Trump’s G7 Grump-a-Thon

by Andrew Egger

We’ve been writing for months about the no-win bind Donald Trump is in as he struggles to end his misfired war in Iran. But even if you hadn’t read a word of that—even, in fact, if you entered a coma in mid-February and are just returning to your senses now—Trump’s defeated, furious speech at the G7 conference yesterday would have done a lot to bring you up to speed.

Although the president spoke in his usual meandering, free-associating, self-aggrandizing way, the throughline of his argument was unusually straightforward. Its basic thrust: Iran hawks who hate his deal need to shut up and cut him some slack, because failing to strike a deal now would have tipped the economy into global disaster. (Have you even said ‘thank you’ once?)

“The one thing I didn’t want to see was economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened,” Trump said. Oil reserves around the world, he suggested, would have been drawn down to critical levels in about four more weeks, and the pain that followed that would have dwarfed what we’ve seen until now. What did you idiots want—for Trump to get blamed for another depression?

“You know, I’ve studied presidents,” Trump said. “The one president I did not want to be was the late great Herbert Hoover. . . . Rather than possibly going into a depression, rather than having your favorite president be Herbert Hoover, we made this deal.”

Even as he tried to focus on selling the supposed pros of the deal, Trump kept getting sidetracked over to what he really wanted to talk about: His grievances with the war hawks in conservative media who have been castigating him as letting Iran off easy. “Some people,” he called them, “some writers that I thought were friends of mine, but I don’t want them as friends anymore, because they’re either stupid or they’re bad people.” At another point, they were “all these so-called geniuses who want to show me how smart they are.” He’s not mad! Don’t put it in the newspaper that he’s mad!

The countries of the G7, he said, are “thrilled that we made a deal, every one of them. There’s not one nation that came to us and said, ‘Please, sir, keep dropping bombs on them.’ Only stupid people say that.”

These people, he suggested, need to know when a negotiating cake is baked: “If we didn’t do this deal, we could have dropped more bombs for another three weeks, two weeks, four weeks, two years. You would never have the Hormuz Strait open. You would never have success.”

It was remarkable to watch Trump, in a fit of pure pique, get up and blab right out the basic realities of America’s terrible negotiating position that nobody in the administration has until now been willing to admit. The world was barreling toward global economic disaster thanks to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The aerial bombardment campaign had proven ultimately insufficient to shake any big new concessions out of the Iranian regime. In the end, despite America’s unquestioned military supremacy, it was Iran that held all the cards.

You do have to wonder what the Iran hawks—both in Israel and in America—thought was going to happen. In the opening days of the war, these hawks rapturously convinced themselves that Trump had really been one of them all along: willing to get the bit in his teeth and really get after Iran in a way no other president had been willing to do. As it turns out, Trump was more willing to push the big red “Bomb Iran” button on the Resolute Desk not because he was more fearless than past presidents but because he’d given less thought to the obvious costs that would follow. Now that those costs have presented themselves to him, Trump is chickening out—and if you think that means he’s courting geopolitical disaster, he’s adding you to his “fake friends” list.

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Donald J. Hoover

by William Kristol

As Andrew notes, President Trump brought up his long-ago predecessor Herbert Hoover not once but twice in his remarks at the end of the G7 meeting in France yesterday. The references to Hoover were revealing. For all that Trump wanted to pretend his new Iran deal was a good one that he negotiated from a position of strength, Trump was inadvertently acknowledging the opposite: He believed he needed a deal, any deal, because of the possibility of a global economic collapse due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. In other words, Iran was winning, and Trump cried “uncle.”

Here’s Trump yesterday:

And you know, I’ve studied presidents, some good, some bad, some great, not too many are great, and some really bad. We had one just recently. And the one president I did not want to be was the late great Herbert Hoover. I didn’t want that and who knows what would have happened. But bad things happen. . . . The one I always thought of, Herbert Hoover, and he caused it. . . . And he caused the Great Depression.

Even before he started the war with Iran, Trump feared winding up with a reputation like Jimmy Carter’s. But then he discovered a legacy perhaps even less desirable—Herbert Hoover’s. He thought the Iranian regime had him over a barrel, not because of a hostage crisis but with the threat of global economic disaster. And so he capitulated.

I don’t know if Trump was right that we were on the verge of a global depression. But the fact that Trump thought we might be is notable. It allows the rest of us to bring home this simple fact: We arrived at such a dangerous moment because of a war Trump chose, a war Trump started.

Of course, the peace deal is no guarantee we won’t in fact slide into a recession. Iran’s new control of the strait, along with the demonstration of American weakness before the whole world, increases global uncertainty and risk going forward, and therefore increases the chances of a downturn.

So Democrats need to hammer the message home: The economy is bad. It was already bad due to Trump’s policies. Thanks to his tariffs, the economy was already weak. Under his budget, the federal deficit and the cost of servicing it have risen to an all-time high. Under his policies—enacted by a Republican Congress—the rich have gotten richer, but most Americans have been losing ground. Under his Fed chair, inflation and interest rates are going up. His failed war has made all of this worse. And it could well get worse yet.

Trump fears being a new Hoover. Democrats have no control over whether his economic policies will in fact be as disastrous as Hoover’s. But they can do their best to make Trump as electorally calamitous as Hoover. Republicans lost eight Senate seats and 52 House seats in the 1930 midterm election, and were then crushed in the presidential election of 1932. It’s a good precedent. We should thank Trump for suggesting it.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Is the Trump Administration Slow-Walking DACA to Death? USCIS doesn’t have to deny applications to derail lives—it can just stop deciding in a timely manner, writes DARA LIND.

• How to Resist Trump’s Weaponized DOJ… The latest in the crosshairs, Gavin Newsom, shows ways we can stand up to intimidation and defend the rule of law, observes KIM WEHLE.

• How to Keep Loving America… Even when it hurts, advises MONA CHAREN.

• Stephen Miller and JD Vance Wanted to Suspend Habeas Corpus… On The Illegal News, LEAH LITMAN joins SARAH LONGWELL to talk about the White House’s plan to suspend habeas corpus.

Quick Hits

LOTS OF LEASH FOR WARSH: Donald Trump wants federal interest rates lowered, and he spent years lambasting former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell1 for not bringing them down quickly enough for his satisfaction. But yesterday, Trump sounded a different tune about Powell’s successor, Kevin Warsh—even though Warsh, at his first Fed meeting this week, kept rates steady while signaling hikes will likely follow.

“We have a very good guy over there now,” Trump told reporters of Warsh at the G7 meeting. “So I’m guided by what he wants.”

It’s anyone’s guess how long Trump’s patience with Warsh will last. But for now, it’s a relief for the Fed chair, who, thanks to higher inflation caused by Trump’s war with Iran, would be crazy to cut rates now.

BRUSHING OFF ATROCITIES: Trump did more than just make excuses for losing his shirt to Iran and rage at his hawkish critics in his G7 speech yesterday. He also brushed aside questions about who bore responsibility for the deadly strike on an Iranian girl’s school in the opening salvo of the conflict: “Mistakes are made. War is nasty. . . . Nobody did that on purpose.” Here’s more from the New York Times:

Privately, U.S. military officials have acknowledged American forces carried out the strikes and cast them as an intelligence failure. The school was located near a base used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Navy, and the school’s exact site had originally been part of the base.

Those officials said that an internal investigation found that the military’s personnel in charge of choosing targets were using imagery that had not been updated in seven years. That imagery, they said, did not show a school next to the base. At least two people involved in the military’s assessment of the site, however, had been aware that a building on the base appeared to have been converted into a school.

That assessment did not make it to officials in charge of targeting, and intelligence and military officials continued to classify the site as a legitimate target for bombing. Dozens of students were killed in the first strike on the school. Dozens more were killed after a second strike.

The incident, Trump added, was still under internal investigation. Though it looks like some lawmakers are ready to start forcing the issue. Politico reports that Senators are looking to withhold some of Pete Hegseth’s travel budget unless the defense secretary turns over details about what happened with the school strike in Iran.

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Trump’s actual motivation couldn’t be plainer: The Senate was moving so quickly he was in danger of never getting to install hatchet man Bill Pulte as acting DNI at all. By gumming up his own nominee’s confirmation process, Trump ensures Pulte will take the reins at least for a bit. For totally benign reasons, we are sure. Happy Wednesday.

Mark Hertling and Ben Parker welcome back special guest Tom Nichols to Command Post today at 10:30 a.m. EDT. Tune in on Substack or YouTube.

It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green

by Andrew Egger

Of all Donald Trump’s little D.C. hobby projects that have caused scandal this year, the snit over his renovation of the National Mall’s reflecting pool has been the one I’ve cared about the least. But you’d need a heart of stone not to laugh at the snags they’re hitting this week: After months of castigating the “filthy, dirty” pool as a symbol of failed Democratic leadership (“Sleepy Joe doesn’t know what ‘CLEAN’ or proper maintenance is!”), and just days after the White House declared the mission of cleaning it up accomplished, the reflecting pool is once again resolutely algae-green.

National Park Service teams could be seen scurrying around Monday and Tuesday, brandishing pool skimmers and gallon jugs of 12 percent hydrogen peroxide solution in a ferocious attempt to restore the pool to its “American flag blue” glory. Hey, look on the bright side: It might not be quite what Trump wanted for the Fourth of July, but it’ll work great next year for St. Patrick’s Day!

It doesn’t really matter, of course—how much algae the duck pond on the mall contains is way, way down the list of important national concerns. But the boondoggle is such a striking metaphor for the failures of Trump’s second term that it’s worth taking at least a minute to soak in.

Here is how the president has approached basically all problems since retaking office last year:

• Step 1: Announce your intent to solve some longstanding problem, like America’s trade deficit,1 or Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon, or the national debt, or an algae-ridden reflecting pool.

• Step 2: Ignore all logistical challenges that made the problem difficult in the first place; proclaim confidently that the only reason previous attempts to solve them failed is because your predecessors were giant idiots.

• Step 3: Try to solve the problem via the first idea you think of.

• Step 4: Fail spectacularly and immediately.

It’s amazing how many times, in just a year and a half, Trump has followed this precise script.

How to fix the American economy? Simple: Throw a million tariffs on it. “For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped, and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike,” Trump thundered on “Liberation Day” in April 2025. “I don’t blame these other countries at all for this calamity. I blame former presidents and past leaders who weren’t doing their job.” He then spent months in a fever dream of tariff negotiations and renegotiations, setting and resetting rates with mad abandon and whipping the economy around like a rag doll, until the Supreme Court declared the whole mess unconstitutional earlier this year.

How to tackle the national debt? Simple: Just throw open the government books to some smart tech guys and let them figure out what to cut. Trump and Elon Musk, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said last February, were doing “the exact same things that Democrat politicians promised the American people they would do for decades. President Trump is just the first president in our lifetimes to actually do it.” Musk then spent a few months rampaging through the government tearing the wiring out of the walls; a project that did major damage to vulnerable populations around the world and U.S. science research but made no appreciable dent in federal spending.

How to bring Iran’s mullahs to heel? Simple: Bomb the hell out of the country until they give you everything you want. “For 47 years, no president was willing to do what I’m doing, and they should have done it a long time ago,” Trump said of his war on Iran back in March. He then spent months watching economic pain pile up in America and waiting in vain for the Iranian capitulation to come, before finally getting sick of the thing and throwing in the towel this week.

It’s happened over and over again. And yet there’s a special pathos to seeing the same pattern play out in the reflecting pool specifically. Maybe it’s just the striking visual—it’s such a beautiful green! Or maybe it’s just the fact that, in this case, the fight Trump is losing happens to be one against a single-celled organism.

Each time this happens, Trump and Co. are compelled to deal with a certain amount of strain in the base. It’s not easy these days being the sort of Trump supporter who rushes in to trumpet every one of his actions as a masterstroke; he tends to leave you with a certain amount of rhetorical cleanup to do.

Here, too, the reflecting pool has provided a rich vein. A reporter Fox News sent to scope it out went viral this week for his dogged insistence all was going according to plan: “I’m here at the newly renovated reflecting pool,” he said. “It’s painted American flag blue.” He then turned to the obviously green water behind him: “The Democrats are gonna tell you, ‘Oh, there’s green algae, it looks so bad.’ But there’s pool guys cleaning it up right now. No other president would do that.”

And you know, in a certain sense, I guess he’s right.

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If you haven’t seen our own Brendan Hartnett report from the reflecting pool, with a couple water bottles full of the green goo, check it out here.

Trump Is on the Side of the Iranian Regime

by William Kristol

Having lost the war in Iran, President Trump now wants us all to move on: “We were focused on Iran. That’s going to be in the back, in the rearview mirror.”

To which our response should be: Forget it.

Donald Trump launched and carried out this reckless and foolish war. It was his decision, his choice. His war has had real human costs and substantial economic costs for this nation and for the world. And our defeat will have very real and substantial geopolitical and strategic consequences. These are all Trump’s responsibility, and the responsibility of his Republican party, which voted over and over again in Congress to support his war. It is proper to hang both the war and the defeat around all their necks. And it is right to remind voters that one reason to elect a Democratic Congress in 2027 and 2028 is to stop, or at least impede, Trump from doing similarly irresponsible and dangerous things over the next two years.

We should also remind Americans that Trump’s Iran war is not just a geopolitical defeat. It is also a moral failure.

As Elliott Abrams points out:

The American agreement with Iran completely abandons the Iranian people.

In December and January, Iranians took to the streets again in huge numbers . . . This was a major challenge to the regime. It responded with mass murder . . .

In response, President Trump posted on Truth Social, “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!! Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price. I have cancelled all meetings with Iranian Officials until the senseless killing of protesters STOPS. HELP IS ON ITS WAY!!!”

But the deal that the United States has now entered with Iran abandons that position and the Iranian people. . . . On Sunday, in an interview announcing the deal with the regime, Trump said, “As far as regime change, I never cared about regime change. This is the third group we’ve dealt with, and this is the most rational group yet.”

Yesterday at the G7 meeting in France, Trump went even further in the direction of sucking up to the murderers of the Iranian people: “We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people. They are nice to deal with. They are strong people, smart people. . . . They’re, you know, looking to help their country.”

So Trump has not just lost a war to the Iranian regime. He has now become an apologist for it. He was defeated by terror-sponsoring murderous rulers, and now he is apologizing for them. His strategic collapse has been accompanied by moral collapse.

If we were to let Donald Trump and his enablers put all this in the rearview mirror, if there is to be no memory and no accountability for what has been done, then it wouldn’t be just Trump’s collapse. It would be a moral and political collapse on our part, as well.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Get Ready for the Bari-fication of CNN… Even as her controversial makeover of CBS continues, reports suggest she has her sights on the biggest name in cable news, writes CATHY YOUNG.

• There’s ‘No Excuse’ for John Bolton… GABRIEL SCHOENFELD revisits the charges against the former national security advisor as he reportedly prepares to plead guilty.

• This Land Is Your Land? This Land Is My Land… The American Revolution began as a land grab. Our politics still revolve around the same hunger, argues MICHAEL ALBERTUS.

• The Vice President Is Looking Pretty Stupid… SAM FORSTAG and MICHAEL WEISS join TIM MILLER on the flagship pod to break down why JD Vance has been set up to sell the Iran “deal.”

Quick Hits

IRAN’S PERMANENT LEVERAGE: If leaks about the content of the Trump administration’s memorandum of understanding with Iran are correct, Iran’s clerical regime will be making out like bandits in exchange for a face-saving end to the war for Donald Trump. But they may not be willing to keep the peace for long. That’s because we’ve handed them a remarkably powerful new geopolitical weapon: Iran knows it can now close the Strait of Hormuz at will. CNN reports that the U.S. intelligence community shares this assessment:

Regardless of the framework agreement that is due to be formally signed on Friday to open the key waterway as a prelude to nuclear talks, Iran proved it can shut off access to the strait during the current conflict and US intelligence assessments suggest that could happen again.

“We have now handed Iran de facto control over the strait—a weapon more powerful than any nuke,” one of the sources familiar with the US intelligence assessments told CNN, emphasizing how the war has fundamentally altered Tehran’s thinking about leveraging similar tactics in the future.

Iran has similarly learned it can leverage targeted strikes against the energy infrastructure of Gulf countries as an asymmetric capability after doing so to great effect during the war, another tool it can use to its advantage going forward, a second source familiar with the assessments said.

Surprising? No. Grim? Extremely. Read the whole thing.

CHARM RE-OFFENSIVE: Europe spent 2025 mercilessly buttering up Donald Trump, a strategy that appeared to blow up in the early days of the Iran war: When allies failed to rush immediately into Trump’s attack on Iran, a furious president made some of his loudest anti-NATO spluttering yet. But with that war apparently behind us at this week’s G7 conference, Europe is back to the charm offensive again. Here’s the New York Times:

Europe’s alliance with the United States may still be on the rocks, but on the first full day of a Group of 7 summit meeting at this Alpine spa town in France, the leaders showed they remained ready to behave politely toward Mr. Trump.

For all the sharp elbows of the last year, they appear to have concluded that the best way to deal with a disruptive president is to court him, particularly since they still hope to engage the United States on thorny issues like the war in Ukraine.

“We’re on the same team,” Mr. Merz said of the president on social media, wishing him a belated happy 80th birthday.

How nice is that? Kumbaya, at least until the next threat to invade Greenland arrives. Read the whole thing.

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“Multiple project summaries provided to the White House by Clark Construction show that internal cost estimates have been significantly higher than administration officials have acknowledged in public comments or court filings,” WaPo writes. “They also show that the work was projected to rely heavily on taxpayer dollars from the moment it was announced.” Knock us over with a feather. Happy Tuesday.

Join Bill and Andrew on Substack and YouTube for Morning Shots Live today at 10 a.m. EDT today.

Trump’s Arrested Agenda

by Andrew Egger

Donald Trump is, above all, a showman. While he’s plainly slowing with age, he has certainly not lost his ability to deliver near-daily shocks with his attacks on good government, ethics, and taste. But the nature of those shocks has been changing lately. More and more, they’ve seemed calibrated to obscure a harsh truth: Not yet two years into Trump 2.0, the administration’s momentum has ground to a halt.

I’ve written about this slowdown before. But I was forcibly reminded of it yesterday while reading the latest piece of jaw-dropping reporting from the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, which pulled back the curtain on a secret internal White House fight from April of last year: Stephen Miller’s campaign to get Trump to suspend the right of habeas corpus for accused illegal immigrants.

The fight came at a time when the White House was charging ahead at max speed with its mass-deportation plans, with Miller and Trump hoping to deport millions in relatively short order. They’d already twisted America’s existing laws into pretzels to set the stage for those deportations, most notably by invoking the Alien Enemies Act. But they were still being slowed by individual migrants’ ability to bring their cases before a judge. Miller proposed: What if we simply took that away? It was “an opportunity for Mr. Trump not only to speed up deportations,” Haberman and Swan write, “but also to assert vastly expanded power over a legal system that was getting in his way.”

Ultimately, miraculously, cooler heads prevailed:1 Trump never pulled the trigger on trying to suspend the right for migrants.

Reading this report was a shocking experience for two reasons. First, obviously, are the merits—it’s insane that any White House would contemplate such measures in peacetime at all.2 But the piece also yanks the reader back to a time last year when pretty much everything was like this.

At this moment, months into his second term, Trump was hurtling forward on everything everywhere all at once. DOGE was ripping through the government, USAID was vanishing in a puff of smoke, “Liberation Day” tariffs were slamming into place, ICE was off the leash, planeloads of migrants were being shipped to an El Salvador torture prison, the National Guard was preparing to march into U.S. cities, suspected deep-staters were being purged from law enforcement and having their security clearances yanked, law firms and colleges were being strong-armed into submission, Trump was threatening to invade Greenland and the Panama Canal, and on and on.

This period of Trump’s furious maximalism seemed to die in Minneapolis early this year. It has stayed dead since. Instead, Trump has spent the first half of 2026 mostly just fighting to keep stuff from sliding away from him. Simply reauthorizing funding for ICE and the Border Patrol turned out to be an enormous, sweaty legislative lift. So was maintaining his tariff regime after the Supreme Court ruled huge portions of it unconstitutional. Ditto maintaining his government’s ability to conduct warrantless surveillance of foreigners—a typically uneventful legislative renewal Trump managed to capsize with his clownish appointment of hatchet man Bill Pulte to a top intelligence role. His top 2026 legislative priority, the elections grab-bag Save America Act, is a running joke that the Senate will never seriously consider. Other major initiatives, like the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund,” barely made it past the announcement stage before blowing up in the face of furious public opposition.

Increasingly, the things that have occupied Trump this year are the things that, last year, were just a sideshow to the major policy work. He has become obsessed with the minutiae of his self-aggrandizing monument building, from his Freedom250 birthday bash to the Kennedy Center to the East Wing Ballroom to the reflecting pool to his planned triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery.

And even that isn’t all going to plan: A judge’s order that his name come off the Kennedy Center has provoked a world-historical hissy fit, with Trump declaring the institution dead and installing an apparently permanent cover over the building’s facade rather than allowing it to be seen with his name removed.3

All this could change, of course. We are approaching the end of this chapter for the White House, a period dominated by the Iran war on the one hand and by Trump’s myopic focus on D.C. bric-a-brac ahead of the 250th anniversary of the country on the other. It’s far from impossible that Trump—his war concluded, his ICE re-funded, his White House UFC fights all brought to a satisfying conclusion—could seriously reapply himself to recapturing his god-emperor domestic-policy mojo. It’s safe to say that he intends to do this in at least one seriously chilling way: by monkeying with the upcoming 2026 and 2028 elections.

But for now, we should allow ourselves to take heart. It’s perfectly natural to remain outraged at Trump’s ongoing parade of obscenities: It’s not fun, exactly, to see him and his people squee and gibber while a bloodsport fighter hoots that “MICHELLE OBAMA IS A MAN!” from a fight cage erected preposterously on the White House lawn. But these circuses aren’t just intended to trigger the libs and titillate his base—they’re designed to distract both camps from how little the president is actually getting done these days. Compared to where we were last year, it’s a damn good start.

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On the Middle East and Minnesota

by William Kristol

Two brief comments today, first on the Iran deal, and then on one phrase in the New York Times article by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan that Andrew discusses above.

On Iran: Donald Trump’s deal is less than a week old, and it already isn’t aging well. Indeed, it’s increasingly obvious that it isn’t a real deal. It doesn’t seem to bind Iran to anything and as things move forward, whatever we were supposed to get out of it seems to be evaporating into thin air.

This New York Times headline is a nice illustration of the deal’s Wizard of Oz–like nature: “Iran Says Strait of Hormuz Won’t Have ‘Tolls’ but It Will Have ‘Fees.’”

So it turns out that the deal depends, in a Clintonian way, on what the definition of the word “tolls” is.

But to put too much emphasis on criticizing the deal can miss the point. The main problem isn’t that Trump didn’t negotiate effectively—though that’s also true. The problem is that he lost the war. Failed wars end in bad deals.

As one looks back on the last few months, it’s increasingly obvious that Trump was played by pretty much every country in the Middle East—from Israel and Saudi Arabia at the beginning of the war, to the UAE and Qatar and China during it, and at the end by Iran itself. Our second-rate con man encountered first rate-con artists, and, as is often the case, it’s the second rate-con men who turn out to be the biggest suckers.

We’ll stay with the Iran deal as we move through this week toward the planned signing of . . . something short and vague in Geneva on Friday. I actually wonder if even that will happen. I wouldn’t be surprised if Iran decided to jerk Trump around some more by finding reasons to postpone the signing. In any case, we’ll be following the depressing denouement of Trump’s failure.

Meanwhile, I want to add a note to Andrew’s excellent item by remarking on one phrase at the beginning of the penultimate paragraph of Haberman and Swan’s article that jumped out at me. Haberman and Swan describe a meeting at the end of January at which Trump basically decided to retreat from the threat of invoking the Insurrection Act. “The vice president and Mr. Miller were still searching for a reason to put federal troops on American streets,” the Times reports. But,

Under immense public pressure, the administration would subsequently take a different course of action. The most vocal immigration hard-liner, Gregory Bovino, the Customs and Border Protection commander-at-large, was removed from his post, and the administration held back on ICE pushes in cities in the weeks after Mr. Pretti’s death.

“Under immense public pressure.”

Public pressure matters. That pressure has come over the last year and a half in many forms and from many places. But the pressure in January came especially from the streets of Minneapolis. Looking back on the long arc of the second Trump administration’s decline, one can tend to assume it all had to happen as it did, and to forget moments of choice, to smooth over particular inflection points. But Minneapolis was key.

All honor to the people of Minneapolis, who, with the Trump administration at the height of its power and presumption, stood up against Trump and his army of goons, and who stood with their neighbors, for our country, and in defense of its principles.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• This Far-Right Thought Leader Is Embarrassingly Vacuous… Auron MacIntyre’s world is one of resentment, decline, and perpetual emergency, writes MATT MCMANUS.

• Trump’s Iran Deal Looks Worse Than Obama’s—And I’m Glad He Made It… Trump promised “total victory” and instead got a sixty-day ceasefire with uncertain nuclear talks ahead. It was still better than the alternatives, argues DANIEL B. SHAPIRO.

• Trump’s Weak, Sad, and Embarrassing Weekend… On the flagship pod, BILL KRISTOL joins TIM MILLER to discuss Donald Trump’s embarrassing birthday weekend.

Quick Hits

ANTHROPICGATE AGAIN: We crossed a major AI-development Rubicon over the weekend: For the first time, the U.S. government stepped in to essentially force an AI company to shut down its latest, most powerful model.

