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He just got back from Beijing without the deal he wanted, and is apparently considering trading away the Taiwan arms package on the way out. His Justice Department admitted in federal court that his voter-purge plan runs on bad data. And Iran has opened a new front in the war we are now eleven weeks into. And Gen Z, the young voters who helped put him back in office, are gone.

1. Trump Spent the Year Trading Stocks of Companies His Own Administration Regulates

The Office of Government Ethics released filings showing that in the first three months of 2026 alone, Trump made more than 3,600 individual stock trades.

Here’s what we learned:

On January 6th, (yes, January 6th) Trump bought up to $1 million in Nvidia stock. A week later, the Commerce Department approved the sale of certain Nvidia chips to China.

On February 10th, Trump bought up to $5 million more in Nvidia. A week later, Nvidia announced a major new computing deal with Meta.

He bought Palantir in January. In February, Palantir landed a billion-dollar contract with the Department of Homeland Security to help run the deportation program.

Also in February, Trump bought up to $5 million in Axon, a company that makes Tasers. Two weeks later, ICE announced its plan to spend $220 million on Tasers over five years.

He also bought Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, AMD, GE Aerospace, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, and Apple. All government contractors. Many of them led by executives who flew with him to Beijing this week.

The Trump Organization says the President does not direct these trades, that they are managed by third-party financial institutions through fully discretionary accounts. Sure.

And in his State of the Union in February, Trump himself called for a ban on members of Congress profiting from insider information. Democratic Congressman Mark Takano shouted back from the House floor, “How about you first?”

And earlier this week, Vice President JD Vance told a crowd in Maine that this administration takes fighting fraud very seriously.

When this administration shouts about fraud, they are almost always telling on themselves. The Trump Organization is asking us to believe that out of 3,600 trades, every single one was coincidentally well-timed to favorable government action. That is not how independent management works. That is how insider trading works. And in any other administration, this story would dominate the news cycle for weeks.

2. The Beijing Summit Is Over. Xi Got What He Wanted. Trump Did Not.

Trump landed back in the United States this morning after his final meetings with Xi Jinping.

Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Trump said he has not yet decided whether to move forward with the $11 billion arms package his own administration approved for Taiwan in December. That is the largest weapons package the U.S. has ever offered to the island.

Asked about it directly, here is the President:

That is the President of the United States telling the world he might walk away from a defensive arms deal with a democratic ally because Xi asked him to.

Xi warned Trump in their private talks that mishandling Taiwan would push the two countries toward, in his words, “clashes and even conflicts.”

What Trump is bringing home: an agreement that the Strait of Hormuz needs to reopen, a promise of more Chinese agricultural purchases, and an invitation for Xi to come to Washington at some point.

For decades, every American president, Republican and Democrat, has held one line in the Pacific. We arm Taiwan and we do not negotiate that publicly with Beijing. In one afternoon, on Chinese soil, Donald Trump broke that line. Whatever he decides next week, the message has already been sent.

3. Trump's Own DOJ Admits His Voter-Purge Plan Is Built on Bad Data

Back in March, Trump signed an executive order directing Homeland Security to build something called State Citizenship Lists. Federal lists of who is and is not eligible to vote, sent to every state in the country, used to scrub the voter rolls.

But yesterday in Federal District Court in Washington, a senior Justice Department attorney told the court that those citizenship lists are “likely to be incomplete and unreliable for determining voter eligibility.”

That is Trump’s own DOJ admitting that the President’s order runs on bad data.

The tool the administration uses is called SAVE, operated by Homeland Security. In Idaho, an initial flag of 760 names shrunk down to about three dozen actual cases. In Utah, when officials actually checked, the number of noncitizen voters was zero. And the Republican Secretary of State in Louisiana called noncitizen voting there a non-problem.

None of this is about election integrity. It is about giving states an excuse to throw eligible Americans off the rolls. And, combined with the aggressive redistricting push across the South, represents a clear and present danger to free and fair elections in 2026 and beyond.

4. Iran's Next Target: The Cables That Run the Internet

Eleven weeks into the Iran war, most of the coverage has stayed on the Strait of Hormuz as an oil chokepoint. But Iran has begun issuing warnings about something else. The undersea fiber-optic cables that carry roughly 95 percent of the world’s internet traffic, many of which run through the Strait of Hormuz.

About a quarter of all internet traffic between Europe and Asia already runs through these chokepoints. Cloud services, financial transactions, military command and control, banking. All of it sits on cables that Iran is now openly threatening.

But on CNN yesterday morning, Republican Congressman Mark Alford of Missouri said that the Trump administration actually has control over the Straits of Hormuz:

CNN’s John Berman asked back: “if we have control, how come there aren’t vessels going in and out?”

Alford did not have a good answer. Because there is no good answer.

We do not have control of the Strait. We never had control of the Strait. And the people running our Iran policy are about to find out that the modern internet runs on physical infrastructure that one angry country can shut off. The President said this war would be quick. Eleven weeks in, things are getting more complicated.

5. Gen Z Helped Elect Trump. They Are Done With Him.

New polling out this morning from Newsweek tracks Trump’s approval rating among voters aged 18 to 29 across his entire second term. The picture is staggering.

Take the numbers in order. In January of 2025, just after his second inauguration, Trump’s net approval with Gen Z was plus 5. He was actually breaking even with young voters.

A year and four months later, the latest poll has him at minus 42. That is a 47-point collapse.

The pollsters are pretty clear on why. Gen Z said they cared about inflation and avoiding new wars. Trump has delivered the highest inflation in three years and started a war with Iran that we can’t seem to get out of. They feel betrayed, and they are not coming back.

The midterms are less than six months away. And the coalition the President needed to keep his majority is shedding the very voters who put him over the top in 2024. And rightly so. This administration has not only been a disaster, it has betrayed the very voters who gave him a chance. And every 2028 presidential hopeful, on both sides of the aisle, needs to come to recognize the anger throughout the country with this pattern. Politicians never deliver for the people who put them in office. They just focus on pleasing their base. And until that changes, the decline in trust for our democracy and wild swings between elections will continue.

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Well folks, that is the show for today, and that is the week. Thanks for joining. Have a great weekend, and I will see you back here on Monday.

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I want you learn about a moment from this week and tell me what you see.

On Kaitlan Collins’s show, Jim Jordan was asked a simple question. For years, Jim and the rest of the House Oversight machine treated Hunter Biden traveling overseas with his father as a five-alarm corruption scandal. Endless hearings. Endless innuendo. So Kaitlan asked the obvious follow-up: if that was disqualifying then, what about Eric Trump flying to China with the President of the United States right now?

Jim didn’t even try. He didn’t draw a line. He didn’t offer a principle. He just said he didn’t “have any issue at all” with it. Same trip. Same country. Same family business overlap. Different last name. Case closed.

The internet, predictably, lit up about the hypocrisy. And it should. But I want to push past the easy dunk, because I think we’re missing what’s actually happening. I keep coming back to a theory that’s gotten harder to shake.

MAGA doesn’t tolerate hypocrisy. It rewards it. The hypocrisy is the point.

I served in the House with these guys. I sat in those conference rooms. I know the people who used to lecture me, hand on heart, about character and consistency and “what would we say if a Democrat did this?” Those same people now stand on national television and contradict themselves inside a single sentence, and they do it without flinching. That used to confuse me. It doesn’t anymore.

Here’s what I think is going on. Inside the movement, openly contradicting yourself on camera is not an embarrassment. It is a status symbol. It is a tattoo of loyalty. The more obvious the contradiction, the more you are proving to your tribe that you will go anywhere for the cause. Anyone can defend a consistent position. It takes a true believer to defend the opposite of what you said last year and dare the press to make something of it.

Once you see it that way, the pattern stops being baffling. It starts being a system.

They warned, for months, that Kamala Harris would drag us into a war with Iran. Now we are in one. Gas prices are climbing. American service members are deployed. And the same voices who promised this would never happen on their watch are now defending it, cheering it, telling Kaitlan Collins on live TV that higher gas prices are just “life.” Higher gas prices were a constitutional crisis under Biden. Under Trump, they are weather.

They spent the Obama and Biden years screaming about the deficit. About spending. About the national debt as a moral failing we were leaving to our grandchildren. Now? Spending like the credit card never has to be paid. Not a peep from the deficit hawks, because the deficit was never the point. The opposition was the point.

They would have lit themselves on fire if Barack Obama had ordered a triumphal arch and a ballroom built in his own honor in Washington, D.C. They’d have called it Caesar cosplay. They’d have done six hearings on the marble. Trump is literally building monuments to himself in the capital, and the same people are silent or, worse, fundraising off it.

They held hearing after hearing because Hunter Biden took a $50,000-a-month seat on a Ukrainian energy board. Real questions. Fair questions. I’ll grant them that. But Donald Trump is personally taking ownership stakes in companies, pulling in billions while sitting in the Oval Office, and the Oversight gavel is suddenly very quiet. They convened panels over Hunter selling paintings above market. Meanwhile, the Trump family is hawking a “T1 gold phone” that was marketed as a proud American-made device and then quietly turned out to be — according to reporting — a reskinned Chinese handset, with the “Made in USA” language stripped from the website once people started checking, and roughly 600,000 customers still waiting on a phone they prepaid for. A grift in gold paint. Crickets.

I could keep going. You could keep going. That’s the tell.

Because if this were about issues, even one of these would matter. One. If it were about corruption, the gold phone alone would be a scandal. If it were about war, the Iran deployment would have triggered the same fury they manufactured over every Obama airstrike. If it were about spending, the deficit caucus would still exist. If it were about nepotism, Eric on Air Force One to Beijing would be the lead story on Fox for a week.

None of it lands. Because none of it is the actual subject.

The actual subject is which side are you on. That’s it. That is the whole movement, distilled. Our team is good. Their team is evil. And once you accept that frame, every contradiction becomes a feature. Every hypocrisy becomes a loyalty test you pass in public. The louder you defend the indefensible, the more clearly you are signaling: I am with my tribe, come hell or high water. The ends justify the means, because the “ends” is just winning, and the “means” is whatever Trump did this morning.

This is not conservatism. I know conservatism. I lived inside it. Conservatism had rules it actually applied to itself. What I’m describing is something else — a tribal identity movement that wears conservative clothes because the closet was already there.

So here’s the part Democrats and independents need to hear, because I think a lot of you are exhausted, and I get it.

You do not get to wait Trump out.

I believe — I really do — that when Trump finally exits the stage, the scales are going to fall from a lot of American eyes. The trance will break. The grandkids are going to ask the hard questions at Thanksgiving. The Republican Party that signed onto all of this is going to face a reckoning it cannot dodge, and history is going to be brutal on the people who knew better and chose the tribe anyway. I believe that.

But “eventually” is not a strategy. Between now and then, real damage is being done — to the Justice Department, to our alliances, to the credibility of American elections, to the basic idea that a public official should be embarrassed to lie on television. If you are a Democrat or an independent or one of the small remaining number of conservatives who still believe in this country more than you believe in any one man, you cannot outsource the defense. You have to make the case. Loudly. Constantly. To your neighbors, your family, your union hall, your church.

