Political News

The Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed on Thursday the U.S. economy’s persistent weakness under President Donald Trump, with the June jobs report showing nearly 60,000 fewer jobs created than economists had anticipated. In June the U.S. economy added a paltry 57,000 jobs. The Dow Jones consensus forecast had expected a gain of 115,000 jobs. The BLS report noted that employment in the leisure…

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I’m writing the end-of-week update a day early today, because Daily Kos has July 3 off for the holiday. Happy independence day! What We Changed This Week What Are Working On Next Week *The “Jump to Comments” box is something we are trying out. I know a lot of people don’t like it — please keep sharing your feedback. It seems like the logout issue is much better for a…

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President Donald Trump is once again hawking a company in which he owns stock.

Trump announced Thursday that stock in Micron Technology Inc., a semiconductor company, had leapt nine points on the stock market following the company’s commitment to donate $250 million to the president’s Trump Accounts, the individual savings vehicle for eligible American citizens under age 18.

“Thank you Micron!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Trump’s thanks aren’t just on behalf of America’s children—it seems that the president personally benefited from the stock’s sudden rise.

Trump’s recently released financial disclosures from 2025 revealed that the president already owned between $1.67 million and $6.65 million worth of stock in Micron. In March, as the administration was making preparations to launch the Trump Accounts, Trump purchased between $215,000 and $550,000 in Micron stock, according to MeidasTouch.

In a press release Tuesday, Micron said the donation was the “largest corporate commitment of its kind.” At the same time, the company is facing a federal class action lawsuit over allegations of collusion and price-fixing with other chip manufacturers.

In 2025, the president raked in loads of cash in the stock market by buying or selling a whopping 21,000 times with companies he talks about publicly, such as Nvidia and Intel. And Trump has a history of manipulating the stock market by boosting certain companies on social media.

This also isn’t the first time the president has attempted to boost a company tied to Trump Accounts. In December, Dell pledged a $6.2 billion commitment to the accounts. A few months later, Trump purchased at least $1 million in Dell stock, and then went on a rant about buying Dell computers.

Donald Trump has made enormous changes to the White House during his time in office: He’s paved over the Rose Garden, stripped the palms from the Palm Room, and most unforgivably, razed the executive estate’s East Wing.

But one strange detail about Trump’s bathroom renovation, revealed by New York Times reporters Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman in their new book, Regime Change, might be the grossest yet.

“New carpet was laid in the bathroom on Inauguration Day, as before,” the authors wrote. “Trump’s preference for a fully carpeted bathroom had posed a challenge for the Residence staff during his first term. The portion nearest the shower would often be soaked through; the staff was never quite sure why, but they worried about mold growing underneath.”

Carpeted bathrooms became trendy in the 1970s and ’80s, several decades after synthetic fibers—namely nylon—were first introduced as carpet materials, making wall-to-wall carpeting a possibility for American homeowners. The novel idea was initially marketed as a luxury option, extending the lush comfort of the bedroom into the washroom.

But the fad quickly fell out of style for obvious reasons. By the late 1980s, carpeted bathrooms had largely been replaced with vinyl or tile to reduce the possibility of trapped moisture and mold growth.

Trump, however, seems to have held on to the fantasy that it could be done well.

“It was important to him to have a fully carpeted bathroom, and residence staff’s solution to the damp problem, or the potential mold problem, was to get essentially a small piece of carpet and overlay it as if it was a bath mat on top of the carpet in front of the shower, and then substitute and rotate that carpeting,” Swan told MS NOW. “So, we do have some details from inside the residence, including some disputes and tensions between the president and the first lady over the interior decorating and renovating.”

The Times duo’s reporting revealed further interior decorating disputes between Trump and his wife, with the president often removing items that Melania had intentionally placed around the residence and stowing them away in his office.

Justice Samuel Alito doesn’t like birthright citizenship, so he tried to legislate it away from the bench. Luckily, he failed. But he’s not the only one fuming. “The Supreme Court’s ruling on birthright citizenship is a tremendous betrayal of the republic,” tweeted Kevin Roberts, the president of the arch-conservative Heritage Foundation, who gave us Project 2025. “The Justices in the…

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The president’s worldview is getting increasingly bizarre.

Donald Trump posted an AI-generated clip to his Truth Social late Wednesday, sharing a depiction of himself as a white coat-wearing doctor supposedly “curing” celebrities of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

“Have you or someone you know been diagnosed with TDS? The symptoms can be relentless. