The New Republic

One day after celebrating his 80th birthday with a UFC spectacle on the White House lawn, President Trump looked like he was feeling every bit his age while visiting France for the G7 summit.

Speaking with the media with French President Emmanuel Macron Monday, Trump was struggling to keep his eyes open as Macron praised the developments on peace with Iran, even as Macron often turned to Trump to acknowledge his efforts.

get a load of Trump's drowsy body language during this Macron meeting pic.twitter.com/gQkFjUlXDb

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 15, 2026

Later, appearing outdoors with Macron and his wife, Brigitte, Trump looked tired and his right hand appeared swollen and discolored.

check out how swollen and discolored Trump's right hand is pic.twitter.com/jU6QNgIJpa

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 15, 2026

The UFC event lasted until well after 1 a.m. early Monday morning as fireworks went off over Washington, D.C. Trump headed to the G7 just hours later, meaning his only time to sleep (aside from the nap he took during the UFC fight) would have been on Air Force One as it flew to France. As we learned from Secretary of State Marco Rubio earlier this month, Trump is up at all hours of the night and usually doesn’t sleep much on plane flights, either.

This and jetlag likely exacerbated his tendency to fall asleep even during normal workdays. Trump is clearly not well, and holding an excessive birthday party (sorry, a “Freedom 250” event) until the wee hours of the morning didn’t leave him at his best to meet with Macron. If this is what the public is seeing, how much worse is Trump doing in private?

California Governor Gavin Newsom accused President Donald Trump Monday of having his family investigated by the Department of Justice.

Newsom released a video statement saying he’d been added to Trump’s “hit list,” claiming that federal investigators had launched a probe into him because he was considering a presidential run in 2028.

“In recent days, federal agents have knocked on the doors of family, friends, and former employees. Not because they found a crime. Because they are simply trying to find one,” Newsom said.

“They’re demanding records. They are abusing the grand jury process. Digging through years and years of random documents,” Newsom said. “Donald Trump isn’t just coming after me because of my mean tweets. He’s coming after me because I am considering running for president.”

Newsom claimed that federal investigators were also investigating his wife, actress and activist Jennifer Siebel Newsom, “who has done nothing wrong, other than having the temerity to advocate for what she believes in.”

There are actually several ongoing investigations related to Newsom, a source familiar with the situation told Semafor’s Shelby Talcott. The investigations reportedly involve his wife’s taxes and his chief of staff Nathan Barankin. Those did not originate from the main DOJ but stem from Sacramento, involving whistleblowers, according to the source.

This revelation comes a year after Trump threatened to have Newsom arrested, amid an escalating feud about the president’s illegal deployment of National Guard troops in Los Angeles.

Trump has bragged about his supposed “right” to weaponize the Department of Justice, and openly directed the DOJ to investigate his political enemies New York Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff, and former FBI Director James Comey. All of those cases crashed and burned.

Trump had also been investigating former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, although he dropped the case in order to get Powell’s replacement approved by the Senate. It’s not clear that the administration won’t resume targeting Powell.

And just a week ago, Vice President JD Vance referred Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to the DOJ for a criminal investigation into allegations of fraud.

This story has been updated.

President Jimmy Carter putting his peanut farm in a trust to avoid a conflict of interest feels like a long time ago.

Financial disclosures submitted to the Office of Government Ethics and dissected by CBS News show that accounts owned by President Donald Trump made 3,642 stock trades from January to March this year.

Trump and Israel began a war in Iran during this period. There was civil unrest too, as two American citizens were killed on the street and others died in custody during Trump’s violent immigration crackdown. Many of Trump’s trades coincided with White House policy directives and Trump making public statements about the companies.

While the monetary value of the trades depend on how each stock is valued now and in the future, CBS puts the minimum valuation of Trump’s trades at $212 million and the maximum at a whopping $695 million. The disclosures show that Trump’s favorite place to buy and sell stocks is the technology sector, followed by exchange-traded funds and the industrial industry. Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Netflix, Advanced Micro Devices, and Oracle were Trump’s most traded stocks.

Politicians trading stocks while in office has been a questionable practice for a long time. Conflicts of interest can easily arise, as politicians can profit by supporting legislation that benefits their investments. The American people, for one, are clear in their opinion: 86 percent think politicians should be banned from trading stocks while in office. Online tools tracking politicians’ trades have also become popular.

The most powerful person in the nation trading at such a massive scale presents even more opportunity for corruption. An investment professional told CBS he had “never seen a strategy out there that would warrant that amount of trading.” Another expert said the trading looked to be an attempt to lower Trump’s tax bill. Senator Elizabeth Warren called for an investigation into “potential insider trading” by the president, in response to the disclosures.

Trump verbally supported a congressional stock trading ban in February and bashed high-profile Democrats who trade stocks, such as former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. But presumably the president thinks he himself should still get to trade as much as he wants.

Such insider trading scandals could plague the president once he departs office. Even before then, Democrats could embrace a stronger anti-corruption stance and open investigations into some of his shady dealings if they can snag congressional majorities in November.

President Donald Trump has replaced several days of concerts to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary with one boring MAGA rally—and this time, he’s picking the music. 

Trump announced Monday that he plans to mark the Fourth of July with a “Trump Rally” designed to celebrate the president’s ego more than the country he’s running into the ground.  

It seems that Trump has had enough of celebrity musical acts canceling on him. Instead, the president is turning to the only acts that can’t bail: military bands and ceremonial units. “This ensemble will be the largest formation of Joint Military Music and Ceremonial performances in History,” he wrote. 

Trump also teased an appearance from his personal playlist that would have “none of those people that put you to sleep and constantly complain!” Meanwhile, the original website announcing several days of concerts as part of Trump’s Great American State Fair has been completely removed. 

And anyone with a flight in or out of Washington, D.C., on July 4 should look into rescheduling. Trump promised even more “incredible Flyovers and Airshows,” even after the similar festivities for his birthday disrupted local air traffic.

“To conclude the program, and commemorate this Historic Occasion, I will be launching, what will be, the LARGEST FIREWORKS SHOW IN HISTORY, right here in our Nation’s Capital,” Trump wrote. 

Trump also promised to deliver a keynote address that is sure to be wildly political. The president has previously used major addresses to push dangerous partisan rhetoric.

Simply put: This bread is dry, and these circuses are lame! 

The Strait of Hormuz will not be reopening long term and toll-free, contrary to President Trump’s assertions.

Vice President JD Vance was asked on CNBC Monday about Trump’s claim that the strait will fully reopen under the tentative deal with Iran, and his words exposed the truth.

“Well, our expectation is that the strait is going to be opened in a toll-free way for the long term, and that’s the sort of thing that we’re going to figure out in these technical negotiations. You know, there are a lot of very important details to figure out that we’re actually going to sit at the table and discuss together, and figure out a path forward on these details,” Vance said, revealing that nothing has actually been decided yet.

🚨 Wow. JD Vance sidesteps confirming a long-term, toll-free reopening of the Strait of Hormuz by stating that those details would be determined in upcoming technical negotiations:

“Well, our expectation is that the strait is going to be opened in a toll-free way for the long… pic.twitter.com/h6qxL4WbQm

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) June 15, 2026

Shortly after Vance’s interview, Trump announced that the U.S. and Iran had both signed the memorandum of understanding. But the text is still not public—with Trump saying it may be released “some time after Friday” or “some time in the very near future.”

When Trump announced the peace deal with Iran on Sunday, he said that he fully authorized “the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and simultaneously herewith, authorize the immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade. Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!”

On Monday, Trump claimed that ship traffic had returned to the strait, but Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said that fees would still be charged for ships traversing the strait.

“Our goal is to pave the way for a secure passage in this waterway,” Baghaei said. “We need a certain period of time to discuss with the other sides this important matter.”

All of this indicates that a return to how the strait ran before the war is still weeks and months away, with an actual agreement between Iran and the U.S. far from settled.

The Trump administration’s narrative on the Iran war is changing by the day.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was caught in his own lie by CBS News’s Margaret Brennan, who reminded him Sunday that America’s depleted missile stockpile was not a media fabrication but actually a material reality that he testified to before Congress.

“​​Ukraine’s President Zelenskiy was on this program a few weeks ago,” Brennan said. “He made a plea, not just for more interceptors, but for the ability to produce them, for friendly governments to be able to produce Patriots. Some Republican lawmakers support this idea. Do you?”

“Nobody makes better and more munitions than the United States of America, and we are open to co-production wherever we can,” Hegseth said.

“And because of this administration, we’re supercharging our arsenal of freedom, building more, building faster, opening up the Pentagon, ripping through the Pentagon bureaucracy to force industry to move faster so—” the secretary added before Brennan interjected.

“But there is a crisis with those stockpiles right now?” pressed Brennan. “There is a crisis with those stockpiles right now in private industry. You have testified to it in front of Congress.”

“No there’s not,” Hegseth replied. “That is a manufactured story that the media wants to peddle. And ultimately, we are, our stockpiles are great, and they’ll only get stronger,” he continued, before Brennan pressed again that Hegseth had testified under oath that it would take years to rebuild U.S. munitions stockpiles.

“You don’t have to read back to me what I testified, I speculated some munitions take more time than others,” Hegseth said. “We’ve got lots of them, we’re building more than ever before. The Biden administration gave away hundreds of billions to Ukraine, and so President Trump had to refill, and he has, and we have in real time.”

“So, the answer to Zelenskiy’s request is a no or a yes?” asked Brennan, regarding Ukraine’s ability to produce Patriot systems.

But Hegseth dodged the question.

“Ultimately, we’ve worked with them, and Ukraine is buying munitions that Europe pays for, and it’s great to see Europe finally step up and pay for those,” he responded.

BRENNAN: But there is a crisis with those weapons stockpiles right now

HEGSETH: No there is not. That is a manufactured story that the media wants to peddle

BRENNAN: You have testified to it in front of Congress

HEGSETH: You don't have to read back to me what I testified pic.twitter.com/sxqM9l4Lca

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 14, 2026

Mere days into the Iran war, Hegseth appeared before U.S. lawmakers alongside Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine in a closed-door meeting that reportedly discussed the rapid decline in America’s long-range precision-guided missile supplies.

At the time, the two Defense officials relayed that the U.S. had used a considerable amount of its wildly expensive interceptor missiles to thwart Iran’s seemingly infinite supply of Shahed attack drones.

By late April, the Pentagon had used at least 45 percent of its Precision Strike Missile stockpile, at least half of its THAAD missiles, and nearly 50 percent of its Patriot air defense interceptor missiles, according to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The White House has, nonetheless, invariably insisted that U.S. munitions are well stocked.

The strangest storyline emerging from the UFC fights on Sunday night came not from the White House lawn but from a former UFC fighter’s Twitter page. A few hours before the fights, Daniel Cormier, a heavyweight fighter who retired in 2020, posted screenshots of D.M.s between him and Eric Trump, in which the president’s son asks if any of the bouts are going to be rigged so he can bet on them.

“I’m probably going to get a lot of flak for bringing this to light, however I refuse to stay silent,” Cormier wrote. “The UFC is a sport that I am deeply passionate about. I will not tolerate this type of insider behavior. Shame on anyone trying to ruin this beautiful event.”

Cormier quickly deleted the post, but it was captured by many online, including a few journalists. The younger Trump claimed the screenshots were “AI generated,” that he has never spoken to Cormier, and that the fighter deleting his post was proof the messages were “clearly fabricated.” But Trump’s denial raises more questions than it answers. (Trump recently deleted this post as well, while leaving up other vague rebuttals.)

First off, Cormier deleting the post has no bearing on whether the messages are real or not. Using that as an excuse is obviously weak. Trump also insinuated that Cormier was unaware the messages were fake—but the messages included those sent by Cormier, and Cormier himself posted them! So that also doesn’t make much sense.

Cormier intentionally posting fake messages also doesn’t add up. He is currently a UFC commentator, as well as a coach. Fabricating something like this would destroy all his professional credibility and probably get him fired. And for what—to create a minor scandal for Eric Trump that he probably wouldn’t face any repercussions for anyway? The younger Trump is already no stranger to grifting through shady crypto deals.

Cormier has now backtracked and said the messages are fake, as well. “I got hacked or something. Who believes stuff like that? That’s crazy,” he told journalist Nicholas Ballasy while leaving the fight. Here is an excerpt of the private messages Cormier tweeted out. You can come to your own conclusions:

TRUMP: You placing any bets?

CORMIER: Nah I’m actually not allowed to bet on any cards or anything.

TRUMP: Are any of the fighters injured that you know of?

CORMIER: I’m not quite sure why you’re asking me this but I think they’re all in good shape..

TRUMP: I’ll just cut to the chase. Are any of the fights tomorrow rigged? I’ve been eyeing the Lopes fight and I think an upset wouldn’t be too unrealistic. $$

CORMIER: No none of our fights rigged and honestly I am appalled that you would even ask me something like that.

Former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was admitted to the hospital Sunday—but his office has provided scant details about what’s going on.

“Senator McConnell was admitted to the hospital this morning. He is receiving excellent care,” said McConnell adviser David Popp. The statement did not elaborate on his condition, why he had been transported to the hospital, or where he was receiving care.

The 84-year-old Republican has represented Kentucky in the U.S. Senate for 41 years, since 1985. He also served as the majority leader of the upper chamber from 2015 to 2021.

These are supposed to be McConnell’s final months in office—he is currently set to retire in January, at the end of his seventh term.

But his determination to remain in play on Capitol Hill has also forced him into the limelight through several critical health scares since 2023. In March of that year, McConnell fell at a dinner event at Washington’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, fracturing his rib and suffering a concussion in the process. He fell again in July. He also froze mid-sentence twice that year, dissociating for 20-30 seconds each time, sparking concerns that the aging lawmaker had suffered a stroke.

After assessing McConnell following the freezing bouts, the attending physician at the Capitol declared that he had not suffered from a seizure, stroke, or movement disorder, and the dissociation was more likely tied to the concussion recovery process or possible dehydration.

McConnell fell again in December 2024 at a Senate Republican Conference luncheon, spraining his wrist and cutting his face, and again in October 2025 while on his way to vote in the Capitol. He has since been transported via wheelchair by his aides as a health precaution.

In February, McConnell’s staffers shared that the lawmaker had spent roughly eight days in the hospital for “flu-like symptoms.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth crumbled when he tried to explain the difference between Donald Trump’s new deal with Iran and Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. 

Spoiler alert: There is none. 

Speaking on CBS News’s Face the Nation Sunday, Hegseth struggled to justify what the U.S. had actually won after months and months of mass destruction and global economic turmoil.

“The document says Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, won’t seek one, won’t buy one, won’t have one,” Hegseth explained. 

“JCPOA said that too,” host Margaret Brennan pointed out.

Pretty much verbatim, actually. The preface of Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal states: “Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.” 

Hegseth scrambled to defend the new deal. 

“But they didn’t have the threat of military force the way that we do that Iran respects in a very—in a way that their regime is more devastated, more devastating, excuse me, more devastated than it’s ever been in its 47 years, and that’s why they’re at the table,” he ranted incoherently. 

HEGSETH: The document says Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, won't seek one, won't buy one, won't have one

BRENNAN: The JCPOA said that too

HEGSETH: But they didn't have the threat of military force the way we do that Iran respects. President Trump led with military might. pic.twitter.com/PQcS6hHhEe

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 14, 2026

“The huge difference is, we did this from a position of strength. President Trump led with military might,” Hegseth added. “That military might will stay as long as necessary.”

But let’s assess that military might, shall we? It will take at least three years and an estimated  $24 billion for the United States to replace the munitions it expended during Trump’s military campaign against Iran. A recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated a multiyear “window of vulnerability” for the United States in potential future conflicts. Hegseth denied that there were any shortages in the U.S. weapons stockpile. 

More to the point, the U.S. has demonstrated our unique powerlessness in the face of a regime that has been reminded it can control the Strait of Hormuz. 

And as for Iran’s regime, it’s far from being “devastated.” Not only was there no regime change, but the regime has arguably gotten even more extreme—and Trump is still ready to hand it billions of dollars.

It’s increasingly apparent that Trump pulled out of the JCPOA only to drag the United States into an expensive war that no one voted for and then walk away with an identical deal. The major difference this time? One $300 billion check for Tehran to rebuild everything Trump destroyed.

Vice President JD Vance all but confirmed a detail being floated as part of the tentative U.S.-Iran peace deal: Iranian access to $300 billion in reconstruction funds.

