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After FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s plan to sell off a stake in the World Cup fell through due to heavy backlash, he tried to get in touch with President Trump.

The New York Post reports that Infantino attempted to call Trump over the weekend several times because he was worried about losing his job following an avalanche of negative press over his idea, which led to the European and North American soccer associations, UEFA and CONCACAF respectively, threatening to boycott all FIFA events. Unable to reach Trump, Infantino instead reportedly held a private call with Secretary of State Marco Rubio Monday morning, hoping to enlist help in staving off pressure to resign.

“He wanted to get online with the secretary and talk about how soccer can be a form of soft power for America,” an unnamed source told the Post. “But we all know that it is about job protection. It is not about anything else at this point.”

Infantino’s plan was to create a commercial entity for broadcasting, sponsorship, licensing, and ticketing rights, and he enlisted financial backing from Thrive Capital, an investment firm led by Josh Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. The plan was immediately attacked as yet another example of decades-long FIFA corruption, which has only gotten worse under Trump.

Now, if Infantino keeps his job, it will be seen as Trump further intervening in international soccer and cementing the corrupt relationship between the two. The threat of a World Cup boycott from major countries apparently didn’t scare Infantino enough, because getting Trump’s help will only increase soccer fans’ anger.

President Donald Trump has his eye on the ball—a golf ball, that is.

The president took to Truth Social Sunday to trash-talk his opponents at a championship tournament at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

“I won with a score of 70, and am so honored in that, unlike the rest of the field, I’m given very little time to practice, because I’m focused on many other things,” Trump wrote. “It’s called TALENT, and I have it, and they don’t!”

Putting aside the fact that Trump just insulted all of the people who pay him thousands of dollars a year for membership at his clubs, the president’s talent for golf has long been disputed. In his 2019 book Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, veteran sportswriter Rick Reilly claimed that when it came to golf, Trump “cheats like a mafia accountant.”

In any case, Trump’s victory was seemingly undercut by the small crowd of attendees who turned up to watch him play. No wonder he had to take to social media to share a video of his final stroke.

Trump’s latest golf triumph brings to mind a quote by Emmet Hughes, a political speechwriter and aide to former Presider Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Hughes asserted that as an intellectual, Eisenhower “bestowed upon the games of golf and bridge all the enthusiasm and perseverance that he withheld from his books and ideas.”

Nothing could be truer about Trump, who just put out an open call for “unconventional” new ideas to end his war in Iran. Maybe that will give him more time to work on his golf game.

It’s hard to imagine a more consummate and humiliating debacle than the retreat the Department of Justice was forced to execute last Friday in the Reflecting Pool case. Having staked a large portion of its remaining credibility on the charges against David Hearn, the 67-year-old former Olympic canoeist it had accused of vandalizing the pool back in June, DOJ was reduced on Friday evening to confessing, in a 20-page filing, that its whole theory was false: The pool had been ruined not by vandals but by the administration’s own botched, rushed renovation.

Some observers gave the department credit for belatedly doing the right thing, In fact, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro had zero choice. A grenade had been hurled into her office, and she was forced to fall on it. No points here for virtue.

Her motion even put her crosswise with the president, a friend and ally since the 1980s, who to this hour insists the pool was slashed with knives and box cutters and wants the case pressed. “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro,” Trump fumed on Truth Social. “I don’t know what she was thinking?” For a prosecutor who has spent this administration as one of Donald Trump’s most reliable instruments, dismissing his pet case and blaming his renovation looks like a rare act of conscience. Don’t believe it.

The move that forced Pirro’s hand was the receipt of documents from the Interior Department demonstrating that the pool’s lining was peeling because of a rushed, failed installation—not because David Hearn tugged at a flap of it. That revelation is what we legal types call classic Brady material: exculpatory evidence the government must turn over to the defense at once, in line with the landmark 1963 Supreme Court decision in Brady v. Maryland. Pirro’s own motion piously recites the point, reminding the court that “prosecutors have an affirmative obligation” to produce such evidence—which takes some nerve, given that the reason she was writing was that the Brady bomb had just gone off in her hands.

Once those documents surfaced, she had two choices. She could either dismiss the case on her own terms—spinning the story as diligent prosecutors misled by a careless agency—or turn the material over to Hearn’s lawyers and let them present it to Judge Todd Edelman, a former career public defender who, a week earlier, had already warned the government it was “operating at its own peril.” Handed the Interior documents, he would have blown his top and dismissed the indictment himself, in open court. So Pirro’s dismissal was not virtue: It was damage control.

The hasty surrender served another purpose: It steered Pirro out of the path of two looming train wrecks, or so she hopes.

The first was a grand jury problem. Hearn had filed a motion on July 27 alleging that the government presented the grand jury with no evidence of damages at all. The administration had elevated what elsewhere were misdemeanor charges to a felony on the strength of a single element—$1,000 or more in damage—yet it apparently had no proof of that amount, or any amount.

And the hole was not incidental; the grand jurors saw it themselves. They asked the government’s witness about the cost of the damage, and he could not quantify it. He testified, moreover, that the repairs would have been necessary regardless of anything Hearn did—the pool was already leaking more than a million gallons a week, its expansion joints past their service life, the liner already torn. On that record, the grand jury somehow returned a felony. Hearn’s motion would have exposed how the prosecution steered it there. Dismissing the case makes that question go away.

The second was Pirro’s own conduct. When the indictment came down on July 2, she did not let the charging document speak for itself, as DOJ norms require. She called a news conference and went well outside the record. “This is not only a priority for the president, but for myself,” she announced—welding her office to Trump’s political grievance—and averred that she had witnesses who saw Hearn do the crime. Prejudicial extrajudicial statements about a defendant are improper in themselves; they are far worse when they are, as these seem to be, whopping lies. A bar complaint over her handling of the case has already been filed in New York.

None of this is peculiar to the Reflecting Pool case. It is a method. Across this administration, the Justice Department has brought cases that are built backward, from the outcome the president wanted to a theory that might sustain it. Grand juries now reject this department’s indictments with a regularity once almost unheard of, and Pirro’s office has been a repeat offender.

All the bluster gives the episode an element of farce—a Cabinet secretary insisting he could “absolutely” prove vandalism, a president raving about a 300-foot slit cut with a box cutter, a U.S. attorney promising tremendous evidence, all collapsing into a filing that concedes the pool fell apart on its own.

But the farce should not obscure the gravity. To prop up a talking point almost everyone knew was false, the government cast a private citizen with no quarrel with Trump and no connection to the pool as the villain of a fiction, and moved to put him in prison for years. The leader tells a lie everyone knows is a lie, and the machinery of the state sets about forcing the rest of us to repeat it—all the way to the felony prosecution of an innocent bystander. That is what makes it the most perfectly Kafkaesque prosecution I can remember outside the annals of fiction.

David Hearn went for a bike ride and grabbed at a flap of coating that was already peeling off on its own. For that, the government of the United States tried to take 10 years of his life. He is owed more than a dismissal; he is owed, for starters, an apology. And the rest of us are owed an accounting of how the Justice Department came to be a willing instrument of the president’s vanity, and what misconduct its dismissal may be attempting to obscure.

On Sunday, Ohio Republican Rep. Max Miller went live on camera to deny the horrifying domestic abuse allegations levied by his ex-wife, saying that her accusations are false because she returned to him days later. “My former wife has claimed that during a custody exchange at my home that day, I assaulted her. Here’s what actually happened, and I have the Ring doorbell footage that backs that…

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Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear is backing off threats to replace Senator Mitch McConnell, noting that the Republican’s extended absence would hurt his party all the same.

Beshear announced Monday that the August 3 deadline to call a special election to replace McConnell had “no legal impact” on the governor’s options should there be a Senate vacancy.

“Worth a reminder, right now, there’s one less vote for the SAVE Act, Trump’s war with Iran, or the potential replacement of a SCOTUS justice,” Beshear wrote in a statement on X.

Beshear never had the power to force McConnell out of his seat.

Under Section 152 of the Kentucky state Constitution, McConnell needed to resign at least three months ahead of the vote in order to call a special election. Kentucky’s law on Senate vacancies, House Bill 622, eliminated the governor’s ability to appoint interim replacements for vacant U.S. Senate seats. That law remains legally untested.

Beshear has repeatedly called on McConnell to justify his absence from Congress or to step down in time for Kentucky voters to choose a replacement. Now, the Kentucky governor’s arguing that missing votes might be a punishment in and of itself for the Republican Party’s astounding lack of transparency.

Over the weekend, Beshear came under fire from Republicans for missing Kentucky’s annual Fancy Farm picnic. The Kentucky governor called them out for their obvious double standard.

“Funny how the Republicans are all mad I missed one political event to watch my son play baseball. But no outrage that Mitch McConnell has been nowhere to be seen for 50 days,” he wrote on X Saturday.

The Washington Post sure seems bent out of shape over wealth taxes. And I suppose that makes sense, given that the once-storied publication is owned by one of the five richest dudes on the planet, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who put the kibosh on the paper’s 2024 endorsement of Kamala Harris, proceeded to kiss the ring of Donald Trump, and has remade the Post’s once-respected opinion section in his own image, declaring in February 2025 that its coverage would henceforth focus on “personal liberties and free markets.” Opinions Editor David Shipley promptly quit, to be replaced by Adam O’Neal, who jumped ship on Friday, citing personal reasons.

In any case, the Post has been pulling out all the stops when it comes to the wealth tax. They’ve run no less than 10 opinion pieces since March arguing against state and federal taxes on wealth and unrealized income—the “paper” gains that constitute the vast majority of the income of the richest Americans. The fact that the IRS can’t touch that income is how Bezos, according to ProPublica, managed to pay a true income tax rate of less than 1 percent from 2014 to 2018.

Here’s the Post’s recent lineup:

• March 2: “Bernie Sanders’s 2028 litmus test would strangle America’s golden goose” (Editorial board)
• March 8: “The myth of the billionaire wealth tax” (Megan McCardle)
• April 17: “This tax would rain a wealth of unintended consequences” (George Will)
• June 5: “The ‘buy, borrow, die’ myth” (Editorial board)
• June 27: “Gavin Newsom’s wealth tax two-step” (Editorial board)
• July 3: “Lower inequality does not guarantee better democracy” (Editorial board)
• July 16: “Socialists think wealth is stolen. They’re wrong.” (Marian L. Tupy, Cato Institute)
• July 21: “‘It should be laughed out of the room’: Four writers on midterm ballot measures” (Megan McCardle, again)
• July 19: “Medicare-for-all means taxes-for-all” (Editorial board)
• July 23: “I’m from Nebraska. Here’s what wealth-tax advocates don’t realize.” (Ben Nelson, former US senator; senior adviser for Saving America’s Family Enterprises)

This last one is particularly problematic for a publication whose editorial slogan is “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Saving America’s Family Enterprises (SAFE), the organization paying Nelson to promote its talking points, is a “dark money” group—a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that isn’t obligated to disclose who is funding it.

We’ll talk more about SAFE, but first let’s deconstruct this op-ed.

“As a factual matter, the threat of taxing the family farm out of existence is a myth.”

Nelson, an 85-year-old former Nebraska senator, was the Joe Manchin of his time—a Republican in Democrat clothing. Backed by the NRA and the notoriously anti-tax US Chamber of Commerce, he’s a staunch opponent of abortion rights and same sex marriage. More to the point, he was the only Democrat who voted for both of George W. Bush’s tax cut packages—Arlen Specter switched to Democrat only after doing so. In 2009, Nelson was the only Democratic lawmaker to sign Grover Nordquist’s Taxpayer Protection Pledge, a vow to oppose all tax increases.

