The New Republic

In the past year, the Trump administration has worked to dramatically reduce the federal workforce and—with the support of the Republican-led Congress—slash spending on the social safety net. A move by the Agriculture Department to reorganize the agency that oversees federal nutrition programs could further complicate low-income Americans’ ability to access the assistance they depend upon to stay healthy and avoid food insecurity.

As part of the larger reorganization of the Food and Nutrition Service, which oversees the nation’s 16 federal food and nutrition programs, most agency employees will be required to move to five new “hubs” across the country. The USDA is also expected to shutter most of the seven current regional offices across the country, as well as the current agency headquarters building in Alexandria, Virginia. The agency—which is also being rebranded as the Food and Nutrition Administration—will maintain a small footprint in Washington, D.C., according to the USDA.

Rather than overseeing nutrition programs based on regions, the new hubs will be divided by program area, with the intention of providing support from a centralized location. The Trump administration argues that moving oversight of these programs to new hubs will make it easier for officials to connect participants across the country. USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen A. Vaden told congressional Democrats that “each hub will have programmatic experts able to assist all states in their execution of USDA’s nutrition programs.” Vaden has also said that the move “reduces duplicative management and complexity within the agency.”

Perhaps the most major relocation will be that of the headquarters for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which serves around 40 million people, to Indianapolis. But Kate Howe, executive director of the Indy Hunger Network in Indianapolis, expressed skepticism that the relocations would actually do much to help SNAP participants in her city.

“We’re creating these silos of programs that will operate in a much more isolated fashion, and then the efficiencies of being in one place together will be lost,” said Howe. “I can’t imagine that having the SNAP office here will make a difference in terms of customer service. It simply seems like moving an administrative office from one place to another.”

Last year, Vaden told a House committee that he believed employees based in and around D.C. would be willing to move due to that region’s flagging job market. But given that many current FNS employees are located in cities with regional hubs that will be closing, this reorganization won’t just apply to workers in the national capital area. A recent internal survey by the National Treasury Employees Union Chapter 226, which represents FNS workers, found that around 80 percent of respondents—comprising around a third of the agency’s 1,200 employees—were unwilling to relocate to keep their jobs.

“They already have a regional structure in place that’s been working. There’s nothing that indicates why that’s not working,” said Doreen Greenwald, national president of the National Treasury Employees Union. “This has just not been well thought through, and is ill-conceived.”

Greenwald added that it would be far more difficult for FNS employees to “uproot” themselves and their families than the USDA suggests, and warned that the reorganization could cause a “brain drain” wherein the agency could lose staff with extensive institutional knowledge. There’s precedent for this possibility: When the USDA moved the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture to Kansas City in 2019, both agencies lost more than half of their staff. Although that number rebounded, the moves resulted in a loss in both employee diversity and productivity.

FNS employees often have a deep understanding of how nutrition programs are managed in their specific regions. For example, SNAP administration and access varies across states, with differences such as income requirements, benefit amounts, and even what food items can and cannot be purchased. It may be difficult to replace these employees, not only because it will take time to train up new workers but because working for the federal government is currently not a stable prospect—from repeated shutdowns to mass layoffs, to insecurity about whether a job can be relocated at any moment. The potential loss in staffing also comes amid a dramatic shrinkage in the federal workforce. More than 15,000 employees left USDA last year, accepting early retirement and deferred resignation offers.

Another key program, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC—which assists around 6.7 million people, including around 40 percent of all infants born in the U.S.—will be moved to Kansas City, Missouri. Nell Menefee-Libey, senior public policy manager at the National WIC Association, said that administration of WIC was deeply reliant on the “close working relationships” between state agencies that administer the program and FNS staff on a regional and national level. The potential loss of those federal employees could make it more difficult for state officials to provide WIC benefits, or adjust to any changes.

“State WIC agencies rely on FNS staff for technical guidance to answer questions or troubleshoot issues as they arrive, for implementation of new policy initiatives, and to get federal resources out to the state level in a timely and appropriate manner,” said Menefee-Libey. Even if WIC recipients aren’t aware of the changes that are being made, she continued, they could soon feel their effects.