Vance was asked by CBS’s Ed O’Keefe Monday morning about whether the rumored detail was true, and he said that it could be possible if Iran adheres to the agreement.

“That’s the sort of thing they could have access to, funded by the Gulf coast coalition, so long as they honor their end of the obligation,” Vance said. He noted that Iranian officials and media would be emphasizing the benefits they receive from the deal as opposed to what they concede.

CBS: The Iranians are saying they're gonna have access to a $300 billion reconstruction fund. True or false?

JD VANCE: That's the sort of things they could have access to so long as they honor their end of the obligation pic.twitter.com/30Ip8CGItn

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 15, 2026

Vance’s admission contradicts what he said on Friday, when he claimed in an X post that Iran would not be “receiving any cash, and no funds are being released simply for signing a deal or attending a meeting.” In addition to the U.S. and its allies paying $300 billion in reconstruction funds, Iran reports that the U.S. has agreed to release $25 billion in frozen Iranian assets.

Conservatives, including Trump and Vance, have long criticized the Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear deal, which involved the U.S. lifting sanctions and sending Iran $1.7 billion to settle decades-old failed contracts between the two countries.

That deal was also succeeding, with international observers stating that Iran was adhering to all its nuclear terms. It was Trump who decided to break it in his first term and then start a war with Iran in his second. Now, he’s only pushing a deal because his efforts are failing spectacularly, costing money, innocent lives, and American credibility.

President Donald Trump’s giant birthday party at the White House appears to have grounded flights at a local airport in Washington, D.C.

All flights at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport were “paused” Sunday evening due to the president’s birthday celebration, according to Clara-Sophia Daly, an immigration reporter for Mission Local in San Francisco.

“The air traffic controllers were not warned, nor were the airport staff or travelers,” Daly wrote on X Sunday night, after her own flight was severely delayed. The pilot said the delay was “one of the most frustrating things I’ve experienced in 20 years of aviation,” according to Daly.

“The pilot says the reason given for the shutdown is that there is going to be some kind of military jet air show above the White House,” she wrote in another post.

In the skies above Trump’s UFC fight, the U.S. military mounted an extravagant air show for the president, including a formation of the Navy’s Blue Angels and Air Force Thunderbirds, as well as an appearance from a B1-B Lancer, a heavy long-range bomber.

Aaron Parnas had a different theory, however. MeidasTouch previously reported that a commercial airline pilot filed aviation safety reports after being exposed to the powerful lighting used during the construction of the UFC octagon on the White House grounds upon their descent into DCA.

“This confirms my reporting with @MeidasTouch—pilots were being blinded by the UFC octagon, and now, based on this tweet, all flights have been paused because of it,” Parnas wrote on X in response to Daly’s thread.

These reports raise serious concerns about the coordination between the White House and aviation authorities, and underscored just how little Trump cares about the American people as he threw himself a $60 million party at the taxpayer’s expense.

Donald Trump has again upended efforts to renew a critical surveillance statute just as lawmakers had begun to reopen stalled talks.

The president declared on Truth Social Monday that any work to renew FISA Section 702, a statute that allows federal agencies such as the NSA and the CIA to surveil foreigners on U.S. soil without warrants, must be passed alongside his voter ID bill, the SAVE America Act.

That legislative measure sparked nationwide controversy earlier this year, particularly over a detail in the bill that would have made it more difficult for married women to vote. The backlash on Capitol Hill was grave, so much so that it gummed up efforts to fund Homeland Security for several months. Republicans eventually had to bail on the package to end the congressional gridlock.

The SAVE America Act suggests numerous amendments to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, including line items that would abolish mail-in voting, require voters to bring proof of citizenship and proof of residency to register to vote, require voter ID, and mandate voter roll purges every 30 days—an enormous bureaucratic task that would place undue burdens on local election officials. The measure would also add a federal law to prevent men from competing in women’s sports, and a ban on “transgender mutilation surgery.”

Last week, Democrats logjammed conservative efforts to renew the FISA section in direct protest against the president’s temporary pick to run national intelligence, real estate developer Bill Pulte, who they argued had run afoul of the law by accepting the position. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence explicitly, legally requires its chiefs to have national security experience.

As a result, the spy bill expired on Friday, and Republicans were able to convince Trump to withdraw Pulte and nominate a new—if equally unqualified—candidate for the job. That man was Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, who would also come to Washington with zero national security experience.

Yet as he gears up for his initial committee hearing Wednesday, Democrats have signaled that they might actually be willing to work with Clayton. Senate Intelligence Ranking Member Mark Warner—a Democratic lawmaker from Virginia—told CBS News on Sunday that he’s interested in confirming Clayton as quickly as possible to advance talks to renew the FISA section.

Israel is refusing to remove its IDF troops from Lebanon, even after the U.S. and Iran announced a memorandum of understanding that hinges on the withdrawal. The move could once again jeopardize any chance of a peace deal, as one of Iran’s primary demands is the end of Israel’s bombardment and occupation of Lebanon.

“Israel is not subordinate to the United States, and we are an independent and sovereign state,” said Israel’s right-wing National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has called for the flattening of Beirut and the kidnapping of Lebanese women and children. “We must not withdraw from any territory that our fighters have occupied and cleared of terrorist infrastructure,” he added. Defense Minister Israel Katz also declared that the Israel Defense Forces would remain in Lebanon “indefinitely.”

“The area will be cleared of local residents and all terrorist infrastructure, above and below ground—including the houses in the contact villages that served as terrorist outposts—will be destroyed,” he said.

These statements make President Trump’s Sunday announcement of a deal ending the war all the more tenuous, as a final deal isn’t scheduled to be signed until Friday. Trump already rebuked Israel on Sunday for bombing Beirut “on a special day when we are so close to a Peace Deal with Iran.”

Nearly 3,800 people have been killed in Lebanon since March 2, with nearly 12,000 injured and over a million displaced.

Last year, the Trump administration was considering suspending the constitutional right of habeas corpus, The New York Times reports.

Some officials pushing President Trump’s mass deportation agenda, chiefly White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, wanted to get rid of the key right, which compels the government to explain in court why it has detained a person. Miller’s goal was to prevent immigrants in government custody from receiving hearings or court orders blocking their deportation.

This idea alarmed others in the Trump administration, who saw it as legally weak and likely to be overturned in court. Among them was Will Scharf, a right-wing lawyer serving as White House staff secretary, who was the last person who saw paperwork before it reached the president’s desk.

In April, Scharf wrote a secret memo to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles warning of the dangers of suspending habeas corpus, pointing out its legal pitfalls. He also wrote another memo to Wiles warning against invoking the Insurrection Act, another legally questionable idea pushed by some in the administration, including Miller.

In October, Scharf wrote a memo against invoking the act, saying that it “serves as a break-the-glass exception to the traditional, general prohibition on the use of the military in the domestic setting.” He pointed out that it was last used in 1992 during riots in Los Angeles at the request of the California governor, and its invocation would be unprecedented to use against immigration protesters.

After Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents in Minnesota in January, administration officials, led by Vice President JD Vance and Miller, revived the idea of using the Insurrection Act. Ultimately, it wasn’t invoked, and the government also did not suspend habeas corpus.

But the Trump administration has still continued to use authoritarian means to implement the president’s mass deportations, treating immigrants who have been in the country for decades as if they have just shown up at a U.S. border. The fact that Trump has not resorted to extreme legal arguments is only a minor victory as violent deportations and draconian immigration policies continue, as he considers federal courts inconvenient obstacles rather than a constitutionally mandated check on his power.

President Trump was seen smiling after a UFC fighter used his post-victory interview to shout that former first lady Michelle Obama was a man—a racist right-wing conspiracy theory that has followed her since 2008.

“Fuck the speech. Aye, shoutout to Trump for having the balls to put some shit like this on,” Josh Hokit said to Joe Rogan after his second-round knockout of Derrick Lewis at Sunday’s America 250 fight night. “And if I’m gonna say anything, there’s only one person more incredible than the incredible hulk, and that’s my lord and Savior Jesus Christ.… And lastly: Michelle Obama is a man! Am I right, America?” 

“Michelle Obama is a man” shouted on the White House lawn in a ring sponsored by Bud Light only available on Larry Ellison’s Paramount Plus. What a way to celebrate America 250 and the twilight of liberal democracy. pic.twitter.com/MCTjdB3slg

— Tim Miller (@Timodc) June 15, 2026

Hokit was met with a mix of boos and cheers. Another camera showed the president, sitting ringside, reacting to the comment with a light smile. There was no public rebuke or condemnation from anyone present. 