His big revelation in the Post is that passing any of the proposed federal wealth taxes, or state-level proposals like California’s Billionaire Tax Act ballot measure, would be devastating…for farmers!

Are we stuck in a time warp?

That’s a semi-serious question. As I noted in 2024, and countless others have pointed out before me, the claim that wealth taxes—or the estate tax, in this case—hurts “family farmers” is “a well-worn Republican trope that amounts, fittingly enough, to a heap of cow manure.”

During the 1980s and 1990s, according to an exhaustive analysis published last year in Iowa Law Review, anti-tax zealots “discovered and capitalized upon an incredibly powerful image in the minds of voters: the threat to family farms. Tax opponents authored publications and held hearings detailing ‘family farm horror stories’ involving farms that would potentially have to be sold to pay the estate tax. It turned out not to matter that no policymaker, scholar, or journalist was ever able to uncover an actual example of a family farm that was sold to pay the estate tax.”

“As a factual matter,” notes the paper’s author, Kathleen DeLaney Thomas, a University of North Carolina law school professor and tax expert, “the threat of taxing the family farm out of existence is a myth.”

So, the Post knowingly published a pro-oligarchy opinion piece written on behalf of a dark money group and based on long-ago debunked propaganda, which makes one wonder whether the publishers view the paper’s slogan as aspirational.

Nelson (or whoever ghost-wrote his op-ed) concedes that most wealth tax proposals only target billionaires, but, he cautions, it’s a slippery slope. He cites a Hoover Institution study that concluded California would ultimately lose $25 billion in tax revenue if this one-time wealth tax passes, because billionaires would flee the state. But is that analysis any good? Not according to a group of prominent economists who support the wealth tax. In their rebuttal, they say the Hoover crew mischaracterized the proposal and made revenue estimates that rely “on a crucial and highly unlikely assumption.”

One hundred people were responsible for half the 2024 presidential election spending. That’s a democracy killer.

Speaking of billionaires, how many would actually leave the state? Nobody really knows. Peter Thiel, who purchased citizenship in New Zealand nearly a decade ago and is now reportedly trying to abscond to Argentina, never seemed inclined to remain in California. Allen Prohofsky, a former longtime chief economist for California’s Franchise Tax Board, told me that anyone who claims with certainty that a given tax change will cause an exodus is either lying or “delusional.” 

“The people who really hate, hate, hate taxes? Most of them have already left California,” he says. But for people thinking about it “there’s a host of variables: Where can I get employment? Where does my spouse want to live? What’s the cost of housing?”

“Where are your grandchildren in school? Where is your health provider?” adds Harvey Dale, a tax law professor at New York University who advises billionaire clients in his private practice. Leaving one’s state, or nation, is “a very complicated and ultimately personal decision,” Dale says, “but it doesn’t blend down easily into something simple.”

Nelson’s conclusion: The IRS should simply collect the estimated $700 billion in taxes that go uncollected each year, and that way “farmers wouldn’t be forced to sell their assets.”

Yes! The IRS should do that. But the agency couldn’t manage it even before Donald Trump rose to power. Historically, every time IRS special agents encounter rich Americans who are cheating the government and start digging in, the oligarchs call in favors and next thing you know the agency is defunded again and the investigations are shut down. Trump’s IRS will never collect the money. His minions and (former) trillionaire Elon Musk gutted the agency to such an extent that it can’t even handle basic customer service, as my colleague Stephanie Mencimer recently revealed.

Even the fact we’re talking about Musk in this context should be the most compelling argument for taxing the unrealized gains his wealth was built on. The nation’s growing cadre of billionaires, more now than ever, is exercising vast, undeserved power over public affairs. As Jeffrey Winters, a scholar of oligarchy at Northwestern University, noted in a Mother Jones excerpt of his latest book, Musk was the biggest influencer of federal elections during the 2024 cycle, spending more than $291 million—a fortune for most, but a pittance for him.

What’s more, Winters wrote:

Former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon’s grandson Timothy, a man few Americans knew existed, spent about $197 million, and [Sheldon] Adelson’s widow, Miriam, ranked third with more than $148 million. All told, 100 individuals invested $2.4 billion in the 2024 election—almost half the total cost of the presidential contest and 16 percent of all federal election spending. The problem is bipartisan—oligarchs poured money in for Democrats and Republicans alike.

One hundred individuals. Half the presidential election spending. That, my friends, is a democracy killer, which underscores how the Post, with its relentless anti-tax rhetoric, is complicit.

Given that SAFE and its hired gun Ben Nelson want the taxman to collect all of those unpaid taxes, you might think that restoring ample funding for IRS enforcement would be among the group’s goals.

It is not.

According to IRS filings, SAFE exists “to advocate against federal tax proposals that complicate the tax code, encourage tax avoidance, or harm small businesses, family farmers, homeowners and the middle class.” Indeed, these salt-of-the-earth farmers, concerned young homeowners, and earnest middle-class folks (or actors portraying them) star in some highly misleading videos posted on SAFE’s website to warn against taxing unrealized gains.

One video implies, for example, that someone who buys a $500,000 house could be taxed annually on the increase in the home’s value. That’s completely false. If a couple buys a $500,000 house today and sells it for $1 million after two years—a realized gain, by the way—they won’t owe a dime, because the IRS exempts $250,000 in home-sale profits ($500k for a couple) from taxation.

This aligns with a standard—and false—Republican scare tactic: The IRS is coming for your middle-class family!

So whom does SAFE really represent? It doesn’t disclose its donors, but some clues can be gleaned from its personnel. Its president from June 2023 through May 2026 was Jim Doyle. He’s the owner of Portico Policy Advisors, “a research and strategic communications firm that conducts policy analysis for leading corporations, financial service firms, venture capitalists and nonprofits.” You may recognize some of his clients, like JPMorganChase, Citi, and TPG—an asset management firm with $306 billion under management that offers, among other things, “global wealth solutions.”

And nothing says “middle class” like global wealth solutions.

The vast majority of untaxed, unrealized income belongs to the richest 10 percent of Americans. Middle-class families have little.

SAFE’s treasurer is Matthew Mazzanti, a former intern for Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson. Mazzanti, eight years out of college, is also Chief Administration Officer at PPHC, “a family of premier advisory firms specializing in government relations, public affairs, and strategic communications” that includes lobbying shops like Crossroads Strategies, which in 2020 merged with the lobby practice of former Republican House Majority Leader Trent Lott and former Sen. John Breaux (D-La.), both now Crossroads principals and board members. The PPHC conglomerate is led by, in its own words, “established founders and seasoned corporate executives.” It boasts: “Our clients include nearly half of the Fortune 100.”

And I’m sure it’s very concerned with the travails of middle-class America.

In September 2023, SAFE and Breaux co-filed a friend of the court brief in the Supreme Court case Moore v. United States. Like Nelson, Breaux supported the Bush Jr’s 2001 tax cut package. He also sided with a Republican attempt to repeal the estate tax—which the lawyers for America’s upper crust have turned into a punchline. His position on Moore was therefore no surprise; the brief asks the court to rule that taxing unrealized gains is unconstitutional.

It never came to that, because Charles Moore’s gains were in fact realized, the court found, even if the money in question wasn’t distributed to him and his wife. But the opinions of conservative justices in the case shocked many legal observers by making clear that the Roberts court would not tolerate taxes on unrealized gains (Federal wealth taxes are already, for all practical purposes, unconstitutional, as I explained in my recent piece “How to Tax a Billionaire,” though states are not beholden to the federal rules.)

The constitutional issue is really the only decent argument against such a tax—not farmers, logistics, venue-shopping moguls, or the concerns of first-time homeowners with infants. And certainly not to protect the interests anyone below the 90th wealth percentile. The richest 10 percent of Americans, after all, own 87.4 percent of all corporate stock and mutual funds. Most families have little to no unrealized gains—and those would be exempted in any piece of legislation intended to rein in the out-of-control, republic-distorting, oligarchic wealth disparities between affluent households and those just scraping by.

Maybe the Washington Post can just spare us the propaganda next time, and tell the truth: The Roberts Supreme Court, Trump administration, and oligarchs of both parties (including Mr. Bezos), care more about wealth protection than American democracy—would that it survives the present darkness.    

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin is on thin ice.

It’s only been four months since Mullin took over from Kristi Noem as head of DHS, and influential MAGA allies are already calling for him to be replaced.

The latest surge of anger came Saturday after Mullin delivered remarks about immigration reform at the National Governors Association Summer Meeting in Oklahoma City. In the meeting, Mullin made the mistake of distinguishing between immigrants pursuing legal status and those who aren’t, calling for changes to work visas and broader immigration reform to address American labor shortages.

A few hours later, Mullin attempted to walk back his statement on X, posting “NO amnesty for illegal aliens. Ever. We are a nation of laws. If you are illegally present in the United States of America—you will be detained and deported. Period.”

But the damage was already done.

Influential voices on the right quickly began attacking Mullin for being weak on immigration.

“Mullin is the wrong guy at the wrong time for the wrong job,” Steve Bannon told Politico Saturday. “At a time when we need focus on ‘mass deportations,’ we get an amnesty advocate.”

Bannon’s sentiments were joined by those of a slew of right-wing advocates, including Laura Loomer, Nick Sortor, Robby Starbuck, and MAGA podcaster Jake Posobiec.

Even former Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino got in on the action, posting that Mullin “celebrates your replacement as long as it’s done legally, without mentioning that 80% of legal immigrants will vote Democrat.… And we wonder why we’re going to lose the midterms?”

“It takes a lot to unite this administration around a cohesive point of view,” one senior Trump official told Politico. “Mullin deserves credit where credit is due. Everyone agrees he sucks donkey butt.”

Mullin’s tenure as DHS secretary has been dogged by a series of missteps and controversies, including his attempt to temporarily restrict Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle stops (there have been 11 fatal shootings by ICE agents since President Trump returned to office, many of which involved officers firing into vehicles), as well as his apparent willingness to interact civilly with the enemy across the aisle, including Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania Josh Shapiro and Democratic Maryland Governor Wes Moore.

Trump allies are already floating names for Mullin’s replacement, including acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.

Still, the administration is standing by its DHS secretary—at least for now.

“The President has confidence in Secretary Mullin and his entire Administration to carry out the agenda the American people voted for,” White House deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson told Politico.

Say hello to our newest merch drop: “Go Touch Grassroots.” Sure, “go touch grass” and reconnect with nature and all that. But around here, we’d like to remember to stay in touch with our grassroots—the volunteers, organizers, neighbors, and everyday people who power real change. Whether you’re knocking doors, heading to a rally, writing GOTV postcards, or just grabbing coffee…

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The Trump administration is running out of ways to pressure Iran, with its airstrikes failing to end Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz or force the country back to the negotiating table. So now the military is asking for “unconventional” new ideas.

CNN reports that an officer in the U.S. Central Command’s intelligence branch sent a message Wednesday to military analysts “looking for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran.” It’s an unusual thing to ask over email, according to CNN, and shows that President Trump knows his options are limited as the war with Iran enters its sixth month.

The email was sent before Trump threatened new airstrikes against Iran and then relented, over the weekend, after Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and other Gulf leaders talked him out of it. Among the plans were attacking Pickaxe Mountain and other Iranian sites reportedly housing nuclear equipment or material.

