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President Donald Trump’s latest effort to steal the midterms has played out in plain view. His plan was to force states to conform to last minute, untested, and too-late-to-implement vote-by-mail requirements with the inevitable result of disenfranchising thousands, if not millions, of voters. The only thing Trump needed to launch this bomb into November’s elections was the go-ahead from the Supreme Court. 

But on Monday evening, the court refused to okay the scheme. The brief, unsigned order stated that the Trump administration was unlikely to prevail in its argument that its US Postal Service rule limiting ballot delivery was legal, and that the harm of letting the rule take effect was too great.

As with so many of Trump’s corrupt and lawless actions—from his crypto schemes to bulldozing the East Wing of the White House—the president often carries out corrupt and illegal schemes in public. His plan to disrupt mail-in voting, which he perceives would harm Democrats more than Republicans, was the latest. By sanitizing the effort with the language of executive orders, rule-making, and court documents, the administration hoped to blind people to the election-stealing scheme underneath it all. It was an attempted heist in broad daylight.

In addition to the scheme’s illegality, officials said it would be impossible to implement in six weeks.

On Monday, only two justices publicly went along with this plan. In a dissent, Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, argued that the government likely had the authority to regulate mail-in ballots in the way the administration tried. A third justice, Brett Kavanaugh, agreed, but said implementing it so close to the election would cause too much harm. That means there are likely three votes, if not more, that would side with a Trump administration push to implement its mail-in ballot rules for the 2028 elections and beyond.

Trump has been set on winning this fall’s midterms by any means for more than a year. Shortly after returning to power in 2025, he issued an executive order requiring citizens to show a passport or similar document to prove citizenship when registering to vote. But the president has no authority to interfere with states’ administration of elections, and a federal court blocked the order. Next, he pressed Congress to pass the SAVE Act, which would have similarly required documentary proof of citizenship. When that failed, he issued the March 2026 executive order that led to today’s court action, this time instructing the Postal Service to limit the delivery of mail-in-ballots by promulgating a rule that places new requirements on how states can send mail ballots. The rule, formally unveiled in late August, would have allowed the Postal Service to throw out thousands, even millions, of ballots that are legally cast. It’s an illegal power grab that states, election officials, and legal experts warned would cause a preventable and monumental disaster. 

“The rule threatens to disenfranchise millions of elderly voters, disabled voters, military voters, and all others including the most vulnerable who depend on mail voting, in both red states and blue,” four experts wrote in an amicus brief to the Supreme Court. “This disenfranchisement risk is literal, not hyperbolic.”

The Trump administration even acknowledged the fallout. In asking the justices to allow the USPS rule to take effect, the administration downplayed it as merely imposing “modest envelope-design and addressee-information requirements.” But a few pages later, the brief argued that failing to swiftly implement the rule—an impossible feat so close to the midterms—would have disastrous results. Unless the rule takes effect immediately, “there is a grave risk that States may not have taken the necessary steps to comply…potentially depriving those States’ citizens of the ability to vote by mail.” In other words, even the administration knew that rushing out the rule would lead to mass disenfranchisement—it simply wouldn’t accept that that was a good reason to block implementation of its “modest” envelope requirements.

Though it help against Trump this time, the Supreme Court let the order get this far. On August 24, the court threw the midterms into turmoil by ruling that it was too soon for states to challenge the executive order because it wasn’t yet affecting the states. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson denounced that ruling as a “Kafkaesque nightmare” that “contributes to pre-election chaos instead of quashing it.” The Postal Service had unveiled its rule on August 21, which specified that it will only deliver mail-in ballots if states both hand over their voter rolls to the Trump administration via an online portal that the Postal Service has yet to complete, and adopt new envelope and bar code requirements.

In addition to the Postal Service rule, Trump’s executive order instructs the Department of Homeland Security to create a nationwide database and individual lists of citizens in each state, presumably to limit who can vote. Such a system might be used to override state voter rolls with potentially inaccurate lists. That portion of the order was put on hold in a different legal challenge, but the administration has appealed to the Supreme Court, which will soon seperately decide whether DHS can use it. This means that the threat of administration meddling in the midterms through this executive order has not disappeared.

Trump’s executive order is a massive power grab that aimed to usurp states’ authority to run their own elections and radically transform the role of the Postal Service from delivering the mail to determining who receives a ballot according to Trump’s whims. “Never before has USPS attempted to interfere with elections in this way, let alone a fast-approaching election,” the 23 states challenging the rule told the court. “And nothing in federal law authorizes USPS to refuse to deliver ballots.” 

In addition to the scheme’s obvious illegality, election officials have repeatedly told courts it would be impossible to implement six weeks before the midterms. 

“In some States, unrebutted evidence establishes that compliance with USPS’ rule would be impossible ahead of the midterms, meaning that millions of voters would be unable to vote by mail and some would not be able to vote at all,” the 23 states challenging the rule wrote. “In the remaining States, there would be chaos—and a significant risk that millions more voters would be denied the ability to vote.” 

A Postal Service whistleblower told Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) on August 31 that the new USPS system was “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed” and could lead to a “catastrophic failure which could derail the midterm elections.” As one example, the whistleblower said that if one ballot out of 10,000 failed to scan properly, all 10,000 ballots would be rejected. The whistleblower concluded that “potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all.”

Election officials across the country and from both parties amplified these concerns.

“Even if state and local officials were somehow able to implement this new rule perfectly, there is a high risk of mistakes, incompetence, and delay on USPS’ part,” the 23 states opposed to the rule told the courts. “One statistic from USPS’ final rule illustrates how little the agency has thought all of this through. USPS estimates that its ballot-scanning process could take up to one minute per ballot. If that is right, it would take USPS approximately 43 years to scan all of California’s 23 million mail ballots, to say nothing of the time required to scan the millions of ballots mailed in other States.”

The opposition to the USPS rule didn’t just come from blue states. Top Republican election officials in Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Utah told the court that “neither election officials across the country nor USPS are equipped to successfully implement this Rule for the 2026 midterms.” The election administrators’ brief notes that mail-in ballots have already been sent in states including North Carolina, Delaware, and Alabama, and will soon go out in many other places. “Attempting to implement the Rule now will almost certainly lead to mistakes, delays, and confusion for both voters and election officials,” they wrote.

