale in elections this April, the people threw him out in a landslide, handing his opposition a legislative supermajority.

That opposition’s leader, a former Orbán insider named Péter Magyar, had a choice. He could take his new power and entrench himself, like his predecessor. Or he could do everything to make sure no one would have that control again.

He chose the latter. As soon as Magyar was elected, he announced an overhaul of Orbán’s state-owned propaganda machine.

Then earlier this month, his government amended Hungary’s constitution, adding an eight year term-limit that applies to Orbán and any other wannabe dictator looking to follow his path. And on Monday he announced new efforts to clear out the loyalists Orbán left behind, claw back public money lost to corruption, and initiate a comprehensive constitutional review before putting a new draft up for a public referendum.

With these reforms, Hungarians are taking their country back from the grips of the authoritarian right. And in doing so, they’re showing the rest of us that no matter the circumstances, we can do it too.

First you out-vote them, even when the scale is tilted, in numbers beyond any doubt. Then, crucially, you take back the institutions they captured. You drag the corruption into the daylight. And you write new guardrails into law, rules the next strongman cannot simply bend.

A “return to normalcy” is not enough. We cannot afford to go back to the status quo that brought us here in the first place. Win it back, then build it back, and make it stronger than before. That is the roadmap.

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We talk a lot around here about the fight for democracy. It is a real fight, and often it feels like an uphill one. But look at what Hungarians just pulled off. For sixteen years Orbán looked permanent, untouchable, the kind of leader you simply learn to live with. But they beat him, and not because of one party or one savior. They beat him because Hungarians from left to right put politics aside to stand behind a single challenger, deciding together that saving their democracy mattered more than anything else. And now they’re making sure it could never happen again.

And if they can do it with an entire government working against them, so can we.

That, my friends, is good news for your Sunday.

— Adam

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Our top story today: yesterday the Supreme Court told hundreds of thousands of people who came here the legal way that they can be deported to countries our own government calls too dangerous to visit. The President is calling it one of the biggest immigration wins of his second term. But there are real human costs to this decision.

We’ll also get into the Vice President saying Watergate would be no big deal today, RFK pressuring a third-party candidate to drop out, the White House posting QAnon slogans from official accounts, and Ted Cruz calling Tucker Carlson the most dangerous demagogue in America.

Do me a favor. Like this video, share it with someone who needs to see it, and subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Let’s get to it.

1. Supreme Court Strips Legal Status From 350,000 Who Followed The Rules

Yesterday, in a 6 to 3 decision split right down ideological lines, the Court cleared the way for the administration to end Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for about 350,000 Haitians and several thousand Syrians.

TPS is a humanitarian protection. It lets people from countries torn apart by war or disaster live and work here legally until it is safe to go home. These are not people who slipped across a border. They registered with the government, passed background checks, paid their fees, and renewed on schedule.

Justice Alito, writing for the majority, said the Homeland Security Secretary has almost unreviewable power to cancel those protections, and that the courts have no business second guessing it. In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the ruling “extinguishes the light of the torch of the Statue of Liberty.”

In a separate ruling, the Court revived a policy called metering, which lets border agents turn asylum seekers away before they ever reach American soil.

And the man who built this entire immigration agenda could not wait to celebrate. Here is White House adviser Stephen Miller, talking about the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio:

A reporter then asked Miller a simple question: “Is Haiti safe?” Listen to his answer:

So let’s hold that answer up against our own government. The State Department has Haiti on its do not travel list. The Federal Aviation Administration bans American airlines from flying there at all, because the gangs on the ground shoot at the planes. More than 2,300 people have been killed in gang attacks in Haiti just this year.

Even Republicans are uneasy. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, who has more than 10,000 of these TPS holders in his state, called the policy “a mistake,” and pointed out that people who were working and paying taxes on Wednesday are now illegal to employ. Nursing homes, where roughly one in five workers is an immigrant, are already warning they may have to close wings and turn patients away.

We told these people that as long as they followed the rules, we wouldn’t send them back until their country was safe. They followed the rules. Their country still isn’t safe, and our own government says so. But we’re going back on our word anyway, just to please people like Stephen Miller who has built his career by treating immigrants as the enemy.

The Kinzinger Report Podcast!

2. Vance Says a Watergate-Style Scandal Wouldn't Last 12 Hours Today

Yesterday, Vice President JD Vance sat for an interview at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in California, promoting his new book. Eventually the conversation drifted to Watergate, the scandal that brought down Richard Nixon in 1974 after he covered up a break-in at his opponents’ headquarters.

The vice president thinks Nixon didn’t deserve it, no surprise there. But there’s more to it than that. Take a look:

Let’s be clear about what Vance is waving off. Watergate was not a misunderstanding. A sitting president ran a criminal operation against his political enemies and then used the power of his office to bury it. And the system of accountability worked. Republicans and Democrats in Congress put the country ahead of their party, and a president who broke the law had to resign.

This is a Freudian slip from Vance. Maybe he’s right in that if the administration did something akin to Watergate, it would be in the news for only twelve hours. That’s because he knows these political scandals that surround the Trump administration are normalized because of the sheer amount of them. Nixon was held accountable in the seventies because politics retained a level of dignity back then, and those scandals were rare and taken seriously.

Our Vice President is basically admitting here that that dignity is no longer intrinsic to our political system. That says a lot and it’s important to note these moments where members of the administration become lucid and admit that nothing they’re doing would be normal in any other time in history.

3. RFK Jr. Caught on Tape Pressuring a Candidate to Drop Out

The Washington Post published audio yesterday of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Junior on the phone with a Libertarian running for Congress in Iowa. The ask was simple. Drop out of the race, and help Republicans hold the seat.

On the recording, Kennedy tells the candidate, Rick Stewart, that he is calling as a “liaison with the White House.” This is the Secretary of Health and Human Services, by the way. He says he cannot get into specifics because, in his words, “there’s legal prohibitions about that.” Then he offers to become Stewart’s advocate if Stewart walks away.

Stewart got the message, and told reporters he understood it to mean a job in Washington could be waiting for him if he wanted one.

Cabinet secretaries are not supposed to do this. There is a federal law, The Hatch Act, written for the express purpose of keeping the people who run our government from using their offices to tip elections. Ethics experts who reviewed the calls said Kennedy may well have stepped over that line.

What this shows is that the Health and Human Services Secretary, of all people, is more interested in addressing the president’s concerns about keeping power after the midterms than helping with, well, health and human services. These senior officials are more concerned with personal favors than doing their jobs, and that should be a wake-up call to every American about the people running the country.

4. The White House Is Now Q-Posting But Even QAnon Isn't Buying It

Remember QAnon? The conspiracy theory group that thinks Trump is a secret hero waging war on a hidden cabal of elites? I certainly do. You cannot tell the story of January 6th without them.

Well this week, in a frantic attempt to appeal to an increasingly unhinged and fracturing base, official White House and Pentagon accounts started posting in their conspiracy language.

The White House account announced it will be “Q posting”, then posted a message mimicking QAnon’s cryptic style. And then the Pentagon posts the President inside a giant glowing Q, asking if you are enjoying the show.

But the people who actually believe this stuff were not enjoying it at all. The movement that once treated the President as messiah has soured on him, after his promises of mass arrests and Epstein documents failed to deliver. Marjorie Taylor Greene, once the most famous believer in Congress, called the posts “Q-slop and propaganda” to reel people back in. Another longtime promoter called the whole effort “cringe.”

Clearly, this White House is so worried about November that it is desperately hoping to rekindle the old conspiracy magic. But even to his most fanatical supporters, it has been nothing but a complete failure.

5. Cruz Blasts Carlson on the Senate Floor — but He Helped Light the Fuse

Earlier this week we talked about Tucker Carlson leaving the Republican Party, after turning it into the engine of grievance and hate he always wanted. Yesterday, Carlson’s record of hatred drew a blistering response from Ted Cruz on the Senate floor:

Let me be very clear: the antisemitism Cruz is describing is real, and it is dangerous, full stop. But this hatred did not come out of nowhere, and I am not going to pick a side between two men who are both responsible for it.

