Hey everyone. Happy Monday!
Breaking news this morning as Iran has just walked out of talks with the United States and is vowing to completely shut the Strait of Hormuz again. So much for the deal that was almost done.
We will also get into a federal judge stripping Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center and blocking his two-year shutdown, Trump’s so-called Freedom 250 celebration falling apart as artists walk and he offers to headline it himself, an investigation showing gun trafficking cases are being ignored to focus on Trump’s deportation efforts, and Jill Biden re-litigating the 2024 election just as we head into the most important midterm of our lifetime.
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1. Iran Ends Talks With the US and Threatens to Shut the Strait of Hormuz, Again
Iranian state media reported today that Tehran is suspending the back-channel negotiations the White House has been promising would end the war. Messages through mediators have stopped.
The announcement follows a weekend of fresh fighting. The US military said it carried out “self-defense” strikes on Iranian radar and drone sites in southern Iran, its third such wave in just over a week, after Iran shot down an American drone. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards hit back at a US air base, and Kuwait reported intercepting incoming missile and drone fire.
And it gets worse. Iran is now vowing to completely block the Strait of Hormuz again, and to open up other fronts in the Red Sea. The reason, according to Tehran’s top negotiator, is Israel’s expanding war in Lebanon against Hezbollah and the US blockade of Iranian ports, both of which Iran is calling violations of the ceasefire.
This is just the latest twist in a rollercoaster the President has put the country through since he started this war. Threats one day. A deal almost done the next. Iran decimated. Their navy is gone. But then this weekend, he was interviewed by his daughter-in-law on Fox News:
“People would be surprised to hear that.” Yeah, probably because you’ve been telling us the complete opposite this entire time.
This is not a campaign rally. This is a war. American service members are still deployed in the Persian Gulf. The Strait is still closed. And the country we are supposedly negotiating with just walked out of the room.
You cannot run a war on contradiction. The first job of a Commander in Chief is to be believed. By our troops. By our allies. By the people on the other side of the negotiating table.
This President is failing that test every single day.
2. Judge Orders Trump’s Name Removed From Kennedy Center
A federal judge in Washington ordered the administration to scrub Donald Trump’s name from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts within fourteen days. Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that the center’s board, every member of it handpicked by Trump after he fired the old one and named himself chairman, did not have the authority to rename the building. Only Congress does.
The judge also blocked the administration’s plan to shut the Kennedy Center for two years for a sweeping renovation, calling the board’s vote to close “ill-informed and seemingly preordained.”
Trump’s response was about what you’d expect. He branded the judge as an anti-Trump hater, said the Kennedy Center would now “soon be closed, probably never to open again,” and announced he was washing his hands of the whole thing.
For the record, the Kennedy Center is the nation’s living memorial to President JFK. It was built by an act of Congress. Trump tried to rename it after himself with no vote and no debate, just a board he had personally stacked. A judge said no.
And it isn’t just the judge. The American people also don’t want this. Here’s CNN’s Harry Enten with the numbers:
The President of the United States is doing something that, until recently, would have been unthinkable in this country. He is trying to write his own name onto national monuments while he still holds the office. He is doing it without a vote, without consent, and against the clear judgment of the people he serves.
That is not leadership. That is a man who needs to see his name on things to feel okay about himself. Honestly it’s just weird and we should all be glad to see some of those efforts stopped by the courts.
3. Trump Makes America's 250th About Himself as Plans Unravel
I put out an explainer on this last week but I’ll give a quick refresher. There is a real, congressionally chartered nonprofit, America 250, with a bipartisan board, public sponsors, and a real budget that is responsible for building a national celebration of the 250 year anniversary of our founding. Then there is Trump’s parallel operation called Freedom 250, run out of the White House through a task force Trump made himself the chair of. No published donor list. No real transparency.
Freedom 250’s centerpiece was supposed to be a Great American State Fair on the National Mall, with country stars and big crowds. Over the past week, artist after artist has dropped out. The artists said they were misled about what the event actually was. Once the performers realized it was a MAGA rally, they walked.