Once again, the company in hot water with Uncle Sam was Anthropic, creator of the AI platform Claude, which had already been beefing with the Trump administration over the government’s use of the company’s most advanced models. Anthropic’s latest model, Mythos, is purportedly so effective at breaking through cyber defenses that the company feared releasing it to the public; instead, it released a neutered version of Mythos called Fable to the public, while a small number of favored companies got access to Mythos itself. But the administration decided that wasn’t going far enough. On Friday, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick ordered Anthropic not to allow any foreign person, including employees of Anthropic itself, to access either Fable or Mythos. With no way of screening people en masse, Anthropic was forced to pull the product altogether.

This is a huge story without obvious right answers: The administration may have been perfectly justified in slamming the brakes on Mythos, or it may have been a matter of overreach against a company they already distrust. Either way, as one person familiar told Axios, one thing is clear: “This is a de-facto licensing regime. Companies will not screw with the White House. That is the ultimate effect.”

DODGING PULTE?: There’s a way for Democrats to keep Bill Pulte out as acting director of national intelligence after all—but they may not like it. Per President Trump, Pulte is slated to take over the job this Friday, June 19. But with Trump having announced his permanent DNI replacement, Jay Clayton, last week, Senate Republicans are now hustling to get him confirmed potentially even sooner than that, with a confirmation hearing Wednesday potentially followed by committee and Senate votes Thursday. Such a timetable, however, would require the unanimous consent of all 100 senators. If any object, Clayton could not be confirmed until next week at the earliest.

Democrats “ought to be happy with Clayton,” Majority Leader John Thune said yesterday. And it’s true that the U.S. attorney and former SEC chair is nowhere near as corrupt and contemptible a figure as Pulte. Still, it’s easy to imagine at least a few Democrats bristling at the dilemma Republicans are forcing them into: Hustle this guy through, or the hack gets the job for a bit.

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Hey, man, glad you’re having fun. Happy Monday.

Join Sam Stein and Will Sommer live on Substack and YouTube at 10 a.m. EDT today for MAGA Mondays.

Bread and Capitulation

by William Kristol

It would have been nice to write this morning about the remarkable and inspiring Knicks and the joyful scenes of celebration in New York City that followed their championship. I would have relished a word about the happy removal of our current president’s name from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in D.C.

But the stern siren of duty calls. There is an Iran deal to discuss, and discuss it I shall, even if writing about a defeat for our country is genuinely painful.

Fortunately our friend Tom Nichols of the Atlantic is made of sterner stuff. He stepped up last night to perform the distressing task of analyzing the deal that will apparently bring to an end Donald Trump’s misbegotten war against Iran:

The United States has little to celebrate: Trump and his team, in record time, just lost a war to a militarily mediocre—but nonetheless extremely dangerous—adversary. . . . It is clear that Trump has failed to achieve every one of the goals he put forward for this war of choice, and now he is determined to sign, seal, and deliver America’s capitulation as quickly as possible. . . .

The reality is that the war will close with the regime in Tehran intact and in the grip of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; the Strait of Hormuz will remain under the threat of Iranian attacks; Iran will continue to possess significant drone and missile stocks; the regime will maintain the capability to be a state sponsor of terror; and many sanctions will be lifted and billions of dollars in unfrozen assets will flow to Iran. In other words, the Iranians have achieved their key strategic aims—regime survival above all—while the Americans have achieved none of their own.

Indeed, the United States has perhaps done worse than gaining nothing. Iran, while temporarily weakened, is now an even more powerful political actor: The regime in Tehran stood up to a massive U.S. onslaught, survived, and then inflicted pain on various states in the Gulf as punishment for going along with Trump’s war. . . .

The war leaves Iran battered, but more powerful and with more cash at its disposal, while it leaves America weaker.

I’m sad to say that Tom has it right. And I’ll mention one point in particular that seems not to be getting the attention it deserves. The memorandum of understanding to be signed Friday reportedly says that Iran will not impose tolls in the strait of Hormuz for the next sixty days. This is presumably the basis of Trump’s claim that the strait will be “toll-free.” But the government of Iran says that the strait will operate in the longer run “under Iranian arrangements.” This seems likely to be true, since Iran has established the principle that it can close the strait, has paid no price, hasn’t repudiated a right to do so in the future, and will be more interested and able to enforce its will in the months and years to come than we’ll be able to stop them.

So Iran comes out a winner. But Iran’s victory isn’t the most important outcome of Trump’s foolish war. The most important outcome is our defeat. Trump’s failure in Iran has confirmed and accelerated the broader retreat during his second term from our standing as the linchpin and guardian of an American-friendly international order. We were a great power—the greatest world power—from 1941 to 2025. Now we appear to be one power among many, even one bully among many, perhaps the preeminent one, but one without much credibility among either allies or enemies.

Our allies at the G7 meeting in France over the next couple days will have no interest in highlighting the fact of our decline, as they want to buy time to make their adjustments. But everyone with eyes to see understands what Trump has wrought. This failed war will leave us both less feared and less respected than before, and will leave the world more dangerous and its future less hopeful than before.

The coincidence yesterday of the announcement of an agreement on a deal and the cage match at the White House has led to much discussion of imperial decadence, and of our entering an age of bread and circuses. The phrase comes from the Roman poet Juvenal, writing around 100 A.D.: The people “shed their sense of responsibility long ago . . . the mob . . . reveals its anxiety for two things only, bread and circuses.”

But the Roman Empire remained great for quite a while after Juvenal’s lament. In his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon identified the subsequent eighty years or so as the peak of the Empire in size and power, the height of the Pax Romana, and also as a golden age of peace, prosperity, and human happiness. So a taste for bread and circuses didn’t mean imminent Roman collapse.

But things seem to move faster these days. Our decline shows every likelihood of being far quicker and more thorough than Rome’s.

Or not? Could the humiliating loss to Iran—along with the embarrassment of our 250th anniversary celebration—be a kind of blessing? Could it provide a spur for us to arrest and reverse our decline in national power and also our slide into imperial decadence? Indeed, the American people don’t seem to have been too impressed by Trump’s White House cage circus. Perhaps here, unlike in imperial Rome, it may not be too late to revive the spirit of republican virtue?

After all, the Knicks pulled off a remarkable comeback. Who’s to say America can’t, too?

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The Real Real America

by Andrew Egger

Although last night’s UFC extravaganza on the White House lawn seemed in danger early on of losing the biggest, most important fight on the card—the fight against the weather—the good Lord in his mysterious judgment apparently decided we wouldn’t get off so easy. The thunderstorms that had menaced the melee turned aside, delaying the start of the event but ultimately robbing me of what would have been the most interesting viewing of the evening: watching them try to figure out the logistical challenge of how to pack the fight’s audience into the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in a downpour. (See, folks: We need that BALLROOM!)

Instead, the saturnalia of bad taste went ahead as planned. Maybe some of you enjoyed the spectacle of grizzled men, having spent the weigh-in the day before pushing and shit-talking each other and pretending (?) to vomit on themselves, beat each other silly on the White House lawn in a cage spangled with ads for prediction markets and Saudi Arabia and Donald Trump’s crypto businesses. Not for me, personally! Two moments seemed to sum up the whole thing: UFC promoter Daniel Cormier tweeting and then deleting apparent DMs from Eric Trump asking him whether any of the fights were rigged,1 and fighter Josh Hokit capping his win by hollering into a microphone: “Michelle Obama is a man! Am I right, America?”

It was the whole Trump moment in miniature. Some of the worst people alive, the biggest fetishists for pointless brute violence and the dumbest conspiracy theories the internet has to offer, luxuriating in the illusion MAGA has built for them: that their proximity to power has given them the opportunity to tell themselves and each other that they speak for the country. This is real America, and if you don’t like it, you’re the unpatriotic one.

Amusingly, some of the loudest proponents for this idea were some of the longtime Beltway elites who have lately taken to wearing MAGA credentials as if they’re a talisman that will ward off any Real Americans who might otherwise want to stuff them in a locker. Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, who has spent his entire life on the Acela corridor but apparently went to a monster truck rally in Maine once, was emblematic: “Most of those bemoaning what Trump is doing to the ‘people’s house’ are elites who have utter contempt for the ‘people’ (who love motocross and UFC),” he scolded on X. “If you’re going to sniff your nose at the proletariat don’t invoke the sanctity of the ‘people’s house’—you look ridiculous.”

Well, I don’t know. I grew up in Missouri and Iowa and I hope my “real America” credentials are good enough to say that the proletariat likes some dumb shit, too. (If you want actual data on the matter, a Reuters poll last week found that just 16 percent of Americans, including a third of Republicans, approved of the MMA-on-the-lawn plan.) But this too is the Trump moment in miniature: A bunch of conservative-media types sternly telling you that this or that objectively terrible thing is real America, and that you’re the out-of-touch one for thinking it’s bad.

Here’s something I think is actually beautiful, however: At exactly the same moment all this has been playing out, we’ve been getting a wonderful reminder that this silly spectacle isn’t “real America”—or not, at least, the whole thing. If you’ve been following the stories around the World Cup, which is playing out across Canada, Mexico, and the United States right now, you’ve been treated to a number of incredible storylines that bring a whole different “real America” into focus. There’s the silly, fun spectacle of the international tourists coming to the states for the first time and going repeatedly viral as they’re blown away by some of the biggest and best of what our country has to offer—the majesty of our college sports stadiums and our Buc-ees. And there’s the host of oddly touching human stories that have bubbled up, too, like the way the locals of Lawrence, Kansas have thrown themselves into enthusiastic support for the Algerian national squad, which has pitched their World Cup base camp there.

“I want to say thank you to Team Algeria for choosing our home town, Lawrence, Kansas, to come here,” one local told an Algerian broadcaster in a now-viral clip. “I came mainly because I was so happy that they chose our town for their base camp. And we just know Algeria is on the Mediterranean Sea, and then the south part is on the Sahara Desert. And we know that you gained independence from France kind of around the time I was born. We don’t know too much, but we want to welcome you here.”

Don’t get me wrong: I’m certainly not saying all the chest-thumping and bloodlust and crypto trading and gambling-scamming isn’t American to its core. But all the good stuff from the World Cup is in our DNA too: the willingness to throw our door open and welcome people in, the pride in seeing others wowed by the stuff that surrounds us that we take for granted, the pleasures of meeting new people—even outsiders!—and approaching them with simple generosity of spirit. You didn’t see that stuff at the UFC fight last night; it isn’t in Trump’s stage-managed picture of “real America.” Out there in the sticks, you still see it plenty.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Sentinels at the Bacchanal… Military participation in the spectacle in D.C. is a reminder that trust in our armed forces depends on them standing apart, writes MARK HERTLING.

• The Iranian Regime Isn’t Going Anywhere….With Eric on vacation, ELIOT COHEN welcomes KENNETH POLLACK, vice president for policy at the Middle East Institute, to discuss Iran’s future.

• After Trump: Proposals for a Post-Authoritarian America… How Democrats can lead the charge for a new Reconstruction—if they can avoid becoming what they defeat, write SHIKHA DALMIA and ANDY CRAIG.

• John Avlon’s Final Warning… As How to Fix It wraps up its run here, JOHN AVLON is joined by RYE BARCOTT to discuss why political courage has become so rare in Washington.

Quick Hits

THE PETTIEST MAN ALIVE: If you thought Donald Trump would comply with the court-ordered removal of his name from the Kennedy Center with a little dignity, think again. The White House had been given a deadline of noon Friday to take the president’s name off the building facade, but pushed that timing later with an eleventh-hour flurry of legal appeals and protestations.2 The courts having failed to rule against them, the White House presumably went ahead with removing Trump’s name—but even that remains unclear, as workers raised tarps to block the view before beginning work, and the tarps have yet to come down.

Even more obscene is a poison pill apparently created by the Kennedy Center’s board of Trump toadies. The emergency motion Trump filed last week made reference to an astonishing and apparently new Kennedy Center bylaw: All new private donations, it suggested, have been conditioned “upon the name of the Center remaining unchanged as the ‘Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.’” If the name were ever changed, the bylaw apparently states, the Center would be obliged to return all such donations.

The suit’s justification for this bylaw is “that people and companies, who have given, or will be giving, millions of dollars to the Center were only willing to do so with the name ‘Trump’ on the building.” And if you believe that is why the Center’s board baked a bomb into its own bylaws, we’ve got a bridge across the Potomac to sell you. What’s actually happening is that the board—at Trump’s behest—is throwing a remarkable tantrum: If Trump’s name can’t be on the Center, there won’t be a Center at all.

This is how Trump sees things, too: “So now,” he wrote after a judge ruled his name had to come down last month, “the Kennedy Center will collapse, both structurally and financially.” No skin off his back—he’s more of a UFC guy, after all.

FISA AROUND AND FIND OUT: Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act expired Friday, meaning that for the first time since 2008, the government is unable to pull information on foreigners abroad from domestic service providers without a warrant. While civil-liberties focused lawmakers have long opposed the program, arguing it can sweep too broadly through Americans’ communications, this was the first time Democrats have opposed reauthorization en masse, in protest over Bill Pulte’s appointment as acting director of national intelligence.

Trump, however, isn’t in much of a hurry to get FISA reauthorized. “I’m against FISA,” he wrote on Truth Social yesterday, “if it doesn’t come with the Save America Act (Full version!) firmly attached to it. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Thank you for your attention to this matter.” Whether Trump actually intends to oppose FISA when Congress agrees to reauthorize it, or whether this is just his latest blunderous attempt to browbeat Congress into passing his DOA voting bill, remains to be seen.

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Will it happen? Who knows. One of these days, predictions of an imminent deal may end up being true. Happy Friday.

Join Catherine Rampell and JVL on Substack and YouTube at 12:30 p.m. EDT today for Receipts Live.

Circuses and Circuses

by William Kristol

Near the beginning of his great biography of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, Winston Churchill takes a few pages to sketch for his readers “the differences of feeling and outlook which separate the men and women” of his time from ours. The first difference he cites? “They gave a very high—indeed, a dominating—place in their minds to religion. It played as large a part in the life of the seventeenth century as sport does now.”

Now sports may not be quite as central for us as Churchill (perhaps a bit sardonically) suggests, but they are a big deal—as we Knicks fans would be the last to deny.

And that’s my apology for remarking this morning on this coming Sunday night’s Ultimate Fighting Championship spectacle on the South Lawn of the White House, part of the administration’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of our independence. No, the UFC event is not as important as the war in Iran, or the economy, or the 2026 elections. But I do think it’s an event that captures something about this moment in our history.

After all, it’s vulgar, it’s violent, it’s commercial, it’s grandiose, it’s tacky, and it dishonors a place once thought worthy of care and respect. In other words, it’s Donald Trump.

Yesterday, the New York Times’s White House correspondent Shawn McCreesh attended a preview tour of the event site offered by the Trump administration.

They came to see the Claw.

The White House welcomed reporters and influencers from around the world onto the South Lawn for half an hour on Thursday morning to inspect the towering, claw-like superstructure that has been built there for the Ultimate Fighting Championship bout that President Trump is hosting on his 80th birthday this weekend. Jack Posobiec, the right-wing commentator best known for spreading the “Pizzagate” paranoia, stood with a White House official next to the octagonal ring down in the nexus of the claw and looked around in awe. “It’s literally Vegas,” Mr. Posobiec said excitedly. “Vegas is in D.C. now!”

From the “star-spangled jumbo claw” to the “clusters of klieg lights affixed to each of the four curving appendages high overhead” to the “massive television screens hanging from every corner,” it’s quite the scene. And I’ll admit that McCreesh’s observation that it all “towers over the old willow oaks and magnolia trees planted long ago by past presidents on the gentle slope of the South Lawn . . . and towering over the White House itself” induced in me a feeling of melancholy.

It’s a feeling that was only intensified by his description of the cage itself:

an eight-sided feat of marketeering, its every angle prominently displaying the name of some sponsor who’d paid big bucks to have their brands juxtaposed against the ultimate backdrop: Live Trade on Polymarket . . . Bud Light . . . Pit Boss Grills . . . Total Wireless . . . Dial #Law Morgan & Morgan . . . Toyo Tires.

The words “crypto.com” were carved into each little metal step leading into the ring.

One can’t help but think that this is surely what the decline and fall of a republic looks like.

Or—maybe it’s just what a low water mark looks like, one from which we are going to rise again?

After all, a Reuters/Ipsos poll out yesterday found that only 16 percent of Americans thought it appropriate for President Trump to hold mixed martial arts cage matches at the White House on Sunday to celebrate U.S. history and his 80th birthday. Forty-six percent said it was inappropriate, and ⁠the rest didn’t offer an opinion.

There are other grounds for hope. Other sports are happening across our fair land. The Knicks and the Spurs play Saturday night—and if necessary, Tuesday and then, if necessary again, Friday night—for the NBA championship. There will be, I’m told, World Cup soccer matches. And there’ll be baseball across the country this weekend—from the majors to kids’ leagues to pick up games on random fields of grass.

Maybe it remains the case, as the historian Jacques Barzun remarked in 1954, that “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.” In a modern spirit of open-mindedness, I’ll add basketball and football, and the new-found popularity of soccer. I’m willing to extend the list to a host of other sports—even to mixed martial arts.

But on the South Lawn of the White House?

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• The Great Books Are for Everybody… An unlikely champion of the canon urges readers not to think of the books as “belonging” to conservatives, reviews CATHY YOUNG.

• Trump’s Firehose of Lies… ANNE APPLEBAUM joins TIM MILLER on the flagship pod to discuss how Donald Trump is using the Putinesque tactic of flooding people with contradictory stories to confuse and exhaust them so they’ll just tune out.

• The Wild West of 1980s Movie Financing… PETER M. HOFFMAN joins SONNY BUNCH to discuss his new book, Karmic Winds, and the rise and fall of Carolco.

• Bulwark Book Club for July: Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic. Be sure to get your copy of LINDSAY CHERVINSKY’s book, either at your favorite bookseller (or the library) so you can get your questions in for our second episode of Bulwark Book Club with MONA CHAREN!

Quick Hits

702 LITTLE TOO LATE: All week, House and Senate Democrats have been telling Republicans: If you want our votes to reauthorize FISA surveillance powers, you need to get Donald Trump to withdraw his spectacularly unqualified and politicized selection for acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte. Having received no such assurances from Trump, the House went into recess yesterday without reauthorizing the program, which will therefore expire today.

Bizarrely, Trump waited until after the window to reauthorize FISA had passed before announcing he had chosen his permanent nominee for DNI: Jay Clayton, who is now serving as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Trump has given no indication he will withdraw Pulte from the acting job he has yet to assume. But announcing Clayton earlier might have made it easier for congressional Republicans to soften Democrats up in FISA negotiations this week. Guess we’ll never know.

Clayton, more than most of the figures Trump has surrounded himself with in his second term, is something of an establishment type who’s learned to thrive in Trump world. He served as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first term, a post to which he was confirmed on a bipartisan basis.

Still, there are reasons to be skeptical. It isn’t obvious that Clayton, a longtime corporate attorney, has the “extensive national security experience” the law requires of the DNI. And he has been far too willing to indulge Trump’s conspiratorial thinking when he feels it useful, especially on TV when he thinks the president might be watching. “Though prosecutors, particularly Manhattan U.S. attorneys, traditionally go out of their way to sidestep discussing anything even vaguely political,” Erica Orden writes in Politico today, “Clayton has used the segments to dismiss concerns about Trump’s ‘anti-weaponization fund’ and float the possibility of fraud in Los Angeles’s recent mayoral primary.”

MORE ON OIL: Yesterday, we briefly contemplated the global economy’s current biggest oddity: If the Strait of Hormuz is still mostly bottled up, how has the price of oil remained so (relatively) reasonable? Yesterday, Bloomberg columnist Javier Blas tallied up ten reasons why oil is still below $100 a barrel, including (as we mentioned yesterday) the quick release of hundreds of millions of barrels from global strategic reserves, the fact that some oil is still getting past the Hormuz bottleneck, and the fact that the world market was actually oversupplied before the crisis began. But the biggest factor, Blas writes, is China—which has been able to lower global demand by dramatically slashing its oil imports, in ways we don’t fully understand:

Beijing has managed to slash its oil imports, providing a massive—and unexpected—relief valve. Last month, China imported 6.7 million barrels a day of crude via tanker, down nearly 40% from the 2025 average, according to Vortexa, a market intelligence firm. That drop of 4 million barrels a day is roughly equivalent to the consumption of Germany and France combined. . . .

If Beijing was buying as much oil as it did in the past, prices would be much higher, global inflation would be rampant and central banks would be forced to hike interest rates quickly, panicking stock markets. Donald Trump would also be in a far weaker position in his talks with the Iranians. In short: China has essentially bailed out both the global economy and the political fortunes of the US president.

Read the whole thing.

WARGAMING THE NIGHTMARE SCENARIO: Nobody knows whether Donald Trump will move aggressively to try to steal this year’s midterm elections, but he’s sure been acting like a guy who’s interested in giving it a shot. Elected Democrats, Politico reports, aren’t just sitting around waiting to see:

Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and nine other Democratic senators huddled with top party election experts last week to drill responses to a range of extreme scenarios—from federal agents at polling locations, to ballot seizures in key battlegrounds, to foreign interference operations—that they fear could become reality pre- and post-Election Day.

They game-planned legal injunctions to bar armed federal agents or armed citizens from voting sites, and lawsuits to force the Trump administration to return ballots if they’re confiscated in key contests that could decide control of Congress. They also choreographed communication strategies across elected leaders, campaigns and advocacy groups to combat misinformation and disinformation designed to sow distrust in the results, according to details of the tabletop exercises shared exclusively with POLITICO.

“Trump has talked about stealing the election, violating the election, perverting the election, over and over again. And woe be us, and woe be anyone who believes in free elections, who doesn’t take that seriously,” Schumer said in a phone interview earlier this week. “We are going to be prepared for anything that he throws at us.”

Read the whole thing.

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Their mayor is Muslim. Their bagels Jewish. Without Trump they thrive. Knicks in Five. Happy Thursday.

The War Gets Worse

by William Kristol

Just over three months ago, acting alone, lacking authorization from Congress, and having made no case for the war to the public, President Trump chose to attack Iran. His choice was unwise and his action was unlawful. And his war has clearly been unsuccessful.

The terrible Iranian regime remains in place. In fact, having survived a massive assault from the United States and Israel and having damaged both U.S. forces and its Gulf neighbors, and having also succeeded in harming the global economy by successfully closing the Strait of Hormuz, that dangerous and deplorable regime is now more powerful than it was before.

Meanwhile the Iranian people, who had bravely risen up against that regime, have been utterly betrayed.

And for our part, we’ve suffered casualties and spent billions and drawn down munitions. Our government has made unjustified claims of success and has concealed losses and setbacks. Our president has demonstrated even worse leadership than one might have expected, with shifting and untenable justifications for the war, threats of war crimes, generally incompetent leadership, and truly unhinged behavior. The American public justifiably has no confidence in this administration’s conduct of the war, and nor do our allies in the Gulf, in Europe, or in Asia.

It’s all very bad, and now Trump is making it worse. Frustrated and angry at the failure of his vanity war, prevented by his narcissism from coming to grips with the situation he now faces, Trump has been resisting putting the country first and extricating us without too much further damage.

And now, over the last couple of days, he has been getting us in deeper rather than getting us out.

A U.S. Army helicopter, flying to enforce what is at this point a pointless blockade or counter-blockade of the strait, crashed Monday after a collision with an Iranian drone. The U.S. military launched a new round of “self-defense” strikes on Iran in “a proportional response to unjustified Iranian aggression.”

These strikes led in turn to relatively uneventful retaliatory attacks by Iran against its neighbors, and it seemed for a few hours that the tit-for-tat might have been completed. Perhaps Trump could now focus on extracting us from the mess into which he’d gotten us? But his vanity and narcissism prevailed. And so, when Iran didn’t immediately accept his latest stipulations for an acceptable deal, last night he ordered a second wave of air strikes, described by CENTCOM as “additional self-defense strikes . . . in response to Iran’s unwarranted and continued aggression” against Iranian targets that “posed a threat to U.S. forces and international commercial ships transiting regional waters.”

These vague rationales or excuses for continued strikes are justifications for endless attacks on Iran. These rationales are a justification for endless war.

But Trump himself promptly undercut even the pretense that these strikes were about self-defense or dealing with threats. As the attacks were underway, he acknowledged both on social media and in interviews with reporters that the point of the strikes is to coerce Iran to sign the peace agreement that he wants, one that he presumably hopes will make it less obvious that his war has been a failure.

In a call with Fox News’s Trey Yingst from the Situation Room (!) as the strikes were ongoing, Trump forgot that he was supposed to talk about proportional responses and self-defense.

He warned that if Iran doesn’t sign the agreement, “we’ll bomb the shit out of them.” He then boasted that the strikes were “vicious” and “violent,” and “they didn’t know what the hell hit them.”

This morning, he threatened further escalation: “At some point in the not too distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island.”

We will see if this is real or Trumpian bluster. But either way, it’s unseemly braggadocio and dangerous fantasy. As the military historian Phillips O’Brien explained, our latest attacks

will almost certainly not get Iran to bend the knee. Trump can boast all he wants, as he did above, about the Iranian military being destroyed, but the reality is that he is still very worried about Iranian capacity. How do we know that? Well many of the US strikes against Iran were done on June 9 and then again last night with (fast depleting) stocks of Tomahawk missiles or by aircraft that can fire at safe distances.

We can fire more missiles and drop more bombs. But at this point, we are waging war, and putting our own service members at risk, for no justifiable reason. And we are simply compounding the considerable damage Trump has already done first by launching, and then by continuing with, this foolish and reckless adventure.

Trump is now digging the hole he has gotten us into even deeper. Responsible members of Congress should redouble their efforts to force an end to this unauthorized, unwise, and unsuccessful war.

