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Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin was back on his propaganda grind Wednesday, telling Newsmax that the possibility of yet another government shutdown under a Republican-controlled Congress would somehow be the Democratic Party’s fault—because apparently, it’s opposite day. “Don’t blame Republicans,” Johnson said, regarding the tepid support for increasing the military’s already-bloated…

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The grand jury transcripts from the “Broadview Six” case, in which the federal government tried to charge six Chicagoans with felony conspiracy for their participation in an anti-ICE protest, were released this week, offering a rare look inside an aggressive federal prosecution. 

The Broadview case collapsed in late May amid prosecutorial-misconduct allegations, a month after the harshest charges against the protesters were dropped. The transcripts show unnamed jurors repeatedly pressing prosecutor Sherri Mecklenburg on why defendants faced assault and conspiracy charges when the ICE agent whose vehicle they blocked was unharmed.

“This person wasn’t harmed, but by extension impeding and assaulting his vehicle, that constitutes simple assault?” one juror asked. “The law doesn’t require that you actually touch him,” Mecklenburg said. 

The juror then asked whether the ICE agent had the right to drive into the protesters. “So if the person comes and stands in front of my car, do I have the right to drive against him?” the juror asked. Mecklenburg brushed it off. “That didn’t happen.”

“It happened,” the juror responded. “He moved.” In video from the protest, the ICE agent’s car can, indeed, be seen driving towards the crowd of protesters. 

In another interaction, Mecklenburg explained the requirements of a charge of “conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer,” which the Trump administration has repeatedly brought against ICE protesters. 

“Are you actually presenting any new actual facts or just a different viewpoint on your side?” an unnamed grand juror asked.

“Okay. I’m feeling the skepticism already. Are you going to be able to listen with an open mind? Tell me the truth,” Mecklenburg said.

“I heard this case like last week, and I thought it was a crock of shit then and I still think it is,” the juror said. Prosecutors required multiple attempts across three separate days to secure an indictment—and a visit from Chicago’s U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros, who gave a speech to the grand jury on the importance of impartiality, according to a special report released by his office. 

The Broadview case is part of a larger federal effort to silence dissent. Last September, Donald Trump explicitly directed federal prosecutors to target ICE protesters, telling US attorneys’ offices to “charge all such persons with the highest provable offense available under the law.” Some prosecutors resigned rather than comply. Others followed orders: in Chicago, in Los Angeles, and in Washington State, prosecutors came for ICE protesters. 

“The right does have a bloodlust to imprison dissenters,” Kat Abughazaleh, a former congressional candidate and Mother Jones contributor, said in an interview May 27. “I and a bunch of other people got hit by a car while exercising our First Amendment rights, and then the federal government tried to charge us with conspiracy.” 

The conspiracy charges could have put the six defendants, who are all involved in local Democratic politics, in jail for the better part of a decade, all for standing in the way of one ICE vehicle. “The conspiracy charge got dropped about a month ago when we asked to see the unredacted grand jury transcripts,” Abughazaleh said. 

“The government was embarrassed, just as they were embarrassed that ICE shot Joselyn Walsh, my co-defendant’s, guitar. And they should be embarrassed. This is absolutely pathetic behavior from supposedly the strongest government in the world.” 

In Spokane, Washington, three people were found guilty last month of the same charge the Broadview protesters were charged with: “conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer.” Cases against ICE protesters in Texas and Minnesota are ongoing. 

“I think the goal is to make an example out of us,” Abughazaleh said. 

GOP Rep. Nancy Mace will now have unlimited time to police America’s bathrooms, after she handily lost South Carolina’s Republican gubernatorial primary on Tuesday. Mace—who led multiple polls when she first launched her campaign last August—came in fifth place out of the five legitimate contenders in the race, garnering just 12% of the vote. She did not win a single county in the state…

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A cartoon by Pedro Molina. Related | Scott Pelley spills messy details about CBS News’ MAGA makeover…

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Inflation rose in May as Americans continue to deal with the fallout of President Donald Trump’s decision to attack Iran earlier this year, and now Trump has inadvertently admitted that his efforts at diplomacy in the Middle East are a failure. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Tuesday that annual inflation rose at 4.2%—the highest it has been since 2023. The rate also increased…

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This Friday (June 12) at 1 p.m. Pacific (4 p.m. Eastern) join Dr. Dave Karpf and me for a live discussion of the latest developments with tech fascism. I’ll send out a Zoom link on Friday morning. Please click here to RSVP.

