Political News

The “Trump Kennedy Center” appears to be no more.

Scaffolding has gone up around the storied performance venue to remove the “Trump” part of the “Trump Kennedy Center” name, which President Trump changed without congressional approval late last year. A judge ruled the decision illegal last month and rejected the administration’s bid to reverse the division on Friday.

“The Kennedy Center’s organic statute makes crystal clear that the Center is to be named for President Kennedy, and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the Board’s unilateral say-so. Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper wrote.

Trump has been particularly hostile toward the lauded cultural center, from firing all of its board members and replacing them with sycophants to slapping his own name on the building. His takeover led to dozens of artists dropping out of planned performances, which in turn led ticket sales to plummet.

Donald Trump’s name is being removed from the Kennedy Center right now

Via @DCNewsNow pic.twitter.com/2gjJnoj5zW

— WABJ - Washington Association of Black Journalists (@WABJDC) June 12, 2026

Massive crude oil tanks in Cushing, Oklahoma—the main hub of America’s energy market—are reportedly growing dangerously depleted as President Donald Trump’s war in Iran stretches into its 105th day.

The oil tanks in Cushing held an inventory of just 21.6 million barrels Friday, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That’s a little more than half of the 40 million barrels they usually store. When they hold less than 20 million barrels of oil, Cushing’s tanks are effectively empty, with only largely unusable sludge remaining.

The extended closure of the Strait of Hormuz has pushed the reserves in Cushing toward operational stress levels, where they will be unable to fulfill the demand for oil.

Cushing isn’t the only place in the United States where oil reserves have been affected. Gas inventories have fallen 5 percent below where they were a year ago, and U.S. diesel stockpiles have hit their lowest level since 2003.

The full shock of the present energy crisis has been dampened by the world’s oversupply of oil—but that could be about to change, as stockpiles drain around the world. If the oil markets get dry enough, the volume of oil won’t be great enough to produce the pressure needed for pipelines. Within a month, the world’s oil market could enter the danger zone, CNN reported Friday.

Earlier this week, industry officials warned the White House that gas prices could spike yet again due to rapidly diminishing inventories, which could be wiped out in a matter of weeks.

Maybe Trump could fill some of these tankers with the 100 million barrels of oil he claims to have miraculously moved through the strait without Iran noticing.

Bari Weiss has ripped 60 Minutes to shreds—and earned a venomous reputation among the show’s various contributors and producers as a result.

Change at the investigative weekly program has been rapid and corrosive. Late last month, Weiss simultaneously fired executive producer Tanya Simon, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi (who criticized Weiss’s decision to delay her report on the notoriously brutal CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador), correspondent Cecilia Vega, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich. That same day, she appointed Nick Bilton—a former Vanity Fair columnist with no television broadcast experience—to lead the venerated newsmagazine.

The following week, Scott Pelley—the de facto face of CBS News—was canned after he openly questioned Bilton’s appointment during a contentious staff meeting.

Former staffers of the investigative news program have since sounded off on Weiss’s chaotic takeover and her heavy hand in restructuring the show.

“We have to acknowledge that 60 Minutes needed a bit of a facelift, and there were potentially positive ways to improve the program, but it’s the way they have gone about it,” one former staffer told Variety. “You don’t give a facelift with a fucking machete.”

Rome Hartman, who worked as a producer on the show for 25 years, lamented the figurative arson of his “professional home,” and speculated that the show would only continue to decay under Weiss’s and Bilton’s direction.

“Scott wasn’t shouting at him or physically intimidating the guy—he was doing exactly what he should’ve done in the best tradition of the best 60 Minutes correspondents,” Hartman told Variety. “And if Nick Bilton is such a snowflake that he can’t possibly tolerate a voice of challenge—and if Bari Weiss has to hide behind his skirts—that does not speak well of how he’s going to run the place or how she’s going to run the place.”

But she may not be running the place for much longer at all. CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, is pursuing a merger with Warner Bros. Discovery—a monumental industry shift that could see Weiss’s brief tenure atop the network come to an end, according to 30-year 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft.

“I have a feeling that Bari will not be overseeing 60 Minutes for very much longer. I think once the deal gets done with Warner Bros., people will demand that she be let go or move into another position,” Kroft told Variety. “Everything she’s touched has turned to shit. Everything she’s touched has gone colossally wrong. And I don’t think she’s showed any talent for this position. She’s only fulfilling other people’s agendas.”

By this point, it’s safe to say that anyone who agrees to work for President Donald Trump is a deeply, deeply bad person. But some folks are more low-key in their evil than others. Take current U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton, likely to be the nation’s next Director of National Intelligence. Sure, he’s not as flashily malevolent as Bill Pulte, the head of the…

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When President Trump took over the Kennedy Center, his people allegedly ignored a long-term agreement and seized millions of dollars from the Washington National Opera.

That’s what the WNO alleges in a lawsuit against the center, filed Thursday in federal court. According to court documents, the WNO and the Kennedy Center had a contractual relationship for nearly 15 years, in which operas were held at the venue in exchange for the center providing support services for the WNO, including managing donations.

With the Trump administration’s takeover of the center, however, many of those services—including marketing, fundraising, and administrative tasks—ended in late 2025. When the WNO complained to the center, instead of fixing the issues, the center’s governance proposed ending the relationship in January 2026.

The WNO then asked the center to return its $17 million in funds, which the agreement states belong to the WNO. But despite being contractually obligated to return the funds, the center still hasn’t returned them to the opera, and now the WNO is suing to get that money back.

All of this comes as a judge denied a last-minute appeal to keep Trump’s name on the center Friday. Now Trump may follow through on his stated desire last month to hand over control of the center to Congress. Will he follow through or try to defy the ruling?

Like a tongue on a sore tooth, Donald Trump keeps coming back to his renovation projects.

The intrusive topic has won his mind in all sorts of inappropriate settings: He has deflected from the Iran war and inflation concerns by fixating on the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, pivoted to renderings of his construction projects during an Oval Office meeting with Mark Rutte that was intended to focus on global alliances and security issues, and interrupted a January meeting with oil executives about Venezuela’s future to mention his $400 million ballroom, an idea so inspiring that he stopped the conversation and walked to a window to muse about its construction.

A prominent clinical psychologist has signaled that the tireless obsession could be a warning sign of cognitive decline.

Dr. John Gartner, a former assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, told The Daily Beast Thursday that the president’s repetitive verbal ramblings are symptomatic of something much graver.

“Tangential speech is one of the diagnostic criteria for dementia,” Gartner told the Beast.

“What he’s obsessed with is a function of malignant narcissism. He’s obsessed with things that reflect glory on him,” Gartner continued. “He’s changing Washington, D.C., to Trump D.C.”

That could include any number of projects: Trump has also (impermanently) plastered his name on the Kennedy Center and proposed a 250-foot “Arc de Trump” in the nation’s capital.

An analysis by The Washington Post in April found that, by that time, Trump had invoked his ballroom in roughly a third of his public remarks, far outpacing any mentions of his supposed policy priorities.

But Gartner mentioned that Trump’s rants would only “go downhill from here.”

The White House, in response, insisted that Trump is in immaculate condition.

“If it quacks like a duck, it may actually just be a Democrat hack doctor,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle told the Beast in response to Gartner’s assessment.

Yet something must be unusual about the president’s condition. Last month, Trump’s examination at Walter Reed Medical Center involved 22 specialists, breaking the previous record held by George W. Bush, who once saw 10 specialists in one go.

The White House has not elaborated on exactly why Trump needed so many doctors. Trump officials told the Post that the unconventionally large medical team allowed for a “complete and preventive evaluation” of the president. White House physician Sean Barbabella commented that the assessment found Trump in “excellent health.”

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) has no more fucks to give after his embarrassing primary runoff loss last month that ended his more than two-decade career in the Senate. In a sit-down interview with The New York Times published on Thursday, Cornyn crapped all over President Donald Trump for refusing to reciprocate loyalty to GOP lawmakers, and said that he now plans to vote his conscience more over…

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Two working-class, three-time Trump voters shared feelings of betrayal and disappointment in their president’s second tenure on Friday’s Morning Joe.

One of the Trump voters, Annette Dombrowski—is about to lose her job at an Ohio manufacturing plant because its billionaire, Trump-supporting owner, John Paulson, is outsourcing domestic jobs to China, something Trump has promised time and time again to prevent. 

“I actually have panic attacks. I’ve had a couple this past week, and I get very emotional over it. I don’t want to work anymore, but I can’t afford to retire,” Dombrowski said. 

“Obviously, President Trump is immensely wealthy. He has been wealthy since he was born,” MSNOW’s Alex Tabet posited.

“Yep.”

“Do you think he understands?”

“No. He hasn’t lived it to understand it. He sees it, he has not lived it. He needs to live it. Wear the clothes, wear the shoes, wear your Walmart clothes, wear your Walmart shoes, do your thrift thrift store shopping. Don’t eat steaks.  I don’t get to go out to dinner,” Dombrowski continued, growing emotional. “It’s not an overnight thing, but it’s been two years now. You said you’d bring down the grocery prices … I must be the most angry person in my grocery shop, because I buy the same things every week, and I see it jump every week. It is not every couple months, it’s literally every week.” 

Morning Joe interviewed 3-time Trump voters who have become disillusioned: "It's been two years now. You said you'd bring down the grocery prices. I must be the most angry person when I grocery shop."

"He's backtracked on every single pitch point he had during his election ...… pic.twitter.com/Il9HuH4BiN

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 12, 2026

Morning Joe also featured another three-time Trump voter, truck driver Chris Tackett. 

“When President Trump said he wasn’t going to start foreign wars, when he said he was going to bring down prices, did you believe him?” Talbot asked Tackett. 

“Yeah. I mean, his first term … I think he held true to everything that he said he was gonna do. I think he fought for everything he said he was gonna fight for. This time around, I haven’t seen it,” Tackett said. “He’s backtracked on every single pitch point he had during his election.… All we heard was ‘drill drill drill’ during the election, now all we’re getting is drilled into the dirt with these prices. I voted for Trump all three terms, [but] to be honest with you, I’m not a big supporter of him at this point.”

“If you could talk directly to President Trump, what would you tell him right now?”

“Get it together, man. The average American is struggling to make ends meet right now, and nobody wants to hear the war [in Iran] is almost over. Nobody wants to hear it’s going to get better. You’ve had a year to make it better at this point. Make it better.”

The most recent consumer price index has inflation at its highest rate in three years, due to President Trump’s widely unpopular, very expensive war on Iran. Even still, Trump claims that the numbers are great, and that he loves inflation—even as Dombrowski and other people who voted for him struggle to afford things he can have any moment he wants, like steak.

Outbound Senator John Cornyn has predicted a midterm “disaster” for Donald Trump.

The Texas Republican has become a vocal critic of the president since he lost his primary runoff last month to the Trump-backed favorite in the race, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

In an interview with The New York Times published Friday, Cornyn flamed Trump’s influence in the race, lamenting that Trump apparently “couldn’t resist” the temptation.

“If he would do that to me, he would do that to anybody,” Cornyn told the Times. “There’s never going to be good enough for him, other than 100 percent, you know, slavish adherence to whatever he wants. But obviously that’s not what the senator’s role is supposed to be, especially in terms of checks and balances.

“If that’s the way friends treat you, you wonder about his enemies,” Cornyn continued, referring to a post-race social media note in which Trump wrote that the Lone Star conservative would “remain my friend for a long time.”

Cornyn’s race was a gamble and a loss for the GOP: one of the most prolific fundraisers, Cornyn had done much to support other Republican candidates over the course of his 24-year legislative career, bringing in more than $400 million for auxiliary races.

The lost cash flow, paired with Trump’s waning popularity and dismal economic offerings, could bode poorly for the Republican Party come November, according to Cornyn.

“It’s going to make things harder, certainly more expensive in Texas, and make it harder around the country,” Cornyn said, adding that Trump would regret his actions. “I don’t say that with any sort of desire for vengeance; I just think that’s the way it’s going to be. He’s going to have the most miserable two years of his life in the last two years of his term, I think, because I think November is going to be a disaster.”

GOP Rep. Carlos Giménez of Florida appeared on Fox Business Friday, where he promised that Cuba is next on President Donald Trump’s invasion list. According to Giménez, Cuba has been biding its time since the last U.S. invasion in 1961. “Cuba has always been a national security threat to the United States,” he said. “The people of Cuba are starting to rise up.