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Trump Found His Roy Cohn

by Andrew Egger

Here are four things we already know. Donald Trump’s top criterion for his attorney general is someone who will act as his personal attorney. He tapped Todd Blanche as deputy AG last year because Blanche had been his personal attorney and would see the job as a continuation of that work. Blanche has now gotten the nod for the top job because Trump thinks he’s done a good job in this respect so far. And a big part of that, as Bill wrote the other day, has been Blanche’s work as “prime orchestrator and key executor of the Trump administration’s Jeffrey Epstein coverup.”

But it’s one thing to know all this as a factual matter, and another thing to see it play out in practice—as we did yesterday in the New York Times’s big new piece of behind-the-scenes narrative reporting of the White House’s struggle to contain the Epstein crisis last year.

Last year, the administration’s shambolic rollout of the files seemed to turn primarily on the work of three officials: then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and then-FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino. Patel and Bongino were the administration émigrés from the right-wing fever swamps, where they had spent years podcasting about the giant trove of incriminating documents about Epstein’s associates they insisted the FBI was sitting on. And Bondi was the clownish figure whose failure to grasp the seriousness of MAGA’s belief in the files had done much to multiply the story’s political damage. The three of them spent months fighting over who was to blame for the crisis.

Blanche, by contrast, was the cleanup man. When the top members of the president’s personal-defense team gathered in the White House Situation Room last July to figure out how to contain the spiraling story, it was Blanche who suggested both major planks of what would come to be the White House’s response. Blanche raised the possibility of publicly calling for the unsealing of the grand jury testimonies in past Epstein-related criminal cases. “If the courts refused to unseal them—as Blanche predicted—they could shift the blame for withholding the Epstein material away from the Trump administration and onto the judges,” the Times reports. “Blanche’s suggestion would make it appear that the White House wanted the materials released, when it was almost certain not to happen.” Trump would go on to do exactly this in a Truth Social post.

At the same meeting, Blanche sanded the rough edges off a lunatic idea proposed by Vice President JD Vance: What if we tapped Tucker Carlson to go interview Ghislaine Maxwell? It would be better, Blanche suggested, to have Justice Department lawyers question Maxwell and release the transcript—and, he said, he was willing to do it himself. The only snag, he suggested, was that “Maxwell’s lawyers might expect something in return for her candor.” It fell to others—White House Communications Director Steven Cheung and Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair—to make the argument that pardoning or reducing Maxwell’s sentence would be a colossal PR mistake.

It’s worth dwelling on how far through the looking glass this moment was. By all rights, it was insane for Blanche—the second-in-command at the Justice Department, the man most responsible for its day-to-day operations—to be attending this meeting at all. It was still more insane for him to be taking the point position in laying out a strategy for how to protect the president from a political crisis, and how to tap the resources and respectability of the Justice Department in order to do so. And perhaps most insane of all—for anybody to suggest, let alone a person in Blanche’s position—was the suggestion he let twist in the air that perhaps a convicted sex trafficker could be recruited as a key part of their self-defense effort, provided they were willing to scratch her back too. While others in the room shot down suggestions of a pardon or commutation, there was one other, smaller thing they could offer Maxwell: Shortly after speaking to Blanche, she was transferred to a far more comfortable prison.

Again: None of this really changes anything we knew about Blanche. It was always in keeping with what we know of his character and how he sees his role that he would do any of these things. But we now know from the Times not just that he would do them, but that he has done them: Blanche in fact was the mastermind behind nearly all of the political effort to shield Trump from any political fallout over the Epstein files. When he goes before the Senate for his confirmation to the top job, they should tear him apart for it.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Meet the Millennial Pastor at the Vanguard of the MAGA Culture War… Pastor/influencer Russell Johnson is the media-savvy new face of growing, Trumpified churches. DOMINICK BONNY takes you on a deep dive.

• Damn the Risks, Pour Me Another Glass… Why MONA CHAREN on why she doesn’t plan to stop drinking alcohol.

• No Guns, No Drugs—Why Did We Blow Up These Boats? Shocking new facts are still emerging about the campaign against ‘drug boats,’ AMANDA KLASING writes.

• Fight for Your Democracy… On the flagship pod, SEN. RAPHAEL WARNOCK joins TIM MILLER to discuss why Trump & co. are pushing the South to gerrymander back to the dark days of Jim Crow: They’re gonna lose the midterms bigly.

The third annual Liberalism for the 21st Century Conference, hosted by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism—publisher of the UnPopulist—comes to the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. on July 16–17. This year’s theme is an important one: the Reconstruction Agenda, or how to create a post-Trump future that is a genuinely and securely post-authoritarian one. In addition to our own Bill Kristol, Sarah Longwell, and Cathy Young, you can catch speakers like Anne Applebaum, Ezra Klein, Adam Serwer, and Jan-Werner Müller. Check out the full program and register here. And use BULWARK-26 for a 10 percent discount.

Quick Hits

RUMBLE WITH THE DEVIL: Yesterday, we published a profile of millennial political operative-turned-pastor/influencer Russel B. Johnson. He’s a case study of a growing trend of overt politicization among some evangelical churches, and things got testy in his exchanges with reporter Dominick Bonny. The independent minister’s aggression toward the press is part of a deliberate strategy that he has used to grow his profile online:

The hope of prosperity in this life is both part of the American dream and a quieter theme of Johnson’s preaching, although he has expressly rejected belief in what critics call the “prosperity gospel,” which associates material wealth and success with faithfulness to God. But asked in an email how he reconciles his luxury lifestyle with Christ’s teachings about the spiritual hazards of wealth, he rejected the question as an example of journalists “cosplaying as theologians.” The Bible, he wrote in an email, “doesn’t teach that holiness requires performative poverty, nor does it require pastors to live according to the aesthetic preferences of hostile journalists.” Whether a person is wealthy doesn’t matter, morally or spiritually; their personal attitude toward their wealth—“whether wealth owns the person,” as Johnson puts it—is what’s important.

“I make no apology for enjoying life,” he continued.

Johnson was similarly exercised about other questions I emailed him about his ministry and politics, including some that touched on recent political stories. For instance, asked how he squares a Christian ethic with Trump’s mass deportations–focused immigration policy, which has broken up families across the country and caused untold harms to communities targeted for enforcement, Johnson claimed the question was “morally unserious.” “Scripture commands compassion for the stranger. It doesn’t command national suicide or the erasure of borders,” he wrote.

Does he differ with President Trump on any significant political matters? The former Republican campaign operative insisted on his ideological independence. “There are always policies, appointments, rhetoric, and other decisions I would evaluate critically. I am a pastor, not a campaign surrogate,” he wrote. He did not provide specific examples.

“If any of my answers come across as dismissive or dripping with disdain, that is intentional. I have deep contempt for what your profession has become,” he added before ending on a version of a classic Trump line: “The media truly has become the enemy of the American people.” Johnson then posted the full set of questions and his responses (with hostile commentary about The Bulwark) to his Instagram story.

There’s a lot more to the story than that. Read the whole thing.

NO BOTTOM: Here’s a simply amazing report from Politico: “A top Justice Department staffer responsible for liaising with Congress planned to make a claim with President Donald Trump’s ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’ and asked to recuse himself from any work related to it—a move that alarmed colleagues at the DOJ.”

The official, Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs Patrick Davis, is a former top aide to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). Davis told the department he intended to apply for money from the proposed fund—now on indefinite hiatus, if acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is to be believed—because his phone and emails had been subpoenaed while he was involved in investigating the origins of the “Russiagate” investigation while on the hill.

Where to begin on this one? For starters, the story highlights once again how unbelievably incestuous the fund was from the jump: Not only was the fund itself negotiated incestuously by Trump’s current personal lawyers and his former personal lawyers who now run the Justice Department, but at least one Justice Department staffer heavily involved in trying to sell the thing to senators on the Hill was planning to try to benefit from it personally. (And that wouldn’t have been the half of it: Recall that the Justice Department tried to win over hostile senators to support the fund by reminding them they could apply for money as well!)

The second is that the “weaponization” Davis would have been seeking restitution for hadn’t taken place under Biden at all, but under the first Trump administration, when his records were pulled as part of a leak investigation. And the third is this bleak joke: We only know about this at all because Davis asked to recuse himself from official work on the anti-weaponization fund in light of his application—which means, relatively speaking, he’s one of the ethical ones. Read the whole thing.

STRAITBREAK: As his war with Iran has staggered on, Donald Trump has been able to thank his stars for one small economic saving grace: While oil prices remain elevated, they haven’t yet come close to the nightmare scenarios of $150 or even $200 a barrel that many forecasters feared because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Just the opposite, in fact: After peaking just north of $110 a barrel in early April, oil prices have settled between $80 and $100 a barrel since early May.

Much of this price relief has come thanks to massive releases from the strategic oil reserves of the United States, China, and other countries—a short-term solution at best, and one that will come with further costs on the back end to replenish depleted stocks. But another factor, as CNN reported this week, is that more oil may be quietly escaping the strait than forecasters had expected.

Yesterday, President Trump claimed credit. “Last month, I directed our Great U.S. Military to execute a secret mission to support Oil Tankers and other Commercial Ships through the Strait of Hormuz,” he wrote on Truth Social. During that time, “more than 100 MILLION Barrels” and “200 Commercial Ships” had traveled through the strait. “This wildly successful effort,” he added, “is because the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CONTROLS the Strait of Hormuz—NOT Iran.”

The braggadocio here was amusing: Trump has repeatedly announced his intent to escort ships through the strait since the very first days of the war, and efforts to do so have periodically stopped and started. Meanwhile, 100 million barrels of oil and 200 ships in a month remains dramatically below the pre-war status quo, when more than 100 ships and 20 million barrels of oil would pass through the strait every day.

CNBC made this useful graph of how many ships are going through the strait each day. If the United States wants lots of purple on the graph and Iran wants barely any, you tell me who controls the strait:

Still, while a porous strait is economically far worse than an open one, it’s better than one with an oil-tight seal. The more ships the administration can spirit past the Iranian blockade, the better for the global economy—and for their negotiating position to finally bring this conflict to an end.

FISA ON LIFE SUPPORT: Senate Democrats have been sticking to their guns: No removal of Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence, no renewed spying powers for him to abuse while he’s there. But that hasn’t stopped Donald Trump and Senate Republicans from trying to wheedle them down.

In a Truth Social post yesterday, Trump made clear he was forging ahead with Pulte, who he said will take the reins June 19. (Previously, Tulsi Gabbard’s term as DNI was slated to end June 30.) Meanwhile, he suggested that Congress pass only a “short-term extension” of the FISA 702 authorities, “to provide time for the selection and confirmation of a permanent Head of the Agency.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson were quick to describe this as a magnanimous olive branch—a “good faith gesture,” as Johnson put it to reporters.1 Thune said lawmakers were discussing the possibility of a three-week FISA extension.

You know what would be an actual “good faith gesture”? Swapping Pulte out for a qualified person with an actual national-security background and no history of pursuing naked, shameless vendettas against the president’s political opponents. Until Trump does that, Republicans who want to paint Democrats as obstructionists here don’t have a leg to stand on.

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Cheap Shots

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Apropos of nothing, it was ninety days ago that Trump had this to say about Operation Epic Fury: “We’ve won. Let me tell you, we’ve won. You never like to say too early you won—we won. We won. In the first hour it was over. We won.” Happy Wednesday.

Mark Hertling and Ben Parker will be live on Substack and YouTube at 10:30 a.m. EDT today for Command Post.

The Catechism of the Stolen Election

by Andrew Egger

These days, Donald Trump reflexively denounces any election result he dislikes as stolen and fraudulent. But it doesn’t always catch on. In April, Republicans seemed faintly embarrassed by his claim that Virginia’s redistricting referendum had been a “rigged election” and “crooked victory” after Democrats executed a phony “mail-in ballot drop”; few wanted to defend it on the merits, and the president let the matter drop.

But last week’s mayoral primary in Los Angeles is going the opposite direction: Trump’s claim last week that “there’s BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California” is catching on. Conservative commentators have embraced the allegation en masse. So have lawmakers: “Some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it’s impossible to prove,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said Monday. “But I think everybody knows instinctively that something is wrong here.”

Sen. Mike Lee suggested North Korea had a more reliable voting system than California. Rep. Tim Burchett insisted “they” had rigged the election against the Republican-coded candidate. Sen. Ron Johnson argued that the absence of evidence of fraud was itself evidence of fraud: “People who do things cover it up.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis accused California of “dumping votes” until “you get the result you want.”

What had happened to get these guys so riled up? As the ballots were counted, progressive challenger Nithya Raman, who had been in third place in the early stages of the counting process, gradually caught up to and passed conservative candidate Spencer Pratt to advance to the runoff against incumbent Karen Bass.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Voters who voted in a certain way—by mailing in ballots at or near the deadline—turned out to be more pro-Raman than early mail-in voters or same-day voters had been. This is the smoking gun that has Republicans everywhere crying “fraud.”

As always, these allegations fall apart at the slightest touch. Why should we find it fishy that Pratt finished up pretty much exactly where polls suggested he would? Why would Bass, who is running for re-election, deliberately scheme to boost a strong Democratic opponent who could beat her in the runoff rather than a Republican she would crush with zero effort? Why is it more “suspicious” that late mail-in voters were disproportionately progressive than it was that same-day voters were disproportionately conservative?

But these counterarguments shouldn’t even matter. Because the simple fact is there’s nothing to argue against. Nobody denouncing the race has pointed to specific supposed examples of malfeasance; it’s simply the result itself that’s supposedly suspicious.

This is a change from 2020. The original “Stop the Steal” effort was lousy with cooked-up anecdotes of scurrilous election-official behavior. They’re pulling boxes of phony ballots out from under the table in Atlanta! They’re giving Republicans ballot-spoiling Sharpies on purpose in Phoenix! They’re re-scanning the same batch of ballots repeatedly in Detroit! The voting machine companies are deliberately switching ballots from Trump to Biden—and we’ve got the proof!

Each of these stories was quickly debunked, but they served their purpose at the time: They generated an overwhelming sense in the minds of MAGA voters that something fishy was going on. Even if this or that individual story fell apart under scrutiny, they couldn’t all be invented, could they? Without the wide dissemination of these anecdotes, Trump wouldn’t have found nearly as much success convincing his base he’d had a presidential election stolen from him.

What we’re seeing now is that this legwork is no longer needed. So thoroughly poisoned are the minds of Trump’s base voters by now that they no longer need to see even pretend evidence to believe his claims that this or that election are rigged. For the election to turn out more Democrat-friendly than they expected is all they need.

This is really bad news for a few reasons. One involves accountability. After 2020, media companies that simply pumped their MAGA viewers’ brains full of vague unease about the outcome didn’t run into any trouble. It was the ones that parroted specific and defamatory stolen-election claims that got burned—most famously in Dominion Voting Systems’ enormous lawsuit against Fox News. If the specific false claims are no longer necessary to convince the base the fix is in, we lose our biggest proven weapon for holding election liars accountable.

Meanwhile, it becomes clearer every day: The GOP base is going to go along with Trump on any major election he decides to claim is fraudulent this November. All it will take, again, is for Democrats to do better than they expected. And what Republican base voter is expecting a blue wave? Trump is going to do this, and they’re going to fall in line. Somehow, some people will be surprised by this. Don’t be among them.

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Stop the Arch

by William Kristol

Last night, President Trump had the White House colorfully and dramatically lit up.

Was it a belated recognition of D-Day, whose anniversary Trump had ignored on June 6? No.

Was it a commemoration of the day 250 years ago when the Continental Congress appointed a committee to draft a declaration of independence? No.

Trump has no interest in wars against fascism or declarations of human equality and liberty.

What Trump is interested in is self-aggrandizing spectacle and personal grift. And so last night’s garish lighting display was to illuminate the Ultimate Fighting Championship arena now set up on the White House South Lawn, which will be the venue for the cage matches to take place on Trump’s eightieth birthday Sunday.

It’s all grotesque.

But even more grotesque to my eyes is the gigantic 250-foot triumphal arch Trump wants to have built on Memorial Circle, interrupting the vista from the Lincoln Memorial to Arlington Cemetery.

I hadn’t been able to put my finger on just why, of all Trump’s offenses to good taste and American history, it’s the arch that bothers me the most, until I read the excellent testimony of Holly Berkley Fletcher, a friend of and occasional contributor to The Bulwark, at a recent hearing of the National Capitol Planning Commission.

Here’s the crux of what Holly told the commission:

I strongly object to the building of the proposed arch because it is an affront to the history and meaning of the site.

In 1864, General Montgomery Meigs made a deliberate decision to bury Union dead at the Arlington estate of his former friend and mentor, Robert E. Lee, whom he considered a traitor to the United States. Meigs wanted to send a message, both to Lee personally and to the nation, about the rebellion’s high moral and human cost.

Decades later, the Macmillan Commission approved a long overdue architectural plan for Washington based on the original design of Charles Pierre L’Enfant, who, notably, is also buried at Arlington, in the section visible from Washington.

The Lincoln Memorial was purposefully placed in the direct sightline of Lee’s home and the graves of the first Union soldiers buried there, with the Memorial Bridge connecting the two, as a symbol of union, reconciliation, and the high price of freedom. This site was never meant to be triumphal, but rather somber, reflective, and profound, much like Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural and Gettysburg Addresses, which are etched into the walls of his memorial.

And Holly concluded on a more personal note:

I am also a former CIA Africa analyst who was raised in Kenya under a dictatorial regime. This arch reminds me more of the bombastic, self-aggrandizing displays of the African strongmen I have observed than the expression of a mature, dignified democracy whose greatness has been proven over time through the fulfillment of and fidelity to its founding principles.

I don’t know if those, like Holly, standing athwart Trump’s arch yelling ‘Stop,’ will succeed. Trump really wants it to happen. On June 6, he boasted that “The Triumphal Arch . . . will be, along with the White House Ballroom, the Greatest Structure in Washington.” Today, the Washington Post reports that federal officials at Trump’s direction are hurrying to begin construction of the arch. Indeed, “the administration envisions 20 hours per day of construction on the arch, year-round, in hopes of completing the project within two to three years.”

But veterans groups in particular are fighting valiantly against it as a desecration of Arlington Cemetery, and there are other arenas—including other federal agencies, the courts, and Congress—in which the struggle to stop it will continue.

But even if the arch isn’t stopped now, the fight against it can lay the groundwork for removing it as soon as possible after January 20, 2029. The day the arch is taken down will be a fitting occasion for the next president to light up the White House, this time to mark the restoration of fidelity to the nation’s founding principles.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Bulwark Book Club: Join MONA CHAREN and MARK HERTLING as they discuss his book, If I Don’t Return: A Father’s Wartime Journal.

• How the Libertarian Party De-MAGAfied Itself… And could Republicans ever follow suit? BERNARD TAMAS explains.

• Sorry, That’s the Wrong Kind of ‘Invasion’... Team Trump keeps mum about Russia’s attack on Ukraine—but fixates on how immigrants ‘threaten’ Europe’s future, writes WILL SALETAN.

Quick Hits

COST OF LIVING. IT’S A THING: Donald Trump came into office pledging to bring down prices, particularly energy prices. But a year and a half later, it’s fair to say that he’s been an abject failure on this front. The latest data point came this morning as the Labor Department’s Consumer Price Index showed inflation rising at a 4.2 percent pace year-over-year. This is the first time that the CPI has crossed 4 percent in three years. And while the main driver of it is transitory, Trump is clearly to blame for it: Gas is up because of his war in Iran. While this might be a major political nuisance for the president, it’s a professional Catch-22 for new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh. Warsh got the job by embracing Trump’s demand to lower interest rates. He would never have been able to do so without the approval of the Fed board. But now, with inflation at this level, it seems silly for him even to try.

—Sam Stein

ICE RE-FUNDED: After months of congressional deadlock, ICE and the Border Patrol are about to be funded again. Here’s NBC News:

After weeks of setbacks and delays, the Republican-controlled House on Tuesday narrowly passed a roughly $70 billion package to fund ICE and the Border Patrol through the end of President Donald Trump’s term.

The vote was 214–212, with Rep. Kevin Kiley, a California independent who caucuses with Republicans, joining all Democrats in voting no. The package, dubbed the Secure America Act, cleared the Senate last week and now heads to the president’s desk for his expected signature.

The successful House vote ends months of drama and partisan bickering over immigration enforcement funding. In February, Senate Democrats voted to shut down the Department of Homeland Security after the fatal shootings of two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, during immigration operations in Minneapolis the previous month.

We’ve praised congressional Democrats for how they played this fight, which made Republicans’ path to re-funding the agencies that killed Pretti and Good much more politically difficult and painful, and even provided opportunities for disgruntled Republicans to confront Trump on other matters like his ballroom and his anti-weaponization fund. In the end, though, Republicans ended up shuffling back into line: The final bill contains none of the immigration-enforcement reforms demanded by Democrats and no restrictions on Trump’s ability to relaunch his J6 slush fund, should he choose to do so. No ballroom money, though.

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IT’S PLATNER: As expected, Graham Platner romped to victory in Maine’s Democratic Senate primary last night—but it wasn’t just Platner. As Politico notes, other candidates endorsed by Bernie Sanders had a good night across the board, extending a string of victories for the progressive Vermont senator:

Hours before his victory was called, Sanders-backed Randy Villegas advanced to a runoff ahead of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s endorsed candidate, as he fights to face Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.) in a swingy Central Valley seat. Other Sanders-backed victors for House seats in recent weeks include Adam Hamawy and Analilia Mejia in New Jersey, Sam Forstag in Montana, Brian Poindexter in Ohio and Bob Brooks in a key Pennsylvania swing district.

Sanders stood vocally by Platner through the latest round of controversies, and his support helped bolster the progressive oyster farmer and former combat Marine through the closing stretch.

Platner heads into the general election against GOP Sen. Susan Collins following a wide margin of victory over Maine Gov. Janet Mills, who shelved her struggling campaign before Election Day, and an also-ran opponent. That may be enough to quiet at least some of the Democrats who had been angling for him to step aside.

So it goes. Now we’ll see how he does against Collins.

AS BAD AS THEY SOUND: Beef prices are high now, and they’re likely to get worse. The New World Screwworm, a flesh-eating fly that was once the scourge of the domestic cattle industry but had been eradicated from America for decades, has been creeping back north toward the U.S. border for months. Cases are now popping up well north of the Rio Grande. Four animals carrying the parasite have now been identified in Texas; another case, the USDA announced Monday, was identified in a pet dog in New Mexico.

The screwworm, a deeply unpleasant creature that lays eggs in the wounds of mammals, which hatch into larva that eat living flesh, had been gradually eradicated by means of a huge, painstaking government intervention: the breeding and release of bazillions of sterile male screwworms into areas overrun by the pest. Since female screwworms mate only once, this program did wonders for knocking out the population in areas where it was implemented. And once they’d done it in America, they didn’t stop—scientists kept pushing the battle line against the screwworm farther and farther south into Central America.

A few years ago, though, the screwworms started breaking back through and spreading north again. The federal government and the government of Texas have been preparing for their arrival, in part by building a big new breeding facility for sterile flies outside Edinburgh, Texas. But Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sounded the alarm last week that that facility may not come online quickly enough: Without greater fly production, he said Friday, “we cannot make it through a second summer.” Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been taking heat for a different screwworm-related decision: Programs for surveillance against the parasite and for animal disease control and prevention were among the cuts implemented by DOGE at USAID and the USDA last year.

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Cheap Shots

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And it was clear from the jump that the juju wasn’t right. Trump’s security requirements caused unfathomable waits outside the arena. His appearance on the jumbotron sparked deafening boos. He appeared to fall asleep at one point and was seen scarfing down fries at another.

The Knicks lost a dogfight. And while the president can’t directly be blamed, it’s hard to imagine that the blue-and-orange faithful want him returning to basketball mecca for game four on Wednesday.

Their mayor may be Muslim. Their bagel may be Jewish. Their Christian is Dior, and they’ll show Trump the door. Happy Tuesday.

Join Bill and Andrew on Substack and YouTube today at 10 a.m. EDT for Morning Shots Live.

Repentagon

by Andrew Egger

Pete Hegseth has sparked a thousand controversies as secretary of defense, nearly all of them on purpose. But it’s safe to say he wasn’t expecting this one.

Last week, the Department of Defense significantly cut down its number of “recognized” faith groups from more than 200 to just 31. The point, as usual, was basically dewokification, with “wokeness” here defined as attempting to respect the faiths of servicemembers belonging to tiny religious minorities: “pagans,” “humanists,” and “New Age” faiths, among many others, were out. The Defense Department, Hegseth said, was “making the Chaplain Corps Great Again.”

But the biggest protests against the change didn’t come from a group Hegseth had taken off the list, but one he’d left on it. The bulk of the remaining list was taken up by various Christian denominations: “Christian - Baptist,” “Christian - Catholic,” “Christian - Non Denominational,” and so on. But one faith was conspicuously missing the “Christian” prefix: “Can anyone tell me,” Sen. Mike Lee tweeted Saturday, “why the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was left out of the list of Christian churches?”

Seemingly by accident, the Pentagon had reignited a longtime controversy on the religious right: Is Mormonism Christian? Lee, who like many Utahns is Mormon, spent the next few days at all-out online war with online Christians who were overjoyed at what they saw as Hegseth’s “based” decision to leave Mormons outside the tent.

Yesterday, Lee promised relief was coming: “I just got off the phone with President Trump,” he tweeted. “We discussed the Pentagon’s ‘Christian list.’ I won’t speak for him, but I’m thrilled about where this is heading.”