Dave has been tracking the political infrastructure of tech power for decades, and he’s usually right about where things are headed. We’ll discuss Palantir’s manifesto, Peter Thiel’s temporary move to Argentina, the backlash against AI data centers, the possibility of a trillionaire Elon Musk, and Dave’s predictions for the year.

And we’ll answer your questions. (Leave them in the comments below or email gil (at) thenerdreich.com)

About Dave: Dr. Dave Karpf is an associate professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. He is the award-winning author of The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy (2012, Oxford University Press) and Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy (2016, Oxford University Press). Both books discuss how digital media is transforming the work of political advocacy and activist organizations. His writing has been published in academic and journalistic outlets, including Wired, The Nation, Nonprofit Quarterly, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Dr. Dave Karpf

National headlines may have shifted, but the impacts of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda are still being felt across Los Angeles. For many, it has devastated their financial, mental, and physical wellbeing. And as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents still roam the city, the struggle is far from over. “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night remembering…

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President Donald Trump last year dramatically ratched up the fee for H-1B work visas to $100,000, saying it would protect American workers from losing their jobs to lower-paid foreigners. But on Monday a federal judge struck down the fees, siding with 20 states and ruling that the Trump administration exceeded its authority by raising the fee without congressional approval.

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Follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon Related | Transportation chief wants AI to manage your air travel safety…

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A record-shattering drought has racked much of the United States. But the artificial intelligence industry is pushing ahead regardless, with the majority of planned data centers set to be built in drought-ridden locations, a Guardian analysis has found.

About two-thirds of upcoming data centers, which typically require a large amount of water to operate, are set to be built in places that have been among the driest in the country over the past year.

Of 809 planned data centers, 517 are in locations that have been in drought conditions throughout the past year, according to data from Cleanview and the federal government, which grades drought across four levels of severity. A similar proportion of existing data centers are already situated in drought-affected areas.

More than 60 percent of the contiguous US is currently at varying stages of drought, the largest expanse for spring in modern records, with a particularly severe lack of rain and snow in the Southeast and West desiccating croplands and raising fears of a disastrous wildfire season.

“There isn’t enough water to go around. Now with this explosion of data centers, I think a crunch point is inevitable.”

Scientists have determined that the climate crisis, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, is worsening the duration and intensity of droughts in the US.

But a stampede of new data centers are adding extra demands via their hefty energy and water requirements. Large data centers, some the size of small towns, can require up to 5 million gallons of water a day, equivalent to the water use of up to 50,000 people, in order to provide cooling to arrays of humming networked computers.

Overall, the multiplying data centers are set to demand as much as 73 billion gallons of water a year by 2028, up from about 17 billion gallons in 2023. Each 100-word AI prompt uses up roughly a half-liter of water due to the cooling needs of data centers, researchers have estimated.

“The AI industry is sprinting as fast as it can to gain market dominance, and the rest of us have to deal with a great increase in water demand in places already in drought,” said Christopher Dalbom, an expert in water resources law at Tulane University. “Even if there wasn’t climate change, we’d be feeling the effects of droughts more acutely, because water demand is going up and up, to feed more people and water more lawns and crops. There isn’t enough water to go around. Now with this explosion of data centers, I think a crunch point is inevitable.”

“I mean, ChatGPT is a pretty nice tool, but most people would prefer to have a beef steak.”

Companies such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon are pouring billions of dollars into new data centers, with developers often drawn to dry, sparsely populated areas, due to the lower cost of land and generous tax breaks. Arid climates are also thought to cause the least amount of corrosion to equipment over time.