“I can absolutely understand how it feels sort of nebulous and removed from the day-to-day lives of new parents who rely on WIC to help them raise their kids, but it really is as simple as not having the guarantee that their benefits will get loaded onto their card on time,” said Menefee-Libey. “The state agency might not have the resources that they need to pay for those benefits, because the funds aren’t being dispersed from the regional office, because they don’t have the support that they need from the national office to get those dollars out the door.”

The timing of the relocations is still nebulous as the USDA continues negotiations with employee unions, but many of the regional offices are expected to close on a rolling basis as leases expire. Oversight of child nutrition programs will be moving to Dallas; emergency management to Denver; and research organizations to Raleigh, North Carolina. Retailer operations and compliance employees will move to Atlanta, Los Angeles, Dallas, and New York City. Diane Pratt-Heavner, the spokesperson for the School Nutrition Association, or SNA, raised concerns about the timing, given the “forthcoming introduction of new school nutrition standards.”

“SNA is concerned that so many staff have reported that they will not be relocating,” she said in a statement. “We worry about the loss of institutional knowledge.”

The reorganization also comes after Congress dramatically slashed SNAP last year, pushing more of the cost of administration and benefits onto states over the next several years. The percentage of benefit costs that a state pays will depend on its rate of overpayments or underpayments. As the Food and Nutrition Administration determines SNAP error rates on a national and state level, a dip in staffing could make calculating those rates ever more difficult.

“We’re just worried about the impact on the state agency trying to rapidly scale up to meet the new federal requirements,” said Howe. “The loss of institutional knowledge at a time when everything is changing is only going to have negative impacts on people trying to access benefits, because there will be fewer trained and knowledgeable people to help them.”

Ultimately, Howe sees this change as a move to make nutrition programs more difficult to obtain, particularly since the law added new work requirements to SNAP last year. She has heard from a local food pantry in Bloomington that they’ve seen a 15 percent increase in visits in the past year, which they believe is “directly correlated to the decline in people accessing SNAP benefits.”

“It feels like this is part of a larger plan to reduce the effectiveness of the SNAP program, and we can’t afford that. We can’t afford to have the federal government step back from the obligation to make sure that people are fed,” Howe said.

Donald Trump erupted at Representative Jamie Raskin in a furious Truth Social post, calling him a “loser” and worse. But the tirade was revealing. Trump raged that if Democrats win the House, Raskin will “impeach me.” In this, Trump revealed that he absolutely does fear impeachment. The self-own gets worse: Trump is urging Republicans to pass something expunging his previous impeachments. But that actually reveals how badly impeachment eats away at him. And Republicans reportedly don’t think this could pass the House: He’s apparently so unpopular that even some Republicans don’t want to vote on his impeachments! All this gives Democrats a good argument: Trump fears a Democratic Congress precisely because it will hold him accountable and constrain his lawlessness. So what would this look like? We talked to Andy Craig, senior editor at The Unpopulist, who thinks creatively on this topic. We discuss the deeper reasons Trump fears another impeachment, the hidden tools that the next Congress could use to constrain him, and why aggressive congressional action would rebalance our dangerously off-kilter system. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

In the first two years of post-Dobbs America, 412 people were charged with “pregnancy-related” crimes, with 399 of these being related to substance use—including alcohol. These charges, which most frequently alleged either child abuse or neglect of the fetus, were made possible by politicians who have slow-dripped the language and ideology of fetal personhood into lawmaking for decades, a process that has only amplified since the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

For years, anti-choice lawmakers have sought to lay down legal precedents for fetuses and embryos to be considered fully fledged persons in need of legal protections as part of a wider framework to criminalize abortion as murder. But this language and this broader approach to so-called public health have ramifications beyond abortion: If a fetus is a person, then consuming alcohol or narcotics while pregnant and putting the fetus at risk for fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, or FASD, and other substance-related birth defects is a form of child endangerment.

Not only does this result in the criminalizing of pregnant people, it also hinders the prevention, research, and treatment for both the FASD and substance use disorders being weaponized to advance this anti-abortion agenda. What’s more, this ideology has proven to be wholly ineffective in the effort to “protect fetuses.” Laws around “pregnancy-related crimes” have only prevented mothers from seeking support, while simultaneously creating legal frameworks for restricting abortion access, creating a climate where pregnant patients are increasingly policed and where public health policies around prenatal substance exposure, FASD, and reproductive justice movements are increasingly linked.