Tucker Carlson built a fortune on grievance, with the biggest microphone in cable news and a standing invitation to this White House. But Ted Cruz hasn’t been watching from the sidelines. He has spent his whole career benefitting from the same rage. They built this. They all did.

So when it turns on MAGA, they do not get to act surprised. You can ride grievance to power, fame, and fortune, but eventually it always comes looking for you.

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Some other stories that caught my eye:

• On Wednesday night, a federal judge temporarily blocked a Trump administration rule that would have left nurse practitioners, physician assistants, physical therapists, and public health students out of the higher student loan limit. The rule was set to start July 1. Here is why it matters: students the government counts as “professional” can borrow up to $200,000 for their degree, while everyone else is capped at $100,000. The administration’s list of “professional” degrees included law, medicine, and dentistry but left most healthcare fields off. The judge said Congress never gave the department the power to draw the line that way, and warned it would hurt communities that already do not have enough healthcare workers. The department says it is reviewing the order.

• Georgia will stick with its embattled QR code vote-counting method for this year’s midterm elections after lawmakers passed legislation Tuesday that puts off changes until 2028. Republican leaders said the delay had the backing of GOP Gov. Brian Kemp, who had called the special session in part to deal with a July 1 deadline that was set to ban the codes from the official count. That deadline came from a 2024 law the same Republican legislature passed, after years of conspiracy theories about the machines, but lawmakers never funded or chose a replacement system. Critics say voters can’t read a QR code, so they can’t actually verify their ballot matches what gets counted. Trump singled out these machines in his first executive order on elections after taking office in January 2025, claiming without evidence that Georgia machines switched votes in 2020.

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Then: JD Vance shrugs off Watergate at the Nixon Library and accidentally tells on himself about how far political accountability has fallen. RFK Jr. gets caught on tape leaning on a third-party candidate to drop out of an Iowa race. The White House and Pentagon start "Q posting" in a clumsy bid to win back a base that's already calling it cringe. And Ted Cruz takes the Senate floor to brand Tucker Carlson the most dangerous demagogue in America.

Go deeper at AdamKinzinger.com

Video discussion for paid subscribers follows article

Hundreds of young Air Force recruits arrived at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland this spring expecting to begin military training. Instead, at least 275 of them spent their first weeks in uniform confined to their bunks, fighting high fevers and influenza. Some were hospitalized. Training was disrupted. And after the whole base was threatened with a mission-crippling outbreak, the Pentagon eventually reinstated the flu vaccine requirement it had abandoned only weeks earlier.

By now, Americans should recognize the pattern. And the culprit. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth makes a decision designed to generate headlines, provoke applause, or advance a culture-war narrative. Experts warn about the consequences. The warnings are ignored. Then reality hits and everyone in the administration acts shocked.

This week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth forced out General Christopher T. Donahue, the highly respected commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa with a reputation for competence that transcends partisan politics. His abrupt departure came after a series of other removals of senior military leaders under Hegseth’s watch, reinforcing concerns that professional expertise is increasingly being displaced by political loyalty and ideological conformity.

When President Trump selected Hegseth to lead the Pentagon, supporters argued that he would shake up a complacent institution. What they got instead was a Secretary of Defense who seems to think the Pentagon is a television studio with a bigger budget.

Consider the latest example. Earlier this year, Hegseth rescinded the military’s longstanding flu vaccine requirement, portraying the move as a victory over unnecessary mandates. The decision fit neatly into a broader political message about personal freedom and resistance to expert authority. It also ignored the realities of military life.

At Lackland, recruits live, train, eat, and sleep in close quarters. Military organizations have understood for generations that infectious disease spreads rapidly in such environments. That is one reason vaccination programs became standard practice in the first place. After the requirement was removed, vaccination rates reportedly fell sharply. Then hundreds of recruits got sick.

None of this was a mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes.

Unfortunately, this is just one of many examples. Last year, senior administration officials discussed military operations in Yemen on a Signal group chat that accidentally included Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. Goldberg said he received detailed information regarding the strikes before they occurred. It was the sort of mistake that should have ended Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon and sent him back to Fox News.

At first glance, the Signal fiasco, the leadership purge, and the flu outbreak seem unrelated. Yet all three point toward the same underlying problem. In each case, expertise was treated as an obstacle rather than an asset. Procedures existed for a reason. Experienced professionals understood the risks. Leadership either ignored those warnings or viewed them as evidence that the system needed disruption. Then predictable consequences followed.

During my years in the Air Force, I learned a simple lesson: readiness is the mission. The military is not a vehicle for settling cultural grievances. Its purpose is to prepare men and women to fight and win wars.

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Television rewards confidence. Politics rewards confrontation. Social media rewards outrage. Military leadership rewards attention to detail, preparation, and respect for consequences. Those are not the same skill sets. After all, we’re talking about a man who once declared on national television that “germs are not a real thing.” Even if that was a joke, it’s hard to ignore the irony of a Defense Secretary who made such a declaration presiding over a preventable flu outbreak.

Throughout his tenure at the Pentagon, Hegseth has displayed a recurring tendency to dismiss expertise, ridicule established practices, and assume that confidence can substitute for competence. The flu outbreak didn’t expose a new problem. It exposed an old one.

At some point, we need to stop treating these episodes as isolated mistakes. When every few weeks produces another preventable controversy, another self-inflicted embarrassment, or another avoidable failure, the issue is no longer the individual mistake. The issue is the person making them.

Running the Pentagon is not like hosting a weekend cable news show. The Secretary of Defense is not supposed to be a military influencer. His job is not to produce headlines, make viral soundbites, or transform every decision into a cultural statement. His job is to ensure that the U.S military remains prepared to fight and win. Hegseth has demonstrated time and again that he does not understand the difference.

He was hired to lead the most powerful military in the world. Instead, he has spent much of his tenure generating controversies that would be laughable if the stakes were not so high.

America’s military faces enough genuine threats without creating new ones for itself. Yet again and again, Pete Hegseth has managed to turn the Pentagon into a source of self-inflicted wounds. Week in and week out, the controversies change, but the pattern remains the same.

If it isn’t obvious by now, the problem is no longer any individual fiasco. The problem is the man who keeps creating them.

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Adam also breaks down Trump admitting on camera that he leaned on a federal prosecutor over a California election still being counted, his Postmaster General threatening to hold back mail ballots until a federal judge blocked the order, and NATO chief Mark Rutte flattering the President to keep America in the alliance.

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Before we get into it, I just want to take a quick moment for the people of Venezuela, who got hit with two terrible earthquakes back to back last night. To everyone there, and everyone here with family and friends in Venezuela, we’re thinking of you.

Our top story today: the President went up to Capitol Hill yesterday to meet with his own party, and the meeting boiled over into a shouting match. At one point, the President of the United States told a sitting Republican senator to sit down. These are supposed to be the people on his side. He treated them like the enemy.

We’ll also get into two Republicans flipping their Iran war votes, the President admitting he leaned on a prosecutor over election results, the post office threatening to hold back your mail ballot, and NATO’s leader buttering up the President with fancy gold charts.

Do me a favor. Like this video, share it with someone who needs to see it, and subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Let’s get to it.

1. Trump’s Visit to Capitol Hill Gets Heated, Ends in Shouting Match

Yesterday, Trump went to the Capitol for a private lunch with Senate Republicans. On paper, it was supposed to be a show of unity. What actually happened was a blowup.

The fight was about Iran. A day earlier, four Senate Republicans had broken with the President to support a resolution reining in his war powers, and he wanted to know why. According to senators in the room, he spent most of the lunch going after his own party.

Punchbowl News reported that he spent roughly 90% of the meeting railing against the Republicans he calls RINOs, among them Lisa Murkowski, Bill Cassidy, and Mitch McConnell.

Then it got personal. When Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy stood up to push back, Trump told him to sit down. Multiple outlets reported the President called Cassidy a lunatic to his face. Cassidy, who lost his primary this year after Trump endorsed his opponent, did not deny it.

On his way out, the President told reporters it had been a great meeting. Then he said this:

Lisa Murkowski walked in late, right as the President was airing his grievances about her. She was not impressed. And on the voting bill Trump keeps demanding, she had a message for him: “If you don’t have the votes, sir, you don’t have the votes.”

