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A cartoon by Jack Ohman. Related | Trump fails miserably to throw America a birthday party…

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The White House is supercharging its deportation efforts again, and the timing shouldn’t go unnoticed. According to The New York Times, daily immigration arrests have recently doubled as Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers put in seven-day workweeks to sweep the streets of people they’ve deemed deportable. Over 10,000 immigrants were reportedly detained within a five-day span…

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A former Olympian was indicted Thursday on a felony charge in what President Donald Trump has called vandalism of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, where a renovation project he launched has been riddled with problems. David Hearn, a former Olympic canoe racer, was indicted on a single count of property destruction in Washington, D.C. court. District of Columbia U.S.

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The sky is actually falling at the Great American State Fair.

The stage for Freedom 250’s July Fourth celebration fell apart during rehearsals Thursday, with a large component of the structure’s ceiling falling roughly two stories down and landing behind a group of dancers and musicians. Miraculously, no one appeared injured.

The stage is falling apart at the rehearsal for Freedom 250's July 4th celebration. pic.twitter.com/bPbg94hp6X

— Aaron Parnas (@AaronParnas) July 2, 2026

Online commenters were quick to flame the stage’s apparently dangerous construction.

“That’s what happens when you don’t consider merit in hiring,” wrote one X user.

“This is why you never let Trump select the subcontractor based on percentage of kickback,” commented another.

Even a lawmaker joined in on the roast.

“Feeling more and more like the Hunger Games,” wrote Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie.

Practically every component of Trump’s wildly expensive plan to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary has turned out to be a dud. The $15 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool failed to rid the iconic monument of algae; a multi-week lineup of music acts had to be cancelled after practically every artist pulled themselves from the program; and a fleet of buses carrying a contemporary retelling of American history have failed to make a splash in their journey across the country.

The Great American State Fair was supposed to be the centerpiece of the celebration, yet even it is more of a potemkin village than a sincere homage. The booths, which offer space for each state to represent its heritage and culture (pet a replica of a bison at the North Dakota pavilion, or walk away with a bag of chips from Maine), are ideologically pitted against the seismic presence of the federal government and Trump’s authoritarian expansion (banners featuring Trump’s grim face flank the event, while a small-scale replica of his proposed “Triumphal Arc” sits center stage). As The Atlantic’s Kelsey Ables put it, “the president is bringing down the mood.”

U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro announced Thursday that a grand jury had indicted former Olympic canoeist David Hearn on charges of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

The indictment seems rather flawed, as Hearn, 67, maintains that all he did was dip his hand into the pool and touch a piece of peeling paint.

“I didn’t vandalize anything,” Hearn told The Washington Post the day after his arrest last month. “I didn’t destroy or break or peel anything. By the time I realized what was going on, I was being put in handcuffs.”

At a press conference Thursday, a reporter asked Pirro why Hearn was being charged with a felony over something so small, and she struggled to explain.

Pirro: He caused damage and that damage was over $1000.

Reporter: How do you prove that?

Pirro: With an expert.

Reporter: With his bare hands?

Pirro: We believe it's his bare hands, both hands.

Reporter: Do you believe it was damaged before?

Pirro: He damaged it!… pic.twitter.com/LmtTZueKZU

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 2, 2026

“There was an effort, a violent effort, to rip up the sealant from the pool, and irrespective of whether or not we think that there is some situation that preceded it, we can state, and prove beyond a reasonable doubt, that he caused damage, and that damage is worth over a thousand dollars,” Pirro said.

When asked how she could prove that, Pirro said, “With an expert,” and urged the reporter who asked the question to come to the trial. The reporter incredulously asked if Hearn used his bare hands, to which Pirro affirmed yes, both hands. The reporter then asked if the pool wasn’t already damaged before.

“Oh, he damaged it. He damaged the pool. He damaged this pool,” Pirro repeated. When the reporter brought up videos showing that the pool’s paint was already peeling, Pirro said, “Well, good. I’m glad you got that evidence. Come on in the grand jury and you can testify.”

It all seems nuts, as the poor state of the pool, from algae growth to peeling paint, had been documented for quite some time before Hearn visited it. The paint had been peeling because hydrogen peroxide was dumped into the pool in a vain effort to kill algae growth. Hearn is clearly being made a scapegoat to satisfy President Donald Trump, who is blaming nonexistent vandals rather than admit he messed up the pool.

“Loitering is not permitted in this area,” an audio recording sternly warns, as uniformed National Guard troops patrol Washington’s iconic, algae-plagued reflecting pool. “Please proceed to a designated location.”

Journalist Amanda Moore’s dystopian video, shot last weekend just steps from the Lincoln Memorial, instantly went viral—a perfect 8-second encapsulation of American democracy under Donald Trump. Amanda has spent the past 18 months documenting the chaos and brutality of the administration’s militarized takeovers and immigration raids in cities across the country. Her footage has been shocking, often horrifying. But it’s never before been quite so absurd. (Well, maybe once.)

In her latest video report for Mother Jones, Amanda takes us on a tour of the Trumpified National Mall as the nation attempts to celebrate its 250th birthday. Not far from the reflecting pool’s nanobubblers and security theater, there’s a very different scene: Trump’s Great America State Fair. When Amanda visited this marquee anniversary event, she found a dearth of visitors, a shortage of napkins, and a decaying model of the triumphal arch the president wants to build across the Potomac.

The symbolism here is about as subtle as a Jon McNaughton painting. If I hadn’t seen Amanda’s reporting, I never would have believed it was real.

The families and survivors of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting are finally receiving some of the money owed to them by right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. The satirical publication The Onion, which recently took control of Jones’ InfoWars brand, paid out $100,000 to the Sandy Hook families during the relaunch of the InfoWars website. Jones owes the families about $1.

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A cartoon by Mike Luckovich. Related | Supreme Court’s leader doesn’t care about the Constitution…

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A heat wave in Washington, D.C., is making attendance at President Trump’s July 4 festivities even worse.

U.S. Capitol Police have already restricted Thursday night’s rehearsal for “A Capitol Fourth Concert” to essential personnel, posting on X that they came to the decision after consulting with the Capitol’s Office of the Attending Physician.

“For safety reasons, the public will not be able to attend tonight’s rehearsal concert,” the post read. “Everyone is sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused. The National Weather Service is forecasting an extreme heat watch with temperatures exceeding 100 degrees.”

The post added that an update will come Friday by 10 a.m. on the status of the full concert, which is scheduled to take place from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. Friday night.

Similar warnings are hitting the Great American State Fair; organizers have already had to cancel a rodeo demonstration scheduled for Thursday night. Attendance at the fair overall has been depressed, and some visitors are complaining about the weather. U.S. Trade Representative Jameson Greer had an audience of maybe 25 people when he spoke about tariffs on the main stage Thursday afternoon.

Many booths at the fair don’t have air conditioning, leading at least one visitor to overheat. She told a reporter she finally found relief at a baptism tent, where she took a dip to cool down.

Great American State Fair goer tells our @JenDelgadoFOX many of the booths she went to today didn't have air conditioning, she overheated, said she saw stars and needed medical attention -- found the baptism tent and took a dip to cool down pic.twitter.com/Smufj0GN8g

— Homa Bash (@HomaBashNews) July 2, 2026

Even without the heat, the fair is coming across as tacky, with empty booths and a lack of energy. The food is expensive, reviews are abysmal, and people aren’t coming, enraging the president. When it hasn’t been hot, it’s been raining. America’s 250th anniversary was already going poorly thanks to Trump, and now the weather may cement the once-in-a-lifetime event’s status as a failure.

Two major polls of the Maine Senate race dropped this week, and they told the same story: The race is incredibly close, and Democrat Graham Platner has real work to do among the working class. He’s running an aggressively left-populist, antiestablishment campaign targeting the billionaire class—and boasts lots of blue-collar appeal—but GOP Senator Susan Collins is way ahead among those voters. Why?

The surveys—one from The New York Times and the other from Fox News—offer good and bad news for Platner. But they’re worrying some Democrats because a loss here deeply complicates the path to Senate control. Without Maine—which voted against Donald Trump by seven points in 2024—Democrats probably must win four out of five seats in Ohio, Texas, Alaska, Iowa, and North Carolina. Trump won all five states—most by lopsided margins—and now Democrats lead in the last but are tied or a bit behind in the others.

The Times survey has Platner up two among likely voters overall, 49–47, and the Fox poll has Collins up three, 50–47. It’s a dead heat—it’s winnable, but he should probably be leading by more given the state’s Democratic lean, which is being outweighed by the brutal press he’s sustained over his Nazi-like tattoo and alleged violence against women.

But note this: In the Times poll, Platner trails among voters without a college degree, a proxy for the working class, by 37–58. In the Fox poll, that’s 41–56. What’s driving this? One possibility: The Times poll has working-class voters saying Platner has “good character” by 37–57 and “the right kind of moral values” by 36–57.

On the plus side, Platner leads in the Times survey among women by 52–44, among young people by 59–32, and among college-educated voters by 66–32. But Platner’s candidacy is all about his blue-collar aura: He’s a tattooed oyster farmer who speaks openly—in that deep, gravelly voice—about his trauma from serving in combat. Though his backstory is somewhat more privileged (his father is an Ivy League graduate and lawyer), he speaks in a left-populist idiom that seeks to connect with working people’s struggles. So his numbers among them are concerning.

Here’s the upshot: This race is awfully close, and importantly, Platner is running behind the Democratic Party as a whole in Maine. Voters there want a Democratic Senate by 54–42, so his 49 percent support lags that. By contrast, in Times polling, all the Democrats in other red states—Ohio, Texas, Alaska, Iowa, North Carolina—are outrunning their party.

I talked about all this with Rebecca Katz, a top Platner adviser. Asked about his numbers with working-class voters, Katz noted that the race has been heavily nationalized, leading them to initially fall into their familiar pattern of opposition to Democrats. Many of these voters, Katz said, have been introduced to Platner via a massive barrage of negative ads and some very bad news cycles.

Katz said the political landscape in Maine—a largely rural state where retail campaigning will really matter—provides Platner with a unique opportunity to grow among that demographic. She noted that he’s already done over 60 town halls in rural areas, and pointed to an intriguing dynamic: People in these areas are coming to listen.

“They are curious about him,” Katz told me, noting that Graham is already somewhat outperforming losing 2020 Senate candidate Sara Gideon among working people.