Don’t argue with the cult. You won’t win that. Argue past it, to the people who are quietly watching and quietly horrified and quietly looking for permission to say so.

I know these people. I served with them. I watched a lot of them choose, in real time, between the truth they used to preach to me and the tribe that was about to win the primary. They picked the tribe. Some of them will, one day, be sorry. Many of them won’t.

Either way, the rest of us have a country to hold together until the spell breaks.

Let’s not wait.

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Ok, let’s get to it.

1. Trump Lands in Beijing Seeking a Deal. Xi Spends 24 Hours Showing Who Holds the Cards

Trump landed in Beijing on Wednesday for his first trip to mainland China since 2017, and his first sit-down with Xi since the two met in South Korea last October.

In his remarks, Xi went right at the issue that matters most to him, telling Trump that Taiwan is, “the most important issue in China-U.S. relations,” and that mishandling it could push the relationship into “clashes and even conflicts.”

Before leaving Washington, Trump signaled U.S. arms sales to Taiwan are now on the table. Here’s Trump:

Xi walked in more confident than ever. Over the last year, he has weaponized China’s dominance of rare earth elements. Twice in 2025, he threatened to cut off the flow. Twice, Trump backed down on tariffs.

Trump’s deliverables so far: a soybean purchase, possible Boeing orders, and an invitation for Xi to visit Washington. What he did not get: a rare earths agreement, a path on AI chips, or anything resembling a structural win.

This is what happens when you start a trade war without the cards to finish it. Xi is treating Trump like a salesman he will politely entertain. And this particular salesman appears to be flying home with very little in his bag.

2. Trump Mobile Suddenly Says the Phones Are Shipping. Funny How That Works.

In case you missed the twists and turns this week: last June, Don Jr. and Eric Trump launched Trump Mobile and a $499 gold smartphone called the T1, advertised as proudly made-in-the-USA. Around 590,000 people paid a $100 deposit.

But the phone never shipped. Ship dates kept moving, and the company blamed the 43-day government shutdown, which analysts called nonsense for a private hardware company.

In April, “Made in USA” came off the website. And the preorder terms quietly added this line: “A preorder deposit provides only a conditional opportunity if Trump Mobile later elects, in its sole discretion, to offer the Device for sale.”

Translation: your deposit does not guarantee a phone.

Then this week, after the story exploded online and California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office publicly described the project as, “FRAUD,” Trump Mobile posted for the first time, in nearly a year, that pre-orders would get an update email and phones would ship this week.

Replies on that post are turned off, by the way. They know what they did, and they are trying to save themselves now. I am not a phone expert. But the people who are phone experts are saying this is a Chinese phone with Trump branding on it.

This is the same pattern as the crypto coin, the sneakers, and the trading cards. A promise. A delay. A quiet rewrite of the fine print. And somebody, somewhere, gets stuck holding the bag.

3. Fox News Spent the Night Telling Viewers the CIA Raided Tulsi Gabbard's Office. It Didn't Happen.

On Wednesday, a self-described CIA whistleblower told a Senate committee that the agency had seized roughly 40 boxes of files on JFK and MKUltra from Tulsi Gabbard’s office.

Within hours, Jesse Watters broke into Fox primetime. Headline on screen: “BREAKING: CIA RAIDS TULSI GABBARD’S OFFICE.”

Republican Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna of Florida ran with it, giving the CIA a 24-hour ultimatum or a subpoena.

There was one problem. Gabbard’s own office said none of it happened. Press secretary Olivia Coleman posted on X: “This is false. The CIA did not raid the DNI’s office.”

Luna walked it back, saying it “did not happen today and was not a raid,” but maybe something else happened at some other point, which they are still trying to figure out.

This is what an information ecosystem looks like when it has stopped checking sources. By the time the correction lands, the original framing is already on a million phones and through a few rounds of fundraising emails. In the actual news business, this kind of story is called “Too good to check.” Unfortunately, tens of millions of Americans live in an alternate reality because of the perverse incentives of the right wing media ecosystem.

4. The FBI Director and a U.S. Senator Are Publicly Feuding Over Who Drinks More

The Atlantic recently reported that FBI Director Kash Patel’s drinking has interfered with his job, including episodes where staff allegedly had to force entry into his home to wake him up. Patel predictably filed a $250 million defamation suit.

On Tuesday, Maryland Democrat Chris Van Hollen put it directly to Patel: “When your private actions make it impossible for you to perform your public duties, we have a big problem.”

Patel called the reporting a “total farce” and “categorically false.” Then he took a rhetorical swing at the Senator.

He accused Van Hollen of being the real drinker, citing the senator’s 2025 trip to El Salvador to visit Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who the administration admitted it had wrongly deported. Here’s Patel:

Abrego Garcia has not been convicted of rape or gang membership. He is awaiting trial on separate charges. And the trip was a senator doing oversight on a man the government admitted it had wrongly deported.

Both men agreed to take the AUDIT alcohol screening side by side. Van Hollen posted his yesterday: two to three drinks a week, everything else clean. Patel has not posted his.

The Director of the FBI is publicly trading accusations about drinking habits with a sitting senator on a federal government account. There used to be a line between the FBI and partisan politics. That line is gone.

5. Inflation Up, Wages Down, Jobless Claims Rising — All in One Week

Three Labor Department reports dropped this week, all moving in the same direction.

Tuesday, the Consumer Price Index for April. Annual inflation hit 3.8 percent, the highest in nearly three years. Gas up 28 percent. Real wages, what your paycheck actually buys, are now down for the year. For the first time in three years, inflation is eating every dollar of wage growth.

Wednesday, the Producer Price Index. Wholesale prices jumped 1.4 percent in a single month. The annual rate climbed from 4 to 6 percent. The biggest one-month jump since March 2022. What businesses pay this month is what consumers pay next month. The pipeline is loaded.

And then today. Initial jobless claims rose 12,000 to a total of 211,000.

Two months ago, the President started a war and told the country it would be quick. Today, gas is more expensive, groceries are more expensive, your paycheck buys less, and more Americans are out of work than a month ago. And there are no signs things are moving in a better direction.

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As always, thanks for reading. Tomorrow we will be watching the back half of the China summit, and what, if anything, the President is willing to give up to come home with a deal.

If this work helps you make sense of the news, please like, share, and subscribe. It keeps this going. See you soon.

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(Quick note. I put out an article on May 11th The Streamer Class Is Eating a Generation — and one of the guys I discuss is named “Chud The Builder.” Yesterday, he got into a confrontation and shot a black man outside a courthouse and was arrested for attempted murder. Chickens came home to roost faster than even I thought. This is a serious problem.)

This week, the New York Times published a classified U.S. intelligence assessment that reveals a deep flaw in Donald Trump’s approach to the Iran War, but also something broader about his antiquated worldview. After two months of conventional bombing, after $29 billion spent, after burning through roughly half of America’s strategic missile stockpile, Iran has restored operational access to 30 of its 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz. It retains approximately 70 percent of its prewar weapons stockpile. It has regained access to 90 percent of its underground missile facilities.

Put simply, what the CIA is saying is that the strategy failed — not because of bad luck or bad execution, but because it was the wrong strategy for the wrong war in the wrong century.

That is the story of this presidency in miniature. Donald Trump is a man frozen in time, running a 21st century country with a 20th century mentality. And the gap between those two things is now showing up everywhere: in the inflation numbers, in the hospital closures, in the housing market, in the lives of young Americans being displaced by AI while Washington argues about who is in charge of regulating it. But nowhere is the cost more visible, or more dangerous, than in the war he started with Iran.

Yesterday’s Battle

Trump has long fantasized about using conventional military might to attack the Iranian regime and force it to abandon its nuclear program. When he took office fifteen months ago, he could have spent that time ramping up drone production to suit the modern way of war. Instead he planned a conventional air campaign — a 2026 version of a World War II bombing campaign — and Iran spent that same time preparing for exactly that.

Iran’s leaders had been studying Ukraine carefully. When Russia invaded with conventional forces — tanks, artillery, massed armor — Ukrainian drone operators dismantled them methodically, using weapons that cost between $20,000 and $50,000 apiece and are powered by motorcycle engines, flown by pilots who never leave the ground. Cheap, precise, maneuverable, and nearly impossible to intercept at scale, drones have become the defining weapon of modern asymmetric warfare. Iran absorbed that lesson. Trump did not.

The result is that the U.S. has been firing million-dollar Tomahawk cruise missiles and Patriot interceptors at Iranian drones that cost fifty thousand dollars. We have burned through more than 1,100 long-range cruise missiles built specifically for a potential war with China. We have stripped missile batteries from South Korea and moved a carrier group from the Pacific. And Iran, the smaller power in this fight, has rebuilt nearly everything we destroyed.

None of this is surprising if you understand where Trump learned about war. He attended the New York Military Academy as a teenager, an institution run by veterans of the Second World War who taught strategy through the lens of Patton and Eisenhower — massed armor, strategic bombing, the projection of industrial-age firepower. That model won a world war. It also ended sixty years ago. There is no evidence Trump has updated it since. He proposed building a class of battleships named after himself. He spent the defense budget on legacy platforms the Pentagon has been trying to retire for a decade. And he launched a war against a country that had spent a year watching Ukraine prove that the era of conventional military dominance was over.

The intelligence community has been trying to say so for weeks. The question is whether anyone with the power to change course is willing to hear it.

Spend Like There’s No Tomorrow

The United States now spends more on interest payments on its national debt than it spends on Medicare. More than it spends on national defense. The annual debt service bill has crossed $970 billion, and it is climbing. I want that the stick: $970 billion…on INTEREST. Wasted payments.

This did not happen overnight, but Trump has accelerated it dramatically. In his first term, he added $7.8 trillion to the national debt during a period of no major war, no deep recession, and no pandemic — until the pandemic arrived and the spending that followed was at least defensible as emergency response. In his second term, he is on pace for a $2 trillion deficit increase this year alone, which will push the national debt above the total value of the American economy. He is proposing to increase the Pentagon’s budget by 43 percent, to $1.5 trillion, while simultaneously cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans. It’s one thing to increase defense spending, I’m for that, but we have to pay for it.

Trump came of age in an era when you could run those numbers and have them work out. In the postwar decades, the American economy grew at rates approaching 7 percent a year. Lyndon Johnson fought an enormously expensive war in Vietnam, raced to the moon, built the Great Society, and still managed to balance the federal budget in his final year in office, because the economy was growing fast enough to cover the bill. Today’s economy grows at between two and three percent in good years. The math that worked in 1968 does not work in 2026. Trump either does not understand that or does not care.

The Iran war has made all of this worse in ways that will outlast the conflict itself. The Federal Reserve cannot cut interest rates while the war is driving inflation above 3.8 percent, the highest reading since 2023. Financial analysts have changed their forecasts for additional rate cuts, with none in sight this year. That means continued high borrowing costs for mortgages, car loans, and small business financing through the rest of this presidency. The cost of fighting yesterday’s war with yesterday’s weapons is now being paid by families who had nothing to do with the decision to start it.