Even his allies could not pretty it up. Senator John Cornyn, who also lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger, said the President closed by preaching unity after spending the previous hour doing the opposite.

You don’t scream at the people who already agree with you. Unless the point was never agreement. The point was obedience, and he wanted everyone in that room to see what happens when you don’t fall in line.

2. The GOP Bends the Knee When the Vote Actually Matters

Walking through the Capitol complex after the GOP lunch with the president, Bill Cassidy sounded like a man who would not back down. But by midnight, it was a different story.

After the blowup, Cassidy was invited to the White House for a private briefing on Iran from Vice President JD Vance and special envoy Steve Witkoff. He came out saying it had addressed “many of my concerns.”

Then he went back to the Capitol to vote.

Tuesday’s resolution, the one that rebuked this war, was symbolic, and it still stands. But a second resolution was moving through the Senate, a version that would actually carry the force of law and land on the President’s desk. Last night, that one came up for a vote.

This time, Cassidy voted no. Rand Paul, who has voted to rein in this war again and again, voted present, saying he wanted to give the President “more space and leverage to negotiate a lasting peace.” Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski held their ground and voted to keep it alive. The motion failed, 47 to 50.

The President was thrilled. He went on Truth Social, thanked Cassidy and Paul by name for switching, and wrote “This vote puts Iran on notice!”

Look, standing up to the president means nothing if you just immediately sit back down. Cassidy has nothing to lose at this point. Obviously we don’t know what was said to him during his briefings on the war, but this isn’t the first time we’ve seen Cassidy take a stand and then back down the second he has the opportunity to actually make a difference.

The Kinzinger Report Podcast

3. The President Just Bragged About Pressuring an Election

Earlier this month, California held its primary for governor. Under the state’s system, the top two finishers advance regardless of party, and the count takes time because California processes a massive number of mail ballots. The President’s endorsed candidate, former Fox News host Steve Hilton, advanced alongside Democrat Xavier Becerra.

Now of course, that should’ve been the end of it. Instead, the President offered his own account of how his candidate got there.

Hold on. The President is saying he called a federal prosecutor, told that prosecutor to go look at the votes in an election that was still being counted, and is taking personal credit for the result. And bragging while doing so.

We’ve seen this before folks. In 2020, the President called Georgia’s secretary of state and asked him to find the votes to flip the state. He was criminally charged over that call, and we all know what happened a few months later on January 6th.

This, among other things, should be a wake-up call for the midterms. He’s telling you he’s going to challenge results, call prosecutors, lean on whoever he can. So the job is simple. We don’t win these by a little. We win them by so much that there’s nothing left for him to contest. You don’t give a guy like this a close one to play with.

4. The Post Office Could Stop Delivering Ballots This November

Yesterday, Postmaster General David Steiner testified in front of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, and he confirmed something that should worry every voter in the country. Take a look:

The questioning came from an executive order the President signed in March, which would force states to hand the federal government a list of everyone who requested a mail-in ballot. If a state refuses, the Postal Service would stop delivering that state’s ballots.

This is the same President holding a crucial bipartisan housing bill hostage until Congress adds new hurdles between voters and the ballot box. It’s the same President who just bragged about pressuring officials over a vote count in California. And it’s the same President who gave the keys to our national intelligence to a loyalist, so he could hunt for alleged election fraud they have never been able to find.

Every one of these moves points in the same direction, toward an administration trying to pick its voters instead of the other way around. None of this should be possible in America. In a healthy democracy, no one gets to stand between you and your ballot.

And our legal system agrees. Just as we were preparing the show, a federal judge in Boston ruled the President’s order unconstitutional, blocking the government from withholding ballots this November in states that sued. That is a real win for now. But the White House is expected to appeal, so it is far from settled and we need to keep an eye on this one.

5. Keeping Trump in NATO Now Takes Flattery and Gold Charts

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte sat down with the President in the Oval Office yesterday, with one job to do. Trump has been furious that our European allies sat out his war in Iran, a war he launched in February without consulting them. Ahead of a key NATO summit in two weeks, Rutte had to keep him from turning his constant threats to leave the alliance into reality.

Knowing Trump, Rutte came prepared with flattery:

Obviously the President ate it all up, calling Rutte a “great guy, great leader, great secretary general.”

Look, I want a strong NATO. I am not going to knock Rutte for any of this. He is trying to hold an alliance together with a raging narcissist, and flattery has been his best strategy. And to his credit, he did push back on some of Trump’s Iran claims, reminding him that thousands of American planes flew out of European bases during the war.

The embarrassment here doesn’t belong to Rutte or NATO, it belongs to us Americans. For many years, we led this alliance proudly. We were the steady hand the rest of our NATO allies counted on. But those days are gone. Now, our President’s ego has to be managed like a toddler just to keep us in the room.

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Some other stories that caught my eye:

• Senator Thom Tillis said this week that he regrets casting the deciding vote to confirm Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary, telling the NOTUS podcast that Hegseth “just doesn’t have the experience” and pointing to a “sophomoric sort of execution” at the Pentagon. On the same day, Tillis unloaded on Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte, who began mass-firing intelligence officials just days into his new job, calling him “an incompetent sycophant” and predicting his tenure will be “another hot steaming pile of DOGE s***.” Pulte has no prior intelligence or national security experience and did not previously hold a security clearance, which is the first time since the office was created after 9/11 that it has been led by someone in that position.

• An internal memo issued by the Interior Department in December, reviewed by the Washington Post and reported Tuesday, instructs National Park Service staff and other department employees to no longer confirm deaths, suspected deaths, or details about severe injuries, which is a direct break from the agency’s longstanding disclosure practices. The Interior Department said the policy is designed to “create a more consistent approach to incident communications across the Department” and is “not intended to conceal fatalities.” Seven current and former park staffers told the Post the policy marks a sharp departure from how the agency has operated in the past. The previous standard was to release as much information as quickly as possible after an incident, because transparency was helping to keep other visitors safe. About 350 people die in national parks every year, or roughly seven per week, across a system that sees more than 300 million visitors annually.

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Imagine if Barack Obama had demanded greater federal control over voter registration six months before a midterm election. Imagine if Bill Clinton had used federal agencies to scrutinize voter rolls while publicly questioning the legitimacy of election officials. Imagine if Joe Biden spent years insisting that any election he lost must have been stolen.

Republicans would have been outraged. And they would have been right.

Yet many of the same Republicans who once warned against concentrated government power are suddenly comfortable watching Donald Trump involve himself in the administration of the next election.

The danger facing the 2026 midterms is not that Trump will cancel them. He can’t. Elections are administered by states, protected by federal law, and scheduled by Congress.

The more important question is whether he can influence them. Here are five ways experts say that could happen.

1. Immigration End-Around

The administration has already made immigration enforcement the defining issue of Trump’s second term. It is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which highly publicized immigration raids, citizenship-verification efforts, or federal enforcement operations become concentrated in areas with large immigrant populations. The administration would argue that it is simply enforcing federal law. But the practical effect would be to discourage participation by lawful voters who fear interaction with government authorities.

The question is not whether every action would be legal. The question is whether Americans should be comfortable with a president using one of his signature policy priorities in ways that could affect voter participation. When election administration and political strategy begin to overlap, trust becomes harder to maintain.

2. Election-Security Emergency

Over the years, Trump has repeatedly warned about foreign interference, particularly from China. Foreign threats are real and should be taken seriously. But emergency powers and emergency rhetoric have a way of expanding once they enter politics.

Imagine the administration announcing, weeks before Election Day, that China is attempting to interfere in the election. Whether the threat is real or overstated, the political effect could be the same: uncertainty, fear, and pressure for extraordinary measures.

Authoritarian-minded leaders rarely claim they are undermining democracy. They insist they are saving it. Throughout history, governments seeking greater control have often justified their actions by invoking threats to national security. The language changes. The temptation does not.

3. Blurring The Thin Blue Line

Trump could use the immense power of the federal government in ways that blur the distinction between law enforcement and politics.

Watergate became a national scandal because Americans understood that government agencies should not be used against political opponents. Nixon’s abuse of power wasn’t alarming simply because it was illegal; it was alarming because it treated public institutions as political weapons.