Those sites are deep underground, however, and would have likely required deploying American ground troops, which Trump is trying to avoid. Eighteen American service members have been killed in the war, according to official counts, and the administration has been criticized for its lack of transparency on military casualties.

“At the end of the day, POTUS will want a deal, so he’ll continually look for ways to get tough and get out of this,” an unnamed source told CNN. “You need creative minds at times—especially if you’re running out of conventional options.”

But more bombing probably won’t change Iran’s negotiating position, according to the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency. Trump has effectively backed himself into a corner with his ill-advised war, and is having trouble with being able to walk away with anything he can call a victory. American missile stockpiles have dwindled, scores of civilians have been killed, and the global economy, including gas prices, has taken a massive hit. Trump needs a way out.

Negotiations to end the Iran war do not seem to be going well.

The White House and Tehran are apparently not even on the same page when it comes to resolving the nearly six-month conflict. Iranian officials directly contradicted Donald Trump Monday by telling Reuters that talks were not currently underway and that there were no plans to resume them.

Trump called off another slate of attacks against Iran Sunday, backing down yet again from the threat of a major assault.

Speaking with reporters aboard Air Force One that day, Trump said that he had scrapped the “massive” attack after being lobbied by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.

“We were all set to go, but when our allies ask to call it off, you sort of have to say, ‘Well, let’s see,’” Trump said.

“And the reason they asked is they think there’s a deal. There’s a deal on Hormuz, and then there will be a deal on the nuclear—or you might call it the denuclearization of Iran. I call it the denuclearization of Iran,” Trump said. “So we’re holding it. We can do it anytime we want, but we were asked by the three primary groups, we were also asked by Iran very strongly actually. They said, ‘We’d like to make a deal.’”

The president then predicted that Tehran would turn around and say, “We don’t know what he’s talking about” with regard to a potential peace deal.

“Obviously they don’t want to be attacked,” Trump said.

The negotiations were set to take place Monday afternoon, according to the president.

Iran is currently in talks with Oman to establish a safe, temporary route for ships through the Strait of Hormuz, according to Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei.

“To avoid any ambiguity, it should be clarified who the negotiations are with. We currently have no negotiations with the United States; the negotiations are with Oman,” Baghaei told CNN Monday, adding that the tentative arrangement would not automatically reopen the strait. “Whether this stage and this process can be connected to another process that leads to a reduction of tensions in the region, we must wait and see.”

Baghaei also blamed U.S. officials for blowing up the memorandum of understanding in June, prolonging the unpopular and bloody hostilities.

“It violated all of its commitments, reinstated the illegal maritime blockade, revoked the authorization for the sale of Iranian oil, and effectively declared almost all of the other commitments it had accepted under the memorandum null and void,” Baghaei said.

The Department of Justice’s move to dismiss its criminal case against Olympian David Hearn exposed just how bad things have gotten inside the Trump administration.

In a new episode of his Justice Matters podcast, former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner argued that the DOJ’s motion to dismiss revealed just how shoddy its case was to begin with.

Kirschner noted that Donald Trump’s DOJ blamed the Department of the Interior for initially claiming that the damage was “entirely caused by vandals” and admitted that the DOJ hadn’t fully investigated the matter.

“Talk about finger-pointing,” Kirschner said. “Talk about the refusal to take responsibility for your botched indictment. That is ugly. That is unseemly. As a career federal prosecutor, including decades that I served in that very office, the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office, you don’t indict first and investigate later. Nor do you take the word of another agency of government.”

In its filing Friday, the DOJ acknowledged that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was caused by flawed installation by the contractor—contrary to the narrative Trump has been pushing for weeks.

In a statement Saturday, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum scrambled to keep up the story. “The evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool. Some of these acts were even caught on camera,” he wrote on X.

Kirschner also slammed the U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro for mounting prosecution before fully investigating her own case.

“That is not the way prosecution works,” Kirschner said. “Not in the ‘Before Times,’ but in the legal upside-down [world] courtesy of Trump and Todd Blanche and Jeanine Pirro, it is ready, fire, aim, and that is inexcusable. It’s horrific, and it is a gross abuse of prosecutorial discretion and power.”

Trump criticized Pirro’s decision to drop the case. In a Truth Social post Saturday, Trump admitted there “may have been some contractor difficulty” in the lining installation, but “the major damage was caused by VANDALS!”

“I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool,” he wrote.

Ugh. Apparently MAGA chuds across the country have shown enough interest in traveling abroad with a sullen picture of Dear Leader adorning their passport that the State Department is issuing 250,000 more and making them available nationwide. Yes, starting Aug. 8, your xenophobic uncle who has never had a passport and likely will never set foot outside of the red state he lives in can go to a…

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Texas Senator John Cornyn just caved to Donald Trump’s demands.

The outgoing Lone Star lawmaker faced a barrage of criticism Sunday after he decided that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s vague assurances against Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund were good enough.

Cornyn had previously tasked the Justice Department chief with formally ending the slush fund altogether, predicating his support for Blanche’s tentative promotion on it. But a tricky memo released by Blanche Sunday night seemed to have tripped up Cornyn’s office—and his offer.

On its face, Blanche’s note appeared to terminate the fund, specifying that the order was “rescinded and shall have no force or effect.” However, journalists were quick to comment that the language employed in the rest of Blanche’s memo not only suggested that the honeypot fund would be preserved in some form but also failed to terminate Trump’s underlying IRS immunity arrangement.

But vague gestures at accountability were apparently all Cornyn needed to get in line.

“Senator Cornyn has reached an agreement with the Department of Justice, which will be issuing a formal order permanently terminating the anti-weaponization fund and making clear in a binding written document that the scope of the audit settlement is limited to only the plaintiffs, including the President, and the IRS,” said Cornyn spokesperson Natalie Yezbick in a statement.

The fund was the result of an unprecedented deal that Trump made with himself after he dropped his faltering $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. The arrangement included a curious addendum from Blanche, immunizing Trump from further federal prosecution. The government of the United States, Blanche wrote, would be “forever barred and precluded” from pursuing “any and all claims” against Trump, his family, or his business. The fund itself would be used as reparations, paid for by U.S. taxpayers through the Department of Justice, to virtually any right-winger who felt impugned by the previous presidential administration.

The idea of the fund fell apart following weeks of backlash, numerous lawsuits, and opposition from even Republican lawmakers, who felt the issue had gummed up party efforts to pass a reconciliation bill.

But Trump has refused to let the topic go, repeatedly affirming his support for the supposedly defunct fund.

“It is dead, but I wish it weren’t, to be honest with you,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting on Friday. “I think people were horribly treated, horribly abused.”

Blanche’s efforts to salvage the fund should be viewed as yet more evidence that the fund is not as dead as officials have publicly claimed.

“Let’s be clear: It’s more certain that Trump is still pursuing bounties for rioters today than when this started,” wrote legal journalist Adam Klasfeld on Monday. “Trump is openly stating that’s the goal, taking legal action to get there and refusing to do the one thing that would kill it.”

Cornyn is in the twilight years of his last term in office, a decades-long career cut short by Trump’s decision to endorse another candidate in Texas’s GOP primary in May. The cut cord has granted Cornyn the breathing room to ignore larger party directives and push back harder against the Trump administration’s off-color orders, but apparently, Cornyn is only willing to take that so far.

They say Kalshi and Polymarket are more like sportsbooks than commodity markets. By Kevin Hardy for Stateline The escalating feud between states and online prediction markets was on full display at a summit of state lawmakers this week as legislators publicly scolded Kalshi and Polymarket, the two most prominent platforms. Prediction market platforms say they are like…

Source

As always, if you find value in this work I do, please consider helping me keep it sustainable by joining my weekly newsletter, Sparky’s List! You can get it in your inbox or read it on Patreon, the content is the same. Don’t forget to visit the Tom Tomorrow Merchandise Mall, and, if you’re so inclined, follow me on Bluesky!

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

Donald Trump has announced that about 200 entities have signed on to his non-binding “Ratepayer Protection Pledge,” expanding a voluntary commitment that claims to ensure US consumers will not bear the cost of the AI data center build-out.

Trump delivered remarks on Thursday at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters, alongside Lee Zeldin, the agency’s administrator, and Chris Wright, the energy secretary. Other attendees included governors who signed on to the pledge, including Brian Kemp of Georgia, Mike DeWine of Ohio, Spencer Cox of Utah, and Jeff Landry of Louisiana.

The pledge, first announced in March, was initially signed by seven tech companies: Google, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, xAI, OpenAI, and Amazon. It will now cover companies delivering 80 percent of all power to US homes and businesses, according to the White House.

“We have kept rates down, way down,” said Trump.

“The American people … need relief from soaring energy bills month after month and real action from these companies to pay their fair share and bring down high costs.”

Twenty-three Republican governors have signed on to the scheme, Trump announced on Thursday, as have major utilities including Nextera and Duke Energy, data center developers and electricity cooperatives.

“Electricity rates for 80 percent of the power distributed in America are now being kept in check by the plan,” Trump said at a press conference.

The announcement came amid a growing backlash to the artificial intelligence boom and the data centers powering it, as electricity bills rise ahead of November’s midterm elections. In June, utility prices were up 4 percent year-over-year, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

On Thursday, Trump said “radical left communists” are the ones who “want to shut down all new development, kill our most successful industries, destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs, and surrender the AI race to China.”

Yet opposition to data centers has become a bipartisan issue, with voters concerned not only about utility rates, but also the environmental and social impacts of AI.

More than a dozen states have considered moratoria on data centers, and New York became the first US state to enact a temporary ban this month. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have also proposed a national moratorium. And on Thursday, Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, called for a ban on data center development in rural Texas; he is now among the governors who signed on to the pledge.

“[The] pledge is a paper-thin commitment to families who are struggling to keep the lights on as bills soar.”

The pledge will “ensure everyone involved in building and powering data centers covers their own costs instead of passing them on to American families,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, told the Guardian.

“The President’s bold action is turning data centers into engines of growth for local communities, while cementing America’s dominance in the global AI race,” Rogers said.

Green groups are largely unimpressed with the non-binding pledge.

“The American people don’t care about the weak pledges and empty promises; they need relief from soaring energy bills month after month and real action from these companies to pay their fair share and bring down high costs,” said Patrick Drupp, climate policy director at the national environmental advocacy organization Sierra Club. “[The] pledge is a paper-thin commitment to families who are struggling to keep the lights on as bills soar. The companies signing on have done nothing to show their work on how they will lower costs.”

Lena Moffitt, executive director of climate advocacy organization Evergreen Action, called Trump’s announcement a “photo op with big tech” that “won’t lower a single family’s electric bill.”

“Trump promised again and again to cut Americans’ energy costs, but instead he’s letting the same corporations driving up demand write their own rules—a voluntary pledge with no teeth and no consequences if they break it,” she said.

In May, the Department of Homeland Security informed the Tohono O’odham Nation, the largest Native nation located along an international border, that it was beginning construction on a border wall that would cut through its reservation. But DHS failed to ask the Tohono O’odham’s authorization to cut through its lands, which include present-day Arizona and the northwest Mexican state of Sonora. The nation sued the Trump administration in June, seeking a preliminary injunction to block border wall construction on its lands. The border wall “would have devastating effects on the Nation’s lands and its people,” according to the complaint. 