Healthcare: The Crisis He Refuses to See

On June 15th, Greenwood Leflore Hospital in Mississippi will close. It is a 120-year-old public hospital that serves roughly 300,000 people in one of the poorest, most medically underserved regions in the country. It is closing because of Medicaid funding cuts in Trump’s own budget legislation. There are dozens more hospitals coming behind Greenwood Leflore.

The American healthcare system is the most expensive in the developed world by a significant margin. We spend 17.2 percent of our GDP on healthcare, compared with an average of 11.2 percent for other developed nations. We spend roughly $14,500 per person — twice the per capita cost of our peers. That money does not buy better outcomes. Americans have lower life expectancy, higher rates of chronic disease, and more preventable deaths than citizens of countries that spend far less.

The reasons are well understood: drug prices that are three to four times higher than in comparable countries because Medicare and Medicaid are legally prohibited from negotiating them, hospital costs that run 50 to 100 percent above international norms, and a system that has evolved around expensive high-tech intervention rather than the preventive primary care that produces better long-term health at lower cost.

Trump came of age when employer-sponsored health insurance was genuinely universal among working Americans, when drug prices were low, and when the out-of-pocket cost of a hospital stay was not a financial catastrophe. American families with employer-based insurance today pay an average of nearly $7,000 per year in premiums. Employers pay another $20,000 per family. That cost is a direct drag on wages, business investment, and competitiveness with countries where the government absorbs it. His response to all of this has been to act as though nothing is wrong, to propose cutting Medicaid for millions of Americans, and to advance a budget that will accelerate the collapse of the rural hospital infrastructure that is the only healthcare option for tens of millions of people. Greenwood Leflore will not be the last.

The Housing Wall

The biggest driver of the affordability crisis most Americans feel every day is housing, and it is a crisis that was built over decades by the absence of the kind of federal policy that once made homeownership broadly attainable.

Rents are up roughly a third nationally since the pandemic, rising faster than inflation and at 1.5 times the growth in personal incomes. The monthly cost of owning a home with a mortgage, including taxes, insurance, and other carrying costs, has exceeded $2,000 for the first time in American history. In high-cost markets like California the average payment exceeds $3,000. Homeowners are simultaneously absorbing spikes in utilities and maintenance that compound the pressure.

Trump grew up surrounded by wealth in an era when federal housing policy was the most aggressive in American history. The postwar suburban boom was not a market phenomenon. It was a deliberate government project, financed by federal loan guarantees, built by federally subsidized developers, and populated by veterans whose mortgages were backed by the government at artificially low rates. The country built itself out of the housing shortage of the 1940s through an enormous act of public will. Those programs have since expired or been dismantled, and the private market has not replaced what they did.

The Trump administration’s response to the housing crisis has been to do almost nothing and in some cases to propose making it worse. The 2027 budget would eliminate rental subsidies for 3.7 million people, including nearly 2 million children. Plans for 50-year mortgages were floated and then abandoned. Proposals to let buyers use retirement accounts for down payments were walked back. The incentives that once housed a generation are gone. Trump either does not know they are gone or does not understand why they mattered.

The AI Displacement Nobody in Washington Is Talking About

Every previous wave of automation in American history displaced workers in one sector and created new ones in another. The steam engine put horse-drawn freight carriers out of business and created railroad jobs. Computers eliminated typing pools and created IT departments. The pattern held well enough, across enough decades, that it became an assumption: technology takes some jobs and creates others, and on balance progress wins.

Artificial intelligence is breaking that assumption, and the evidence is already in the employment numbers. Workers aged 22 to 25 have experienced a 16 percent decline in employment attributable to AI displacement — an entire generation beginning their working lives in an economy that is restructuring faster than policy can respond. Last month, an estimated 25 percent of layoffs in white-collar professions including law, media, and financial services were attributed to AI. The technology is not automating physical labor this time. It is automating the cognitive tasks that a college degree was supposed to protect.

The honest answer about what comes next is that nobody knows. AI’s defenders argue that new categories of work will emerge, as they always have. They cannot yet specify what those categories are or whether they will be economically meaningful for the people they are supposed to absorb. What is clear is that the window for getting ahead of this is closing, and the federal government has not begun to engage with it seriously. Instead, culture war absorbs their focus.

The Trump administration’s response has been institutional paralysis. The Commerce Department and the intelligence agencies are still negotiating jurisdiction over AI oversight. There are no mandatory security requirements for AI developers, even as bad actors are using the technology to build malware that can exploit American infrastructure faster than human defenders can respond. Trump came of age when every new technology was an unambiguous good — transistors, microwave ovens, commercial aviation, the interstate highway system. The political reflex from that era is to let innovation run and trust the market to sort out the consequences. That reflex produced enormous prosperity for fifty years. The question is whether it will work for a technology that can replace the people who are supposed to benefit from it.

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Add it all up and you have a president who is not simply making bad decisions. He is making categorically wrong-era decisions — applying frameworks that worked in a world that no longer exists to problems that require entirely different thinking.

In Iran, he fought a 21st century asymmetric war with a 20th century air campaign and is now calling the intelligence community traitors for reporting the results. On the federal budget, he is spending at Lyndon Johnson scale in an economy that grows at a third of Johnson’s rate. On healthcare, he is cutting the programs that keep rural hospitals open in communities that have no other option, apparently unaware that the private market he expects to replace them has been declining for thirty years. On housing, he is presiding over the most severe affordability crisis since the postwar shortage without appearing to understand that the programs that solved that shortage were government programs. And on artificial intelligence, he is watching the most consequential economic disruption since industrialization unfold without a policy framework for responding to it.

The Vietnam comparison that haunts this presidency is not simply about a quagmire in a distant country. Vietnam was a catastrophe because American leaders spent years telling the public one thing while the intelligence community was telling them another, until the gap became impossible to paper over and the cost had already been paid in lives and money that could never be recovered. The classified assessment published this week is that moment arriving again.

Every one of the failures discussed above has the same root: a man who learned how the world worked at a specific moment in American history and stopped updating the model. Countries that are run that way do not collapse all at once. They fall behind slowly, and then they look up one day and discover that the gap has become a canyon. We are not there yet. But the intelligence community is not the only one keeping score.

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We also have major news as the federal government continues to bend under Trump’s corruption, with online gun sales about to become a reality and the DOJ considers writing him a $10 billion check, paid by the taxpayers.

1. Republican Redistricting Plans Are Falling Apart Across the South

• In three separate Southern states this week, Republican redistricting efforts pushed by President Trump have stalled. South Carolina killed its redistricting push outright last night. Louisiana refused to deliver the map the White House wanted. And Mississippi punting the whole thing to 2027.

• The biggest blow came Tuesday in South Carolina, where the state Senate voted 29-17 to reject a measure that would have let the legislature redraw the state’s congressional map and eliminate Rep. James Clyburn’s seat ahead of the November midterms. Five Republican state senators broke ranks to block the measure, despite a personal phone call from the President and a Truth Social post Monday night warning lawmakers he was “watching closely.”

• Here’s Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, the most senior Republican to vote against the measure, explaining his decision:

• Watch what happens to Massey and the four other South Carolina Republicans who voted no. Just last Tuesday, five Indiana Republican state senators who had blocked their state’s redistricting effort in December were defeated in Trump-backed primaries.

• The scorecard is starting to look different than the White House expected. While the GOP has had wins in Florida and Tennessee, their momentum has slowed. South Carolina just refused altogether. Louisiana drew a 5-1 map but rejected the 6-0 map the White House wanted. And Mississippi delayed the whole effort until after the midterms.

• The Supreme Court did everything it could to give Republicans an open road on redistricting. The reason the road is bumpier than expected is that Republican state legislators in these states can read polling, and the polling is telling them that drawing too aggressively could pick up one seat in the short term and cost them the chamber for a decade. And the result is that the President’s plan to lock in Republican control of the House is starting to come apart in the very states he depended on the most.

2. The Trump Administration Is Quietly Legalizing Online Gun Sales. Unsurprisingly, One of His Kids Stands to Profit.

• The MeidasTouch News Network reported last night that the Trump administration’s DOJ, ATF, and USPS have all proposed regulatory changes in recent weeks that, taken together, would let Americans buy firearms online and have them delivered directly to their homes.

• The proposed rules cover three pieces.

  • The ATF would let federally licensed dealers verify a buyer’s identity digitally instead of in person.

  • A second ATF rule would broaden the state permits that exempt buyers from real-time FBI background checks.

  • And a USPS rule would let handguns be shipped through the U.S. mail for the first time since 1927.

• Together, these rules dismantle the in-person transfer requirement that has been the foundation of the Gun Control Act of 1968 for nearly 60 years.

• Donald Trump Jr. has a financial stake in this. He joined the board of GrabAGun, a Texas-based online firearms retailer that explicitly markets itself as the “Amazon of guns,” and reportedly received 300,000 shares as part of his consulting agreement when the company went public last year. And his father’s administration is now finalizing the rules that would make the business model dramatically more valuable.

• Here’s Don Jr. on Bloomberg late last year:

• The rules are still in the public comment phase. Watch for legal challenges from state attorneys general and gun violence prevention groups once the final rule drops. And watch for state-level resistance, because several states have laws on the books that would block residential firearm delivery regardless of what the federal framework allows.

• The Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed because Lee Harvey Oswald bought the rifle that killed President Kennedy through a mail-order ad, using a fake name and an out-of-state address. The whole point of in-person firearm transfers was to make sure that could never happen again.

• The administration is now trying to roll that back, while the President’s son holds stock in the company best positioned to profit. This is bad policy driven by unabashed corruption and we shouldn’t shy away from saying that loudly.

3. Trump Wants American Taxpayers to Pay Him $10 Billion. He Says Not to Worry, Because He’ll Give It to Charity.

• The New York Times reported Tuesday night that the Department of Justice is having “internal discussions” about settling President Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, in which Trump is the plaintiff, his own administration is the defendant, and any settlement money would come from taxpayers.

• Trump filed the $10 billion suit in March 2025 over a 2019 leak of his tax returns by a former IRS contractor. The DOJ, which is representing the IRS, is led by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal defense attorney.

• Here is Trump being asked on Air Force One whether it is fair to ask Americans to pay for the lawsuit:

• The President is negotiating with the Department of Justice he runs, through an acting Attorney General who used to be his personal lawyer, to pay himself $10 billion of taxpayer money.

• Federal District Judge Kathleen Williams, an Obama appointee, has already questioned whether Trump can sue an agency he oversees, writing that it is unclear whether Trump and the federal government are “sufficiently adverse to each other.”

• This is not complicated. The President wants money and he is using the powers of his office to get it from a government he controls. And American taxpayers are stuck with the bill. This is banana republic stuff, folks.

4. A Republican Congresswoman Just Insulted a 10-Year-Old in an Official Letter

• Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina responded to a 10-year-old constituent’s fourth-grade school assignment by accusing his teachers of “indoctrinating” him with “propaganda,” in a letter that prompted his mother to publicly call the response “horrific.”