Trump’s response was vintage Trump. He went on Truth Social to call the artists boring, brag that he is “bigger than Elvis,” and float canceling the whole thing in favor of a Make America Great Again rally with himself as the headliner.
America 250 is supposed to be a quarter millennium of self-government celebrated by all of us. The kind of moment that belongs to the whole country. Instead, the President is trying to turn it into a campaign rally because nobody else wants to show up.
It was quite a lot when the only star you can book for America’s birthday is yourself.
4. ATF Pulled Off Gun Trafficking Cases to Help Trump's Deportation Push
A new ProPublica investigation lays out how this White House has gutted federal enforcement of gun trafficking laws to feed the deportation machine.
The numbers tell the story. Under Biden, the ATF revoked the licenses of about 180 lawless gun dealers a year. Under Trump in 2025, that number dropped to 56. ATF referrals for gun trafficking charges fell 15 percent. And out of roughly 2,500 ATF agents, nearly 1,800 have been pulled off their normal work to assist ICE in immigration enforcement.
That includes the inspectors who police gun stores. One veteran ATF inspector said his bosses ordered him and his colleagues to spend at least six hours a week scouring dealer records for buyers with foreign-sounding names and turning those names over to Homeland Security. These are the people whose job is to catch gun dealers selling to traffickers, and they are spending a significant part of every work week doing immigration database searches.
The danger in this distraction is clear. As another former ATF official put it, “Just because no one is watching the trafficking pipelines right now doesn’t mean guns aren’t flowing through it. It just means they’re not being intercepted.”
Trafficked guns kill cops. They kill kids. And we just took the people whose job is to prevent gun trafficking and pointed them at immigrants instead.
If you want to know what this administration means when it says law and order, look at where it sends the cops.
5. Jill Biden's Book Tour Looks Backwards. The Country Can't.
Jill Biden’s new memoir comes out tomorrow, and the rollout has not gone well. Clips from the interviews have been everywhere this weekend, including this one:
I have to be honest with you. The pro-democracy coalition in this country cannot afford this conversation right now. The fight in front of us is not about what happened in 2024. It is about November of 2026, and it is five months away.
Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in 2020. He undid a lot of the damage from Trump’s first term. He served this country for half a century, and he made the call to step aside when his party asked him to. We owe him real thanks for all of that. And the best way to thank him is to finish the job he started.
But finishing that job means looking forward, not backward. And right now, with respect, the most useful thing the Bidens can do for the coalition that needs to win in November is to let the rest of us focus on November. Not relitigate the past.
Anyone in this fight who is not helping us focus on the midterms is, whether they mean to or not, hurting the cause.
So with all the respect they have earned, my ask to the Bidens is a simple one. Let the rest of us finish the work. The 2024 election is not on the ballot in November. Republicans are. And they are counting on voters to be looking the wrong way.
Okay, that is it for June 1st.
Thanks for being here. If any of this hit home, hit the like button, share it with someone who needs to see it, and subscribe so you don’t miss what’s coming. Tomorrow we will have more on the Iran fallout and what this latest breakdown means for the price you will pay at the pump this summer. See you then.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
President Trump spent six hours of his Saturday flooding Truth Social with more than 50 memes, AI images, and political attacks. The lineup included him as a fighter-jet commander captioned "You're getting discombobulated," him looming over Greenland, and him riding horseback with George Washington alongside a NASCAR race. One post included footage from a flight simulator video game of fighter jets escorting Air Force One. To top it all off, Trump revived a two-decade grudge against Rosie O'Donnell and depicted Barack Obama's presidential library as a giant trash can.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick donated $5 million on April 1 to the Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC that re-elects House Republicans. The donation came four weeks after Oversight arranged to interview Lutnick about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. He sat for the closed-door interview on May 6. The Commerce Department says Lutnick gave "in his personal capacity, just as many Cabinet Secretaries from both parties have done in the past." Chairman James Comer admitted before the hearing that Lutnick had not been "100 percent truthful" about his Epstein history. He left the closed-door session calling Lutnick "forthcoming."