District Judge Indira Talwani, a Barack Obama appointee, first blocked Trump’s order in June in the 23 states that challenged it and extended that to a nationwide injunction in early August. “The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” she wrote. Following the Supreme Court’s decision on August 24 to allow the executive order to move forward, she specifically blocked the new USPS rule after a new challenge from states and voting rights groups, finding that states working “on a prescribed timeframe” would be “unable to pivot this late in the election cycle, nearly guaranteeing significant disenfranchisement.”

A unanimous panel of judges on the First Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed Talwani’s decision last Thursday. “We see no obvious error in the district court’s conclusion that allowing this Final Rule to be effective for the soon-arriving November 3 election will likely result in the disenfranchisement of millions of voters across the country while providing minimal—if any—gains in combating voter fraud,” they wrote.

On Sunday night, a Trump-appointed district court judge, Carl Nichols of Washington, D.C., also issued an injunction against the USPS rule. While Judge Talwani had only enjoined key parts of the USPS rule, Judge Nichols blocked the entire rule, writing that it exceeded “any conception of the outer bounds” of the agency’s authority.

Trump’s proposed system appeared designed to fail—which is exactly what the president wanted. One in 3 Democrats voted by mail in 2024, compared to 1 in 4 Republicans, according to data published by The New York Times. Trump was willing to disenfranchise a significant chunk of his own voters so long as more Democrats pay the price.

This Supreme Court has allowed many of Trump’s illegal actions to proceed, from deporting people without due process to building his ill-gotten ballroom. Massive chaos and disenfranchisement in the midterms, with the court’s imprimatur, proved beyond the pale. But the court has done the president and his party many favors this election cycle.

After all, the six conservative justices have already green-lit a key part of Trump’s effort to tilt the midterms in the GOP’s favor by destroying the Voting Rights Act and approving the unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering that has allowed Republicans to draw 10 more GOP-friendly seats in the race for the House of Representatives. They’ve repeatedly overruled their own so-called precedents and allowed states like Louisiana and Alabama to cancel primaries and suspend elections in order to give Republicans as many extra seats in the midterms as possible.

Just last week, they intervened on the shadow docket to further boost the GOP’s fortunes by holding that political party committees, where Republicans hold a huge financial advantage over Democrats, should get the same discounted TV ad rates as candidates.

Trump’s Postal Service ruse will not take effect for the midterms. But the administration is likely to turn to other tactics, and the Supreme Court could be drawn into the fray. Trump may try to interfere in the midterms through actions like sending ICE to the polls, seizing ballots, or declaring a fake national emergency. After all, this is the same president who launched a violent insurrection to overturn an election. The president has long acted like he was above the law and dared the courts to stop him. He’ll almost certainly try it again.

“Your courage is contagious.”

In May 2026, while staring directly into the eyes of three of the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein—during a congressional hearing on the late financier’s sprawling web of rape, trafficking, and abuse—that’s what Rep. Jasmine Crockett said.

“I’ve been smiling probably more than I’m supposed to as I’ve sat here because y’all bring me so much joy. And let me tell you why,” she added. “The reason is this: because in spite of this incompetent government, y’all do not back down.” 

Four months later, Crockett would take to the mic to express her joy once again, not at a congressional hearing but at the Texas AT&T Stadium, to bestow honors on a man who, in 2009, choked his then-girlfriend to the point that she “began to lose consciousness.”

On Sunday, the Texas Democratic representative joined Chris Brown onstage to sing his praises while awarding him recognition in the congressional record during the Texas stop of his joint tour with Usher.

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“We’re experiencing Black joy to the highest degree,” crowed Crockett, flanked by fellow Rep. Venton Jones.

For those not in the know, Chris Brown is a decorated R&B singer who’s been performing since he was a teen. Known for his smash songs, “Run It,” “Loyal,” and “Forever,” he’s been a staple of the genre for decades.

Nowadays, Brown is known less for his radio hits and more for the hits he allegedly bestowed on dozens of individuals, dating all the way back to 2009 when he brutally assaulted Rihanna, then his girlfriend. But his legal problems didn’t stop there. Over the past fifteen years, Brown has racked up so many convictions and allegations of assault and drug use that there’s an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to his legal issues.

Most notably, Brown has a long track record of alleged violence against women specifically. In 2009, he pleaded guilty to assault against Rihanna, whom he repeatedly struck, bit, and choked during an argument. In 2017, his then-girlfriend, Karreuche Tran was granted a restraining order against him after he threatened to “beat the s— out of” her in text messages. She also accused him of punching her in the stomach twice and pushing her down the stairs, which Brown has denied.

In 2018, a woman sued Brown for sexual assault in a case that settled out of court in 2020. In 2024, ID dropped the documentary Chris Brown: A History of Violence, in which several alleged victims of the singer came forward, including a woman who said Brown raped her in 2020 on Sean “Diddy” Combs’ yacht.

Brown’s penchant for violence has followed him throughout his entire career, but has somehow done absolutely nothing to stop dogged public support for the singer, especially among Black women.

Actress Keke Palmer attended Brown’s “Breezy Bowl” in 2025 despite interviewing Tran about Brown’s alleged assault against her in 2014. Throughout the 2020s, stars like Lizzo, Ciara, and Kelly Rowland have all given Brown his flowers. He’s collaborated with the likes of Normani, Chloe Bailey, and Cassie, who’s testified that Diddy sexually abused and exploited her.

But what separates Crockett from those figures is her status as a politician and her past use of her position to support victims of sexual violence. Throughout her career, Crockett rarely, if ever, shied away from calling out the Republican Party’s racism and misogyny. She’s steadfastly called out the Department of Justice’s failure to release the Epstein files and done the same with Trump for his sexual misconduct during his second presidency. 

To (rightfully) lambast your colleagues for supporting a sexual abuser, only to have those politics fly out the window for something so inconsequential, is, on its face, a baffling choice. Saying Trump’s White House is covering up the Epstein files scores you viral clips circulated on the evening news. Calling survivors of sexual exploitation “courageous” leads to comments calling you “inspiring” and “OUTSTANDING.”