Dr. Sarah Roberts is a professor and legal epidemiologist at the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health initiative at the University of California at San Francisco, and one of the only researchers in the United States working on the intersections of health care practices and policies around abortion and the criminalization of behaviors while pregnant. “Singling out drinking while pregnant isn’t effective,” she explains, noting that none of the punitive or so-called “supportive” FASD prevention policies that she’s analyzed actually prevented FASD.

The only policies that actually prevented FASD and offered support to mothers and babies with FASD were those that addressed alcohol consumption across the board. “People who are drinking while pregnant were drinking before they got pregnant and are in families and communities where people are drinking as well, so by reducing drinking at a population level, that also relates to improved outcomes during pregnancy,” Dr. Roberts explains.

In her research, Dr. Roberts has found that the states that criminalize pregnant people consuming alcohol largely overlap with states restricting abortion.

“Anti-abortion laws have always opened up the potential for greater surveillance, policing, and punishment of pregnant people. We see that in the way that miscarriage is policed, the way that substance use during pregnancy is increasingly policed, in the way that people have been punished for this, under a range of laws that have nothing to do with abortion,” explains Dr. Gretchen Sisson, sociologist at the University of California at San Francisco, and the author of Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood.

As Roberts explains, many of the policies that target pregnant people who drink also target those who consume other substances. These policies have deep roots, often dating back to the “war on drugs,” and, more specifically, the racist “crack baby” scare in the 1980s and 1990s. Media outlets of that era often presented sensationalist narratives that babies born to mothers using crack cocaine would be born with brain damage and overwhelm welfare systems, leading to a widespread targeting and policing of Black pregnant people, in particular. These policies were often ignored or brushed aside by mainstream pro-choice, often white-led organizing groups at the time, without the foresight of recognizing that this very same positioning of fetuses as people would be used to dismantle abortion access in the years to come. “There is a racist history to this, an ableist history to this, and a classist history to this, that these issues weren’t considered ‘mainstream’ abortion rights or reproductive rights issues,” explains Dana Sussman, the vice president of Pregnancy Justice.

Today, Roberts’s research has found that Black mothers are still excessively targeted by “total welfare reporting,” or laws that require physicians to report pregnant patients to Child Protective Services if alcohol consumption is suspected. This reporting is linked to an increase in adverse effects for Black women and babies, despite the “pro-family” rhetoric behind them. Similarly, Black women are more likely to face restricted abortion access and be targeted by pregnancy-related (and abortion-related) criminal prosecutions.

Pregnancy Justice is a New York–based organization that represents people charged with pregnancy-related crimes, the vast majority of which involve allegations of substance use. For Sussman, the intersections of pro-choice organizing and organizing around FASD and prenatal exposure to substances are clear: “We are all fighting for people to get health care,” she explains. For her organization, the idea of fetal personhood is the product of a shared ideology of control and coercion, linking restricted abortion access and the criminalization of pregnant people. “If your Supreme Court is interpreting your statutes around children to include embryos and fetuses, then how does that work with abortion?”

Many of the clients of Pregnancy Justice under criminal investigation were reported or “found out” when seeking health care, including support for substance use disorders. Where mothers sought support for alcohol or substance use disorders, they found credible, legal threats against them under the guise of child protection policies. “We know that when you put people at risk of losing their children, either children already born or future children, or at risk of losing their liberty because they have a substance use disorder, whether it be alcohol or drugs, they will not get care, and outcomes will be worse for everyone—both mom and baby,” says Sussman.

Advocacy groups for research and funding toward FASD acknowledge and condemn the criminalization of pregnant people consuming alcohol, with one organization, which requested to remain unnamed so as not to put its research at risk, reiterating that the punitive policies only prevent mothers from seeking help and add to the stigma of both mothers and children with FASD, undermining the principles of disability justice for which the movement is often fighting.

At the same time, organizations dedicated to FASD appear to be in an uncomfortable position: Lawmakers supportive of funding and various supportive policies around FASD are not always advocates for struggling pregnant people or for reproductive justice. The FASD Respect Act, a 2025 bill that brought in waves of funding for FASD-related research and programming, for instance, was passed across party lines, with co-sponsorship from Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas, rated an A+ by Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America because he’s “voted to consistently protect the lives of the unborn,” and Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, who describes himself as a “staunch advocate for life.”