Sure enough, the Pentagon rereleased the list with all “Christian” prefixes eliminated altogether. “The Pentagon list included redundant and unnecessary labeling, and the mistake has been fixed,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “The Pentagon’s job is not to adjudicate theological debates, but instead to ensure sincerely held faith is respected and encouraged in our ranks.”

As a theological matter, the “Is Mormonism Christian” question is fascinating, in part because it brings up other questions of who exactly gets to decide. Historically, Christianity has had very specific theological criteria for who is inside the faith of the church, particularly a series of doctrinal assertions about the nature of God (answer: Triune—three persons in one God) and the nature of Jesus Christ (answer: both fully God and fully man) summed up in a set of early-church creeds.1

But Christianity in America has long been much less institutional and more doctrinally loosey-goosey. There are many churches and many professed Christians who don’t spend much time (if any) on these doctrinal matters, but who still believe that Jesus is their savior. And of course there’s an even broader category of people who have basically stopped having any real doctrinal commitments whatsoever, but who still consider themselves “Christian” in a vague social or political way. Mormons are far outside Christianity if the credal doctrines are what matter, but have a reasonable claim on the “we love Jesus, too” front—and perhaps a better claim than many in the vague cultural-Christian camp.

It’s fascinating to see this long-simmering theological conflict spill over into the intramural fights on the American political right—especially at a moment when many on the right have begun to sneer at anything resembling religious pluralism and agitate for a muscular Christian nationalism to grow in political power in America.

This moment is present as subtext in the Pentagon fight. The idea that Hegseth and Co. would have backtracked on their based new recognized-faiths list over organized protests from, say, Wiccans is hilarious: kicking woo-woo lefty-coded groups to the curb was the entire point of the exercise. The reason Mormons had capital with which to challenge the list to which they objected was because they’re more or less in good standing with the current religious right: They’re a relatively large, reliably conservative church body that sends a number of their own to Washington as Republican lawmakers.

And yet it’s just the latest reminder that “Christian nationalism” is really something that can only exist in America as a force against the established liberal order. If it were ever to come close to achieving actual hegemonic cultural or political power, it would immediately collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions—because no single vision or version of Christian political power actually commands anything like majority support even on the political right. Who’s going to run the show? Catholics? Mormons? Radical Calvinists?

This is not, by the way, a problem specific to Christian nationalists, but to basically all forms of Trump-era right-wing nationalism, all of which are predicated on the assumptions of small intra-right factions that, when the right takes real power, they’re the ones who will be calling the shots. I wrote about the phenomenon when I attended last year’s National Conservatism Conference: “The NatCons are all chasing a vision of national greatness, but it turns out that ‘national greatness’ is a concept with as many definitions as there are NatCons.” As above, so below.

Amusingly, the Mormonism/Christianity episode seems to show the Pentagon recreating civic pluralism from first principles: To solve the fight, they found it useful to get less specific about who “counts” as Christian, not more so. If these folks could remember that that’s a useful prudential standpoint for all public policy, we’d be in business.

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A Letter from the Insurrectionists

by Mona Charen

Dear President Trump,

We, the undersigned, are the patriots who stood with you on January 6th. We are the people who charged the Capitol, broke windows, smashed doors, injured 140 law enforcement officers with flagpoles, bear spray, and other weapons (causing the deaths of five), sent lawmakers fleeing for their lives, stole property, erected a gallows, sought to kill the vice president and speaker of the house, and left urine and feces on desks and in hallways. We don’t regret a thing. Unlike those who spoke at the rally that day—John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, Mo Brooks, and of course, yourself—1,270 of us were tried and convicted and 660 of us were sentenced to terms in prison (long ones, in the cases of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers).

You’ve often stressed how terrible our plight has been since then. We were gratified, for example, when you justified the $1.776 billion slush fund by noting that we’ve been “horribly treated, horribly treated . . . they’ve been weaponized, they’ve been in some cases imprisoned wrongly, they paid legal fees that they didn’t have, they’ve gone bankrupt, their lives have been destroyed, and they turned out to be right.” We can see how deeply you feel the injustice.

Don’t get us wrong, we appreciated the blanket pardons for everyone, even the most violent. But as you yourself have said, more must be done to redress this injustice.

It’s a shame and disgrace that the Deep State was able to thwart your plan to create a taxpayer fund to compensate us for our suffering. But because we know how deeply you feel about this, we are confident that you will use your own money to create the war chest. In the last few years, you’ve been able to defeat the swamp in Washington and rightfully add at least another $3 billion to your personal net worth since January 2025. We imagine that’s only a down payment.

We don’t believe the fake news media stories about how you’ve been the stingiest billionaire in American history, claiming to donate to charities that you actually stiffed. One story about you just showing up at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a charity dedicated to kids with AIDS was really below the belt. They claimed that you just swanned into the event, took a seat at the front that was meant for an actual donor who was late, and basked in the assumption that you had donated, even doing the Macarena with the kids! And even afterwards, you never sent a dime. Or so the fake news said!

Nor do we credit the stories that say the vast majority of your charitable giving was actually just easements you signed with environmental groups when your plans to develop land parcels were blocked. About $119 million of the claimed $130 lifetime charitable donations were from these easements, so they claim. As for the rest, well, most were funded by the Trump Foundation, which was later shuttered for malfeasance. Or so the lying media would have it.

Sir, we know those stories are false. We have faith that you will do right by us out of your own pocket.

In fond expectation,
The January 6th Patriots

P.S. If you need our Social Security numbers, just ask Musk’s DOGE team. They have all that private stuff, right?

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Putin’s ‘Cringe’ Weekend of Humiliation… His effort to put on a show of strength didn’t fool anyone, writes CATHY YOUNG.

• Talk of Canceling Elections Shows Trump Is Unfit for Office… No president has ever canceled a federal election, even in our deepest crises, observes ROBERT DALLEK.

• Make It the Summer of Epstein… On the flagship pod, BILL KRISTOL joins TIM MILLER to make the case why Democrats must ruthlessly hang Todd Blanche’s dirty work on every Republican senator who’s willing to confirm him as AG.

Quick Hits

H-1B FEES: One of the biggest policy wins Donald Trump gave his coalition’s hardline nativists last year was a new $100,000-a-head fee on companies hiring foreign workers on H-1B visas—a major crackdown on skilled legal immigration. But yesterday, a federal judge blocked the policy, declaring it a tax requiring congressional approval. The New York Times has more:

The decision by Judge Leo T. Sorokin of the Federal District Court for the District of Massachusetts nullified one of a series of tactics the Trump administration has used to restrict legal immigration, even in fields in which foreign skilled labor helped address severe shortages.

In a 42-page opinion, Judge Sorokin acknowledged that the policy, imposed in September, appeared to step on Congress’s “exclusive power” to levy taxes under the Constitution. He dismissed claims by the Trump administration that the fee was a “regulatory payment” that would have been within the executive branch’s power to set, not a tax.

“This is mere ipse dixit,” he wrote, meaning offered without evidence. “Defendants offer no definition for what constitutes ‘a regulatory payment,’ cite no cases or statutes employing the term, and advance no reasoned argument explaining how this term encompasses something different than a tax or a penalty.”

The White House intends to appeal the ruling, which comes months after a different federal judge ruled in the administration’s favor in a separate suit against the same policy. Read the whole thing.

FISA SPYING ON THE CHOPPING BLOCK: For years now, despite perennial protests about warrantless spying from civil-libertarian lawmakers, Congress has repeatedly managed to cobble together coalitions to reauthorize the post-9/11 surveillance authorities of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Now, however, the program might be on life support—with Democrats threatening for the first time to oppose the program en masse over Donald Trump’s appointment of Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence. Here’s Politico:

Democrats are withdrawing their support in protest of the Pulte appointment, with nearly every Democratic senator joining a handful of Republicans in tanking a procedural vote early Friday morning that would have allowed for passage of that three-year deal before the June 12 deadline.

It’s only the latest in a string of occasions where Trump has acted seemingly on impulse and without consideration for the political fallout and ramifications on Capitol Hill. That has complicated efforts by Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Speaker Mike Johnson . . . to enact the president’s agenda with just months to go until the midterms.

“I don’t think he thinks about the impact on us and the timing,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) told reporters. “Which is unfortunate because it really has had an impact. Quite honestly, I’m worried about what we’re going to do on FISA.”

In one sense, this is just Democrats going to war with the toolkit they have: If the only pain point they can inflict on the administration in protest of Pulte’s appointment is FISA reauthorization, you’re going to see more Democratic defections than you would otherwise. But Pulte’s appointment also makes the abstract civil-liberties argument much more concrete: It’s not just a matter of possible future abuse of surveillance authorities, but of all but guaranteed present abuse.

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Blanche → Epstein

by William Kristol

There are many, many Republican lawyers in America. Many, sadly, are also pro-Trump. But it is Todd Blanche who has been selected by the president to be attorney general of the United States. He has this distinction: He is the prime orchestrator and key executor of the Trump administration’s Jeffrey Epstein coverup.

As former Attorney General Pam Bondi told the House Oversight Committee recently, it was Blanche who, as deputy attorney general, “supervised [the] entire process” of dealing with the Epstein files. “He was leading the Epstein matter and the release of everything from the beginning,” she testified. Blanche has also been the most visible public defender of the coverup, and of the decision not to investigate or prosecute anyone else for crimes.

Blanche stepped boldly into the Epstein spotlight on July 24, 2025, when he traveled to Florida to interview convicted Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. The meeting was initiated by Maxwell, and she received limited immunity via a proffer agreement.

But Maxwell didn’t use her immunity as an opportunity to be more forthcoming than she’d been previously about anything to do with Epstein. As every sentient observer familiar with the Epstein case agreed, she simply continued to stonewall and lie. But Blanche wasn’t sure. He told CNN a couple months later that deciding if Maxwell was a “credible” witness is “an impossible question to answer.”

Really?

In any case, Blanche explained, “The point of the interview was not for me to pressure test every single answer she gave.”

Why not?

Because “the point of the interview was to allow her to speak, which nobody had done before.”

This was laughable. But the real point of the interview became clear a few days later, when Maxwell was moved, contrary to Bureau of Prison guidelines for sex offenders, to a comfortable minimum-security prison.

The point of both the interview and the move was to encourage Maxwell not to talk about Donald Trump—and to hold out the prospect of even more favorable treatment in the future. Since the interview, Trump has continued to refuse to rule out the possibility of a pardon or commutation for Maxwell.

Since then, Blanche has been assertively pushing back against widespread public unhappiness with the botched and selective release of the Epstein files. For example, in early February 2026, Blanche had this exchange with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham:

Ingraham: Is there any chance that any of these individuals who partied with Epstein and engaged in relations with minors will be prosecuted? Any chance?

Blanche: I’ll never say no, and we will always investigate any evidence of misconduct, but as you know, it is not a crime to party with Mr. Epstein. And some of these men may have done horrible things, and if we have evidence that allows us to prosecute them, you better believe we will. But it’s also the kind of thing that the American people need to understand that it isn’t a crime to party with Mr. Epstein.

“It isn’t a crime to party with Mr. Epstein.” But “Mr. Epstein” (it’s kind of striking that Blanche added the honorific) pled guilty in 2008, and then was indicted again in 2019, for horrible crimes arranged or committed or celebrated at some of those parties. The Justice Department could now be following up on the testimony of scores of survivors to finally, properly investigate those crimes and their perpetrators. But Blanche’s Justice Department hasn’t even pretended to be seeking further evidence. Blanche’s DOJ has no interest at all in investigating or prosecuting the men who have done truly horrible things. After all, “it isn’t a crime to party with Mr. Epstein.”

Trump rewarded Blanche for arranging and managing the Epstein coverup. First he made Blanche acting attorney general. Now he wants to place him in that post outright. And that requires Senate confirmation.

Which means the Senate will debate and vote. Last November, thanks to a discharge petition, and over the opposition of the Trump administration and Republican leadership, Congress was forced to engage on the Epstein matter. Opposition to legislation requiring the release of the Epstein files collapsed when the issue emerged into broad daylight, and Congress voted almost unanimously to order the Justice Department to release the files. At the time, everyone from both parties could look as if they were in favor of the truth coming out.

But now we’ve had only a partial release of those documents and no follow-up investigations. Trump has gone out of his way to punish Republican critics of his administration’s Epstein coverup. Republicans have been happy to avoid further engaging on the issue.

But thanks to Trump’s nomination of Blanche, there is a chance to force a real public debate, with real Senate votes, on the Epstein coverup.

That is not what Blanche wants. In early April, shortly after becoming acting attorney general, Blanche told Fox News, “And so I think that to the extent that the Epstein files was a part of the past year of this Justice Department, it should not be a part of anything going forward.”

But the Epstein coverup should be part, a key part, of one thing going forward: It should be a key part of the upcoming debate on Blanche’s confirmation as attorney general. The Blanche confirmation fight can bring the Epstein coverup back into the spotlight this summer. His nomination can be turned into a referendum on the coverup by the Trump administration, and by the entire political class, of Epstein and his co-conspirators and clients.

The vote on Blanche can become, it should become, a vote on Epstein.

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Vance Never Met a Racial Controversy He Didn’t Like

by Cathy Young

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who used D-Day commemorations in Normandy to lecture Europe on resisting a new “invasion,” wasn’t the only Trump administration figure to annoy our allies with anti-immigration harangues in recent days. On Friday, the office of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer criticized those who would “interfere in our democracy” by exploiting the murder of 18-year-old British student Henry Nowak after his killer, Vickrum Digwa—a Sikh of Indian background—was sentenced to 21 years to life. That was a veiled swipe at Vice President JD Vance, who jumped into the controversy over the police response to Nowak’s fatal stabbing last December with a post saying Nowak would be alive if “European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants.”

The outrage over the circumstances of Nowak’s death is legitimate. Digwa stabbed Nowak multiple times after a minor (non-racial) verbal altercation. But it was Digwa and his brother, not Nowak, who called the police to report a violent racial assault. When the police arrived on the scene, they initially dismissed Nowak’s pleas that he’d been stabbed. The victim, bleeding internally and barely conscious, was handcuffed and arrested for assault; only then, after a cursory check, did the police call an ambulance and try CPR. Digwa was arrested a few minutes later, and Nowak was soon declared dead. (I discuss the incident in more detail in an article in Persuasion.)

Though the pathologist on the case declared that Nowak could not have been saved, it’s still horrifying that one of the last things he heard was “You are under arrest.” Many people, including commentators who are not on the right, think this appalling police negligence may have stemmed at least partly from hypersensitivity about racism based on an “overcorrection” in response to legitimate concerns about biased policing. Or maybe, as conservative British analyst Andrew Fox argues in Quillette, it was lazy assumptions based on the Digwas’ police call (how often does the murderer call the cops, after all?); the belief that, as the Digwas had claimed, the man on the ground was a violent drunk; and the lack of visible stab wounds or blood. There is now a well-warranted official investigation.

But far-right narratives pushed by politicians like Nigel Farage and media outlets like the GB News TV channel have promoted a drastically distorted account in which “woke” antiwhite racism caused the police to let Nowak die in a pool of his own blood. These hyperbolic accusations have already led to violent protests against the police and harassment toward Sikhs. Nowak’s family has asked that their tragedy not become a cause of division.

Enter Vance, not only denouncing the uncaring authorities but blaming Nowak’s death on immigration. Presumably, this means that Digwa, whose father is British-born and whose mother immigrated legally from India thirty years ago, should not have been in England. (One may only wonder what Second Lady Usha Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants, thinks.) Presumably, Vance also means non-white immigration, since Nowak himself was the son of an immigrant from Poland. It’s repulsive, bigoted demagoguery, all the more vile since it exploits an awful tragedy to praise the Trump administration’s efforts to stop “mass migration.” But what else is new?

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Soldiers Need Clarity From the President... When the commander-in-chief speaks, the troops—and our allies—listen, MARK HERTLING writes.

• Tonight! The Bulwark Book Club kicks off with MARK HERTLING joining MONA CHAREN at 7 p.m. Eastern to discuss If I Don’t Return: A Father’s Wartime Journal. This is exclusively for Bulwark+ members on Substack and YouTube. Join now.

• What a Russian Army Collapse Might Look Like… The Ukrainians are trying to break the Russian military—and they just might do it, argues BRYNN TANNEHILL.

• North Korea’s New Nuclear Doctrine… On Shield of the Republic, ERIC EDELMAN and ELIOT COHEN discuss the latest jackassery before pivoting to the war with Iran and under-reported nuclear developments on the Korean Peninsula.

Quick Hits

PRESIDENTIAL HISSY FIT: Donald Trump’s done a lot of combative press interviews over the years, but it’s been a while since he ragequit one. In a Meet the Press interview with NBC News’s Kristen Welker aired yesterday—taped in a barn in Wisconsin and frequently interrupted by torrential rain—the president gradually melted down over his stolen-election claims, insisting that the 2020 election had been rigged against him, that January 6th rioters who pled guilty to assaulting cops had actually been innocent, and that Democrats are rigging another primary election in California as we speak.1 As Welker repeatedly pressed him to give evidence for any of these claims, Trump repeatedly dodged: “There’s tremendous evidence. There’s nothing but evidence. . . . All I have to do is look. . . . I listen to people.” He got madder and madder until: “You’re a one-sided crooked network,” he spat. “Sorry. Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time.”

It was all the base-pleasing hits he’s played a thousand times before: The elections are crooked, the press is crooked, everybody’s crooked except Donald J. Trump. Another major interview, in other words, in which Trump failed to do a thing to neutralize the enormous hole he’s dug himself with voters ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.

DON’T TELL ME PEOPLE ARE MAD ABOUT THE ECONOMY: There were many other interesting moments in Trump’s Welker interview, but here’s another that stood out: As Welker repeatedly asked Trump what his message was to farmers who have been hammered by the economic effects of the Iran War, Trump repeatedly refused to give them a message at all, simply insisting that “nobody’s been better to farmers” and “I love the farmers and the farmers love me.”

It was a striking illustration of Trump’s bizarre unwillingness to engage on one of his key negative issues: voters’ growing fury about the cost of living in America.

Meanwhile, anti-Trump groups are gearing up to turn the heat up on Trump on the issue ahead of the midterms. This morning, our friends at Home of the Brave launched a new ad blitz in sixteen states highlighting spiking prices in essentials like gas and groceries, including a faintly horrifying AI spoof of Wal-Mart’s old price-rollback ads, which you can watch here.

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They Are Who We Thought They Were

by William Saletan

On Thursday, Republican senators had a chance to kill Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund for professed victims of “weaponization” by the Department of Justice. They refused. A Democratic amendment to block the fund, as part of an immigration-enforcement spending bill, failed in the Senate. Subsequent attempts to limit or outlaw the fund failed as well.

Republicans seem to think they can walk away from this issue because Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, has said he won’t implement the fund. They’re wrong. Blanche’s corrupt deal with Trump, in which he agreed to set up the fund as part of a fake “settlement” of a Trump lawsuit against the IRS, remains intact. And it’s not just the slush fund that is very much alive. The deal also continues to guarantee—and Blanche has refused to withdraw—immunity for Trump and his family against any investigations by the IRS.

DOJ revealed the immunity guarantee on May 19, a day after it announced the slush fund. Under the pretense of settling Trump’s suit, Blanche issued an order that insulated Trump and his family from tax enforcement:

The United States RELEASES, WAIVES, ACQUITS, and FOREVER DISCHARGES each of the Plaintiffs from, and is hereby FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing, any and all claims, counterclaims, causes of action, appeals, or requests for any relief, including injunctive relief, monetary relief, damages, examinations, or similar or related reviews, appeals, debt relief, costs, attorney’s fees, expenses, and/or interest, whether presently known or unknown that . . . have been or could have been asserted by Defendants against any of the Plaintiffs.

Blanche extended this immunity to Trump’s family members, “trusts, parent, sister, or related companies, affiliates, and subsidiaries.” It covered “any matters that were raised or could have been raised” in the Trump family’s legal battles with the IRS. The order could save Trump more than $100 million in known tax obligations the IRS might otherwise have recovered. And that’s not counting whatever else he and his family are hiding.

The deal was unprecedented and corrupt in numerous ways. Among them:

1. It shielded Trump from audits based on a lawsuit that wasn’t about audits. (Trump sued because his returns were leaked by a contractor, not by the IRS.)

2. In so doing, it violated DOJ policy that settlements must be limited to germane matters.

3. It selectively yielded to Trump while DOJ fought lawsuits by other parties regarding the same leaks.

4. It violated a law that bars the IRS from withdrawing audits at the president’s direction.

5. It overrode civil servants in the IRS who had written a long memo outlining arguments for challenging Trump’s lawsuit.

6. It bypassed judicial scrutiny by inventing a phony “settlement” that took the case out of court.

7. It evaded a judicial order that had instructed Trump and DOJ to show that they were adversaries, not colluding partners.

8. Nobody from DOJ bothered to challenge Trump’s suit or even show up in court.

9. As Trump’s personal attorney, Blanche was handsomely paid. In 2023 and 2024, his firm got more than $9 million from a pro-Trump PAC.

In one respect, the immunity order was even more corrupt than the slush fund: The slush fund didn’t extend to Trump and his family. The immunity order did. That difference has turned out to be pivotal. When Republican senators signaled that they opposed the slush fund, the DOJ said it would be willing to drop it. But not the immunity order. That was never taken off the table. In fact, Blanche made clear when testifying before a House Appropriations subcommittee that the immunity order would not be dropped.

Under questioning from Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), he claimed that the order was normal procedure. “Anytime the IRS settles with an individual taxpayer or another company, as part of the settlement, it’s standard,” he said.

He was lying. As a matter of IRS and DOJ policy, Blanche’s deal with Trump was grossly abnormal. But as a matter of Trumpian morality, Blanche’s compromise—publicly dumping the slush fund while keeping the immunity order—was standard operating procedure. Trump did what he always does: He screwed other people and protected himself.

By rejecting amendments to kill the slush fund legislatively—and not even attempting to block the immunity order—Republican senators essentially accepted that compromise. With their complicity, Trump has once again put himself above the law.

Trump has announced his intention to nominate Blanche to be the attorney general (in a full rather than an acting capacity). In refusing to drop the immunity order, Blanche has made his ethical emptiness clear. In an interview with Sean Hannity last weekend, he dismissed the “drama around the fact that [Trump] settled with his own DOJ.” Such putative conflicts of interest were immaterial, said Blanche:

Is a congressman allowed to work on tax legislation if he or she stands to benefit from it? Of course. It’s their job. . . . When [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller said, “You might want to indict the president for obstruction,” and [Attorney General] Bill Barr said no, was that a conflict? That was his AG saying, “I’m not going to indict you, sir.” No, we do that all the time.

Yes. In Trump’s government, flunkies like Blanche and Barr do that all the time. And if Republicans in Congress won’t stop the corruption, voters will have to step in.

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Please, Sir, May I Have Some More?

by Benjamin Parker

Donald Trump’s most dangerous traits are probably his greed and his cruelty.1 The former inspires the massive corruption that is corroding the framework of the republic. The latter motivates the widespread abuses of government power that infringe on people’s rights, intimidate legitimate opposition, and—in the cases of Renée Good, Alex Pretti, and unknown numbers of deportees and former USAID aid recipients around the world—end people’s lives. Will described above how Senate Republicans overnight refused to thwart Trump’s greed. But they also enabled his cruelty.

Less than a year after pumping $170 billion into immigration enforcement, Senate Republicans voted early this morning to add another $70 billion to that sum. In other words, Senate Republicans looked at the last year of mass deportations, of ham-handed “enforcement operations,” of wrongful detentions and deportations, of foreign torture chambers and domestic prison complexes, of masked government thugs and semi-official government violence, of protests, of court rebukes, of chaos in the Justice Department and in America’s cities, and they thought: Yes, we’d like more of that, please.

Much of the new money, like the money approved last year, will be used to hire and equip new ICE and Border Patrol officers. But as Adrian Carrasquillo has noted, there will be less training for those new officers precisely because they are being rushed into service. The worry last year was that Trump was turning an enlarged, heavily armed ICE into his own personal paramilitary. After witnessing ICE’s cruelty and lawlessness since then, we should be even more concerned now—especially to the degree immigration and election fraud are entangled in Trump’s mind, about which more below.

If Democrats manage to retake just one chamber in the midterms, it will be all but impossible for them to rescind any of this funding, or to change the rules governing immigration enforcement. Even if they take both houses, they will likely have to resort to the same reconciliation tactics Republicans are using now if they want to cut ICE and the Border Patrol back down to a proper size. And even then, they will face the problem of Trump’s veto, the possibility of more government shutdowns, and the difficulty of maintaining opposition to an authoritarian president while holding together a fractious majority.

And those are just the medium-term problems. The bigger questions about what to do with all those ICE agents; how to repair the economic damage from mass deportations; how to make whole all the people who have been wrongly injured (or worse); and how to create an immigration enforcement system that enforces the law without breaking it—those are the real, long-term hurdles. Unfortunately, after the Senate’s vote overnight, we’re further from addressing those problems than we were at this time yesterday.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• The Europeans Don’t Trust Us… In fact, they consider us a threat, writes PAUL ROSENZWEIG.

• I Used to Be a Pizza Hut, Ask Me Anything… An indie documentary explores the afterlives of an iconic brand’s castoffs; ADDISON DEL MASTRO reviews.

• We Got a Billionaire Problem… On the flagship podcast, JONATHAN V. LAST and KATHERINE POMPILIO join TIM MILLER to discuss whether America needs to start taxing extreme wealth, assess the Democrats’ search for a standard-bearer, and examine what happens when pardoned January 6th offenders reoffend.

• Bringing ‘Day of the Dead’ Back to Life… On The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, SONNY BUNCH is talking about Scream Factory’s new 4K of George Romero’s Day of the Dead with JEFF ROLAND and JOHN HARRISON, covering the film’s legacy, its painstaking restoration, and why this collector’s edition is a must-own for horror fans and physical media enthusiasts alike.