If one criticism of Democrats is that they don’t show up and talk to rural and working- class voters, well, Platner is certainly doing that. The theory seems to be that despite his bad stories, Platner is compelling enough to open the door to getting an audience with these constituencies, and then to reach them in a fresh way.

“Graham is a different kind of candidate,” Katz said. “He grew up in a rural community. He’s one of the only candidates running who’s actually worked with his hands. He will continue to connect with more rural and conservative voters.”

Asked to respond to the oft-heard argument that seeking working-class voters with Platner’s type of leftist politics is a chimera, Katz insisted this doesn’t jibe with what they’re seeing at town halls in working-class and rural areas.

“Mainers are focused on their cost of living, health care, corruption, and whether anyone in Washington is actually fighting for working people,” said Katz, a founding partner of Fight Agency, the firm that does Platner’s media and strategy, along with rising progressive strategist Morris Katz (no relation), who helped recruit Platner.

In this understanding, Platner’s appeal can get these voters to at least listen to his agenda of breaking billionaire control over elections, Medicare for All, a more progressive tax system for small businesses and corporations alike, a billionaire minimum tax, and protecting and expanding social welfare programs. That agenda is somewhat to the left of many mainstream Democrats. But it’s aimed squarely at what’s really driving voter concerns, Katz notes, which matters more than the details, and Platner is the one to make that case.

“There are people coming who are not into politics but are intrigued by Graham,” Katz said of the town halls. “He’s an outsider.”

Asked to respond to Platner’s struggles with working people, Adam Green, the head of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee—an early booster of Platner’s candidacy—acknowledged that he has more work to do among them. But he cast this as an opportunity. “Most working-class people who are low-propensity voters don’t know him yet,” Green said. “But once they do, he’s an obvious fit for them.”

Katz, for her part, said other big dynamics here deserve attention: This is likely to be a change election amid deep anger at establishment politicians. The Times poll finds 61 percent of Maine voters say the country is on the wrong track, 60 percent disapprove of Trump, large percentages say Collins is too old to serve, and Democrats hold a nearly 20-point enthusiasm edge.

“The big question of this race is whether or not voters are willing to vote for change,” Katz said.

The political graveyards are full of men—mostly men—who boasted of the right kind of populist and biographical appeal to reverse Democratic losses among working people. Indeed, different factions in the party are already battling over the meaning of Platner’s candidacy, with progressives and socialists insisting it will show their agenda to be broadly popular and moderates insisting that chasing working-class voters with that sort of leftism is a fool’s errand.

But, unsatsfyingly, the outcome is unlikely to turn on Platner’s precise policy prescriptions or his exact ideological leanings. It will more likely be decided on whether Collins’s special hold on the Maine electorate is spent, particularly after her vote for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the overturning of Roe v. Wade; whether Trump’s unpopularity will be enough to nudge voters to risk a different kind of challenger; whether Platner’s able to reach just enough persuadable voters to allay concerns about his past conduct; and a thousand other intangibles involving turnout and last-minute voter decisions.

Ultimately, it may all turn on good old-fashioned shoe-leather politicking. And whatever you think of Platner, one thing that can’t be denied is this: He’s certainly willing to work hard enough to win.

In the four months since the US and Israel initiated their ongoing joint military campaign against Iran, the Trump administration’s negotiations with Iranian leadership to end the war have been predictable in their unpredictability.

On Monday, President Trump said US officials would meet with Iran in Qatar the next day. Iran said that no negotiation meetings were scheduled. (They ultimately conducted low-level talks on Wednesday.) Both countries have launched strikes despite signing a memorandum of understanding on June 17 that included a ceasefire and was designed to help bring an end to the war. But—despite the US celebrating a security deal between Israel and Lebanon last week—Israel has continued strikes on southern Lebanon and Hezbollah, an ally of Iran, rejected the Israel-Lebanon deal, which it was not a party to. 

According to data from multiple Iranian government ministries, as of June 10, about 3,500 people have been killed in Iran since the war began. Lebanon’s health ministry reported on Wednesday that about 4,300 people have been killed in that country.

All to say, as I wrote shortly after the memorandum of understanding was signed, the Iran war doesn’t appear to be ending anytime soon.

“I think Iran was very open to a potential arrangement that was stronger than the JCPOA.”

Nate Swanson, a resident senior fellow at the nonpartisan Atlantic Council, spent nearly two decades as a State Department official, most recently as the Biden administration’s director for Iran at the National Security Council.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct, Swanson told me, took a wrecking ball to many of the US’ already tenuous relationships in the region, and made a region-spanning war with Iran much more likely even before 2026.

I spoke with Swanson last week about what could be next for US relations with Iran, Israel, and the Gulf states.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. 

Given how the second Trump administration has handled relations with Iran, I was curious what you think a different negotiator could have gotten out of this situation.

I don’t want to say the US-Iran relationship has ever been good in my time working on this، for almost 20 years, but I think Trump walked into a situation in 2025 where Iran was in a historically bad spot.

They just had these two direct exchanges with Israel. They had no air defense. Their proxies at the time seemed like they were much weaker. Domestically, they had very acute economic and environmental crises. They had also come off massive protests in 2023. So I think Iran was very interested in the deal right there. 