• The fourth grader, Christian Mango, attends Canterbury School, a private Episcopal day school in Greensboro. In April, his class was assigned to write persuasive essays and mail them to someone in a position to act on their request. Christian chose to write to Foxx, his congresswoman, urging her to support a $5,000 federal tax rebate for electric vehicle purchases.

• He sent his essay in a Canterbury School envelope clearly marked “4th grade” on the return address. Foxx wrote back a few weeks later. The letter included six articles from outlets like the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, an argument that Christian and his classmates would be responsible for the national debt, and the line his mother says crossed every line.

• Here is Christian reading the closing of the congresswoman’s letter:

• I served alongside Virginia Foxx for ten years in the House. This is not the congresswoman I knew. But the reason is simple: the Trumpification of the GOP has destroyed the character and judgement of more people that I once respected than I care to count.

5. U.S. Intelligence Says Iran Has Restored Nearly Every Missile Site Along the Strait of Hormuz. Trump Calls The Reporting “Virtual Treason.”

• The New York Times reported Tuesday evening, based on classified U.S. intelligence, that Iran has restored operational access to 30 of its 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz, retains roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile, and has regained access to about 90 percent of its underground missile facilities.

• The classified assessments directly contradict what the President and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have spent two months telling the country, which is that Iran’s military was “shattered,” “crushed,” and “decimated.” The intelligence community now says it is none of those things.

• The President’s reaction Tuesday afternoon was to post on Truth Social that the “Fake News” reporting on Iran is “virtual treason” and that the journalists involved are “aiding and abetting the enemy.”

• Watch for the next leak. Intelligence officers do not start handing classified assessments to The New York Times unless they believe their concerns are not being heard inside the building. And let’s see whether any Republican senator on the Intelligence or Armed Services Committee demands a briefing this week.

• Two months ago, the President started a war with Iran and told the country it would be quick. But today, after already spending more than $29 billion on the war, no end seems to be in sight and our destroyed enemy appears to not be destroyed. The intelligence community has been trying to say so for weeks.

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Some other stories that caught my eye:

• Nebraska Democrats Just Cleared the Path for an Independent Veteran to Take On a GOP Senator. Cindy Burbank won the Nebraska Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday night and plans to drop out before November, clearing the way for independent Dan Osborn to face Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts head-to-head. Osborn is a Navy veteran, an industrial mechanic, and the former union leader who led the 2021 Kellogg’s strike in Omaha. He came within seven points of Sen. Deb Fischer in 2024, in a year Donald Trump carried Nebraska by more than twenty points. Ricketts, the eldest son of TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, has a personal net worth of roughly $200 million.

• Trump Doesn’t Rule Out Sending Federal Agents to Polling Places This November. President Trump told reporters Tuesday that he would do “anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections,” and refused to rule out deploying National Guard troops or ICE agents to polling locations during the 2026 midterms. The same day, the Republican National Committee announced it would spend millions on an “election integrity” push across 17 states. Federal law since 1865 bans armed federal agents from places where elections are held, and any kind of voter intimidation is illegal under both federal and state law. The answer is supposed to be an easy “no.”

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Hey everyone! Today Im inviting () Michael Weiss to come on a live and discuss Iran, Ukraine, and a few other things. Be sure to tune in, you should get an email when I start it.

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Adam

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Ok, let’s get to it.

1. Inflation Just Hit 3.8 Percent, the Highest It’s Been in Three Years.

• The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday morning that the Consumer Price Index rose 0.6 percent in April and 3.8 percent over the past twelve months, the highest annual reading since May 2023.

• Energy drove the spike. The BLS reported that energy prices alone rose 3.8 percent in April and accounted for more than 40 percent of the monthly increase. Food prices climbed another 3.2 percent on the year. The underlying cause is not a mystery. Gas prices are up roughly 50 percent since the Iran war began on February 28, and Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has kept roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply offline for more than two months.

• This is the first taste of what the war is costing Americans at home. Bank of America announced after the report that it no longer expects the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates at all in 2026, pushing its first rate cut forecast all the way to the second half of 2027. That means continued high borrowing costs for mortgages, car loans, and credit cards through the rest of this year and likely well into next.

• Inflation is now the top concern of American voters, and 63 percent of them blame President Trump directly for the price spike. Sixty-nine percent disapprove of his handling of inflation overall.

• Last week, the University of Michigan consumer sentiment index fell to 48.2, the lowest reading since the survey began in 1952. That is worse than the 2008 financial crisis, worse than the depths of the pandemic, and worse than the post-Covid inflation spike. Here is how the President’s top economic advisor explained that on CNBC:

• So, to translate: Americans are not actually struggling. They are just overwhelmed by the sheer pace of winning. I’m sure that makes you all feel better about things, now doesn’t it?

• Trump leaves for a state visit with Xi Jinping in Beijing on Thursday, where Iran will be central to the agenda. Watch whether oil prices respond to anything that comes out of that summit, because nothing else on the table is going to fix this in the short term.

• Kevin Warsh is set to be confirmed by the Senate this week to take over the Federal Reserve from Jerome Powell. The administration spent the better part of a year pressuring the Fed to cut rates. The Fed is now boxed in by a war the same administration started, and the new chair is going to inherit the worst inflation reading in three years on his first day.

2. Don Jr. and Eric Trump Took $59 Million in Deposits For Golden Trump Phones Last Summer. Now Customers Are Furious At Them.

• In June 2025, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump stood on stage at Trump Tower and announced Trump Mobile, a new wireless company built around a gold-colored smartphone called the T1.

• Eric Trump went on Benny Johnson’s podcast to tell supporters exactly what they were paying for: a phone that would eventually be built in the United States, backed by an all-American customer service operation:

• But the “Made in the USA” language quietly disappeared from the Trump Mobile website, replaced with vague phrases like “designed with American values.” By February, company executives confirmed that the phone would actually be manufactured overseas, with only final assembly of about ten components happening in Miami. Industry analysts have since identified the likely manufacturer as Wingtech, a Chinese company owned by Luxshare.

• Now the third shoe has dropped. Last month, Trump Mobile quietly updated the fine print on its preorder page to say that the $100 deposit “does not guarantee that a Device will be produced or made available for purchase.” In plain English, the company that took $59 million from customers just confirmed in writing that they may never get a phone, may never get their money back, and have no binding contract to enforce.

• Watch the FTC, because Elizabeth Warren and ten Senate Democrats already asked the agency to investigate this in January, and the FTC has been notably quiet under this administration. Watch state attorneys general, who do not need federal permission to act. And watch the customer base, because the people who paid for a gold Trump phone are the most loyal supporters this President has, but he is just blatantly ripping them off.

3. Josh Hawley Just Introduced a Bill He Called “One of the Dumbest Things I’ve Ever Heard Of” Three Years Ago

• Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri introduced the Gas Tax Suspension Act on Monday, legislation that would pause the federal gas tax for 90 days, just hours after President Trump told CBS News he wanted Congress to do exactly that.

• In 2022, when Democrats proposed the same idea under President Biden, here is what Republicans, including Hawley himself, had to say about it:

• The only thing that changed is which party is in the White House. Republicans spent four years building a political brand on Biden’s gas prices, and now that Trump’s war with Iran is driving prices through the roof, they are endorsing the exact policy they ridiculed just a couple of years ago.

• The math here is rough. Pausing the gas tax for 90 days saves the average driver about $2.21 on a 12-gallon fill-up while costing the federal Highway Trust Fund roughly half a billion dollars a week.

• And the actual cause of the price spike, Trump’s war with Iran, is not going anywhere. Trump just called Iran’s latest peace offer a ‘piece of garbage.’ The bill doesn’t fix the problem. It just lets Republicans tell their constituents they tried.

4. Pete Hegseth Is Investigating Senator Mark Kelley. Again.

• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that Pentagon legal counsel will investigate Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona for “blabbing on TV” about a classified Pentagon briefing on U.S. weapons stockpiles in the Iran war, marking the second time Hegseth has formally targeted Kelly since taking office.

• Kelly, a retired Navy captain and former NASA astronaut who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Face the Nation on Sunday morning that it was “shocking how deep we have gone into these magazines,” referring to the U.S. stockpile of key munitions that we have burned through with the Iran war. Within hours, Hegseth posted on X that Kelly had “violated his oath” and the Pentagon would review his comments.

• Senator Kelly responded by posting a video of Hegseth talking about this very issue, publicly, just a few weeks ago:

• Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official and senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told The Hill that Hegseth’s attack on Kelly is ‘the national security equivalent of going ad hominem on a debate opponent when you’re poorly matched on knowledge, ability and content.’ He added that Hegseth’s choice to bicker over classification rather than address Kelly’s actual argument ‘suggests Hegseth simply can’t argue on the facts.’

• The Defense Secretary is using the Pentagon’s legal authority to investigate a fellow veteran and sitting senator for saying out loud what the Pentagon has already said in public. That is not how this country is supposed to function, and every member of Congress who served in uniform should be saying so this week.

5. Trump’s Approval Rating Just Crashed to the Lowest Point of His Second Term.

• A wave of polling released over the last two weeks shows President Trump’s approval rating sinking to between 32 and 37 percent across major surveys, the lowest reading of his second term, with the steepest drops coming on inflation, the Iran war, and the cost of living.

• The most telling number is not coming from a left-leaning outlet. It is coming from Fox News, the network the President watches and quotes daily, which now has his disapproval rating at 59 percent, the highest reading they have ever recorded for him in either term.

• The collapse is being driven by the issues Americans actually live with every day. Gas at $4.52 a gallon, the highest grocery bills in three years, and a war that nobody asked for with no end in sight.

• And look, this is a White House that has spent months telling Americans that the things they are seeing are not happening, that they are happening for good reasons, or that the people noticing them are the problem.

• The political consequences are now starting to show up where they matter. Republicans in tough districts and tough states are getting nervous, and they are quietly looking for ways to put distance between themselves and the President wherever they can find it.

• November is six months away, which is a lifetime in politics. But the trajectory is the trajectory, and right now it is pointing in one direction.

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Some other stories that caught my eye:

• The President Is Spending $13 Million to Paint the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool Blue. President Trump announced last month that he would resurface the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in a color he is calling “American Flag Blue.” The work is now underway, and the President drove across the drained pool last week to inspect it personally. Trump said the project would cost about $2 million when he announced it on April 23. The New York Times reported this week that the contracting firm is actually being paid more than $13 million, and that the contract was awarded without competitive bidding. The Reflecting Pool was built in 1922. It has been a defining feature of the National Mall for more than a century, and the dark stone basin was specifically designed to create the illusion of depth and a more profound reflection between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.

• A Court Just Struck Down Trump’s Tariffs. Again. The Trump administration filed a motion Monday asking the US Court of International Trade to pause its own ruling that the President’s 10 percent global tariffs are unlawful, while the government appeals the decision. In a 2-1 ruling last week, the trade court found that Trump’s use of Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose the tariffs was invalid. The administration’s motion would let US Customs and Border Protection keep collecting the tariffs from importers during the appeal, which could take months. This is the second time in three months that a federal court has invalidated a major Trump tariff program. The Supreme Court struck down the President’s earlier IEEPA tariffs in February, and roughly $166 billion is now being refunded to importers as a result.