“‘Michelle Obama is a man’ shouted on the White House lawn in a ring sponsored by Bud Light only available on Larry Ellison’s Paramount Plus,” The Bulwark’s Tim Miller posted on X. “What a way to celebrate America 250 and the twilight of liberal democracy.”

The “transvestigation” into Michelle Obama has been a yearslong effort to spite, harass, demoralize, and delegitimize this country’s first Black first lady. Given the other lies Trump has told about her husband, it’s no wonder he found the crass comment humorous.  

“With Joe Rogan smiling along,” said journalist Medhi Hasan. “(Of course I don’t need to bore you all by telling you that if this was an event hosted by a Dem president and someone said this about Laura Bush or Nancy Reagan … well … you know the rest…).” 

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 15 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

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 exploded in fury at Jamie Raskin, calling for him to be expelled from Congress. Trump raged that if Democrats win the House, Raskin will lead the president’s impeachment. In saying this, Trump is accidentally admitting that he cares very much about the prospect of another impeachment. In fact, he’s meanwhile reportedly trying to get Republicans to expunge his two past impeachments, indicating how much they eat away at him.

All this hands Democrats a weapon. They should say, Mr. President, if we win the House, we absolutely will hold you accountable. And that raises a question: What can a Democratic House really do to hold Trump accountable, anyway? What should it look like?

We’re talking about all of it with Andy Craig, a senior editor at The UnPopulist, who often thinks creatively on this topic. Andy, good to have you on.

Andy Craig: Good to be with you, Greg.

Sargent: So let’s start with Trump’s explosion at Congressman Jamie Raskin. It kind of came out of nowhere. He posted this:

“Jamie Raskin, a Loser in Life, who worked endlessly during my First Term to impeach me, will guaranteed be trying to do it again despite one of the most successful Presidencies in history.”

Trump then continues:

“EXPEL THE BUM. Congress can never be great with people like this who suffer massively from Trump Derangement Syndrome, casting their vote of HATE!”

Andy, there’s a lot more of that. What’s your reaction?

Craig: Well, it does show that it’s certainly one of his fixations, that he is thinking already about what will happen in the next Congress. He’s not wrong that it’s very likely he will face another impeachment trial. Even though we’ve seen some reluctance from Hakeem Jeffries and from some Democrats to do another impeachment, the pressure will be too much, because the outrages are just too many and will continue to pile on. And this is one of the tools Congress has, and it does have an effect even if you don’t get to 67 votes in the Senate.

Sargent: Exactly. The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump and his allies are hatching a plan to get GOP lawmakers to vote on a resolution that somehow voids Trump’s impeachments, whatever the hell they think they mean by that. Trump said this to the Journal: “It should be done because I did nothing wrong.” So he’s saying on the record that he thinks his impeachments should be expunged.

But here’s the real kicker. Several GOP lawmakers tell the Journal that such a thing would have a tough time passing. Which means some Republicans in the House don’t want to vote to expunge Trump’s impeachments.

Craig: One of the more normal aspects of this midterm is that they’re always a referendum on the president, and this president is deeply underwater on his approval ratings. So they’re making their political calculus—the last thing they want to do is be dredging up January 6, on which he is still particularly unpopular, or going down that route, or just generally having to be more associated with him.

They want to be on the attack blasting Democrats for whatever they’re going to do. They don’t want to be defending Trump right now, given where the polls are at.

Sargent: So in a way, that’s why Trump’s explosion of fury at Raskin actually reveals weakness and hands Democrats a weapon for the midterms. It’s really a self-own. He’s admitting that he doesn’t want a Democratic House because he will face accountability. So Democrats can say, Trump is plainly afraid of a Democratic House because it will hold him accountable—he’s admitting it himself.

And, Andy, Democrats should say that. Even some Republicans don’t want to vote to protect Trump. And I guarantee you, independents who are already tilting overwhelmingly against Trump right now and hate corruption really want a check on Trump and really want him held accountable. What do you think?

Craig: Right. Well, that’s the campaign strategy decision for Democrats to make in terms of what’s going to maximize their chances in November. But on the merits, the fact is that the shyness away from talk of impeachment isn’t well justified. The polling numbers show it’s not unpopular. It’s not toxic. It’s not something independents and swing voters repel from.

We see a lot of sentiment, understandably, across the board, that people want more elite accountability. The idea that he should get off the hook—whether it’s Trump or whether it’s anybody else, people caught up in the Epstein files—there’s a mood in the air of that kind of thing, where Trump is not immune from this kind of backlash against the sense of elite impunity.

Sargent: I agree 100 percent. So let’s talk about what a Democratic House can actually do. Let’s put aside impeachment for now, although I do think Dems should impeach Trump and many of his top officials.

If you look at oversight and investigations, a quick list would mean much more digging into the Epstein files, serious investigations into how Attorney General Todd Blanche is deciding to prosecute Trump’s critics and how Blanche oversaw the bogus settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS—which granted Trump IRS immunity—[and] serious investigations into the Trump family’s crypto scams and their dealings abroad. That’s just a start. What do you want to see happen on the investigations front?

Craig: Well, the endless litany of outrages in the second term has been so much more extreme in terms of it being a target-rich environment for things to go after. Certainly one thing I’m particularly interested in is the boat strikes campaign. The, frankly, murder that’s going on with that—the commander of Southern Command essentially resigned in protest over this.

I think there’s real digging that needs to be done there with Hegseth and what’s been going on in the military in terms of rationalizing how this is somehow legal, which it obviously isn’t.

Sargent: Andy, let me just jump in and say about that—you could subpoena Pete Hegseth. You could subpoena top defense officials. You could subpoena the ones who are resigning under protest—there’s at least one of them. You could bring them into Congress and question them all under oath. We’re learning every day in dribs and drabs new things about this campaign of murder on the high seas, basically.

And it looks to me like if you were to be able to just dig even a little bit, you’d find an extraordinary lack of any real rationale at the core of this. You might even just find summary executions being carried out just because Trump says, Blow it up. Basically something as really disgusting as that.

Craig: That really gets to the important nuts-and-bolts problem of subpoenas and enforcing them and making them work. This is something Josh Chafetz has written about that I highly recommend people look into. For years now—and we saw this in the first term—congressional subpoenas have tried to be enforced through civil litigation, going to the courts and asking a federal district judge, Will you please make this person show up because Congress subpoenaed them?

That’s not how it should work. Congress is not dependent on the other branches, nor on the other mechanism, which is referral to the Department of Justice for prosecution, which is obviously a dead end also.

Congress really needs to lean into using other tools they have, including its inherent contempt power, where ultimately Congress can arrest somebody on its own say-so, and it’s been done before. Congress can impose financial penalties. Congress can also attach funding fights to this—we won’t fund Pete Hegseth’s own office staff, potentially, or the Executive Office of the President, the White House staff.

There are all kinds of tools that they need to use. But the problem with the litigation is it just drags on for years and years. Even if Congress ultimately wins, it never gets done before there’s been a new presidential election and a new administration comes in.

Sargent: I just want to break up what you said there into two parts and explore each one, because they’re important. The first one is, how do you get a rogue administration to obey subpoenas? You’re essentially saying Congress has got to maximize its own tools to do that. That’s especially true given that this would be up to this administration, up to Todd Blanche—essentially his Department of Justice—to decide whether to enforce subpoenas.

So you have to have Congress exercise something like an imperial power itself and really maximize what it can do to force these subpoenas to be honored, right?

Craig: Absolutely. Congress needs to remember that they are their own branch of government. They have coequal—as it’s often put—powers. When Congress issues a subpoena to somebody, that doesn’t depend on the president agreeing. It doesn’t depend on a court agreeing. That is a binding order that has legal force.

And ultimately, they need to go after people’s bank accounts or even send the sergeant at arms out to haul in, potentially. Along with the other procedural tools they have, like potentially defunding people who aren’t complying with subpoenas.

Sargent: That was the second thing you brought up, which is the act of defunding. I want to try to get at that a little bit more. You’re talking about Congress essentially really using as a hammer the ability to just essentially zap an office. In other words, Congress could essentially say—either to enforce a subpoena or for some other purpose—We’re not funding the White House personnel, we’re not funding this agency, we’re not funding that agency until you do A, B, and C. Correct?