Now imagine a series of high-profile investigations, subpoenas, raids, or corruption inquiries involving prominent Democratic officials in the months leading up to the election. The public would have little reason to trust the motives of a president who has repeatedly vowed retribution against political enemies and frequently speaks of prosecutors and investigators as instruments of political combat.

4. Working The Refs

One of the most under appreciated stories of 2020 is that our institutions held because enough people inside government refused to break them. Republican governors certified election results. Republican secretaries of state defended the integrity of their elections. Judges appointed by both parties rejected frivolous claims. Career officials refused to manufacture evidence of fraud.

Many of those people are no longer in positions of authority. We have seen the departure of scores of career officials who played important roles in protecting election integrity and resisting political pressure after the 2020 election.

The greatest danger may not be what Trump wants to do. It may be the shrinking number of people willing to tell him no.

5. Rejecting The Result

Suppose Republicans lose control of the House. Would Trump accept the outcome?

In a healthy democracy, that question would be absurd. Yet this is the same president who pressured state officials to overturn certified results and who still refuses to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election. During his now-infamous phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Trump urged officials to “find 11,780 votes”—precisely the number he needed to reverse the state’s outcome.

That history matters because it provides a roadmap. If Republicans lose this November, Americans can already predict the sequence. Claims of fraud will emerge before evidence is gathered. Demands for investigations will follow. Election officials will become targets. The legitimacy of the outcome will be questioned. Millions of Americans will be told that defeat is impossible and that any unfavorable result is therefore illegitimate.

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None of this requires tanks in the streets. It does not require martial law or the cancellation of elections. It requires only what Trump has demonstrated repeatedly: a willingness to place his personal interests above public confidence in democratic institutions.

The Constitution was written with a healthy skepticism of concentrated power. The Founders understood that every president, regardless of party or popularity, would eventually face the temptation to put self-preservation ahead of principle. That is why they dispersed authority across states, courts, legislatures, and independent institutions.

The strength of a democracy isn’t measured by who wins elections. It’s measured by whether the country can absorb victory and defeat without questioning the legitimacy of the system itself.

We’ve faced that test before. In 1800, one political faction handed power to another for the first time in modern history. In 1864, Americans held a presidential election in the middle of a civil war. In 1974, the country forced a president from office and preserved the constitutional order. Again and again, Americans chose institutions over individuals.

That’s why I’m ultimately optimistic. Our system has never depended on perfect leaders. If it did, it would have collapsed long ago. It depends on citizens who understand that the Constitution matters more than any politician and that the rule of law matters more than any election result.

In 2020, our institutions held because enough people—Republicans and Democrats alike—were willing to do their jobs and tell a president no. The question facing the country now is whether enough people will be willing to do that again.

I’m betting they will.

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Our top story today: many of us feel Washington is broken and nothing ever gets done. But this week, Congress actually did its job. Republicans and Democrats came together to pass the most comprehensive housing bill in 30 years. Then, in breaking news this morning, the President got in the way, refusing to sign it until his bill to address made-up election fraud is passed. This is the second time in the last couple of weeks we’ve seen the President refuse to sign bipartisan legislation just because he isn’t getting his way.

We’ll also get into the Senate’s rebuke of the Iran war, the mess Pete Hegseth is making at the Pentagon, an administration that keeps burying the truth about people’s health, and the reflecting pool story falling apart.

Ok, let’s get to it.

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1. Congress Passed the Biggest Housing Bill in 30 Years. Then Trump Refused to Sign It

This week, Congressional Democrats and Republicans did something they almost never do. They agreed. Both chambers passed the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, the biggest housing bill in 30 years. The Senate passed it 85 to 5. The House passed it 358 to 32. Those are clearly not party-line numbers. Those are the numbers you get when Republicans and Democrats look at a crisis that’s crushing families and decide, for once, to actually try and fix it.

The bill would tie federal dollars to new home construction, turn vacant buildings into housing, and even put new limits on the Wall Street investors who’ve been buying up single-family homes and pricing regular families out.

As is with all bills that Congress passes, the President had to sign it and was scheduled to do so this afternoon. This morning, his own party’s leaders were on stage taking a victory lap.

Moments later, while they were still standing there, by the way, the president put this up on Truth Social:

“Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DJT”

So, let’s translate. The President is refusing to sign the most popular thing his party has done all year, until Congress passes a completely different bill, the SAVE Act. That bill would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, to stop a wave of noncitizen voting that study after study has shown does not exist. And Republican leaders have already said countless times they don’t even have the votes to pass it.

He didn’t stop there. He called this landmark housing bill “of minor importance,” and because Senator Elizabeth Warren helped write it, he wrote it off as a “Warren centric housing bill.” Then he demanded Republicans blow up the Senate filibuster to ram his voting bill through.

Look, these are political games at their absolute ugliest. There’s a real opportunity here to help working-class Americans by addressing a true issue in our country. There is a housing shortage in this country. People can’t find somewhere to live that is affordable for them. And this president has the nerve to hold all of those people hostage, tell them their lives and problems finding a home to live in aren’t important, and instead argue that rigging the midterms in his favor is more important. It’s frankly disgusting.

Bipartisanship is so rare in this country right now that you would think any President would sprint to put his name on it, be encouraged by it, and sign it into law. But this one enjoys the chaos. He enjoys the dissent and the partisanship, because all it has done is benefitted him ever since he took office in 2016 and polarized American politics.

We’ll keep an eye on this for you over the next few days, and hope that GOP leaders do the right thing and don’t capitulate with this latest demand.

2. Four Republicans Join Democrats to Tell Trump His Iran War Should End

Yesterday afternoon, the Senate passed a war powers resolution 50 to 48. It directs Trump to remove U.S. forces from hostilities with Iran unless Congress authorizes it.

The House passed its own version earlier this month, and now the Senate has joined it. That makes this the first time in American history that both chambers of Congress have passed a war powers resolution on the same conflict, and they did it during the levels of political polarization we mentioned.

Four Republicans broke ranks to get it done: Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Rand Paul. One Democrat, John Fetterman, voted no.

The resolution is mostly symbolic. It doesn’t carry the full force of an actual law, and it won’t land on the President’s desk. But the message is impossible to miss.

Just consider the moment this lands in. Trump’s Iran war is now the least popular American war in modern history. Even from the start of the war, less Americans backed it than any U.S. military action going back decades.

The cherry on top? It’s about to get even more expensive. The Pentagon is asking Congress for roughly eighty billion dollars, mostly to pay for this war and refill weapons stockpiles. A reporter asked the President whether Americans really support spending that kind of money while so many families are struggling. What do you think the president said?

Did you catch that? You don’t just support this war, according to your president. You “demand it.” By the way, a Reuters poll found that a mere 24% of Americans think the war in Iran is worth the cost.

When you have a president that is totally out of touch with what the American people want, that’s the exact moment Congress is supposed to step in, and yesterday it finally did. It’s unfortunate that it came in the form of a symbolic resolution, but it’s a step in the right direction.

3. The Pentagon Is Being Run by a Fox News Host, and It Shows

For years General Chris Donahue was widely seen as a future Army Chief of Staff, with the resume to prove it: he was the last American soldier to leave Afghanistan, commanded Delta Force in the fight against ISIS, and was among the first senior U.S. officers on the ground when Russia invaded Ukraine. Few people in the American military understand modern drone warfare better than him. But yesterday, Pete Hegseth forced him into retirement with no public explanation.

Donahue is the latest in a line of senior military leaders pushed out under Hegseth, who likes to say he wants fewer generals and more boots on the ground. For contrast, before his appointment to lead the Pentagon, Hegseth only made it to the rank of major. His full-time job was hosting a show on cable television.

And his lack of leadership experience is clear across the board. Back in April, Hegseth scrapped the military’s flu vaccine requirement, a rule on the books since 1945. He said the flu was no threat to readiness and called it a matter of personal choice. Thanks to old Fox News footage, we can probably guess what choice he made:

Before the mandate was dropped, nearly every trainee was vaccinated. But by the time a flu outbreak tore through Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, only about 40% were. More than 200 recruits got sick. So what did the Pentagon do? It started requiring the shot again for new recruits across the Army, Navy, and Air Force.

This is what it looks like when you hand the most powerful military on earth to a cable TV host. Your best generals gone. Your own recruits are getting sick because you want to look tough about the flu shot. And the country is less safe for all of it.

4. The White House Hid Proof the COVID Shot Works.. What Else Are They Hiding?

In April, the CDC was set to release a study on the effectiveness of this year’s annual COVID vaccine. That is, until Trump appointees suspiciously pulled it, citing issues with its methodology.

But a major medical journal did not find these same issues, and published the study itself on Tuesday. Unsurprisingly, it confirmed what MAGA won’t admit: the shot works. Very, very well. It cuts the likelihood of COVID-related trips to the emergency room in half.

Vaccine denialism is nothing new from this White House, unfortunately. But another medical story circling the administration is new, and a lot stranger.

Yesterday, it was reported that the FDA and drug company Eli Lilly gave one patient special access to an experimental weight loss drug, an unusual move under a program that typically recruits larger groups. The patient was a 79 year-old man when the request was made in April. The diagnosis was severe obesity, sleep apnea and dangerously high blood pressure. And sources indicated that the person seemed very well connected. You can see who this appears to point to.

The White House denies that it was the President, but weirdly Trump himself can’t stop talking about the drug:

And the questions about his health aren’t coming out of nowhere. They’re coming from moments like this:

Now, I’m not saying for certain this mystery patient is actually our bumbling Commander in Chief. There’s not enough evidence for that right now. But this Administration has given us no reason to trust them when it comes to these sorts of things. Or anything, really.

5. The Government's Own Records Say Trump Botched the Reflecting Pool

We’ve been following the saga of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. I sure wish we didn’t have to. But here we are. The paint peeled. The water turned green. And the President keeps insisting this is the work of vandals who slipped in under cover of darkness with knives and box cutters.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported on internal government documents that tell a very different story. Park Service workers did find two small cuts, but they had nothing to do with the issues we’ve seen. Workers watched chunks of paint float to the surface on their own. They tried to kill the algae and couldn’t. And the whole time, administration officials were calling the pool pristine.

In plain terms, the government’s own records point to a botched renovation, not a crime scene.

So how is the White House responding? They are doubling down on the vandalism excuse. Last night, crews started putting up a chain link fence around the pool, along with a solar-powered surveillance tower packed with AI cameras, spotlights, and a loudspeaker. Take a look.

The Interior Department says the fence was always part of the Fourth of July plan, but admits it went up early because of the supposed vandalism.

When the evidence says you botched the job, you can admit it and fix it, or you can build a surveillance tower to guard your own peeling paint and start arresting tourists, and they’ve clearly chosen the second one.

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Some other stories that caught my eye:

• Yesterday federal judges in Texas sentenced eight people the Justice Department called an “antifa cell” to a combined 450 years in prison for an attack last year outside an ICE detention center near Dallas. The DOJ called it the first sentencing tied to antifa since President Trump designated the group a domestic terrorist organization last fall, and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said attacks on federal facilities will be met with uncompromising justice. Defense lawyers say the antifa label is being stretched to punish protest, and legal experts have called the sentences “stunningly severe”. The same Justice Department is prosecuting Rep. LaMonica McIver of New Jersey, who faces up to 17 years for allegedly impeding officers during an oversight visit to a Newark ICE facility. Her appeal went before a federal appeals panel today, while twenty former members of Congress, including seventeen Republicans, warned the case threatens Congress’s power to conduct oversight at all.

• A lobbying shop founded by former Trump campaign and administration officials has opened a profitable new line of work: lobbying for presidential pardons. Federal disclosures show the firm, Mo Strategies, has already collected $500,000 from its first pardon client. The firm’s president told CBS News he counsels clients on which cases are likely to appeal to this White House, and the numbers suggest a booming market. CBS found more than two dozen pardon-related lobbying registrations during Trump’s second term. The largest, $960,000, was filed for a nursing home operator who pleaded guilty in a $39 million tax fraud scheme and then walked free after serving three months of a three-year sentence. House and Senate Democrats are now investigating whether clemency is being sold in a pay-to-play arrangement.

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In the coming days, the Supreme Court will confront a question the Founders thought they had already answered: How much power should one person have?

The Court is about to decide several cases that could define the scope of Trump’s authority. One case concerns Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship. Another involves the administration’s attempt to revoke legal protections from hundreds of thousands of immigrants. Others could expand presidential control over independent agencies and officials Congress deliberately insulated from political pressure.

Taken individually, these disputes may seem technical. Together, they point in the same direction: a presidency with fewer constraints and more power.

The question before the Court is larger than immigration, agency structure, or administrative law. It is whether the Constitution still imposes meaningful limits on the chief executive.

I spent most of my political life surrounded by conservatives who believed limiting government power was the central purpose of the Constitution. For decades, conservatives warned about the dangers of concentrated government power. They argued that the Constitution’s genius was its ability to restrain ambitious politicians. They preached fidelity to the text, celebrated checks and balances, and insisted that no person—not even a president—stood above the law.

Then Donald Trump came along.

Today, many of the same people who once spoke passionately about limited government are demanding a presidency with fewer constraints, broader authority, and greater immunity from constitutional limits. They are abandoning principles they claimed to cherish in order to accommodate an authoritarian who measures success by how much power he can accumulate.

The Founders were deeply suspicious of concentrated power. Having just fought a revolution against a king, they designed a system intended to prevent any single individual from dominating the government. Congress would make the laws. The president would execute them. The judiciary would interpret them. Each branch would serve as a check on the others. James Madison described the arrangement with characteristic clarity: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”

The system was never supposed to depend on the goodwill of elected officials. It was designed to restrain them. That is why the Supreme Court exists. It exists to preserve constitutional boundaries, especially when other institutions fail to do so.

And let’s be honest: Congress has already surrendered.

Many Republicans who once warned about executive overreach now treat Trump’s every demand as an article of faith. Oversight has disappeared and independent judgment has become politically dangerous.

The legislative branch has become increasingly reluctant to check the executive branch. That leaves the courts. If the judiciary is unwilling to scrutinize presidential power, then what exactly is the point of having a Supreme Court at all?

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Unfortunately, the Court’s recent record offers little reassurance. Just two years ago, the Supreme Court held that presidents enjoy broad immunity from criminal prosecution for many official acts undertaken while in office. By doing so, the Court made it significantly more difficult to hold presidents accountable for abuses of power committed while in office.

Trump supporters celebrated the ruling as a victory for executive authority. I saw it as a warning sign. At a moment when the country needed a clear reaffirmation that no public official is beyond accountability, the Court expanded the protective shield around the presidency.

Consider the birthright citizenship case now before the Court. The text of the Fourteenth Amendment is explicit. Ratified in 1868 after the Civil War, it declares that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

For generations, conservatives insisted that constitutional language meant what it said. Judges were not supposed to rewrite the document to reach preferred political outcomes.

I’m old enough to remember when constitutional conservatives existed. They were the people who argued that the Constitution meant what it said—even when the text got in the way of a policy outcome they liked.

Now many self-described conservatives are embracing precisely the opposite approach. Because Trump wants to end birthright citizenship, they suddenly discover ambiguities that previous generations somehow missed. Because Trump wants greater authority, constitutional limitations become obstacles to be explained away rather than principles to be defended.

This is not constitutional conservatism. It is personality-driven politics.

Birthright citizenship is only the most obvious example. Whether the issue is immigration protections, independent agencies, or the president’s authority over officials whose independence Congress deliberately protected, the question is ultimately the same: How much power should one person have?

For most of my life, conservatives had a straightforward answer: Not much.

Now, however, many Republicans are ready to abandon their constitutional principles because they support Donald Trump. That is precisely the mistake the Founders warned us not to make.

Trump has long displayed contempt for institutional constraints. Throughout his political career, he has viewed independent agencies, inspectors general, congressional oversight, and judicial review as irritants rather than essential components of constitutional government. When courts rule against him, he attacks judges. When officials resist him, he questions their legitimacy. When constitutional limits stand in his way, he treats them as negotiable. That instinct is fundamentally at odds with the American system.