Apparently, it’s easier to denounce abusers when it’s politically advantageous.

A whistleblower has alleged that federal investigators violated state law in a desperate attempt to find proof of President Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud. 

Agents at the Department of Homeland Security have been posing as voters, entering people’s personal voting information (like Social Security number and date of birth) into public-facing state websites, and using that to determine if they are eligible to vote or note—all in about 12 minutes thanks to their 40-person-a-day quota. Many states have laws indicating that only the actual person voting may input their own information into said public-facing sites, making the agents’ actions potentially illegal. 

These questionable tactics make the  “Unlawful Voter Initiative” launched by Trump two weeks ago an extremely tenuous endeavor,

In the report, compiled by the government watchdog group the Democracy Defenders Fund, the whistleblower also alleges that the agents’ rushed data collections may be rife with inaccuracies. The “alien identification numbers” of people who entered the U.S. as noncitizens are still listed on their records—even if they became a full citizen years ago. The hasty nature of DHS’s efforts may result in people who are well within their right to vote as citizens are flagged as “unlawful voters.” The report also notes that some of the agents themselves began to grow concerned about using people’s personal data, and hesitated to identify individuals as unlawful  voters

DHS in a statement argued that it is well within its rights to peruse the intimate voter data of millions of Americans because “It’s not rocket science; it’s an easy step to secure our elections.”

“I do think the American people value keeping their personal information private,” said Senator Alex Padilla, whom the report was delivered to on Sunday. “The other thing that’s concerning here, that the American people who would be offended by, is the knowing inaccuracy of what they’re doing, whether it’s the data or their sham analysis. It’s going to produce false positives.”

While at a campaign rally in Kansas for incumbent Republican Senator Roger Marshall, Vice President JD Vance was interrupted by a heckler.

“He sues his patients!” the protester shouted while Vance spoke at the MAGA Inc. event in Olathe, Kansas, Monday. A New York Times report last week exposed Marshall for suing patients who couldn’t pay their bills while he was a practicing ob-gyn prior to his political career (and even during the first few years he was in Congress).

“I see we have, I see we have a guy who is protesting,” Vance said as the pro-Trump crowd chanted “USA” and the heckler was escorted off of the premises by security. “You know, the last time I gave a speech and we had a guy who was interrupting, he had the common courtesy to bring a Mexican flag so we knew where he stood.”

Not a great sign that Vance is getting heckled in Kansas. pic.twitter.com/WEtue8xzlY

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 14, 2026

“Now this guy, this guy, I’m telling you, ladies and gentlemen, here’s what happened, is he decided to come in and lie about my very dear friend Doc Marshall, because the reality is that Doc Marshall has stood up for everyday Americans every single day he’s been in the United States Senate,” Vance continued.

Marshall was attacked by his Democratic opponent, pastor Adam Hamilton, during a debate at the Kansas State Fair on Saturday over the lawsuits.

“There are 2,000 verses in the Bible that speak to caring for the poor,” Hamilton said. “This is not happening under this man.”

Marshall struggled to speak over a loud and unfriendly crowd in the rest of the event, saying that he engaged in “common business practices” and claimed that his hospital “would go a year before we’d ever send somebody over” to litigation. However, the Times reporting found multiple instances of patients who were sued just months after their appointment.

While Kansas hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1932, they elected a Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, in 2018 and reelected her in 2022. In a year where the incumbent president and the Republican Party are historically unpopular, Marshall’s medical lawsuits could sink his chances.

Alligator Alcatraz, the notorious immigrant detention camp erected in the Florida Everglades last year, routinely held detainees in “small metal enclosures” with just 18 square feet of floor space, a practice that the Department of Homeland Security’s independent watchdog called “highly unconventional and does not align with standards for humane treatment,” according to a DHS Office of Inspector General report.

First revealed by the New York Times on Monday morning, the document provides a rare comprehensive glimpse of life inside the facility, erected by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration last year.  Consisting of several soft-sided tents on a remote airfield surrounded by swampland, Alligator Alcatraz at its peak housed up to 1,500 immigrant detainees when DHS was short on detention beds in other facilities. As I’ve reported throughout the last year, since its opening in the summer of 2025, Alligator Alcatraz was criticized for its treatment of the migrants, with advocates noting that the tents were prone to flooding. There were also mosquito infestations, limited access to legal counsel, and food scarcity. The state of Florida officially closed it in June, citing the threat of hurricane season.

The report is based on an unannounced inspection by the DHS Office of Inspector General in January. They concluded that while the detention camp did adhere to intake and use-of-force standards, they discovered several violations. Most notably, the use by detention staff of tight metal enclosures to confine a total of 79 people for periods of time ranging from a few minutes to up to two hours. The metal mesh enclosures, roughly the size of a phone booth, measured about 4 feet by 4 feet and were nearly 8 feet tall. “Facility staff described the small metal enclosures as ‘calming areas’ for detainees to de-escalate and have time alone,” the report states. “Staff further maintained that detainees asked to spend time in the small metal enclosures.” But inspectors found at least one case in which the enclosure was used to discipline someone who failed to comply with a staff order.

Inspectors found several other violations. Each detainee should have at least 75 square feet of living space, but they received only 28 square feet at the camp. During their inspection, OIG officials saw as many as 32 people held within the facility’s eight cell areas. Detainees were also only allowed recreation outside of their housing units three days a week for one hour. As the report noted, “With the limited amount of recreation, detainees could not engage in recreational and exercise programs, which could negatively affect physical and mental health.” Detainees told inspectors that they did not have access to clean drinking water, and inspectors found that they could shower only three days a week—federal detention standards require access to daily showers. 

“The absence of well-defined standards at detention facilities increases the risk that detainees may not receive appropriate care.” 

Corene Kendrick, deputy director at the ACLU’s National Prison Project, called the report “horrifying.” “It confirms and reaffirms the cruelty of Alligator Alcatraz. It backs up everything that the people who were detained at that camp were reporting to advocates about the conditions and the lack of access to legal calls, the lack of access to going outside, the cages that were used as punishment,” Kendrick told me. “At the time when these allegations were being brought up by people in the facility and by their family members and their attorneys, ICE and the state of Florida repeatedly said that that was all made up and that people were exaggerating and it wasn’t true.” But this report, she added, confirms that “people were suffering.” 