Craig: Absolutely. This goes back to the deep fundamentals of our constitutional system in the English parliaments of the Middle Ages. The power of the purse is the ultimate power. That’s why it’s vested in the legislature. So there are different ways you can structure it and procedurally how you tackle it.

But if nothing else, these appropriations come up every year. They elapse. And Congress can attach conditions saying, if the secretary of defense—and that’s the title to use for him—is refusing to comply with a subpoena, or the White House chief of staff or whatever, then we’re just not going to pay their salary. We’re going to defund their staff. Or there are other tools—you can defund various programs. You have to be willing to kind of take hostages. This ain’t beanbag.

Sargent: A hundred percent. And so let me ask you this. Let’s say the corrupt prosecutions of Trump’s critics really went even further. They’re already absolutely lawless and terrible. But let’s say it kept going. You could theoretically see a Democratic Congress essentially saying, We’re not funding that U.S. attorney’s office anymore. Isn’t that a valid tool?

Craig: Absolutely. That’s what it’s there for. We’re not going to have King Charles I ruling without Parliament and funding his own prosecution of critics and that kind of thing. There are some appropriations where there are fights you’ll have to have about trying to claw it back because they’re standing appropriations, they automatically renew, that kind of thing.

But most things, including exactly that—the U.S. attorney’s office that’s going after somebody, or anything like that, the whole DOJ—those are on the annual appropriations. They will expire if Congress doesn’t get its act together and pass something.

Sargent: I want to hone in on your big point enmeshed in all that, which is basically that this sort of act would, if in a sustained way carried out, be a way of restoring integrity to our constitutional system. It’s worth pointing out that Trump’s abuses are heavily, heavily dependent on Congress utterly checking out of the business of oversight and lawmaking and everything, really.

Republicans have neutered themselves, neutered the Congress. That is part of the reason we’ve got this unchecked lawless presidency running rampage everywhere.

If we did what you’re talking about, you’d really be restoring balance to the system in a fundamental way. It wouldn’t be that Congress is overreaching. It would be Congress is bringing balance back to the system. Can you talk about that?

Craig: Yes. This is the core Madisonian checks and balances. These are the powers Congress is supposed to have. Like so many things, this problem predates Trump. The imperial presidency has been gaining power and Congress has been becoming more dysfunctional and more passive and not being as assertive as it should be going back decades. But as with so many other things we see, this is Trump coming in and turning it up to 11.

We’ve created a presidency that is this kind of turnkey tyranny, where it can outrun what even the courts can keep up with. But on a fundamental level, the big-picture political accountability for a lawless executive branch can only come from Congress.

Sargent: OK, so let’s just imagine that Democrats win one or both chambers of Congress. It’s most likely that they’ll win the House and not the Senate, but it is possible that they’ll win both—or it’s possible that they’ll win neither, but they probably will win one or both.

So what happens if they do something approaching your vision of this? Do we really just see this fundamental shift in how the government is essentially functioning? What would it look like in a day-to-day, week-to-week way? What would the American people be seeing?

Craig: Well, there are historical precedents, and the biggest one would be what happened when Andrew Johnson was president after Lincoln during Reconstruction. And Congress was able to act more aggressively because they had Republican supermajorities—the South was unrepresented.

What you can do with simple majorities can sometimes be more modest. But even then, what they essentially did is Congress took over reining in the government. It passed laws instructing the Cabinet secretaries what to do. It passed laws against Johnson firing them, which is what got him impeached and within one vote of getting removed from office.

We’re not going to have a parliamentary system—it’s not going to look like the United Kingdom where the executive merges into the legislature. We do have an independently elected president. There are certain constitutional powers that the president has.

But Congress is the preeminent branch. Congress is the voice of the people. The president is not the sovereign tribune of the American people. Our elected representatives are the ones who have those powers. They can pass laws and use their various tools to pretty directly reduce, in some ways at least, the presidency to a much more constrained role, where there are legal guardrails on what the executive branch agencies, the Cabinet departments, the secretaries, the heads of these agencies are obligated to do. And to craft that in ways that it’s enforceable, both through the courts and by Congress following up with oversight.

Sargent: It would really be something else if Democrats would actually go through with that. Of course, for a whole bunch of reasons, they might not, or they might adopt something in between. That’s a topic for another pod.

But just to close out here, when Donald Trump explodes in fury because he might be held accountable by a Democratic Congress, it makes me wonder—why don’t Democrats right now go out there and talk the way you’re talking? Maybe not exactly saying that this will be an imperial Congress, but saying something along the lines of, This is an absolutely out-of-control chief executive and that is having an enormously damaging effect in this country and the whole world. And if you put us in charge of Congress, we will rebalance. We will hold this guy accountable. We’ll put guardrails on him. We’ll restore balance and sanity to this system. They should get their heads to this place and talk that way, right?

Craig: Yes.… You can have the political strategy arguments about how many votes will this get and what the polls say. There’s pretty solid evidence that this is a winning message. But also what it does is it amounts to a kind of precommitment. It shows that if and when they win, that this is the public mandate they have.

When you’re talking about impeachment in particular, even if you cannot get to a major supermajority in the Senate to convict, it’s a kind of censure with teeth. Do you want to be out there hammering these issues, exposing the wrongdoing, creating the historical record, and showing that you’re doing what you can?

Or are you going to just kind of roll over with a defeatist, Well, he’s not going to get removed from office anyway, so what’s the point? I think that’s entirely the wrong attitude, and it’s learning the wrong lessons from what happened in the last two impeachments.

Sargent: I could not agree more. Andy Craig, I really hope Democrats are listening to you on this. Anyway, folks, if you enjoyed this, check out Andy’s work over at The UnPopulist. He thinks about this stuff very creatively, very frequently. Andy, thanks so much for coming on.

Craig: Thanks.

Hunter Biden is back, seven years drug-free, and spoiling for social media fights. He’s won kudos for his (only slightly creaky) clapbacks to his haters. “Hunter went from smoking crack to smoking MAGAs,” observed one fan last week. Last seen advising his father to defy common sense by staying in the 2024 presidential race, Hunter is today owning his crackhead days and flexing his recovery from addiction. He’s even launched a kind of secular ministry with the hope, he says, of “giving people the space to talk about what they’re going through” and helping them see “the incredible promises they can receive if they stay the course” of recovery.

What’s novel about this coming-out is not that Biden, who has been through the wringer, now abstains from alcohol and drugs. Teetotaling in public life is extremely common. Instead, the surprise is that he’s expressing a moral ideal we haven’t seen in U.S. politics in a long, long time: a form of sobriety that is much more appealing than mere abstinence from drugs and alcohol.

Alcoholics Anonymous, which Biden has participated in, sees sobriety as a kind of sacred condition, one contingent on much more than a person’s blood alcohol content. Sobriety requires a daily commitment to a set of moral and spiritual precepts, including honesty, humility, accountability, solidarity, and service.

By contrast, a “dry drunk,” in A.A.’s terms, is an alcoholic who doesn’t drink but hasn’t undergone the wholesale psychic change that is both the price and the dividend of A.A.

The logic adds up. Dry drunks must manfully resist the temptation to drink, and thus often feel deprived, like a person on a highly restrictive diet. You can think of a dry drunk as always hangry, always stuck in traffic without A.C., always quietly fuming about what the world has denied him—from career success to a hit of the crack pipe to the adulation of the whole world. Out of this sense of deprivation, dry drunks variously retreat into self-loathing, approach others with fear, or lash out in anger.

We’ve had 18 years of dry drunks in the White House, with a reprieve only with Obama, who drank in moderation. With George W. Bush, Joe Biden, and now Donald Trump, none of whom touched a drop as president, it might be that dry drunkery, in which suppressed demons come out sideways, has become the ranking paradigm of moral character. For most of this century, then, Americans have not seen a president with a temperament worth aspiring to.

George W. Bush drank heavily for decades and gave it up when he was born again at 40. Fine. But as president, he was given to saber-rattling and warmongering that many in A.A. consider to be at steep odds with Twelve Step sobriety. Likewise, Joe Biden, who abstained, citing family history, could often be what my sober friend Beau Friedlander calls a “crispy critter”—prone to defensiveness and snippiness. Unwisely deciding to stay in the 2024 race suggests that Biden lacks the humility and self-awareness that is key to real sobriety.