One of the world’s largest data centers, a complex twice the size of Manhattan, was controversially approved last month in a Utah county that has been deep in drought since summer last year. Meanwhile, Walla Walla county in Washington, site of a planned Amazon data center, has also been overwhelmingly in drought since July of last year.

In Texas, two of the largest new data centers are arriving in counties—Pecos and Carson—recently parched by drought. Data centers could account for 9 percent of Texas’s total water use by 2040, researchers recently calculated, with the state’s water development board forecasting Texas will have to deal with rising overall demand and falling supply of water in the decades ahead.

While an immediate water shortage is unlikely, hard choices will have to be made to avoid future clashes over water access, according to Dalbom. “When we get into a situation where there’s a limited amount of water available, are we going to limit water to residents and businesses before data centers?” he said.

“In the eastern US, we have always assumed an abundance of water, so the legal systems aren’t set up for shortages. We can’t just assume that people aren’t going to be asked to reduce their water use, while data centers and energy won’t be.”

Concerns over water use, as well as rising energy bills, have stirred local opposition to a rash of data center projects, causing some developments to be curtailed or canceled. These concerns have become a political headache for Republicans—Donald Trump has been a vocal supporter of the AI industry—with much of the opposition coming from rural, more conservative areas.

“Ranchers are being told to be conservative with water, to not waste water, and now there’s a new competing interest able to get near unlimited access to water,” said Andrew Coppin, chief executive of Ranchbot, a company that helps ranchers track their water use. “The concerns from farmers are real and justified. Data centers are flavor of the month now, but we wouldn’t make the choice to only be able to have a shower on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. I mean, ChatGPT is a pretty nice tool, but most people would prefer to have a beef steak if they had to choose.”

Data center developers say the industry’s current water use is still just a fraction of what much larger consumers, primarily agriculture, already take, causing growing strain on key sources such as the Colorado River. Even the irrigation of golf courses and lawns sucks up more water than data centers.

Guardian graphic based on data from Cleanview and NOAAGuardian graphic. Sources: Cleanview, Noaa

“Data center operators work closely with local authorities to ensure compliance with all applicable rules and regulations and to ensure operations do not stress local water supplies,” said Dan Diorio, vice-president of state policy at the Data Center Coalition. “The industry is actively prioritizing responsible water use through operational best practices and innovative development strategies, often collaborating with local authorities and conservation organizations on water restoration and reclamation projects. Data center operators are among the few private sector industries actively investing in local water infrastructure.”

The sector claims it is making progress to replace standard evaporative cooling with more efficient technologies such as closed-loop cooling, whereby the same coolant, such as water or glycol, is continually piped among the servers to absorb their heat.

However, while such cooling systems save water, they need more energy to run. This power typically comes from fossil fuels, which unlike cleaner forms of energy require copious amounts of water to generate electricity.

Such a trade-off is evident at Meta’s huge proposed data center, called Hyperion after the father of the sun in Greek mythology, in Louisiana. While the facility will use closed-loop cooling, it will also need the energy input of 10 gas-fired power plants that will use large amounts of water as well as emit planet-heating emissions.

“It will be an issue for farmers near the data center and if more data centers are approved to draw down the same aquifer you get a death by a thousand cuts,” said Dalbom. “You may see the water table going down so wells will have to be deeper to access the groundwater. There will still be water there but cost more to access.”

Meta said that it will prioritize on-site water efficiency to the extent that its water use will be less than if the land was used for agriculture purposes.

“I think there is an emerging consensus among the major hyper-scalers about the importance of water stewardship.”

“Meta estimates the data center will use as much as 1 billion gallons of water per year, drawing it from an aquifer currently used for agriculture, not from the community’s drinking water,” a company spokeswoman said.

The overall water impact of AI is far larger than data centers themselves, however. A January study found that data centers will be responsible for just 4 percent of the 30 trillion gallons of extra water that will be needed, globally, for AI expansion by the midpoint of this century. Power generation and semiconductor fabrication for AI will suck up much more water than the data centers themselves, the report states.