Quick Hits

INSURRECTIONIST RECIDIVISM: Just over five hundred days have passed since Donald Trump, on the first day of his second term in office, pardoned more than a thousand January 6th criminals. The supposedly tough-on-crime president chose not just to pardon those convicted of more minor offenses like trespassing, but also those who attacked police officers. And there’s no way anyone could have predicted this, but 97 of those pardoned people already went out and committed crimes again. Lawfare has the details:

The alleged crimes by Jan. 6 defendants since Jan. 6, 2021, run the gamut from relatively low-grade offenses like property damage, possession of drug paraphernalia, and trespassing to serious felonies like grand larceny, stalking, planning to assassinate law enforcement officials and prominent politicians, and defrauding government agencies. One Jan. 6 pardonee was convicted in February 2026 of child molestation and sentenced to life in prison. Another was convicted in 2025 of reckless homicide.

At least 14, meanwhile, have been charged with sex crimes or crimes related to child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and at least six have faced domestic violence charges. Others have faced charges for physical assaults, illegal firearms possession, or other violent crimes. . . .

Perhaps most strikingly, five recipients of presidential clemency were arrested in connection with conduct that occurred at least in part subsequent to Trump’s freeing them from prison—meaning that Trump’s clemency order on the first day of his second term may have actively facilitated criminal conduct. These include:

• Andrew Paul Johnson, who was freed from prison as a result of the pardon in 2025, was convicted of five charges, including child molestation, in February 2026, and sentenced to life in prison. The criminal conduct for which he was convicted took place both before and after his pardon.

• Zachary Alam, who was convicted of felony charges of grand larceny and burglary just months after his pardon.

• Ryan Nichols, who was charged with deadly conduct and harassment on May 10, 2026, after allegedly threatening a person with a gun in a church parking lot.

Read the whole thing.

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NUMBERING THE NONSENSE: For almost a decade, Donald Trump has been insisting that massive numbers of illegal immigrants are voting in American elections, distorting popular vote totals and maybe even swaying the outcomes of races. Now, after the Trumpified Justice Department has had a year and a half to look into this top-priority issue, we have a good idea of just how big the problem really is.

It’s really, really small.

Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh complained to Justice Department prosecutors last month that the total number of prosecutions for illegal immigrants voting was just ninety, according to a New York Times report. But even that overstates the problem: “Even smaller than the number of active investigations, experts and a review of records suggest, is the number of noncitizens who have so far been charged with such voting crimes since President Trump took office for a second term.”

The number of cases that will actually result in conviction will likely be lower than the number of prosecutions. It will certainly not come near the 11,780 votes Trump asked Georgia officials to invent in 2020.

THE OTHER HALF OF THE WAR: The United States and Iran have been at an impasse over the Strait of Hormuz—and the future of Iran’s nuclear program and possible sanctions relief—for weeks. But part of the reason the talks seem to be going nowhere is because of the other half of the war, which is proceeding 1,300 miles away in Southern Lebanon.

Israel has been at war with Iran and its proxies since October 7th. That war wasn’t limited to Gaza—it also involved the bombardment of Hezbollah’s headquarters in Beirut and the killing its leader, Hassan Nasrallah; an air campaign against the Houthis in Yemen; the bombing campaigns against Iran in 2025 and 2026; a limited invasion of Syria to seize strategic geography near the Golan Heights; and a ground invasion of southern Lebanon. That last item—the Israeli invasion and occupation of the home turf of Hezbollah—has been a sticking point in negotiations between Washington and Tehran for months.

Trump allowed himself and the United States to be drawn into a war without a clearly defined goal. Trump deserves the blame for being gullible, naïve, and hubristic, and it’s no surprise that he’s reportedly losing his patience with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who cares more about prosecuting his country’s war against Iran and its proxies than about Trump’s domestic approval rating.

The Trump administration has been attempting to negotiate a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, which would presumably be a necessary prerequisite for a more formal Iranian–American ceasefire. But Hezbollah just rejected the latest option. To borrow a phrase: Nobody knew the Middle East could be so complicated.

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Donald Trump wasn’t pleased. “Who would do such an unpatriotic thing,” he fumed on Truth Social. “They know where the negotiations stand. . . . They should be ashamed of themselves.”

In other words: Quit telling me to end my war! Can’t you see I’m TRYING? Happy Thursday.

The Authoritarianism Accelerates

by William Kristol

Last night, President Trump announced at a dinner in what used to be the Rose Garden that he would be nominating acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to hold that post in a full capacity. As Trump put it, “we are going to make him permanent attorney general.”

It’s an interesting formulation. Trump can’t actually “make” Blanche attorney general. That will require Senate confirmation, which could well be problematic. And moving up from acting attorney general doesn’t make you “permanent attorney general.” Unless Trump plans to remain permanent president.

Which, it seems, is something Trump increasingly seems to have in mind.

In his two months as acting attorney general, Blanche has gone out of his way to show Trump, conspicuously and publicly, his unsparing commitment to the autocrat’s precept: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies the law.” From the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, to the authorization of a sweeping investigation of former law enforcement and intelligence officials allegedly engaged in a decade-long conspiracy against Trump, to the attempt to establish a $1.776 billion slush fund for Trump’s allies and supporters, to his earlier work on the Epstein coverup—Todd Blanche has done what Trump wants. Trump’s announcement last night sends the signal that such an effort will be recognized and rewarded.

Trump’s announcement of his intention to promote Blanche came hard on the heels of Trump’s selection Tuesday of his spectacularly unqualified but fervently loyal henchman, Bill Pulte, to be acting Director of National Intelligence. And the last few days have also seen progress, if that’s the word, in the ongoing Trumpification of other key national security agencies. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has intervened in unprecedented ways in the selection of senior military officers, and has also put a 24-year-old convicted January 6th rioter in a counterterrorism job at the Pentagon. Trump has also been increasingly strident in recent days in his defense of what he and his supporters attempted on January 6, 2021. And in testimony to Congress, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has refused to commit to obeying court orders. This led senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) to comment, “If you’re a Republican or a Democrat on this committee, you should be really, really freaked out.” Just yesterday, Trump signed an executive order converting some 8,000 career, non-partisan civil service positions into political appointments, making those employees hirable and fireable at will.

We all should be “really, really freaked out.” Because it’s clear that Trump’s power grab over the executive branch is not just proceeding apace, but is intensifying. Yes, Trump is less popular than he used to be, and he has less of an absolute sway over Republican members of Congress than he once did. But this seems to be causing not hesitation on Trump’s part, but an intensification of his power-grabbing efforts. He seems no longer to care much about political backlash, or electoral consequences. As he said last week, “I don’t care about the midterms.” It’s almost as if he doesn’t expect elections to matter because he’s not going to do everything he can to allow them not to matter.

Trump seems to be at the stage of his authoritarian project when the mask comes off, when he increasingly disdains to conceal his aims. Trump has always presented himself as the tribune of the people. But yesterday he posted on Truth Social:

Communists always do well with the Voters or, as they would say, THE PEOPLE, in the Early Years! But, in the end, the Country, State, or City, GOES TO HELL! Great Violence proceeds at levels never seen before, and the entity dissolves into Poverty, Squalor, and Crime. Remember, breathtaking ‘Popularity’ first, and then, guaranteed DEATH AND DESTRUCTION!

This professed disdain by Trump for the “Voters or, as they would say, THE PEOPLE” is striking. Trump has been a fantastically successful demagogue, a master flatterer of the people. But at some point in an authoritarian takeover, one has to explain why one is taking over power despite or against the wishes of the people. What we are seeing is a president who is going full steam ahead on his centralization of power in a way that should make one doubt he intends to give it up—whether over the next two years, whatever a Democratic Congress tries to do, or in 2028, whatever the people try to do at the polls.

Many of the authoritarian efforts of Trump and his apparatchiks remain in the shadows, to be sure. But he wants to accustom his supporters to the idea that the opposition is thwarting him and that he may therefore need to take extraordinary measures. Trump didn’t have to nominate Blanche as “permanent” attorney general. Blanche can stay in the job as acting attorney general, with all the powers of a “permanent attorney general,” for quite a while. Trump wants these public fights. Authoritarianism needs to come into the daylight in order to socialize the acceptance not just of particular measures, but of the overall project, and to justify what might need to be done to seize power or stay in power in order to defeat the “Communists” who have seduced the people.

Over the past century, in many nations, fascist movements and authoritarian coups have sought justification in the need to save their respective countries from the Communists. One hopes and trusts that American exceptionalism will win out, and that we will not go down in history as merely another chapter in this sad story. We’re in no way destined to succumb to such a fate.

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Schrödinger’s Slush Fund

by Andrew Egger

Earlier this week, facing a Senate Republican mutiny, the White House suggested it would cancel a planned $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund for payouts to January 6th rioters and other Trump allies. Yesterday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told the House Appropriations Committee that the Justice Department was “not moving forward with the fund.” But nobody involved—not the president, not the rioters, not the senators who oppose the fund—seems convinced that the idea of cash transfers to insurrectionists is really dead.

In an interview with the New York Post this week, Trump continued to insist that the January 6th criminals he pardoned last year “should be reimbursed for a crooked government.” Yesterday, when CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked him whether the fund was dead or merely on hold, Trump dodged the question: “It’s, uh . . . I’d have to ask the lawyers. I don’t know.” He then pivoted to an extended personal attack on Collins.

Meanwhile, many of the rioters and the lawyers representing them are still holding out hope for a payout. The slush fund, after all, was just a financial mechanism for bundling their claims; Trump’s ongoing endorsement of the idea that they should get money has many thinking the Justice Department may prove more willing to settle with them individually. Peter Ticktin, a MAGA lawyer with hundreds of J6er clients, said this week he has filed claims for 200 clients and expects to file 200 more.

“As much as we’re disappointed that the plan was canceled,” Ticktin told ABC News, “right now we’re still very optimistic.”

Several senators suggested yesterday they’re not taking the administration at face value here either.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who recently lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger, told reporters he wasn’t inclined to take Blanche at his word. “You want to make sure something’s dead, not just mostly dead,” the physician legislator told NOTUS, channeling his inner Billy Crystal.1 “You want to make sure it’s really dead, and I think we can make it really dead.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D.-Mass.) sounded a similar note. “They will call it dead so long as it is politically expedient for them to do so,” she told reporters. “We will only know that that fund, that slush fund, is dead when we make that the law that the president cannot do this.”

It’s exactly the right sentiment. If Congress has learned nothing else during the Trump era, maybe they’ve at least learned this: You’d have to be a fool to take these guys at their word.

If Congress is going to do anything to make sure the slush fund is truly dead and buried, today’s the day to do it. The Senate will be voting for hours today on amendments to its $70 billion reconciliation package to fund ICE and the Border Patrol, a top legislative priority for Republicans on the Hill. It’ll be a good opportunity to see how gullible this crew still is.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Tell Me How the Iran War Ends… MARK HERTLING asks: What are we fighting for?

• Why Stone-Faced Fascists Keep Getting Antiquity Wrong… Online bigotry masquerades as a love of history in the fever swamps of Elon Musk’s X, writes BRET DEVEREAUX.

• The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy… On the flagship pod, LUKE RUSSERT and JOSH TUREK join TIM MILLER to discuss why it sure feels like there’s a vast right wing conspiracy to try and take over the media.

Quick Hits

YANK PULTE OR STOP SPYING: For Senate Democrats, reauthorizing America’s broad post-9/11 spying programs is one thing—and reauthorizing them with a Trump hatchet man like Bill Pulte in the government’s top intel position is quite another. Punchbowl News reports that Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, met with Majority Leader John Thune Tuesday to urge him to press Trump to change his mind on Pulte. If he refuses, Warner said, Democrats may be forced to tank a bill under consideration to extend the administration’s FISA 702 intelligence authorities. Here’s Punchbowl:

Democrats believe they’d be doing Republicans a favor because they also see Pulte as unqualified for the job, even if few openly say it. As we scooped Tuesday, the White House had indicated to top Republicans that Aaron Lukas, whom Trump announced as the acting DNI 12 days ago, would remain in the role for an extended period. Senate Republicans felt blindsided.

Despite Republicans’ concerns about Pulte, many argued Tuesday that reauthorizing Section 702 shouldn’t be “conflated” with his appointment. . . .

But Democrats have leverage here. Republicans can’t pass a FISA reauthorization on their own. With a handful of GOP senators expected to oppose any FISA agreement, Thune would likely need at least a dozen Democrats to support the bill. . . . That’s where Warner comes in. As his party has grown more antagonistic toward the surveillance authority, the Virginia Democrat is seen by Republicans as a crucial ally who can deliver Democratic votes.

Read the whole thing—and watch this space. We’ll be keeping a close eye on this one.

CEASEFIRE, DESPITE ALL THE FIRING: Despite Iran’s strikes on Bahrain and Kuwait Tuesday and American strikes against Iran’s Qeshm Island, the Trump administration yesterday maintained that nothing fundamental has changed: The war against Iran is over, the ceasefire holds, and negotiations with Iran are ongoing.

“Epic Fury has concluded,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a House committee in testimony yesterday. “We’re no longer conducting sustained strikes inside of Iran to degrade their military because Epic Fury is over.”

It’s an argument the White House is politically obliged to make: If Epic Fury were still ongoing, the administration would have been compelled by law to seek congressional authorization for its continuance weeks ago. But the distinction is largely one of scale and definition only, with Iran and American forces continuing to trade missile barrages that both sides insist on describing as “defensive strikes.”

Meanwhile, negotiators remain hung up on the same roadblocks as ever: In addition to the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s nuclear program, Trump has grown skittish about granting Iran sanctions relief after a reported preliminary deal that would have freed up billions for Iran sparked backlash among Republicans last week. Trump is eager, CNN reports, “to strike a deal that will be viewed as superior to a prior agreement inked during the Obama administration.”

TINKERER IN CHIEF: As early as March of last year, we were already remarking on the remarkable amount of time Donald Trump was spending on vanity projects like shaking up the Kennedy Center and redecorating the White House relative to working on his actual political agenda. At the time, we considered this a good thing: “Every minute spent critiquing the upholstery in the Kennedy concert hall is one less minute the president has to search out new beefs with Canada or personally vet FBI agents to no-knock Liz Cheney’s home.”

We stand by the sentiment—but even we have to admit this stuff’s getting ridiculous. Yesterday, the president summoned reporters to the Oval Office for a major announcement: The resurfacing of the bottom of the reflecting pool between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial was nearly complete. He even had bizarre props on hand: “Our Pool is Bigger than Skyscrapers,” read the giant posterboard printout Trump brandished, boasting that the reflecting pool is longer than the Empire State Building and One World Trade Center are tall. (This is, of course, true of many bodies of water, both natural and artificial.)

Trump was equally exultant on Truth Social: “Excitingly, the final coat of protection will be completed on the Reflecting Pool . . . at 4 P.M. today,” he posted shortly before that hour. “The water will start flowing, shortly thereafter. The walking paths outside of the Pool will, likewise, be cleaned, sandblasted, and finished soon. This will be the first time since the day it was built, 1922, that it has worked, and worked wonderfully, indeed!” Our long national nightmare, it seems, is finally at an end. Thank you, Mr. President!

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Cheap Shots

Seriously, you’ve got to see this thing:

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“We’re building something in front of the White House that’s quite attractive to a lot of people,” Trump said in a TikTok filmed from the Oval Office yesterday. The Eiffel Tower, he noted, had begun as a temporary installation too—so hey, why not his arena? “I’m looking at it, and maybe we’ll never, ever take it down.” Happy Wednesday.

Mark Hertling and Ben Parker will be live on Substack and YouTube today at 10:30 a.m. EDT for a special episode of Command Post with special guest Lt. Gen. Dr. Eric Shoomaker, former surgeon general of the Army, to talk about our government’s response to the Ebola outbreak.

Director of National Retribution

by Andrew Egger

Donald Trump is facing a host of crises at once. His political agenda is on the rocks, his popularity has never been lower, and his quest to punish his personal and political enemies for their crimes has all but stalled out.

At times like these, a guy’s got to make some hard choices about which priorities to push hard for and which to let fall by the wayside. And Trump’s selection yesterday of Federal Housing Finance Agency chair Bill Pulte as his new pick for acting director of national intelligence makes it crystal clear: Punishing his enemies is the one goal he’s determined to see through to the bitter end. Virtually everyone not in the bag for Trump—both lawmakers and veterans of the intel community—has been left aghast.

“That’s what politicization fundamentally is,” Susan Gordon, who served as principal deputy director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term, told The Bulwark. “You’re putting into this messy fray, this difficult thing in which the president already has distrust, you’re putting someone in charge that wants to support the president by going and finding the things that he wants to be true. You’ve now just corrupted the whole discipline.”

Gordon is right to worry. By practically any metric you can imagine, Pulte—the scion of a construction dynasty who parlayed minor MAGA e-celebrity into a housing-policy post—is an insane pick for a top intelligence role. He has zero experience, none whatsoever, in any national-security-related field, making him not only a silly pick but also perhaps an illegal one: Literally the first thing federal law has to say about the DNI is that any nominee to the post “shall have extensive national security expertise.”

Nor has Pulte earned the post by proving to be a lion of good government in his current post. Just the opposite: He’s routinely earned the scorn of other D.C. Republicans for the clownish ideas he regularly feeds into Trump’s brain. It was Pulte who briefly sold Trump on a housing policy built around the “50-year mortgage,” which sent White House officials scrambling to do damage control after Trump posted an endorsement of the idea with no explanation and no warning last November. When Trump posted a bizarre AI image of himself as Jesus Christ healing a sick man in April, prompting outrage from his evangelical base, it came out that Pulte was the one who had “brought the image to Trump’s attention.”

“I’m going to punch you in your fucking face,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Pulte at a dinner last September after hearing Pulte had been badmouthing him to the boss. This earned (anonymous) applause from Republican lawmakers on the Hill: “He’s a nut,” one House Republican told Politico. “The guy’s just a little too big for his britches,” groused another. “I would have done the same [as Bessent],” said a third.

But Pulte has done one thing that Trump has really, really liked: He has gone after Trump’s enemies with ferocity, tenacity, and an utter lack of shame. The Federal Housing Finance Agency might have seemed a strange perch from which to wage the president’s war of retribution. But as soon as he got there, Pulte busied himself finding ways to use the limited tools at his disposal to get scalps for his boss. Eventually he found a promising route. In fact, the strategy he put together—rooting through opponents’ federally filed mortgage applications in search of discrepancies he could trumpet as fraud—became one of the White House’s go-to strategies in 2025, with Pulte laying the groundwork for mortgage-fraud investigations into a host of Trump foes, including then-Rep. Eric Swalwell, Rep. Adam Schiff, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Now Pulte will get to bring this hatchet-man zeal to a much bigger perch with a much more powerful set of dirt-gathering tools: the office of the director of national intelligence. (Have no fear, though: The president said Pulte will keep his housing job at the same time.)

Gathering dirt on Americans, particularly political foes of the government, isn’t what our intelligence agencies are supposed to be for, but it’s long been obvious that it’s Trump’s primary use for them. When Tulsi Gabbard was DNI, she was routinely sidelined or excluded from matters of foreign affairs like the raid to capture Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Instead, the president sent her haring off on all sorts of revenge-tour missions: relitigating the launch of the 2016 Russia investigation, or supervising raids on election offices in an attempt to prove 2020 voter fraud. (When the FBI raided an office in Fulton County, Georgia, Gabbard wasn’t just bizarrely on hand—she even facilitated a speakerphone call from Trump to the on-site agents congratulating them on their success.)

But at least Gabbard had national-security experience—as an Army officer and as a Democratic lawmaker who served for years on the House Armed Services, Homeland Security, and Foreign Affairs Committees. She was a putatively qualified nominee who Trump liked because she would do what he wanted, where he wanted. With her gone, Trump is dropping the fig leaf. All that national security experience, it turns out, was just window dressing. The main thing for a director of national intelligence is to be willing to hit Trump’s foes where it hurts.

It’s worth stressing, too, how bad a candidate for this job Pulte would be even if you set this evidence of obvious malice aside.

“There’s so much uncertainty in intelligence, just in general,” Gordon said. “To put someone who has never in his whole life probably even seen intelligence, to understand what it means, is I think profoundly disturbing and sends a lot of signals about how the president values intelligence, how the president understands the job.”

If Pulte’s appointment suggests Trump intends to keep doubling down on his revenge tour, it will do little to help either his swooning popularity or his growing problems keeping lawmakers in check. It’s far from their top issue, but the polls have been clear for months that Americans disapprove of Trump’s weaponization of government against his enemies. Continuing to burn more political capital in pursuit of this goal won’t help dig him out of the popularity pit he’s in. And as Republican lawmakers keep finding new reasons to resent the ways Trump has tried to short-circuit their oversight and policymaking authorities, they can’t love the fact that Trump is nominating an unqualified person they disdain to a top national security role—all in an “acting” capacity that spares Pulte of needing to get the Senate’s consent for the job.

Year two of his second term has left Trump battered and wounded, but in his instincts he remains an authoritarian to the last. He could be spending his time trying to shore up Americans’ living conditions and attempting to win back the voters he’s already lost since 2024. But why bother with that when there’s all these Democrats left to crush?

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What Congress Can Do

by William Kristol

One additional point on Donald Trump’s ludicrous—but more importantly, dangerous—selection of Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence.

The pick is bad for U.S. intelligence and a threat to the civil liberties of American citizens. But the greatest danger of appointing Pulte as DNI is that it’s a further step in Trump’s plans to subvert free and fair elections in the United States, to some degree in 2026 but especially in 2028.

As Andrew reminds us, Tulsi Gabbard as DNI has already used the excuse of possible foreign election interference to try to help out the Trump administration’s efforts at injecting itself into election supervision in the swing state of Georgia. But the appointment of Pulte takes the danger to another level. With Pulte in charge of the intelligence community—along with Todd Blanche at Justice, and Kash Patel at the FBI, and Markwayne Mullin at DHS, and Pete Hegseth at Defense—we have the clear and present danger of a full-fledged effort of election subversion, perhaps in 2026, but I would say almost certainly in 2028.

Many actors in our system have to be alert to this and be ready to fight this. The general public, state officials, the legal community, the courts, and many institutions in the private sector and civil society all have a role. But Congress will need to step up as well. It will be able to do so far more effectively if the Democratic party controls it. So electing Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate is the single most important step for democracy that could happen this year.

This means we all have to focus on free and fair elections in 2026, so that we can have a Congress that can ensure free and fair elections in 2028.

But there are things that Democrats in Congress can do even before the midterm elections. As we’ve seen recently, even as a minority they have leverage in both houses. They can sometimes block legislation and appropriations bills. They can use oversight mechanisms and opportunities for publicity. They can sometimes pressure a few Republicans to break from the administration.

Different kinds of what we might call guerilla legislating, all types of imaginative and creative resistance, efforts to use the different levers of power—these need to be mobilized on behalf of democracy for the rest of this year and of course beyond, in 2027 and 2028, when, let’s not forget, Trump will still be in power.

In the case of Pulte, Democrats—and pro-democracy Republicans—need to take a fresh look at every legislative and appropriations measure that affects the intelligence community in light of saving democracy and the rule of law. This means, for example, that one arrangement for handling intercepts involving American citizens under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that might be reasonable for a normal administration may well not be suitable for this one, and should be opposed given that Pulte would be in charge. Along these lines, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner has reportedly warned Majority Leader John Thune that an extension of Section 702 might fail unless Pulte is removed.

To put it simply: Democrats—and responsible Republicans—need to avoid the trap of trying to help Pulte—or Blanche, or Patel, or Mullin, or Hegseth—to be as effective in doing their jobs as possible. Given what they are trying to do, Congress needs to make them all as ineffective as possible.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Playing Politics with Military Promotions… When personal preference trumps professionalism and merit, trust breaks down, argues MARK HERTLING.

• Yes, Russia Is Losing the War in Ukraine… And Putin seems to be the last person not to know it, writes CATHY YOUNG.

• The Party of Vicemaxxing… DEREK THOMPSON joins TIM MILLER on the flagship pod to discuss why Republicans never defend Trump’s corruption on the merits but serve up anti-moral excuses for his repeated acts of immorality instead.

Quick Hits

IRAN HITS KUWAIT: The war in Iran is getting hot again, with limited strikes between Iran and U.S. forces expanding yesterday into Iranian strikes on the broader region. Here’s NBC News:

Iran launched a deadly new set of attacks in the Persian Gulf on Wednesday as it traded strikes with the United States, the latest exchange to threaten the fragile ceasefire and stalled peace talks between the two countries.

One person was killed and flights were suspended in Kuwait, officials said, after missile and drone strikes including an attack on its international airport. The U.S. military said it shot down Iranian drones near the Strait of Hormuz and struck Iran’s Qeshm Island a day earlier.

Repeated military exchanges between Washington and Tehran, as well as Israel’s escalating campaign in Lebanon, have added strain to efforts to end the war and reopen the crucial trade route. The two sides offered mixed messages on the status of talks, with President Donald Trump insisting they were ongoing after Iran signaled it may walk away.

Trump, who on Monday told CNBC he “couldn’t care less” if Iran negotiations had stalled out since they had “started to get very boring,” insisted yesterday on Truth Social that “Fake News Reports” to that effect are “false and erroneous.”

THE 60 MINUTES PURGE CONTINUES: CBS News didn’t wait long to punish veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley for his public objections to the purge of the program’s leaders this week. One day after Pelley took over new executive producer Nick Bilton’s introductory meeting to grill him about Bari Weiss’s leadership and firing decisions, the company informed him he was being terminated for cause, effective immediately.

“Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear,” Bilton told Pelley in his termination letter. “And I have heard you.”

In a statement, Pelley castigated CBS’s new leadership for casting aside the legacy of “the most successful program of any kind in history,” accusing “new management” of instructing him to “inject falsehoods and bias” into politically sensitive stories. “The collapse of values at the top has become untenable,” Pelley wrote. “The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well.”

PRIMARY RESULTS: California and Iowa held their party primaries last night. Because California counts its votes with ludicrous slowness, we still don’t know the outcomes of some of the major races there, but as of now the governor’s race seems to be heading for a runoff between Republican Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host, and Democrat Xavier Becerra, a former congressman and state attorney general who served as secretary of health and human services under President Joe Biden. Billionaire Tom Steyer, who briefly looked like the race’s frontrunner after the campaign implosion of Rep. Eric Swalwell, currently lags in third. Meanwhile, in the Los Angeles mayoral race, former reality star Spencer Pratt seems likely to advance to a runoff against Democratic Mayor Karen Bass.

Over in Iowa, Democrats got the candidates for governor (Rob Sand) and senator (Josh Turek) they expected, but there was one big surprise on the Republican side: The Trump-endorsed candidate for governor, Rep. Randy Feenstra, was edged by insurgent challenger Zach Lahn by less than a single percentage point. Trump’s endorsement came late in the cycle, and Feenstra was widely seen as having run a lackluster campaign. But it’s a notable outcome in a GOP primary season that has so far featured mostly big successes for the president’s picks.

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Cheap Shots

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Not so, respond Netanyahu’s access reporters at Israel’s N12 News: “Trump did not make personal remarks about jail or claim Netanyahu is hated globally.”

And hawks in the American media are beside themselves over the whole thing: “THE LEAK IN AXIOS WAS A VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW AND PROVIDED SUPPORT TO THE IRANIAN REGIME AND ITS HEZBOLLAH PROXY,” conservative radio host Marc Levin fumed.

So negotiations to end the war seem to be going great, is the point. Happy Tuesday.

Join Bill and Andrew for Morning Shots Live today at 10 a.m. EDT on Substack and YouTube.

Not His Holiday

by William Kristol

I wrote last week that it’s increasingly and painfully obvious that Donald Trump’s attempted hijacking of our 250th birthday celebration has become a national embarrassment. But Trump’s celebration of the 250th anniversary will be his embarrassment. We need not allow it to be ours.

Embarrassment is an emotion unknown to Trump, and so he’s forging right ahead. Construction is proceeding apace in turning the White House South Lawn into a vulgar venue for Trump’s gladiatorial circus scheduled for June 14, his eightieth birthday. Active-duty military are being pressured to attend, in uniform, to act as props for the birthday boy whose painful bone spurs precluded his own military service.

Then, ten days later, on June 24, to make up for all the performing artists who’ve pulled out of his “Great American State Fair,” Trump plans to take over the National Mall for a speech. And God only knows how much Trump will go out of his way to make himself the center of the festivities on Independence Day itself.

Meanwhile, Trump continues to agitate, in honor of our 250th, for the issuance of a $250 bill with his face on it and for the construction of a 250-foot high imperial arch that only he wants that would loom over our national cemetery.

So here in Washington, D.C., Trump is trying to make America 250 all about Trump all of the time. As David Frum lamented,

a void has opened between the scheduled roster of events and the true purpose and meaning of the solemnity of July 4, 2026. This powerful date will go unmarked by any act of memory worthy of the nation. . . . Trump has made a pitiful shambles of what should have been a glorious moment.

It can all be a bit dispiriting. One’s natural reaction can be to look away from this year, and look beyond towards a brighter future. That was my reaction last week, that “we can reasonably hope that one day soon, after this unfortunate interlude, we will once again have elected leaders who will celebrate our national birthday in a way fitting and proper for this great nation.”

But we can do better than merely hope for a brighter future. We can refuse to allow Trump’s desecration of our 250th to be our desecration.

And this doesn’t actually require that we do anything that special. All we have to do is to go ahead and celebrate the Fourth of July as we usually do. After all, the Fourth has never been about one big spectacle anchored by the president in Washington, D.C. It’s always been about family and local and community events across the nation, about family cookouts and community parades and fireworks at local high school football fields. It’s never been about looking up to something given to us by Washington. It’s always been about our gathering to commemorate our anniversary.

These events around the nation aren’t and shouldn’t be particularly solemn. They typically don’t and needn’t feature conspicuously deep reflection about The Meaning of America. They should be fun. John Adams was hardly the most fun-loving of the Founders, but it was he who wrote in 1776 that he hoped to see the anniversary of our independence marked by “Shews, Games, Sport, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other.”

Dispersed, local, fun events are what we’ve done to mark July Fourth over the years. That’s what we can do and will do again this year.

But this year, our normal July Fourth celebrations can make a kind of statement. They’ll be making a statement that July Fourth is our celebration, not Trump’s. That America is our nation, not Trump’s. That here, we the people rule, not Trump.

So rather than be demoralized by Trump’s effort to hijack our holiday, we can view this July Fourth as a moment for remoralization. We can see it as an opportunity for a renewed dedication to the real meaning of Independence Day. We can look away from Trump’s sad simulacrum of kingly spectacles in Washington, D.C. Across the length and breadth of this land, of our land, we can enjoy July Fourth as our celebration of our independence.

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Is the J6 Slush Fund Dead?

by Andrew Egger

The so-called “anti-weaponization fund”—the $1.776 billion slush fund for allies Donald Trump announced last month as part of a so-called settlement with the Treasury Department—has been an interesting test of a scholastic sort of thought experiment: Can the president create a humiliation so large his congressional allies can’t swallow it?

Remarkably, in this case, the answer now appears to be “yes.” As I wrote last month, House and Senate Republicans were ballistic with anger on the news of the fund’s creation. Even more remarkably, that indignation only grew stronger during the congressional recess, and many lawmakers returned to Washington this week determined to stop the thing. Yesterday, Trump seemed to throw in the towel: Multiple outlets suddenly reported yesterday afternoon that Trump was quietly telling allies he would abandon the fund altogether.

Could this still just be a feint on Trump’s part? The specifics are worth drilling into.

First, the slush fund had received a pair of judicial setbacks late last week. On Friday, after a group of plaintiffs including a January 6th prosecutor sued in federal court to block the fund, a federal judge in Virginia temporarily blocked all payments both from the Treasury to the fund and from the fund to claimants. Meanwhile, Judge Kathleen Williams, who had been assigned to the Trump–IRS case that led to the settlement in the first place, wrote Friday that she still intended to investigate whether Trump’s lawyers had “abused the judicial process” by filing “a frivolous lawsuit for the sole purpose of forcing a settlement.”

By this point, the fund seemed to be in pretty bad shape. Trump and Co. had drawn it up specifically to avoid legal scrutiny, but legal scrutiny was arriving anyway, and their ridiculously shameless argument that lawmakers should approve of the fund because they themselves could apply for money from it wasn’t landing. But pulling the plug would be met with outrage by the core MAGA base. How to pick the lock?

Step one is to blame the courts. Although the judicial hold on payments to and from the fund was only a short-term order, the Justice Department’s statement yesterday made it sound as though the court had shut the fund down altogether. The court, the government claimed, had stated that “under no circumstances may the Department of Justice proceed with the Anti-Weaponization fund.”

“This fund was open to anybody who was so weaponized [sic], targeted, or persecuted, whether they were Democrat, Republican, Conservative, Independent, or otherwise,” the statement continued, in the language of an elegy. “The Department will abide by the Court’s ruling.”

What’s going on here is obvious: The DOJ is betting that the MAGA base is so incapable of reading and processing the specifics of the news that if the fund never materializes, Trump supporters will blame the courts rather than the administration.

But the particularly interesting bit is the way the administration seems to be making a similar case to Republican senators. These senators have a lot of sway at the moment: They’re currently considering legislation to re-fund ICE and the Border Patrol, legislation into which they could easily tuck language blocking the anti-weaponization fund from going forward at all.

The pitch from the White House seems to be: Hey, look, we’re backing off on the weaponization fund—lucky for you, now you don’t have to bother with banning it!

Even this, however, doesn’t seem to be landing. “It’s pretty clear that the president has to say very explicitly that there’s not going to be a weaponization fund” before the Senate will move forward with the reconciliation bill, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said yesterday, a sentiment that was echoed by many other GOP senators.

They should go further, though. The Senate should not ignore the possibility that Trump is trying to deke them: whisper enough sweet nothings in their ear to get them to pass the reconciliation bill, then go right back to trying to make the fund happen when their moment of leverage has passed. If blocking the fund was good legislation when Trump was trying to make it work in the first place, it’s still good legislation today.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Inside MAGA’s Fake Gay Motorcycle War… In False Flag, WILL SOMMER reports on the Dunces of Anarchy.

• ‘Masters of the Universe’ Review… it’s a feature-length meme, writes SONNY BUNCH.

• Trump Is All-In on Authoritarianism…On the flagship podcast, BILL KRISTOL joins TIM MILLER to discuss Trump’s unhinged late night bleats and why we need to be vigilant for Trumpian attempts to meddle in the midterms.

• Bari Weiss is “Murdering 60 Minutes”... On Bulwark+ Takes, WILL SOMMER joins JVL to discuss the explosive showdown inside CBS News where Scott Pelley confronted Bari Weiss’s new executive producer on their neutering of the famed program.

Quick Hits

15 MINUTES AT 60 MINUTES: There’s heated meetings, and then there’s what went down at 60 Minutes yesterday amid Bari Weiss’s purge of the program to install more pliable leadership and correspondents. Over at Status, Oliver Darcy has the painful tick-tock:

On Monday morning, the staff of “60 Minutes” convened for an introductory meeting with Bari Weiss’ handpicked new executive producer of the program, Nick Bilton. Bilton, the technology journalist who lacks both broadcast news and managerial experience, opened the meeting by reading from some prepared notes. He didn’t get far.

Scott Pelley, the iconic “60 Minutes” correspondent and longtime CBS News journalist, interjected and started grilling Bilton about what he dubbed “Black Thursday”—referencing the day last week in which Weiss carried out mass firings, terminating Tanya Simon as executive producer, ousting Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega as correspondents, and showing the door to other senior staffers.

In the extraordinary back and forth, an impassioned Pelley relentlessly pressed Bilton on Weiss’ intentions for the storied newsmagazine, pointed out that he has no relevant experience to helm television’s most prestigious news program, grilled Bilton on what he knew about the firings, and more.

“Bari loves this institution,” Bilton told staffers at one point during the highly contentious meeting. “She loves ‘60 Minutes.’”

“She’s murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” Pelley countered. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it—and she’s doing exactly that.”

The meeting only lasted fifteen minutes before Bilton gave up and called it, but those were fifteen eventful minutes. Read the whole thing.

THE PEOPLE v. THE MACHINE: Under Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida has taken a more populist, hostile approach to AI policy than the mostly pro-AI Washington GOP. Yesterday, the state sued OpenAI and Sam Altman, arguing that the company and its CEO had “chosen the AI race over the safety and security of our kids.” CNN has more:

The lawsuit, filed on Monday in Florida’s tenth circuit, accuses OpenAI of deceptive and unfair trade practices, negligence and violating product liability laws. It also seeks to hold Altman “personally liable for the harm he has caused Floridians,” including his alleged “utter disregard for the risk to human life caused by his firms’ conduct.”

The lawsuit lists a litany of accusations against ChatGPT, including helping mass shooters, encouraging suicide, causing “public humiliation,” getting minors addicted to a tool with “no parental oversight” and causing users to lose “critical thinking skills.”

OpenAI said in a statement that it believes minors “need significant protection” and that it has “put in place industry leading protections and policies.”

Read the whole thing.

THE PENTAGON’S LITTLE TYRANT: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has already gone to unprecedented lengths to neuter and muzzle the Pentagon press, beginning last year when he revoked the badges of pretty much every non-MAGA defense reporter after they wouldn’t sign a pledge not to report on “unauthorized” information. But the work against the Enemy of the People is never done! Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that the Defense Department has designated its press office a “classified space,” banning journalists—if any should ever happen to get back in the building—from accessing it at all:

While Pentagon reporters are still largely barred from the building, as litigation over the agency’s press rules continues, the change would have an outsize impact on them upon a possible return—restricting access to a space they have for years been able to walk freely.

People familiar with the change said it was driven in part by a shift that moved Pentagon speechwriters into the public affairs office. The office will be equipped with SIPRNet, the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, so personnel can use the tool without decamping for a separate secured room. . . .

The latest designation creates a scenario in which even if journalists are able to access the Pentagon, their ability to interact with the department’s spokespeople will be reduced.

As the Post notes, Hegseth’s anti-press approach increasingly stands out even within the administration: Neither the White House nor other key departments like State have clamped down on access with anything like Hegseth’s zeal. Read the whole thing.

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“Don’t the Dumocrats, and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans, understand that it is MUCH tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate, when political hacks keep negatively ‘chirping,’ at levels never seen before, over and over again, that I should move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever,” the president fumed on Truth Social shortly after 1 a.m. this morning. “Just sit back and relax, it will all work out in the end - It always does!” Happy Monday.

Join Sam and Will for MAGA Mondays, live at 10 a.m. EDT on Substack and YouTube.

Is This Platner Scandal Different?

by Andrew Egger

Graham Platner, oysterman, veteran, and presumptive Democratic Senate nominee in Maine, has for months faced a steady drip of embarrassing stories about his personal life: from the Nazi-logo tattoo he got while a young meathead Marine to his post-service history of basically unhinged anonymous social-media posts.

Until recently, these stories didn’t seem to be landing with Maine voters, who had adopted a frame of Platner that accounted for those rougher edges. For them, Platner’s whole story was that he got older, wiser, and more politically engaged after struggling mightily with post-war disillusionment. The young dumb soldier simply wasn’t the same person as the one they now supported politically.

But now comes a Platner scandal that threatens to upset that accommodation. This weekend, multiple outlets reported on Platner’s recent turn as an extramarital sexter. When Platner launched his bid for Senate last year, his wife Amy Gertner, whom he married in 2023, told a top campaign aide about a possible skeleton in his closet: She had found explicit texts with a number of other women on his phone in early 2025.

Platner has pushed back on the story—attacking “gossip” from “establishment media outlets” and trying to spin the real villain as the ex-staffer who leaked it. But he hasn’t denied the texts. In fact, he and Gertner have both acknowledged them, saying they worked through the issue in marriage counseling.

That may be enough to survive politically. But I, for one, am not so sure. This story is different from the others: Platner running around on his wife while in his late 30s can’t be written off as a youthful idiocy he later grew out of. And the attempt to redirect the story is silly: Infidelity is bad, speaks poorly of your judgment and character, and is the sort of thing that has caused problems for politicians who get caught doing it from time immemorial. Susan Collins was born, it seems, under a lucky star.

For a certain type of anti-anti-Trump conservative commentator, Platner has long been a favorite conversation piece. Chronically grumpy over all the nonsense Trump makes them swallow, they’ve leapt at the opportunity to use Platner to press the same critiques they regularly receive against their Democratic critics: Look who’s eager to overlook character defects in their candidate NOW!

But to me, the closest cross-party parallel for Platner isn’t Trump. It’s some of the Republican candidates that cropped up in the years preceding Trump’s rise, when anti-establishment sentiment in the Republican base had already hit a fever pitch but before Trump came along as its perfect vessel.

During the Obama years, Republicans were in many ways psychologically where Democrats are now: Licking their wounds after incredibly painful electoral losses, seething with rage at what they saw as out-of-touch party leaders, ready to fall in love with pretty much anyone who was willing to reflect that rage back at them.1

The problem—for Republicans then and for Democrats now—is that the machinery of the major parties was and is still best in class at ferreting out people’s old baggage and filtering out candidates who had too much of it to win. A world where iconoclastic outsiders routinely beat up on establishment-approved types is a world where unvetted candidates with big personal skeletons in the closet see those skeletons revealed during the general election rather than being quietly revealed before the primary.

Which means it’s also a world where voters are routinely incentivized to overlook and rationalize these scandals once they are revealed. Because if you’re a Democrat, it’s certainly not unreasonable to look at a guy like Platner and say: Okay, so he’s a cheater—now explain to me exactly why I should think that means Republicans should control the Senate?

I don’t have a convenient moral to the story here. It’s not like the answer is just for the parties to keep running the same old colorless senior-citizen career politicians. Voters don’t like them, and they shouldn’t. If Maine Gov. Janet Mills hadn’t been such an uninspiring establishment Senate candidate, Platner would never have found a populist wave to catch in the first place.

But I do worry that the path we’re on is one that makes it easier and easier for Democrats to follow Republicans into just abandoning character-related assessments of their candidates altogether. We’re currently in the midst of a long, painful education in how badly that can go on the GOP side of the aisle. Once you decide moral fiber in your leaders is a luxury your party can no longer afford, it’s amazing how quickly things can get out of hand.

Why Iran Buys Chinese

by Mark Hertling

NBC News reported this weekend that the American F-15E Strike Eagle shot down over Iran on April 3 may have been hit by a Chinese-made shoulder-fired missile, known by its NATO nickname the “Flying Crossbow.” If that reporting is confirmed, it would mean that Chinese military technology played a direct role in the first shoot-down of an American combat airplane in decades. That is certainly newsworthy, but the missile itself is not the story. The story is how it got there.

The Flying Crossbow did not suddenly appear in Iranian hands. China’s military relationship with Iran dates to the earliest days of the Iran–Iraq War, when Beijing became one of Tehran’s most important sources of arms when many other nations were reluctant to sell to the newly installed revolutionary regime. Throughout the 1980s, China provided Iran with aircraft, armor, and missiles, eventually selling more than $2 billion worth of weapons while helping establish a long-term defense relationship that survived long after the war ended. In the decades that followed, that relationship expanded beyond simple arms sales to include missile technology, anti-ship cruise missiles, radar systems, drone components, electronics, manufacturing assistance, and increasingly sophisticated military cooperation. Recent intelligence reporting suggests China may have provided Iran with advanced radar capabilities.

These weapons transfers are only part of the equation. Modern military systems require training, on-site maintenance and logistics support, and even doctrine development. China and Iran have conducted military exercises because effective air-defense systems depend on operators who understand radar integration, target acquisition, command-and-control procedures, and electronic warfare techniques. Missiles become dangerous not simply because they are delivered, but because someone teaches others how to employ them effectively.

My father was a grocery salesman, representing companies that distributed quality food products. But I remember he always insisted that the product itself was only part of the sale. “People want to buy our product,” he would say. “But what seals the deal is the personality of the salesman.”

His point was simple. Customers tend to buy from people they trust. Anyone who has a favorite car dealer, real estate agent, hotel chain, or local business understands this instinctively. The relationship often matters as much as, or sometimes more, than the product.

The same principle applies in international arms sales. Countries do not simply buy weapons; they buy relationships. Every fighter aircraft, missile battery, radar system, and training program represents a long-term commitment between nations. The hardware matters, but the trust behind the hardware matters more.

For decades, nations purchased American equipment not only because it was often the best in the world, but because it came with a trusted relationship with the United States. Arms sales created partnerships, interoperability, intelligence sharing, training opportunities, and strategic alignment that frequently lasted for generations. The sales contributed to building strong alliances.

Today, many allies are beginning to question that reliability. European governments have watched repeated interruptions and political disputes over support to Ukraine while confronting the most serious security threat on the continent since the Cold War. Taiwan continues to express concern about delayed weapons deliveries, while Japan recently learned that delivery schedules for key capabilities, including Tomahawk cruise missiles, may be affected by American inventory shortages and competing priorities. Other allies have quietly raised similar concerns.

Whether those delays are justified is beside the point. It’s the perception that matters.

China understands this. Beijing does not need to outspend the United States to gain influence. It simply needs to appear more dependable. While Washington debates commitments and sends mixed signals, China continues offering weapons, technology, infrastructure investment, and security partnerships around the world. In many places, it is capitalizing on doubts about American reliability.

The Chinese-made “Flying Crossbow” that may have downed an American aircraft is certainly something that should concern us. The Chinese missile is the product, but the relationship that put it there is what really matters. The Chinese–Iranian relationship is not new, and it would be ill-advised to think China is not part of the global arms market. But the questions we should be asking are: Who else is buying Chinese weapons, and why?

My father understood that lesson decades ago in the grocery business. Nations are learning it today in the international security business.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• The Pentagon Is Too Fixated on China… Good strategy involves handling multiple problems at once, observes MARK HERTLING.

• The Never-ending Iran Negotiations… On Shield of the Republic, ELIOT COHEN joins ERIC EDELMAN from the shores of Lake Champlain to break down the latest administration jackassery before pivoting to the ongoing negotiations with Iran.

• Will Trumpism Die With Trump? On How to Fix it, JOHN AVLON welcomes his wife MARGARET HOOVER—host of Firing Line and great-granddaughter of President Herbert Hoover—to discuss what Paxton’s annihilation of Cornyn reveals about today’s GOP, Trump’s Iran gamble, the case for ranked-choice voting, and what this political era has done to two journalists who started on opposite sides of the aisle.

• Trump’s Staggering Corruption Is Finally Catching Up to Him… On The Mona Charen Show, JONATHAN CHAIT joins MONA CHAREN to discuss the incredible scope and scale of Trump’s corruption—from the $4 billion the Trump family has added to its net worth since January 2025 to the $1.776 billion “weaponization” slush fund. Voters, it turns out, don’t like it!

Quick Hits

SOME MORE ELEVENTH-HOUR CHANGES: Sure doesn’t sound like that Iran peace deal is actually just around the corner. Here’s the New York Times:

President Trump has toughened the terms of a potential framework for a deal to end the war in Iran, and has sent those proposed changes back to the country for consideration, according to three officials. . .

Mr. Trump has been concerned about parts of the potential deal that would include unfreezing funds for the Iranians, two officials said. He has been harshly critical of President Barack Obama for doing the same in the more than decade-old agreement that was signed to curtail Iran’s nuclear program.

Mr. Trump has also been frustrated by how long it has taken for Iran to respond to U.S. proposals, one official said. The proposals have been hammered out with the involvement of intermediaries, including from Pakistan.

Read the whole thing.

RUNNING OUT OF SCAPEGOATS: Pam Bondi reportedly threw acting Attorney General Todd Blanche under the bus at her long-awaited testimony on the Epstein files before the House Oversight Committee on Friday. “As the head of a large Department with broad responsibilities,” read her drafted opening statement, “I delegated oversight over [the document review] process to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.” She also tried to redirect blame toward Kash Patel: Rep. Ro Khanna said that she claimed that the FBI scrubbed documents before they even reached her at DOJ. But ultimately, it doesn’t matter much whose signature is on what memo or who presided over which redactions. Neither Bondi nor Blanche nor Patel orchestrated the Epstein coverup. Trump did.

The president can’t make the Epstein story go away, so he’s trying to do the next-best thing: make the people he can blame for it go away. That is, after all, why Bondi is the former attorney general.

Trump’s campaign against Epstein scapegoats also extends to the four Republicans who signed the discharge petition for the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Two are out of a job—Marjorie Taylor Greene broke with Trump over the Epstein case and ultimately resigned from Congress, while Trump helped end Rep. Thomas Massie’s career by endorsing the primary challenger who knocked off the seven-term incumbent last month. The other two Epstein defectors might soon join them.

Also on Friday, Trump endorsed Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette over Rep. Nancy Mace in South Carolina’s gubernatorial race. He also called for a primary challenger against Rep. Lauren Boebert.

If Trump’s aim is to purge the government of anyone who shows an iota of interest in pursuing the Epstein matter, it’s been a successful few weeks. No one can doubt that pursuing truth and justice in the Epstein case puts them in direct contest with the president of the United States.

But that won’t solve Trump’s problem. If anything, it makes it worse. The Epstein case became the one durable scandal of Trump’s second term—perhaps the one durable scandal of his whole political career—because the coverup has been so blatant, so furious, and so public. And Trump doesn’t show any signs of becoming subtler.

—Jordan Ferdman is a researcher at Longwell Partners.

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FIGHTING THE MEMORY HOLE: Authoritarians tend to hate the public record—a cataloging of what actually happened, as opposed to what their self-serving line on what happened is. So it was no enormous surprise to learn last month that Trump’s Justice Department had been mass-deleting information from its website about the prosecutions of January 6th rioters, including news releases about verdicts, pleas, and sentences. Much of this information served to disprove the administration’s ludicrous assertion that the Trump administration had merely pardoned people who had been victimized by Biden-era government “weaponization.” Out it had to go.

At such times, the archival efforts of regular people outside the regime become even more important. So it was heartening to see friend of The Bulwark Tom Joscelyn, a top staffer on the January 6th committee and a principal drafter of its final report, write on social media yesterday he’d produced a backup:

It’s no big surprise that Trump’s DOJ is deleting all of the January 6th press releases from its website. Here’s the thing: I downloaded all of them in Feb. 2025 (that’s right, more than a year ago) suspecting that they’d do just that. And we’re working to post them all online, as are others.

Remembering is only one small part of the battle. But it’s a crucial one.

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Cheap Shots

If the deal materializes as promised, it’s likely a better outcome for the United States than the extraordinarily bleak one many expected, in which Iran felt empowered to throw its weight around in the strait in perpetuity—although, as always, the devil will be in the details.

Even here, the deal represents at best a return to the pre-war Hormuz status quo of open international navigation—and at a heavy cost. In addition to the thirteen American service members killed and more than 500 wounded, plus the eye-watering price to taxpayers of the war itself, the United States appears prepared to extend a major economic lifeline to Iran that will help it quickly rebuild. And Iran seems to have convinced the Trump administration to punt for now on further negotiations about its nuclear program. Why American negotiators think they’ll be able to get more concessions from Iran later, when they’re able to apply less economic and military pressure, is unclear. Happy Friday.