After touring the detention center and interviewing staff and detainees, OIG officials found there was a “lack of clarity” on whether Alligator Alcatraz was following state or federal detention standards. The report states, “The absence of well-defined standards at detention facilities increases the risk that detainees may not receive appropriate care.” 

In its response to the Office of Inspector General, DHS officials blamed the state of Florida for the conditions, which the agency says maintained authority over daily operations. But the report noted that ICE personnel were frequently on site and federal funding was used to open and run the detention camp. The state Department of Emergency Management, which ran the camp, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a statement, Alex Lanfranconi, the communications director for the governor’s office, said: “At least ten million illegal aliens entered our country under the Biden administration. Florida decided to do something about it. The left-wing media wants to focus on a confinement area for violent criminal aliens who have proven they cannot remain peaceful while awaiting deportation. While it adheres to all federal standards for criminal confinement, we’d make it even smaller if we could.” 

Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia are filing lawsuits against the Trump administration to prevent the Department of Homeland Security from changing the “public charge” rule, increasing the power of federal immigration officials to deny green card and visa applicants based on their potential future participation in federal aid programs.

A separate lawsuit was filed the same day on behalf of Democratic cities including New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle.

Traditionally, immigration officers looked at whether applicants relied on programs like Supplemental Security Income and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. But the Trump administration now wants to expand that to penalize applicants who are enrolled in Medicaid or receive food stamps.

“Under @POTUS Trump, DHS is restoring the basic principle that immigrants must be able to support themselves,” DHS announced earlier this summer, before the lawsuit was filed. “We are reaffirming the requirement of self-reliance, protecting public resources, and ending policies that encouraged dependency on hard-working American taxpayers.”

New York Attorney General Letitia James zeroed in on that “self-reliance” bit during a press conference on Monday.

“The rule would allow immigration officers to consider use of critical benefits like Medicaid and SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), and even participation in school meal programs, as part of an applicant’s circumstance,” said James. “That means immigrant New Yorkers may be forced to ask themselves impossible questions: ‘Will getting health insurance hurt my chances of getting a green card? Will accepting food assistance when I fall on hard times be held against me?’”

“Cruelty is the point.... Having a chilling effect on immigrants is the point. Letting individuals know that they are not welcome here is the point. Immigration animus is the point,” James continued. “The fact that you’re going to deny individuals who are sick and hungry and homeless benefits just is beyond the pale. And that’s why we are seeking in the state of New York to vacate this rule,” she said.

This rule change, if accepted, will also incur a massive chilling effect, leading green card and visa applicants and their families to avoid engaging with federal programs at all, even if they’re legal and needed.

“No family should have to choose between accessing healthcare and nutrition assistance today — or protecting their pathway to a green card tomorrow,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said. “The Trump Administration is seeking to rewrite more than 100 years of law with its expansive new definition of who is considered a ‘public charge.’ In doing so, it is providing individual immigration officers with the discretion and power to punish families for lawfully accessing certain public benefits programs during short-term periods of need. This Administration’s cruelty continues to know no bounds. We’re going to court on behalf of the millions of immigrants who call this state home — and we will fight to get this unlawful rule undone.”

The public charge policy change is scheduled to take effect on Friday.

America’s billionaire president is preaching to his followers that the threat of artificial intelligence is a “hoax.”

“Concerning AI, when, in the History of Business, did anyone see the Leaders of an Industry call for Regulation that, if strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy?” Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday afternoon. “AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX.”

Trump compared the latest national furor over artificial intelligence (sparked by industry insiders) to several other controversies that have plagued his presidency, including the investigation into Russian collusion in his 2016 presidential campaign, the Ukraine war, and both impeachment efforts against him.

The AI uproar is “no different from RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA—UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE—IMPEACHMENT HOAX #1—IMPEACHMENT HOAX #2—and all of the other HOAXES and SCAMS that America was forced to endure through the Destructionists’ and Deviants’ foul play and illegal conduct,” Trump wrote.

He added that he is “not happy” about the backlash, which he suggested has placed America in a backseat position amid the global race to dominate the burgeoning technology. He cited Google’s €13 billion deal with Finland to build out the company’s AI infrastructure, as well as Beijing’s recent dismissal of Silicon Valley’s urgent warnings to develop and implement AI safeguards (former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon cautioned last week that, in private, the people building large language models have expressed it could be capable of killing all humans by the end of the decade.)

“AI, and Data Centers, will be the Greatest Economic Development Engine in History—Bigger than Oil, Gold, Diamonds, or even the Internet. It will not be stopped by brilliantly run Destructive Forces during the Term of President DONALD J. TRUMP!” he concluded.

Trump has a lot to politically—and personally—gain from championing AI. Days into his second term, the president unveiled a $500 billion public-private venture to support AI development. The project was dubbed Stargate and backed by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX, an AI investment firm owned by the United Arab Emirates.

The president’s 2026 financial disclosures also reveal that he’s invested a sizable sum in tech companies pursuing AI projects, spending millions of dollars on stock purchases for Oracle, Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Alphabet.

But Trump’s opinion on the matter is seriously at odds with that of the American public. Recent polling indicates that the vast majority of Americans, including Republicans, have no interest in permitting the tech industry to build AI facilities in their backyards. An August survey published by Heatmap revealed that 75 percent of the public opposes data center development in their communities.

The growing divide between the president’s sentiments and the reality lived by the American public should serve as a reminder that Trump—who is worth an estimated $6.5 billion and owns hundreds of business entities and properties around the world—has almost nothing in common with the rest of the country. Trump will never be hard pressed to find drinking water like the residents of Flint, Michigan; apparently doesn’t have to buy (or even pronounce) America’s increasingly expensive “groceries”; and will never experience the crushing toll of the housing crisis (a “big yawn,” he called it in June, while profiting off it) or need to split the cost at the gas pump between credit cards.

Last month, Trump even went so far as to claim that anyone who opposes data center development is “backwards and poor,” a sobering reminder that Trump simply does not care about the average American.

