Hey everyone. Happy Friday, and welcome back.
Our top story today: yesterday the Supreme Court told hundreds of thousands of people who came here the legal way that they can be deported to countries our own government calls too dangerous to visit. The President is calling it one of the biggest immigration wins of his second term. But there are real human costs to this decision.
We’ll also get into the Vice President saying Watergate would be no big deal today, RFK pressuring a third-party candidate to drop out, the White House posting QAnon slogans from official accounts, and Ted Cruz calling Tucker Carlson the most dangerous demagogue in America.
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Let’s get to it.
1. Supreme Court Strips Legal Status From 350,000 Who Followed The Rules
Yesterday, in a 6 to 3 decision split right down ideological lines, the Court cleared the way for the administration to end Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for about 350,000 Haitians and several thousand Syrians.
TPS is a humanitarian protection. It lets people from countries torn apart by war or disaster live and work here legally until it is safe to go home. These are not people who slipped across a border. They registered with the government, passed background checks, paid their fees, and renewed on schedule.
Justice Alito, writing for the majority, said the Homeland Security Secretary has almost unreviewable power to cancel those protections, and that the courts have no business second guessing it. In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the ruling “extinguishes the light of the torch of the Statue of Liberty.”
In a separate ruling, the Court revived a policy called metering, which lets border agents turn asylum seekers away before they ever reach American soil.
And the man who built this entire immigration agenda could not wait to celebrate. Here is White House adviser Stephen Miller, talking about the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio:
A reporter then asked Miller a simple question: “Is Haiti safe?” Listen to his answer:
So let’s hold that answer up against our own government. The State Department has Haiti on its do not travel list. The Federal Aviation Administration bans American airlines from flying there at all, because the gangs on the ground shoot at the planes. More than 2,300 people have been killed in gang attacks in Haiti just this year.
Even Republicans are uneasy. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, who has more than 10,000 of these TPS holders in his state, called the policy “a mistake,” and pointed out that people who were working and paying taxes on Wednesday are now illegal to employ. Nursing homes, where roughly one in five workers is an immigrant, are already warning they may have to close wings and turn patients away.
We told these people that as long as they followed the rules, we wouldn’t send them back until their country was safe. They followed the rules. Their country still isn’t safe, and our own government says so. But we’re going back on our word anyway, just to please people like Stephen Miller who has built his career by treating immigrants as the enemy.
2. Vance Says a Watergate-Style Scandal Wouldn't Last 12 Hours Today
Yesterday, Vice President JD Vance sat for an interview at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in California, promoting his new book. Eventually the conversation drifted to Watergate, the scandal that brought down Richard Nixon in 1974 after he covered up a break-in at his opponents’ headquarters.
The vice president thinks Nixon didn’t deserve it, no surprise there. But there’s more to it than that. Take a look:
Let’s be clear about what Vance is waving off. Watergate was not a misunderstanding. A sitting president ran a criminal operation against his political enemies and then used the power of his office to bury it. And the system of accountability worked. Republicans and Democrats in Congress put the country ahead of their party, and a president who broke the law had to resign.
This is a Freudian slip from Vance. Maybe he’s right in that if the administration did something akin to Watergate, it would be in the news for only twelve hours. That’s because he knows these political scandals that surround the Trump administration are normalized because of the sheer amount of them. Nixon was held accountable in the seventies because politics retained a level of dignity back then, and those scandals were rare and taken seriously.
Our Vice President is basically admitting here that that dignity is no longer intrinsic to our political system. That says a lot and it’s important to note these moments where members of the administration become lucid and admit that nothing they’re doing would be normal in any other time in history.
3. RFK Jr. Caught on Tape Pressuring a Candidate to Drop Out
The Washington Post published audio yesterday of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Junior on the phone with a Libertarian running for Congress in Iowa. The ask was simple. Drop out of the race, and help Republicans hold the seat.