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A cartoon by Jack Ohman. Related | Kellyanne Conway is back—with ‘alternative facts’ on Graham Platner…

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The FBI raided the offices of an Ohio pro-democracy organization in Cleveland Thursday and questioned employees across the state, asking about voter fraud.

The Ohio Organizing Collaborative, which promotes voter registration and voting rights, was targeted by over 100 agents who showed up at the homes of the organization’s leadership and employees, seeking electronic devices and in some cases carrying subpoenas. The bureau also had a search warrant for the organization’s Cleveland office.

“They had agents all across the state going to civil rights leaders’ and community leaders’ doors intimidating them, coming and demanding that they talk about literally anything they would ask,” Prentiss Haney, an OOC board member, told MS NOW. The agents “asked them if they’re committing voter fraud, just on their doors, in front of their houses with their children, and just following them to work and school.”

Haney told the Cleveland Plain-Dealer that the agents who approached the organization’s staff at their homes in Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton, and Youngstown didn’t have warrants, calling their approach “just straight-up intimidation tactics.” He said the OOC is not involved in voter fraud in any way.

“It was terrifying,” Haney said. “I’ve never seen this sort of force from a federal agency against regular people, regular Ohioans, who are helping people participate in elections.”

The FBI and the Department of Justice have not commented publicly about the raid or any investigation into the OOC, but Democratic Representative Shontel Brown, who represents Cleveland and much of northeastern Ohio, said in a statement that she was “alarmed and outraged by reports that Trump and Kash Patel’s FBI has raided the Ohio Organizing Collective in Cleveland.”

“This appears to be a blatant effort to suppress and deny the vote of people in Northeast Ohio. These raids must end immediately,” Brown said on X.

The FBI’s raids bring to mind the right-wing smear campaign in 2009 to bring down ACORN, a national organization that also advocated for voting rights, among other efforts aimed at low-income Americans. Even though investigations found that ACORN staff broke no laws, the organization lost almost all of its funding, depriving many communities of a valuable organization and hurting voter registration. Thursday’s raids seem aimed at depressing voter registration and creating panic about nonexistent voter fraud in a state where Democrats stand to make gains in November.

President Donald Trump had a meltdown Friday, claiming that Iranian state media was making up terms for a peace deal the president had promised to deliver just hours before.

“The terms that Iran leaked out to the Fake News have NOTHING to do with the terms that were agreed to, in writing,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, on the 105th day of a war that was only supposed to last two weeks.

“What they said, including their weak and pathetic statement on having a deal, bears no relation to the truth. Very dishonorable people to deal with. With them, there is no such thing as dealing in good faith. AMAZING!” he wrote. “Also, their totally rebuffed Drone attack last night against Indian Ships leaving the Hormuz Strait is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE. They better get their act together, and FAST!”

IRNA, Iran’s state news agency, reported earlier Friday that the memorandum of understanding established a 60-day ceasefire that the country could use to negotiate retaining some of their enrichment capabilities. They also reported that Tehran would receive compensation for the damage incurred by U.S. and Israeli attacks.

Vice President JD Vance also directly contradicted IRNA’s reporting in a post on X, insisting that Iranians “are not receiving any cash, and no funds are being released simply for signing a deal or attending a meeting.”

Trump announced Thursday that a deal had been agreed upon by “all parties involved” and would be passed very quickly, but it’s looking increasingly like peace is still very far away. Israeli officials indicated Thursday they were not aware of any deal, and now Iran has presented conditions that the president says he never agreed to.

The president turns 80 on Sunday, and, as with everything pertaining to Donald Trump, his need to place himself at the center of our attention is pathological. He could not just have a dinner at the White House, or a party at Mar-a-Lago. No; he had to build a massive arena on real estate that belongs to the people of the United States to host a vulgar, garish event that is one of the most violent forms of spectacle available to the human race today. Trump will be sitting there like some Roman emperor at the Colosseum watching enslaved men try to stave off lions. The man who wanted law enforcement to shoot protesters “in the knees” is probably bummed he couldn’t just replicate that.