“Data centers are the most visible element to people but they are only part of the picture,” said Albert Cho, chief strategy officer at Xylem, the company behind the study. Cho said that data centers’ water use will remain smaller than other large sectors, such as agriculture, and use of renewable energy and reduced water waste will help reduce demand.

“Water tends not to be the top-line consideration,” when data center sites are chosen, Cho said, but he added: “I think there is an emerging consensus among the major hyper-scalers about the importance of water stewardship.”

Yet the public backlash has been so strong—polling shows 70 percent of Americans don’t want to live next to a data center—that some states are considering new restrictions. California, Michigan and Iowa, for example, are mulling bills to require operators to submit regular reports on water use while others, such as South Carolina and Kansas, may force developers to use closed-loop cooling systems. Lawmakers in New York have gone further, with plans for an outright moratorium on data centers.

In Utah, the state’s governor, who last year asked residents to pray for rain amid a deep drought, has attempted to reassure voters that the enormous new Stratos data center will not endanger the Great Salt Lake, which was already shrinking due to water overuse and rising global temperatures. A group opposing the county approval of Stratos is aiming to overturn this decision via a public referendum.

The data center is backed by Kevin O’Leary, a Canadian businessman who has featured on TV shows such as Shark Tank and is a keen supporter of Trump. O’Leary has, without evidence, accused opponents of Stratos of being paid protesters or in league with the Chinese Communist party.

“There could not be a worse advocate for this project than Kevin O’Leary, who has been absolutely dismissive of people in Utah again and again,” said Ben Abbott, an ecologist at Brigham Young University and the executive director of Grow the Flow, a Utah environmental group.

Alexa Chandler holds a sign at a protest against the construction of a data center on May 4, 2026 in Tremonton, Utah.Natalie Behring via Getty

“I haven’t found a single person in favor of this,” he added. “It has brought together urban and rural communities, farmers and environmentalists, linking arms against this. I think this project is mortally wounded as a result.”

The Great Salt Lake is “headed for an all-time low” and the massive 9 gigawatts of power needed for Stratos, as well as its cooling systems, will probably push the ecosystem into further water deficit, Abbott said.

“There couldn’t be a worse time to do this,” Abbott said of the Stratos project. “Climate change is causing important hydrological shifts and here in the west we have a less stable water supply due to the mega-drought. But, more importantly, we are also harvesting the fruits of a century of water overuse.”

O’Leary’s case for the project is that it would be a big economic win, bringing jobs and tax revenue to rural parts of the state while helping the US win on AI in its rivalry with China. Last week he agreed to make cuts to the scale of the project after pressure from state lawmakers and said in a post on X that he was “working around the clock to address every issue raised, from water usage and environmental impact to power generation and community benefits.”

A lawsuit has also been filed against the project brought by five local residents and a progressive group.

Worldwide, three-quarters of people could face drought impacts by 2050 all while data centers use 2.5 trillion gallons of water in the coming decade, enough to meet the drinking water needs of the planet’s human population for over a year, the UN has estimated.

Even when some withdrawn water is recycled by data centers, “large-scale withdrawals can strain aquifers and river systems, particularly in arid or groundwater-depleted regions,” a recent UN report warned.

“We need to rethink our relationship with water because at the moment there is just this unrestricted demand everywhere,” said Abbott. “We are in systemic water deficit almost everywhere on the planet.”

Last week, the Pentagon released a new list of 31 religions officially recognized by the US Department of Defense, edited down from more than 200 that had previously been accepted. The purpose of streamlining, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a statement, was not to delegitimize any one religion, but rather “to allow chaplains to quickly look at the religious composition of their units and determine how they structure resources to best provide for warfighters of all faith groups.”

But to some religious groups, the new list looked biased. Of the 31 groups listed, 22 were Christian. Atheists, pagans, and humanists, which had all been on the original list, were excluded. But the loudest complaints were about its structure. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints noted that while their faith was included, it had been sequestered from other Christian faiths—which they saw as part of a pattern of some denominations refusing to recognize LDS members as fellow Christians.