On the recording, Kennedy tells the candidate, Rick Stewart, that he is calling as a “liaison with the White House.” This is the Secretary of Health and Human Services, by the way. He says he cannot get into specifics because, in his words, “there’s legal prohibitions about that.” Then he offers to become Stewart’s advocate if Stewart walks away.
Stewart got the message, and told reporters he understood it to mean a job in Washington could be waiting for him if he wanted one.
Cabinet secretaries are not supposed to do this. There is a federal law, The Hatch Act, written for the express purpose of keeping the people who run our government from using their offices to tip elections. Ethics experts who reviewed the calls said Kennedy may well have stepped over that line.
What this shows is that the Health and Human Services Secretary, of all people, is more interested in addressing the president’s concerns about keeping power after the midterms than helping with, well, health and human services. These senior officials are more concerned with personal favors than doing their jobs, and that should be a wake-up call to every American about the people running the country.
4. The White House Is Now Q-Posting But Even QAnon Isn't Buying It
Remember QAnon? The conspiracy theory group that thinks Trump is a secret hero waging war on a hidden cabal of elites? I certainly do. You cannot tell the story of January 6th without them.
Well this week, in a frantic attempt to appeal to an increasingly unhinged and fracturing base, official White House and Pentagon accounts started posting in their conspiracy language.
The White House account announced it will be “Q posting”, then posted a message mimicking QAnon’s cryptic style. And then the Pentagon posts the President inside a giant glowing Q, asking if you are enjoying the show.
But the people who actually believe this stuff were not enjoying it at all. The movement that once treated the President as messiah has soured on him, after his promises of mass arrests and Epstein documents failed to deliver. Marjorie Taylor Greene, once the most famous believer in Congress, called the posts “Q-slop and propaganda” to reel people back in. Another longtime promoter called the whole effort “cringe.”
Clearly, this White House is so worried about November that it is desperately hoping to rekindle the old conspiracy magic. But even to his most fanatical supporters, it has been nothing but a complete failure.
5. Cruz Blasts Carlson on the Senate Floor — but He Helped Light the Fuse
Earlier this week we talked about Tucker Carlson leaving the Republican Party, after turning it into the engine of grievance and hate he always wanted. Yesterday, Carlson’s record of hatred drew a blistering response from Ted Cruz on the Senate floor:
Let me be very clear: the antisemitism Cruz is describing is real, and it is dangerous, full stop. But this hatred did not come out of nowhere, and I am not going to pick a side between two men who are both responsible for it.
Tucker Carlson built a fortune on grievance, with the biggest microphone in cable news and a standing invitation to this White House. But Ted Cruz hasn’t been watching from the sidelines. He has spent his whole career benefitting from the same rage. They built this. They all did.
So when it turns on MAGA, they do not get to act surprised. You can ride grievance to power, fame, and fortune, but eventually it always comes looking for you.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
On Wednesday night, a federal judge temporarily blocked a Trump administration rule that would have left nurse practitioners, physician assistants, physical therapists, and public health students out of the higher student loan limit. The rule was set to start July 1. Here is why it matters: students the government counts as “professional” can borrow up to $200,000 for their degree, while everyone else is capped at $100,000. The administration’s list of “professional” degrees included law, medicine, and dentistry but left most healthcare fields off. The judge said Congress never gave the department the power to draw the line that way, and warned it would hurt communities that already do not have enough healthcare workers. The department says it is reviewing the order.
Georgia will stick with its embattled QR code vote-counting method for this year’s midterm elections after lawmakers passed legislation Tuesday that puts off changes until 2028. Republican leaders said the delay had the backing of GOP Gov. Brian Kemp, who had called the special session in part to deal with a July 1 deadline that was set to ban the codes from the official count. That deadline came from a 2024 law the same Republican legislature passed, after years of conspiracy theories about the machines, but lawmakers never funded or chose a replacement system. Critics say voters can’t read a QR code, so they can’t actually verify their ballot matches what gets counted. Trump singled out these machines in his first executive order on elections after taking office in January 2025, claiming without evidence that Georgia machines switched votes in 2020.