It’s Still About Us, Not About Him

by William Kristol

On July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, voted to approve the resolution proposed by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia stating that the United Colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.”

The next day, John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, explaining what the Congress had done. And he looked forward with pride and pleasure to the fact that July 2 would heretofore be celebrated as the new nation’s birthday, with “Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sport, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”

As it happened, Americans decided to date our independence not from the vote on July 2 but from the adoption of the formal document declaring independence two days later. So July 4 became our national birthday. But Adams was vindicated in his hope that it would be commemorated by “Shews, Games, Sport, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations.”

And so it will be this year, our 250th anniversary of independence.

There is one small problem, though. We elected Donald J. Trump as our president in 2024. And so he will preside over the 250th birthday of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

I hope the Supreme Judge of the World (as the Declaration refers to Him) is enjoying this rather dark cosmic joke.

It’s not just that Trump’s policies fly in the face of the principles of the Declaration, and seek to undermine a government that secures our rights and derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.

It’s also that Trump is doing his best to horn in on the celebration, to turn it into his event, not ours, to vulgarize it according to his taste, to personalize it in accord with his narcissism, and to distort its meaning in line with his prejudices.

And so we had the unseemly “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving” on the National Mall two weeks ago. And we have the plans for the grotesque 250-foot Trump arch desecrating Arlington National Cemetery. And we have the attempt by the Trump administration to feature Trump on a new $250 bill for our 250th birthday (about which more below). And we have the $1.776 billion slush fund to be dispersed to January 6th insurrectionists. And so on.

These efforts all need to be blocked by Congress and the courts if possible, and shunned and deplored by the public as necessary.

The good news is that this seems to be happening. Trump may succeed in pulling off individual events and even projects, for now. But his attempted hijacking of the meaning of America is failing. The public disapproves of his grandiose imperial arch by 51 percent to 21 percent, according to a Washington Post/ABC/Ipsos poll last month, and Democrats in Congress are introducing legislation to block it.

And even Republicans in Congress don’t support repealing the century and a half-old law that stipulates that “no portrait or likeness of any living person shall be engraved or placed upon any of the bonds, securities, notes, or postal currency of the United States.” This law harkened back to the example of Washington, who during his lifetime turned down having his portrait struck on the first silver dollar, believing this would be reminiscent of a monarch and inappropriate in a republic.

There’s no way to stop all of Trump’s indignities. The State Department is beginning to issue passports featuring Trump’s portrait and signature, which doesn’t require congressional approval. The late-Roman-empire-style Ultimate Fighting Championship event scheduled for June 14 on the South Lawn of the White House is presumably going to happen. And so will the “Great American State Fair” exposition on the National Mall from June 25 through July 10, though performing artists are pulling out of it en masse.

But we do have reason to be increasingly confident that Trump won’t succeed in using our 250th birthday to corrupt our civic traditions. We have increasing reason to think that the American people aren’t being seduced by his vision of the country. And so we can reasonably hope that one day soon, after this unfortunate interlude, we will once again have elected leaders who will celebrate our national birthday in a way fitting and proper for this great nation.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Sometimes Stopping Extremism Means Getting Your Hands Dirty… MATT DALLEK writes about how the Anti-Defamation League’s secret spy campaign helped destroy the far-right John Birch Society.

• The Holiday from History Is Over and the Great Powers Are Back… BRIAN STEWART reviews Brendan Simms’s unsettling and erudite new book.

• Three Movies to Prep For Our Viral Apocalypse… On The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, JONATHAN COHN joins SONNY BUNCH to discuss Contagion, And the Band Played On, and Outbreak.

• CBS Fires Top Staffers from 60 Minutes In Newsroom Purge… On Bulwark+ Takes, JVL and SAM STEIN give their takes on CBS News firing Sharyn Alfonsi, Cecilia Vega, and top executives at 60 Minutes.

• The Tech Bros Should Just Shut Up… KARA SWISHER joins TIM MILLER on The Flagship Pod to explain why the pitchforks are coming for big tech.

Quick Hits

PHONY AS A $250 BILL: Another day, another Trump’s-putting-his-face-on-something news story. Here’s CNN:

The Bureau of Engraving and Printing is planning to potentially print a commemorative $250 bill with the image of President Donald Trump to mark the country’s 250th anniversary.

A Treasury Department spokesperson confirmed the plans in a statement, saying it was conducting “appropriate planning and due diligence” in response to “active legislation.”

“Should this legislative mandate be signed into law, the BEP is moving proactively to produce a $250 commemorative note which will appropriately recognize the 250th Anniversary of our great nation,” the spokesperson told CNN.

Remarkably, the president’s face being involved might not even be the stupidest part of this. There’s competition, anyway: Commemorative coins are one thing, but high-denomination commemorative bills? And in a gaudy red, white, and blue color scheme to boot? What are we doing here, exactly?

Then again, maybe there’s one silver lining: Inventing brand-new high-denomination bills and slapping his face on them is a pretty good way for Trump to remind Americans just how little he’s done to address their inflation anxieties.

BOMBS AWAY IN GUATEMALA: Wars in the Middle East not going so hot? Maybe throwing around your weight a bit more in Latin America is what you need to put the pep back in your step. The New York Times reports on America’s planned military strikes against drug trafficking groups in Guatemala:

Guatemala has agreed to carry out joint strikes with the United States military inside its territory to target drug trafficking groups, according to three people familiar with the talks, in a further expansion of the Trump administration’s military campaign across Latin America.

Last week, President Bernardo Arévalo of Guatemala agreed to both airstrikes and other military action in a call with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, two of those people said, with operations to start as early as next month. It was unclear what other military activities could be included in the agreement. . . . One of the next countries that the Defense Department intends to press to accept joint military action is Honduras, said two of the people familiar with the plans.

But Guatemala and Honduras aren’t the big fish:

The Trump administration is targeting Guatemala and Honduras to pressure Mexico into accepting joint counterdrug operations, those two people said. While Washington has been pushing for U.S. boots on the ground and drone strikes, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico has staunchly rejected the requests. The White House’s broader strategy is to normalize an American military presence across Latin America to gain leverage over Mexico, according to the two people.

Read the whole thing.

LEFT HOLDING THE BAG: Donald Trump tends to brush off unfavorable headlines as fake news, but here’s one from Politico he might want to pay attention to: “Trump could be on the hook for taxes on his $1.8 billion ‘Weaponization Fund.’”

Here’s the gist: Because the fund is set up to draw from the Treasury’s Judgment Fund—a step the lawyers took to make sure they wouldn’t need to ask Congress for new money—the money by law must first go to Trump himself, as the litigant in the case that resulted in the settlement. Thus, some tax experts argue, he’ll likely be the one on the hook for the settlement fund’s tax bill—even if he sticks to his pledge (made explicit in the text of the settlement) not to take any of it himself.

It’s not like Trump has anything to worry about in the short term: The IRS that he ordered to give him the ridiculous settlement in the first place might not be too quick to force him to fork over any money he owes. Future IRS leadership, though, might be another story.

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Just classic D.C.!

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In other news, former First Lady Jill Biden opened up yesterday in a CBS News interview about her husband Joe Biden’s catastrophic 2024 presidential debate performance, saying that—

Just kidding! God knows we’ve all spent plenty of time already talking and thinking about that. Happy Thursday.

Special edition! MAGA Mondays has a special mid-week update today with Sam Stein and Will Sommer live on Substack and YouTube today at 11:00 a.m. EDT.

Markwayne Under Fire

by Andrew Egger

When Markwayne Mullin took the reins as secretary of homeland security earlier this year, we spent a lot of time pondering whether he would be a better or worse leader than his scandal-soaked predecessor, Kristi Noem. But here’s a possibility we perhaps didn’t spend enough time considering: What if he turned out to be exactly the same?

Okay, I’m overstating it. But yesterday, a new report in the Daily Mail1—a hotbed, recently, for scoops from leaky and disgruntled DHS employees—featured anonymous Mullin underlings griping about some remarkable parallels between life under the old boss and under the new boss. For one thing, Mullin is reportedly trying to get his wife Christie on the DHS payroll as a “Special Government Employee”—the same arrangement Noem once used for her boy-toy adviser Corey Lewandowski.

For another, Mullin appears still to be flying around in the same $70 million luxury jet that helped end Noem’s tenure—and using it to spend a good chunk of his working time in his home state of Oklahoma. “He leaves on Thursdays a lot at 11 in the morning and doesn’t fly back until Monday afternoon,” one source complained to the Daily Mail. “He is barely in the building.”

“Mullin seems to think ICE requires less work than a senator, and it shows,” griped another. “Meanwhile, ICE has no direction.”

Ordinarily, I’d be indignant to learn that a supposed public servant was approaching his charge with so much apparent nonchalance. But perhaps that doesn’t apply to Trump lackeys charged with stewarding his lawless immigration-enforcement mooks through their mass-deportation and protester-punching mission. Maybe a lazy, checked-out DHS secretary isn’t the worst thing to have, given the circumstances. Markwayne Mullin, the work-life-balance hero we didn’t know we needed!

Still, disgruntlement in the rank and file is never a good thing for a leader, and perhaps Mullin realizes his honeymoon period is coming to an end. Which might explain why, after a period of relative absence from the headlines, Mullin has been elbowing back into them lately to float a truly preposterous policy: refusing to process international flights into cities run by “radical-left Democrats.”

On Tuesday, the secretary was on Fox News complaining about weekend protesters outside an ICE facility in Newark, New Jersey—a protest at which Sen. Andy Kim was pepper-sprayed while trying to deescalate the tense situation. Was Mullin apologetic that his goons had roughed up a senator? Just the opposite.

“They’re barricading our employees from coming in and out of the facility,” he said. “Then why are we processing international flights into the airport there? We are currently—which we’re not initiating yet—but we’re currently drawing up plans to say, ‘Listen, these sanctuary cities where the local radical-left Democrats aren’t allowing us to do our jobs and enforce federal laws, then we shouldn’t be processing international flights into their cities either.’”

It was a jaw-dropping statement in at least three different ways. It is, to begin with, flatly illegal. Trump has repeatedly tried before to pull government services from blue locales to punish them for various policies, including on immigration; courts have slapped him down every time.2

It also makes no sense as a punitive measure. If protesters outside an ICE facility overstep the bounds of legal protest, they can be arrested and charged with crimes. Jumping straight from there to blocking all international flights into a particular city’s airport is like addressing a turnstile-hopping problem on the subway by blowing up a train.

And then there’s the obvious economic devastation that would result. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you can’t turn off the spigot of international travel into some of America’s busiest transit hubs without breaking a few eggs. The U.S. Travel Association is warning that “such a move would have devastating consequences for the travel industry and communities that depend on international visitation.” Even Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy agrees: “We have people from around the world and around the country that need to be able to fly into all different kinds of places. We shouldn’t shut down air travel in a state that doesn’t agree with our politics,” Duffy told Congress last week.

The fact that Mullin keeps pitching the plan anyway shows how perverse the incentive structures remain for Trump’s underlings. You might think that Mullin, who was explicitly brought into DHS to stop the endless parade of scandals that followed Noem, would spend a bit more time working the kinks out of his plans before introducing them to the world. But that’s not how it works in Trump’s orbit: The only way to win currency with the emperor is to roll the ball forward in directions you think he’ll personally like, and to be seen doing so on TV if you can swing it. Trump hates blue cities and loves punishing them in performative ways. So forget the law, forget what’s fair, forget the economy, forget winning back disaffected voters, forget good policy—Markwayne’s going to dance for him the only way he likes.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Retired Judges Call Out Trump’s “Unprecedentedly Fraudulent Scheme”... Former federal jurists ask the court to void the dismissal that led to Trump’s giant slush fund, writes KIM WEHLE.

• A Total and Complete Shutdown of Trump… On the flagship pod, ROBERT KAGAN joins TIM MILLER to discuss how Donald Trump is leading the collapse of the American-led world order.

• Judge Nukes Trump DOJ’s “Vindictive” Prosecution… On The Illegal News, MARY McCORD joins SARAH LONGWELL to explain a series of jaw-dropping legal scandals surrounding Trump’s Justice Department.

Quick Hits

THE CORRUPTION. IT’S STAGGERING: Another day, another jaw-on-the-floor story about the Trump family looting our Treasury. This morning’s addition to the genre comes from ProPublica, which ran the traps on the Pentagon’s denial that anything untoward was behind the grant of a $620 million contract to Vulcan Elements, a company in which Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm is an investor. It turns out (and, please, if you need to, sit down for this) there was indeed pressure from Trump allies to ink the deal.

But interviews and Defense Department records reviewed by ProPublica show that the request to loan hundreds of millions of dollars to the firm linked to Trump Jr. was made by Peter Navarro, a White House adviser to President Donald Trump and a friend of Trump Jr.’s.

Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was considering funding at the time, Vulcan’s was the only deal initiated by a top aide to the president, said an official at the Pentagon who was not authorized to speak publicly.

After defense officials got the White House request, they asked Pentagon staff to move at an unusually rapid pace, said another person who was involved in the deal at the Pentagon but not authorized to speak about it. The staff worked late nights and with little sleep to get the loan through in a matter of weeks, the source said.

“The call came from the White House: We have to get this done,” the person said.

Six hundred and twenty million dollars. That’s like one-third the J6er slush fund. We’re talking about real money here, folks.

Read the whole thing.

—Sam Stein

TALARICO COPS TO ‘CRINGE’: Now that the brutal Paxton/Cornyn primary fight is over, Texas Republicans are turning to the next task: Getting their hilariously corrupt candidate over the bump by painting Democratic nominee James Talarico as too liberal for the state. Some of this requires some heavy-duty lying: Talarico is not, as Republicans are now claiming ad infinitum, an “open borders” Democrat, nor is he a vegan. But some Republican attacks against him simply involve replaying Talarico’s most out-there clips, particularly on matters at the intersection of his liberal Christian faith and politics—that, for instance, God is “non-binary,” or that there are six biological sexes.

Until now, Talarico has waved off these concerns. But now he’s feeling the need to do a bit of cleanup. “I know there are two sexes, men and women,” he told CBS News yesterday. “I also know that there’s a very small percentage of people who have these chromosomal abnormalities, and I believe they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.” More broadly, Talarico admitted having made some “cringey comments”—while accusing Paxton of clipping them “to distract from his career of corruption.”

KAISER FAMILY FAREWELL: You may not recognize the name of Drew Altman, who on Wednesday announced his retirement. But if you’ve gotten an MRI or gone to a hospital or paid a medical bill, then you’ve been affected by his work, because few people have had the kind of sustained, indelible impact on American health care that Altman has.

He’s done it as the CEO and founding president of the policy research organization KFF, where he’s been since 1990—although, back then, it was a smaller operation known as the Kaiser Family Foundation, with origins in the fortunes of industrialist Henry J. Kaiser. Altman led its transformation into a fully independent entity that today has truly unrivaled influence in the field of health care policy research.

KFF’s data, analysis, and expertise are the coin of the realm in debates over everything from Medicaid to HIV treatment policy. Politicians, academics, journalists—they all rely on it. There’s also the KFF polling enterprise and KFF Health News, each with their own, distinct contributions.

KFF is known for its intellectual seriousness and firm nonpartisanship, plus an uncanny ability to anticipate where debates will go next. It’s all the doing of Altman and the talented people that he hired and mentored—including Larry Levitt and Mollyanne Brodie, who will now take the reins as chief executive and president, respectively.

Altman’s nearly lifelong crusade to help people get health care—which traces back to stints in state and federal government—might seem frustrating, even futile. But he has never stopped believing (which perhaps isn’t surprising, given that he is famously a Boston Red Sox fan), so if Altman keeps weighing in on policy, nobody in the world of health care will be surprised—or the least bit unhappy.

—Jonathan Cohn

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Mark Hertling and Ben Parker will be live on Substack and YouTube for Command Post today at 10:30 a.m. EDT. Make sure to tune in!

Big John Deflated

by Andrew Egger

If Donald Trump’s base is a cult, we’re rapidly approaching the Comet Hale–Bopp phase. Outside his party, he’s already a lame duck with catastrophically low approval and a stalled agenda. But as he weakens outside the building, his remarkable influence inside seems only to grow over a party eager to drink the Kool-Aid at his request.

Yesterday’s Republican Senate primary runoff in Texas was the clearest sign of this yet. It pitted a formidable, well-funded establishment incumbent, Sen. John Cornyn, against a sad-sack rabble-rouser MAGA type in Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Paxton is damaged goods in fifteen different ways—uncharismatic and dull, loathed by those who have worked with him in state government, beset by serial adultery scandals, impeached by his own party over his extraordinary corruption and self-dealing. Paxton had exactly two strengths: The perverse intuition of the MAGA base that his run of bad behavior and scandal meant he was actually a strong conservative fighter, and his obsequious, servile loyalty to Trump, for which the president rewarded him with a late endorsement.

Which turns out, of course, to be all you need. In the end it wasn’t even close. Paxton walloped Cornyn by more than 27 points.

This result came as a heavy blow to anyone still carrying a hopeful torch for some unsullied original-flavor Republican party to reemerge from the ashes of Trumpism. Believe it or not, these people are still out there; some of them are even senators themselves. For a decade now, these senators have clung frantically to the idea that, if they just stick with Trump for now, eventually he’ll ride off into the sunset and leave them in control of their own party again. And in the meantime, sticking with Trump had its direct benefits: It seemed for a while like a bulletproof shield against grassroots-insurgent primary challenges.

You couldn’t find a better poster child for the accommodationist approach that the GOP Senate old guard took than Big John. For years, he was the consummate grin-and-bear-it Trump ally, steadfastly supporting his agenda from his post in Senate leadership. But as it turns out, that posture wasn’t as bulletproof as guys like Cornyn thought. It kept him in Trump’s good books as long as the president had bigger, more openly mutinous fish to fry. But once he had rid himself of the Mitt Romneys and Liz Cheneys of the world, Trump found himself at his leisure to start punishing smaller and smaller crimes: an unwillingness to abandon the legislative filibuster, a curiosity toward other candidates early in the 2024 presidential primary, the inescapable scent of belonging to a pre-Trump establishment at all.

In another world, I would lament Cornyn’s ignominious defeat. It seems impossible to deny he is a better man than Paxton, and a better and more reasonable negotiator of the sort the Senate needs to function.

But in this world, it’s hard to respond to last night’s outcome with anything but grim, bleak pleasure. What, in the end, did Cornyn’s decade of Trump accommodation get him? Nothing but the futile hope that he might outlast the era—a hope that finally brought him to the greatest humiliation of all, a yearlong fruitless effort to woo Trump into blessing him with his endorsement by posting pictures of himself reading The Art of the Deal and introducing bills to rename Texas highways after the president. He made himself a dog for Trump, and Trump put him down like a dog.

At the same time, Cornyn’s loss can only diminish Trump’s actual political power. Trump has now robbed yet another Republican senator of his political future, meaning he has unencumbered yet another Republican senator of his biggest reason for ignoring or indulging Trump’s perpetual outrages. And that’s not all: The rest of the Senate GOP can’t help but notice that their former accommodationist arrangement seems to be falling apart before their eyes. What’s the point of giving the president America increasingly hates so much of your blood and sweat when he may just turn around and sic his base on you anyway?

And then there’s the little matter of the Texas seat itself. We’ve known all along that Democratic nominee James Talarico polls much better against Paxton than he does against Cornyn. That gap will shrink in the months ahead as “normie” Republicans—now a minority in their own base—perform their now-familiar humiliation ritual and try to rationalize away their distaste for Paxton. But there’s no question that Republicans can no longer count on Texas; they will be forced to spend heavily in the (very expensive) state just to feel good about a race they by rights shouldn’t have to think about at all.

So enjoy your nominee, Mr. President—and try not to choke on him.

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Do Not Pity Big John

by William Kristol

Just after 9:00 p.m. last night, soon after it became apparent that Sen. John Cornyn had lost his primary to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico posted:

I want to thank Senator John Cornyn for his years representing our state. We don’t agree on everything, but we both still believe in public service. To Senator Cornyn’s supporters: you have a place in our campaign.

The post was kind and gracious. It was true to Talarico’s political identity as someone who believes in civility and comity. It was quite likely politically effective.

At almost exactly the same time yesterday evening, another Texan, Michael Wood, an ex-Republican and friend of The Bulwark (you can watch my Sunday conversation with him on the war in Iran and Memorial Day here), published his own thoughts about Cornyn.

Wood sounds very different from Talararico.

It is as important to call out our gutless elected officials as it is to celebrate the brave ones. . . .

John Cornyn . . . has had more agency in our country’s existential fight against Trumpism than roughly 99.999% of Americans. In 2021 there were exactly 100 people who could have put this sad and sorry chapter of American history behind us for good, and in that moment John Cornyn hid behind Mitch McConnell’s skirt . . .

Fifty-seven United States senators were able to do the right and obvious thing and voted to convict and bar that evil man from ever holding public office again, including seven Republican senators. . . .

This little man didn’t want a primary challenge six freaking years later.

And yet again the world is shown the fruits of every Faustian bargain ever made: you sell your soul, and in the end you lose your soul without even getting the object of your desire. . . .

What annoys the hell out of me about people like Cornyn—which is to say almost every person still active in GOP politics in Anno Domini 2026—is that they think they are all so smart and clever. . . .

No. The difference isn’t intelligence and skill. The difference is courage and patriotism. These men without chests, as C.S. Lewis would call them, are not nimble or smart. They are cowards, and I for one will not let them forget it. . . .

So goodbye and good riddance, Big John Cornyn.

The whole thing is worth a read.

Wood obviously differs in both tone and substance from Talarico.

But I’m pro-Wood and pro-Talarico. Both truth-telling and prudence are virtues.

The democratic opposition to Trump and Trumpism needs to understand the truth. It needs the moral clarity and intellectual honesty of Michael Wood.

The democratic opposition to Trump and Trumpism also needs to defeat corrupt and dangerous men like Ken Paxton. So it needs the gracious civility and political prudence of James Talarico.

So Wood ends his piece, “Vote Talarico.” And one trusts that in private Talarico would say, “You’re right, Michael Wood.”

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Republican Exiles Make the Case Against Trump… Targeted by the big orange boss and ousted from Congress, they’re finally speaking up, writes WILL SALETAN.

• ‘Backrooms’ Review… SONNY BUNCH on the labyrinth of the mind.

• An Inventory of Trump’s Second-Term Wreckage… Betrayed, a new summary of the appalling damage so far, is a midterms turnout tool—and hopefully a roadmap for repair, JILL LAWRENCE writes.

• Texas Primary Results! Megyn Kelly Turns on Trump?! Join JVL, SARAH, and TIM for The Next Level, recorded live on TX primary night.

Quick Hits

REDISTRICTING SKIRMISHES CONTINUE: Republicans turned out the winners in this year’s Redistricting Total War, but a couple recent developments may end up crimping their advantage a bit. Yesterday, Republicans in the South Carolina Senate once again rejected a redistricting measure that had been championed by President Trump and Gov. Henry McMaster, arguing that the state had run out of time to change its maps with primary voting having already begun: “Neither my conscience nor my common sense,” state Sen. Richard Cash said, “will allow me to stop an election that is already underway.” The upshot: Democratic Rep. James Clyburn’s seat appears safe for now.

Meanwhile, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday against Alabama’s newly gerrymandered map, a decision that could theoretically preserve a second Democratic district in the state—should the Supreme Court allow it to stand, which might be a dubious proposition. Politico has more:

Following the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act ruling earlier this year, Alabama sought to revert to a 2023 map—with only one Democratic-leaning district—that had previously been blocked in court.

But a three-judge panel Tuesday prevented the state from using that map, mandating that Alabama use a map that has two majority Black, blue-leaning seats.

“Ultimately, we cannot see our way clear to requiring Alabamians to cast their votes in the 2026 elections under a districting plan tainted by intentional race-based discrimination,” the panel wrote in their decision.

Read the whole thing.

OLD PRESIDENT IS OLD: This guy just can’t stay away from the hospital! Donald Trump was back at Walter Reed yesterday for what he described as his “six-month physical,” and he’s happy to have you know, as he wrote on Truth Social, that “Everything checked out PERFECTLY.” In and of itself, that wouldn’t be so interesting—setting aside the many oddly unresolved questions still knocking around out there about the president’s health and haleness, like the now-frequent makeup smears on the backs of his hands and his habit of falling asleep in cabinet meetings and, well, any other public function at which he’s sitting down.

What was particularly odd, though, was the frothing rage the president’s digital comms teams flew into over the latest round of “the president’s pretty old” commentary sparked by the latest presidential hospital visit. The “Rapid Response 47” X account spent most of the day tweeting out still images of various media figures mid-blink with ludicrous captions: “BRIANNA KEILAR SAYS NAP WENT ‘PERFECTLY’ AFTER FALLING ASLEEP LIVE ON AIR.” “FAKE TAPPER APPEARS TO DOZE OFF THROUGHOUT HIS ‘SHOW.’” “@DanaBashCNN FALLS ASLEEP AHEAD OF HER 55TH BIRTHDAY NEXT MONTH. WHAT IS GOING ON?”

We could ask them the same question.

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How long exactly is this war going be?

Something a little different for today from The Bulwark’s crack video team. Like or share it on your social platform of choice: Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, Twitter, Substack Notes.

As a thanks for sharing, an extra Cheap Shot:

Join Bill and Andrew for Morning Shots Live on Substack and YouTube at 10 a.m. EDT.