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Video discussion for paid subscribers follows article

I get the emails every day. The DMs. The conversations after speeches. People are exhausted, and a lot of you are scared. The redistricting fight has been ugly, and it deserves to be called what it is: a deliberate, coordinated effort by Republican legislatures across the South to erase Black congressional districts and rig the next decade of representation before a single vote is cast. That is a structural threat to our democracy, and I won’t pretend otherwise. We are going to be fighting that battle in courts and in statehouses for a long time.

But I want to be very clear about something, because the doom is starting to drown out the data:

On this election — November 2026 — the numbers say wave.

Let me run through where we actually are, because the gap between the mood online and the mood in the data is enormous right now.

Trump’s job approval has fallen to roughly 40% overall (that’s the generous number) — and on the issue voters care most about, it is in a freefall. His approval on the economy is sitting at 30%, a career low. On inflation specifically, only 25% approve of how he is handling it. 61% of Americans say the economy is getting worse, the largest share since 2022. And in a CNN poll just out this month, 77% of Americans — including a majority of Republicans — say Trump’s policies have raised the cost of living in their own community.

That is not a poll. That is a verdict.

Democrats now lead the generic congressional ballot, and on the central issues — cost of living, the middle class, inflation — voters trust Democrats more than the GOP. The history is on our side too: the president’s party has lost an average of 28 House seats in modern midterms. Republicans are defending a razor-thin majority. Prediction markets are pricing the House flip at around 78% for Democrats, and Sabato’s Crystal Ball, which is about as sober as it gets, now gives Democrats a strong chance to take it back.

This is what a wave looks like before it crests.

Why the House Matters More Than People Realize

A Democratic House is not just a number on a scoreboard. It is the difference between continued silence and finally — finally — sunlight.

Right now, the corruption is happening in broad daylight and nobody with subpoena power is doing a thing about it. Self-dealing. Foreign money. Pardons traded like party favors. Cabinet officials operating without any meaningful oversight. The agencies hollowed out from within. A Democratic House means hearings. Real ones. Documents. Witnesses under oath. The kind of accountability the Founders designed Congress to provide, and that the current majority has abandoned entirely.

I served on the January 6th Committee. I know what oversight can do when people in power take the job seriously. We need that gavel back.

The Real Question Is the Senate

The Senate is the harder fight, and it is the one that will tell us how big this wave really is. Democrats need a net gain of four seats. Here is the map:

Maine. Susan Collins is the most vulnerable Republican incumbent in the country. Polling is tight but good.

North Carolina. Open seat. Roy Cooper — popular two-term governor — against Trump-endorsed Michael Whatley. Toss-up across every major rater. Cooper is exactly the kind of candidate who wins in a state like this in an environment like this.

Georgia and Michigan. These are the must-holds. If Democrats lose either, the math to 51 stops working. Both are tough, both are winnable, and both are where the DSCC will be pouring resources.

The reach states. Ohio, Iowa, Alaska, Texas, New Hampshire. In a normal year, most of these are out of reach. In a wave year, two or three of them come into play — and we only need a couple to break right. In Nebraska, Independent candidate Dan Osborn is 4 points ahead of the incumbent.

If Democrats take the Senate, Trump loses the ability to confirm another judge for the next two years. Every cabinet vacancy gets a real vote. Every reckless nominee gets stopped at the door. The damage of the next two years gets contained instead of compounded. That is the stakes.

Stay in the Fight

I know the summer feels long. I know watching the redistricting maps roll out feels like watching a slow-motion theft. The structural problems are real, and we will keep fighting them.

But November is closer than it feels. The economy is not going to get better between now and then. Trump’s numbers are not going to magically recover. The wave is forming — you can see it in every poll, in every special election result, in every town hall where Republican members are getting booed in their own districts.

Keep showing up. Keep registering voters. Keep donating where you can. Talk to your neighbors — especially the quiet ones who voted for him and now regret it. They exist, and there are millions of them.

The summer will go fast. November will be here before you know it.

And we are going to win.

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Ok, Let’s get to it.

1. Stephen Miller Is On The Hot Seat.

• The Atlantic reports that Stephen Miller is seeing his influence in the White House rapidly diminish. Trump has dismantled the roving Border Patrol strike forces that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller designed, and has handed control of the deportation program back to career law enforcement officials. This is the most significant internal retreat by the President on his own immigration agenda since taking office.

• Miller was the architect of Trump’s second-term immigration agenda. He spent the first year of the administration building the most aggressive enforcement model in modern American history — mass workplace raids, Border Patrol strike forces, the targeting of long-settled families. Trump signed off on all of it.

• The political reality caught up to Miller in stages. Trump’s approval rating on immigration, his strongest issue throughout the 2024 campaign, collapsed. The fatal shootings of two American citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, by federal agents during the Minneapolis raids in January made the political damage impossible to ignore. Trump fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in March. Career officials are now running the operation Miller designed.

• The pattern began to emerge months ago. Back in January, after the U.S. captured Maduro in Caracas, reporters started asking Miller what he was actually doing inside the administration. Watch what he said when CNN’s Kaitlan Collins pressed him on it:

• This is what an internal political retreat looks like in real time. White House insiders insist Miller’s job is not in jeopardy and that he remains a top adviser, but the policy levers are being pulled out of his hands one at a time. The administration is keeping the rhetoric and dialing back the operation, because the operation was costing them the midterms.

• Immigration is still expected to be central to Trump’s midterm messaging, but the gap between what Miller wants and what Trump’s political team will allow is now visible. Whether Miller accepts that quietly or pushes back publicly is the next question. He has not historically been someone who accepts being sidelined quietly, but Miller is the classic political survivor.

2. Trump Is Furious That Cuba Hasn’t Collapsed Yet. Now We All Have To Hope He Doesn’t Do Something Crazy.

• President Trump has grown increasingly frustrated with the Cuban government’s resilience under months of U.S. economic pressure. He has been pressing his advisers about why his administration’s efforts to topple the regime have not yet produced results, NBC News reported this morning.

• The frustration follows a year of escalating American pressure on Cuba. In January, the U.S. military captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in an early-morning operation in Caracas, which cut off Cuba’s primary oil supplier. Trump began publicly predicting Cuba would “fall of its own volition.”

• In March, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office what he thinks his options really are:

• Trump has used military force to remove two foreign leaders in five months, one captured and one killed. Cuba is the third country on the list. U.S. officials internally believe the regime could collapse by the end of this year, but Trump considers that too slow. The administration has already begun exploring federal criminal charges against Cuban officials, the same legal playbook used against Maduro. There is no clean version of what happens if the President decides economic pressure is no longer fast enough.

• Cuba has already had three nationwide blackouts since March. UN experts have called the U.S. fuel blockade a “serious violation of international law.” The Cuban government has said it is willing to talk about anything except changing its government. Trump has indicated nothing else is on the table.

• We are seeing in Iran the ramifications of poorly planned efforts at regime change. Let us pray Trump’s ego and impulsiveness don’t pull us into another debacle in the Caribbean.

3. The Iran War Is Closer to Restarting Than Ending.

• President Trump rejected Iran’s response to the latest U.S. ceasefire proposal, posting on Truth Social that the offer was “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!” and accusing Tehran of “playing games with the United States, and the rest of the World.”

• The U.S. sent Iran a 14-point proposal last week through Pakistani mediators. The deal would have required Iran to halt uranium enrichment for 12 years, hand over its 60-percent enriched stockpile, and reopen the Strait of Hormuz within 30 days. In return, the U.S. would lift sanctions, unfreeze Iranian assets, and end the naval blockade. Iran came back with a counter-proposal over the weekend. Trump rejected it within hours, on Truth Social. Here’s Trump this morning:

• This is the most fragile the ceasefire has been since it was reached on April 8. Both sides are dug in on the nuclear question, which Trump has called his red line and Iran has called non-negotiable. Netanyahu called an emergency security meeting in Jerusalem this morning, just hours after Trump’s post. His office signaled to Israeli media that “the war is not over.” Meanwhile, the U.N. warned today that tens of millions of people could face famine if fertilizer shipments do not get through the Strait of Hormuz in the next few weeks. This has never been just an oil story.

• Watch what Pakistan does next, because Pakistan is the only reason these two parties are still talking. Watch Israel, because Netanyahu has been waiting for a reason to resume operations in Lebanon since the ceasefire was announced. And watch CENTCOM, which announced this morning it has redirected 62 commercial ships and disabled four since the blockade went into effect on April 13.

• The CIA told the White House last week that Iran can survive this blockade for months. Iran is signaling it would rather starve the global south than concede on enrichment. And the leader of the free world is conducting the most dangerous negotiation of his presidency in all caps.

4. The Hantavirus Cruise Ship Just Docked in Spain. 18 Americans Are Now in Quarantine in Nebraska.

• The MV Hondius finally docked in Spain on Sunday, ending two weeks at sea, and 18 Americans from the ship landed in Omaha early Monday morning, where they have been admitted to the only federally funded quarantine unit in the country.

• Fifteen of the Americans are in the quarantine unit, which works more like a hotel for people who may have been exposed. One American, who tested positive, is in the biocontainment unit next door. That is the same wing that took in Ebola patients in 2014 and the first COVID-19 patients in 2020. Two more Americans are being monitored elsewhere. At a press conference this morning, the Assistant Secretary for Health, Dr. Brian Christine, told the country the risk to the public is, in his words, “very, very low.”

• To be incredibly clear: the Andes variant of hantavirus does not spread the way COVID did. It takes prolonged, close contact with someone who is already showing symptoms. The average American is not going to catch this. But “low risk” is not the same thing as “contained.” This virus is now in five countries on three continents. Three people are dead. Contact tracers are trying to find 90 people who shared a single flight from Saint Helena to Johannesburg with a confirmed case. Another 30 passengers got off the ship at earlier ports and went home to places we have not yet heard about. The outbreak is being tracked. It is not over.

• Watch the next two weeks, because the Nebraska quarantine unit has 20 rooms and one of them is already taken by a confirmed case. Watch Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Singapore, where new infections have already shown up in people who disembarked earlier. And watch how this story gets covered, because the country that voluntarily walked out of the World Health Organization in January is now relying on the WHO to run the contact tracing across three continents.

5. Gas Prices Are Up 50% Since the Iran War Started. The Same Republicans Who Hammered Biden Over Gas Are Suddenly Out of Town.

• The average price of a gallon of gas in the United States hit $4.48 last week, a 50 percent increase from before President Trump’s war with Iran began and the highest pump price Americans have paid since 2022. 81 percent of Americans now say gas prices are straining their household budget, including 79 percent of Republicans.

• This is the same party that built the entire 2022 and 2024 campaign cycles around gas prices. “I Did That” stickers of Joe Biden’s face went on pumps across the country. Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas, asked on Newsmax about the price spike, told American families directly that their national security was more important than their wallets.