And then there’s Trump. He has always maintained that he doesn’t smoke or drink, for fear of ending up like his older brother, an alcoholic who died young. And while he has periodically taken Ambien, a sedative-hypnotic tightly controlled by the Drug Enforcement Administration, and while allegations of further drug use are rampant, Trump doesn’t come off like an active addict.

Instead, he’s a quintessential dry drunk. Feeling deprived, Trump has made a career of copping resentments, indulging in self-pity, and striking out in frustration at those who least deserve it. Members of A.A. are taught to be wary of exactly the “willpower” dry drunks like Trump pride themselves on; sobriety requires letting go of alcoholic impulses, not repressing them.

All of this comes to mind just about every time the president speaks. During his interview with Kristen Welker on Meet the Press Sunday, he later recalled, he was driven to rage by the sound of the rain on the roof. The man is nearly 80, and anyone with a modicum of serenity should be soothed and not enraged by the sound of rain.

But he also seemed to be scanning his mind for someone to blame for his discomfort, someone to hate. “They’re crooked,” he said of one of his imagined foes, “just like you’re crooked.” Welker calmly replied, “I’m not crooked.” Trump then shot back, “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid!” Before he stormed out, stepping on his mic, he added maniacally, “Thank you darling! Have a good time!” Whether he drinks or not, this is not a sober man.

Sobriety proceeds a day at a time, and it’s hard to know what Hunter Biden’s interior life is like these days.

On the one hand, Biden has exhibited real candor and willingness to help others in his recent tweets and interviews. On the other hand, it’s not clear how close he stays to the moral demands of true sobriety. “I know what I’ve done, I know the amends I have to make,” he now says. But Lunden Roberts, the mother of one of Hunter’s children, has written movingly and without rancor about raising their daughter in Arkansas while Biden first refused to acknowledge his child, then paid less than expected in support, then seemed to ghost his daughter. Making a complete amends to one’s children and partners is usually considered a first step toward lasting sobriety.

As Hunter Biden would surely be the first to attest, the path to sobriety is winding and difficult, and, as A.A. says, “We seek progress, not perfection.” Biden’s voice is welcome in the public sphere, and not for the zingers. Rather, he has opened the possibility—just the possibility—that with attention to our moral responsibilities we Americans might one day find a less furious, more honest, and more charitable way to live.

Last month, a federal judge tossed the federal criminal case against Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man who became nationally known last year after the Trump administration acknowledged having illegally deported him to the CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador along with a larger set of Latino men that seemed to have been randomly snatched up by federal agents despite the government’s evidence-free insistence that they were all hardened gang members.

All of these removals were illegal, but Ábrego García’s was most obviously, glaringly so, on account of the fact that an immigration judge had specifically ruled that he could not be returned to El Salvador, where he would face danger. After a separate federal judge ordered his return, the government dragged its feet for months, insisting absurdly it had no custody over him before abruptly flying him back and immediately hitting him with criminal human smuggling charges—which were dismissed under an extremely rare finding of vindictive prosecution.

That doesn’t mean the 30-year-old sheet metal apprentice is out of the woods. The government is still trying to deport him, having rejected his offer to be removed to Costa Rica and instead gunning to send him to Liberia, where he’s never been, after an effort to deport him to Uganda, where he’s also never been. Every time there’s a new twist in this saga, I see people asking the same basic questions: Are they being serious? Is the administration still expending resources, over a year-plus, in a fanatical attempt to screw over this one guy? Why?

I think there’s an answer, and it’s a different one from that of many of the administration’s other targets in its weaponization of its power. While Ábrego García’s case is often lumped in with the attempts to investigate or prosecute people like former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, former Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell, and Senator Mark Kelly, I think there are clear differences in both intent and result, which stem ultimately from an analysis of their relative power.

Naturally, each of these efforts is an outrage in its own right, and not just in a “violating our sacred norms and decorum” kind of way. The spurious attempted railroadings of James, Powell, and Kelly are attempts to wrestle control of parts of the government or civil society that Trump has not been able to fully take by force or subservience—local prosecutors, the central bank, and parts of the Senate, respectively. Every single one is a direct shot at the foundations of our system of government, just in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary.

These people, though, will ultimately all be fine. Each have gone into an incredibly high-profile and powerful role in government, and while they didn’t and shouldn’t have expected to be criminally investigated for their trouble, they knew they were to some extent playing the game, one that has only gotten more dangerous in the Trump era. For good or ill, elected officials and high government functionaries at all levels, particularly those who are pro-democracy and willing to do something about it, should be steeling themselves for an increased level of risk, perhaps more than they thought they signed up for. Politics these days is a perilous field (and those that aren’t prepared for that should step aside).

Ábrego García did not sign up for any such risk. Everything we know about him points to his being a relatively run-of-the-mill Maryland dad that—while having had some acute personal struggles at times in his life—seemed, until his detention, to be focused mainly on learning the sheet metal trade and raising his son. If he’s become a fixation of the federal government, it’s not really because of anything he personally did. Instead, he has become this idée fixe because of something that was done to him. Or, if you prefer, he’s now famous for what his travails have come to represent: The Millerite campaign of savagery is indiscriminate, it is sloppy, and the government is, in fact, making serious mistakes that enormously impact people’s lives. He is a living, high-stakes symbol of Trumpian misrule and this administration’s need to break its opponents on the rack of authoritarianism.

The admission of an “administrative error” that triggered Ábrego García’s removal to the notorious CECOT gulag remains one of the few times I can remember when this innately combative and contemptuous administration has acknowledged in any public forum that it made a significant mistake. This was all the more disorienting in the context of a situation where it was sending, without any acknowledged legal basis whatsoever, people to be held in kind-of-but-also-kind-of-not U.S. custody at a foreign mega-prison with no due process. The admission of Ábrego García’s unlawful deportation was a crack in a carefully constructed facade of righteously deployed power for which the administration has never forgiven him.

In that way, he has become the most acute example of this phenomenon—but certainly not the only one. Mahmoud Khalil certainly involved himself more in political life than Ábrego García did, but it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that he was a campus activist and negotiator at one university campus, admittedly one of the most high-profile sites of pro-Palestinian organizing. Still, he was little known outside that scene until he was actually detained. I do not in any way intend to minimize his dedication and his activism in saying that it seems clear the Trump administration did not engineer his arrest as a way to decapitate Palestinian activism or take a significant public opponent off the board.

As Khalil himself told me when I spoke with him for this magazine last year, he had expected to potentially incur the wrath of the administration (and he certainly did). He never considered that his activism would draw the individualized attention of the federal government, and while he doesn’t at all regret his work, this is a level of consequence neither he nor anyone had really gamed out. Rather, his detention was a signal—you might think you’re not a big enough fish to warrant a heavy-handed response, but that response might come anyway.

To this you can add the so-called Broadview Six, an assortment of individuals that include a congressional candidate, her aide, several local elected officials and candidates, and a musician. The Six were all charged with felonies, including conspiracy, after a September protest outside an ICE holding facility in Broadview, Illinois, in which an ICE vehicle was mildly damaged. The defendant pool was whittled down to four people facing misdemeanors before the case was dismissed altogether amid questions about federal prosecutors’ conduct with the grand jury. Still, the months of uncertainty and legal bills took a toll on all of them, just as the specter of prosecution and deportation have taken a toll on Khalil and Ábrego García, who are not insulated by high public office and connections.

These committed efforts to throw the massive weight of the federal government against not just potent political enemies but individuals who, at least in the case of Ábrego García, don’t seem to have any public political bearing at all are not coming out of nowhere. It is a tried and true method among authoritarians, of making clear to the population that while any given person might be unlikely to find themselves in these terrifying crosshairs, it absolutely can happen to you, and so maybe you should work assiduously to avoid drawing that unwelcome attention.

Most anyone who’s had even a cursory brush with the adversarial power of the state knows how jarring it can be, whether that’s being pulled over or audited or investigated in some way. These interactions might be quickly resolved, but while they’re ongoing, the awesome power of the state and the stark imbalance between you and it put themselves in acute relief. Now imagine that this stretches beyond any one particular interaction and becomes an all-encompassing monthslong ordeal where every legal victory against the state’s vexations leads to the government doubling down again and again, with the goal of depleting resources and willpower even when putatively unsuccessful. It is the legal procedural equivalent of a head on a stake outside the castle doors: a warning to the others, to everyone.