The good news is that the Constitution was designed for moments like this. The Founders anticipated ambitious presidents. They anticipated timid legislators. They anticipated political movements willing to place loyalty to a leader above loyalty to principle. That is why they built a system of checks and balances.

The Supreme Court now has an opportunity to prove that the system still works. If the justices are willing to defend the Constitution when it is politically inconvenient, they will remind Americans of something we have nearly forgotten: no president is bigger than the republic.

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Our top story today: the courts keep doing their job and are ruling against the Trump Administration over and over again. A federal judge just torched the DOJ’s attempt to use the grand jury as a weapon against the President’s political enemies in Minnesota. And a separate judge shut down the administration’s secret national voter database. Two rulings. One very clear message: constitutional guardrails still exist. And despite all the noise, the courts are still enforcing them.

We’ll cover Trump’s threat to sue ABC News, growing protests in Albania over Jared Kushner’s luxury resort project, the latest turmoil in Iran talks after Vance downplayed Trump’s comments as “trash talk,” and Tucker Carlson’s split from the Republican Party after 35 years.

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Let’s get to it.

1. The Courts Continue to Slam the Breaks on Trump

Two big court rulings landed Monday. Both of them landed on the wrong side of the Trump administration.

First, in Minnesota — a George W. Bush appointee issued a 29-page ruling throwing out the DOJ’s grand jury subpoenas against Governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and a list of other state and local officials the administration had targeted

These subpoenas went out on January 20th of this year. Right in the middle of Operation Metro Surge, the administration’s deportation campaign in Minneapolis that resulted in the deaths of two American citizens and set off mass protests across the state.

And what did the DOJ find to justify going after these officials? The Judge looked at the evidence and said the connections between the information the DOJ was seeking and any possible criminal violation ranged from, in his words, “extremely weak to nonexistent.”

He went on to call it a “blatantly unlawful and unethical use of the grand-jury process” and connected it to Trump’s well-established pattern of using criminal investigations to retaliate against political enemies. He wrote that the DOJ wasn’t conducting a criminal investigation. It was using the grand jury “for other unlawful purposes.”

The second ruling Monday was just as important. A judge in D.C. struck down the Trump administration’s overhaul of a federal database called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE. The administration had expanded this system last year, with help from DOGE, to include the records of natural-born American citizens, link it to Social Security data, and allow states to run bulk searches against it. States like Texas used it to flag registered voters as potential noncitizens and started removing them from the rolls.

The problem: the data was inaccurate. The administration, the judge wrote, “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”

Over 60 million voters had their records run through the system. Some American citizens lost their right to vote. One of them had his registration canceled because he didn’t respond in time to a letter demanding proof of citizenship. He’s a natural-born citizen. He had to go prove it in person just to vote in a primary.

The Judge continued: “The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote. This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”

The DOJ hasn’t said yet whether it plans to appeal, but there’s a pattern developing here. This administration has treated the DOJ as a tool of political vengeance, and the courts keep calling the foul.

Yesterday was a good day for the rule of law. Two federal judges appointed by presidents of both parties looked at what this administration was doing and said no. The system is working, but we shouldn’t take it for granted.

2. Trump's New Plan for the Reflection Pool: Sue the People Reporting on It

Yesterday, we told you about the fact that there had been arrests of people accused by Trump of vandalizing the pool, a pool he had once said was so sturdy and well-built that vandalism would be impossible.

Well, things escalated further last night and we want to bring you the latest on that.

The president went on Truth Social and announced he is preparing lawsuits against ABC News over its coverage of the reflecting pool disaster. He accused the network of “false reporting.” He made sure to add: “I like their money, which will be given to the U.S. Treasury!”

This is, of course, the same network that already paid him $16 million to settle a defamation case involving the George Stephanopoulos segment. So in Trump’s mind, this is a strategy that has worked before and one he can get away with.

But here is what actually prompted the lawsuit threat. ABC’s chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl went to the reflecting pool last week. He reached down, picked up a piece of the peeling blue coating that was already loose on the bottom, and held it up so viewers could see what was happening with the peeling paint. That’s journalism.

Like we told you yesterday, Trump responded by claiming Karl was “trying to rip the rubber off of the surface.” But take a look at the video:

Karl was clearly holding up a piece that was already unattached and basically floating to the surface.

Of course, it’s important to note that ABC isn’t the only outlet that’s faced Trump’s legal threats during his second term. He’s sued the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, and the New York Times in the last year alone.

Trump’s attacks on journalists and journalism as a practice are unprecedented and one of the more unsettling results of his administration, which is of course plagued by unsettling results. He knows that these lawsuits and threats will intimidate the press and push journalists away from negative coverage of him out of fear of being sued. That is objectively textbook authoritarianism.

We can only hope that these brave journalists continue to hold the president accountable despite the constant threats for doing their jobs.

3. Protests Erupt in Albania Over Jared Kushner’s Resort

This is a story that’s been building for weeks, and it deserves more attention than it’s getting.

Tens of thousands of Albanians have been in the streets protesting a proposed luxury resort on Albania’s coast. The resort is backed by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who has been publicly describing the project in podcast interviews as a dream she and her husband have had for years.

The project sits on protected coastline near a lagoon that conservation groups say is critical habitat for hundreds of bird species. One sea turtle nest was destroyed when bulldozers moved in. The public was given no notice or consultation.

It gets more complicated when you hear that among the investors backing the project are two Qatari brothers, wealthy Syrian-born businessmen with close ties to the Qatari royal family.

Take a look at the scale of the protests in Albania, a country with only two-and-a-half million people by the way.

Now, Qatar is simultaneously a keeper of Iranian funds, the setting for Iran peace diplomacy, a financial backer of a Kushner family resort project, and the donor of the president’s personal plane.

The protesters aren’t just angry about the resort. They’re angry about what that resort represents, which involves a government that sold access to a protected piece of their coastline to Qatar which has political connections to the most powerful country in the world.

This is a story worth watching, especially given how many threads from this lead directly to the Oval Office. There are also plenty of foreign policy implications here. If Albanians are successful in forcing their government to abandon the plans to build the resort, there’s a real chance Trump seeks some form of retribution or at least makes a controversial Truth Social post that sours relations with yet another NATO ally. It’s just unfortunate we have to worry about the president carrying out personal vendettas with countries that are supposed to be our friends.

4. Trump Threatens Iran Mid-Negotiation, Then Vance Calls It "Trash Talk"

The first round of post-MOU talks took place in Switzerland this weekend, with the US delegation led by JD Vance. In the middle of these talks, the President posted on Truth Social threatening to hit Iran again, and reportedly told Iranian officials, quote, “you won’t even make it back to your f—ing country.”

The damage from the President’s statements had to be contained at the bargaining table, as Iran’s lead negotiator publicly warned Trump to be careful with his words. Take a look at how Vance spun it after talks concluded:

So after the President publicly threatened officials involved in ongoing negotiations, his loyal Vice President dismissed it all as “trash talk”, with his only defense being the classic playground excuse of “they started it”.

As for any actual progress, Vance emerged from the talks with a big claim:

Sound familiar? Vance may call it a milestone, but these are the same inspectors Iran allowed under the deal that Trump tore up in his first term. And this time it wasn’t even true, because today Iran’s Foreign Ministry claimed they never agreed to those terms.

This is the pattern we’ve seen over and over in these negotiations. Even after a war that cost taxpayers billions of dollars, inflated gas prices for struggling Americans, and claimed the lives of American troops, the administration is still fighting tooth and nail to reach a deal that falls short of the same one they got rid of.

5. Tucker Carlson Helped Build This Republican Party. Now He Says He's Done With It.

Whether we like it or not, Carlson has been one of the most prominent voices in right wing media for many years now, and was an early and enthusiastic Trump supporter. But listen to what he said about the Republican Party this week:

Now, let me be clear with you. Tucker Carlson and I have had very different politics for a very long time. He has been a vocal defender of the President, through many things that were genuinely indefensible. Many of the ideas, grievances, and talking points he pushed for years have moved from the fringes to the center of Republican politics, leaving no room in the party for moderates like myself.