Staff at Alligator Alcatraz called them “calming areas.” They were really cages.

A new report Monday revealed that the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General discovered two metal cages, roughly the size of a phone booth, where immigrant detainees were kept at Alligator Alcatraz, the Trump administration’s soft-sided concentration camp in the Florida Everglades.

Between the camp’s hasty construction in July 2025 and its official closure in January 2026, at least 79 detainees were held in these small outdoor cages, according to the report. Immigrant detainees would spend between seven minutes and two hours in the enclosures, each four feet three inches wide and seven feet nine inches tall.

Staff claimed that detainees would request time in these so-called “calming areas,” and that they were never even locked. Both cages, however, included locking mechanisms.

The OIG found one instance in which a “calming area” may have been used as a disciplinary tool. Documentation provided to the OIG noted that one detainee who spent 26 minutes in a small metal enclosure had “failed to comply with a lawful command.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed that the cages were used for “disciplinary issues, crisis intervention, housing changes, and conflicts among detainees,” according to the report.

In March, Democratic Senators Jon Ossoff and Dick Durbin wrote a letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and then–ICE Director Todd Lyons over concerns that immigrants were being kept in a small structure called “the box,” where they were “held in stress positions with hands and feet tightly shackled for hours at a time, in direct sunlight with no access to food or water.”

The OIG could not confirm these claims, but stated that the use of these cages was “highly unconventional” and did not align with the standards for humane treatment.

“Use of these small metal enclosures for any reason is unprecedented among ICE facilities inspected by OIG,” the report stated. “Confining individuals in small metal enclosures for any reason presents significant risks to detainee health and well-being.”

Alligator Alcatraz has been the source of dozens of disturbing reports of inhumane treatment. Detainees at the soft-sided facility reported flooding in the tents, worm-infested food, behemoth bugs, no access to running water, and widespread violations of immigrants’ legal rights.

A former corrections officer at Alligator Alcatraz previously claimed that detainees were being kept in a “human-sized kennel.” One detainee told CBS News: “We’re human beings; we’re not dogs. We’re like rats in an experiment.”

A coalition of NFL owners have deemed Macklemore unfit to perform in their stadiums.

The “Thrift Shop” rapper was slated to perform during 10 stops of Ed Sheeran’s Loop Tour. That plan was unexpectedly canned Monday, when Sheeran’s representatives announced that the tour would go on without Macklemore after several stadiums across the country banned him from performing.

“As the concert promoter for Ed Sheeran’s U.S. Loop Tour, we have been notified by venues on the upcoming U.S. tour dates that they will not allow a concert to take place with Macklemore on the lineup, which would result in the cancellation of the tour and impact hundreds of thousands of fans,” Messina Touring Group, the promoter of Sheeran’s U.S. tour, told Rolling Stone. “After discussions with stakeholders, Macklemore will not be performing on the remaining support dates.”

Macklemore was more explicit in a post on his Instagram account, claiming that he was booted from the tour after billionaire New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft deemed the musician’s brief pro-Palestine speech at New Jersey’s Metlife Stadium too risqué.

“Last Monday, in the middle of all the media attention surrounding P!nk and what I said at Metlife, Ed told me that Robert Kraft called him,” Macklemore wrote.

Kraft owns Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, where Macklemore and Sheeran were scheduled to perform on September 25.

“Ed told me that Kraft said I would not be allowed to perform in his stadium,” Macklemore continued. “Ed also told me that Kraft had rallied some of the other stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues.”

Macklemore said he had a tough conversation with Sheeran, during which Sheeran insisted on maintaining his apolitical image.

“Taking a side can cost you. Money, brand deals, sponsorships, festivals, private shows, relationships, and access. I’ve lost all those things,” Macklemore continued. “But there is no neutral position between the oppressor and the oppressed.”

Besides Metlife and Gillette Stadiums, Macklemore was scheduled to play alongside Sheeran at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia; Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta,; AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas; Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida; Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida; Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California; SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles; and Lumen Field in Seattle. Nearly all of the stadiums are owned by NFL-affiliated groups or maintain enormous contracts with the football league.

“What I said at Metlife I have been saying on stages around the world for almost three years,” Macklemore continued. “So why is it an issue now? Because I’m sharing a stage with one of the biggest artists in the world, in some of the biggest stadiums in America. At a certain level of exposure, ‘Free Palestine’ becomes too much of a risk.”

No other artist in recent memory has kicked up such a firestorm from the NFL’s powerful billionaire owners. Earlier this year, Ye—better known by his former name, Kanye West—performed at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles and Raymond James Stadium without issue, despite his affinities for Adolf Hitler, the Nazi regime, and his long history of antisemitic remarks.

Chris Brown too has been performing in the same stadiums across the country, despite the fact that he has been accused—and found guilty of—brutalizing multiple people, including his then-girlfriend Rihanna in 2009. Representative Jasmine Crockett even honored Brown onstage during his performance Saturday at AT&T Stadium.

Pro-Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil is suing his alma mater, Columbia University, for failing to protect him and other students from harassment over their activism against Israel’s war in Gaza.

Khalil and other former Columbia students filed a lawsuit against the university in federal court Monday, alleging that Columbia’s administrators ignored their pleas for help against repeated threats as part of a pattern of “deliberate indifference” even before the attacks of October 7, 2023, The New York Times reports.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Khalil in March 2025 at his university apartment building despite the fact that he was a legal permanent resident and had not committed any crimes. He was detained for 104 days and missed the birth of his first child.

This is a developing story.

Attorney General Todd Blanche invoked the Alien Terrorist Removal Act for the first time ever to expel Nazira Haji Zada, a lawful permanent resident from Afghanistan, from the country for allegedly being the “matriarch” who helped radicalize her Islamic extremist family members.

According to court filings unsealed Friday, Haji Zada waived her rights to challenge her detention and was deported back to Afghanistan last month.

“Nazira Haji Zada, 47, an Afghan national previously residing in Fort Worth, Texas, was removed from the U.S. after conceding that she is an alien terrorist. As the matriarch in her family, she supported a plot to commit an ISIS-inspired mass shooting on Election Day in 2024 for which her son and son-in-law were previously arrested and convicted,” the Justice Department announced.