While Trump’s malicious series of attempted prosecutions and investigations so far have been framed as an abject failure—and, from a pure legal perspective, they have been a litany of embarrassing disasters that have damaged the Justice Department indelibly—it’s quite possible that, at chilling speech and political action, they’ve been more successful than we can see on the surface. That is a Trump legacy that will be difficult to repair.

You know already that President Donald Trump is on a rampage to build hideous oversized structures in Washington, D.C. (the Epstein Ballroom, the Arc de Trump) and to deface existing structures using exorbitant no-bid contracts. We got some good news this past weekend when a judge made Trump take “THE DONALD J. TRUMP AND” off the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. I only wish the judge further required the president to hang the removed letters on the clubhouse portico at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, rearranged anagrammatically into UNHAT DAMP NJ TODDLER.

What you may not know is that the Trump administration is also on a tear to unload government buildings that it’s judged to be all cost and no value. The General Services Administration, which is the federal government’s real estate arm, is selling off government real estate at fire-sale prices into a historically depressed commercial market. These prices are lousy even within the context of the post-Covid office-space glut, making the GSA look very foolish as it claims thrifty stewardship of the taxpayer dollar.

I’ve been primarily concerned about the fate of the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, which the GSA designated last year for “accelerated disposition.” Gray Brechin, founder of the nonprofit Living New Deal, described the Cohen Building to me last September as “a kind of Sistine Chapel of the New Deal” because of its murals by Philip Guston, Seymour Fogel, Ethel and Jenne Magafan—and, most especially, Ben Shahn, whose dry frescoes along both sides of a 70-foot lobby corridor, “The Meaning of Social Security,” Shahn judged “the best work I’ve done.” (To read my earlier pieces on the Cohen building and the Shahns, click here, here, here, and here. These were followed up in, among other publications, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and USA Today.)

I won’t tug your lapel too long about the Cohen, which has yet to be sold, because my subject today is those buildings that the Trump administration has sold already, most especially the Old Post Office Building, which Trump leased during his first administration and refurbished as a hotel. The Trump International Hotel became a kleptocratic vortex before Trump sold it at the end of his first term well above market value. Now Trump is poised to repurchase not just the lease but the entire building at a heavy discount, shredding whatever remains of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses as he uses the presidency to expand his fortune at a rate of $1 billion or more per year.

More on that in a moment. Permit me first to update you about the Cohen building.

Neither Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, nor her staff knew that the Cohen building housed precious New Deal art before she inserted into a January 2025 water resources bill a provision requiring that it be sold off “no later than two years” after being vacated (which has not yet occurred). Such ignorance is astonishing given that the Cohen lies a mere two blocks from the United States Capitol, but I wouldn’t call it atypical of how the Republican congressional majority operates.

After Ernst learned about the art, she said in a written statement: “It speaks volumes that only 2 percent of the folks who were actually paid to work at the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building were showing up to see its murals in person.” Ernst here misconstrues a low occupancy rate attributable to GSA misallocation (the main tenants, Voice of America and its parent agency, used only a small part of the building) to be an entirely made-up absentee rate for supposed civil service malingerers. “Given that fact,” Ernst continued, “let the property’s buyer decide its artwork’s fate.” Which is exactly what the Cohen building’s defenders fear, even though the law requires that New Deal art remain public property even after the building where it resides is sold. These days we can never be sure the executive branch will pay any heed to what the law says.

In recent months, various Democratic members of Congress have walked those two blocks from the Capitol to tour the Cohen building’s artworks, and we’ve seen some murmurings from Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas and others, prodded by Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, and Mary Okin, assistant director of the nonprofit Living New Deal, about introducing legislation to block the Cohen’s sale. On April 21, Representative Chellie Pingree, Democrat of Maine, offered an amendment to an appropriations bill for financial services, general government, and related agencies requiring public release of a GSA feasibility study, initiated by the Biden administration and buried by the Trump administration, on refurbishing the Cohen building. As I reported previously, the study proposed a $1 billion green renovation of the Cohen building to make it “a flagship in the federal government portfolio,” including restoration of the murals, which “add a sense of cultural identity in the building that remains from tenant to tenant.” Amen.

Pingree’s amendment to make public this taxpayer-funded study failed, as Democratic amendments tend to in the Republican-majority House. But two Republicans, Representatives Ryan Zinke of Montana and Michael Simpson of Idaho, voted with Pingree. “I was glad to see I convinced a couple of my [GOP] colleagues,” Pingree told me afterward. “I got pretty close.” It gave her hope, Pingree said, that Congress would “keep the building off the market.”

I hope soon to have more to report on that. Now let’s move on to those government buildings the GSA has sold already.

Three of them are in Washington, and the first two, like the Cohen, have been designated for “accelerated disposition.” In March, the GSA’s own Regional Office Building was sold (to the residential developer Dalian Development) for $24.26 million. That worked out to $26 per square foot, or less than one-tenth its market value. In May, the GSA sold the Liberty Loan Building (to Satvik “Vinny” Raj, founder and managing director of Digilent Consulting) for $17 million. That works out to $98 per square foot, which is somewhat better, but still about one-fifth the average sale price for a D.C. office building in the current depressed market. Why the government insists on disposing of these buildings at so inopportune a moment is anybody’s guess. (I’m indebted to the Washington Business Journal for details on these sales, which went unreported in The Washington Post.)

The third building, which is not on the accelerated disposition list, is the Old Post Office Building. It sold earlier this month for $80 million, or $172 per square foot. Which sounds like a big improvement on the GSA Annex and the Liberty Loan building until you remember that the Old Post Office is a gorgeous Romanesque revival structure completed in 1899; that a mere 10 years ago Trump spent $200 million, or $430 per square foot, to convert the Old Post Office into a luxury hotel; and that Trump sold the hotel five years ago for a reported $375 million—and that was just for the lease, because until last week the GSA retained ownership of the building and the land. In current dollars, Trump got paid for the renovated Old Post Office $452 million, or $972 million per square foot—again, just for the lease.

That means, among other things, that even if the Old Post Office Building’s new buyer gets its asking price of $400 million, the building and the land will sell for less in 2026 than just the lease sold for in 2021. And who’s the likeliest buyer? According to The Wall Street Journal, Eric Trump has been in talks to repurchase the Old Post Office Building since mid-January 2025. Trump wants his Kleptorium back, at a discount.

When Trump bought the Old Post Office lease back in 2012, Steven Pearlstein observed in The Washington Post that the likely outcome would be, for Trump, yet another appearance in bankruptcy court. Trump had bad luck with hotels, having previously gone bust with the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, the storied Plaza Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, and the Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts. Pearlstein thought the GSA was crazy to lease the Old Post Office to a screw-up like Trump. He didn’t know the half of it.

As he’d done many times before, Trump overpaid for the Old Post Office, agreeing to an inflation-adjusted annual lease payment of $3 million plus the $200 million renovation. Pearlstein was quite right that this would compel Trump to charge room rates well above those of his hotel competitors. What Pearlstein couldn’t know was that Trump would become president of the United States shortly after his Trump International Hotel opened on Pennsylvania Avenue, allowing it to become, as I wrote in May 2022, Washington’s premier shakedown venue. Foreign governments spent $3.8 million at the hotel; the Secret Service spent more than $200,000; the Republican National Committee spent $3,000 per month; Trump’s inaugural committee spent $1 million (prompting a lawsuit from the D.C. attorney general that Trump later settled for $750,000); and so on.

But Trump had paid so extravagantly for the Old Post Office that even with all this baksheesh pouring in, the Trump International still lost about $70 million in operating expenses. Then he lost the 2020 election, which meant he no longer needed a Kleptorium. Trump sold the Trump International Hotel for $375 million, pocketing $100 million in profit. The $375 million price tag was, Jonathan O’Connell reported in The Washington Post, the most anybody had ever paid for a Washington hotel, which was all the more remarkable because

a) this was a money-losing venture

and

b) the building and the land were still owned by the federal government.

(I recount the story up to here, in greater detail, in my May 2022 piece.)

The new owners, who scraped Trump’s name off the hotel and reopened it in 2022 as a Waldorf Astoria hotel, were a Miami-based investment group called CGI Merchant Group. It isn’t clear why CGI Merchant Group got into this, but the trade publication The Real Deal last year called the firm “financially embattled” because of various real estate investments gone sour. To no one’s surprise, CGI Merchant Group in 2024 had to sell the Waldorf Astoria for $100 million at a foreclosure auction.