I think they approached negotiations not sure what Trump wanted to do. I was there—and I wasn’t quite sure what Trump wanted to do—but I think up until the June 2025 war, the US had a great hand in terms of leverage. And I think Iran was very open to a potential arrangement that was stronger [in restrictions] than the JCPOA. After the 12-day war though, it’s been a declining chance for a real deal and certainly US leverage. Iran knew that more war was coming and that was where their focus was.

“The US doesn’t seem interested in complicated deals, and [now] I’m not sure Iran is willing.”

I’m curious if you think the Biden administration would ever have launched strikes against Iran like those last June and this February—or how you think they would have handled the aftermath.

Yeah, there’s no way those strikes would have happened.

To some extent, you had a path that was drawn with October 7, 2023. For Israel, that was a game-changing event. They went after Hamas and Hezbollah, and both of those, from their military perspective, were relatively successful. You had conflicts with Israel and Iran directly for the first time in October 2024, right before the election.

I think the priorities in the Biden perspective was one, to make sure that Israel and our Gulf allies were protected. Second is to, wherever possible, deter escalation. We were very clear that we were not going to support larger escalation, while Israel definitely was considering a larger war at multiple points across 2024.

[The June] 2025 and 2026 [wars] would not have happened at nearly the same level if it had not been Trump. Netanyahu has been pushing some form of an Iran war forever. He’s Mister Iran. And the major difference between Trump and any other administration before him—including Bush, Obama, and Biden—was that [the Israelis] were always told no, and that we weren’t going to support [a war]. Trump said yes, and that is fundamentally the difference.

How has the US’ ongoing role with the war in Gaza changed its relationships with the Gulf states?

[The US had] a pretty strong relationship with all the GCC members [Gulf Cooperation Council, constituting Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates].

Prior to [October 7], there was a movement to normalize relations between Israel and the rest of the Gulf. It has been a long-standing goal across multiple administrations, and Trump [partly] did it with the Abraham Accords.

But it was happening without a solution to the Palestinian issue. We were able to do it with the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco, and Biden spent a lot of time trying to facilitate Saudi-Israel normalization. 

It went out the window on October 7, especially from the Saudi perspective. Bibi was willing to prioritize his number one objective to have this military conquest in Gaza.

But the relationship [with the Gulf states] has been shifting significantly forever. A significant moment in our history was when the US pulled out of the JCPOA in 2018. Iran responded by attacking the Gulf, which was a harbinger of what happened in this war. So the US pulled out of the JCPOA, put maximum pressure on Iran, [which] attacked oil tankers [in UAE waters] and Saudi energy infrastructure. This was the [2026] playbook, at a much smaller scale.

For the first time, you saw [Gulf states] try to de-escalate with Iran. There was a recognition that we weren’t going to be there for them in the way they hoped. The relationship has been slowly evolving through then, and then we put on turbo burners during this war, where the US relationship with the Gulf became a liability. If [a Gulf state] had a real US base, not only did it not protect, it encouraged attacks.

Recent reporting suggests that the US may effectively be returning to aspects of the JCPOA—such as JD Vance saying last week that Iran agreed to nuclear inspections. If the current negotiations come through, do you see the JCPOA-era relationship as partially restored?

Yes, in the best-case scenario; but ultimately, no. I don’t think we’re going to get the bigger phase two deal that the MOU outlines. The US doesn’t seem to be interested in complicated deals, and I’m not sure Iran is willing to do a big deal with Trump—just and uniquely him. 

I also think you can’t recapture what we did in 2015 with the JCPOA. The JCPOA was done to stall out Iran’s nuclear program at that moment in time. But you can’t turn back time. Even if Iran agreed to all the Trump administration requests of no enrichment and getting rid of all the stockpiles of enriched uranium, the time it would take Iran to break out for a weapon is about half the time it was under the JCPOA.

Iran has learned so much about the process, specifically their ability to install vastly more technologically efficient and proficient centrifuges and to install them a lot faster. It’s like six times stronger centrifuges that can install at three times the speed. 

And those [demands from the US] aren’t going to be met, so I think we are in a significantly worse off position.

What were the years under the Biden administration, after the US left the JCPOA, like regarding relations with Iran? I know Iran had resumed nuclear enrichment at that point after the US had reinstated sanctions.  

Under past presidents, the Israelis “were always told no…Trump said yes, and that is fundamentally the difference.”

Different Biden officials have different takes on this. My opinion is that there was a deal achievable but there were a few mistakes made on both sides, but more on Iran’s.

Iran expected, when Biden came in the door, to immediately indicate a desire to get back to the JCPOA as quickly as possible. We were slow; it took us a month. There was a conversation that happened both inside and outside the government about whether you should go back into the JCPOA directly or a deal that could be hypothetically more sustainable. At that point it was clear that Iran wanted a clean return to the JCPOA. By early April, the US had put together a comprehensive return to the JCPOA. 

But at that point it was too late for Iran. While I think their negotiators wanted a deal, they had elections coming up a couple months later and their Supreme Leader [Ali Khamenei] didn’t want the outgoing administration to get credit for it. So as much as we were trying to move forward a deal, they couldn’t say yes. 