Experts say DHS’s failure to seek the tribe’s consent fits into a long history of the United States failing to honor tribal sovereignty, especially when that sovereignty conflicts with the US’s own plans. Any time the federal government tries to interfere with the borders of a Native nation, it is inherently “threatening the territorial sovereignty of a tribal nation,” said Dr. Keith Richotte, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and law professor at the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona.

Since its inception, the United States has frequently flip-flopped on its understanding of tribal sovereignty. Former Justice Antonin Scalia reportedly once said the nation’s highest court was “just making it up” when it came to Indian law. It’s a remark that, years later, still best sums up the US government’s attitude toward tribal sovereignty—and DHS’s border wall plans are just the latest example. 

Native nations are sovereign governments with nation-to-nation relationships with the federal government. Their sovereignty pre-dates the United States, and though Indigenous people were granted US citizenship under the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, it didn’t make tribal nations any less sovereign. Instead, it stratified Native identity, making Indigenous peoples citizens of their respective tribal nations and of the United States. 

When the founding fathers wrote the US Constitution, they established treaty obligations as the “supreme law of the land,” along with the Constitution and federal law. The first treaty between the US and a Native nation was written in 1778. Over the next 93 years, the United States entered into some 368 treaties with Indigenous nations—most of which were subsequently broken. These early treaties are a sign that from its inception, the US acknowledged tribal nations’ sovereignty—even though it typically failed to honor it. In its infancy, the United States used treaty-making with Native nations as the foundation for its own sovereignty, said Caroline LaPorte, an Immediate Descendant of Little River Band of Ottawa Indians and staff attorney for the Indian Law Resource Center. “They saw [treaty making as] an inherent necessity—something that was required for them to be able to establish themselves as a sovereign power,” LaPorte told me. 

Because of its 62-mile stretch of reservation land bordering Mexico, the Tohono O’odham Nation has a longstanding cooperative relationship with Homeland Security and other federal agencies like the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Bureau of Indian Affairs. In the complaint, the Nation says that it spends an average of $3 million of its own funds annually to maintain border security, but that the federal government is now crossing a line. 

But Indigenous communities and the US government have different views on sovereignty. LaPorte said that the even the term “sovereignty” is a  “very western word,” tied up in a western understanding of power. Early settlers viewed sovereignty in a top-down manner, in which an actual sovereign, like a king or queen, ruled over a people—it’s the exact kind of power early American colonists were fleeing. That idea of sovereignty still shapes the US’s relationship to Native nations today. 

“Western understandings and their ideals make claims to not just ownership, but dominion over the land,” Richotte said. “Whereas Native communities have tended to recognize that there’s not necessarily ownership of [land], but that there’s an engagement and a participation with it.” He explained that Indigenous communities often see the land as the source of everything they need—food, water, clothing, religion. When that land is taken away, it represents a fundamental attack on how Indigenous people understand the world and their capacity for survival. For the Tohono O’odham Nation, a border wall would create a physical separation between the nation’s communities on opposite sides of the border, but it would also impede on religious rituals and practices, threaten sacred plants and animals, and destroy sacred mountain peaks, including Baboquivari Mountain—the home of the O’odham Creator I’itoi. 

The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has become just the latest excuse for the federal government to trample over tribal sovereignty.

Even with policy and treaties in place that have established reservation borders and tribal sovereignty, the US still likes to wield power against Native nations when it’s convenient. Though the US initially valued treaty-making as a means to establish its own legitimacy and acquire land, its attitude toward tribes soured as it established military dominance and economic power on the continent. When the US wanted to continue its expansion South, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and facilitated the forced removal of thousands of Indigenous peoples from the southeastern United States to Indian Country. And when Manifest Destiny called for US expansion West, the Dawes Act of 1887 authorized the government to take more than 90 million acres of land from Indigenous peoples. “If Native peoples are ever in the way of the collection of resources—which again is the purpose of colonialism—then there’s going to be friction,” Richotte said. 

The debate over the border wall is just the latest example of the federal government choosing to ignore tribal sovereignty whenever it’s politically convenient. It also isn’t the first time the Trump administration has trampled over tribal sovereignty to enforce its immigration agenda: The recently closed Alligator Alcatraz immigrant detention center was located in Big Cypress National Preserve in the Everglades, the homelands of the Miccosukee Tribe. The detention center was built within 1,000 feet of Miccosukee villages, but despite that, the tribe was not consulted in its construction. The tribe, which has called the detention center a direct violation of its sovereignty, is now involved in a lawsuit against DHS, Florida, and Miami-Dade County. 

Between Alligator Alcatraz and the border wall on Tohono O’odham lands, it seems that the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has become just the latest excuse for the federal government to trample over tribal sovereignty. “We’re dealing with an administration right now that is not particularly conciliatory in any way…and [is] willing to move far outside of the boundaries which other administrations have been willing to operate under,” Richotte said. “What that means for Indian Country is hard to tell right now, but it is a reminder that the fight for sovereignty is constant, and one needs to be ever vigilant.” 

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 3 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Late Sunday, Todd Blanche finally confirmed in writing that the slush fund is officially dead.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump just unleashed two angry, explosive rants at members of his own party, and they were really revealing. It’s clear that Trump is extremely sensitive to perceptions that he’s losing control over the GOP, because he fears it makes him look weak.

And in response to all this, one GOP senator dropped a bomb, making a surprising revelation.

So here’s a big question: Can Democrats be doing more to exploit these schisms, and more to inflict pain on the GOP over Trump’s cratering public standing?

New Republic staff writer Emma Janssen has a new piece reporting on how that might happen. She’s the author of TNR’s new newsletter on D.C. politics, The Blue Book, which you should subscribe to right away. Emma, good to have you on.

Emma Janssen: Hi, Greg. Thank you so much for having me. I am a big fan of the podcast, and I’m glad I’m here.

Sargent: Thanks so much. OK, so Trump is in a fury with Senator John Cornyn and several others who are holding up Todd Blanche’s nomination to officially become attorney general.

The sticking point is that Blanche created this billion-dollar fund as a settlement of Trump’s corrupt fake lawsuit against the IRS, which is supposed to give money to supposed victims of government weaponization and gives Trump and his family tax immunity. These senators want this thing dead for good. Emma, can you just explain this situation and why it’s so important?

Janssen: Senator John Cornyn, as well as Senator Thom Tillis, are two crucial votes for pushing forward Todd Blanche as the nominee for attorney general. And they’ve been so far holding out and saying that they won’t vote for Todd Blanche because of this anti-weaponization fund, like you mentioned.

The idea behind this fund is very corrupt. It’s to provide financial benefit to January Sixers. And these two Republican senators have drawn a red line and say that unless they have it in writing that this fund will not move forward and that it’s dead, they cannot vote for Todd Blanche.

Sargent: I mean, this thing is a slush fund, right, Emma? All it is is just this huge pile of money that Trump can just hand out to his insurrectionist supporters and to other supporters if he wants. The way it was configured was extraordinarily corrupt. It gave him lots of backdoor control over it. And then the tax shield is even worse. And so these senators are actually taking something of a principled stand here, right?

Janssen: They definitely are, kind of shockingly. There are other things about Blanche that they have overlooked and say that his actions, for example, on the Epstein files have not been great, but they’re willing to sort of overlook that. This slush fund, however, is not something that they will let happen and vote for Blanche.

Sargent: So Trump unleashed this wild tirade on Truth Social targeting Cornyn. Trump absurdly claimed that this fund is necessary to reward all the January Sixers, who he painted as victims and martyrs. Then Trump tore into Cornyn and gloated over his endorsement of Ken Paxton, who defeated Cornyn in the Texas GOP primary.

Trump said this: “Millions of people agree with me, as was proven in my landslide presidential win, so did John Cornyn until he lost his election to an opponent that I endorsed. Todd Blanche, a good man, should be immediately approved as U.S. Attorney General.”

It was an epic screed, and I think what Trump meant is that millions of people agree that all this money should be handed to January Sixers. But of course, there’s no way that’s true. Emma, what did you make of all that?

Janssen: I think it’s the latest example of how Trump really uses primary elections as a way to force Republicans to comply with his agenda. As he mentioned in that Truth Social post, he endorsed Ken Paxton over John Cornyn, and Cornyn is now leaving the Senate.

Of course, that has sort of backfired on him in this situation, now that Cornyn seems to be standing up and asserting a little more independence from Trump’s agenda. But Trump has really been able to force Republicans into compliance with even these ridiculously unpopular policies, slush funds, et cetera, because of how he engages with the primaries.

Sargent: And now we’re really seeing some shifting here, where Republicans are getting less reluctant to go along with him. You did this piece for The Blue Book, which is The New Republic’s new newsletter—folks, subscribe to this, please—that stepped back and looked at what these tensions really mean. As you detailed in the piece, it’s very clear that Republicans are now at odds with Trump in a new way. There’s the anger over the IRS fund, which Republicans are holding up Blanche over. And the holdup of Blanche is itself a pretty big deal, as evidenced by Trump exploding in such rage.

Then there’s the war powers vote. Three Republicans just joined Dems to curb Trump’s war in Iran—Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Rand Paul. That failed, but still it’s very clear Republicans are now at odds with him over the war, not least because the GOP base is splitting over it and a lot of MAGA influencers have gone their own way. Can you talk about these splits?

Janssen: With respect to the war powers resolution, this is the thirteenth time that Democrats have tried to get senators on the record about their support for the Iran war. And it has actually passed once before. Like you mentioned, it didn’t pass this time, but it feels like they’re increasingly getting more and more Republican defectors to come over and vote against the war.

When I spoke to some Democratic senators, what they really seem to be focused on are the midterms in November. Because as a minority party, there’s little that they can actually do to advance their agenda, to advance partisan legislation. But they’re hoping that by forcing Republicans to vote for an expensive and unpopular war, they can then weaponize that into electoral victory in November and actual change in the next Congress.

Sargent: Well, your piece for The Blue Book points out that Republicans really need distance on the war in particular from Trump, but Trump doesn’t want to let them. And the key here is that that’s unusual. Presidents tend to understand the needs of their own party when they’re holding their party back in a midterm, the way Trump is now. You quoted a political scientist, Seth Masket, who’s very good, saying, “He’s proven that he can end careers.”

I think the essence of this here is Trump can’t let Republicans get distanced from him, in part because it would require admitting that he’s unpopular and that his war is failing. And he can’t do that. Can you talk about your reporting on that?

Janssen: This is a deeply unpopular war. It continues to get more and more unpopular. It is incredibly expensive for average consumers when we’re talking about, obviously, gas. Farmers might be feeling it from fertilizer prices. People who play video games could feel it when the price of their regular everyday electronics go up. And there’s also kind of a humanitarian element. People don’t want to see U.S. soldiers dying in the war. They don’t want to see Iranians dying in the war, etc. But yeah, Trump has this grip on the party and cannot come to terms with the fact that he’s gotten the country into an unpopular war and forced his party to back it.

I think that there are some obvious places where we see splits here. This is over on the House side, not the Senate side, but Thomas Massie from Kentucky lost his election. This was a big uproar. When he was running for reelection—he has been a strong opponent of this war, and he’s also been against Trump on other issues, such as the Epstein files—and Trump endorsed against him. And a lot of money, including from AIPAC, was poured in to get his opponent elected, and Massie lost his election.