Indeed, Samuel Perry, a professor of rhetoric at Baylor University who studies Christian nationalism, noted that it wasn’t until evangelicals rallied around LDS politician Mitt Romney during his run for president in 2008 that mainline Christians accepted LDS as a Christian faith. That was, said Perry, “completely a political change in order to be able to move centrally around one candidate.”

Last week, after the Pentagon released its list, Utah’s two Mormon senators made their objections known on social media. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) tweeted, “Can anyone tell me why The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was left out of the list of Christian churches?” Sen. John Curtis (R-UT) was more pointed in his tweet:

Latter-day Saints are among the most patriotic, service-oriented individuals in our country. They are also unequivocally Christian—just look at who is in the name of the Church.

It is unacceptable for a government entity to characterize a faith in a manner that contradicts the… https://t.co/ywqk59ZtRz

— Senator John Curtis (@SenJohnCurtis) June 6, 2026

On Monday, the Department of Defense released a new list—and that version did list LDS as a “Christian” faith. But the Pentagon’s perceived slight is still roiling Christian social media, with some accounts rushing to defend the LDS church, and others, like firebrand pastor Joel Webbon, declaring to his 111,000 followers, “Mormons will go to hell.”

So was the original listing of Mormons apart from other Christian faiths simply an oversight, or a snub? In a tweet about the newest version of the list, the DOD claimed the former. “The Pentagon list included redundant and unnecessary labeling,” the agency said in a tweet on Monday, “and the mistake has been fixed.”

But in the past few days, some accounts on social media have pointed out that US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth belongs to a Christian nationalist denomination—called Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC)—that holds that Mormons aren’t Christians.

Which wouldn’t be terribly significant in the grand sweep of religious beliefs—except that CREC explicitly advocates for Christians to exert their faith’s influence over the government. Doug Wilson, the Moscow, Idaho, pastor who founded CREC, has described his vision of “a network of nations bound together by a formal, public, civic acknowledgement of the lordship of Jesus Christ and the fundamental truth of the Apostles’ Creed.” He has long argued in favor of Christian nationalism, and he has likened his fiefdom in Idaho—which includes a church, school, college, and publishing house—to a “working prototype” of what Christian nationalism could look like.

One theological point of distinction between LDS and other Christian denominations is that LDS members don’t accept the Apostles’ Creed because it states that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are all one entity. In contrast, Perry, the Christian nationalism scholar, noted the LDS church teaches that they are three distinct beings. From Wilson’s description of his ideal version of America, it appears that everyone would have to live by the Apostles’ Creed—whether they believed in it or not. In Wilson’s Christian America, said Perry, “Anything that falls outside of the doctrinal vision that Wilson or CREC have would fall outside of what they consider to be kind of a true belief in Christianity, so there’s kind of an exclusivity that’s being cultivated.”

Over the last few years, Wilson has begun to move in influential political circles, speaking at the National Conservatism conference with Vice President JD Vance and appearing at an event about Christian political strategy with Project 2025 architect Russell Vought. Last year, he planted a new CREC church in Washington, DC, where Hegseth often attends services. Most significantly, in February, Wilson delivered a sermon at the Pentagon, at the behest of Hegseth.

In an email, Wilson confirmed that CREC’s version of Christianity doesn’t include Mormons. “We would consider the Mormons to be a non-Christian faith with Christian terminology,” he wrote, and added that his church would consider LDS people to be “polytheists.”

The LDS Church did not respond to a request for comment for this story, and the US Department of Defense directed me to its tweet about the most recent revision of the list.

In April, during a congressional hearing that coincided with Black Maternal Health Week, Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) pressed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about the US’ abysmal and largely preventable rates of maternal death compared to its peers.

Black women, Lee pointed out, fare three times worse than their white counterparts, even as the Trump administration continues to cut both health funding and research into racial health disparities.