Many children diagnosed with FASD are adopted. “Children with special needs are more likely to be adopted because if you have a family that is low-resourced who doesn’t feel equipped to care for a child with special needs, they’re more likely to relinquish; and if you have a mother who is engaged in alcohol use at high levels, she’s more likely to be subject to family policing and child removal,” explains Sisson.

Anti-abortion, pro-FASD-funding lawmakers appear to see adoption as a fundable, moral alternative to abortion, creating a contradictory overlap between the two movements—all while refusing to acknowledge the harmful ramifications of their policies. “There is definitely a pro-adoption thread within the disability community, and I think it is particularly pronounced in cases where disability is attributed to maternal actions during pregnancy, because then [it’s] even more about how adoption can be about saviorism,” Sisson remarks. This overlap also creates an apparent nervousness within FASD organizations to engage with pro-choice movements, reproductive rights organizing, or even the word feminism, for fear of having these lawmakers turn their back on them.

The anti-abortion movement, despite many members labeling themselves as supportive of FASD research funding and programs for those with FASD and their families, seeks a framework that treats fetuses with FASD as the victims of crime—and the mothers as perpetrators. At a lawmaking level, this only propagates extreme stigma against both mothers and babies with FASD and prevents families from seeking help for substance use disorders and for disability support.

Laced with saviorism and the desire to police both disability and pregnancy, the anti-abortion underpinning of pregnancy-related laws and prosecution hinders proactive and effective FASD-related support, resulting only in the targeting of pregnant patients, and not in the protection of children or mothers. On the flip side, for organizers working to support disabled people, abortion rights, and mothers targeted by pregnancy-related prosecutions, reproductive rights and policies on prenatal substance exposure are inseparable: The dismantling of fetal personhood ideologies is critical to the underpinning of both abortion rights advocacy and policies that effectively support mothers and babies, as well as reversing the Trojan horse the anti-abortion camp has been building for decades.

The Supreme Court did something extraordinary on Thursday night: It refused to help the state of Alabama carry out an execution. Since the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy in 2018, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has almost never intervened in capital cases on defendants’ behalf. The justices have even overridden lower courts’ stays so that executions could take place on the state’s preferred schedule, even in cases where serious constitutional issues were at stake.

But in Lovelace v. Lee, the court declined to step in at Alabama’s request. The case is important for three reasons. First and foremost, it appears to be the first successful constitutional challenge to a specific execution method since the Eighth Amendment’s ratification in 1791. Jeffrey Lee, a death-row prisoner who was convicted of killing two people in 1998, filed a federal lawsuit last year to challenge Alabama’s plan to execute him via nitrogen hypoxia. Alabama adopted the new method in 2018; Lee argues that it would violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Nitrogen-hypoxia executions are fairly simple in theory. Earth’s atmosphere is roughly 78 percent nitrogen and 20 percent oxygen, with trace elements rounding out the remaining 2 percent. Humans have evolved to breathe large amounts of nitrogen, and we can do so indefinitely as long as some oxygen is present. Alabama’s plan is to simply subtract the oxygen—or, more accurately, to place a mask over Lee’s face so that he only breathes pure nitrogen until he dies.

The state has already killed seven death-row prisoners by this method; Louisiana also executed a man via nitrogen hypoxia last year. Three other states have authorized the method. Proponents describe it as relatively simple and largely painless, even compared to lethal injection. Justice Sonia Sotomayor described it differently in a dissenting opinion last year:

Take out your phone, go to the clock app, and find the stopwatch. Click start. Now watch the seconds as they climb. Three seconds come and go in a blink. At the thirty-second mark, your mind starts to wander. One minute passes, and you begin to think that this is taking a long time. Two … three.… The clock ticks on. Then, finally, you make it to four minutes. Hit stop.

Now imagine for that entire time, you are suffocating. You want to breathe; you have to breathe. But you are strapped to a gurney with a mask on your face pumping your lungs with nitrogen gas. Your mind knows that the gas will kill you. But your body keeps telling you to breathe.

Sotomayor said that the death-row prisoner in that case would “immediately convulse,” “gasp for air,” and “thrash violently against the restraints holding him in place as he experiences this intense psychological torment until he finally loses consciousness” before finally dying about 15 to 20 minutes later. The justice’s description also assumes that everything goes as planned. Unsurprisingly, Lee asked the court to let him be executed by firing squad instead, which can be virtually instantaneous when done correctly.

