Happy Friday, everyone!
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.