But if you can’t have lions, six UFC fights are the next best thing. Granted, UFC fighting is very popular in the United States and across the world. I’ve read various accounts this week contending that UFC fighting has supplanted hockey as the fourth-most-popular sport on television, behind the big three of football, baseball, and basketball. I’ve also read that its popularity may have peaked; here’s a 2025 piece by a sportswriter who has followed “combat sports” for 15 years, showing that the number of matches is in steep decline. “The United States, long the backbone of [mixed martial arts], has seen a sharp decline in activity,” wrote John S. Nash. “In 2009, more than 6,266 professional fights took place across the country. This would be the pinnacle for American MMA contests. By 2024, that number had dropped to just over 3,027—a 52 percent decrease.”

Still—it’s popular. Fine. But guess what’s strikingly, overwhelmingly not popular? The idea of hosting such fights at the White House, on grounds we tend to associate with understated, democratic solemnity. A poll released Thursday found that just … wait for it … 16 percent of Americans considered it appropriate to hold MMA cage matches on the White House grounds. Meanwhile, 46 percent opposed. Even among Republicans, only 31 percent considered it appropriate. Yet a narrow plurality of Republicans in the survey backed the event, by said 31 percent to 22 percent.

Democrats opposed it by huge margins, 75 to 5 percent. Independents were strongly against it too, by 45 to 11 percent. So once again, it’s Republicans—no; specifically, it’s MAGA Republicans, because they’re undoubtedly that 31 percent—who are way out of step with what real Americans think. Yet they—Trump, his lackeys, and all those Soviet-style propagandists on Fox and Newsmax and One America and elsewhere—will of course spend the entire weekend equating men beating each other to a pulpy mass on hallowed civic ground with “real” patriotism.

It’s sickening. Oh—and it’s also, as we’ve come to expect with Trump, deeply corrupt. First of all, the cost of constructing the arena is around $60 million. Supposedly UFC is picking up that check, but with Trump, who really knows? We taxpayers will undoubtedly be on the hook for something. Meanwhile, the chief sponsor—surprise, surprise!—is Crypto.com. There are in addition figurines of some of the featured fighters. There’s apparel—garish T-shirts running $40. Over at TrumpStore.com, somewhat to my surprise, I didn’t see any merch specifically tied to the event, but you have to believe that Trump’s short-fingered hand is dipping into some till or another here. A lawsuit filed by the group the Public Integrity Project to block the event from taking place (it’s pending as I write) states that UFC set up a for-profit entity to manage this event, which is selling seating packages that cost up to $1.5 million—and that Trump previously bought $50,000 worth of stock in TKO, UFC’s owner.

Out in the real world, Trump is being reduced to impotence by a bunch of dictators who are even more reactionary than he is. He’s about to cut a “deal” with Iran that sounds like it will be little more than an extended ceasefire. It will, many experts fear, compare unfavorably to Barack Obama’s 2015 accord, which Trump tore up in 2018. Trump may achieve what Obama achieved, in terms of getting Iran to agree not to enrich uranium at anywhere close to weapons-grade levels. But as I’ve noted several times, the thing to watch is how much money Trump agrees to transfer to Iran. Which in a sense is fine; it’s Iran’s frozen money. But when Obama agreed to give Iran $1.7 billion, right-wingers screamed that it was capitulation and even treasonous. Iran now wants up to $24 billion. We’ll see how Mr. Art of the Deal fares.

But even if he does strike a decent deal, he’s already done enormous damage to the U.S. economy, the global economy, and American prestige and power projection. To sane observers in the United States and across the world, he looks like exactly what he is: a weak and hollow and insecure man who started a needless and counterproductive war out of nowhere because it looked “tough.”

But inside his little MAGA cocoon on Sunday night, he’ll be a manly man, presiding over watching other manly men spill each other’s blood for the leader’s greater glory. It’s the most undemocratic pageant one could imagine, a fact that—given that scant 16 percent support—the people know in their bones. In fact, this is exactly what fascism is: grotesque, violent spectacle that repulses most of the population but drives the fervent worshippers to a frenzied state and tries to bully its way into being synonymous with what it means to be a real American.

It’s all made worse by the fact that Dear Leader will be embarking upon his ninth decade of life that night, and that six in 10 Americans believe he lacks the mental sharpness to serve as president. So that’s the not-so-secret meaning of this event. I just wonder if Vegas will establish odds on whether he’ll fall asleep.

MY NOVEL IS OUT!: Buy my new novel, Killing Baby Hitler, out this week from O/R Books. “Fabulous in every sense,” says Kurt Andersen. “Savagely funny,” says Molly Jong-Fast. They’re right!

For those participating in today’s live chat with Dr. Dave Karpf, click here to join at 1 p.m. PST (4 p.m. EST). You should be able to log in with the link, but the code is 111 (if necessary). If you haven’t RSVP’d yet, please click here.

Notes: This meeting will be recorded for a possible podcast, but we will not use your faces. Please do not use any AI recording or note-taking devices (or you’ll be asked to leave). Thanks, and see you in a few hours from now.

Excellent news: Paulina Borsook’s Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech is now available as an ebook. It features a new introduction by me. You can buy it at this Bookshop link to support independent booksellers and this newsletter. (See other purchase options here.)

Paulina’s work has undergone a big resurgence in the past year as people realize that she presciently warned—three decades ago!—that trouble was brewing in Silicon Valley. While many other journalists and writers were praising tech arrogance as “genius,” she saw through the hype and described late 90s techno-libertarians as men who made “a philosophy out of a personality defect.”

Here’s my interview with Paulina on the Nerd Reich podcast. And here’s a great profile of her in the New York Times.

“Smart and humorous...the shortcomings of these ambitious tech giants ring true even today,” says Craigslist founder Craig Newmark of the book.

Especially today—as SpaceX launches the biggest IPO ever, likely making Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire even as he spreads conspiracy theories about elections and stokes racial hatred and violence around the globe.

Book club, anyone? (The print version of Cyberselfish will release in September. Pre-order here.)

President Donald Trump is reportedly trying to expunge his two impeachments—his latest attempt to rewrite history from his disastrous first term. “It should be done because I did nothing wrong,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal. “It was a rigged deal—it was a whole rigged situation.” But forcing Republicans to pass a meaningless resolution just to soothe Dear Leader’s fragile ego…

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A federal judge blocked Donald Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund” on Friday, demanding the Trump administration release signed proof that the president’s pet project is really dead.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in the Eastern District of Virginia issued a preliminary injunction against the president’s slush fund, but said she was willing to drop the case altogether if acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signed a document under penalty of perjury saying they would not move forward with the fund.

The judge gave Blanche and Bessent one week to provide their sworn testimony.

Last week, Blanche insisted publicly that “we are not moving forward with the fund,” and claimed it wasn’t necessary to release a document reversing the DOJ’s position. It turns out Blanche’s pinky promise won’t be good enough.

Staffers in the Justice Department and White House have reportedly been telling the president’s MAGA allies they can still expect to receive some form of payment, and Trump has continued to talk up the fund, later telling NBC’s Meet the Press he and Republicans thought it was a “great idea.” (Spoiler alert: They did not.)

Trump’s fund had attracted the attention of some of his most notorious allies, as well as one top DOJ official.

This story has been updated.

Ahead of going public, Anthropic is nearing a $1 trillion valuation, surpassing OpenAI—now valued at $862 billion—to become the world’s most valuable AI company. Not long after that news broke, on Wednesday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a blog post and policy framework outlining his preferred way for AI companies like Anthropic to be regulated. Not for the first time, he warns that his company’s products promise both an ill-defined set of benefits and potentially catastrophic risks that “could even threaten humanity itself.”

Luckily for us, he has a plan to keep the products that are making him rich from wiping everyone out. Amodei suggests the government should “have the power to block or deter deployment” of models it deems too risky. He calls for frontier large language models to be subjected to technical testing and auditing, workplace protections against AI-related job displacement, coordination among “allied democracies” against “adversaries,” and limits on the use of LLMs’ use in warfare and for domestic surveillance. Anthropic has previously suggested that a pause on frontier model development might be worthwhile, but—for now—impossible, as it might allow “the least cautious actors catch up technologically.” Like OpenAI’s progressive-coded “New Deal,” Amodei’s vision contains plenty of nice-enough-sounding ideas that are unlikely to be implemented so long as Donald Trump is in the White House and our political system is being pumped full of donations from Amodei’s fabulously wealthy, openly reactionary colleagues in Silicon Valley. Amodei, of course, laments the lack of global coordination on these issues, and the disconnect between the scale of the problem at hand and the pace of policymaking: “We now, globally and collectively, need to activate a slow and rickety policy apparatus to deal with risks and opportunities that are going to compound surprisingly quickly from here.”

