We’re moving closer to the midterm elections. Yesterday, there were some important primaries in Texas. Another of Trump’s enemies–John Cornyn–went down in flames, and now he’ll join other losers like Bill Cassidy who are now free to criticize his policies. Is it possible that Texas could turn purple in 2026? Here’s the latest:
Ken Paxton, the Trump-endorsed and MAGA-backed insurgent, ousted Senator John Cornyn in a runoff on Tuesday, becoming the second primary challenger to knock out an incumbent Republican senator in less than two weeks in a raw display of President Trump’s powerful hold on the party base.
Texas Senator John Cornyn
The contest was the most expensive primary in American history — and Mr. Paxton prevailed despite being outspent on advertising by pro-Cornyn forces by roughly $80 million.
Now, Republicans are bracing for a potentially competitive general election in Texas, where Democrats have not won statewide in a generation. Democratic donors nationwide have swooned for their nominee, James Talarico, a smooth-talking 37-year-old seminarian and state legislator, in the hopes he will realize their long-dashed dreams of turning Texas blue.
National Republicans have warned for months that Mr. Paxton’s scandal-riddled past could put the Republican-held seat in jeopardy. But G.O.P. primary voters proved on Tuesday that they were in no mood for political guidance from Mr. Cornyn or a much-reviled party establishment.
The scope of his defeat was staggering. Mr. Cornyn, once the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, was trailing in nearly all of Texas’ 254 counties.
Here are Goldmacher’s takeways from the election. You can read more details on each with the gift link above.
— Cornyn’s defeat is another proof point of Trump’s sway.
— An ugly G.O.P. primary could take time to heal.
— The general election is going to have a Texas-size price tag.
— Cornyn’s loss could reverberate on Capitol Hill, too.
— An old-guard Democrat [Rep. Al Green] goes down.
— Crypto spent big and won.
— A sheriff’s deputy prevails over a sex therapist accused of antisemitism.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton won the Republican Senate primary in his state Tuesday night, ousting incumbent Sen. John Cornyn.
Paxton excited President Trump and his MAGA base. But many Republican leaders and strategists are worried.
Few politicians have garnered as much scandal in Texas as Paxton. He was impeached by the Republican-controlled state House on multiple charges of abuse of office. His own senior staffers reported him to the FBI, alleging he illegally used his position to help a prominent donor. His wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, filed for divorce last year on “biblical grounds,” citing adultery.
Ken Paxton
And yet, Paxton has repeatedly come out on top. The state Senate acquitted him on all charges, and the FBI dropped its investigation. Paxton won reelection for his current job twice and defeated Cornyn, one of the best-funded Republicans in the country, with a fraction of the resources and institutional support.
Senate Republicans are now nervous they’ll have to pour boatloads of cash into the race to prop up Paxton against state Rep. James Talarico, the Democratic candidate in the race. Talarico has blown past fundraising records for a contest that is likely to break spending records.
Why is Paxton so controversial?
The state House impeached Paxton in 2023 on overwhelmingly bipartisan grounds, with 60 Republicans joining 61 Democrats. Only 21 Republicans voted against impeachment charges.
The charges stemmed from his relationship with Nate Paul, a real estate developer and political donor. Paxton allegedly ordered his employees to improperly intervene in Paul’s legal troubles. Paul allegedly provided Paxton free services including a home renovation and a job for a woman with whom Paxton was allegedly having an extramarital affair. Paxton was also charged with retaliating against whistleblowers on his staff who had reported his conduct to the FBI in 2020.
Paxton was tried on 16 charges in the Senate, which acquitted him on all of them. His wife, Sen. Angela Paxton, was part of the Senate jury, though she was not allowed to vote.
The Justice Department continued investigating the allegations made by his senior staff to the FBI but closed its investigation at the end of the Biden administration.
Paxton was also indicted on felony securities fraud charges just after becoming attorney general in 2015. He was charged, as a state senator, with defrauding his fellow lawmakers by encouraging them to invest in Servergy, a tech company where he was secretly making a commission on their investments. He agreed to settle the case in 2024, paying $300,000 in restitution, though he never admitted to any wrongdoing. That case was unrelated to his impeachment.
It’s hard to believe this guy is still in office. But Trump likes him, and I guess that’s enough for Texas Republican voters.
President Donald Trump proved once again that his endorsement is, as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton put it in his primary runoff victory speech Tuesday night, “the most powerful force in politics.”
One by one, Trump is putting an end to the political careers of lawmakers in his party that he deems, for reasons more personal than policy-oriented, to be apostates. But in doing so, he may also be liberating them as they serve out their remaining seven months in Congress. They now have nothing to lose if they stand up against him.
By giving belated independence to a handful of incumbents he vanquished at the ballot box or forced into retirement, the president is creating a growingly noxious dynamic between the two ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Thom Tillis
“It’s hard for me to see how the president is going to get his agenda through the Senate in the next seven months if he keeps purging Republican senators who support him,” former senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee) told CBS News last week. “… I think Republican senators will find they can say what they think and the country will be better off if they do.”
In his Trump-engineered defeat, Sen. John Cornyn joins a club of two other Republicans in the chamber, where their party holds a 53-47 majority. The other two are already expressing resistance to the president’s dictates.
One is Thom Tillis (North Carolina). Under a barrage of Trump attacks for opposing parts of the president’s agenda — including the sprawling One Big Beautiful Bill that was its domestic centerpiece — Tillis announced his retirement last year rather than making what was deemed to be a hopeless bid for a third term.
Tillis has since become a regular Trump critic. He has criticized the Justice Department’s recently announced “anti-weaponization fund,” which could allow the Trump supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to receive taxpayer dollars, as “stupid on stilts” and said: “These people don’t deserve restitution. Many of them deserve to be in prison.”
Bill Cassidy (Louisiana), who failed to even make the runoff in his party’s May 16 primary, voted for the first time a few days later to advance a resolution to block Trump from ordering further strikes on Iran without congressional authorization.
If you want to read more, you can use the gift link above. I’m using up my gift articles because it’s close to the end of the month.
Paxton will now face Democrat James Talarico in November.
In the end, James Talarico and Democrats got the matchup they had been salivating over for months.
Within two hours of Ken Paxton’s GOP primary win on Tuesday, Talarico had hauled in $600,000 — the strongest two hours of his entire campaign. Recent internal polling from a pro-Talarico PAC shows the Democrat has a 7-point lead against Paxton. Both figures were shared first with POLITICO.
In an interview, Talarico said he’s confident about his chances.
But Talarico faces a Texas-sized challenge to finally deliver on Democrats’ long-held fantasy of flipping the state, just two years after Trump won it by 14 points….
James Talarico
Talarico said Tuesday night that to win in November, he must convert supporters of Sen. John Cornyn — a conservative by almost any metric, except Trump’s. After Cornyn conceded, Talarico thanked the four-term incumbent for his service and told his supporters “you have a place in our campaign.”
It’s all part of his general election pitch, which Talarico outlined in the interview following Paxton’s primary win.
“I have a legislative record that I think has a lot to offer supporters of Senator Cornyn. Ken Paxton has a criminal record. I have a legislative record,” Talarico told POLITICO (Paxton struck a deal in 2024 where he paid restitution and securities fraud felony charges were dropped). He emphasized his history reaching across the aisle “to cut property taxes and raise teacher pay and lower the cost of housing and child care and prescription drugs,” and touted his willingness to break with Democrats on issues including energy and the border that are important in Texas.
“I’ve called out the extremes in both parties, on the right and left, and as you know, called out President Biden for failing to secure our southern border,” he said. “I’ve pushed back against national Democrats who want to hurt the Texas oil and gas industry and so I think that Texans are looking for a senator who is going to be independent, who’s not going to serve a political party, not going to serve any special interests or megadonors, but who’s going to serve people of Texas.”
We’ll have to wait and see. The dream of Texas going blue again has been with us for a long time, but so far it hasn’t come close to happening.
While it’s tempting to be skeptical, a blue Texas is increasingly easy to imagine. It’s even easier to imagine after Ken Paxton’s victory over John Cornyn, the incumbent senator, in the Republican primary runoff on Tuesday night.
That’s partly because Mr. Paxton, the state attorney general, has distinct political liabilities. He’s faced investigation, indictment,impeachment and a messy public divorce.
But there’s another reason Democrats might pull off a statewide win for the first time in three decades: demographics. Texas is one of the most diverse states in the country, and national polls show Democrats surging back in support among young and nonwhite voters — and especially Hispanic voters.
On paper, these national demographic trends ought to send Texas racing toward the left and into contention. Add in Mr. Paxton’s nomination and you can start to see how Democrats could flip Texas this fall.
After a decade of big talk from Democrats about Texas, it’s understandable that people could harbor some doubt about flipping the nation’s largest red state. Judging by presidential election results, Democrats barely made any progress at all: President Trump won Texas by almost 14 percentage points in 2024.
But beneath the state’s stable Republican voting record, extraordinary demographic shifts have put Texas Republicans in a much more vulnerable position. To an extent few would have imagined a decade ago, Texas’ status as a reliably Republican state now depends on elevated levels of support among Hispanic voters.
Read more at the gift link.
Let’s face it. Democrats have to take back the House if we are to have any hope of impeaching Trump. They need to take the Senate too, but even if that happens, they won’t have the votes to remove him. Nevertheless, I think it’s important to impeach him. Democrats need to do everything in their power to weaken Trump, because he obviously has no plans to leave the White House unless he is dragged out or carried out on a stretcher.
Iran war news:
The Trump administration and the Iran government disagree about what is in their supposed peace agreement.
Iranian state television on Wednesday released what it said were details of “an initial, unofficial document” outlining the framework for an agreement between Iran and the United States that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz to shipping traffic.