Trump’s War Ends With a Whimper

by William Kristol

Whoa. This past weekend, as the outlines of Donald Trump’s Iran deal became clear, not one, not two, but three Republican senators were so appalled that they did something heretofore unimaginable in the era of Trump: They told the truth.

On Friday, Senate Armed Services Chairman Roger Wicker had warned that President Trump was “being ill advised to pursue a deal that would not be worth the paper it is written on. Further pursuit of an agreement with Iran’s Islamist regime risks a perception of weakness.” On Saturday, Wicker followed up: The rumored deal “would be a disaster. Everything accomplished by Operation Epic Fury would be for naught!”

Later that day Sen. Ted Cruz joined in voicing his alarm:

I am deeply concerned about what we are hearing about an Iran “deal,” being pushed by some voices in the administration. President Trump’s decision to strike Iran was the most consequential decision of his second term. . . . If the result of all that is to be an Iranian regime—still run by Islamists who chant “death to America”—now receiving billions of dollars, being able to enrich uranium & develop nuclear weapons, and having effective control over the Strait of Hormuz, then that outcome would be a disastrous mistake.

Even Trump’s lickspittle extraordinaire, Sen. Lindsay Graham, weighed in:

If a deal is struck to end the Iranian conflict because it is believed that the Strait of Hormuz cannot be protected from Iranian terrorism and Iran still possesses the capability to destroy major Gulf oil infrastructure, then Iran will be perceived as being a dominate [sic] force requiring a diplomatic solution.

This combination of Iran being perceived as having the ability to terrorize the Strait in perpetuity and the ability to inflict massive damage to Gulf oil infrastructure is a major shift of the balance of power in the region and over time will be a nightmare for Israel.

Also, it makes one wonder why the war started to begin with if these perceptions are accurate.

Needless to say, this brief spasm of Republican truth-telling will likely prove . . . a brief spasm. Since Saturday, Wicker and Cruz seem to have fallen silent. Graham, for his part, has already reversed course. By yesterday he had fully entered fantasy-land in order to be back in Trump’s good graces:

President Trump’s most recent proposal requiring expansion of the Abraham Accords as part of a negotiated settlement to the Iran conflict is simply brilliant and would result in the most significant change in the Middle East in thousands of years.

With Saudi Arabia and others like Pakistan making peace with Israel, the region will know a level of stability never dreamed of before President Trump and will eventually lead to regional integration making the Middle East a powerhouse for economic opportunity and good instead of a powder keg.

Still, even as the truth-telling subsides, the question Graham posed will linger: “It makes one wonder why the war started to begin with.” And the answer will be hard to evade: The war started because Trump and his administration are foolish and reckless and hubristic, and those in a position to check him—like Sens. Wicker and Cruz and Graham—have utterly failed to do so.

The bad news is that since Trump is our president, the country will pay a price for his foolishness and recklessness and hubris. And the damage that’s been done is real.

Iran’s brutal and terror-sponsoring regime is in place, having withstood the fury and might of the world’s strongest military. The brave Iranian people, who were told that help was “on the way,” have been betrayed. The Iranian regime has shown it can close the Strait of Hormuz and attack its neighbors, and get away with it. More than get away with it: Iran will apparently now get sanctions relief and substantial assets unfrozen.

What’s more, the conditions under which the strait will reopen remain murky, with Iran retaining the explicit or implicit ability to exact fees or favors for its passage. The disposition of Iran’s nuclear material, and the regime’s ability to restart its nuclear program, remains uncertain.

So the Iranian regime has emerged from the past three months strengthened. The United States has emerged weakened. In addition to the failure to achieve our war aims, and on top of our losses of soldiers and weaponry, our allies, from the Gulf to Europe to Asia, have all learned that they can’t trust us. In this respect, this three-month “excursion” has been a significant moment in American decline. Trump will do his best to bluster and obfuscate. But no one should be fooled.

It is a depressing but unavoidable fact that in this instance, Trump’s defeat is also America’s. And it’s important to acknowledge that this defeat will be very difficult to reverse. But there was never going to be a painless way out of the disaster of Trump’s second term.

At least more people are telling the truth, even if only for a moment, that it is a disaster. That’s a step on the road to recovery.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Trump’s Slush Fund Is Based on a Lie… The real victims of lawfare and weaponized prosecutions aren’t the insurrectionists, observes MONA CHAREN.

• Trump’s Iran Disaster Is Also a Defeat for the U.S.… On the flagship pod, BILL KRISTOL joins TIM MILLER for a holiday pod about the ‘master’ negotiator who clearly wants out.

• For the First Time Since WWII, Moscow Is Under Attack… Author and journalist MARC BENNETTS joins ELIOT COHEN and ERIC EDELMAN on Shield of the Republic to discuss the state of Russia years into its war against Ukraine.

• Bulwark Book Club for June: If I Don’t Return: A Father’s Wartime Journal... Leave a question and then join the discussion with MONA and MARK on Monday, June 8 at 7 p.m. Eastern time.

• Danielle Crittenden on Losing Her Daughter… On The Mona Charen Show, DANIELLE CRITTENDEN joins MONA CHAREN for a raw conversation about what Danielle calls the “alternative universe of grief” after the death of her child.

Quick Hits

GABBARD GONE: Donald Trump’s cabinet is down another woman. On Friday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced she would resign from the Trump administration, citing her husband’s bone-cancer diagnosis.

This wasn’t the only factor. Reuters, citing a source familiar, reported Friday that Gabbard had been quietly pushed out by the White House. Whatever the reason—and it’s plausible that it was a combination of both—her exit comes after two months of war in Iran, which has been pure political pain for Gabbard. After all, she was the longtime anti-war Democrat who jumped ship to the GOP one month before the 2024 election, ostensibly on the conviction that Republicans were more serious about keeping America out of pointless wars. That she stayed as long as she did was notable: She had reportedly been frozen out of the planning for major military operations, had been publicly contradicted on intelligence questions by Trump himself, and had seen top aides like National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent head for the hills earlier in the conflict with Iran.

Even as Gabbard found herself more and more crosswise of the president’s plans abroad, she long kept him happy with her zealous pursuit of a shared agenda here at home: using America’s intelligence agencies to target the “deep state” and other supposed domestic enemies of Trump. She issued reports disparaging the early days of the Russiagate investigation, accused Barack Obama of “treasonous conspiracy” against Trump, and was on scene when the government seized ballots in Georgia and directed the seizure of voting machines in Puerto Rico to advance Trump’s undying claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from him.

Gabbard becomes the fourth woman—after Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer—to experience an unscheduled rapid departure from Trump’s cabinet. Linda McMahon, Kelly Loeffler, and Brooke Rollins better keep their heads on a swivel.

THE POPE VS. THE MACHINE GOD: Pope Leo XIV yesterday sounded the alarm about the threats posed by the “anti-human vision” of artificial intelligence, writing in a papal encyclical that the technology risks reducing humans “to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever-greater efficiency.” Here’s the Wall Street Journal:

Leo used two biblical images to describe the choice humanity faces.

“The primary choice is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem,” he wrote.

In the Bible, the Tower of Babel symbolizes a top-down, grandiose project where decisions are driven by pride, profit and a push for homogenization, the pope suggested in his text. In the rebuilding of Jerusalem, diverse people worked together to rebuild the ruined walls and established a fraternal coexistence within them, he added. . . .

“Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed, freed from the logic that turned it into an instrument of domination, exclusion and death,” he said. “It must be at the service of all, and of the common good.”

Leo stopped short of condemning AI technology as inherently evil, instead focusing on the dangers of its haphazard and profit- and conflict-driven development and of the risks of concentrating power over it in the hands of a few all-powerful companies. Read the whole thing.

ADVENTURES IN SYCOPHANCY: If you’ve ever watched a Trump cabinet meeting, you know how viscerally unpleasant they are, with each member of the president’s retinue squirming and squeeing to squeeze in as many over-the-top compliments to their boss as possible. Now, the New York Times’s Ashley Cai has the analysis we didn’t know we needed, breaking down the adulation by official and by type. “On average, at least one of every six sentences either flattered Mr. Trump, gave him credit, or criticized his political opponents,” Cai writes. (That few?) Some other chestnuts:

• Secretary of State Marco Rubio “both spoke and flattered the president the most.”

• Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth “said three times that Mr. Trump would have prevented conflicts from occurring.”

• Vice President J.D. Vance “insulted political opponents the most. On average, one of six sentences was an insult.”

• Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick “said Mr. Trump achieved what nobody believed was possible five times.”

• Environmental Protection Administrator Lee Zeldin “repeatedly said Mr. Trump was ‘willing to take a bullet for this country.’”

Read the whole thing.

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Join JVL and Catherine Rampell for Receipts Live at 12:30 p.m. EDT today on Substack and YouTube.

Trump Doesn’t Have the Cards

by Andrew Egger

How far beyond the pale, how ludicrously far outside the bounds of law and morality, is Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund? Far enough, apparently, to shock even the dead, embalmed consciences of GOP lawmakers back to life.

House and Senate Republicans do not, as yet,1 share my view that the creation of the Slush Fund from Hell is a cut-and-dried impeachable offense. But the energy to oppose it is stronger in both houses than I expected it to be.

In the House, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) joined Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) to introduce a short, simple bill: “No federal funds,” it reads, “may be used for the payment of any claim submitted to the Anti-Weaponization Fund, established by the Department of Justice on May 18, 2026.”

And in the Senate, Republican anger over the fund burned hot enough to derail, for now, the must-pass reconciliation bill intended at long last to restore funding for ICE and the Border Patrol.

The White House, sensing congressional hostility, spent yesterday deploying both carrots and sticks to try to keep Republicans in line. According to Semafor, the White House warned Republican senators that they would risk Trump’s veto if they passed a reconciliation bill that didn’t fund his East Wing ballroom project or that restricted the weaponization fund. Meanwhile, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was deployed to yesterday’s Senate Republican lunch to help them look on the bright side: Don’t sleep on the fact, Blanche urged them, that “senators whose records were secretly subpoenaed” by Special Counsel Jack Smith can get in on the settlement fund too!

It didn’t work. The response to Blanche, Punchbowl News reported, was “incredibly hostile,” with roughly half the Republican conference standing up to speak in opposition to the fund and expressing a desire not to pass the reconciliation bill without including language reining it in in some way. “The nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops?” Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in a statement afterward. “Utterly stupid, morally wrong—take your pick.”

There are lots of reasons—beyond the obvious one that the slush fund is evil, stupid political malpractice in a terrible political climate in an election year—why Republicans might be rediscovering their spines here.

First, Trump’s immediate-term political leverage over them is weakening. The 2026 primary cycle is now mostly past, giving lawmakers more room to breathe. A Trump-backed MAGA primary challenger in 2028 (or, for some senators, even later) is a problem for their future selves. At any rate, they’ve got to survive an extremely Trump-hostile electorate in 2026 first.

Second, many GOP senators are currently at the height of their anger over the endorsements Trump did make this cycle. Sens. Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn are liked and respected in the Republican conference. Many of their colleagues view Trump’s shivving of Cassidy as a ludicrous relitigation of old grievances and his endorsement of Ken Paxton over Cornyn in Texas as just as bad: Paxton is far likelier to lose Republicans the seat and, should he beat the odds and win, they’ll have to start hanging out with Ken Paxton.

Third, there remains just enough plausible deniability over the slush fund that Republicans can still make their objections to it in a form they remain more comfortable with: As an objection to acting Attorney General Blanche, not to Trump. It was no accident that McConnell’s statement singled out “the nation’s top law enforcement official.” Despite Trump’s own history of applying that label to himself, it’s clear McConnell meant Blanche.

And while we’re on that subject, one wonders: What if, in this particular case, they’re right? Trump plainly approves of the anti-weaponization fund. He’s spoken favorably of it and trotted out various administration officials—Blanche, Vice President JD Vance, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller—to give it support. But it’s equally plain he doesn’t feel as strongly about it as he does about, say, his ballroom. After all, it’s a slush fund for his supporters, not for him himself. He has not been burning up Truth Social putting public pressure on senators to comply; in fact, he has yet to post about the anti-weaponization fund online at all.

Whatever the reason, it’s good that Trump is finding his slush fund harder than expected to ram down the gullets of his ordinarily pliable congressional allies.

It’s also worth pointing out the quiet role Senate Democrats played to set the stage for this fight. The only reason Republican senators are in a strong position to stare the White House down on this issue in the first place is because they have a pressure point of their own—the ICE reconciliation bill—to hold hostage over possible changes. And the only reason that bill exists is because Senate Democrats were so relentless in pressing their anti-ICE advantage during spending fights earlier this year, when they successfully backed Republicans into a corner and got them to fund everything in the government except the immigration-enforcement components of the Department of Homeland Security.

In other words, the current level of Republican dysfunction is only possible thanks to this year’s strategic successes by Senate Democrats, who trusted that the winds of public opinion were at their back and pushed for—and got—serious concessions in earlier games of legislative chicken. Trump is only getting weaker. It’s a template they should look to replicate.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• The Smugness of Anti-Empathy Politics… CATHY YOUNG breaks down Gad Saad’s ‘own the libs, scorn the weak’ ethos.

• Prepare for a Post-America World Order… It will take a long time to recover America’s credibility after Trump’s foreign policy chaos, writes MATT GURNEY.

• Tim, Sarah, and Sam LIVE From the Bulwark Tour Bus… If you couldn’t make the California shows but you want to feel like you were there for the whole tour, check out this video.

Quick Hits

THE TRADER IN THE WHITE HOUSE: One might be tempted, against the backdrop of so many other corruption scandals, to view Donald Trump’s stock-trading behavior as small ball. But as Joe Perticone wrote in Press Pass yesterday, the reality is that in this form of corruption, too, Trump seems determined to break the scale:

Filling in as press secretary on Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance told reporters “the president doesn’t sit at the Oval Office on his computer on his Robinhood account buying and selling stocks. That’s absurd.” True enough—someone (or a team of people) is obviously making the trades for him. But they’re still his transactions being conducted in his name using his money. The whole thing reeks of the same unethical behavior that earned Congress its reputation for corruption over the years. . . .

But Trump’s case is different. And it’s not just because of the brazenness of his approach but the sheer volume of his trading.

The total value of Trump’s transactions in the first three months of this year—again, $750 million—is higher than the value of all trades by all 535 members of the House and Senate combined in an average year.

According to data compiled by Quiver Quantitative and provided to The Bulwark, the average of the total dollar amounts traded by all members of the House and Senate between 2021 and 2025 comes out to around $650,000,000. Since the start of this year, federal lawmakers have traded just north of $213,000,000, which puts them on pace for a slightly slower year than normal, with a projected year-end total of around $550,000,000, assuming their rate of buying and selling remains steady.

Read the whole thing.

DEMS STEP ON AUTOPSY RAKE: For months now, Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin has been fending off questions—and conspiracy theories—about what happened to the party’s long-promised post-2024 autopsy. In an article for The Bulwark last week, former Kamala Harris deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty alleged that the “stupider than fiction” truth was that “no autopsy was released because there is no actual autopsy,” and that the autopsy team had been “in over their heads and struggled to put the thing together.”

Turns out: Yeah, pretty much! On Thursday, CNN obtained and published a copy of the report, leading Martin to follow suit by releasing it himself—while acknowledging it “wasn’t ready for primetime” and “does not meet my standards.” He wasn’t kidding: The document contains few insights, a dizzying quantity of typos and factual errors, and enormous chunks where promised sections were apparently never written at all. Making the whole thing more surreal, the whole document is studded with the DNC’s own corrections and annotations criticizing the quality of the work.

Martin took responsibility—if not blame—for the poor product on a call with DNC members yesterday, saying that being a leader meant owning up to mistakes, both “those of your creation and frankly those not of your creation.” He also said that the document’s primary author, Democratic strategist Paul Rivera, is no longer working at the DNC. Still, the whole thing has to make Democrats uneasy: It’s bad enough to lose to Trump, but to be so dysfunctional that you can’t even manage to figure out and write down why it happened? Read the whole thing, if you’re a glutton for punishment.

TALK ABOUT TAKING STOCK: Some companies are just too big to play by the rules. Nasdaq, in a bid to win the IPOs of SpaceX, OpenAI, and Athropic, changed its restrictions on how quickly new stocks can be incorporated into indices. The Financial Times explains what the new “fast track” rules mean:

SpaceX will make relatively few shares available to public investors at its IPO next month, a small “free float” which under old rules would exclude the rocket company from indices tracked by trillions of dollars of passive investments. However, Nasdaq has loosened its rules as it battled to win the SpaceX listing over its rival NYSE, allowing the stock to join the Nasdaq 100 after just 15 days. SpaceX and other new entrants will also be given an index weighting equivalent to three times the value of the shares floated. S&P Dow Jones Indices is also consulting on changes that could fast-track the stock’s entry into the S&P 500. . . .

JPMorgan estimates that if 50 per cent of the company’s shares are eventually floated with a valuation reaching $2tn, passive investors would have to sell $95bn of Wall Street’s eight biggest existing tech stocks.

In other words, anyone whose retirement account includes an index fund—millions of people—will suddenly, in effect, own much less of all the companies they previously had, and much more of SpaceX and the AI companies.

—Benjamin Parker

ARCH CYNICISM: The Trump Administration is moving forward as fast as possible with its plans to build a 250 ft. arch in the middle of the traffic circle that lies between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial. So quickly, in fact, that administration officials have decided (shocker) they don’t need Congress’s approval—or, more precisely, that they already have it. The Washington Post has more:

Administration officials have cited a 1924 report by a federal commission charged with designing the Arlington Memorial Bridge. That report called for building a pair of 166-foot-tall columns, surmounted by statues, on Columbia Island that would frame the nearby Lincoln Memorial.

Congress formally ratified the commission’s report in 1925, and the Memorial Bridge was soon built. However, the columns were not constructed, and Trump officials today argue that in building the arch they would be carrying out past lawmakers’ wishes.

Only a politician or a Trump administration lawyer could think that “a pair of 166-foot-tall columns” is the same as a 250-foot-tall arch. Go figure.

As it happens, there is already an arch at Arlington. At one of the original entrances to the cemetery, the red stone McClellan Gate—a much more human-scale thirty feet high—bears a fitting few lines from Theodore O’Hara’s poem, “Bivouac for the Dead”:

“On fame’s eternal camping ground their silent tents are spread / And glory guards with solemn round, the bivouac of the dead.”

—Benjamin Parker

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Freedom’s Not Just Another Word

by William Kristol

There’s so much infuriating and dispiriting news to share—as we do every day. But precisely because the world seems to be getting more somber, more bleak, more dangerous, I feel duty bound to bring you inspiring news when I can. So I want to say a word about the Freedom House dinner I attended last night.

Freedom House is an organization dedicated to defending democracy and promoting human rights, to fighting for a world in which all are free. It was founded in late 1941 to counter the original America First movement and to support U.S. involvement in the fight against fascism. Over its eighty-five years, it has stood firm against Nazism and Communism and the many other variants of authoritarianism that have disfigured the global landscape. It has supported democracy, human rights, and dissidents fighting for freedom.

It was a bipartisan enterprise from its beginning. Its original chairmen were Wendell Willkie, who’d been the Republican presidential candidate in 1940, and Eleanor Roosevelt, whose husband had defeated Willkie in that contest. Among its other founders were prominent anti-fascists like the journalist Dorothy Thompson, whose 1941 essay “Who Goes Nazi?” has enjoyed a new burst of well-deserved attention of late, and Rex Stout, whose Nero Wolfe mysteries deserve their continued fame.

Last night’s dinner program honored courageous dissidents from authoritarian and totalitarian countries, with moving tributes to their courage and the causes for which they have fought. It also featured expressions of confidence in the ultimate success of those causes, despite the depressing trends of the last two decades of democratic backsliding, documented best by Freedom House’s annual reports.

But for me, the dinner was less about the program and more about reconnecting with men and women, from left and center and right, who have tried to fight, mostly arm-in-arm, sometimes arguing with each other, for freedom. I caught up with former staffers for John McCain and for Nancy Pelosi, with men and women who’d served in administrations from Reagan’s to Biden’s, with career diplomats and trouble-making activists from America and abroad.

Our current president was not much mentioned—but of course his non-freedom-loving shadow hovered over the dinner. One of yesterday’s leading foreign policy stories was Putin’s visit to China, following on Trump’s paying court to Xi Jinping last week. So the fact that freedom today has powerful enemies working against it was front and center in everyone’s mind. And the people with whom I spoke were clear-eyed about the moment in which we’re living and the challenges we face at home and abroad.

At one point last night I was commenting on how daunting some of those challenges seem. My interlocutor quite correctly pointed to the world of eighty-five years ago, when Freedom House was being founded. In May 1941, Great Britain stood alone. Nazi Germany was unchecked in continental Europe and still in alliance with Stalin’s Soviet Union. Imperial Japan was dominant in East Asia. Our challenges pale by comparison.

But one thing the founders of Freedom House did have going for them was an American president who was on the side of freedom. That’s not the case today. But that hasn’t stopped the brave Ukrainians from holding their own without much help from us. It hasn’t deterred the people of Hungary from defeating Viktor Orbán contrary to the wishes of our government. It hasn’t stopped dissidents around the world like Jimmy Lai, unjustly imprisoned by Beijing and honored last night, from facing cruel persecution in order to stand for freedom.

Last night we heard references by several speakers to the fact that this is our 250th anniversary. We are, sadly, not now holding high the Declaration of Independence’s torch of freedom. But the fact that so many others around the world are inspired by its principles is an ironic but powerful confirmation of their universality. Perhaps it’s not the case that America is an indispensable nation. But it seems as clear now as ever that the principles of the American Revolution, of the Declaration, are indispensable principles. It was heartening to spend an evening with men and women who are committed to them.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• The Last Full Measure, Quietly Remembered… A Memorial Day reflection from MARK HERTLING.

• The Assault On Multiracial Democracy in the South… JUSTIN JONES joins TIM MILLER to talk about voting and elections in the South since the Supreme Court disemboweled the Voting Rights Act.

• Trump Wants to Be . . . What?!… JVL and ANDREW EGGER break down why Trump said he wants Benjamin Netanyahu’s job.

• An Ebola Survivor on the Ebola Outbreak… Dr. CRAIG SPENCER joins JONATHAN COHN to talk about the hemorrhagic fever epidemic in Central Africa.

Quick Hits

NO PUBLIC FUNDS FOR THE BALLROOM: Donald Trump still wants $1 billion in taxpayer money for “security improvements” to his East Wing ballroom plans, but it’s looking like he won’t get it. Senate Republicans quietly threw in the towel on squeezing the East Wing funds into their forthcoming immigration-spending reconciliation bill, with several GOP senators expressing deep skepticism over the line item and Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruling against its inclusion in the reconciliation bill at all. “We were told that the ballroom money is out,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) told reporters after the GOP’s regular conference lunch Tuesday.

The president won’t be thrilled. Just hours before, he had been publicly flogging Senate Majority Leader John Thune to go to total war with MacDonough: “Over the years, she has been brutal to Republicans, but not so to the Dumocrats—So why has she not been replaced? . . . The Dumocrats cheat, lie, and steal, especially when it comes to Votes in Elections, but stick together, whereas the Republicans allow the Elizabeth MacDonoughs of the World to stay in power, and brutalize us.” What a shame!

SUING THE SLUSH FUND: It’s not clear yet who will have standing to sue over Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund—but people are already giving it a try. Two police officers who defended the Capitol during the attack, former Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn and D.C. policeman Daniel Hodges, filed suit yesterday to block the creation of the fund, which they called “a slush fund to finance the insurrectionists and paramilitary groups that commit violence in his name.” Politico has more:

The lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Washington, argues that the fund violates the 14th Amendment’s prohibition on use of federal money to “pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.”

The officers’ complaint also alleges that the Justice Department has no legal authority to create the fund, announced Monday as part of a settlement of a lawsuit Trump filed over the leak of his tax returns during his first term.

The Justice Department will likely argue that the officers don’t have standing to bring the suit. The complaint contends that Dunn and Hodges have faced ongoing harassment, including death threats, from participants in the riot. The officers allege that they have a personal stake in the dispute over the fund because it will be used to provide financial support that is likely to fuel that sort of harassment in the future.

Hodges was one of the indelible faces of the violence of the riot—the officer who was captured on video screaming in pain as the mob of rioters crushed him against a doorframe. Read the whole thing.

HOW WE GOT HERE: Amid all the (justified) complaining over Trump’s ridiculous abuse of the Judgment Fund this week, we shouldn’t ignore one crucial fact: Congress didn’t have to make it so easy for him. Although “very few people had given the Judgment Fund much thought until this week,” the New York Times notes, “legal experts had long warned that it was ripe for abuse”:

“The integrity of the Judgment Fund is dependent on the good faith of executive branch officers,” Paul F. Figley, a former Justice Department official who helped administer the fund from 1978 to 2006, wrote in 2015 in an article in The Journal of Constitutional Law. Its title was telling: “The Judgment Fund: America’s Deepest Pocket and Its Susceptibility to Executive Branch Misuse.”

“It serves a good purpose,” Mr. Figley said in an interview this week. “But it’s subject to manipulation.”

Professor Bagenstos, who served as the general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget and of the Department of Health and Human Services in the Biden administration, wrote in January about the danger posed by the Judgment Fund.

“An administration that wished to spend money on projects or beneficiaries not authorized by Congress,” he wrote, “could simply encourage its desired recipient to bring a lawsuit against the United States and then settle that lawsuit (no matter how frivolous) by making a payment from the Judgment Fund.”

Odds are we won’t be so lucky, but it sure would be nice if the aftermath of Trump 2.0 included a major reckoning with how much of our legal plumbing relies on “the good faith of executive branch officers,” and a serious attempt to change it—in a way we didn’t really get during the Trump interregnum. Read the whole thing.

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