And that’s what makes this departure so notable. Carlson isn’t walking away from a party that rejected him. He’s actually leaving one that, in many ways, embraced his vision. But for people with influence built on challenging the status quo, it gets complicated when the movement you championed becomes the establishment you condemn.

For years, many of us have warned that the Republican Party was drifting away from conservative principles and towards loyalty tests, grievance, and increasingly extreme rhetoric. Carlson wasn’t one of the people sounding that alarm. In many ways, he helped build that environment.

So while it’s fun for us to watch MAGA turn on itself, let’s not mistake this for a rejection of extremism. Because it’s not. It’s a disagreement about where the Republican Party goes next.

Carlson is leaving because the party won’t go far enough for him. But America doesn’t need a Republican Party that moves further from reality. It needs a Republican Party that rediscovers character, responsibility, and a commitment to the Constitution.

And until that happens, the real divide in American politics won’t be between Republicans and Democrats. It will be between those willing to defend democratic principles and those willing to sacrifice them for power, money, and influence.

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Some other stories that caught my eye:

• Yesterday the Supreme Court again put off deciding whether to hear President Trump’s appeal in the E. Jean Carroll case. That makes fifteen delays since February, with no explanation from the justices. Trump’s lawyers call the suit baseless and say it distracts the President from doing his job. The appeal targets the $5 million a New York jury awarded Carroll in 2023, after finding that Trump sexually abused her in 1996 and later defamed her, a verdict a federal appeals court has already upheld. Every reschedule keeps that money out of her hands, and it has now been more than three years. Trump’s team has also signaled a second appeal built around presidential immunity, which could push any decision into the fall.

• Mass firings are underway at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the office that coordinates all eighteen of America’s spy agencies. The White House says the cuts carry out Trump’s order to shrink a bloated office and send staff back to their home agencies, and Trump has said it is full of people who should not be there. ODNI was created after the September 11th attacks to force the spy agencies to share what they know, and it had already shed about 40% of its staff under Pulte’s predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard. This round is expected to hit the National Counterterrorism Center hardest. Pulte is serving in an acting capacity that skips Senate confirmation, has no intelligence experience, and is best known for opening mortgage fraud investigations into Trump’s political enemies.

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Plus: Trump threatens to sue ABC News over its reflecting pool coverage after correspondent Jonathan Karl held up a piece of peeling paint on camera. Tens of thousands protest a Kushner-backed luxury resort in Albania with ties to Qatari money. The latest Iran talks collapse into threats, cleanup, and a deal that already isn't what Vance claimed. And after 35 years, Tucker Carlson says he's done with the Republican Party — though not for the reasons you might hope.

Go deeper at AdamKinzinger.com

Video discussion for paid members follows article

Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene announced yesterday that they are leaving the Republican Party. The coverage will almost certainly treat this as a story about a party coming apart, about cracks in the MAGA coalition, about dissent and fracture and the inevitable entropy of political movements. That framing is understandable and almost entirely wrong.

Tucker and MTG are not leaving the Republican Party because it failed them. They are leaving because they won the debate. The party became, over the course of a decade, almost exactly what they wanted it to be. It absorbed their grievances, adopted their language, and made their worldview the official ideology of one of the two major parties in the United States. They won. And winning, it turns out, is a problem for people whose identity is built on fighting.

I want to be clear about what I mean, because it matters for understanding something deeper about the political moment we are in. There are two kinds of people in any insurgent political movement. There are the people who want to change the system because they believe the changes will produce better outcomes. And then there are the people for whom the insurgency is the point. The fighting is the identity. The enemy is the product.

Tucker Carlson has made more money, reached more people, and accumulated more cultural influence than almost any other figure in American media over the past decade. He did it by being permanently at war; with the mainstream media, with the left, with the Republican establishment, with the intelligence community, with whoever represented the acceptable enemy of the moment. The through-line across every position he has ever taken is not an ideology. It is opposition. When the opposition wins, Tucker needs a new thing to oppose. The Republican Party, now fully captured by the movement he helped build, is the new establishment. So he leaves it.

MTG is a simpler version of the same story. She came to Congress not to legislate but to perform. She understood before most of her colleagues that the institution was a stage and that the audience was not in the chamber but watching on their phones. She filed impeachment articles on her first day. She harassed colleagues in hallways. She said things designed to be repeated and condemned, because condemnation from the right people is the currency her political brand runs on. Governing (you know, the actual work of passing bills, building coalitions, managing the machinery of the state) has never been her goal and never will be. The Republican Party is now the governing party. That makes it, by definition, the enemy.

The person who understood this most clearly, long before either of them did, is Donald Trump. Trump has controlled the executive branch, bent the legislative branch to his will, reshaped the judiciary, and occupied the most powerful office in the history of the world. And he still talks about draining the swamp. He is the swamp. He built the swamp. Every cabinet secretary, every political appointee, every federal prosecutor doing his bidding is his swamp. And yet the language of the insurgent outsider, the lone fighter against a corrupt system, never goes away. Because without that language, the movement has to answer for what it has actually done with power. The machine keeps running because the enemy never disappears. You just find new ones.

This is not a sustainable politics, but it is a remarkably durable one. The grievance model does not require results. It does not require policy victories or improved conditions or evidence that the movement’s prescriptions are working. It requires only the continuous identification of enemies. And new enemies are easy, because in a complex society there is always someone to blame. The “genius” of it, and I use that word without admiration, is that winning actually strengthens it. Every victory can be reframed as incomplete, as stolen, as proof that the real enemy is still out there. The MAGA movement controls the White House, the Supreme Court, and both houses of Congress, and its most prominent media figures are still describing themselves as resistance fighters.

And I know something of suddenly being out step with your party. I walked away from my place in the Republican Party. I want to be honest about how different that departure was from this one. I let the party careen away from me and the principles I believed in because staying in the party’s good graces required a form of silence I was not willing to perform. I was not looking for a new enemy. I was trying, imperfectly and at real cost, to say what I actually believed.

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Tucker and MTG are leaving to find a bigger stage. The Republican Party is no longer radical enough for the audience they are competing for. And more importantly, it is no longer oppositional enough to generate the conflict that drives their businesses. They need an establishment to fight. Their Republican Party has become one. So they go in search of a new one, taking their audiences with them, and the cycle begins again.

The question worth asking is what it means for the country that figures like this have become its most influential political communicators. A politics organized around permanent opposition cannot build anything. It can only tear things down and declare the tearing a victory. We have seen what that produces. And the people most responsible for producing it have now decided that even the ruins are not radical enough for their purposes.

They did not leave because they lost. They left because people who need an enemy can never afford to win.

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We’re back at it with another Ask Me Anything! This week let’s get back to our normal format where you throw whatever questions you have, on any topic, my way and we’ll select a diverse set of questions to answer.

Drop your questions below in the comments!

Thank you being a part of this community. You’re the reason I can keep speaking truth to power.

-Adam

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Plus: a Washington Post investigation suggests Tulsi Gabbard spent years following the script of an alleged cult leader while in elected office. Trump blames "vandals" for the algae in his $14 million reflecting pool. The Iran deal collapses days after it was announced, with the Strait of Hormuz closed again. And Trump unveils his Qatari-gifted Air Force One — a "free" jet whose makeover is costing taxpayers close to a billion dollars.

Go deeper at AdamKinzinger.com

I want to start today with something serious. We have to talk about the President’s mental acuity. Not because we disagree on policy. Because the warning lights are flashing, and the future of this country is riding on the answer. On the eve of Father’s Day, the President went online to celebrate a “great daughter,” and posted a photo of a woman who is not his daughter. His behavior keeps getting weirder, and it’s time we talk about it.

We will also get into reporting on Tulsi Gabbard’s ties to a cult, Trump’s green reflecting pool, updates on Iran, and the brand new Air Force One a foreign government paid for.

Do me a favor. Like, subscribe, and send this to somebody who needs to see it.

Okay. Let’s get to it.

1. Trump Mistakes a Stranger for His Daughter, Raising Fresh Questions About His Mental State

Late Saturday night, on the eve of Father’s Day, the President posted an old photograph to Truth Social. It showed an older blonde woman sitting on a red sofa, talking on a phone. The caption read, “Great daughter. My Honor!!! President DJT.”