The purchaser at foreclosure was a private equity firm called MSD Partners (now BDT & MSD Partners). MSD Partners had put up most of the money for CGI Merchant Group to buy Trump’s unprofitable hotel in the first place; of the $375 million purchase price, $285 million came from MSD Partners. After CGI Merchant Group defaulted on that $285 million loan, BDT & MSD Partners decided, what the hell, let’s kick in another $100 million and take it off their hands. And so they became the owners of Trump’s unprofitable former hotel—or rather, the owners of a lot of fancy renovations and a lease on same. Now GSA has come along and sold the building itself to BDT & MSD for an additional $80 million.

I don’t know who’s a more generous soul—BDT & MSD for acquiring this dog of an enterprise, or GSA for handing over title at so low a price.

We know why GSA would be charitable; these folks work for President Donald Trump, who wants to repurchase the Old Post Office, this time at a less burdensome price. But why would BDT & MSD Partners be charitable? Because when Trump was trying to unload the Old Post Office back in 2021, MSD Partners’ chief executive was a Palm Beach neighbor named John Phelan. (Phelan left the firm in June 2022, seven months after the sale.) Phelan is one of Trump’s biggest financial supporters. In April 2024, Phelan threw a Trump fundraiser at his Aspen vacation home, with contribution tiers rising from $25,000 to $500,000. Phelan himself donated $927,000 to Trump’s 2024 campaign.

Shortly after that election, Trump named Phelan to be secretary of the Navy, despite Phelan’s notable lack of armed forces experience in either a military or a civilian capacity. Experts told the Associated Press that Phelan was chosen because he wouldn’t give Trump any pushback. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly grew jealous of Phelan’s closeness to the president, and in April Hegseth fired Phelan, apparently annoyed that Phelan was currying favor with Trump by proposing to create an expensive new “Trump Class” of battleships. This may be the single instance in which Hegseth fired someone from the Pentagon who was actually unqualified.

BDT & MSD Partners, I’ll wager, would very much like to sell the Waldorf-Astoria at a price that lets them recoup their investment in the property, which (between the unpaid portion of its loan to CGI Merchant Group, its foreclosure purchase, and its purchase from GSA of the building and land) probably isn’t much lower than its $400 million asking price. Indeed, given operating expenses on the less-than-thriving hotel, BDT & MSD may be out even more than $400 million.

If Trump pays $400 million to buy back the Old Post Office, he’ll get it for $52 million less, after inflation, than he sold it for five years ago—and this time he’ll have the building and the land. That’s a pretty good deal! But if I know Trump, he’ll demand a lower price than $400 million, leaning heavily on his knowledge that the GSA sold it to BDT & MSD Partners for a mere $80 million and pretending not to remember MSD Partners’ previous exertions to bail him out. He has no time to delve into such petty details. And anyway, he gave that guy the Navy secretary gig and he blew it. Trump probably doesn’t remember how. He’s a very busy man.

Imagine you were buying a car, and the only thing you knew about it was the color. Not the horsepower, not the number of cylinders, not the options; none of that. Just the color.

Obviously, you wouldn’t make such a purchase. You’d demand to know more, and quite rightly so. Well, voters choose candidates on the basis of scant information all the time, especially when it comes to the economic realities that obtain in this country. This is largely the Democrats’ fault. The Republicans don’t want people to know these facts. The Democrats should, but they don’t talk about them nearly enough. Now that America has freshly minted its first actual trillionaire in Elon Musk and Donald Trump has made working people’s lives far harder than they already were with his pointless, gas-price-raising little war, those of us who do know those realities need to demand of Democrats that they talk more about them.

Before I get into it, let me say clearly: I’m not calling voters stupid. It isn’t their fault they don’t know this stuff—it’s, as I said, the Democrats’, and to some extent the media’s, which doesn’t talk about these things enough because they aren’t “news.” People do know in their bones that the U.S. economic system is rigged—although, as we shall see, they generally have no idea how rigged.

OK. So: Let’s start with the fact that the top 1 percent of Americans now own about 32 percent of the wealth. You may know this. This one fact does get reported or mentioned pretty frequently. It’s a shocking number, though. It’s not OK, and it’s not normal. Look at this historical chart from the authoritative St. Louis Fed. In 1990, it was around 22 percent. It’s been above 30 percent since 2014. And it just keeps going up—except, interestingly, for three dips, two during George W. Bush’s presidency and one during Trump’s first term; not because they were warriors on behalf of income equality but because they tanked the economy.

A pretty big chunk of that 32 percent is owned by not just the 1 percent, but the 0.1 percent. That’s about 135,000 households. I couldn’t find precise current numbers for 2025–26 on deadline, but I did find this study, from 2013, by the formidable duo of Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. In that year, the top 0.1 percent owned about 22 percent of the wealth. Again, this is not normal. It’s not “just the way things are.” The last time the top 0.1 percent owned that much wealth was—of course—back in 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression.

Trump wants to take America back to the 1950s, does he? In this one respect, we should all wish he would. From the end of World War II until the late 1980s, the top 0.1 percent owned around 10 to 12 percent of the wealth. The current madness started after Ronald Reagan’s two big tax cuts. (The famous joke about everything about the United States going bad after the Reagan presidency isn’t quite as hyperbolic as it sounds.)

Now—you may consider the above information old hat. If you read someone like me on a regular basis, you’re more likely to know this sort of stuff. But people—voters—generally do not. In fact, what they don’t know is astonishing.

A week or so ago, I tripped across this video on YouTube. It’s old—it’s from 2013. So the reality described in it has only gotten worse. The narrator starts like this: “There’s a chart I saw recently that I can’t get out of my head. A Harvard business professor and economist asked more than 5,000 Americans how they thought wealth was distributed in the United States.”

They thought the top 20 percent probably owned around 58 percent of the wealth. Then they were asked what they thought the ideal distribution should be. They thought that ideally, the top 20 percent should own around 33 percent of the wealth. The actual distribution, in 2013? The top 20 percent owned 82 percent of the wealth.

This was 2013, but in the intervening years, people’s perceptions haven’t changed much. I did find a study from this year in which researchers asked people how many times wealthier an average member of the top 10 percent is than someone in the remaining 90 percent of the population. People said about 13.5 times wealthier. The actual answer is precisely twice that, 27 times.

You get the idea. So, what does all this mean for Democrats?

I suppose some would say, well, a few things. First, they need to disenthrall themselves from the idea that talking about all this stuff is too “left-wing.” Undoubtedly, such rhetoric will be labeled that by Republicans and elements of the media. But so what? It’s just reality. This country is on an unsustainable economic path. It must be changed. You don’t change things by being afraid of how you’re going to be attacked. Nonconfrontational Democrats are, to be blunt, not fit for purpose.

Others would contend that even if the mass of voters knew these numbers and more, they wouldn’t care; it wouldn’t move them, and they wouldn’t vote on the basis of them. I think that too is cowardly nonsense. The study I cited above, in which people’s ideal income distribution is well to the left of where they think it is and way to the left of where it actually is? (And by the way, I’ve seen other such studies, and they all show the same thing.) That suggests to me that most people would welcome a message of income redistribution.

And by the way—and this too is a crucial point that Democrats need to get through their skulls—if that many people hold that view, it’s not even “left.” It’s mainstream. Democrats need to accept this and act accordingly.

Also, always remember: Be suspicious of people who tell you such and such an issue won’t move voters. One question in a poll or focus group isn’t the same thing as a charismatic candidate making something the centerpiece of his or her campaign in speech after speech. And besides, no candidate has to move “voters,” generally and generically. Candidates have to persuade small, decisive percentages of voters that they will fight for their interests.

So, as these billionaires become trillionaires, as their share of the wealth grows ever greater, as some of them express open contempt for democracy itself, it’s time that we demand that the 2028 Democratic aspirants be willing to say: “My fellow Americans, if you elect me and give me a Democratic House and Senate, we’re going to take some money away from the billionaires and give it to you.” How on earth is that a losing message?

And while they’re at it, they need to tell Americans the economic facts of our society, over and over and over until they start to hit home. Republicans want voters to think only, “My, what a pretty red car.” Democrats have to tell them what’s in the engine.