• The “pay more, complain less” message is not just coming from one senator. Rep. Mike Lawler of New York, who is facing a tough reelection race in a district Trump barely won, ran a 2024 campaign ad saying gas prices had “gone through the roof” when the national average was $3.19. In March, with prices climbing and the Iran war underway, he told CNN they were “absolutely worth it.” Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, who in 2021 said Americans “can’t afford to pay 50% more to fill up their gas tanks” at $3.41, now calls the new $4.48 prices a simple “trade-off.”

• Voters are noticing. Sixty-three percent of Americans, including a third of Republicans, blame Trump directly for the current gas price spike. Trump’s approval on the economy has dropped to 35 percent. Democrats now lead the generic congressional ballot by ten points. Republican strategists quoted by NOTUS say they have until the Fourth of July to fix this before it gets baked in for the midterms.

• They are not going to fix it. The blockade is still in place. The war isn’t over. And the people in charge keep telling Americans the prices are worth it. And the American people keep disagreeing.

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Some other stories that caught my eye:

• Trump Heads to Beijing This Week for a High-Stakes Summit with Xi Jinping. President Trump arrives in Beijing on Thursday for a two-day summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the first state visit to China by a sitting U.S. President since Trump’s own 2017 trip. The White House says the agenda will focus on trade, rare earth exports, Taiwan, AI, and Iran, where Beijing remains Tehran’s largest oil buyer and could play a decisive role in reopening the Strait of Hormuz. The summit was originally scheduled for March but was delayed after the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran. Xi just hosted Iran’s foreign minister last week, signaling that Beijing wants to be seen as the broker who solves the war Trump started. China has also tightened rare earth export controls, banned Nexperia chip exports, and ordered Chinese companies not to comply with U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil.

• RFK Jr. Just Launched a Federal Campaign to Get Americans Off Antidepressants. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced last Monday a new federal initiative to curb “overprescribing” of psychiatric medications, with a particular focus on getting Americans off SSRIs like Zoloft, Prozac, Lexapro, and Paxil. Kennedy framed the plan as one focused on “patient autonomy” and “informed consent,” and said the country has a “dependency crisis driven by overmedicalization.” The initiative includes new Medicare and Medicaid payments for clinicians who help patients taper off these medications and new federal training materials on so-called deprescribing. Kennedy has previously claimed that SSRIs are more addictive than heroin and may be linked to school shootings. The medical evidence does not support either claim. The American Psychiatric Association responded by stating it “strongly objects to framing the nation’s mental health crisis as primarily a problem of overmedicalization.”

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You’ve probably seen the clips, even if you weren’t looking for them. They surface in your feed, get passed around in group chats, get stitched and remixed until they feel like background noise.

A guy who calls himself “Chud the Builder” walks around in public, shouting racial slurs — including the N-word — at strangers, trying to bait somebody, anybody, into a reaction he can monetize. Another character who goes by “Clavicular” livestreams himself as a self-described “looksmaxxer,” roaming around trying to approach women on the street, turning their discomfort into content for an audience of young men he is quietly teaching to see other human beings as props.

Around those two spins a whole orbit of MAGA-flavored streamers running the same play: provoke a stranger, get them on camera, and the instant anyone pushes back — a shove, a raised voice, a hand near the lens — pivot on a dime to “I’m calling the police,” “I’m pressing charges,” “I’ll see you in court,” “my lawyer will be in touch.”

I want to talk about what this actually is. Because I think a lot of people see these clips and feel something curdle in their stomach and can’t quite name it. I can name it. It’s cowardice dressed up as content. And it is doing real damage.

Let me be plain. This isn’t free speech. It isn’t journalism. It isn’t edgy comedy or “just asking questions.” It’s a grift, and the grift has a specific shape.

The shape is this: you go out in public, you do something deliberately humiliating or threatening or dehumanizing to another person, you film it, and then you use the legal and police systems — the very systems this movement claims to despise — as a shield the moment your target shows the slightest bit of human reaction. The provocateur gets to play the victim. The actual victim gets a cop called on them, or a lawsuit filed against them, or both. And tens of thousands of teenage boys watch it happen and learn a lesson that will deform them for the rest of their lives.

The lesson is: cruelty is funny, women are targets, minorities are punchlines, and if anybody objects, you have the state on your side.

This is destroying a generation

I don’t say that lightly. I’m a parent. I talk to a lot of parents. I get emails from mothers whose 14-year-old sons have gone from playing baseball and talking about girls to sitting in a dark room watching this stuff for six hours a night and laughing in a way that doesn’t sound like laughter anymore.

This content is engineered to be addictive in the same way slot machines are engineered. The dopamine hit of watching somebody else get humiliated is enormous, and it scales. You start with one streamer harassing a barista. A month later you’re watching guys scream slurs in subway cars and you’re laughing because the editing is good and the music drop is funny.

And what does it produce, at the end of it? It produces young men who genuinely cannot tell the difference between courage and cruelty. Who think being “based” means having the guts to say something ugly to a woman in a Target parking lot. Who think confrontation is the same thing as strength.

It is not the same thing. It has never been the same thing. The men I served with overseas — the ones I’d actually call brave — would have been physically embarrassed for these guys. Bravery is what you do when the camera is off. This is the opposite of that.

Here’s the big part.

Watch what happens in those clips the moment the target starts to push back. The streamer doesn’t square up. The streamer doesn’t stand on principle. The streamer doesn’t even hold the line on whatever ugly thing they just said. They reach for a phone and they say the magic words: “I’m calling the cops.” “You just assaulted me on camera.” “My lawyer will be in touch.”

That is the tell. That is the entire game, exposed in one move.

If you actually believed in the strength you were performing — if you actually thought the slur or the leer or the confrontation was a brave act — you would own it. You would take whatever came next. You wouldn’t run behind the badge of an institution your whole brand is built on hating.

The lawsuit-and-law-enforcement pivot is the ultimate confession of weakness. It is the moment the costume slips. It says, in plain language, I am not strong enough to stand behind my own words for ten seconds without an armed agent of the state arriving to protect me.

That’s not strength. That’s not toughness. That’s a small man with a phone and a lawyer on retainer.

And it goes all the way to the top

This isn’t just streamers in parking lots. This is the operating system of the whole movement now, and it runs from the bottom of the ladder all the way to the top of it.

Donald Trump has spent his entire public life threatening to sue people. Reporters. Networks. Pollsters. Companies that won’t put his face on a magazine cover. Women who described what he did to them. He has sued, threatened to sue, or demanded the Justice Department prosecute his political opponents and even his former staffers more times than anyone can count. He has openly mused about using federal law enforcement against critics, comedians, satirists — and yes, against members of his own former party who refused to lie for him.

The man who built a brand on the word “strong” runs to the courthouse and the prosecutor’s office every single time somebody embarrasses him.

That’s not strength. That is the same move the streamer in the Target parking lot is making. The exact same move. Provoke, get pushback, then call in the lawyers and the cops. The scale is different. The play is identical.

Here’s what makes this especially painful for those of us who used to be Republicans in good standing.

The party I joined was the party that screamed — correctly, in many cases — about “lawfare.” About the criminalization of politics. About prosecutorial overreach. About frivolous lawsuits clogging the courts. The GOP I knew talked constantly about personal responsibility, about taking your lumps, about not running to mommy government every time life got hard. Tort reform used to be a Republican rallying cry.

Now the entire movement is one long lawsuit. Now the model citizen is a guy who screams at a stranger and immediately dials 911. Now the leader of the party threatens to sue or jail anybody who makes him look bad.

I don’t say this to score points. I say it because it matters that we name the inversion clearly. The people who told you for forty years that the left was weaponizing the courts have, in the space of a decade, become the most litigious, police-summoning political movement in modern American history. They didn’t oppose lawfare. They envied it. And the moment they got near power, they picked it up and swung it harder than anyone they ever accused.

I know this piece sounds bleak. It is bleak. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. A generation of young men is being marinated in this stuff right now, and we are going to be living with the consequences for a long time.

But I want to tell you why I am, somehow, still hopeful.

Every cultural sickness this country has gone through has eventually produced its own immune response. The excesses of the 1920s gave us the seriousness of the 1930s and 40s. The cruelty of segregation gave us the moral clarity of the civil rights movement. The cynicism of Watergate gave us a generation of public servants who actually believed in the institutions again. The pendulum is real, and it swings because human beings, in the aggregate, eventually get tired of being lied to and demeaned.

I think we are closer to the snap-back than people realize.

I talk to young men who are quietly disgusted by what they are being offered. They don’t want to be Chud the Builder. They don’t want to be the looksmaxxer. They can feel that the streamer in the parking lot is small, even when the algorithm is telling them he’s a hero. They want lives that mean something. They want to be brave in the real sense — to build things, to protect people, to be loved by someone who actually knows them. They are out there. They are paying attention. And they are not impressed.

When the counter-reaction comes, and it will come, it will not look like another political movement. It will look like a quiet, generational decision that cruelty isn’t cool anymore. That calling the cops on someone you provoked isn’t tough — it’s pathetic. That a man who sues everyone who hurts his feelings is not a strong man. That the loudest guy in the room, the one with the camera and the slur and the lawyer’s number saved in his favorites, is exactly what he looks like: afraid.

The bullies always think they’re winning, right up until the day they aren’t. That day is closer than they think.

And when it comes, history will remember which of us stood up early and named this thing for what it was.

I intend to be on that list. I hope you’ll be on it with me.

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Mark your calendar: our Live Politics Debrief for paid subscribers is TODAY 5/11 at 4:30EST/3:30CST.

Other than marking your calendar, there’s nothing you need to do ahead of time. You’ll get a notification from Substack or an email when I go Live. You’ll be able to join live, weigh in, and hear my thoughts directly and in real time.

I’m grateful that you’re part of the community. Looking forward to talking tomorrow.

Hey everyone and a happy Mother’s Day to the moms reading this. I hope someone is bringing you coffee, and you get to spend the day surrounded by the loved ones who you have poured yourselves into day after day.

For today’s Good News Sunday, I want to tell you about a quiet, five-year, state-by-state shift that has fundamentally changed health care for new mothers in this country for the better. And that almost nobody outside of policy circles has heard a word about.

After Wisconsin’s legislature passed it earlier this year, the United States now has 49 states plus the District of Columbia covering new mothers on Medicaid for a full year after they give birth. Just one state — Arkansas — still cuts that coverage off at 60 days.

Five years ago, that number was zero.

Here is what this means in plain English. Medicaid pays for about four in ten births in the United States. It is, by a wide margin, the largest single source of maternity care in this country. Until 2022, federal law only required states to cover those mothers for 60 days after they gave birth. Sixty days. After that, the coverage ended. Mom went home, the bill arrived, the insurance disappeared.

The trouble was simple. Recovery from childbirth doesn’t fit into 60 days. Healing takes longer far than that. So does screening for postpartum depression, adjusting medications, following up on any condition that pregnancy revealed or worsened, and getting to the appointments where a doctor catches the small things before they become big ones. The first year after a baby comes home is one of the most demanding stretches of a woman’s life. Moms deserve a doctor in it.