But she is not his daughter. The internet quickly identified the woman as the wife of a New York billionaire and Trump ally. The photo appears to be decades old, likely taken at Camp David during the Clinton administration. The White House has offered no explanation.

Look, I am not a doctor, and I am not going to try to diagnose anyone. But look at the pattern. Last month the President posted 861 times. That’s 27 times a day. And it’s not coherent. It’s AI memes in the middle of the night. It’s a shirtless photo of himself in a pool floatie at the Lincoln Memorial. It’s rage about the war he started in Iran. And in April he was averaging 18 a day, so the behavior is getting worse. Not better.

Unfortunately, a lot of us have watched this happen up close to someone we love. Somebody who is sharp your whole life, but one day they call you by your brother’s name, or they don’t quite place you for a second. It is one of the most frightening things you can go through with someone you love.

And you handle it with grace, because it’s family. If this were your dad, you’d be worried. You’d be making phone calls. You would want to know how bad things really were.

But this isn’t your dad. This is the man who carries the nuclear codes, the man sitting on top of our entire national security.

And the only people who can tell us how bad it really is are the same people who’d lose everything by admitting it. So they don’t. They put out a statement saying he’s sharper than ever and wave off every slip as a typo, a joke, or just completely ignore it.

But we can all see what’s happening here. Things are getting worse. Whatever the cause is, the President’s behavior is becoming more erratic. You see it. I see it. The only people pretending not to see it are the ones who work for him.

2. A Cult May Have Been Scripting Tulsi Gabbard for Years

A Washington Post investigation published this weekend looked at Tulsi Gabbard, who until last week ran all of our intelligence agencies as Director of National Intelligence. Gabbard grew up inside the Science of Identity Foundation, a Hawaii-based religious group. Former members have called it a cult.

The Post got their hands on 25,000 pages of documents, and what they show is extraordinary. Memos telling Gabbard which bills to introduce, which positions to take, and even how to carry herself on television. When the Post compared those memos to 32 of her television interviews, she used the scripted language almost word for word in 24 of them.

The group ran fake social media accounts to defend her and boost her presence online, and the documents suggest she knew. One email even records a phone call where she was berated, and then reassured, at the end, that “me and Krishna still love you.” Krishna is a major deity in Hinduism.

Here’s a pretty crazy example of the reportedly scripted moments. A memo laid out a specific line for her to deliver in a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer. Watch what she said.

Now guess what the memo given to her by this group, titled “CNN Wolf Blitzer Talking points (Final),” said?

Quote, “It’s not a ‘boohoo, I don’t get to go to the party’ situation, Wolf.”

Look, I served with Tulsi in Congress. Initially we were close, but it became apparent that she was constantly saying whatever would benefit her in the moment. She also appeared to always have a soft spot for dictators, given her regular appearances on Russian state television during the first months of the Ukraine war.

I went on Stephen Colbert’s show early last year where he asked me about how concerned I was with Tulsi’s nomination. I mentioned there about Tulsi meeting with former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and subsequently spewing out Russian talking points like Syrian rebels being the ones responsible for chemical weapons attacks instead of the Assad regime.

This is a person who was labeled by Russian state television as their, quote, “girlfriend.”

For years I have listened to Tulsi’s talking points. I could tell those words were changing depending on the day. I guess I didn’t suspect that a shady religious group was behind many of them, but it was clear something was off. Now it’s all starting to make sense.

3. The Reflecting Pool Turned Green and Trump is Looking For Someone to Blame

Back in April, the President ordered the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool be repainted “American flag blue” for the country’s 250th birthday on the Fourth of July. The cost went from an estimated 2 million dollars to more than 14 million. The pool was refilled, the new paint peeled, and the water has now become a bright, fluorescent…green.

A professor at George Mason and other experts told reporters it was a harmless algae bloom, the kind you get in shallow, sunlit water, very likely made worse by the renovation itself. Not sabotage, and a pretty predictable problem.

Our president saw it differently. On Truth Social, he claimed vandals “took some form of knife or blade, and put a 250 foot long gash” into it.

But last month, the president said this about the bottom of his renovated reflecting pool.

So…which is it?

Then he went after ABC’s Jonathan Karl, accusing him of vandalism for holding up a loose flake of that peeling paint on camera. Trump said he was quote, “trying to rip the rubber off of the surface.”

At least five individuals have been arrested so far on vandalism charges. One of them was a 67-year-old former Olympic canoeist, who says all he did was reach into the water to touch a piece of the liner that had already peeled off on its own. We’ll have to wait and see what comes out of these arrests, but it sure feels like the President is just looking for someone to blame.

Look, this all follows the classic Trump pattern of making a mistake, not admitting to said mistake, and trying to blame something completely random for said mistake. Trust me, I sat on a committee that investigated in-depth Trump’s biggest mistake of all, and the pattern, like it always is, was eerily similar. Accountability is just nowhere to be found anywhere in this administration, and it’s unfortunate that it isn’t shocking anymore.

4. Days After Declaring Peace, Trump Is Back to Threatening to “Take Over” the Strait

Just last week, Trump announced a deal to end his war with Iran and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The administration spent the next several days justifying every line of the agreement, which included billions of dollars to rebuild the country we just destroyed. But the deal had one core condition: the fighting had to stop on every front, including Lebanon.

That condition failed on Saturday, as Israel kept striking Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and Iran declared the Strait closed again. Days after the President capitulated to end the war he started, we are right back to square one. According to Fox News, here is how he responded:

Trump went on to tell Fox News that “we may take over the Strait if we have to”. So we are back to threats of invasion and occupation, no closer to peace than we were before.

By the President’s own admission, we were about four weeks from running out of oil reserves before the deal was announced. We already saw how much he was willing to give up to reopen the Strait last week. So what happens when that clock starts ticking again?

5. The Free Jet From Qatar Is Costing You Close to a Billion Dollars

On Friday, Trump unveiled the jet at Joint Base Andrews. He called it the most luxurious plane in the world, and he could not stop talking about it.

As a reminder, this is a used jet from the government of Qatar who gifted the plane to Trump last year. A gift Trump himself said he’d be “stupid” to turn down.

What he didn’t talk about was the repair bill. Turning an airliner into a plane secure enough to fly the President of the United States is not cheap. Experts put the overhaul at over $1 billion, and the New York Times traced a roughly $934 million transfer out of a nuclear modernization fund into an unnamed classified project widely believed to be the plane.

And here’s the kicker. When he leaves office, the plane goes to his presidential library foundation. A sketchy donation from a foreign government. We pay to fix it up. And then Trump keeps it.

So while millions of Americans struggle to get by, the President is more focused on the gold fixtures and leather seats on his new jet than the people he is supposed to be fighting for. Because at the end of the day, Trump just can’t resist having the biggest and the fanciest. Of Everything.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: America is not for sale. On day one, our next president must take this aircraft as the property of the American people. Sell it and send the money back to the Treasury. Or just scrap it. And we should send a message by sanctioning Qatar for trying to buy the presidency while we are at it.

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Some other stories that caught my eye:

• British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced his resignation Monday morning outside 10 Downing Street, paving the way for the country’s seventh prime minister in a decade. The announcement confirmed what Trump had posted on Truth Social the day before: the president declared “Keir Starmer will resign as Prime Minister of The United Kingdom” on Sunday, when Downing Street hadn’t announced anything yet, raising questions on the president’s handling of sensitive information. It is unclear if Trump was informed yesterday or if it was mere speculation. The UK has had six prime ministers since 2022.

• Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni added more fuel in her feud with Trump Sunday, writing on Instagram that Trump’s attacks are “constant, unprovoked” and “senseless.” She added “As for my popularity, being your friend certainly has not helped it,” and “my popularity is none of your concern…I suggest you focus on yours.” The whole fight started last Friday when Trump told an Italian broadcaster that Meloni had “begged” him for a photo at the G7 summit in France, saying he only agreed because he felt sorry for her. This was a claim Meloni said was fabricated. Italy’s Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani canceled a planned U.S. visit, and Italian officials reportedly also scrapped plans to attend U.S. Independence Day celebrations in Rome. Meloni was the only European leader at Trump’s 2025 inauguration and was once seen as his closest ally in the EU.

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