The White House immediately dismissed the report as a “complete fabrication,” and it was not clear whether the United States and Iran were any closer to an agreement.
Iran’s state broadcaster, IRIB, said that under the framework, Iran would allow shipping to resume through the strait in return for an end to the U.S. naval blockade on Iranian ports. For days, the two sides have been alternating between renewing hostilities and issuing positive signals.
In its framing of the draft, the broadcaster presented it as a broad victory for Iran while cautioning that it was not final.
The report said that, under the agreement, commercial marine traffic would return to prewar levels within a month of the framework’s implementation. It also said that Iran would handle the strait’s management in cooperation with the Gulf state of Oman, a U.S. ally.
A bit more:
The reopening of the strait was the only one of the five main sticking points in negotiations that was mentioned in the brief report. The waterway is a crucial route for the world’s oil and gas that Iran has effectively closed since March. There was no reference to the future of Iran’s nuclear program and its stockpile of enriched uranium
The report said the framework included a U.S. pledge to “withdraw its military forces from the areas surrounding Iran” without specifying the geographic area included. The United States has a number of military sites in neighboring Iraq and nearby Gulf countries.
“Whether this includes forces newly deployed to the region or only permanent base personnel remains subject to negotiation,” the report said.
Trump called a cabinet meeting to discuss the situation.
The administration’s new plan would also keep U.S. citizens who might have been exposed to Ebola out of the country, according to two of the people with knowledge of the plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
A few dozen Public Health Service officers are now being trained to deploy to Kenya to provide medical care to Americans who are deemed at high risk of developing Ebola. The initial plan was to monitor those Americans in Kenya, but to move anyone who started to show symptoms for treatment in Europe.
Because we no longer have a real CDC, and Trump, Musk, and RFK, Jr. fired all the disease experts.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has asked staff to volunteer for urgent deployment to support Ebola screening at the country’s entry points, according to an email seen by Reuters on Tuesday.
CDC Acting Director Jay Bhattacharya said in the email that the agency had activated a Level 2 emergency response on May 18 to an outbreak of the Bundibugyo strain of the Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, and was expanding recruitment beyond its usual emergency responder pool as screening of selected international arrivals ramps up.
Level 2 is an intermediate level of emergency response. It indicates a need for substantial additional staffing to meet response demands, according to the CDC’s website.
The CDC said enhanced screening operations are already under way at several port health stations and will require additional personnel. Staff across roles, including public health advisers, emergency specialists and licensed medical providers, are being asked to support the effort, subject to supervisor approval.
Volunteers could be tasked with monitoring incoming travelers for signs of illness, checking temperatures and referring suspected cases for further assessment, according to the email.
Unbelievable. Ebola remains dormant for weeks after exposure. What if people don’t report exposures or don’t realize they’ve been exposed? We’re going to have a lot of Ebola cases here, aren’t we?
Construction is under way on the White House lawn for an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) arena that will host a cage match next month to mark the US’s 250th anniversary and Donald Trump’s 80th birthday.
The mixed martial arts fight is planned for 14 June.
Photos of cranes and other construction equipment on the White House lawn on Tuesday showed the beginnings of the temporary construction. Trump has said that the finished project will feature “a 5,000-seat arena right outside the front door of the White House”.
Online renderings depict what the completed, wire-mesh-fence-ringed fight space is expected to look like. The octagon-shaped cage will be ringed by a red, white and blue stage under a towering arch featuring stars and stripes patterns and two large screens carrying the action live.
The cage and stage will themselves be surrounded by thousands of temporary seats, including ringside space for a full marching band that can set the entire scene to blaring music.
In December, Trump said the White House event would host “eight or nine championship fights – the biggest fights they’ve ever had”. But like the size of the crowd, the number of fights expected to be held on the White House
lawn has shrunk. The fight card includes two title fights: a lightweight championship fight between Ilia Topuria and Justin Gaethje in the main event, and an interim heavyweight title fight between Alex Pereira and Ciryl Gane.
This is beyond disgusting. I feel like I’m going to throw up.
I’ll end there, even though there are plenty more Trump messes that someone will have to clean up. Hang in there everyone. We can and will survive!
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Trump is struggling to deal with his losing war in Iran. He is supposed to give a speech to the nation about it tonight, something he should have done before he started dropping bombs. He is also threatening to pull the U.S. out of NATO. Here’s the latest.
Donald Trump has told The Telegraph he is strongly considering pulling the United States out of Nato after it failed to join his war on Iran.
The US president labelled the alliance a “paper tiger” and said removing America from the defence treaty was now “beyond reconsideration”.
It is the strongest sign yet that the White House no longer regards Europe as a reliable defence partner following the rejection of Mr Trump’s demand that allies send warships to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Mr Trump was asked if he would reconsider the US’s membership of Nato after the conflict.
He replied: “Oh yes, I would say [it’s] beyond reconsideration. I was never swayed by Nato. I always knew they were a paper tiger, and Putin knows that too, by the way.” [….]
Mr Trump added: “Beyond not being there, it was actually hard to believe. And I didn’t do a big sale. I just said, ‘Hey’, you know, I didn’t insist too much. I just think it should be automatic.
He is single-handedly wrecking the international alliances that have maintained relative peace since the end of WWII. The rest of the interview consisted mostly of insults to the UK and Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
“We’ve been there automatically, including Ukraine. Ukraine wasn’t our problem. It was a test, and we were there for them, and we would always have been there for them. They weren’t there for us.”
“You don’t even have a navy. You’re too old and had aircraft carriers that didn’t work,” he said, referring to the state of Britain’s fleet of warships.
Asked whether the Prime Minister should spend more on defence, Mr Trump added: “I’m not going to tell him what to do. He can do whatever he wants. It doesn’t matter. All Starmer wants is costly windmills that are driving your energy prices through the roof.”
After speaking to The Telegraph, The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr Trump had raised the issue of withdrawing from Nato with White House aides.
The newspaper said he had made comments to Mr Rubio and others in private but had made no final decision on the future of the alliance.
No one seems to know what Trump is going to say tonight in his overdue “speech to the nation.” It seems likely he will try to bring an end to U.S. involvement, and leave the mess he created for other countries to clean up In addition to the threat to pull out of Nato, according to the AP:
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has confirmed direct contact with
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi says the Strait of Hormuz falls under the territorial control of Iran and Oman File, Khaled Elfiqi AP Photo
Araghchi confirmed that he had held conversations with Witkoff, Trump’s trusted envoy for peace negotiations around the world, during the current conflict.
But the Iranian foreign minister downplayed that contact.
“I receive messages from Witkoff directly, as before, and this does not mean that we are in negotiations,” he said.
“There is no truth to the claim of negotiations with any party in Iran. All messages are conveyed through the Foreign Ministry or received by it, and there are communications between security agencies,” he added.
Araghchi explained that they have never had a “good experience” negotiating with the US, referring to Washington’s decision to withdraw from the Barack Obama-era nuclear deal during Trump’s first term. The US has also twice attacked Iran during negotiations over the past nine months — in June 2025 and with the current war, which began on February 28, at a time when Oman, the mediator between the two sides, had said they were on the cusp of a breakthrough over Tehran’s nuclear programme.
“We do not have any faith that negotiations with the US will yield any results. The trust level is at zero,” Araghchi said, adding: “We don’t see honesty.”
Sounds about right. On the Strait of Hormuz:
In the interview, Araghchi argued that the waters of the Strait of Hormuz fall under the territorial control of Iran and Oman, and that once the war is over, it is these two countries who would decide the future of the waterway.
But he added that the strait should be a “peaceful waterway”.
Gulf nations, including Qatar, have, however, insisted that they be included in any talks to decide the future of the strait.
Araghchi also insisted in the interview that, from Iran’s perspective, the strait is open for ships from most nations.
“Only for the ships of those who are at war with us, this strait is closed. That is normal during war – we cannot let our enemies use our territorial waters for commerce,” he explained.
Read more at the link.
But what about Netanyahu? Will he be OK with Trump wimping out of their war?
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel and the United States are “beyond the halfway point in terms of success” in their war against Iran, saying that the joint strikes are focusing on the country’s nuclear material.
He added that he doesn’t want to “put a schedule on” the timeline for ending the war with Iran.
In an interview with the right-wing American media outlet Newsmax, Netanyahu said the Iranian regime is “pursuing nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to American cities,” adding, “That’s what this war is about – preventing that outcome.”
The Israeli prime minister also said that the attacks have “already degraded their missile capabilities, destroyed factories, and eliminated key nuclear scientists.”
He appeared to be sending messages to Trump in the interview:
Iran “killed and maimed more Americans than any other force in recent decades,” Netanyahu told Newsmax, saying Tehran also tried to assassinate U.S. President Donald Trump. “Thousands and thousands killed and maimed in Afghanistan by Iranian IEDs. They bombed our embassies. They tried to kill President Trump twice. They’re still trying to kill him.”
According to Netanyahu, Iran has openly shown it is a threat to the West. “Most importantly, is they they chant ‘Death to America.’ They also say ‘Death to Israel.’ But they say America is the Great Satan. They’re religious zealots, and they have to wipe out Western culture led by America,” he said.
Netanyahu also said Iran is more dangerous to the United States than North Korea, China and Russia. “I don’t hear North Korea chanting ‘Death to America.’ I don’t hear China chanting … I don’t hear Russia,” he said.
I guess we’ll find out something about Trump’s plans tonight in his speech–if he makes any sense, which is unlikely.
President Trump isn’t just befuddling foreign leaders and financial markets with his mixed signals on Iran. Advisers who speak regularly with the president tell Axios they’re just as uncertain.