So this is happening in the House, this is happening in the Senate. And Trump has shown that he can get his way by just blunt-force endorsing an opponent in a Republican primary and making sure that money gets funneled into that election. And I think we’re going to keep seeing that. But on the flip side, like we’re seeing with Cornyn and Tillis to some extent, we’re also seeing a bit more independence now that they’ve lost their primaries.

Sargent: Yeah, and we should note that Trump has really gloated like crazy over ousting Thomas Massie in a really disgusting way. Trump exploded in another rant, this time at a Republican state Senate leader named Rodric Bray. Trump is still angry because Indiana refused to obey his command that they redraw congressional districts, and Trump backed primaries against all the Republicans who bucked him.

Trump gloated here again about ousting Bray, and he said this: “Rodric Bray should be ashamed of himself for costing our country, mainly the Republican Party, two U.S. House seats.” Trump went on to rip Bray as a “FOOL” in capital letters and thanked Indiana GOP voters for their loyalty in ousting Bray, meaning their loyalty to Trump.

Emma, I think this is really telling, because, you know, this whole thing with Indiana happened a good while ago already, yet Trump is bringing it up now because he’s so desperate to remind Republicans that he can oust them in primaries—precisely because he’s losing control over them now. Your thoughts on that?

Janssen: Yeah, exactly. It’s also notable that we’re getting to the end of primary season. So this major source of power for him to enforce his agenda and elect the people that he wants elected, or make sure that the people he doesn’t like don’t get elected—that might actually be the more important part. That tool for him is disappearing now that the primaries are coming to a close.

And so I think it’s exactly what you said. It’s a grip on power. And we might start seeing more resistance from his own party. I mean, I wouldn’t put a ton of money on that, but he’s losing this tool. And that could open up a space for more Republicans to jump ship on a war powers resolution, for example.

Sargent: Absolutely. I think there’s a bit of a split screen here that’s worth commenting on for a sec. On the one hand, he really does wield this iron control over Republican primary voters. His record is not a hundred percent perfect, but it’s pretty damn good when it comes to ousting whoever he wants, with whoever comes along and says, Mr. Trump, I’ll run a primary for you.

He’s just able to get Republican voters to stampede away from their own representative or senator and go back whoever Trump says they should vote for instead. So, you know, I don’t know how well that reflects on these Republican voters—not very well—but it surely shows that Trump does wield some real power over them.

But then on the other hand, he doesn’t have that kind of control over Republican legislators, senators, and even in some cases representatives. And that drives him absolutely crazy. And he can’t stand that. So he won’t let them get distance from him in order to position themselves for the midterms, which they absolutely desperately have to do. I really wonder whether Trump in his head doesn’t understand that the midterm electorate is a different thing than the Republican primary electorate. You know what I mean?

Janssen: Yeah, that is a very good point, because Trump is incredibly unpopular. And now that we’re shifting from primaries to general elections, the entire game has changed.

Sargent: You were talking to a bunch of Democrats about whether there are openings to drive these wedges and schisms a little deeper. What’s your sense of that? Is there a way to do that? And what are Democrats saying to you about it?

Janssen: When I talked to Professor Masket, he made the point that even if Democrats were able to advance a great piece of legislation on whatever—you name it—Trump would just veto it. So there’s not actually much that they can do concretely and materially right now, except just trying to push this messaging game. Trying to force Republicans to get on the record, to take a side, to split with Trump. And then hopefully we’ll see the results of that in November.

That’s kind of what I heard over and over again: we’re going to make them defend their positions on the war, we’re going to make them defend the high cost of gas. And if they can’t do it, they’re going to lose their seats.

Sargent: And it seems like Democrats have been somewhat effective at forcing Republicans to take votes that they don’t want to take. What’s your sense of that? Do you think they have been?

Janssen: Yeah, I think Democrats have been successful, particularly on the issue of the war, at getting Republicans on the record again and again and again. There was a long stretch there when they just kept bringing war powers votes to the table. This is in both chambers—the House was doing this, the Senate was doing this. And the point of it was to just get those nay votes from Republicans and be able to point to them later during midterm season, for example, and say, hey, are you upset that your gas is expensive? Well, look what your representative voted for.

Sargent: Senator Thom Tillis, who, as you mentioned, is one of the voices trying to kill this thing, really dropped a bomb on Twitter in response to Donald Trump’s crazy screeds today. Tillis said: “The president made it clear today that the so-called anti-weaponization fund is still alive, which is exactly why we are attempting to formally end it.” That’s pretty harsh language. Tillis is saying here, you just revealed, Mr. President, that you’re a corrupt shit, and we’re not going to let you get away with it, basically.

And then there’s another line in here where Tillis says that he’s been working with Blanche to end the anti-weaponization fund and praises Blanche’s work on that. But then Tillis adds this: “It’s a shame his confirmation has hit a snag only because an incompetent personal advisor to the president refuses to amend the bogus settlement.”

Emma, I mean, that’s really harsh stuff. I think what Tillis is saying here is he’s letting the world know that there’s somebody inside the White House who’s corruptly and in great depravity trying to keep this thing alive against the will of everybody else, right?

Janssen: Yeah, that’s how I’m reading it. And I think, importantly, he is definitely leaving open a path for Blanche. He’s not scorching that earth at all. Like you read, he calls Blanche forthright, thoughtful, patient. So I agree—it seems that he is putting blame squarely on someone else, who we don’t know who it is. And he’s kind of framing it as though Blanche is trying to make it work.

Trump himself doesn’t seem to want to make it work. He is not certainly being forthright, thoughtful, and patient about this. He has continued throughout the week to say that he wants the fund, even if he is sort of acknowledging that it’s likely dead. So yeah, I wonder who this incompetent personal advisor is. Trump himself doesn’t seem to want to amend the agreement, but it seems like this is a scapegoat situation.

Sargent: Yeah. And I think Tillis is sending up a flare to the media saying, look into this, people. There’s somebody in there who’s really acting in an extraordinarily corrupt way, trying to prevent us from ending this thing. And that person is who you should be focused on.

Janssen: Mm-hmm. I agree. That is definitely what it seems like he’s trying to do.

Sargent: OK, to close this out, let’s talk about what’s really at stake here, I think. Glenn Thrush of The New York Times had a really good point. Basically, what he said is that the battle is far bigger than about Blanche. What’s actually happening here is that Republicans are, for the first serious time, revolting against something much bigger, which is Trump’s effort to turn DOJ into an extension of his own will, into a corrupt instrument of presidential will, into his own personal team of lawyers who’ll extract pain and revenge on whoever he directs them to go after.

And so I think if Republicans actually do hold the line here and force an end to this fund, then something important will have been achieved. I don’t want to get too optimistic about Republicans doing that, but I really do think that if they can kill the fund, it lets Trump know that there are limits to just how much he can corrupt DOJ. What do you think of that?

Janssen: I completely agree. I think that there’s a couple of messages that could come out of this, if the line is held by Tillis and Cornyn. Like you said, there’s the message that you can’t actually go this far with the DOJ. Of course, they’re letting some things slide that Democrats certainly wouldn’t. Blanche has been a big part of the effort to conceal the Epstein files, and he spoke with Ghislaine Maxwell in prison, right?

There’s a lot that I think is still concerning about Blanche that isn’t related to this slush fund. But it sends that exact message that you mentioned. It also sends the message that Republicans can stand up against Trump and potentially win. Maybe not win their elections, but they can win some public favor and also accomplish the goals that they’re hoping to accomplish.

Sargent: Emma Janssen, well said. Folks, make sure to check out Emma’s new newsletter. It’s TNR’s new newsletter on what’s going on inside Washington. It’s good stuff. You need to subscribe. It’s called The Blue Book. Please subscribe, folks. Emma, really nice to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Janssen: Thank you, Greg. I really appreciate you having me, and this was a great conversation.

I’m betting there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Max Miller. Just another take-a-number MAGA Congressman. Except that he’s not. He’s a personal favorite of Donald Trump, having worked in the Trump 1.0 White House; he accompanied Trump on that cynical June 2020 stroll to St. John’s Church so he could hold a Bible in front of the cameras. He’s the soon-to-be-former son-in-law of Ohio GOP Senator Bernie Moreno, another MAGA dead-ender. That “soon-to-be-former” should have told you that there’s trouble in Trumpy paradise: Miller and the senator’s daughter, Emily, are in some extremely ugly divorce proceedings, apparently still ongoing. And oddly, he’s the nephew of the respected foreign policy analyst Aaron David Miller (our sympathies to him).

And now, he’s something else: in trouble in Ohio’s 7th congressional district, which leans Republican and which Trump carried by double digits in 2024. Stories have been popping lately that have detailed Emily Moreno’s allegations that Miller has gotten physically abusive with her—and even that Miller injured their then-two-year-old daughter, who, according to a recent Mother Jones report, returned to her mother from a night at dad’s place with a broken collarbone.

Miller denies all these charges vehemently. But they sure have roiled a race to which no one was paying a lick of attention. Indeed, the needle has nudged close enough to the red zone that Miller felt compelled on Sunday morning to release, via X, some documents that he claimed exculpated him entirely. He followed it up with a nearly 20-minute video he posted Sunday (“I have never abused our daughter,” he said, even alleging that day care workers may have harmed her).

Not to be outdone, just after Miller posted his material, Senator Moreno posted a statement on X that … well, what did he say, exactly? He didn’t explicitly call on Miller to resign. But he did say this: “As he has admitted privately, Max Miller needs serious psychological help. He is a danger to my daughter, and I hold my breath every minute he has custody of my granddaughter. If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them. He should not serve in the House of Representatives.”

Umm, by the way, lest you think the good senator is holding some sort of moral trump card here, I beseech you to think again. He’s a sleazeball too. He’s an immigrant from Colombia who made a fortune in car dealerships; so far, so fine—the American dream and all that. And the pre-MAGA Moreno, while no doubt conservative, used to do things like write op-eds back in 2014, when Cleveland was awarded the Gay Games, urging businesses and philanthropic groups to support the LGBTQ community and get behind the games.

But fast forward to MAGA Moreno, who defeated Sherrod Brown in 2024. How did he win? He owes his success in some part to the fact that he was running in red Ohio in a presidential year, sure. But Moreno was also the beneficiary of a barrage of innuendo-rich and often outright false ads accusing Brown wanting boys to compete in girls’ sports and men to invade women’s locker rooms. It was the only issue he had, and his campaign and affiliated groups spent millions on it.

Oh—I almost forgot. Moreno might have a more interesting private life of his own than is standard in MAGA land. During that 2024 race, the Associated Press reported that a user profile that appeared to match Moreno’s was found on a website called Adult Friend Finder “looking for young guys to have fun with while traveling.”

As you might imagine, this was concerning to party honchos (the story hit shortly before the GOP primary), some of whom, as the AP put it, “sought a review of data to determine his potential involvement. That review, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter, linked the profile to Moreno’s work email address. The AP’s independent review reached the same conclusion.” Moreno, of course, denied it was his doing. His campaign told the AP that it was a “juvenile prank” pulled by a former intern, and they even produced the intern in question, who told the AP he was sorry about it. And, since he had Trump’s endorsement, he managed to skate his way through the primary.

So that’s who Bernie Moreno is. Gay, or whatever? (He’s married with four kids.) Fine, who cares? But if he’s gay and wins races with hateful anti-trans advertising and now opposes all things LGBTQ, which he does, well, people should care about that quite a lot.