The new [Iranian] team came in and spent three or four months getting their act together and eventually decided that they wanted to get back into the JCPOA too, basically under the exact same terms. A deal was possible, but Iran thought that the longer they held out, the more we would give them. And so they kept stalling and pushing for more and more. 

The Russia war broke out [in which Iran backed Russia], and then Iran went through massive protests. By the end of fall 2022, a return to the JCPOA wasn’t viable politically and timing-wise. And in the midst of all this happening, there were significant advances made in the nuclear program. 

So the deal was less valuable than it was in 2015, and even as it would have been in early 2021. 

I do think they wanted to get to yes, but they never could.

Trump’s JCPOA withdrawal meant economic sanctions were put back on Iran. How do you think that played into the events you mentioned during the Biden administration?

By the time Trump left office in his first term, you had a significant increase [in sanctions] under “maximum pressure.” For instance, the key part of JCPOA sanctions relief was delisting their central bank, their shipping sector, their oil sector, etc. All that got re-sanctioned not only when we pulled out of JCPOA, but then they also listed this vital JCPOA sanctions relief as terrorism. That complicated any potential deal.

But I think the bigger difference is oil. Obama signed language that reduced Iranian oil, but it was capped to not destabilize oil markets and it was agreed on with other countries. I think Trump’s approach was that no one can buy any Iranian oil. The net effect is everyone went down to zero eventually but China. China ended up buying the Iranian exports at that point and has ever since. China has become a beneficiary of the system and has basically kept Iran alive because they’re not adhering to the US sanctions.

Is there a good way to understand how the US leaving the JCPOA impacted Iran’s economy and the global oil market?

“You [now] have to have something that seven people agree on…I think that’s why you see this MOU is in Iran’s favor—because they couldn’t say yes to anything less.”

Oil exports are the best number. Pre-JCPOA they were doing about a million barrels a day. During the JCPOA, they’re at max capacity over two million barrels a day. And then under Trump’s maximum pressure—including during COVID when [production] went away, it went down to a couple hundred thousand barrels a day. It’s been creeping up ever since, including through [the second] Trump [administration]. They are now doing 1.7 million barrels a day—all that illegal, all to China, and at a discount. Iran has figured out how to evade sanctions and how to get oil to China. 

As a part of this [2026] deal that we signed, Iran could sell all the oil again with no repercussions for the first time since the JCPOA. They will now be able to recruit new purchasers who used to buy Iran oil—like Japan, South Korea, and India would be the biggest.

How do you think the re-implementation of US economic sanctions in 2018 affected the negotiations under Biden?

It definitely made it harder. It added layers of complexity that were time-consuming and difficult to figure out. You basically had to go through one by one and say, “is this actual, real terrorism or is this [an additional terrorism designation from] Trump’s sanctions?”

Some experts I’ve talked to have emphasized the 1953 CIA-backed coup in shaping Iran’s attitude to negotiating with the US. What do you think about that?

It’s very much in Iran’s political ideology and statecraft. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 was founded on anti-imperial and anti-US ideas that came out of 1953. They view the US as supporting Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war, and it’s just one living continuous piece of history that hasn’t ended. I don’t know if that’s wise or not, but I think it’s reality. 

There is no trust on either side. I think the difference between now and the JCPOA, though, is at least there was a desire to try to work through the mistrust to get somewhere that’s mutually beneficial. I am not sure that environment exists at all anymore, and I think it’s evidenced by the fact that Iran won’t sit down with the US directly. It has to be with an intermediary or a mediator in the room or just not at all. They’ll only pass messages right now through Qatar or Pakistan. 

And it goes both ways. When I started at the State Department in 2007, the door across from me had a sticker of an American flag and the inscription was like “save our hostages” from the hostage crisis. There’s still these survivors of this hostage crisis left over. There are still victims of Iranian violence and terror around the world, through Hezbollah or others.

It goes both ways, and the level of mistrust and animosity has got to be an all-time high coming out of this war.

The US and Israel’s bombing campaign has killed a lot of Iranian officials. Do you have any idea who is negotiating now, and if they have any different priorities?

I’m not really sure of the answer. On one hand, the foreign ministry guys are the same—they’re not dead. So the foreign minister and [longtime] lead negotiator [Abbas Araghchi], and his surrounding team have been around—with a minor blip from 2021 to 2024 during the Raisi presidency—since 2013.

To your real question of who’s making decisions, I don’t know. We knew before the Supreme Leader [Ali Khamenei] died that it was him. We don’t even really know if the Supreme Leader’s son [Mojtaba Khamenei, who was elected after his father’s assassination] is alive or not. We know the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a branch of the Iranian armed forces accountable only to the Supreme Leader] has a bigger role than they have in the past, but we don’t really know what that means. There’s a new lead negotiator, the Speaker of Parliament [Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf]. There’s clearly five, six—probably more—people who are making decisions in a collaborative manner.

It’s much more complicated than the JCPOA. You have to have something that seven people agree on to get to yes. I think that’s why you see this MOU is in Iran’s favor—because they couldn’t say “yes” to anything less. 

I do think it reflects the correct desire by the president to get out of this war, which is a debacle and getting worse. But the terms are terrible, and it’s like the ultimate indictment of the war itself.

Yet another Republican lawmaker is missing in action.

Florida Representative Neal Dunn’s office told Punchbowl News Thursday that he won’t be voting unless Republican leadership says they need him.