Why it matters: Trump’s off-the-cuff musings and Truth Social postings can have life-or-death consequences for the war, and massive implications for the market. Then the cycle restarts without any lasting clarity.
Between the lines: Some Trump aides and allies say he’s mostly improvising rather than following any clear plan.
He likes to keep his options open, spitball with different audiences, then capitalize if he thinks he sees an opportunity, they say.
Aides have been convinced at various points that Trump was leaning toward a major escalation, and at others that he was eager for a swift resolution. “Nobody knows in the end what he’s really thinking,” a senior adviser said.
“They had a plan for the first week and since then, they are making the plan up as they go along,” a former U.S. official said.
Others claim it’s all by design. “That’s the plan — for you to not have a clue,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who spoke to Trump on Monday, told Axios.
The UK will convene 35 countries – excluding the US – to explore ways to reopen the strait of Hormuz, the vital shipping route for oil and gas that has been blocked by Iran.
Keir Starmer, the prime minister, said the next phase of discussions in the joint British and French efforts to secure the waterway would be held on Thursday, with Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, alongside international leaders….
Starmer said on Wednesday the meeting would bring together 35 countries to “assess all viable diplomatic and political measures we can take to restore freedom of navigation, guarantee the safety of trapped ships and seafarers and to resume the movement of vital commodities”.
In other news, Trump attended the Supreme Court session his morning on his efforts to end birthright citizenship. No other president has done that.
The Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday over the constitutionality of President Donald Trump’s effort to ban birthright citizenship. The justices questioned the attorneys about the definition of “domicile,” core to the government’s argument that only children of immigrants who are domiciled in the United States should receive birthright citizenship. In an indication of the political stakes in the case, Trump attended the hearing while Solicitor General D. John Sauer made his arguments, the first time a sitting president is known to have done so. Arguments concluded after Sauer made his rebuttal.
American Civil Liberties Union Legal Director Cecillia Wang argued for the plaintiffs, immigrants using pseudonyms. The ACLU and other groups challenged Trump’s order, saying it violates the 14th Amendment, which grants citizenship to “all persons” born or naturalized in the United States.
In the hearing, Sauer argued that children born to parents without permanent immigration status should not be granted citizenship, upending the long-settled principle that nearly everyone born on U.S. soil is automatically a citizen.
A ruling upholding Trump’s order could have sweeping political, economic and social ramifications….
ACLU Legal Director Cecillia Wang said the 14th Amendment does not allow Congress to add more exceptions to the birthright citizenship rule.
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh replied: “I guess the answer you just gave means they don’t have any authority to look at this, even if they passed it 435 to 0 in the House and 100 to 0 in the Senate. Your point is, no, they’re closed. They’re frozen forever.”
“Correct,” Wang said….
Arguments concluded after Solicitor General John D. Sauer made his rebuttal.
Congress “in 1866 had a very, very clear understanding that the children of the newly freed slaves have the requisite allegiance to the United States,” he said in his closing remarks. “This was all about overruling the grave injustice of Dred Scott and making sure that allegiance was granted to the children of slaves.”
“Thank you, counsel, general. The case is submitted,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said, as he does when arguments end in every case.
The Supreme Court is casting doubt on President Donald Trump’s restrictions on birthright citizenship in a consequential case that was magnified by Trump’s unparalleled presence in the courtroom.
Conservative and liberal justices on Wednesday questioned whether Trump’s order declaring that children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens comports with either the Constitution or federal law.
Trump, the first sitting president to attend arguments at the nation’s highest court, spent just over an hour inside the courtroom for arguments made by the Republican administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer, Solicitor General D. John Sauer. The president departed shortly after lawyer Cecillia Wang began her presentation in defense of broad birthright citizenship.
Trump heard Sauer face one skeptical question after another. Justices asked about the legal basis for the order and voiced more practical concerns.
“Is this happening in the delivery room?” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked, drilling down into the logistics of how the government would actually figure out who’s entitled to citizenship and who’s not….
“How much of the debates around the 14th Amendment had anything to do with immigration?” Thomas asked, pointing out that the purpose of the amendment was to grant citizenship to Black people, including freed slaves.
The justices are hearing Trump’s appeal of a lower-court ruling from New Hampshire that struck down the citizenship restrictions, one of several courts that have blocked them. They have not taken effect anywhere in the country.
The case frames another test of Trump’s assertions of executive power that defy long-standing precedent for a court that has largely ruled in the president’s favor — but with some notable exceptions that Trump has responded to with starkly personal criticisms of the justices. A definitive ruling is expected by early summer.
Yesterday the Supreme Court voted 8-1 that conversion therapy cannot be banned in Colorado.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday held, on an 8-1 vote, that Colorado’s law banning therapists from engaging in conversion therapy with minor patients is presumptively unconstitutional as to talk therapy, deeming the law “an egregious form“ of speech regulation that almost always violates the First Amendment.
Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the court’s decision — warning that the court might have made talk therapy “effectively unregulatable” and that the “fallout could be catastrophic.“ Taking the rare step of announcing her dissent from the bench, Jackson declared that the majority got it “wrong as a matter of precedent, first principles, and history.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the court’s majority opinion, holding that lower courts had applied the wrong standard for addressing Kaley Chiles’s First Amendment challenge to the state’s ban on conversion therapy — efforts to change a patient’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
As with his opinion in the wedding website case in 2023, 303 Creative v. Elenis, Gorsuch waved broadly at his purpose being to protect free speech and to stop, as he wrote on Tuesday, “censorious governments.“
The proper standard to be applied in Chiles’s case, the court held, is a particularly skeptical form of strict scrutiny because the law is a content-based regulation and, further, includes “viewpoint restrictions” by banning efforts to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity and allowing efforts to affirm a patient’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Gorsuch wrote that Chiles’s challenge would likely succeed when the case goes back to the lower courts because “Ms. Chiles seeks to engage only in speech, and as applied to her the law regulates what she may say.“
I guess the solution is public education about the research that shows conversion therapy doesn’t work. But that might not protect children in right wing religious families, especially if they are home schooled.
A few more stores of possible interest:
NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Artemis II commander, from left, Victor Glover, Artemis II pilot, Christina Koch, Artemis II mission specialist, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, Artemis II mission specialist, right, in a group photograph as they visit NASA’s Artemis II SLS (Space Launch System) rocket and Orion spacecraft. (Bill Ingalls/NASA via AP)
Tensions were high as hydrogen fuel started flowing into the rocket hours ahead of the planned launch. Dangerous hydrogen leaks erupted during a countdown test earlier this year, forcing a lengthy flight delay.
By mid-morning, no leaks had been reported.
The launch team needs to load more than 700,000 gallons of fuel (2.6 million liters) into the 32-story Space Launch System rocket on the pad before the Artemis II crew can board.
Read more at the link. I had no idea this was happening until I got a message from JJ this moring.
The Trump administration was within its rights to demand that the University of Pennsylvania turn over information about Jews on campus as part of a federal investigation into discrimination at the school, a federal judge decided Tuesday.
The government’s investigation had united Penn leaders with Jewish students and faculty members as they opposed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s subpoena. Many on campus drew parallels between the government’s approach and methods deployed in Nazi Germany.
But the Trump administration has said that its request was typical for discrimination investigations to seek potential victims and witnesses, and Judge Gerald J. Pappert of Philadelphia’s Federal District Court agreed on Tuesday. He gave Penn until May 1 to comply with the administration’s subpoena, though the ruling appeared unlikely to quell the debates around how the administration has pressured top American universities.
Judge Pappert, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, appeared to hint at the discomfort that the government’s subpoena had prompted and at the accusations that the E.E.O.C. had gone too far with its tactics, especially a demand for information tied to groups “related to the Jewish religion.”
“Though ineptly worded, the request had an understandable purpose — to obtain in a narrowly tailored way, as opposed to seeking information on all university employees, information on individuals in Penn’s Jewish community who could have experienced or witnessed antisemitism in the workplace,” Judge Pappert wrote in his 32-page opinion, issued three weeks after he heard oral arguments.
The cartoonishly large breasts. The pink spandex. The come-hither stare.
Byron Noem
“Must be A.I.,” a burly cattle rancher named Kevin Ruesink said as he inspected pictures of his neighbor Bryon Noem that had been published by The Daily Mail on Tuesday morning. The rancher was playing pinochle in the back of a convenience store with five other men in the tiny town of Castlewood, S.D., not far from the Noem family farm.
These men all knew Bryon Noem as the nice, tall insurance salesman who married Kristi Arnold, the town beauty queen who grew up to be governor. But now there were these pictures.
The rancher squinted at them with a mixture of suspicion and pity. “I grew up playing ball with Bryon,” he said. “I’ve never known him to be part of stuff like that. I don’t believe that at all.”
The British tabloid report on Tuesday was the latest and most dramatic development in the saga of Kristi Noem, who was sacked as homeland security chief earlier this month, the first Trump cabinet member to get the old heave-ho this term. She quickly put out a statement saying that she was “devastated” by the images of her husband and that “the family was blindsided by this.”
In response to multiple requests for an interview, Mr. Noem wrote in a text message on Tuesday: “I will at some point. Today is not the day. I appreciate your heart.”
While the pictures of Ms. Noem’s husband with what appear to be enormous inflated balloons under his spandex shirt ricocheted across the internet, becoming a political punchline for her many, many enemies, the reaction back on the proverbial ranch was a little more … tenderhearted.
That’s kind of a refreshing response from the townsfolk. Use the gift link to read more if you’re interested.
Those are the stories that caught my attention this morning. What stories have you been following?