A federal district court judge in Alabama rejected those claims, citing the high threshold for execution-method challenges laid out by the Supreme Court in the 2015 case Glossip v. Gross. (More on that later.) The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that ruling and instead found that there would be a “substantial risk of serious harm,” then asked the district court to consider whether Lee’s firing squad recommendation would be viable. The district court concluded that it would be and entered judgment in Lee’s favor.

In its appeal to the justices, Alabama claimed that the ruling amounted to “the first-ever permanent ban on a legislatively enacted method” in American history. The Supreme Court itself has never explicitly held a specific method of execution to be unconstitutional. Though the justices have suggested in passing that the Eighth Amendment forbids certain medieval methods of execution, such as breaking someone on a wheel or burning them as the stake, the high court has never before compelled a state to abandon its preferred option.

Instead, execution methods have changed over the years largely due to public pressure and criticism. Hanging was the most common method of execution in the nineteenth century, but it was often administered by unskilled amateurs. A competent hangman would ensure that the prisoner’s neck snapped at the first drop. More common outcomes were grisly scenes of strangulation or, in rare cases, decapitation.

By the early twentieth century, states began to experiment with alternatives. New York carried out the first execution by electric chair in 1890 after the Supreme Court rejected the prisoner’s Eighth Amendment challenge. Electrocution was billed as a more scientific and humane method of execution in the early 1910s, but the reality was far more grim. In the late 1990s, the state of Florida carried out multiple executions with an unreliable electric chair, including at least one where a prisoner’s head burst into flames.

After the Supreme Court agreed to hear an Eighth Amendment challenge to Florida’s use of electrocution, Governor Jeb Bush called a special session of the state legislature to switch to lethal injection. A three-drug cocktail developed by an Oklahoma medical examiner in the 1970s soon became the most widely used method of killing death-row prisoners in the late twentieth century. This form of lethal injection was explicitly sanctioned by the Supreme Court in the 2008 case Baze v. Rees.

Things fell apart a few years later. The European Union imposed an embargo on drugs for executions in the United States in 2011 amid pressure from death penalty abolitionist groups. Many pharmaceutical companies had already largely cut off the flow in previous years. With no U.S.-based manufacturers of certain key drugs, death penalty states began to rely on unfamiliar chemical cocktails. This haphazard improvisation led to a series of botched executions in the mid-2010s, including one in Arizona in 2015 where a prisoner survived for almost two hours while gasping for air after the injections.

The Supreme Court ultimately heard a challenge to Oklahoma’s use of the controversial sedative midazolam in the 2015 case Glossip v. Gross. It was not as receptive to the Eighth Amendment argument as abolitionists had hoped. At oral arguments, Justice Samuel Alito asked whether it was “appropriate for the judiciary to countenance what amounts to a guerrilla war against the death penalty,” which had “reduced” states to using less reliable drugs like midazolam. That hostile mindset was reflected in the court’s final opinion, which Alito wrote.

In the U.S. constitutional order, the government has powers and the people have rights. When the former conflicts with the latter, the latter must generally prevail unless the government has an exceedingly good reason for doing something. The government’s mere desire to enact a preferred policy is typically not enough to overcome a person’s constitutional rights.

Alito apparently disagrees. In Glossip, he subordinated a prisoner’s right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment to the state’s desire to kill prisoners. Because the death penalty is constitutional, he reasoned, “there must be a constitutional means of carrying it out.” Alito borrowed this flawed reasoning from Chief Justice John Roberts, who first expressed it in his three-justice plurality opinion in Baze. Glossip marked the first time that a majority of the court embraced it.

In his own concurrence in Baze, Alito had warned that the court “should not produce a de facto ban on capital punishment by adopting method-of-execution rules that lead to litigation gridlock.” In Glossip, he turned that policy preference into constitutional law. To win the “guerrilla war,” Alito also required death-row prisoners to provide courts with a “substantially” less painful alternative method to be killed when challenging a state’s chosen option on Eighth Amendment grounds in the future.

That requirement also came from Roberts’s plurality opinion in Baze, where the chief justice laid out a hard-to-overcome standard for challenges to execution methods. “To qualify, the alternative procedure must be feasible, readily implemented, and in fact significantly reduce a substantial risk of severe pain,” Roberts wrote. Showing marginal improvements in safety weren’t enough. Only then would a state’s refusal to adopt the alternative method be sufficient to suspect a desire to inflict cruel and unusual punishment.