Donald Trump put the 73-year-old lawmaker on blast in March, prematurely revealing at a White House event that Dunn was suffering from a terminal heart problem and would be “dead by June.”

“Congressman Neal Dunn of Florida had had some real health challenges, and it was very serious, and had had a pretty grim diagnosis,” House Speaker Mike Johnson admitted at the event at Trump’s behest. “I mentioned it to the president. I said, ‘Congressman Dunn is a real champion and a patriot because he’s still coming to work, and if others got this diagnosis, they would be apt to go home and retire.’”

“What was the diagnosis?” Trump pressed.

“It was—I mean, I think it was a terminal diagnosis,” Johnson said.

“He would be dead by June,” Trump interjected, before Johnson confessed, “That wasn’t public.”

Dunn has not been on Capitol Hill since June 11 and has so far missed 11 votes, according to his voting record. Nonetheless, he has not announced any plans to truncate his time in office. In January, Dunn released a statement indicating that he would not seek reelection, though the former Army surgeon is apparently not planning to formally bow out before the end of his term.

Dunn has a bad track record with missing votes. Since he entered the House in January 2017, Dunn has missed 246 of 4,992 roll call votes. That means the septuagenarian has missed at least 4.9 percent of the votes that took place during his term, according to an analysis by Govtrack.us, which is much more than the median of 2.1 percent missed by other representatives.

But he’s not the only Republican who’s been missing in action. Representative Tom Kean Jr. was absent from Congress since March 5, sparking a Washington brouhaha that lasted until Tuesday, when he suddenly appeared before the House floor to share that his inexplicable multimonth absence was due to depression. Notably, Kean has voted repeatedly to block paid sick leave for his constituents.

Honestly, this is getting exhausting. Every day—like, literally every day by now—we see evidence of some new desecration of the White House. One of the most galling things about this latest indignity is that we don’t actually know what is happening here, because why would we ever know about the workings of our government these days? All we know for sure is that there was suddenly some…

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The Department of Justice accidentally released the second volume of former special counsel Jack Smith’s report on President Trump’s handling of classified documents in a legal case last month, according to a legal filing published Thursday.

DOJ lawyers sent the sealed report to lawyers for Carmen Lineberger, who was charged with stealing the report by emailing it to herself disguised as a cake recipe. On June 3, DOJ officials handed over discovery items on flash drives to Lineberger’s lawyers. Included in those drives were documents embedded in electronic messages that were required to be disclosed. On June 9, the defendant’s attorneys reported they found three documents and contacted the government to confirm if they were supposed to be part of discovery materials.

After they reviewed the documents, DOJ lawyers confirmed that they were actually copies of Smith’s report. Defense attorneys told the government they stopped reviewing the material before examining the report itself, deleted the discovery materials they had downloaded, and handed the flash drives back to the government. Thursday’s legal filing was to notify Judge Aileen Cannon, the judge presiding over Trump’s classified documents case.

The accidental leak has to be embarrassing for the government, considering Trump’s successful effort to keep the Smith’s report hidden from the public after he won the 2024 presidential election. The defense counsel could have leaked the documents, but considering that their client was accused of improperly handling them, chose to follow the rules.

The situation is ironic, considering Smith’s report was all about how Trump allegedly mishandled classified documents by keeping them at Mar-a-Lago instead of returning them to the government. Smith’s case wasn’t allowed to go to trial thanks to Cannon, a Trump appointee, dismissing it on flimsy grounds. It seems that the public may never know the full details of what Trump did.

President Donald Trump’s “Great American State Fair” has been an attendance disaster, but his allies at Fox News are doing their best to hide the failure. While broadcasting from the event Thursday, co-host Dana Perino proclaimed that there was great “excitement” days before the celebration of America’s 250th birthday. But the imagery behind Perino and co-host Bill Hemmer told a…

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A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | Supreme Court’s leader doesn’t care about the Constitution…

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Foreign Service Officers play a pivotal role in the US Department of State—and in the world. According to the agency’s website, these high-ranking officials “engage with foreign governments, advocate for American interests, and help shape global policy across political, economic, and humanitarian priorities.” Because of the importance of their duties, the vetting process for Foreign Service Officers is famously intense and includes both a rigorous screening process and a difficult multi-hour exam.

Last year, the Trump administration announced sweeping changes to the program, vowing to end hiring practices that it said relied too heavily on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The Secretary of State was to “remove any reference to the Core Precept entitled ‘Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility,'” Trump ordered in a March 2025 memo. “The Secretaries shall promptly direct all employees of their Departments not to give this Core Precept any force or effect.”

Later that year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio abruptly recalled 29 ambassadors and fired 246 Foreign Service Officers. The moves were part of a restructuring that, Rubio wrote in a Substack post, aimed to rid the State Department of a culture where “radical ideologues and bureaucratic infighters have learned to…push through their own agendas that are often at odds with those of the President and undermine the interests of the United States.”

Now, the US Department of State is looking to hire a new generation of Foreign Service Officers. To recruit applicants for these coveted and vital positions, the agency just signed a contract with a company called Military Hire, a subsidiary of the employment firm RedBalloon, which describes itself as “America’s non-woke job board.” At $978,750, the amount of the contract is not particularly high, but the company nevertheless has lofty ambitions. It aims to give the Foreign Service an anti-woke makeover by attracting ideologically “aligned” candidates—hopefully Christians. 