One last thing to note on this topic. In a text message that became public during all the legal proceedings, Max Miller wrote to Moreno: “Take this however you want, everyone is going to get to know you better than your wife does. Enjoy the ride brother, I wouldn’t have to do this if you could keep your lying daughter under control.” Better than your wife does. Hmm…I’d like to think that if my son-in-law had threatened to blackmail me, I’d have the guts to call on him to resign.

But enough! Let us depart this depraved world of Republican hypocrisy and get to know Miller’s Democratic opponent, Brian Poindexter. He’s a city council member in the Cleveland suburb of Brook Park, but much more interestingly than that, he’s a union ironworker. He’s been endorsed by nearly every major union and political figures from Bernie Sanders to Tim Ryan.

I watched his two-and-a-half minute intro video, and you should too. It’s impressive. When he utters the sentence “working people like you and me,” he isn’t pretending. And when he says “we’re working harder and harder, and we’re getting less and less,” it’s clear that he is a totally legit part of that “we.”

He’s the son of a union machinist and grandson of a union auto worker. Education? No Hotchkiss School for this guy (Graham Platner’s fancy private school). He went to a normal high school and has an associate degree from Cuyahoga Community College. I have some friends in Ohio who are involved in Democratic politics, and they say that Poindexter and his campaign manager, his old best friend, are the real deal.

Ohio’s 7th is an R+5 on the Cook Partisan Voting Index. That’s not ruby red by a long shot. In a wave election, it’s very gettable. I should stipulate that I know little about Poindexter; maybe there’s some stuff clanking around in his closet, too. But he’s an actual working-class person who talks plainly and relentlessly about how working people are getting screwed. He’s exactly the kind of person the Democrats need to send to the House—I wish there were 200 Brian Poindexters.

And Max Miller is exactly the kind of person who should not be in Congress. Even if he’s innocent on all the physical abuse allegations, he’s clearly an out-of-control person who, to put it mildly, can’t devote his full energy to serving the people of the 7th district. Given what appears to be his lack of moral compass, they, and we, should be thankful for that. Meanwhile, here’s hoping the Democrats have the sense to throw money at a man who appears to be a stellar candidate in a suddenly-winnable seat.

IN-HOUSE PSA: PLEASE subcribe/opt in to The Blue Book, our new morning newsletter that covers doings inside (and outside) the Beltway from a liberal perspective. Our great reporter Emma Janssen takes you inside Democratic thinking on Capitol Hill, and Heather Horn fills you in on what the progressive think tanks and interest groups are up to. You can sign up here. It’s free and takes literally four seconds.

In September 2021, while yachting in the Mediterranean, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner found paradise. They stopped to refuel their yacht in the Albanian port city of Durrës, around an hour’s drive from the capital, Tirana. Edi Rama, Albania’s prime minister, joined them for dinner. When they met again at Davos, Rama has said, Kushner raved about Albania.

“You are an American investor,” Rama recalled telling him. “And this country is open to every American investor.”

By 2024, Kushner had announced plans to build a luxury complex on the former military island of Sazan, off Albania’s southern coast, and on nearby beaches. The artist renderings posted to Instagram depicted villas cascading down rocky slopes, their organic facades undulating against the face of the cliff. Most of the development is intended for the mainland, rather than the island. Initial documents from 2025 sketched out more than 2,500 units of one to seven bedrooms, along with a yacht club and marina for 350 superyachts (“up to and over 100 meters,” or 328 feet), a casino, an “equestrian center,” an 18-hole golf course, a nearly one-million-square-foot water park, and a shopping and leisure hub called the “Citadel.”

Local residents heard about the project on the news. For nearly two decades, they had been caught in property disputes over the same stretch of coastline with a mysterious Miami-based developer whom prosecutors and investigators had linked to organized crime. They immediately sent a letter to Affinity Partners, Kushner’s private equity firm, requesting compensation or a halt to the project until the property disputes could be resolved. They heard nothing back.

In late January 2026, a colonnade of black cars wound through the villages on the mainland across from Sazan, where, in the ecologically protected Vjosë-Nartë delta, the construction is planned. Ivanka was conducting a site visit, during which residents were instructed to stay in their homes. Later, she dined with Rama in nearby Vlorë. In late April, trucks appeared along one of the delta’s rugged beaches. The coast at that time of year is windy and wet, and mist is common over the lagoon as migratory birds return for the spring. Soon bulldozers and excavators came to lay gravel for a new road. By May 12, local shepherds, who regularly take their sheep to the area to graze, noticed that deep holes had been dug along the perimeter of the beach. A fence suddenly appeared.

For local villagers, the fence was a clear signal that whoever put it up had no intention of grinding out property disputes in court before building. After all, this was how many projects across Albania had begun. Once the churn of development begins, it rarely stops.

By the end of the month, as the weather turned warm enough for summer tourists to begin arriving, a barbed wire perimeter replaced the fence. Residents from the surrounding area came to protest, including a man who was dragged along the road by private security and punched repeatedly in the neck. Later, he told reporters that his mouth filled with blood as he was beaten. He has since been in Greece, where he works to send money home to support his sick mother and paralyzed brother.

After a recording of the assault went viral in Albania, protesters arrived in Tirana’s streets en masse. They came from across the ideological spectrum, united by the belief that this project was an example of politically connected development that repeatedly trumped protections meant to safeguard Albanian citizens. Grievances included years of disputed land seizures, ecological destruction, corruption, crumbling public services, and poor infrastructure. Protests have since continued daily, with estimated attendance reaching as high as the tens of thousands.

Soon they were calling for a new direction for the country and a new government. The movement has been dubbed the “Flamingo Revolution,” a reference to the flamingos that feed in the protected lagoon. Conservationists say the project would sacrifice one of the Mediterranean’s last surviving untouched wetlands—largely preserved by decades of communist isolation—by loosening environmental protections to clear the way for construction. It would threaten a fragile habitat not only for flamingos but also for more than 70 other endangered species, including loggerhead sea turtles, Dalmatian pelicans, and Mediterranean monk seals.

The day after the protests in Tirana began, Ivanka Trump appeared on a YouTube channel hosted by the business influencer David Senra, extolling the virtues of the planned project. “We have five miles of beachfront directly across from the island, this beautiful peninsula with a lagoon on one side, the ocean on the other,” she said. “We developed the opportunity to help realize its potential and transform it, but with a lot of restraint and care because the land is so beautiful.”

She also spoke about plans for Sazan, Albania’s largest island, which lies at the meeting point of the Adriatic and Ionian seas. During a brief period of Italian fascist control of Albania, Benito Mussolini built a villa there. Under the communist regime that followed, it was made into a highly fortified military outpost. Closed to the public for decades, the island now receives tour boats that depart regularly from the city of Vlorë, carrying visitors past abandoned military installations and ashore among thousands of decaying “mushroom” bunkers left behind by the paranoid communist dictator Enver Hoxha. There is no running water; sanctioned trails wind through scrub, where several healthy populations of venomous Mediterranean snakes live among rusting military debris and shattered concrete. In an area known to local sailors as “Hell’s Gorge,” unexploded artillery shells and anti-submarine mines remain scattered in the surrounding waters.

“We were on a friend’s boat, and we stopped for a swim,” Ivanka told Senra. “Effectively, that’s how we found it. We swam to the island. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way, up to the top. And we were just captivated.”

Sazan Island may have entered the Kushners’ founding myth by chance. As a former military outpost, it remained public land, still patrolled by a small rotating military contingent. But the environmentally protected coastline along Vlorë Bay, around which many of the protests are centered, was sold.

The seller was Artur Shehu, who transferred the land for €110 million to Albania Land Development, a project-specific company within a byzantine multilayered holding structure linked to the Ivanka-Kushner development project. After a stint in Albania’s special forces in the 1990s, Shehu owned a hotel and built a casino in Vlorë. In 1997, the country dissolved into near anarchy when nationwide pyramid schemes collapsed and some 700,000 weapons entered civilian hands. Shehu fled the country two years later, when his uncle and brother were killed in a shoot-out at a bar he owned. He continued to conduct business from Miami, where he has lived since 2005. For years, Albanian authorities have alleged that, via an intermediary, Shehu used fraudulent documents to claim ownership of hundreds of hectares of coastal property, including land claimed by some 300 other local families.

According to documents recently obtained and analyzed by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, or BIRN, one of Shehu’s property claims was based on an Ottoman-language document from around 1900, at the tail end of the Ottoman period, purportedly proving that his ancestor “owned thousands of square metres of forest and grazing land.” The ownership claim, in other words, ultimately relies on a document that only a handful of modern experts familiar with a bureaucratic world that died 100 years ago could interpret. The case files say that once landownership was secured, Shehu further subdivided and transferred ownership through various means, “with the aim of obscuring their origin and making tracing more difficult.”

Shehu’s alleged intermediary in securing the land was sentenced in 2018 to three years in prison for the fraudulent acquisition of 187 hectares of land in Zvërnec, near the Ivanka-Kushner development, according to reporting in 2021 by the Miami Herald and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, or OCCRP. The case, however, has since continued to bounce between courts; it remains hotly contested.

From the outside, determining the legitimacy of a land claim can seem like an intractable tangle of Ottoman deeds, unreliable courts, and endless litigation. For the families caught up in these claims, the questions are ancestral and personal.

I met Agron Hyseni, a contractor and developer in Vlorë who goes by Goni, and his cousin Hyrie Luzaj, who goes by Coco, at Goni’s bar in the newly reconstructed old town of Vlorë. Sitting across from them was Bareq Sadiraj, the “mayor,” or kryetar, of Kaninë, which overlooks Vlorë from the nearby mountainside. They are all from Kaninë, where Shehu is also from, and told me they had known him and his family their whole lives.

All agreed that the development promised by the Ivanka-Kushner resort was the best thing that could happen to Vlorë. Infrastructure would come in the form of developed roads and a revitalization of Vlorë’s languishing airport. Sadiraj mostly ignored my presence, except to show me an AI rendering of a glass and steel building in the shape of an enormous two-headed eagle, the national symbol of Albania, towering over the turquoise waters of what I presumed to be the Narta Lagoon, where the resort is planned. The image bore no resemblance to the renderings I’d seen, but he thought it was a cool idea.

The group believed that the land sold to the Ivanka-Kushner development indisputably belonged to Shehu. Because their families go back generations, they suggested, they simply know the property claims are correct. A question about what should happen to the families who also claim the land that Shehu sold to the Ivanka-Kushner development project elicited a groan from the table.

“Everyone knows where everyone’s land is,” Coco explained. “Everyone knows it’s Shehu’s land. It’s not a secret.” In 1991, as Albania’s communist regime was collapsing, Coco was 15. She left Albania for San Diego, where she lived for much of the past 35 years before recently returning to her birth country. She, too, is embroiled in a land dispute. Acting as an interpreter between me, Goni, and Sadiraj, she nearly exploded at the mention of Law 7501, the regulation that redistributed land previously confiscated by the state to the people living and working on it.

“It is a disgusting law,” she said. “It has meant that I haven’t been able to get back my land—my ancestral land!”

A great deal of the confusion over land disputes in Albania can be traced back to Law 7501. Under communism, private property was nationalized, and much of it converted to collective farms. Law 7501 attempted to return land to those working it rather than to its pre-communist owners, while later laws sought to compensate those expropriated by the regime. The result was a palimpsest of overlapping claims, a mess compounded by poor records, uneven enforcement, and mass emigration. A vulnerable legal system was left to answer what should be a simple question: Who owns what?