As a climate reporter, I find Amodei’s admonitions eerily familiar. For decades, scientists have warned about the enormous dangers posed by continuing to burn fossil fuels that deposit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and warm the planet. Once policymakers seemed to be taking those concerns seriously, the companies whose products have fueled global warming—and that backed efforts to downplay its importance—started to ape those scientists’ warnings, laying out their own plans for a “transition” to a vaguely defined future known as “net-zero.” Ahead of U.N. climate talks in Paris in 2015, for instance, Saudi Aramco, Shell, and other major fossil fuel producers announced their “collective support for an effective global climate change agreement.” Many backed the implementation of a global carbon tax that there was no practical means of implementing, especially given that a foundational premise of what became the Paris climate agreement was that its goals would be nonbinding. The companies poured millions into academic institutions that lent credibility to the idea that fossil fuel companies would play a leading role in the transition to a fossil fuel–free world.

These moves weren’t all cynical theatrics. In the lead-up to U.N. climate talks in Glasgow, in 2021, a few European producers released somewhat plausible-sounding plans to start actually scaling back their oil and gas operations and invest in renewables. That was seemingly out of a fear that governments might actually start requiring them to do that, but also because there were a few greenish areas—like carbon storage—that aligned well with their expertise and core business model. Governments never did enforce a global energy transition, and most of those lofty industry climate plans have been walked back. Throughout that saga, at every level of government, even the allegedly more climate-conscious oil and gas companies continued to lobby against laws and regulatory proposals that weren’t to their liking.

The regulatory proposals from Anthropic and OpenAI are different from polluters’ net-zero plans in meaningful ways. It may be the case that Amodei, at least, really does believe the scary stories he tells about Anthropic LLMs creating biological weapons and defying their creators. Unlike fossil fuel CEOs, Amodei and Altman have been among the loudest voices broadcasting the existential risks their products pose. However, genuine or not, Amodei and Altman’s philosophizing about the allegedly mystical properties of their products enables them to cast themselves as guided by some deeper, more altruistic purpose because of their access to a special kind of knowledge that endows them with a power nobody else has: If they’re the only ones who truly understand the awe-inspiring powers of Claude and ChatGPT, then who else could possibly know how to regulate them and avert dystopia?

The truth is that there’s a business imperative for the likes of Altman and Amodei to avoid talking about the middle ground between the techno-futurist utopia and/or existential threats promised by artificial intelligence—all squishy concepts in their own right. Increasingly advanced large language models may well turn out to be massively important for the businesses that can afford to automate enormous numbers of the entry-level programming jobs and administrative positions. They could at once help advance some genuinely exciting medical breakthroughs and create a generation of kids who never learn to read or think for themselves. Scammers might figure out new ways to trick your grandparents into signing away their life savings as governments automate warfare and make manual tax preparation a thing of the past. These are all transformative developments in their own right. They pose novel dangers that governments ought to take seriously. They do not add up to a new god.

Recent headlines, moreover, lend some credence to the idea that AI developers are on the verge of acting more like normal corporations. Companies that have rushed to embrace LLMs are running up unsustainable bills on their token usage, i.e., monetized units of usage that users pay for based on how compute-intensive and numerous the tasks are that they’re asking LLMs to do. Results have been mixed, and, for now, automation remains an expensive and (human), labor-intensive task for many firms. In response to such concerns, OpenAI has signaled that it will start lowering its prices to compete with Anthropic.

The most important difference between oil and gas producers’ climate pledges and AI companies’ recent policy proposals is that the world does not run on large language models. Fossil fuels are the foundation of modernity. As the now monthslong closure of the Strait of Hormuz has shown, abruptly cutting off supplies of coal, oil, gas, and the many products derived from them is economically disastrous. And whereas few people on earth can remember life without fossil fuels, just about everyone can recall—perhaps fondly—a world before Claude and ChatGPT. Despite their best attempts to convince the public and policymakers otherwise, these companies are neither too big to fail nor too magical for regular people to understand.