Earlier this week, RedBalloon CEO Andrew Crapuchettes appeared on CrossPolitic, a podcast that says it is “helping Christians apply God’s law to politics.” CrossPolitic is a project of CanonPress, the publishing house connected to Christian nationalist Idaho pastor Doug Wilson’s Church. Perhaps not coincidentally, Crapuchettes is an elder at Wilson’s Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and Wilson has robust connections to the Trump administration through defense secretary Pete Hegseth.

“It was focused on trying to get in the guy with a PhD in Black dance, rather than people who can actually do a good job.”

In the CrossPolitic episode–called “Could 1,000 Employees Change the State Department Forever?”—Crapuchettes says that before the current administration, “a lot of the recruiting was focused on DEI. It was focused on trying to get in the guy with a PhD in Black dance, rather than people who can actually do a good job.”

Those DEI hires, Craphuchettes charges, were often reluctant to follow directives that aligned with the administration’s “America First” ethic. “What they’re finding is all these Foreign Service Officers are like, ‘Yeah, I don’t really want to. Yeah, that sounds really hard, so I’m not going to,’ because they’re, more than not, leftists, and they don’t want to do President Trump’s agenda,” he says. “They want him to look bad, and they want to drag their feet.”

Because of this mismatch of values, Crapuchettes says, the State Department “got rid of the entire recruiting department…like 50 people,” and now is in the process of “cleaning house.” That means “removing a lot of people who are not aligned with the current administration’s agenda, and they want to get people who are more aligned.”

Crapuchettes then invites Christians to apply for jobs in the foreign service. “I would love to see a lot of Christians applying, taking the test, doing the hard work, becoming a foreign service officer, going to Germany for two years, or Botswana, or Thailand,” he says. “You’re working for the ambassador; you’re going to build connections and relationships that you can’t get any other way, and all of a sudden you’re in a position where you can have a huge influence for the rest of your life on the US government.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Crapuchettes explains that RedBalloon is working on developing similar recruiting contracts with the Department of War and the Department of the Interior. He also claims that the company “just got another contract” with the Department of Veterans Affairs to perform “political appointee level recruitment for them.” Neither the State Department nor the VA responded to our questions; a spokesperson from the Department of War declined to comment.

Crapuchettes founded RedBalloon in 2021. At first, the company attracted applicants who were seeking jobs without Covid vaccine mandates. But as the pandemic faded into the background, the company’s remit expanded. A 2023 Wired profile noted that Donald Trump, Jr. called RedBalloon “a HUGE advance in the culture war.” Today, it boasts a network of “tens of thousands” of job seekers “who value freedom, hard work, and merit-based recognition.” The employers hiring through it include Turning Point USA, the Christian cell phone service Patriot Mobile, and the conservative media company The Daily Wire.

In the podcast, Crapuchettes boasts that RedBalloon has developed a reputation for working with government agencies unpopular with the political left. “We’re already doing stuff for like Border Patrol, which gets us in trouble—ICE, Border Patrol, we do hiring for them,” he tells Wilson. He suggests that Military Hire is a less controversial brand. “RedBalloon’s a little hotter to handle than Militaryhire.com, and so on a PR front, Militaryhire.com’s got the contract, not Red Balloon,” he says, “which is fine with me.” (A Border Patrol spokesperson clarified in an email to Mother Jones that the agency “has worked with Military Hire since 2022 and was under contract with them when they were acquired by RedBalloon.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Doug Wilson, who heads the Idaho church where Crapuchettes is an elder and also oversees a small fiefdom of businesses and schools connected to his church, is increasingly influential in national politics. A spiritual adviser to US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, he delivered a sermon on manly, godly warriors at the Pentagon earlier this year. A self-proclaimed Christian nationalist, Wilson is a firebrand online. In previous interviews, he has told me that women’s suffrage was “a mistake” and that in his ideal version of the United States, public flogging would largely replace prisons. In a 2024 address at the National Conservatism conference, he described a society under siege by identity politics and anti-Christian bias. “It used to be that the sexually troubled had to keep their kinks hidden away in the closet,” he said. “Now it is the conservative Christian who needs to keep his virtues hidden in the recesses of the closet.”

On matters of woke-ism, Wilson appears to be firmly aligned with the Red Balloon ethos. In a post on his blog last year, he thundered against DEI initiatives. “It is not enough for us to be against woke, or DEI, or social justice, or whatever new term our lizard overlords have decided to foist upon us,” he wrote. “We must be hostile to all such verbal iterations.”

Job seekers don’t pay to use RedBalloon and Military Hire; rather, employers pay to recruit through these companies—hence the State Department’s contract. Crapuchettes says in the podcast that his platform will offer opportunities to take practice tests—an important feature because applicants are only allowed to take the test once a year. In an emailed statement, RedBalloon spokesperson Isaac Lopez said that the company does not “screen, filter, or evaluate any applicant based on political affiliation, religion, or ideology, and we have no policy, written or unwritten, that does so, consistent with federal hiring law.” Lopez added that Crapuchettes’ comments on the podcast “reflected a personal hope that more public-service-minded people of faith consider federal careers. His sentiment was not a company screening criterion.”