Law 7501 has meant that for Albanians like Coco, whose family were prominent landowners before the communist period, land restitution has been a question of inheritance. They see themselves not as elites but as victims and insist that their families paid dearly under the regime. Coco recollected packaging tobacco as a young child to help her mother on a collective farm and being refused a glass of milk for her ill grandmother. Goni said he had no childhood, only labor. In their view, post-communist Albania never truly broke with the country’s communist past—they believe that former communist elites simply reconstructed themselves as new political elites while denying restitution to families whose land had been confiscated. To landowning families, today’s corruption is not a recent phenomenon but the continuation of an unfinished tradition.

Goni and Coco told me that I had misunderstood Shehu and the land issue by listening to protesters and prosecutors. They offered to take me to Kaninë to show me where his land is.

Two days later, we met at the same bar. Driving through Vlorë, construction was everywhere. Cranes loomed, and it was rare to drive more than a minute or two before spotting a skeletal concrete stack of boxes that may, someday, become a usable building. This is a common sight across Albania, especially in Vlorë, which, as the gateway to a stretch of pristine beaches called the “Albanian Riviera,” has seen a massive construction boom under Rama.

Driving from Vlorë into the steep hills where Kaninë sits, I had an immense view of the city. Its patchwork construction interrupts whole neighborhoods, while skyscrapers sprout from the ground like weeds.

We stopped at a marble fountain carved into the hillside. It read SH D KANINË 12.11.1924, and Goni and Coco said it was evidence that this was Shehu land.

Driving on, we reached a castle at the top of the mountain. It sat in ruins, its stone walls crumbled to nubs. A bulldozer puttered back and forth behind us as we walked along the ramparts. Reconstruction of the castle had been ongoing for the last year.

“Whoever owned the castle owned all the land they could see in their view,” Coco said, translating for Goni. “That’s how it used to work.”

As we drove back down into Vlorë, Coco said she wanted to drive past her own family’s land. If she were able to reclaim it, she said, she would use it to build homes for her family and develop the rest. She had been navigating the issue of ownership since returning to Albania from San Diego a year and a half ago.

“Every time I pass by, I think: Oh I want to have a home here, I want to have a home there,” Coco said. “It’s such a wild beauty.”

It really was. Every view was a dream landscape unlike any I’d ever seen. Soaring mountains plunged into turquoise waters. Vines blanketed fences and walls. Despite the ubiquitous construction, so much of Albania felt remarkably untamed.

After winding down the mountain switchbacks, we were back at the gorgeous beachfront. Driving along the Lungomare, the palm-lined waterfront promenade that has become Vlorë’s showpiece for tourism and development, Goni stuck his hand out of his Land Rover. “All of this,” he said—he gestured broadly, from the water to several buildings back—“all of this is Shehu land.”

To our right, as we drove, stretched Vlorë Bay and Sazan Island, which the Kushners have acquired at zero taxes for 99 years during development while the Albanian state takes care of water, electricity, and sewage. (Rama has insisted that this project is “a private deal between private parties which the Albanian government has nothing to do [with].”) To our left, apartment buildings in varying conditions and states of construction stretched back up onto the base of the hills.

Directly abutting Shehu’s land is Coco’s family’s land. “But we cannot get it, there are other families there,” she said. “I pass by and I look at it and I see other people on my property.”

Coco showed me the parcel of land that she has been able to reclaim. It is only a small portion of what rightly belongs to her family, she said. We passed one- or two-story homes with fences made from naked brick or concrete. Satellite dishes and clotheslines with bedsheets drying in the sun covered makeshift porches, and bougainvillea spilled over walls in pink and purple cascades.

Suddenly, we arrived at a fence surrounding an enormous pit. On the fence were renderings of two sinuous towers of glass and steel labeled LUZAJ TOWERS. Luzaj is Coco’s family name. The development’s website describes the buildings as “fluid, organic forms—resembling amoeba-like silhouettes—elegantly rising above a solid, monolithic plinth.” Just a few hundred feet from the seaside, the structure’s “elevated design maximizes sea and mountain views” from the 23 stories planned.

“Imagine, we could have built 10 of those,” Coco said. “Is it fair that it is given to other people and you own none of it?”

I didn’t know the answer to that question. It doesn’t seem like anyone in Albania does.

There was another reason Albanians viewed the Ivanka-Kushner project differently from an ordinary investment. It wasn’t simply that it was foreign capital. It was that it was American.

On June 22, 1991, just a week and a half after the communist party that had ruled since 1944 officially dissolved, an American motorcade wove its way through Albania’s capital city. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker was making the first high-level official visit to the country, and as he and his team drove through the city, the streets seemed strangely empty. But soon, on the city’s outskirts, American flags began to appear. People crowded the cars, threw flowers, and kissed the windshields. Some even tried to carry Baker’s limousine toward Tirana.

An estimated 300,000 people crammed into the central Skanderbeg Square, designed to accommodate 200,000 as the principal venue for communist ceremonies. Under Enver Hoxha, Albania had been one of the most isolated countries on Earth. Foreign travel was nearly impossible, Western broadcasts were jammed, and private property long forgotten. America existed less as a country than as an idea. When Baker arrived, he was greeted by a banner draped across the Palace of Culture that featured the Statue of Liberty and read: “Welcome Mr. Baker, Albania has been waiting for you for 50 years.”

Baker responded, “America is returning to you,” as the crowd cheered for freedom, prosperity, and hope.

Many Albanians of a certain age recall the idea of Baker arriving with a “blank check” that would underwrite Albania’s reentry into the world after near total isolation. But actual aid was far more paltry than anticipated, and the transition to capitalism proved harsher than imagined. (One contemporaneous article about the visit stated that Baker ultimately signed off on just $6 million in aid, half of it in powdered milk.)

Despite the relative meagerness of that gift, for most Albanians, the United States as a symbol of competence and leadership endures. Even in the protests in Tirana today, it is common to see protesters carrying American flags alongside the Albanian double-headed eagle. According to Gallup polls, Albania has remained one of the most steadfastly pro-American places in the world, typically ranking only behind neighboring Kosovo—which is 90 percent ethnic Albanian.

Jared Kushner arrived in Albania not simply as an investor, but as the beneficiary of more than three decades of accumulated American goodwill. Many protesters I spoke to felt that Kushner’s American fame was used as a means of selling the project to Albanians.

This is all to say that Kushner arrived in Albania not simply as an investor, but as the beneficiary of more than three decades of accumulated American goodwill. Many protesters I spoke to felt that Kushner’s American fame was used as a means of selling the project to Albanians; it was seen not as an uncomfortable inconvenience but as an asset.

In other words, it’s not so much that the dream of the United States has disappeared in Albania; it’s more that it has mutated. If in 1991 Baker embodied an America of diplomacy, democratic aspiration, and public institutions, in 2026, Kushner represents an America whose primary instrument is private capital. In place of diplomacy is “dealmaking.” And Albanians no longer believe that anyone will offer aid without asking for something in return. “No one does anything for nothing,” I recall Coco telling me.

Kushner is notoriously publicity-shy, so scrying his mind is a different challenge than it is with his father-in-law. But he has quietly become one of the most revealing characters of Trump’s foreign policy, both when he was in the administration and now that he works outside it as a special adviser. And the basic idea that investment is statecraft and statecraft is investment seems to be the governing rationale of his geopolitics. Speaking at a conference in Miami earlier this year, he remarked that “all countries should have a business plan.” He added, “Why don’t countries do that?”

It is an illuminating theory of government. It also says something about why Kushner seems to be constantly shuttled off to negotiate this or that crisis, which often have wildly different histories and contexts: For Kushner, every problem boils down to business. But one obvious counter to the question he poses is that countries are not companies. Or at least democratic ones aren’t. Unlike corporations, democracies are not usually organized around a single goal; they balance them. Employees do not vote on the direction of the company or its leader the way a citizen does for their country, and governments cannot simply pursue the highest return without also asking who and what bears the cost. A coastline may be more valuable as a luxury resort than as a protected area for wildlife or the rightful land of a handful of villagers. That alone doesn’t mean it should become one.

Kushner’s vision extends well beyond Albania, and has a funny way of being regurgitated by President Donald Trump, albeit in his own idiom. Speaking at Harvard in 2024, Kushner described the Gazan waterfront as “very valuable” and suggested moving civilians to a bulldozed location in the Negev desert while developers would “clean up” the strip. A year later, at a press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump suggested that the United States would “take over” and redevelop it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” Later, he shared a fever dream, AI-generated, rage-bait video of “Trump Gaza” that featured golden Trump heads and children dancing on a gleaming beachfront as dollars rained from the sky.

And it’s possible that Trump’s penchant for hotels has rubbed off on Kushner as well. This is the first international hotel the Kushners have publicly backed, although there was an attempt at building one in Serbia, too—on the site of the 1999 NATO bombing of the former Yugoslav Ministry of Defense, which stands in decay as an informal memorial and a reminder of U.S. interventionism in the region, albeit from the opposite political vantage of Albania’s. Kushner halted the project after several senior officials were charged with corruption.

In his first term, Trump said that he would cease inking new deals on branded resorts in foreign countries and would cede control of the Trump Organization to his sons Eric and Don Jr. He declared that legally he “didn’t have to do that,” but would anyway for the sake of optics against foreign influence. In Trump 2.0, the Trump Organization has explicitly abandoned that restriction. According to Forbes, Trump’s foreign licensing and development business has grown 900 percent.

But why hotels? Why is a luxury resort more of a nation-building project than, say, a semiconductor factory, a logistics hub, or a hospital? For Trump, the answer might be simple. To build a “big beautiful hotel” is to say something like, “This place is fixed now.” If a country can sustain a luxury resort, it signals that disorder has ended—that it has become habitable not just for those who live there, but for those wealthy enough to choose anywhere else. What does a luxury property promise if not a life of leisure, free from the friction of labor, strife, or conflict? For Kushner, the answer may be even simpler: A hotel offers the cool logic of an optimized asset.

“After Jared announced the deal, the prices of real estate in Vlorë had a visible jump,” Rama said, speaking to the Financial Times, arguing that an investment of more than €4 billion into a country with a total GDP of a little more than €29 billion was self-justifying. “We need super luxury in this country like the desert needs water. What you gain from 500 yachts is the same as from 40,000 budget tourists.”

In a July 2024 interview with Kushner, veteran Italian journalist Marzio Mian reported that Kushner said the project wasn’t exactly for everyone, despite Kushner’s business partner Asher Abehsera’s insistence that “everyone should have the opportunity to visit the island.” Kushner, according to Mian, seemed skeptical of that idea. “We’re creating a very, very high-end luxury product,” he said. “One of the most compelling points about the island is the ability to have privacy.”

Kushner, even as he remains one of Trump’s most unusually empowered advisers, certainly values his own privacy. Despite rarely explaining himself to the press, during the first Trump administration, Kushner presided over a portfolio that stretched from criminal justice reform to Covid vaccinations. But he became most closely associated with Middle East diplomacy. His “Peace to Prosperity” program, a $50 billion economic plan unveiled in Bahrain in 2019, hinged on the premise that investment in commercial and tourist infrastructure could create the conditions for peace in the Israel-Palestine conflict. In a 2021 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Kushner wrote that the Abraham Accords, arguably his most lauded diplomatic success, had exposed the Israel-Palestine conflict as “nothing more than a real-estate dispute.”