She posed a question: “How are we going to solve the Black maternal mortality crisis if we cannot say ‘Black’?” 

The GOP’s attacks on Medicaid—which finances health care for more than two in five births across the country—and the White House’s termination of thousands of federal health and science workers, including those tasked with compiling the country’s most comprehensive data on maternal and infant health, give even more weight to independent research like Listening to Mothers, a nationwide survey published by the nonprofit National Partnership for Women and Families on Monday.

The report—the group’s first nationwide survey since 2013—surveys thousands of mothers who gave birth in a hospital in 2023 and 2024 about their experiences with the maternal care system, revealing pervasive barriers to quality care and widespread failures by health systems.

The report ends by warning that “modest gains” like expanded postpartum Medicaid coverage “are now at risk of being rolled back.”

Around 40 percent of respondents said they’d been disrespected, dismissed, or ignored by providers during labor and delivery. More than a third reported unmet social needs during pregnancy—mainly a lack of income, difficulty paying utility bills, or finding childcare—particularly Black and indigenous respondents and those on Medicaid. After having their children, more than a fifth said at least one of those needs still hadn’t been met.

Before, during, and after their pregnancies, up to a fourth of respondents reported experiencing depressive symptoms. Symptoms of anxiety were even higher. Yet most people with either symptom received no treatment, even as late as 12 weeks after giving birth. And while research suggests that support from doulas and midwives improves outcomes, only a small fraction of respondents reported having access to or using either.

The report ends by warning that the “modest gains of recent years,” such as the expansion of Medicaid coverage to one year postpartum in all 50 states but Arkansas, “are now at risk of being rolled back.”

“We’re not where we should be,” said Nan Strauss, National Partnership’s senior director of maternal care. “We need to be adding to and improving people’s lives, making it easier for them to focus on their families at this really critical moment, and instead their own efforts to be the best new mom that they can are being undercut every step of the way.”

In July, congressional Republicans enacted major cuts to SNAP and Medicaid; my colleague Daniel Friedman noted at the time that the bill would cost millions of people their health insurance and reduce access to birth control and other reproductive care—imperiling maternity services at more than 140 rural hospitals, as my fellow colleague Nina Martin also reported. 

As the administration slashes the social safety net, it’s also suppressing vast amounts of data on maternal health. For decades, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Reproductive Health Division partnered with a majority of state health departments to survey tens of thousands of women about their experiences before, during, and after pregnancy as part of the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System. But last April, the CDC team that oversaw PRAMS was put on leave, indefinitely cutting off federal support to the states collecting this data. (The termination of thousands of federal workers, including those at the CDC, is currently being challenged in court.)

In the aftermath, said Rita Hamad, a social epidemiologist at Harvard University who has used PRAMS data to research safety net policies like paid parental leave, “some states were not able to continue their data collection, in part because they were losing out on that technical assistance from the CDC.”

“One really heartbreaking example is Mississippi, which stopped data collection for most of 2025,” Hamad said, noting that the state declared infant mortality a public health emergency the same year. “I was just thinking, gosh, how are they going to be able to address this crisis?”

Cassondra Marshall, an associate professor in UC Berkeley’s Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health Program, has used both PRAMS and Listening to Mothers data in her research. The data is “needed to develop interventions” by policymakers, Marshall emphasized. Yet policies like the Momnibus bills, which were reintroduced in March and seek among other things to expand the perinatal workforce and improve data collection, face an uphill battle in the Republican-dominated Congress.

As my colleague Madison Pauly put it last June, “With the White House and state governments denying the very idea of systemic racism and targeting anything that smacks of [DEI], structural change seems further away than ever.”

To make matters worse, the information the government is releasing isn’t exactly reliable. Last month, on Mother’s Day, HHS launched moms.gov, a website it described as offering “guidance and information to support the health and wellbeing of mothers and their families.” Yet the homepage contains no mention of parental leave or contraception, includes minimal mental health resources, and directs people to crisis pregnancy centers through another website operated by the Christian, anti-abortion Heartbeat International.