The Trump administration’s July 4th fireworks show will likely produce unhealthy levels of pollution at the National Mall and the surrounding area—a fitting byproduct of the president’s 250th American anniversary celebration. 

Internal documents from the National Park Service, which hosts the annual DC fireworks celebration, and obtained by the Washington Post, say that people in the area should “remain indoors as much as possible during and after the show” and “wear an N95 mask when outdoors” to prevent “irritation symptoms.” 

A significant contributor to these warnings is the scale of the fireworks display: the approximately 850,000 fireworks for 40 minutes. This is about 50 times more than the usual number of fireworks and double the typical show duration. 

To fund the extravagance, Trump is using $1.6 million in revenue from entry fees to national parks—five times more than what’s usually spent on the show. According to the Washington Post, the president is funneling a total of at least $90 million from national park entry fees for his plans to remake DC in his own image. This includes $76 million for repairing fountains, such as the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. 

Surely, this is the best use of these funds, considering the US Department of the Interior states that, as of September 2025, it needs $35.4 billion for maintenance and repair tasks that have already been postponed.

As my colleague Dan Friedman noted in May, some watchdog groups say the Trump administration skipped past congressional oversight by funneling money to the public-private partnership Freedom250.

It’s just another set of opaque business deals to serve one man’s vanity.

The White House is trying to break a fireworks record on Saturday—but doing so will likely cost taxpayers a pretty penny.

The Trump administration has not communicated how much the July 4 celebration will cost, or who is expected to foot the bill for the pyrotechnics display. There has been no public record of the company behind the show, Pyrotecnico, receiving a standard government contract for the job, as has been the case with Washington’s previous July 4 celebrations.

In lieu of concrete digits, NOTUS’s Anna Kramer reached out to several fireworks companies for a rough estimate on the show’s price tag. They projected the cost in the millions.

“You’re talking a many multimillion-dollar production, without a doubt,” James Woods, the director of sales at Pyro Shows in Tennessee, told NOTUS. Pyro Shows assisted in one of the previous world record-setting fireworks displays in Dubai in 2014.

Woods told NOTUS that some of the individual shells used in the upcoming celebration could cost anywhere between $50 to $1,000. NOTUS estimated that if even “3 percent of the devices used in this show cost $50, that would total $1.3 million for those devices alone.”

This year, the Freedom 250 celebration has promised a record-shattering 40-minute display beginning at 10:30 p.m. that will use more than 860,000 explosives. They’ll be set off along the Reflecting Pool, as well as in West Potomac Park and off of eight barges on the Potomac River.

The current record is held by the Iglesia Ni Cristo, a church in the Philippines that earned the Guinness World Record title in 2016 for lighting 809,000 fireworks during a New Year’s Eve event.

Another fireworks professional, Kellner’s Fireworks owner Bob Kellner, hypothesized that even if the entire record-setting show were composed of “filler” shells (the cheapest explosives possible, sold for around $2 a pop), the display would still cost a minimum of $1.7 million. But only hitting that bare minimum is highly unlikely, as more sophisticated fireworks cost significantly more.

There is just one federal record offering details about the upcoming semiquincentennial. A document from the Interior Department, dated December 2025, dedicated $1.5 million to Garden State Fireworks to man the display. But that was months before Donald Trump promised to launch “the LARGEST FIREWORKS SHOW IN HISTORY” on Independence Day 2026.

NOTUS reported that Garden State Fireworks has been responsible for the capital’s July Fourth show for the last decade, and typically receives a contract between $250,000 and $300,000 for the display.

President Trump bought hundreds of stocks the day before he paused tariffs and caused the stock market to rally.

Trump filed his latest financial disclosure on Monday, and it shows that he made 327 individual stock purchases worth as much as $12.8 million on April 8, 2025, from companies including Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, and Alphabet (Google’s parent company), according to an analysis from investigative outlet Sludge. The next day, Trump announced that he was pausing his sweeping tariffs for 90 days, and the S&P 500 went up by nearly 10 percent, one of its largest one-day increases ever.

The timing of these trades suggests he planned to cash in, realizing that markets would rally after his announcement. Those weren’t the only suspicious stock trades he made last year, either. On August 18, Trump’s accounts bought between $250,000 and $500,000 of stock in chipmaker Intel, four days before the president announced that the federal government would take a nearly $9 billion equity stake in the company. Intel’s stock price went up 6 percent after that announcement.

Trump also bought stock in defense contractor Palantir Technologies throughout the year, publicly praising the company while increasing its federal contracts, particularly those with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One of his top advisers, White House deputy chief of staff and anti-immigration hawk Stephen Miller, also owns between $100,001 and $250,000 of Palantir stock. This year, Trump singled out Palantir on Truth Social in April and sent its stock price soaring.

By law, Trump and other executive branch officials are supposed to publicly disclose securities transfers, including stock purchases, over $1,000 within 45 days. Not only did Trump wait more than a year to disclose the April stock purchases, he didn’t disclose any other of the thousands of stock trades he made in 2025.

In all, Trump reported $2.2 billion in income in 2025, from crypto, stock trades, foreign real estate, suing news organizations, and other grifts. His administration is openly engaging in market manipulation and insider trading without any fear of consequences.