Haji Zada became a permanent resident in 2018, as her husband worked as an assistant to the U.S. military on Bagram Air Base, one of the largest U.S. bases in Afghanistan. Her son, Abdullah Haji Zada, and son-in-law, Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, pleaded guilty to attempting to purchase two AK-47-style rifles and 500 rounds of ammunition from an undercover FBI agent in order to carry out a terrorist attack in Oklahoma in 2024. Abdullah was sentenced to 15 years in prison, while Tawhedi is still awaiting sentencing.

Investigators noted that Haji Zada, however, had no knowledge of their plans.

The Alien Terrorist Removal Court, created after the 1996 Oklahoma City Bombing, allowed to DOJ to circumvent charging suspected terrorists in criminal court and instead allows them to be removed from the country over “terrorist activity.”

“Under the law, terrorist activity includes not only serious offenses … but also providing, whether voluntarily or under duress, housing or transportation to what the law defines as a ‘terrorist organization.’ Statutorily, the term terrorist organization includes even ‘a group of two or more individuals, whether organized or not,’ who have hijacked a vehicle or used a firearm to cause substantial damage to property — a threshold virtually any criminal gang would meet,” the Brennan Center for Justice notes. “As the courts have acknowledged, these terms encompass ‘more conduct than our society, and perhaps even Congress, has come to associate with traditional acts of terrorism.’”

It is also much easier for the government to secure approval for an individual’s removal, as they only have to prove a “preponderance of evidence” rather than the traditional, more strenuous “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The DOJ also reportedly refused to show classified evidence to Haji Zada’s attorneys, even though they had a security clearance.

“Dragging lawful permanent residents into court but refusing to show them or their attorneys the evidence that will be used against them is a plain violation of due process,” Haji Zada’s public defenders said, adding that they expect the decision to be rejected as “unconstitutional.”

Two U.S. citizen teenagers who were on their way to file enlistment papers to join the Marines were violently attacked by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, who reportedly detained them for nearly eight hours before letting them go. 

Telemundo reports that agents pepper-sprayed the teenagers because they were allegedly filming ICE arresting parents outside of Santos Livas Elementary School in Alamo, Texas. ICE agents were caught on video pulling one teen from the car and punching him repeatedly in the face while he lay on the ground. The other teen, Luis Ochoa, said he informed the ICE agents he was a citizen, but was told, “I don’t give a damn.... Your parents can’t help you now.”  

ICE brutally detain 2 U.S. citizen teens—driving to hand in papers to join Marines.

Now changing their minds about enlisting.

"How can I serve a country that doesn't even uphold my basic rights?"

Agents shot them with pepper spray—then punched them in the face.

Just because… pic.twitter.com/C0JQ7G3P4Q

— LongTime🤓FirstTime👨‍💻 (@LongTimeHistory) September 14, 2026

Ochoa is reportedly rethinking his decision to enlist, with his mother telling Telemundo, “How are they supposed to serve a country that doesn’t even uphold their basic rights?” 

The Trump administration is already making it clear it has no interest in uploading those rights. Military service has no effect on this regime’s mass deportation agenda, with agents freely targeting the family members of service members and recruits without any fear of reproach. The two teens didn’t even experience the worst of ICE. ICE agents routinely attack people in public, shooting and killing targets as well as bystanders regardless of legal status. Sometimes people have been held in ICE custody for months. Still, the agency has received record amounts of funding with virtually no accountability.  

New York is leading a 22-state lawsuit against the Trump administration for unlawfully expanding the “public charge” rules that restrict entry to the United States for immigrants deemed likely to make use of public benefits. A group of municipalities, led by New York City, are separately suing over the same rules.

The new regulations, scheduled to go into effect September 18, reverse a set of 2022 rules which prohibited immigration officers from considering immigrants’ potential future use of non-cash public benefits—like food stamps, Children’s Health Insurance Program benefits, and Medicaid—when determining whether to grant visas. Under the rules scheduled to go into effect this week, officials can use an applicant’s need for food or medical aid to help determine grounds for inadmissibility.

In a report released this summer, health policy organization KFF estimated that between 1.4 million and 4.1 million Medicaid and CHIP enrollees in mixed-status households could disenroll out of fear. The cities and states suing over the rule change argue that it “throws out more than a century of settled law and decades of federal guidance and gives officers wide latitude to make decisions that are inconsistent and discriminatory,” representatives for New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani wrote in a press release.

Trump attempted to establish similar rules—sometimes described as a “wealth test for immigrants”—during his first administration. In 2020, as my colleague Noah Lanard reported, some mixed-status families were forced to choose between green cards and food for their children.

The public charge rule was sometimes described as a plan for denying green cards to people who used public benefits programs like food stamps and Medicaid. The reality is that immigrants are rarely eligible for public benefits until they get a green card. What the public charge rule did was deny green cards to people who immigration officials decided were likely to use public benefits after they became eligible for them. 

It’s a revival of a 19th-century policy that grew out of a nativist backlash to Irish and Italian immigrants. The New York Times argued in 1887 that the public charge rule would prevent Italy from sending “monthly consignments of Neapolitan mendicants.”

“The new public charge rule seeks to push immigrant families away from the programs that have kept people fed and healthy for decades,” Mamdani said in a statement announcing the cities’ lawsuit. “That fear will not stop at the families that the federal government is targeting. Families who remain fully eligible for benefits will feel a chilling effect, and all New Yorkers will pay for it.”

Donald Trump Jr.’s new wife defended her husband’s “dear friend” Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, following a bombshell report that he dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars on their wedding.

In a post on Instagram Monday, Bettina Trump claimed that it was merely a coincidence that the lavish weekend getaway had turned into a last-minute wedding celebration.

“The weekend that followed had actually been planned well in advance as a fun weekend with friends. It was never intended to be our wedding weekend. When our original wedding plans changed, we simply decided to get married before it and arrived at an already planned weekend as newlyweds,” she wrote. (Her post included a picture of a personalized matchbook inscribed for “Don & Bettina”— a thoughtful detail for a supposedly impromptu wedding party.)