For decades, mothers and maternal health experts have been talking about the need for evidence-based, community-focused interventions. Under RFK Jr., public health seems to be moving in the opposite direction.

A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Donald Trump’s pathetic and sleazy effort to create a slush fund of $1.776 billion that his lieutenants could dole out to his political allies, including, possibly, his violent January 6 brownshirts, appears to be dead. After even Republicans howled about this brazen corruption, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former (and, in a way, still) personal lawyer, proclaimed the so-called “Anti-Weaponization Fund” kaput—though Trump continues to support this idea and there remains a possibility it could be revived in some form. But in all the brouhaha over this attempt by Trump to swipe nearly 2 billion smackers from American taxpayers, one damn big point has gotten lost: The claim that past administrations weaponized government against Trump and his right-wing confederates is complete bullshit.

There was no need for such a fund, because there were no such victims. This chief grievance of Trump and his MAGA cult is a myth that’s been created to cover up the many transgressions of Trump himself. And any acceptance of this notion of weaponization is a win for Trump.

Official reviews of the Russia investigation repeatedly declared it was a legitimate enterprise that was justifiably initiated and not a political hit job.

Trump has been braying for years that he has been the target of politically motivated investigations and prosecutions—what’s called lawfare. But that’s not true. The granddaddy of all this, as far as he is concerned, was the Russia investigation. He’s been moaning about the “Russia, Russia, Russia” probe for a decade, and through that stretch, he, his GOP lickspittles, and his right-wing media enablers have contended the investigation was a fraud cooked up by the Deep State, the Democrats, and the media.

But…no. Official reviews of the Russia investigation repeatedly declared it was a legitimate enterprise that was justifiably initiated and not a political hit job. This included a Justice Department inspector general report issued in 2019, a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee released in 2020 (when then-Sen. Marco Rubio chaired the committee), and the 2023 final report produced by special counsel John Durham, who had been appointed in 2019 by then–Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate the investigation.

Each of these reviews concluded that inquiry was neither a hoax nor a witch hunt, as Trump and his lackey have never stopped proclaiming. (The IG report and Durham did criticize elements of the Russia investigation, most notably the FBI’s improper surveillance of Carter Page, a former adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign.) And the Senate Intelligence Committee report reaffirmed (as did special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report) the intelligence community’s assessment that Moscow covertly attacked the 2016 election in part to help Trump win the White House.

There was no weaponization on this front. The Russia investigation led to solid indictments of several Trump aides, including Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, George Papdopoulos, and Roger Stone. Each of them either pleaded guilty or were convicted by a jury. It was Trump who then politicized the process by pardoning all four at the end of his first term. (Trump’s Justice Department in April handed Flynn $1.25 million to settle an iffy lawsuit he filed that alleged he had been maliciously prosecuted, and the department can be expected to be sympathetic to similar claims from other Trump devotees.)

Trump’s other two big gripes about supposed weaponization concern the federal investigations mounted by special counsel Jack Smith of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his alleged swiping of top-secret documents when he left the White House. Both these inquiries were fully justified. During the House January 6 committee’s investigation, multiple Republican witnesses testified that Trump took actions that were possibly criminal to try to retain power. And a bipartisan majority of the Senate voted to convict him of impeachment charges following his incitement of the January 6 riot. (It was not the supermajority needed for a conviction.)

In each of these cases, a jury or judge found Trump guilty—a sign the cases had merit.

As for the stolen-papers case, throughout 2021 and the first half of 2022, the National Archives and the Justice Department repeatedly tried to retrieve from Trump the sensitive records he held on to when he departed 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Had Trump returned the records, there would have been no prosecution. He did give back some of the material, and one of his attorneys certified that all documents had been sent back. But that was false, and an FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago found 25 boxes that contained documents of the highest classification. The subsequent criminal case was no witch hunt.

Neither the stolen papers nor the 2020 election case went to trial because Smith closed them after Trump won the 2024 election, citing a Justice Department policy that states that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted on federal charges. (That’s the reason Mueller did not file obstruction of justice charges against Trump during the Russia investigation.)