The fix was straightforward and sat in front of policymakers for years: extend Medicaid coverage from 60 days to 12 months. The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 created the option for states to do exactly that. The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 made the option permanent. And then, very quietly, a state-by-state rolling adoption began.

The full ideological spectrum of American state governments have signed on. Conservative Governor Abbott signed Texas’s extension in 2023, calling it “critical bipartisan legislation.” Florida and Massachusetts agree on this. Alabama and New Jersey agree on this. Wisconsin’s legislature finally agreed on it this winter after years of failed attempts.

There is something genuinely heartening about watching elected officials in fifty different state capitals — almost all of whom disagree about almost everything else — quietly arrive at the same conclusion: that mothers should not lose their doctor two months after they have a baby.

The early outcome data is also encouraging. A study of Texas mothers found that, after extension, women used roughly twice as many postpartum services — preventive care, contraception, mental and behavioral health treatment — and short-interval pregnancies dropped 37 percent. Research on Colorado’s earlier expansion found a meaningful increase in postpartum women receiving treatment for perinatal mood and anxiety disorders. Other studies have linked the extension to reductions in postpartum hospitalizations and emergency department visits. None of this is a maternal-health miracle on its own. It is the kind of basic, structural fix that should have been law decades ago.

There’s more work ahead, of course. American moms deserve better than they get on a lot of fronts. But this is the kind of practical, durable progress worth celebrating today — and hundreds of thousands of new mothers and babies every year are quietly better off because of it.

Again, happy Mother’s Day to every mom reading this. Take the day. Let someone else look after you this time.

And that, my friends, is good news for your Sunday.

Thanks everyone for the questions! If you’re a free subscriber, consider becoming a paid… mainly to support the cause but also you get some more “stuff!”

The first couple questions are available for everyone.

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Today we have a remarkable set of stories that paint a clear picture: this administration continues to operate under the assumption that voters, courts, allies, and the truth are all things they can ignore.

First, the White House Chief of Staff went on the record that the country is about to “find out” Trump actually won the 2020 election. Ominous.

At the same time, Senate Republicans are privately panicking about having to vote on Trump’s billion-dollar ballroom. A new CIA analysis directly contradicts everything the administration has told you about the Iran war. The Virginia Supreme Court just struck down the redistricting map that voters approved three weeks ago. And the Pentagon dropped UFO files on a news-heavy Friday, because of course they did.

Real quick before we get into it. If you find this useful, please like, share, and subscribe to the Substack. Every share gets this in front of someone new, and it really helps.

Let’s get to it.

1. The White House Chief of Staff Just Said The Country Will “Find Out” Trump Actually Won in 2020

• White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles told an audience at the Independent Women’s Forum gala Thursday night that she believes the country will “find out” that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election in states beyond Florida.

• This is the senior-most staffer in the White House recounting her conversations with Trump about the 2020 race:

• This wasn’t a slip. The White House Chief of Staff doesn’t accidentally tell a roomful of Republicans what she thinks the country is about to discover. She tells them because she believes it, and because she expects them to believe it too.

• And she’s not alone. The President himself has told reporters, on the record, that he regrets not seizing voting machines after losing in 2020. The DOJ is now demanding ballots from Wayne County, Michigan — for the 2024 election.

• Joe Biden won the 2020 election by seven million votes. Every court that looked at fraud claims rejected them. Georgia counted its ballots three times. None of that matters anymore. But the Chief of Staff to the President of the United States just said the country is about to “find out” otherwise. This is a clear signal that the White House is continuing to explore every avenue to meddle in future elections. Vigilance has never been more important.

2. Congressional Republicans Are Terrified To Vote For Trump’s $1B Ballroom

• Senate Republicans privately admit they’re afraid to take a vote on $1 billion in taxpayer funding for Trump’s White House ballroom that’s been tucked into the GOP’s $70 billion ICE funding bill. Republican senator anonymously warned that doing so “right before the election” would be “absolutely not” good politics.

• The publicly-disclosed cost has gone from $200 million to $400 million to a project requiring $1 billion in federal security infrastructure, all in less than a year. But the ballroom was supposed to be privately funded, Trump has said so for months. Check out this CNN montage of Trump repeatedly promising Americans they wouldn’t be paying a dime:

• So why is it now in a funding bill? That is, by definition, taxpayer dollars.

• This is the moment Republicans are realizing they may have to defend on the campaign trail. Conservative stalwart Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) said he wants the construction privately funded as Trump originally promised.

• Watch what happens when the bill comes to the floor. Trump wants it on his desk by June 1. Expect amendments to strip out the ballroom money, expect quiet conversations to keep those amendments from getting recorded votes, and expect at least a couple of Republicans up for re-election to suddenly be out of town.

3. The CIA Just Contradicted Everything the Pentagon Has Been Saying About Iran

• A confidential CIA analysis delivered to senior policymakers this week concludes that Iran can survive the U.S. naval blockade for at least three to four months and retains about 70 percent of its prewar stockpiles of missiles, first reported by the Washington Post.

• The finding directly contradicts what the Trump administration has been telling the country for two months. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a March press briefing, said the U.S. was destroying the Iranian regime so completely that “never before has a modern, capable military been so quickly destroyed and made combat ineffective”:

• And then this week, sitting in the Oval Office, the President offered the country an estimation of Iran’s stockpiles:

• The CIA reads the situation differently. The agency assesses that Iran has been quietly stockpiling oil, food, and military supplies for over a year and that the regime can still pay its security forces and maintain basic services for months. That’s not a military “made combat ineffective.”

• Watch how the administration handles the gap between what it’s saying in public and what the CIA is telling it in private. Trump asked for an Iran peace framework on his desk by next week. If the regime is months from breaking, the leverage Hegseth has been promising is not the leverage we actually have.

• The Trump Administration has been telling Americans the war is essentially won. Our own intelligence agency just told the White House the war isn’t close to over. Only one of those two things is true.

4. The Virginia Supreme Court Just Struck Down the Redistricting Plan Voters Approved Three Weeks Ago

• The Virginia Supreme Court ruled 4-3 Friday morning to strike down the constitutional amendment that voters approved on April 21 to allow Democrats to redraw the state’s congressional map, leaving Virginia’s existing maps in place for the 2026 midterms and the rest of the decade.

• Virginia Democrats had pushed the amendment as a counter to the aggressive gerrymandering efforts we’ve seen from Republicans this cycle. Governor Spanberger laid out the case herself during the campaign:

• The General Assembly passed it twice, voters approved it at the ballot box, and the new map was projected to flip the state’s congressional delegation from a 6-5 Democratic edge to as much as 10-1. The court’s Republican-appointed majority found that the legislature had violated procedural requirements in how the amendment was placed on the ballot, ruling the constitutional violation “incurably taints the resulting referendum vote.”

• This is a real loss for Democrats as they had been counting on Virginia to offset Republican gerrymanders elsewhere in the country, and that math just got harder. Virginia Democrats are calling the ruling “a partisan attack” while Virginia Republicans are calling it “a victory for the rule of law.” The practical effect: four to five House seats Democrats expected to compete for in November are no longer in play.

• Watch the appeals. Virginia Democrats have signaled they’re “evaluating every legal pathway forward,” but legal analysts believe a U.S. Supreme Court appeal is unlikely because the dispute is rooted in state constitutional procedure, not federal law. That makes today’s 4-3 ruling effectively final.

• As Republicans across the country redraw congressional maps to lock in their House majority, Democrats just lost one of their few real counters. Voters will still decide the House in November, but court decisions over which maps stand and which don’t are going to shape what that fight looks like.

5. The Pentagon Just Released 162 UFO Files. The Timing Is Hard to Ignore.

• The Pentagon on Friday morning released 162 newly declassified UFO files from the FBI, Department of Defense, NASA, and State Department, hosted on a new dedicated government site.

• The release is being run through a new interagency program with the acronym “PURSUE” — Presidential Unsealings and Reporting System for UAP Encounters.

• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the rollout this morning, saying these files have “long fueled justified speculation” and it’s time the American people “see it for themselves.” Trump posted on Truth Social that the documents will let Americans decide for themselves “WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?” The Pentagon says additional files will be released “on a rolling basis.”

• The timing here feels suspicious, at the very least. Trump used the same playbook with the JFK, RFK, and MLK files earlier this year — release them on a Friday, generate headlines about transparency, change the subject from whatever was bleeding the administration that week.

• In terms of the contents of the files themselves, early reporting suggests there are no smoking guns and no green men, just declassified eyewitness reports, infrared video, and FBI sketches dating back to 1947. I’m not saying aliens don’t exist. But proof positive this is not.

Some other stories that caught my eye:

• Trump Sent Rubio to the Vatican to Clean Up After His Attacks on the First American-Born Pope. Secretary of State Marco Rubio met privately with Pope Leo XIV at the Apostolic Palace on Thursday for more than 45 minutes, in what reporters openly described as a damage-control trip after weeks of public attacks by Trump on the first American-born pope in the Catholic Church’s 2,000-year history. Trump told Hugh Hewitt on Monday that the Pope is “endangering a lot of Catholics” and repeated the false claim that Leo is fine with Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon. The Vatican has rejected that characterization. Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s top diplomat, said this week that attacking the Pope “seems to me a bit strange.” Pope Leo, the Chicago-born former Augustinian missionary, gave Rubio a parting gift at the end of the meeting: a pen made of olive wood, because olive is “the plant of peace.”

• A Federal Judge Just Ruled the FBI Can Keep 650 Boxes of Fulton County’s 2020 Ballots Indefinitely. The ruling acknowledges, in the judge’s own words, that “the seizure in this case was certainly not perfect,” but lets the federal government keep the records anyway. The original FBI raid was triggered by a referral from Kurt Olsen, the White House lawyer Trump assigned to “reinvestigate” the 2020 election, and relied on claims of fraud that Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State had already investigated and dismissed. Georgia counted its ballots three times in 2020. Joe Biden won the state. The DOJ is now using a grand jury subpoena to demand the personal contact information of every Fulton County employee and volunteer from the 2020 election.

• New Poll Found That 39% of Republicans Think Trump Could Beat Them in a Fight. A YouGov poll released this week asked Americans a deeply unserious question and got back a deeply unserious set of answers. Asked who would win in a physical fight between themselves and Donald Trump, 33% of Republicans said they would beat the 79-year-old President, while 39% said Trump would beat them. The same poll then asked who would win in a fight between Trump and an average eight-year-old boy. 54% of Democrats said the eight-year-old. 31% of all Americans agreed. Even among Republicans, only 72% were willing to bet on the leader of the free world over a third grader.

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The Virginia Supreme Court struck down the state’s redistricting map today, and if your timeline looks anything like mine, it’s already a five-alarm fire. People are dunking, people are catastrophizing, and somewhere a pundit is filing a take about how this changes everything.

So before we get into the actual analysis, let me say this first: take a breath. It’s going to be an annoying day on social media. That’s okay. The work doesn’t change.

Now, let’s talk about what this actually means — and what it doesn’t.

Here’s something you’re going to hear a lot today that I want to push back on immediately: the right will claim that this ruling, and the broader wave of redistricting happening across Southern states to dilute Black political power, was somehow caused by Virginia. That it was a response to the Virgina vote, and so… “F around and find out.” Don’t buy it for a second.