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“I’m actually surprised MAGA didn’t put on an alternative Oscar Award Show this year.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I’d just like to gripe about one thing today. Humor me. Is it just me, or does everything seem messed up in this country? I’m starting to have visions of us in a Dystopian SyFy movie where the AI in computers decides the best way for financial institutions to make money and gets some sort of cosmic jolly out of making sure something shipped with a commercial deliverer as late as fuck. Also, all inventory systems appear to have certain items that are always gone, even when the company, like Amazon or Walmart, has traditionally had a super inventory system. I’m pretty sure the DOGE thing has messed up student loan and Social Security functions. And wow, now we are completely screwed when it comes to anything that needs petroleum products. It’s like Artificial Intelligence and The Trump Regime Dysfunction have joined together to make our lives miserable.
I’d like to highlight this Substack of Dr. Paul Krugman this morning. “No, America is Not Respected. Thanks to Trump, we’re held in contempt even by our closest allies.” Trump is actually making China great again. They are the obvious winner of all this.
There’s a real Baghdad Bob feel to pronouncements from the Trump administration these days. The war is going great! We’ve been totally victorious! Also, other countries — including China! — must immediately send ships to escort oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, which the U.S. Navy isn’t doing because it’s too dangerous.
But this has been the pattern ever since Trump returned to power. Despite repeated failures to deliver on his campaign promises — remember how he was going to cut energy prices in half? — he and his minions have continually insisted that everything is wonderful, that everything they do is a triumphant success story. And he’s still doing it. On Thursday, he told a rally that
Inflation is plummeting, incomes are rising, the economy is roaring back and America is respected again.
As I and others have documented ad nauseam, none of those economic assertions are true. Today, however, I want to focus on the bolded claim. Trump constantly insists, in speeches and social media posts, that he took over a weak, despised nation and restored its international reputation. This is clearly something that matters a lot to him and his sense of self-worth.
It’s also the total opposite of the truth.
A stunning poll from Politico — just released, but taken last month — confirms what I and other observers strongly suspected: America is now widely despised, despised like nobody has ever been despised before.
I don’t mean that we’re disliked, although that too. But this isn’t a case of oderint dum metuant — let them hate so long as they fear. Instead, the world increasingly holds America in contempt.
And they no longer believe that being a U.S. ally offers protection, that a good relationship with America will deter potential enemies from attacking them.
At this point, a plurality of the population in every one of our erstwhile allies considers China a more reliable partner than the United States.
Check the graphs and more at the link. Jonathan V. Last, writing at The Bulwark, has this analysis today.
If you want to understand the difference in the quality of strategic thinking between Washington and Tehran, consider the messages being sent out over the last three days:
Tehran: We will continue to resist, however we are open to allowing oil transport in the strait that we control provided the product is sold in yuan and not dollars.
I have been saying since the beginning that America is playing checkers while Iran plays chess, but it’s worse than that. American leadership is utterly incoherent: We won, but we need help. We hate our allies; but will our adversaries please come bail us out?
Meanwhile Iranian leadership survived a transition of power in the midst of war, achieved its strategic objective in closing the strait, and is now looking to leverage China’s rising economic ambitions against the United States.
I cannot overstate how significant it would be if Iran and China reached an agreement to allow oil transport under condition of a switch from the dollar to the yuan,1 so here’s European Business:
The condition, if formalised, would represent the most significant challenge to the petrodollar system in its fifty-two-year history, striking at the financial architecture that underpins American global power rather than at US military assets. . . .
To understand why the yuan condition matters, it is necessary to understand what the petrodollar system actually is. Born from the Nixon shock of 1971 and formalised in 1974, the arrangement under which Saudi Arabia and the broader Gulf agreed to denominate all oil sales in US dollars created a self-reinforcing loop that has governed global finance ever since. Because oil—the world’s most traded commodity—must be purchased in dollars, every nation that imports energy must first acquire dollars. Every central bank holds dollar reserves for precisely this reason. The dollar’s status as the world’s primary reserve currency is not an abstract achievement; it flows directly and mechanically from oil. . . .
[Iran] is proposing that access to the world’s most critical energy chokepoint be conditional on currency denomination.
The practical consequence, if even partially adopted, would be a bifurcated global oil market: yuan-denominated barrels flowing through Hormuz for those willing to pay in China’s currency, dollar-denominated barrels rerouted at significant additional cost and time for those who are not. The war premium that Western energy importers are already absorbing would become structural rather than temporary.
I don’t know how to make people care about this except to say that if Iran and China made this deal it would absolutely be the beginning of the end of the dollar backstopping the global financial order. The long-term cost to America would be incalculable.
As I said, he’s making China great again. As for NATO, I think Orange Caligula has managed to blow it up. This is from Reuters. It’s the news behind all that analysis. “US allies rebuff Trump’s request for support in Strait of Hormuz.”
BERLIN/BRUSSELS/LONDON, March 16 (Reuters) – Several U.S. allies said on Monday they had no immediate plans to send ships to unblock the Strait of Hormuz, rebuffing a request by President Donald Trump for military support to keep the vital waterway open.
Trump called on nations to help police the strait after Iran responded to U.S.-Israeli attacks by using drones, missiles and mines to effectively close the channel for tankers that normally transport a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas.
Politico’s Nette Nosslinger has more details. “Germany to Trump: We won’t help you reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Berlin says Iran is “not NATO’s war.”
Germany’s government rejected U.S. President Donald Trump’s demand that NATO allies help secure the Strait of Hormuz, declaring that the alliance had no place in the war.
“This war has nothing to do with NATO. It’s not NATO’s war,” Stefan Kornelius, a spokesperson for German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, told reporters in Berlin on Monday. “NATO is a defensive alliance, an alliance for the defense of its territory,” he added.
Trump had warned NATO allies on Sunday they face a “very bad future” if they refuse to help secure the Strait of Hormuz, pressing Europe to support an American effort to reopen the key maritime corridor.
The German government said it would not assist in that effort as long as the war rages on.
“As long as this war continues, there will be no involvement, not even in an option to keep the Strait of Hormuz open by military means,” Kornelius said, adding that he was not aware of an official request by the U.S. government to Germany to take part in such a mission.
“I would also like to remind you that the U.S. and Israel did not consult us before the war, and that Washington explicitly stated at the start of the war that European assistance was neither necessary nor desired,” Kornelius said.
Heather Cox Richardson puts it into perspective at her SubStack “Letters from an American.” We had quite the Ides of March yesterday; however, the Roman version was a bit more successful in ridding themselves of the bad guy.
Today, as the country enters its third week of war against Iran, President Donald J. Trump was on the golf course, illustrating the observation of journalist E.J. Dionne in the New York Times that “from the very beginning of this war, we got a sense that there wasn’t a great deal of serious thought put into it by the president of the United States about how it might end, what our objectives were, what needed to be done to protect Americans who are in the Middle East, what might happen to oil in the Strait of Hormuz.”
Although the administration appears to be trying to convince Americans that the U.S. military’s destruction of the Iranian military means the U.S. has won the war, Iranian leadership needed simply to continue in power to declare victory. Then, blocking the 20% of the world’s oil that flows through the Strait of Hormuz would give them leverage over the war’s outcome.
On March 10, Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported that senior defense officials told them the Iranian military is adjusting its tactics to strike at the communications and defense systems protecting U.S. troops. Those tactics include drone strikes. The same day, Marc Caputo, Barak Ravid, and Colin Demarest of Axios reported that Ukrainian officials had tried several months ago to sell the U.S. anti-drone technology for downing Iran-made drones as a sign of thanks for U.S. support and as a way to strengthen ties between the U.S. and Ukraine, but the U.S. did not pursue the offer.
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly responded: “This characterization made by these cowardly unnamed sources is not accurate and proves that they are simply outside looking in. [Defense] Secretary [Pete] Hegseth and the armed forces did an incredible job planning for all possible responses by the Iranian regime, and the undisputed success of Operation Epic Fury speaks for itself.”
And yet the fallout from the strikes on Iran by the U.S. and Israel appears to have caught the administration by surprise. Trump told Kristen Welker and Alexandra Marquez of NBC News yesterday that he was “surprised” that Iran attacked other countries after the U.S. and Israeli strikes. He also said strikes on Saturday on Kharg Island, which is about fifteen miles off the Iranian coast and is home to Iran’s primary oil export terminal, “totally demolished” most of the island but that “we may hit it a few more times just for fun.”
President Donald J. Trump posted on social media Saturday morning: “Many Countries, especially those who are affected by Iran’s attempted closure of the Hormuz Strait, will be sending War Ships, in conjunction with the United States of America, to keep the Strait open and safe. We have already destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military capability, but it’s easy for them to send a drone or two, drop a mine, or deliver a close range missile somewhere along, or in, this Waterway, no matter how badly defeated they are.”
Well, that didn’t happen, did it? China is full-speed ahead in transitioning away from its fossil-fuel-based energy grid. Trump still shakes his fist at windmills. I did enjoy Kyle Cheney’s take at Politico. “Trump is losing one battle after another. Cue the posts. The president’s Sunday night diatribe was most notable for his attacks on the highest court in the land.”
President Donald Trump is increasingly at the mercy of forces he unleashed but can’t control — so he’s taking aim at the umpires.
So it was, in a fit of Sunday night fury that set Washington’s armchair psychoanalysts ablaze, that the president channeled his rage at the few functioning checks on his power: the media, independent regulators and — most pointedly — the federal judiciary.
Trump’s Sunday night outburst took on all of them, but it was most notable for how he cast the Supreme Court — one that has staved off the destruction of his agenda and even his own criminal prosecution — as “a weaponized, and unjust Political Organization.”