That’s not a case for pulling the plug so much as for seeing through the religious bromides that Amodei and Altman use to describe their companies. Anthropic and OpenAI’s products should indeed be subject to stringent regulations. Their billionaire CEOs are just that: executives with a financial interest in a regulatory regime that preserves their business model and future earnings. Like their counterparts in the fossil fuel industry, it’s their prerogative to try to convince policymakers and the public that they have a good-faith interest in our collective well-being. But no one should mistake them for philosopher kings building a god. Dario Amodei and Sam Altman have some doctrinal differences, but they are both—above all—wealthy men who want to keep getting wealthier by selling their products however and to whoever they want.

President Trump blasted Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin Thursday evening on Truth Social, accusing the Maryland progressive of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and saying he should be expelled from Congress.

“Jamie Raskin, a Loser in Life, who worked endlessly during my First Term to impeach me, and failed miserably, wasting the Country’s money, time, and effort, will guaranteed be trying to do it again, despite one of the most successful Presidencies in History,” Trump posted.

“He spent time on the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs, and was rebuffed on that, just as he has been rebuffed on Impeachment, and many other things. If Biden didn’t give him a pardon, he’d be in jail right now! Something should be done about people like this who do bad things, but always come up on the short end because of their illegal or unscrupulous behavior, and hurt our Country in the process,” Trump added. “I agree with Mark Levin when he says to, EXPEL THE BUM.”

Trump was responding to a post on X from conservative commentator Mark Levin calling for Raskin’s expulsion, claiming the Maryland congressman was “already leading a plot to impeach the President if the Democrats take the House.” Raskin has long been a thorn in Trump side, serving on the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, and supporting both congressional attempts to impeach Trump during his first term.

Raskin responded to Trump’s post on MS Now’s All In With Chris Hayes Thursday night, saying the president “is obviously having nightmare flashbacks about impeachment.”

“There’s a very easy way to not get impeached. Stop committing impeachable offenses. Stop committing high crimes and misdemeanors. Don’t go to war and usurp the powers of Congress to declare war,” Raskin told Hayes, saying that Trump should stop defying Congress and the Constitution.

Chris Hayes: The president is rage posting about you. He calls you a loser in life, and he's mad that you wanted to impeach him.

Jamie Raskin: There's a very easy way to not get impeached. Stop committing impeachable offenses. Stop committing high crimes and misdemeanors. pic.twitter.com/KkTFDx8xsY

— Blue Georgia (@BlueGeorgia) June 12, 2026

The post comes as Trump and his allies are working on a plan to expunge Trump’s previous impeachments from the record, even though that isn’t constitutionally possible. But that won’t stop Trump, as he can’t accept the idea that he could ever do anything wrong. Not only does he want his record to reflect that, he also wants to punish anyone who tries to hold him accountable.

President Trump threatened Washington, D.C. mayoral front-runner and Democratic Socialist Janeese Lewis George with a federal takeover if she were to win next week’s primary.

“Here in Washington, D.C., there’s a Democratic primary for mayor. One of the two leading candidates, Janeese Lewis George, is running a Zohran Mamdani campaign—focused on socialist policies,” Trump was asked at a Thursday afternoon press conference. “How would you feel if she emerged victorious?”

“Well I wouldn’t like it. Maybe we’ll take back Washington and run it on a federal basis,” Trump responded bluntly. “We won’t put up with it. We’re not gonna lose our businesses.”

Q: Here in Washington DC, there's a Democratic primary for mayor. One of the two leading candidates is running a Zohran Mamdani campaign focusing on socialist policies. How would you feel if she wins?

TRUMP: Maybe we take back Washington and run it on a federal basis. We won't… pic.twitter.com/H3E69bXzdW

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 11, 2026

Lewis George responded on X.

“We are not going to get ICE off our streets or protect Home Rule by fearing this President. Threatening DC because you do not like how our residents vote is an attack on democracy itself,” she wrote. “The people of DC elect the Mayor of DC. And they want someone who will stand up to Trump.”

While the extent of Trump’s threat is unclear, he is no stranger to “federal takeovers” of the nation’s capital. He instituted one last summer, which current Mayor Muriel Bowser largely cooperated with. As for home rule, Trump would need 60 Senate votes to end it—something he’ll likely never have in this term.