“Our dear friend Umar very generously hosted two nights of celebrations for us AFTER our wedding. It was an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend, and something for which we were and remain incredibly grateful.”

Of course, it really couldn’t matter less whether it was intended to be their actual wedding weekend or not. It was still a wildly expensive vacation on a Russian oligarch’s dime—one who’s deep in Putin’s pocket.

The original ProPublica report specified that Kremlev was not present at the private 18-person wedding ceremony, but he and a sizable delegation of Russians were attendees to the roughly 50-person afterparty. Kremlev rented out a private island where the reception was held, and guests were housed for $100,000 per night. He paid an estimated $70,000 for a massive fireworks display, and his team even helped to plan the festivities.

Bettina insisted it was all innocent fun. “Friendship doesn’t require a political motive. Generosity doesn’t automatically come with an agenda. And sometimes a wedding gift is simply a wedding gift,” she wrote on Instagram. When it comes to Russian oligarchs rubbing elbows with the president’s son, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Florida will likely send a neo-Nazi to its state House of Representatives.

Florida state House of Representatives nominee Marshall Rawson marched in the 2017 neo-Nazi “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. 

New reporting from Talking Points Memo Monday revealed that Rawson and his wife marched in the racist parade as part of the League of the South, a neo-Confederate, pro-secessionist group. He can even be seen in video near James Alex Fields Jr., the Nazi who drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters and killed Heather Heyer. 

Last month Marshall Rawson won upset victory in GOP primary for seat in Florida House of Representatives.
Here he is arriving at infamous 2017 Unite the Right rally. He's greeted, by name, by members of League of the South, a white nationalist/southern secessionist group pic.twitter.com/mxzvbGYDH4

— Christopher Mathias (@letsgomathias) September 14, 2026

Rawson, 34, also ran a violently racist anonymous Twitter account, and has been involved with the League of the South since at least 2014, when he was a college student at Shorter University. In 2023, he advocated for a religious justification for slavery.

Once he did run for office in 2026, he got $15,000 in donations from individuals who identified as or had ties to white nationalists, according to an analysis from TPM. He even received $200 from Kristine Duke, the daughter of infamous Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. Now he will likely win the general election in Florida’s 10th district in November. 

The League of the South is an extremely racist organization. Its leader Michael Hill has called for the group to “restore the South as White Man’s Land” and has long advocated for succession. 

“I pledge to be a white supremacist, a racist, an anti-Semite, a homophobe, a xenophobe, an Islamophobe, and any other sort of ’phobe that benefits my people, so help me God!” Hill wrote in 2016.

Two years earlier, he posted a picture of Rawson at a League of the South event, while writing that “Southern Nationalism is the cutting edge and the wave of our future for Southern youth.” 

Rawson claims to have ended his relationship with the League of the South, even as he continues to receive donations from white supremacists, uses his campaign to elevate white nationalist dog whistles, and pledges to “stand up to the radical left and protect our heritage and values.” 

The Florida GOP fully supports Rawson in all his bigotry, and has yet to comment on TPM’s report. Rawson did offer a statement. 

“Over the entire span of my adult life, I’ve been very active defending historical monuments from destruction or removal, and I feel that way about almost all monuments, not just those associated with southern history,” he told TPM. “I don’t screen my donors, and I put in tens of thousands of requests for donations by email, text, and phone. I’ve been extremely transparent about my campaign agenda, and any donation to my campaign is presumably an endorsement of my agenda and not my campaign’s endorsement of a donor’s views or agenda.  Obviously, I’m not privy to any conversation you reportedly had with any donors and cannot speak to those conversations.

Donald Trump thinks JD Vance is “terrific,” but he still isn’t ready to endorse his number two guy in the 2028 race.

Speaking with reporters on the tarmac of Shannon International Airport in Ireland Sunday, Trump claimed that it was “too early” to throw his weight behind Vance’s highly probable bid for president.

“I think he’s terrific, he’s got so many terrific people,” Trump said as the engines of Air Force One blared nearby. “I just think they’re all very good, but JD is fantastic.”

Q: Are you ready to throw your weight behind JD Vance?

TRUMP: It's too early pic.twitter.com/yu5C8LE0k6

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 13, 2026

Vance is the early Republican front-runner in the 2028 race, though he has not yet formally announced his candidacy. Despite playing coy, the vice president received widespread support for his potential bid at the Republican midterm convention last week, where the attending crowd repeatedly chanted, “JD! 48!”

Vance has stressed that his decision hinges on the results of the midterm election cycle.

“We got to take care of business this November. Then we’ll worry about what comes next,” Vance said at the convention.

Other Republican presidential contenders include Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who last ran for America’s highest office against Trump in 2016) and former Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Some prediction sites—including City & State and Kalshi—are including Trump in the lineup as well, despite the fact that he is term-limited.

Vance, however, has an extra edge above his conservative competitors as the heir apparent to Trump’s MAGA movement.

A national polling average compiled by Race to the White House found that—as of September—Vance has a 40.6 percent chance of beating out the rest of the GOP field. Rubio is behind him, with a 21.9 percent chance, while Donald Trump Jr. is in third, with an 8.8 percent chance of winning.

Industry leaders in artificial intelligence are sounding the alarm over the catastrophic risks of unchecked progress—but President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance insist that everything is fine.

On Sunday, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei called for the AI industry to reduce the speed of its work, following insiders’ concerns that the race to develop self-improving superintelligence could cause a mass extinction event. More than 1,000 employees of AI companies have called for increased government regulation.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration has bet big on data centers to drive the president’s so-called “Golden Age” of industry. Plus, the president clearly gets a kick out of posting AI slop.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday morning. “The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’—and we will continue to do so!”

Trump claimed there was a sick “conspiracy” against AI and data centers—even though the warnings were coming from within the industry itself—and implied that only China stood to benefit from a slow down. “Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!” he added.

Vance, whose rise to power was bankrolled by right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel and his network of tech billionaires in Silicon Valley, also came out against the industry’s request for more guardrails.

“I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the company, and begging the government to regulate them,” Vance told reporters Monday. “It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse. So, I think we just have to be careful about this.”

The vice president’s comment suggests he is concerned that large firms hope to extract favorable terms over their competitors.