“This completely inept and embarrassing Court was not what the Supreme Court of the United States was set up by our wonderful Founders to be,” the president blared on Truth Social. “They are hurting our Country, and will continue to do so.”
It was a remarkable attack. Until the Feb. 20 tariff ruling, the Trump administration had been touting its winning streak at the Supreme Court. The justices have salvaged Trump’s broadest efforts to end legal protections for hundreds of thousands of noncitizens in the United States, allowed him to assert unprecedented control of once-independent agencies and unilaterally slash congressionally authorized spending.
The court, as Trump knows, is arguably responsible for his return to power in the first place: The justices blocked an effort by some blue states to keep Trump off the 2024 ballot by labeling him an insurrectionist responsible for the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. And the court’s decision to adopt a sweeping view of presidential immunity helped stave off special counsel Jack Smith’s most potent criminal case against Trump.
But to Trump, that’s ancient history.
The core of the attack is the frustration that Trump often exhibits when he brushes up against the limits of his power. He spent Sunday lashing out at the news media, cheering on FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s threat to revoke broadcast licenses for stations that report unfavorably on the war in Iran, and lamenting his inability to control the independent Federal Reserve’s interest rate decisions.
Trump describes the high court’s recent rejection of his unfettered ability to levy tariffs against American trading partners as a deeply personal affront — one that contradicted the ethos of his entire decade in public life.
Since the stinging tariffs decision last month, Trump has seemed fixated on the ruling, weighing in against the high court every few days.
“Our Country was unnecessarily RANSACKED by the United States Supreme Court,” he wrote Sunday.
I’m not sure I’d call this a Come-to-Jesus moment for the Supreme Court. Maybe Roberts doesn’t want to go down as the worst Chief in history. Your guess is as good as mine. And once more, we have more Epstein stories. Basically, you have to chase them down to read about them. Here’s something from The Guardian. “‘Attention will swing back’: Epstein outrage unlikely to subside despite Trump’s Iran war. Advocates say 24/7 coverage of US attacks will not last for ever – and spotlight will return to Epstein and his crimes.”
As the US woke to news that Donald Trump had bombed Iran, domestic discord was fast simmering.
There was unrelenting outrage over ICE raids. There was frustration with the rising cost of living. There was fear over rocketing healthcare prices, mounting household debt, not to mention many Americans’ nagging sense of desperation in a country, some warned, where democracy itself was under threat.
During his third presidential run, Trump promised to release investigative files involving someone Trump had once called a “terrific guy”. This pledge served as ideological catnip to the far-right flank of Trump’s base, many of whom believe that a cabal of elite figures participated in Epstein’s trafficking of teenage girls.
Trump’s administration botched the initial release, however, with his justice department disseminating documents in dribs and drabs before announcing in July that there would be no more disclosures – spurring backlash among longtime supporters. In a rare display of bipartisanship, members of Congress took matters into their own hands, conducting their own investigations and passing the Epstein Files Transparency Act in November.
Trump, despite repeatedly calling the Epstein files a “hoax”, signed the bill into law. His justice department had 30 days to disclose publicly all Epstein files, with rare exceptions.
Trump’s DoJ did not meet Congress’s deadline, disseminating one tranche at the 30-day mark and several others days and weeks later – including a 3 million document disclosure on 30 January – prompting still more ire from opponents and some diehard supporters who believe more files remain.
But now US headlines are dominated by the US-Israel attack on Iran – and the economic and diplomatic chaos it has unleashed. Yet advocates and observers say that Epstein-related outrage is still unlikely to die down.
Gretchen Carlson and Julie Roginsky, who pursued sexual harassment claims against former Fox News chief executive Roger Ailes and started the non-profit Lift Our Voices, told the Guardian that the Iran war can draw attention from the Epstein files – but not in perpetuity.
“We all know that the Trump administration is very good at flooding the news market with a lot of different stories every single day, and so it’s very difficult in the news media to keep up with all of them and give them what they all deserve, as far as time [is concerned],” Carlson said.
“The way the news media works, especially on 24/7 cable news, is that you are covering the biggest story of the moment. Right now that appears to be Iran.”
Carlson said she is still seeing Epstein stories – including news that authorities never searched his New Mexico ranch – and said conservative figures’ opposition to the war portends prolonged attention over Epstein.
“Influencers, especially on the right, criticize the Iranian war and the reasons that the United States got involved,” Carlson said. “I believe that will bring us right back to Epstein.”
So, I’ll quit and just say we’re coming apart at the seams in this country. Tech Bros and Bankers and Pedophiles! Oh My!
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
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I’m even more overwhelmed than usual with the news today. It’s absolutely insane.
Yesterday we got to see Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday book, and it is simply disgusting, as JJ wrote yesterday. Trump can deny he wrote the note with his signature all he wants. No one is buying it. He was closse friends with this man for 10-15 years and had to know what Epstein was up to. Not only that, Trump makes other sickening appearances in the book, including one about buying a “fully depreciated” woman from Epstein.
That would be enough horrible news to deal with today, but there’s much more. Poland shot down Russian drones that entered their air space. Israel bombed a building in Qatar. The Supreme Court decision to legalize racial profiling continues to be a top story (Dakinikat covered that extensively on Monday.). ICE is continuing to terrify residents of numerous cities. Trump ventured out of the White House last night with some cabinet members and was called Hitler by citizens of Washington DC.
Looking back, I don’t know what exactly I was expecting when I opened “Request No. 1,” the PDF file containing the contents of Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th-birthday book. Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend and co-conspirator, created the book in 2003 by soliciting tributes from the financier’s friends and associates. Given the crimes Epstein was convicted of, I steeled myself before scrolling. Somehow, my internet-addled imagination failed me. This book is a nightmare.
The book was released yesterday by Congress after Epstein’s estate, which was subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee, provided a copy. It is the same book that contains the now-infamous letter and “bawdy” sketch from Donald Trump that ends: “May every day be another wonderful secret.” When The Wall Street Journal reported on the letter’s existence in July, the newspaper described it but did not republish the letter itself, so Trump vehemently denied that it was real and sued for defamation. But the now-public letter certainly looks real, and so does Trump’s signature. Many of the people who encountered it for the first time yesterday made a similar observation: Its creepy prose is framed by a markered sketch of what looks like the caricature not of a woman’s body, but of a girl’s. (The White House can no longer plausibly deny that the letter exists, but it now insists that Trump did not write or sign it.)
The Trump letter makes the birthday book inherently newsworthy. But it is far from the most disturbing or lecherous of the book’s contents. A section titled “Brooklyn” includes recollections of Epstein’s horrible sexual escapades, apparently including making a maid watch people have sex and holding a knife up while telling women to take off their swimsuits on a boat—a story told in the book under the heading “Girls on My Boat.” Given what we know about Epstein’s sex crimes, including his sex crimes against minors, the birthday book is a sickening document. Over its 238 pages, Epstein’s friends, “girlfriends,” and business acquaintances offer lurid tributes to the pedophilic multimillionaire in the form of acrostic poems, drawings, and letters extolling him as “a liver, a lover,” and, affectionately, the “Degenerate One.” Individual contributions vary but it is the sheer volume of sexual references and jokes that ends up being most shocking. So much so that I suggest you read the document yourself.
The book’s contributors apparently include former President Bill Clinton, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, the billionaire retailer Leslie Wexner, and, of course, Maxwell herself, as well as a prominent fashion designer, financiers, and a media magnate. Clinton, Mitchell, and Wexner did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for Clinton referred The Wall Street Journal to a previous statement that said, “The former president had cut off ties more than a decade before Epstein’s 2019 arrest and didn’t know about Epstein’s alleged crimes.” Wexner declined to comment to the Journal but previously told reporters he cut ties with Epstein in 2007.
Not all of the entries in the book allude to sexual activity, and it’s plausible that not all of the contributors knew about Epstein’s crimes. Still, the document is conspiracy jet fuel—visual and textual confirmation of the long-held suspicions that Epstein’s sex pestery was an open secret, enabled by powerful people who may have participated in it themselves or laughed it all off as a friend’s roguish quirk….
Sanitizing this document would be wrong, so I’ll be blunt: The Epstein birthday book is full of contributions from wealthy and powerful people who appear fully aware of Epstein’s attraction to “girls.” In fact, they seem to celebrate it and, in some cases, allude winkingly to Epstein’s predatory lifestyle.
Use the gift link to read the rest. I haven’t looked through the entire book yet. I suppose I should do it, but I’m not looking forward to it after what I’ve already seen and heard.
The splashy focus of Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday book released by lawmakers on Monday was a lewd drawing apparently signed by Donald J. Trump. But Mr. Trump’s cameo in another part of the book also provided fodder for Democrats and other critics of the president.
An entry in Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday book, contributed by the Florida real estate developer Joel Pashcow.
The entry, included in a bound volume in 2003, was made by Joel Pashcow, the former chairman of a real estate company in New York and a member of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s resort in Palm Beach, Fla. It shows a photograph of Mr. Pashcow at the resort with Mr. Epstein, another man and a woman whose face is redacted. Mr. Pashcow is holding an oversize check that appears to have been doctored, with a seemingly phony “DJ TRUMP” signature.
A handwritten note under the photo, which was taken in the 1990s, joked that Mr. Epstein showed “early talents with money + women,” and had sold a “fully depreciated” woman to Mr. Trump for $22,500.
The woman, whose name is also redacted in the files released by the House Oversight Committee, was a European socialite then in her 20s, according to two people familiar with the original photo. She had briefly dated both Mr. Epstein and Mr. Trump around that time, according to court transcripts and a person close to Mr. Epstein. The birthday book entry appears to be a reference to the competition between the two men for the woman’s affections.
The nature of the woman’s relationship with Mr. Epstein is murky. The New York Times is not naming her because she may have been one of his victims.