Beyond the Middle East and back in the Balkans, Kushner also played a role in normalizing economic relations between Serbia and Kosovo. To do so, the administration reportedly leaned heavily on the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, or DFC, colloquially called by some in development-finance circles “the bank of Jared,” which was created in 2019 to encourage private-sector investment in developing countries.

Whether in the Middle East or the Balkans, Kushner has repeatedly treated economic development not simply as a consequence of peace but as a tool for producing it. When the American dream in the form of Baker arrived in Tirana, Albanians imagined a blank check; instead, they received a few million dollars and shipments of powdered milk. Nevertheless, Baker’s statement that “America is returning” revealed itself to be true in one sense. Three decades later, a proxy for another U.S. administration has arrived with an actual investment proposal whose scale, at least on paper, outstrips anything Washington ever contemplated.

Kushner did not have to persuade Rama that development could transform a nation. Rama had spent years advancing his own version of that vision. But Kushner’s proposal alone could not explain why it found such an enthusiastic champion in the prime minister. To understand that, I needed to better understand the city he had spent more than a decade remaking.

If there is a single fact Prime Minister Rama wants the world to know about him, it is that he is an artist. “People can lecture me on many things—economics, legal affairs, agriculture, or health care—but there is one thing no one can lecture me on, and that is beauty,” Rama said, speaking to a reporter at Deutsche Welle.

After training as a painter in Paris, Rama became Albania’s minister of culture in 1998; he was mayor of Tirana from 2000 to 2011. As mayor, Rama transformed the city. Since becoming prime minister in 2013, he has treated architecture, design, and ambitious development as a cornerstone of economic growth and as a mechanism for reimagining Albania’s place in the world.

Between 2015 and 2025, Tirana alone approved nearly 10 million square meters (107.6 million square feet) of new construction. That’s roughly the equivalent of building 30 One World Trade Centers. Meanwhile, emigration remains high, as tens of thousands of Albanians continue to leave each year to seek economic opportunities abroad. This kind of construction is happening across the country, in Vlorë as much as in Tirana. Who is all of this being built for? And how is any of it making any money?

To explore these questions, I went on a walking tour with Redi Muçi, a young MP who has been in Parliament since last year, after leaving his post as a lecturer in engineering at the Polytechnic University of Tirana. Muçi got involved in activism in 2011, when, as a newly appointed university lecturer, he stepped out of his offices to join protests against Sali Berisha, then the prime minister, who had been implicated in several corruption scandals. When protesters clashed with police outside the prime minister’s office, the police opened fire. Four people were killed and dozens more injured. Muçi is now the only elected MP out of 140 seats to represent the “Together Movement,” a leftist party formed in 2022 from people involved in student and youth activism.

We met in Tirana near two enormous 25-story towers that dwarfed the surrounding buildings. There was a café called Mr. Chef and a dental parlor. According to Muçi, the site once housed a natural history museum, which was left to decay in the 1990s and 2000s. The road in front of it, by contrast, “is the same as it was 80 years ago,” Muçi said, only with more traffic. Most of the apartments are empty because normal Albanians cannot afford them. “This is typical,” Muçi said.

Mass construction with murky financing is common across Albania. In addition to allegedly using falsified documents to obtain the land that will be used for the Ivanka-Kushner resort outside Vlorë, Shehu has been named in an ongoing investigation by Albania’s Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Corruption, or SPAK. On June 10, SPAK announced 20 arrest warrants, froze more than €128 million in assets, and ordered the seizure of properties across Tirana and the southern Albanian coast. A SPAK court filing, summarizing information gathered by Belgian authorities, cited Shehu’s direct contact with Alfredo Hamzai, who was convicted in Belgium in a narcotics-trafficking case, and Shehu’s international travel “to participate in meetings for the purpose of organizing narcotics trafficking” as evidence that Shehu holds “a leadership position” in trafficking networks. (There is no reason to believe Kushner or Ivanka had knowledge of these allegations before purchasing the land. Neither Rama, Affinity Partners, nor Abehsera, Kushner’s operating partner, responded to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the development project said that, contrary to widespread reporting, Affinity Partners is not connected to it, and that Kushner and Ivanka are involved in their personal capacities. In answer to detailed questions, Shehu’s lawyer responded, “OK.”)

As we walked toward Skanderbeg Square, where Baker had stood amid a cheering crowd 35 years before, Muçi pointed out a troubling construction project every few hundred feet. There was a 60-story, half-completed building whose construction was halted due to the project’s links with drug trafficking. Another had illegally built an additional seven stories. A national theater was demolished to make way for skyscrapers. Construction on a building meant to be the tallest in the Balkans was halted, again, due to links with drug traffickers.

“I think it’s a way to transform the city, to give the aura of wealth or progress,” Muçi said. He explained that foreign investment in Albania is “very, very low, almost zero,” and cited a long list of issues that would be concerning for an investor. “Unresolved property rights, a monopolized economy that benefits so-called strategic investors, a low workforce because young people are leaving, and a host of other issues which make it not worth it, even if you’re an investor who wants to come invest here.”

We arrived in Skanderbeg Square, where Albanians had come to protest nightly for a month. Dominating the square was a skyscraper whose balconies form a familiar outline.

“Is it a face?” I asked.

It was supposed to be Skanderbeg, the medieval nobleman who became Albania’s national hero for resisting the Ottomans in the fifteenth century. “But everybody feels that this is Edi Rama’s facial features,” Muçi explained, “who wants to immortalize himself with this building.”

We counted five cranes from our view in the square. “Will these buildings be filled with rich people who have invested?” Muçi asked. “I don’t see that happening; it is only a means of transforming the facade. It is a means of money laundering and drug trafficking, but the mere fact that all these apartments remain empty, it shows that it is not for Albanians.” For land disputes, state protection is limited. “You can go to court, but nothing comes out of it,” Muçi explained.

Much of this construction was made possible by the introduction of Rama’s “strategic investment” framework of laws in 2015, which were expanded in 2024. Rather than waiting for every dispute to be resolved before construction began, the state increasingly treated private development as a matter of public interest.

The existence of these kinds of laws is not inherently remarkable. The United States has eminent domain, and many European countries have versions of mechanisms that acquire land or expedite projects in the public interest. “In a normal property system, this might simply be a development incentive,” wrote Elton Dusha, an economist in Tirana with the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, in the magazine Peizazhe të Fjalës. “In Albania’s system, where ownership is often unresolved, it becomes much more powerful.” Once a project receives strategic status, like the Ivanka-Kushner resort, “the state … puts its weight behind the investor before land disputes have been fully resolved.” And this weight essentially flows directly from the Strategic Investment Committee, established by Rama and chaired by Rama himself.

It helps explain why fences and bulldozers typically arrive as a first step in construction projects in Albania, while hundreds of families still insist the land is theirs. Under the strategic investment framework, the existence of competing claims is no longer, by itself, enough to halt development. Because the underlying property law, 7501, is vague, and the strategic investment framework gives sweeping powers to push through large projects, “the government becomes the end-all and be-all of economic activity,” Dusha told me in a phone call. “If Kushner is just some guy with no connection to the government, he is a nobody.”

“Everything somehow functions outside the legal boundaries of what’s permissible and what’s not,” Muçi said. “Construction starts, it becomes a fact, and then the whole administration and the paperwork is in the service of what has already happened.” But serious investors generally want rule of law; they want limited risk on their investments. “If the property rights are not sold ... the only way to make it worth investing is if you contact the prime minister directly and somehow arrange it.”

“This is why it’s so hard to attract foreign investors in Albania,” he said, “because who would want to play by these rules?”

What Typically deters investment is uncertainty: disputed ownership, weak courts, and the possibility that political connections matter more than legal rights. For many investors, those conditions in Albania make it a risky place to do business. But Ivanka and Kushner are not most investors. Kushner arrives with not only private capital, but private capital backed by extraordinary political access; the prime minister has personally championed his project. The risks that might discourage an ordinary developer can look very different to someone whose relationship with the state is anything but ordinary.

The novelty is not that Kushner, as a representative of the Trump administration, mixes business and foreign policy. It is that, under Trump, business is the foreign policy.

Thirty-five years ago, the United States encouraged Albania to build institutions that could withstand the pressures of powerful individuals. Kushner has a different goal. The novelty is not that Kushner, as a representative of the Trump administration, mixes business and foreign policy. It is that, under Trump, business is the foreign policy. And it’s a business that chafes against the restraints states typically put in place to prevent the powerful from simply taking what they want.

While I was in Albania, a pink coffee-table book was released with a foreword by Rama. The Albanian Files, as it’s called, documents more than a decade of architectural projects by internationally renowned architects Rama brought in. In his foreword, Rama describes what draws the “world’s most visionary architects” to his country. It is “something alive, something unrepeatable.” But it is also that Albania is “still free from the suffocating comfort of overregulation” and offers “a freedom from ‘no’ in all its forms.”

After our tour of Kaninë, Coco and Goni took me to lunch at Shehu’s resort on the water. We walked a literal red carpet through a poolside patio to our table. The seats were tan and plush, the tables an elegant natural stone. A vanishing-edge pool looked out over the sea, Sazan Island in the middle of our view.

The chefs clearly knew us, and we were offered a lavish off-menu feast that blended old and new Albanian cuisine. I requested a glass of white wine. No one asked what kind, and the correct one simply arrived. Cubes of polenta artfully arranged with peppers, cheese, and marinated anchovies appeared, along with more courses of purple shrimp carpaccio, grilled squid in ink, black truffle pasta, ravioli with lamb ragu, and an elevated sultjash—traditional rice pudding with cinnamon. We finished the meal with an enormous plate of perfect fruits on a bed of ice, condensation pilling on their skins.

“You are sitting at the table Ivanka sat at,” Goni told me.

I asked what made them proud to be Albanian. Coco smiled as she translated. “We get down but we get back up, bigger and stronger,” she said. She took a second to laugh. “Kind of like Trump!”

Then Coco put it another way. America, she said, was Albania’s “big brother,” and the former regime looms large.

“The whole perception of the regime had a counterweight in the U.S.,” Muçi later told me. “People in Albania are not protesting because the U.S. wants to take away Sazan Island. It’s been happening across Albania for a long time. And we feel that Ivanka and Jared are there to pink-wash this typical Albanian thing.”

As of now, protests notwithstanding, the Ivanka-Kushner project is still happening. Rama has vowed to press on. “I was voted to make these things happen,” he said. “I’m not voted to be led by people that have a different idea of how to develop the country.” He has insisted that the resort could be open to visitors by the end of the decade.

At the pool, Coco and Goni told me that the allegations against Shehu were false. They said that, despite years of scrutiny from law enforcement, investigators had never been able to pin anything on Shehu. Everyone was looking, no one had found anything, and no one gets away with a crime with no traces. I didn’t know what to say. Getting away with illegal activity sounded like the definition of organized crime to me.

Goni asked me who I thought owned the pool behind us. Shehu, I presumed. “No, it belongs to the city of Vlorë,” he said. It has an entry fee, of course, but technically it is publicly owned.

I saw families lounging, speaking French, German, English, and Italian. Someone getting a scuba lesson bobbed in the water. The atmosphere was rarefied and opulent. I had a hard time imagining how locals might think the pool was accessible, let alone built for them.

Beyond the pool, a half-finished concrete structure jutted out into the sea. A fence had been put up at its entrance. As I watched, a group of teen boys casually climbed it and walked out to where the water was deeper. They took turns jumping into the clear water below. For now, I thought, this place still belonged to them.