The gerrymandering happening in Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina — that was happening regardless. They were just waiting for the Supreme Court’s decision, map in hand. Those maps were drawn with the explicit intent of cracking and packing Black voters out of political relevance. The architects of those plans didn’t need Virginia to give them permission or inspiration. They had a playbook, they had the legislatures, and they had the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act as their green light. Virginia is one data point in a much longer and more deliberate project.

The right will try to take credit for a strategy that predates this ruling. Don’t let them rewrite the timeline.

That Said — Yes, There’s a Structural Problem

Honesty requires acknowledging the real thing here: there is now a clearer structural advantage for Republicans heading into the election. Let’s not minimize that. Redistricting is a force multiplier. Maps drawn to suppress competition tend to do exactly that.

What does this mean practically? The Senate map doesn’t change — that math remains what it is, and Democrats have a tough but winnable cycle ahead. But the House gets harder. Taking the majority was already going to require a strong cycle. Now, it likely requires a wave. Not impossible — wave elections happen, and the conditions for one are arguably building — but the margin for error just got thinner.

Eyes open. Plans adjusted.

Here’s what I keep coming back to, and what I think gets lost in the doom-scrolling: structural disadvantages are not the same as insurmountable ones. The way you overcome gerrymandered maps is not to outsmart them on paper. It’s to make them irrelevant by volume.

This is the moment for Democrats to recommit — seriously, not rhetorically — to the old art of persuasion. That means welcoming people in. That means making the coalition as wide as possible. That means talking to voters who didn’t vote for you last time, or the time before that, rather than assuming they’re permanent losses. Every percentage point of increased turnout in a gerrymandered district is a direct counter to the map.

A pro-democracy coalition is not a niche coalition. It is, by definition, a majoritarian one. But you have to actually go build it. That means showing up. It means having a message that speaks to people’s material lives. It means not treating persuadable voters like lost causes.

The maps want Democrats to fight in a smaller box. The answer is to refuse to fight in the box at all.

One More Thing to Watch

There’s a dynamic worth flagging that has nothing to do with redistricting but will shape everything: at some point — probably before November — the conflict with Iran will wind down. Gas prices will fall. And Donald Trump will stand at a podium and tell you he solved a crisis he created. He’ll say it was the greatest diplomatic achievement in American history. Half the country will nod along.

That moment is coming. It will feel like the air going out of the room. Be ready for it, because the answer to it is not outrage. The answer is a clear-eyed reminder of who created the conditions in the first place — and a coalition strong enough that the credit-taking lands with a thud.

Today is annoying. Tomorrow, the work continues. The House is harder but winnable. The path runs through persuasion, through coalition-building, through making the Democratic tent genuinely big. Not aspirationally big — actually big.

Take a deep breath. Take a walk. Then get back to it.

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First, Trump’s pay-to-play pardons are officially under investigation by both the House and the Senate. At the same time, DOJ has launched an investigation into the obvious insider trading on oil futures around Trump’s Iran announcements. And all this is happening as the deadly hantavirus continues to spread while the US refuses to cooperate with the World Health Organization.

Ok, let’s get to it.

1. Trump Pardons Are Now Under Investigation as a “Pay-to-Play” Operation

• Senate and House Democrats sent letters Thursday to more than a dozen recipients of Trump pardons and commutations, opening a formal investigation into whether the clemency was driven by “pay-to-play dynamics.”

• The targets include some of Trump’s most controversial pardons of the second term:

  • Cryptocurrency billionaire Changpeng Zhao (money laundering)

  • Nursing home operator Joseph Schwartz (tax fraud)

  • Nikola founder Trevor Milton (securities fraud)

  • Private equity executive David Gentile, who saw $15.5 million in restitution to victims of a $1.6 billion Ponzi scheme wiped away when Trump commuted his sentence.

• The pattern is the story. Asked at the White House last year why he pardoned Milton — who was sentenced to four years in prison for defrauding investors — Trump’s answer was simple:

• Loyalty is the standard. Milton and his wife donated nearly $2 million to Trump-aligned PACs in October 2024, weeks before he was pardoned. Real estate developer Timothy Leiweke was pardoned after hiring Trump ally Trey Gowdy as his lawyer. Paul Walczak was pardoned for tax crimes after his mother raised millions of dollars for Trump.

• Democrats have already documented $1.3 billion in cancelled restitution to victims of these crimes — money that came out of the pockets of defrauded investors and nursing home patients and went into the pockets of donors. Democrats don’t have subpoena power right now, but every name on this list becomes a witness if (when) Democrats take back the House.

• The pardon power exists in the Constitution to correct injustice. Right now it is being used to launder it. Should Democrats regain a trifecta in 2028, pardon reform should be at the top of the list for their early priorities.

2. As the Hantavirus Cruise Ship Approaches Spain, the Outbreak Is Now in Five Countries

• The MV Hondius set sail for Spain Wednesday after the Spanish government overruled the Canary Islands’ regional president and agreed to receive the ship at Tenerife, where 146 people on board — including 17 Americans — will begin disembarking May 11.

• The strain has been confirmed as Andes virus, the only hantavirus known to spread human-to-human. WHO reports five confirmed infections, three suspected cases, and three deaths. New cases have surfaced in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Singapore as passengers who disembarked earlier started showing symptoms or testing positive. Three patients were medically evacuated from the ship by air ambulance Wednesday and flown to hospitals in Europe.

• The CDC issued a statement Wednesday calling the United States “the world’s leader in global health security.” That sentence sits oddly next to the fact that we formally left the WHO fifteen weeks ago. The actual response — five countries, contact tracing across continents, lab confirmation of the strain — is being run by the WHO.

• WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he hopes the outbreak will make the United States and Argentina, the two countries that have withdrawn from the WHO, reconsider their decisions:

• Let’s be clear about what’s happening here. Three people are dead. Five countries are tracing cases. And the country that built the original global pandemic response is on the outside, writing press releases about how good it is at responding. The damage the Trump administration has done to science and public health is immeasurable. And the cost is measured in lives.

3. Trump Says Oil at $200 a Barrel “Would Have Been Worth It”

• Trump told the Wall Street Journal this week that even if oil prices had hit $200 or $250 a barrel because of the Iran war, the conflict would still have been worth it.

• Oil was around $72 a barrel the day before the war started on February 28. It peaked at $117 this week and is sitting near $100 today. Gas at the pump is $4.54 a gallon — the highest since 2022, and Americans are already feeling it. But that’s nowhere near what the President said he was willing to accept. Here’s what he told the Journal:

• This is the President of the United States telling working Americans that doubling the price of oil would have been a fair trade for his war. Do the math. At $200 a barrel, gas at the pump runs about $7 a gallon. At $250 — the other number he floated — it’s closer to $8.30. The all-time U.S. record was $5.02 in June 2022, and Republicans still cite that brief spike as a mark against Joe Biden’s economic legacy.

• The people who actually pay that price — truckers, families heating their homes, the airline workers who lost their jobs at Spirit last week — don’t get a vote on whether it’s “worth it.” At least until November.

4. Trump’s Top Economic Adviser Is Bragging That Americans Are Maxing Out Their Credit Cards

• National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett went on Fox Business Wednesday and described surging credit card debt as proof the U.S. economy is firing on all cylinders.

• Asked by Maria Bartiromo about the jobs outlook, Hassett pivoted to consumer spending. Watch what he tried to sell as good news:

• Americans are not maxing out their cards because they’re confident. They’re maxing them out because gas is $4.53 a gallon, inflation climbed to 3.3% in March, and roughly three-quarters of Americans now use credit cards to pay for groceries, gas, and medical bills. Total U.S. credit card debt is $1.28 trillion.

• Watch where this messaging goes, because if top administration officials are reading from the same script, this is Trump’s actual economic argument heading into the midterms. Recent polling shows 65 percent of Americans already disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, once his strongest issue. More analysis here

• This is the same party that spent fifteen years calling rising consumer debt a national emergency. The only thing that changed is who’s in the White House.

5. The DOJ Is Investigating Suspiciously Timed Oil Trades Made Right Before Trump Announced Iran War Decisions

• The Department of Justice and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission are jointly investigating four oil trades — totaling more than $2.6 billion — in which traders bet prices would fall minutes or hours before Trump publicly announced major Iran war decisions, ABC News reported this morning.

• The pattern is striking.

  • On March 23, traders bet $500 million that oil prices would fall — fifteen minutes before Trump announced a delay on planned strikes against Iran’s power grid.

  • On April 7, traders bet $960 million prices would fall — hours before Trump announced a temporary ceasefire.

  • Two more clusters have been flagged. Senators Warren and Whitehouse asked the CFTC to look at this last month, citing a “recurring pattern” of trades anticipating administration decisions.

• Here’s a graphic from The Kobeissi Letter:

• This is what insider trading looks like when the inside information is a presidential decision about a war. Oil futures collapse the moment Trump posts a ceasefire or announces a strike delay. Whoever placed these trades knew what he was going to say and when.

• Watch the next 30 to 60 days, because investigators are now pulling trading records that will reveal exactly which firms placed these trades. If even one of them traces back to someone with access to the Oval Office, this becomes the biggest insider trading scandal in American history.

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Some other stories that caught my eye:

• Trump’s Newest Surgeon General Pick Just Got Caught Deleting Anti-Trump and Anti-RFK Tweets. CNN reported Wednesday that Trump’s third nominee for surgeon general, Dr. Nicole Saphier, has quietly deleted dozens of tweets from the past year criticizing both the President and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The White House is standing by her, calling Saphier “an accomplished physician” and “an outspoken voice on breast cancer prevention.” The deleted posts, preserved by the Internet Archive, include Saphier accusing the administration of hiding the loss of measles elimination status until after the midterms, mocking Trump and Musk as “petty, loud, and obnoxious” during their public feud, questioning Trump’s MRI, and criticizing his Tylenol warnings to pregnant women. She also wrote that Kennedy’s hand-picked vaccine advisory committee was “lacking diversity of thought.” Saphier is Trump’s third surgeon general nominee, after the first two — Janette Nesheiwat and Casey Means — failed to make it through the process.

• Epstein Suicide Surfaces that Federal Investigators Had Never Seen. A federal judge in New York unsealed a purported suicide note from Jeffrey Epstein on Wednesday, dated to Epstein’s failed July 23, 2019 suicide attempt, less than two weeks before he was found dead in his Manhattan jail cell. The note was filed under seal years ago as part of the case of Epstein’s former cellmate, Nicholas Tartaglione, who said he was the one who found it. U.S. District Judge Kenneth Karas ordered it released after the New York Times requested it, finding no sufficient reason to keep it sealed.

• The Times reported that the note was never seen by federal investigators and was absent from the millions of Epstein-related documents released by the DOJ. It surfaced publicly on the exact same day Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick spent four hours behind closed doors on Capitol Hill answering questions about his own Epstein ties. And look, this story keeps not going away. Every time the White House tries to close the file, a new piece of evidence shows up that everyone except federal investigators somehow had access to.