President Trump’s allies claim the Kennedy Center for the Performing Center will collapse unless he gets to take it over and put his name on the building.

The Washington Post reports that Trump’s handpicked officials leading the center are claiming that “within a matter of weeks,” they won’t be able to pay employees or fulfill regular maintenance contracts, and that giving Trump the recognition he wants could secure the funds that would keep the center alive.

The center is in structural danger as well. A severe storm caused a four-by-five-foot section of ceiling plaster to fall in the building’s Grand Foyer, sending debris near the Concert Hall entrance, Trump’s handpicked executive director Matt Floca told trustees. Water damage is reportedly widespread throughout the building.

The officials recommend that the center close immediately, saying that keeping it open would put lives at risk. If the board approves the recommendations, which were laid out in a 57-page document distributed to the center’s board of trustees, the center could close on Tuesday, when the board meets next.

The document all but says that Trump’s support is contingent on receiving public credit. The financial resolution proposed to the board states that Trump has offered to “raise the necessary funds to keep the center from bankruptcy” while the building gets a major renovation, but he is unlikely to provide “fundamental oversight” to rescue the building without “appropriate recognition.”

Trustees are being given 10 different text options to put on the building’s exterior underneath its name. One of them is “Renovation Restoration and Endowment overseen by President Donald J. Trump and the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.” That’s very similar to another plan the board approved less than a month ago to inscribe “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump” on the building’s facade, which is being challenged in federal court.

One of the trustees is Democratic Representative Joyce Beatty, who sued to remove Trump’s name from the building, and her lawyers blasted the proposal in a statement to the Post.

“This constant effort to add Donald Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center facade is the definition of insanity,” attorneys Norm Eisen and Nathaniel Zelinsky said. “This is now the third attempt to deface this sacred memorial and turn it into a vanity project for one man’s ego.

“Worse still, now Trump is taking the Center hostage and threatening to in effect kill it unless he gets his way,” Zelinsky and Eisen added. “This has to stop.”

Trump has threatened to demolish the Kennedy Center if he can’t have his name on it, and his attempted takeover has led to performers canceling their engagements at the center and ticket sales plummeting with fundraising drying up. He proposed closing the building earlier this year, but that was blocked by a court challenge. One wonders how much of this latest news is an attempt to force through his takeover.

President Donald Trump and his three sons are poised to receive a massive payout from their shady crypto scheme, The Washington Sun (formerly NOTUS) reported Monday.  

In May, four digital wallets moved more than 20 billion in $WLFI tokens—launched by the Trump family’s cryptocurrency firm—into a vesting contract, which would allow the owners to sell their shares after a two-year waiting period. The wallets precisely matched the initial amounts of crypto awarded to Trump and his sons Donald Jr., Eric, and Barron, all listed as founders of World Liberty Financial. 

Eric Hagerman, a spokesperson for World Liberty Financial, told the Sun that new governance rules required the owners to shed 10 percent of their holdings, and the only way to do so was to place them in a vesting account. But three experts that reviewed the company’s governance documents found that doing so was strictly optional.

Zach Everson, the research director at Public Citizen, warned that the president’s family was headed for a massive payout. “It has never been clear what World Liberty Financial was supposed to do other than enrich the Trumps, and here we have them taking the first avenue they can to offload their coins,” he told the Sun. 

Trump’s total holding of 14.175 billion in $WFLI tokens is currently worth about $1 billion, while his sons each hold roughly 2.75 billion in tokens, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The value of these tokens would likely plummet if the president or his sons sold off their shares.

Trump has used his family’s business to rake in cash while in office. In 2025, he took in $526 million in token sales from World Liberty Financial and $635 million from a license agreement with a company connected with his $TRUMP meme coin. The president’s crypto scheme has long been a source of corruption concerns; shady players who bought large amounts of coins have received favors from the White House. 

Meanwhile, investors are already losing money. Nearly one million people who bought the president’s meme coin lost a total of $3.81 billion through the end of June.

The Environmental Protection Agency no longer intends to protect any environment from the interests of America’s power plants.

Lee Zeldin, the agency’s administrator and Donald Trump’s former impeachment defense attorney, will announce plans Monday to walk back several critical national regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions from plants that burn coal and gas, reported The New York Times.

By the EPA’s own analysis, the power sector is the second-largest contributor of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases in the U.S., accounting for a quarter of all emissions in the country.

Zeldin is expected to announce the change while meeting with international energy ministers from the G20 countries. He intends to make the case that greenhouse gases from power plants do not endanger human health or the rest of the world, delegitimizing the legal grounds used to develop the 1963 Clean Air Act.

If U.S. courts agree with the EPA’s new parameters, it could restrict future administrations from enacting similar regulations.

Environmentalists and climate scientists that spoke with the Times argued that, if the U.S. power sector were its own nation, it would be the fifth-largest global polluter behind China, the U.S.’s various other industries, India, and Russia.

“This is another nail in the coffin for this administration’s commitment to protecting people and tackling the climate crisis,” Manish Bapna, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the Times. Bapna added that Zeldin is ending the EPA’s “legal and moral responsibility to end climate pollution.”

It’s the latest of many efforts by Trump and his allies to diminish or completely rewrite the destructive realities of climate change and global warming. Yet evidence abounds proving the catastrophic forecast: Summer 2026 was the hottest season in U.S. history (surpassing the national average temperature during the infamous 1936 Dust Bowl heatwave), the California coast—from Malibu to the San Francisco bay area—is falling into the sea due to land erosion caused by rising sea levels, and intense, sudden rainfalls in the Grand Canyon caused by a spike in temperature killed two people last month.

The changes have been even more harrowing on a global scale. Last month, a glacier several times the size of the Empire State Building melted away from its perch atop the Himalayas, which have experienced climate change at a disproportionately higher pace than the rest of the world—sometimes warming as much as twice the global rate.

The glacial chunk crashed into a valley along the Nepal-Tibet border nearly 7,000 feet below, carving into the land and reshaping the earth before landing in the Lhende Khola River, where the enormous quantity of rock and ice displaced enough water to trigger a nine-meter flash flood. The entire event killed at least 1,300 people, and more than 5,300 are still missing in the region.