This is a threshold plainly designed to produce a specific outcome: Leave constitutional challenges theoretically intact, but make it effectively impossible for them to succeed. You can see echoes of this approach in later decisions written by Alito. Earlier this month in Louisiana v. Callais, for example, the conservative justices erased the last vestiges of the Voting Rights Act by imposing bespoke hurdles. In effect, they elevated a state’s interest in partisan gerrymandering—a fig leaf in some states for eradicating Black electoral influence—above the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

Alito even required VRA plaintiffs to produce maps to achieve a state’s stated redistricting goals when they accuse that state of racial gerrymandering, echoing his earlier demand in Glossip for death-row prisoners to describe their preferred way to die when challenging an execution method. There is something deeply unseemly about the Supreme Court forcing litigants to argue against their own interests if they wish to defend their constitutional rights. It smacks of deterrence by humiliation.

Moreover, this case was procedurally irregular, to say the least. The Supreme Court’s shadow docket typically works by hearing arguments for interim relief. (Justice Brett Kavanaugh has even argued that it should be called the interim docket.) In other words, the court’s shadow-docket rulings almost always involve preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders. Final judgments by lower courts are generally resolved by the court’s merits docket—which until 10 years ago was just “the docket.”

Alabama’s challenge was different. Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor and expert on the shadow docket, warned the justices in a friend-of-the-court brief that the state was asking for something more significant this time. “Alabama’s application wears the familiar costume of a ‘state-on-top’ death penalty application—where a State asks this Court to vacate a lower court’s temporary stay so that an execution may proceed,” he wrote.

“But the relief it actually seeks is far more extraordinary—the evisceration of a federal court’s final equitable judgment,” Vladeck continued. The Supreme Court has a long history and well-established set of precedents for handling last-minute appeals from death-row prisoners. Indeed, until the mid-2010s, that was the most significant work it performed on what we now describe as the shadow docket. Since Alabama was asking the court to “effectively set aside a final judgment on the merits,” Vladeck explained, it was really asking for summary reversal, which the court handles through its normal petition-for-certiorari process.

The justices did not explain the reasoning for their decision in Thursday’s order. Alabama’s procedural misstep is significant enough, however, that it would not surprise me if the six justices who voted to deny the state’s request did so entirely for the reasons Vladeck described, regardless of their thoughts on the underlying merits of the lower courts’ rulings. Since the justices didn’t explain themselves, however, that would be only speculation on my part.

You might wonder why I spent so much time describing execution methods if this is simply a procedural outcome. I admit that the court may ultimately overturn the district court’s ruling on the merits docket; that too would not surprise me given the court’s post-Kennedy approach to capital punishment. Surely there is another bespoke rule that they could craft to ensure that the state of Alabama can kill people without hindrance that would not repeal the Eighth Amendment altogether.

But that brings me to the third and final thing that’s revealing about this case: Three justices still would have sided with Alabama. Alito, along with Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, indicated in the court’s order that they would have granted Alabama’s motion to stay the lower court ruling. Since we’re talking about an execution here, that is also effectively a judgment on the merits—Jeffrey Lee could hardly retain counsel or continue appeals from beyond the grave.

As I’ve noted before, the Roberts court is almost institutionally hostile to death-row prisoners. It treats the capital-defense bar as almost inherently suspect, as evidenced by Alito’s affront to the “guerrilla war” that death penalty opponents once waged. Again, nobody wrote any opinions in this matter so we can’t say for sure why they voted the way that they did.

That doesn’t stop us from drawing some reasonable inferences. For Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, their skepticism of death-row inmates has limits and Alabama’s plea to suffocate this particular prisoner to death apparently found them. For the court’s other three conservative justices, there appears to be almost nothing that they are willing to prioritize over a state’s desire to kill someone.

The White House UFC tournament’s biggest problem might be just a few millimeters in size.

The UFC is hosting its America 250 celebration on Sunday, June 14—Donald Trump’s 80th birthday and Flag Day—on the White House’s South Lawn. But in an unexpected turn of events, bugs are likely to be the major opponent during the executive mansion’s first ever cage match.

University of Maryland entomologist Michael Raupp told Axios Friday that the odds of a winged invasion during Sunday’s festivities was 100 percent.