A lawyer for the woman said she knew Mr. Epstein in “a professional capacity” when she was a student but severed ties with him in 1997. She did not know anything about the letter or its “derogatory content,” the lawyer added.
A bit more information:
Mr. Pashcow appears to have contributed several consecutive pages to the book. On the page before the mock check is a vulgar cartoon depicting Mr. Epstein’s grooming of young girls: On one side, marked 1983, Mr. Epstein is handing out balloons to a group of girls; on the other, labeled 2003, he is receiving a naked massage from four topless young women. “What a great country!” it reads at the bottom.
The photograph with the giant check offers fresh insight on the social circles shared by Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein. It is no secret that the two were friendly in the 1990s and early 2000s, before Mr. Epstein was convicted of sex crimes in 2008.
A visual analysis by The Times found that the photo was taken at Mar-a-Lago after the resort opened as a club in 1996 and was landscaped with palm trees and other features.
Use the gift link to read more details if you so desire.
NATO fighter jets shot down multiple Russian drones that violated Polish airspace during an attack on neighboring Ukraine early on Wednesday, as the military alliance denounced Moscow for “absolutely dangerous” behavior that ratcheted up tensions to a new level.
The operation marked the first time that shots were fired by NATO since the start of the war in Ukraine. Polish and Dutch jets intercepted the drones, with assistance from Italian, German and NATO’s multinational forces, officials said.
People watch as a house is damaged after a drone or similar object struck a residential building according to local authorities, following violations of Polish airspace during a Russian attack on Ukraine.
Addressing the Polish parliament, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said that while there was no reason to say that Poland was in a state of war, it was closer to a conflict than any time since World War II. He said the country was facing an “enemy that does not hide its hostile intentions.”
Tusk also announced that Poland has invoked Article 4 of NATO, meaning the alliance’s main political decision-making body will now meet to discuss the situation and its next steps.
Russia’s defense ministry said in a statement that it had carried out a strike against Ukraine overnight. It said that “no targets on the territory of Poland were planned for destruction,” and that the drones it used in Ukraine have a flight range that of no more than 700 kilometers (435 miles).
The Russian foreign ministry then said that these “specific facts completely debunk the myths repeatedly spread by Poland in order to escalate the Ukrainian crisis further.”
NATO chief Mark Rutte said, however, that the violation of Poland’s airspace was not an “isolated incident.”
Poland invoked Article 4 of NATO’s treaty on Wednesday after the alliance’s fighter jets shot down Russian drones that entered its airspace in the early hours of the morning. Russian drones have crossed into Poland before, including twice last week, but this was the first time that Russian drones had been shot down over the territory of a NATO country.
“What is clear is that the violation last night is not an isolated incident,” said Mark Rutte, NATO’s secretary general. “We will closely monitor the situation along our eastern flank, our air defenses continually at the ready.”
Here’s what to know about NATO’s Article 4….
Article 4 allows a member state to start a formal discussion among the alliance about threats to its security. While invoking Article 4 does not commit NATO to any military action, it is a required step toward a NATO decision to invoke Article 5. (An invocation of Article 5 is often assumed to have military implications, but the NATO treaty says only that its members will “assist” the party that has been attacked. This can also mean economic or political action.)
Article 4 states that the alliance’s members “will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the parties is threatened.”
Since NATO’s founding in 1949, Article 4 has been invoked eight times. Before Wednesday, the last was on Feb. 24, 2022, the day Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Now what?
The joint NATO response early Wednesday showed how quickly the war in Ukraine could escalate into a military confrontation between Russia and NATO.
Mr. Rutte said that the alliance’s air defenses were activated to ensure Poland’s protection. The response included fighter jets and air-defense systems from the Netherlands, Germany and Italy, he said.
“The security situation of our airspace has been stabilized, and ground-based air defense and radar reconnaissance systems have returned to standard operational activities,” the Polish military said on social media.
• US President Donald Trump expressed displeasure about the attack. “I’m not thrilled about the whole situation. It’s not a good situation,” he said, adding he would issue a full statement on Wednesday. Qatar’s prime minister was visibly angry as he described the strike as “state terrorism.”
Qatar said it has the right to respond to Israel’s strike in Doha that targeted Hamas political leaders, which it decried as a “blatant attack”.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, the Qatari prime minister, described Tuesday’s attack as “state terrorism” that targeted the security and stability of the region.
Aftermath of Israeli strike inside Qatar.
“Qatar… reserves the right to respond to this blatant attack,” he told a late night press conference.
“We believe that today we have reached a pivotal moment. There must be a response from the entire region to such barbaric actions.”
US president Donald Trump said he was “very unhappy” about Israel’s airstrike that killed six people, saying it advances neither Israel nor America’s goals.
Trump called the strike on Hamas’s political wing “unfortunate” and said he had directed US envoy Steve Witkoff to warn Qatar but it was too late to stop the strike.
Hamas said five of its lower-ranking members and a Qatari security official were killed in the airstrike, but that all its leaders survived the attack.
A big change happened yesterday, when the Supreme Court said it was okay for ICE and the Border Patrol to racially profile individuals walking freely on America’s streets. If you’re brown, speak Spanish, and work in a blue-collar job, you officially belong to a different class of citizen and according to Chief Justice John Roberts, it’s okay to racially profile you.
We have never in US history seen a federal law enforcement agency operate the way ICE has operated this summer — it marks the arrival of a new style of domestic policing, more in line with the infamous “brown shirts” of authoritarian regimes the world over than any regular policing tradition in the nation’s interior. Yes, we’ve seen similar abuses of civil liberties and due process stem from corrupt and racist state police and country sheriffs in the Jim Crow south, and plenty of local police departments even today suffer from localized corruption scandals, but never we seen what is happening with ICE right now take place the whole country over.
All of the nation’s law enforcement are blending together into an “ICE auxiliary.” — Garrett Graff
The day-to-day behavior and aggression of ICE is corrupting the soul of America. I encourage you to watch this video of federal agents policing the start of an elementary school in DC — there not to secure the school and children, but specifically to intimidate and punish schoolgoers. Tell me that isn’t the picture of authoritarianism? You know how you’re going to be the bad guy in the eyes of history? If school children and mothers have to push their way through your armed, masked gang while you’re carrying assault weapons in order to attend school. I can’t help but think how the Trump administration has turned the proud tradition of the US Marshals at the University of Mississippi or the 82nd Airborne at Little Rock Central High on its head. Similarly, this video of a masked officer detaining a father outside immigration court in New York City — the masked officers are indistinguishable from Wild West bank robbers.
There are four things that have really struck me about ICE’s operations over the last month, all of them worrisome about the trajectory of that agency and the presence and role of federal law enforcement in American life. (Separately, I’m going to write about the warning signs already visible in ICE’s dramatic hiring surge.) Taken together, they paint a picture of an already rogue agency that feels it operates outside of the Constitution and owes nothing to the Americans it’s supposed to serve.
(NOTE from BB: You’ll need to go to the link to read the entire explication under the four headings)
1) Everything is now ICE.
The most worrisome aspect of the quick militarization and turbo-charging of ICE is how American law enforcement across the board — and much of the government beyond — is being subsumed by ICE’s mission and lowering themselves, from hiring to behavior to tactics, down to ICE’s standards.
We have different federal law enforcement agencies for a reason — and moreover, as citizens, we as a country need and want federal law enforcement. The FBI, DEA, ATF, Secret Service, and the US Marshals all have their own lanes, authorities, and responsibilities, but right now we’ve watching the Trump administration turn all of federal law enforcement across both the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security into an faceless quasi-ICE auxiliary, blending all these agencies and agent into some amorphous anonymous blob of masked, brown tactical-vest-wearing federal law enforcement. I wrote recently about how this precisely is what authoritarian regime looks like — armed, masked, anonymous agents of the state jumping from unmarked vehicles and whisking people away….
2) Collapse of Moral Legitimacy.
I wrote earlier in the summer about how in a democracy policing requires moral legitimacy and the permission of the policed. That’s been one of the hallmarks of policing ever since Sir Robert Peel built the first modern police force in London’s Metropolitan Police. One of his core principles of policing was: “To recognize always that the power of the police to fulfill their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behavior, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.”
The DC police department was literally created originally in Peel’s image, which is why it too is known awkwardly as the “Metropolitan Police.” Now, in a historical irony, it is ground zero for the erosion of the moral legitimacy of federal law enforcement writ large….
3) Operating without due regard for civil liberties and due process.
In my essay at the end of August about how America has tipped in fascism, I wrote, “America has become a country where armed officers of the state shout ‘papers please’ on the street at men and women heading home from work, where masked men wrestle to the ground and abduct people without due process into unmarked vehicles, disappearing them into an opaque system where their family members beg for information.”
Add up all of the above and you have a portrait of a rogue agency, which is what leads me to my final dangerous warning sign: This agency clearly knows that it can do no wrong in the eyes of the White House and administration — there is no level of violence, brutality, or abuse of civil liberties that would get any of these agents or officers in trouble with their bosses. Earlier this summer, I wrote about how ICE is acting as if it will never face accountability again. We’ve seen ICE flaunt federal law that requires congressional oversight — and, instead, it has tried to arrest and charge federal lawmakers, a bright line if there ever was one.
At every turn, though, the agency is going out of its way to make it harder to hold officers accountable. ICE officers don’t routinely wear name tags or easily visible badge numbers (in this video, check out how you have to zoom in on his badge on his belt to even begin to identify his badge number.) Moreover, though, despite the fact that we’re weeks and months into this national ICE takeover, the agency has made no effort to make its masked officers on the streets identifiable to either the public — or even to itself.
