Hey everyone. Happy Wednesday.
Today’s big news: the United States Senate smacked down Donald Trump on Iran. Four Republican senators broke ranks yesterday, and the senator who provided the deciding vote is the same guy Trump just helped kick out of office this weekend.
I have a sense of what those four senators are about to go through. Breaking with your own president on a vote of conscience is not a thing you do because it feels good. But it looks like there is a contingent of Senators, driven to this point by Trump’s own actions, that now may side with Democrats occasionally. This isn’t a sea change, but it is significant. More on that shortly.
Beyond the Senate, the Justice Department signed a deal yesterday giving Trump and his three sons lifetime immunity from the IRS. Thomas Massie lost his Kentucky primary in the most expensive House race ever. Analysts are forecasting the worst summer at the pump on record. And Trump is adding Maryland to the list of blue states he says he actually won.
Let’s get to it.
1. The U.S. Senate just smacked down Donald Trump on Iran.
The Senate voted 50 to 47 to advance a war powers resolution forcing Trump to come to Congress for authorization to keep fighting in Iran. It is the eighth time Democrats have brought a version of this resolution. Seven times it failed. This time it advanced. Four Republicans flipped their votes: Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul, and Bill Cassidy.
Cassidy is the whole story. He had voted no on every previous version. Then last Saturday, he lost his Louisiana primary to a Trump-endorsed challenger after the president called him a sleazebag who was bad for Louisiana.
A few days later, Cassidy explained his YES vote: “Until the administration provides clarity, no congressional authorization or extension can be justified.”
He took a swing at Trump’s brand-new slush fund too: “People are concerned about making their own ends meet, not about putting a slush fund together without a legal precedent. We’re a nation of laws.”
Then, just to put a button on the whole day, Trump endorsed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton over four-term Republican Senator John Cornyn in the Texas primary. Paxton, for the record, avoided prison on securities fraud charges only by paying restitution and doing community service.
Donald Trump decided a long time ago he can and will do whatever he wants, regardless of the chaos or damage it causes. We’ve known that for a long time, but apparently Senate Republicans are finally waking up to the fact that Trump simply does not care about anything but himself.
John Thune, the Republican leader of the United States Senate, who spent months personally lobbying Trump to back Cornyn, walked into the GOP lunch stone-faced and just said, “It’s his decision.“
To be clear, the vast majority of the Senate GOP is still in lockstep with Trump. But Trump’s own actions have created a small group of GOP Senators who just proved that, on some issues, they can be persuaded to side with Democrats in rebuking the president.
Some are calling them the “nothing left to lose caucus.” We’ll see how far their principle goes in the coming months.
Four votes isn’t the twelve they would need to override a veto. But the wall that was supposed to hold just buckled, and senators in that conference are watching. Now is the time to turn up the volume as we push back against Trump’s corruption and anti-democratic regime.
2. The DOJ Just Granted Trump and His Family Lifetime Immunity From IRS Audits
It came in a one-page document signed Tuesday by Attorney General Todd Blanche. The language is not subtle. It says the IRS and Treasury are, quote, “forever barred and precluded” from pursuing any claims arising out of any tax return Trump filed before this week.
The protection covers the President himself, the Trump Organization, Eric Trump, and Donald Trump Jr. It also shields all of them from anything the Justice Department later decides to call “lawfare“ or “weaponization,” which in practice means anything they want it to mean.
So who actually wins here? Trump’s political allies get the checks. Trump’s family gets immunity. The taxpayers get the bill. And the lawyer signing off on all of it used to work for the Trumps directly. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington called it: “the most brazen act of self-dealing in the history of the presidency.”
The truth is that Presidents of both parties test the limits of their office. That is American history. But there is a difference between testing limits and using the Justice Department as a personal indemnity policy for yourself and your kids. We crossed that line this week and there’s no going back until an entirely new administration and congress makes it a priority.
3. Trump Ousts Massie in Most Expensive House Primary Ever
Trump-recruited challenger Ed Gallrein, a farmer and former Navy SEAL, beat Massie 54 to 46. The race drew more than $32 million in ad spending, shattering the old record by nearly seven million dollars.
Massie’s offenses, in the eyes of the president: he opposed the Iran war, the Venezuela strikes, and pushed for the release of Epstein files. So Trump called him a moron, a nut job, and a major sleazebag, and personally recruited a primary challenger in his own backyard. He even sent his super serious Secretary of War to campaign against Massie.
In his concession speech, Massie made the argument that has gotten him into all of this trouble in the first place:
He is right. And the Senate Republicans we just talked about are starting to feel that yearning too. This is what Trump’s Republican Party looks like. If you cross him, he comes for your seat. Even on Epstein, which was his own campaign promise not that long ago. And he will spend sixteen times what a typical House race costs to do it.
4. Analysts Predict a $4.80 Summer Gas Average, Topping the Biden-Era Record Trump Campaigned Against
Here is the whiplash. In January, before Trump’s war, analysts projected the 2026 national gas average around $2.97 a gallon. The cheapest year since 2020. The country was finally going to catch a break. Then Trump went to war.
The new forecast has the national average hitting $4.48 on Memorial Day weekend, up sharply from $3.14 last year, and topping $4.80 between Memorial Day and Labor Day.
Remember the rhetoric. The all-time peak was $5.03 in June of 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine. Republicans slapped “I did that” Biden stickers on every gas pump in America. Trump promised, at the 2024 convention, to drive down prices on day one. But this week he called the surge: “a very small price to pay.”
Analyst Patrick De Haan was more direct: “This is the most volatile summer at the pump in years, and the Strait of Hormuz closure is at the center of it.”
If you posted an “I did that” sticker in 2022, you do not get to call $4.80 gas a small price in 2026. You don’t get to have it both ways.
5. Trump Is Adding Blue States to His "I Actually Won" List
This week, after a Maryland printing vendor accidentally sent some primary voters the wrong party’s ballot, Trump posted that the state had sent out “500,000 illegal mail-in ballots.” They had not. It was a vendor error caught by Maryland’s bipartisan State Board of Elections the same week, and the state is reissuing replacements. There was no fraud.
Of course, Trump disagreed. He posted that this kind of thing “has gone on for years” in Maryland, and said it never made sense to him that Maryland was considered an automatic Democrat state. Translation: he won it.
For the record, Kamala Harris won Maryland by 28 points and more than 580,000 votes. So that must have been some real ballot box wizardry.
But nobody around him is pushing back. So Trump runs wild. And this morning, he ran all the way to California, telling reporters he actually won that one too:
So the list of states Trump supposedly won now includes California and Maryland. Give him another month and he’ll add two or three more to the list. And every Republican who refuses to say plainly that he lost, fair and square, by millions of votes, is signing the permission slip for the next one. Silence is the loudest endorsement in politics. They are giving it to him every day.
Ok folks, that is the show for May 20th. The four Senate Republicans who broke ranks yesterday have a tough next two weeks ahead, and the House will get its own version of the war powers vote soon. We will be watching all of it. If you found this useful, please like, share, and subscribe so more people see it. See you tomorrow.