“This event is going to draw a big crowd,” Raupp said. “But guess what? There are going to be even more bugs joining.”

The swarm will include midges, mayflies, stoneflies, caddisflies, winged beetles, “a whole cadre of night-flying moths,” mosquitos, and possibly biting black flies. The buzz will also serve as a banquet for bats that feed on small, flying insects.

The unfortunate reality of the grounds has not been lost on UFC President Dana White, who told Boardroom that he had encountered a “holy shit” level of gnats during a visit last month to the White House’s recently renovated Rose Garden (an artifact of Jackie Onassis’s gentle touch that Trump has since paved with concrete).

“The amount of gnats that were flying around, I’m like, ‘Holy shit’,” White said.

“As soon as I got on the plane, I called my head of production and said, ‘Let me tell you about the gnat situation.’”

Fighters in the octagon will be lit by an enormous, five-ton lighting rig that includes more than 175 square feet of LED lighting—a setup that White observed would be the perfect magnet for all sorts of flying insects.

Beyond that, the bugs could cause a sticky problem between fighters. “In your nose, in your mouth while you’re trying to fight,” White noted while lamenting the complicated nature of outdoor events. He added that his team was considering installing large fans around the cage to keep the bugs away from the action. Those in attendance, however, are unlikely to find similar reprieve.

Mother Nature has other challenges in store for Trump’s birthday bash, as well. Washington is expected to be hot and muggy this weekend, with possible thunderstorms on Sunday evening that could affect the 8 p.m. main card.

White has told reporters that the show will go on, no matter if there’s rain, snow, or “even lightning.”

“You guys all played sports when you were growing up,” White said Wednesday. “Whenever there was lightning, you’d sit the lightning out. When it was over, you played. That’s what we’ll do.”

The Trump administration came incredibly close to putting boots on the ground in Iran to seize enriched uranium, according to reporting from CNN.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine was briefed on the plan last month before briefing President Trump himself. But Trump apparently put the plan on hold given the high potential for U.S. casualties and increased Iranian aggression—a massive risk for his political standing in the midst of a widely unpopular war.

“It would be insanely difficult to fish through those tunnels and all the barrels,” an anonymous source told CNN. “We’d have to set up a massive presence. Essentially, we’d have to invade.”

An invasion would most certainly ensure an Iranian response, either economically—through the continued closing of the Strait of Hormuz—or militarily, by continuing to attack U.S. allies in the region, like Israel and the UAE.

Senate Republicans on Thursday shot down efforts to keep federal troops from getting involved in federal elections.

Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee first killed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, proposed by Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin, that would have prohibited using Pentagon funds to deploy the military to seize ballots, voting machines, voter rolls, or any other election materials. The NDAA is the fiscal year’s main funding bill for the military.

After that effort failed, Slotkin proposed another amendment that would have required the Pentagon to notify Congress if troops were deployed to polling places for any reason other than repelling “armed enemies of the United States.” But even that was too much for Republicans on the committee.

“I introduced these amendments to protect our free and fair elections from military interference,” Slotkin told MS NOW. “It’s deeply concerning that none of my Republican colleagues on the committee voted to include it.”

Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal agreed, calling the committee’s party-line votes a worrying sign for November’s midterm elections.

“Republican opposition to barring use of federal troops at the polls is deeply alarming, signaling this extreme step is part of Trump’s agenda to suppress voting,” Blumenthal said. “I’m fearful about it portending illegal domestic deployment of our military.”

Last year, Slotkin was among several Democratic members of Congress who urged members of the military not to follow illegal orders from the Trump administration, and she said that her amendments included language reaffirming that.

“I introduced these amendments to protect our free and fair elections from military interference and intimidation, and importantly, to protect the military and service members from the exact kind of illegal orders I warned about last year,” Slotkin said to MS NOW.

President Trump always claims fraud whenever Republicans don’t perform well in an election, and his allies in the Senate don’t seem willing to check his worst impulses. Refusing to pass what would seem to be obvious affirmations of existing laws suggests that these Republicans would let Trump use the military to overturn elections if he wants.

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

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

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

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

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

Via @DCNewsNow pic.twitter.com/2gjJnoj5zW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yep.”

“Do you think he understands?”

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

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

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

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 12, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This story has been updated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Blue Georgia (@BlueGeorgia) June 12, 2026

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