You there. Stop what you’re doing. Take off that tool belt and hard hat—let’s see some ID. Why? Because we don’t think you’re a citizen. Now show us your papers.
This kind of behavior by government officials is now legal in the United States.
Masked ICE agents in Los Angeles
Yesterday, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court allowed ICE officials to conduct roving patrols and use racial profiling to stop and detain people for no other reason than their skin color, the language they’re speaking, suspicions about their national origin—or, really, if immigration officials just feel like it.
But wait, you might object. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits unreasonable search and seizure. Did the Court explain why that protection apparently no longer applies to you if you’re a day laborer or running a fruit stand? Good luck with that: This Court’s majority doesn’t explain itself to anyone. It merely lets stand or overturns the decisions of lower courts—lately, almost always in favor of expanding the power of, and corroding any checks on, President Donald Trump.
Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo is a case from Los Angeles about whether ICE can stop people because of a suspicion of their being in the United States illegally, based solely, as SCOTUSblog summarized it, on any combination of four factors: a person’s “‘apparent race or ethnicity,’ speaking in Spanish or accented English, being present at a location where undocumented immigrants ‘are known to gather’ (such as pickup spots for day laborers), and working at specific jobs, such as landscaping or construction.”
A California district-court judge had earlier enjoined ICE from making such stops, perhaps appalled by this example:
Plaintiff Jason Brian Gavidia is a U.S. citizen who was born and raised in East Los Angeles and identifies as Latino. On the afternoon of June 12, he stepped onto the sidewalk outside of a tow yard in Montebello, California, where he saw agents carrying handguns and military-style rifles. One agent ordered him to “Stop right there” while another “ran towards [him].” The agents repeatedly asked Gavidia whether he is American—and they repeatedly ignored his answer: “I am an American.” The agents asked Gavidia what hospital he was born in—and he explained that he did not know which hospital. “The agents forcefully pushed [Gavidia] up against the metal gated fence, put [his] hands behind [his] back, and twisted [his] arm.” An agent asked again, “What hospital were you born in?” Gavidia again explained that he did not know which hospital and said “East L.A.” He then told the agents he could show them his Real ID. The agents took Gavidia’s ID and his phone and kept his phone for 20 minutes. They never returned his ID.
In overturning the lower court’s decision, five of the Court’s six right-wing justices—there is no other reasonable way to describe them at this point—took advantage of their right to remain silent, but Justice Brett Kavanaugh gamely tried to speak up in a concurrence. If his goal was to be reassuring, he did not help matters: Such stops are usually “brief,” he explained. Again, I am not a scholar of the Constitution, but I had no idea that I could be deprived of my rights under the Fourth (or any other) Amendment as long as my getting roughed up takes only a few moments out of my busy day.
President Donald Trump stepped out for dinner in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday only to find himself immediately confronted by protesters calling him “the Hitler of our time,” forcing him and his entourage of cabinet officials to stand awkwardly listening to their taunts before they could sit down to eat.
Activists took advantage of Trump’s rare public outing to to Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab, a short walk from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, to heckle and berate the president with cries of “Free D.C.! Free Palestine! Trump is the Hitler of our time!”
“You are not welcome here!” one woman can be seen telling him in a video shared on social media. “Yes he is,” another diner countered.
Trump initially looked unfazed by the provocation but then gestured to his security team and said impatiently: “Come on. Let’s go. Get them out of here.”
The activist in question was escorted out of the dining area but continued to yell, despite some boos: “He’s terrorizing communities all over the world! From Puerto Rico… to Palestine to Venezuela! He’s not welcome to D.C.! He’s not welcome to Palestine! Palestine is not for sale!”
Only after she had been removed could Trump and his guests take their places at their table.
Joining the president for dinner were Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and other senior White House officials.
Those are my offerings for today. What’s on your mind?
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Well, that was just about what most of us expected. Trump practically bowed down to Putin. Uniformed U.S. troops were seen on their hands and knees setting up a red carpet from Putin’s plane to where Trump stood to welcome him.
When he saw Putin coming, Trump clapped his hands. He was obviously thrilled to see his idol again, and he gave Putin a warm handshake while patting him on the shoulder. Then Putin was invited to ride in the Beast where the two men could talk privately. Or perhaps Putin handed Trump a written message–who knows?
The cats are not happy today.
After the meeting, Putin and Trump appeared at a supposed “press conference,” but no questions from the press were allowed. Traditionally the host speaks first, but Trump deferred to Putin, who gave a dissertation on the history of Russia in Alaska. Putin also agreed with Trump that there never would have been an invasion of Ukraine if Trump had been president. Trump spoke only briefly, and he complained about how the “Russia Russia Russia hoax” interfered with his “fantastic relationship” with “President Putin.”
We were interfered with by the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. It made it a little bit tougher to deal with, but he understood it. I think he’s probably seen things like that during the course of his career. He’s seen- he’s seen it all. But we had to put up with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. He knew it was a hoax, and I knew it was a hoax, but what was done was very criminal, but it made it harder for us to deal as a country, in terms of the business, and all of the things that would like to have dealt with, but we’ll have a good chance when this is over.
Trump also noted that he was going to call NATO and Zelensky to let them know what happened in the meeting.
No questions from the press were allowed. You can read the full transcript at CBS News. It’s not very long.
MSNBC’s Peter Alexander reported that Trump’s entourage did not seem happy after the meeting:
Peter Alexander: "What struck me was the looks on the faces of a lot of the American, delegation here. Caroline Leavitt, Steve Witkoff, who came into the room, then left quickly. Leavitt appeared to be a bit stressed out, anxious. Their eyes were wide, almost ashen at times."
Papers with U.S. State Department markings, found Friday morning in the business center of an Alaskan hotel, revealed previously undisclosed and potentially sensitive details about the Aug. 15 meetings between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin in Anchorage.
Eight pages, that appear to have been produced by U.S. staff and left behind accidentally, shared precise locations and meeting times of the summit and phone numbers of U.S. government employees.
At around 9 a.m. on Friday, three guests at Hotel Captain Cook, a four-star hotel located 20 minutes from the Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage where leaders from the U.S. and Russia convened, found the documents left behind in one of the hotel’s public printers. NPR reviewed photos of the documents taken by one of the guests, who NPR agreed not to identify because the guest said they feared retaliation….
The first page in the printed packet disclosed the sequence of meetings for August 15, including the specific names of the rooms inside the base in Anchorage where they would take place. It also revealed that Trump intended to give Putin a ceremonial present.
“POTUS to President Putin,” the document states, “American Bald Eagle Desk Statue.”
Pages 2 through 5 listed the names and phone numbers of three U.S. staff members as well as the names of 13 U.S. and Russian state leaders. The list included phonetic pronouncers for all the Russian men expected at the summit, including “Mr. President POO-tihn.”
Pages 6 and 7 in the packet described how lunch at the summit would be served, and for whom. A menu included in the documents indicated that the luncheon was to be held “in honor of his excellency Vladimir Putin.”
A seating chart shows that Putin and Trump were supposed to sit across from each other during the luncheon. Trump would be flanked by six officials: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles to his right, and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and Special Envoy for Peace Missions Steve Witkoff to his left. Putin would be seated immediately next to his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov, and his Aide to the President for Foreign Policy, Yuri Ushakov.
During the summit Friday, lunch was apparently cancelled. But it was intended to be a simple, three-course meal, the documents showed. After a green salad, the world leaders would dine on filet mignon and halibut olympia. Crème brûlée would be served for dessert.
The state-run Russian international news network Russia Today (RT) has released behind-the-scenes video from Alaska that appears to show President Donald Trump fawning over Vladimir Putin.
The video shared by the Kremlin shows Trump and Putin standing together backstage near where they delivered public remarks following their three-hour meeting.
Despite walking away without a deal and without sharing any details on progress toward ending the war in Ukraine, the president could be seen laughing as he spoke to Putin.
The only person standing with the two leaders as they spoke was Putin’s translator.
In the video, Trump can be seen offering his hand first to shake hands with Putin. The president then tapped their joined hands with his other hand, embracing Putin with a two-hand shake. He also shook the Russian translator’s hand at the end of the clip.
The Kremlin was quick to release the video. While the White House has been posting a series of clips from the historic visit in Alaska, it has not yet shared any candid video of Trump and Putin together. The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.
According to RT, the video was taken right after their public remarks, during which neither man took any questions from reporters. It described their behind-the-scenes banter as “light chatter.”
President Donald Trump has ended his high-stakes Russia summit without announcing a deal to end the war in Ukraine, despite rolling out the red carpet for Vladimir Putin as the first U.S. president in years to invite him to America.
After a ride in the presidential limousine, a military flyover, and three hours of talks, a somewhat subdued Trump told reporters in Alaska: “We didn’t get there—but we have a very good chance of getting there.” [….]
During a press conference lasting only a few minutes, Trump and Putin spoke of an agreement of sorts, but gave no details, took no questions, and made no mention of a ceasefire.
“There’s no deal until there’s a deal,” Trump said. “I will call up NATO in a little while. I will call up the various people that I think are appropriate, and I’ll, of course, call up President Zelensky and tell them about today’s meeting. It’s ultimately up to them.”
The lack of an announcement is likely to fuel claims that Putin was using the meeting as a stalling tactic to stave off further U.S. sanctions.
And, of course, Trump used it as an attempted distraction from the Epstein files.
The Russian authoritarian has been frozen out by the West for years, and his visit has been depicted in Moscow as a win for the Kremlin.
At the press conference, Putin addressed the room first, and then spoke for eight-and-a-half minutes about the history of the two nations, his desire for more business ties with America, and flattered the American president by agreeing that the war would not have happened if Trump had been in office.
He also told reporters that he greeted Trump on the tarmac in Alaska by saying, “Good afternoon, dear neighbor—very good to see you in good health and to see you alive.”
But Putin also made the point that in order to make a “lasting and long-term” end to the war, “we need to eliminate all the primary root causes” of the conflict in Ukraine.
This is viewed as shorthand for Putin’s hardline demands, which have repeatedly been rejected: that Ukraine disarms, gives up a large part of its land to Russia, and swears off joining NATO.
Friday’s summit in Alaska’s Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson was the first time Putin has been on U.S. soil in 10 years.
It was also the first time a U.S. president has given the VIP treatment to a Russian leader who faces an arrest warrant for war crimes issued by the International Criminal Court as well as being sanctioned by the U.S. government.
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin agrees with him that letting voters send in ballots by mail puts honest elections at risk.
Trump, who promoted the false narrative that he, not Democrat Joe Biden, won the 2020 election, cited his agreement with Putin over absentee voting as he pressed his fellow Republicans to try harder to advance overhauls to the U.S. voting system that he has long sought.
Trump has voted by mail in some previous elections and urged his supporters to do so in 2024.
Putin, who has been Russia’s president or prime minister since 1999, was elected to another term in office with 87% of the vote in a 2024 election that drew allegations of vote rigging from some independent polling observers, opposition voices and Western governments. The most formidable opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, died in an Arctic penal colony in 2024.
Imagine taking advice on fair elections from Putin. LOL
Those were the words that came to mind when we watched the Alaska Summit unfold.
On our screens, a blood-soaked dictator and war criminal received a royal welcome in the land of the free — as his attack drones headed for our cities.
In the lead-up to the meeting in Alaska, U.S. President Donald Trump declared he wanted a “ceasefire today” and that his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin would face “severe consequences” if he didn’t go for it.
Yet after a 2.5-hour closed-door meeting, Trump and Putin emerged to share… nothing. “Progress” was made and some “understanding” reached, but the two didn’t come to an agreement on “the most significant point” — clearly, Ukraine.
Trump didn’t get what he wanted. But Putin? He sure did.
From the moment he stepped off the plane on U.S. soil, the Russian dictator was beaming.
No longer an international pariah, he was finally getting accepted – and respected — by the leader of the free world. Trump’s predecessor once called Putin a murderer; Trump offered him a king’s welcome.
Trump greeted Putin with a red carpet, warm handshakes, a flyover of U.S. bombers, and a backseat limo ride.
The chummy display stood in stark contrast to Trump’s hostile reception of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office six months ago.
Ukraine’s president endured a public shaming. Russia’s was pampered. Both episodes were disgraceful.
Glasser begins by describing the buildup and aftermath of the meeting pretty much as I’ve already posted here. Her evaluation of the event:
Sometimes the news is what it seems to be, meaning, in this case: No deal. The day began with a hellish war in Ukraine, with air-raid sirens in Kyiv and fierce battles in the east, and that is how it ended. The only difference is that Putin got one hell of a photo op out of Trump, and still more time on the clock to prosecute his war against the “brotherly” Ukrainian people, as he had the chutzpah to call them during his remarks in Alaska. The most enduring images from Anchorage, it seems, will be its grotesque displays of bonhomie between the dictator and his longtime American admirer.
Right around the time that Trump was on the tarmac, clapping for the butcher of Bucha, his fund-raising team sent out the following e-mail:
Attention please, I’m meeting with Putin in Alaska! It’s a little chilly. THIS MEETING IS VERY HIGH STAKES for the world. The Democrats would love nothing more than for ME TO FAIL. No one in the world knows how to make deals like me!
The backdrop for this uniquely Trumpian combination of braggadocio and toxic partisanship was, of course, anything but a master class in successful deal-making; rather, the impetus for the summit was the President’s increasing urgency to produce a result after six months of failure to end the war in Ukraine—a task he once said was so easy that it would be done before he even returned to office in January. Leading up to the Alaska summit, nothing worked: Not berating Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office. Not begging Putin to “STOP” his bombing. Not even a U.S.-floated proposal to essentially give Putin much of what he had demanded. Trump gave Putin multiple deadlines—fifty days, two weeks, “ten or twelve days”—to agree to a ceasefire and come to the table, then did nothing when Putin balked. When his latest ultimatum expired, on August 8th, instead of imposing tough new sanctions, as he had threatened, Trump announced that he would meet Putin in Alaska a week later, minus Zelensky, in effect ending the Russian’s global isolation in exchange for no apparent concessions aimed at ending the war that Putin himself had unleashed.
In the run-up to the meeting, debates raged about the right historical parallel to draw between this summit and its twentieth-century antecedents: Was it to be a replay of Yalta, with two great powers instead of three settling the fate of absent small nations, and with the United States once again signing off on Russia’s dominance over its neighbors? Or perhaps Munich was the better analogy, with Trump in the role of Neville Chamberlain, ceding a beleaguered ally’s territory as the price of an illusory peace? For Ukraine and its supporters in the West, the prospect of a sellout by Trump loomed large.
But history doesn’t repeat so neatly, and certainly not when Trump is involved. He is a sui-generis American President, who, at the end of the day, seemed to have orchestrated a self-own of embarrassing proportions. As ever, Trump’s big mouth offered up the best reminder of what he wanted in Alaska and what he did not get. On Friday morning, as Trump flew out of Washington aboard Air Force One, he told reporters, “I want to see a ceasefire rapidly. I don’t know if it’s going to be today, but I’m not going to be happy if it’s not today.” But, after his long-sought meeting with Putin, as he again boarded Air Force One for the long flight home, this was the chyron on Fox News that greeted him: “No Ceasefire After Trump-Putin Summit.”
Read the rest at The New Yorker. I got past the paywall by using the link at Memeorandum.com.
President Donald Trump berated President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. He allowed the Pentagon twice to halt prearranged military shipments to Ukraine. He promised that when the current tranche of armaments runs out, there will be no more. He has cut or threatened to cut the U.S. funds that previously supported independent Russian-language media and opposition. His administration is slowly, quietly easing sanctions on Russia, ending “basic sanctions and export control actions that had maintained and increased U.S. pressure,” according to a Senate-minority report. “Every month he’s spent in office without action has strengthened Putin’s hand, weakened ours and undermined Ukraine’s own efforts to bring an end to the war,” Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Elizabeth Warren wrote in a joint statement.
Many of these changes have gone almost unremarked on in the United States. But they are widely known in Russia. The administration’s attacks on Zelensky, Europeans, and Voice of America have been celebrated on Russian television. Of course Vladimir Putin knows about the slow lifting of sanctions. As a result, the Russian president has clearly made a calculation: Trump, to use the language he once hurled at Zelensky, has no cards.
Trump does say that he wants to end the war in Ukraine, and sometimes he also says that he is angry that Putin doesn’t. But if the U.S. is not willing to use any economic, military, or political tools to help Ukraine, if Trump will not put any diplomatic pressure on Putin or any new sanctions on Russian resources, then the U.S. president’s fond wish to be seen as a peacemaker can be safely ignored. No wonder all of Trump’s negotiating deadlines for Russia have passed, to no effect, and no wonder the invitation to Anchorage produced no result.
There is not much else to say about yesterday’s Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska, other than to observe the intertwining elements of tragedy and farce. It was embarrassing for Americans to welcome a notorious wanted war criminal on their territory. It was humiliating to watch an American president act like a happy puppy upon encountering the dictator of a much poorer, much less important state, treating him as a superior. It’s excruciating to imagine how badly Trump’s diplomatic envoy, Steve Witkoff, an amateur out of his depth, misunderstood his last meeting with Putin in Moscow if he thought that the Alaska summit was going to be successful. It’s ominous that Trump now says he doesn’t want to push for a cease-fire but instead for peace negotiations, because the latter formula gives Putin time to keep killing Ukrainians. It’s strange that Russian reports of the meeting focused on business cooperation. “Russian-American business and investment partnership has huge potential,” Putin said today.
Applebaum notes that Trump had already destroyed any chance Americans had of influencing Putin.
The U.S. has no cards because we’ve been giving them away. If we ever want to play them again, we will have to win them back: Arm Ukraine, expand sanctions, stop the lethal drone swarms, break the Russian economy, and win the war. Then there will be peace.
President Donald Trump said he will meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House on Monday afternoon to discuss an agreement “which would end the war” between Russia and Ukraine.
The Truth Social post came about half a day after Mr. Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska. Mr. Trump said the meeting with Putin “went very well.” He also said the meeting was followed by a “late night phone call” with Zelenskyy and other European leaders, including Mark Rutte, the secretary general of NATO. The call took place around 2:40 a.m. ET.
“It was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement, which often times do not hold up,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Trump did not share any details of the agreement. He said Zelenskyy would join him in the Oval Office on Monday afternoon to discuss the proposal.
European leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, said in a statement that they had been debriefed on the meeting with Putin, and said Mr. Trump had supported security guarantees for Ukraine.
“We are clear that Ukraine must have ironclad security guarantees to effectively defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity. We welcome President Trump’s statement that the U.S. is prepared to give security guarantees,” the statement read.
Read more BS at the link.
That’s it for me today. What do you think?
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Check the graphs and more at the link. Jonathan V. Last, writing at
As I said, he’s making China great again. As for NATO, I think Orange Caligula has managed to blow it up. This is from Reuters. It’s the news behind all that analysis. “US allies rebuff Trump’s request for support in Strait of Hormuz.”
Heather Cox Richardson puts it into perspective at her 
Well, that didn’t happen, did it? China is full-speed ahead in transitioning away from its fossil-fuel-based energy grid. Trump still shakes his fist at windmills. I did enjoy 
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