Trump also argues that he was unfairly investigated in New York for tax fraud and for falsifying business records to cover up the hush money payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels, who claimed to have had an extramarital tryst with Trump. In each of these cases, a jury or judge found Trump guilty—a sign the cases had merit.

Beyond Trump’s own personal beefs, the MAGA crowd claims that the federal government in the Biden years was weaponized against right-wingers. They assert that the FBI targeted conservative Christians and school-board activists. An internal memo from the FBI’s Richmond, Virginia, field office, which was leaked in 2023, cited “radical-traditionalist Catholic” ideology as a possible pathway for domestic extremist violence. GOP officials and conservatives were outraged by this. But the memo was rescinded, and there was no evidence that it had resulted in any investigations or prosecutions. It was essentially the work of one junior analyst in a field office.

Right-wing groups also howled when the Biden Justice Department—following complaints that some parents protesting at school board meetings were threatening board members—issued a memo directing US attorney and FBI agents to discus this matter with local officials. They objected to comparing concerned parents—who often were religious conservatives—to terrorists. But this, too, did not lead to sweeping investigations of conservatives.

Then there’s January 6. MAGA luminaries—and Trump himself—have long championed the convicted rioters as victims of unfair and overreaching criminal investigations. A White House website—paid for with your tax dollars—makes this ludicrous case. And there was much worry that the Trump slush fund would dole out millions to these violent insurrectionists, thus endorsing and encouraging political violence.

Trump and his cult will continue insisting that he and his loyalists have been victimized by law enforcement. That’s what many crooks do.

To dub the prosecution of the J6 marauders “weaponization” of government is one of the biggest acts of gaslighting a White House has ever tried to pull off. It illustrates the fundamental absurdity of this propaganda campaign. We all saw what happened on that horrific day. Assailing the subsequent quest for justice as repressive federal overreach is bonkers and Orwellian in the extreme.

The investigations and prosecutions Trump bitches about were not acts of weaponization. They were appropriate government activity. But for years, Trump and his handmaids have been mounting this disinformation crusade without much opposition to its big lie. On top of that, Trump has shown us what the weaponization of government truly looks like with the criminal investigations he has ordered up of former FBI Director James Comey, New York state Attorney General Letitia James, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), former CIA Director John Brennan, and others, as well as the assaults he has launched on major law firms and universities.

The idea that he should be given $1.8 billion to hand out to his supporters who ran afoul of the law was preposterous but so too is the assertion that Trump and his comrades have been the targets of pervasive government weaponization. Yet that’s a major component of Trump’s self-glorifying mythology: He’s the target of a Deep State cabal and a martyr for MAGA. The pot of money for his malfeasants may be gone for now—though Trump still says, “I love it. I think it’s so important.” Whatever ultimately happens, Trump and his cult will continue insisting that he and his loyalists have been victimized by law enforcement. That’s what many crooks do. In this case, it’s a MAGA fairy tale and a cover story for a criminal president that deserves as much resistance as the corrupt slush fund has drawn.

Heather Cox Richardson is one of today’s unlikeliest social media stars. The Boston College historian has been teaching and writing about 19th-century America, Reconstruction, and the Civil War for decades. But it was only in 2019 that her work took off when she began writing her daily newsletter, Letters from an American, a no-nonsense analysis of the news through the lens of US history.

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The newsletter became one of the most popular on Substack. And today, Richardson has millions of loyal fans who rely on her to make sense of American politics and provide a little sanity and democratic reassurance even as she herself is concerned about the direction of the country today.

“I’m worried about where we’re going. Just don’t even start me,” Richardson tells host Al Letson. “But I am heartened in this moment by the number of people who are rediscovering that they do have agency to change the future. And of course, that’s always been the story of our democracy.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Richardson talks about the decades-long failure to hold corrupt American leaders accountable, the still-resonant death of Reconstruction, and what she sees as the tragic hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

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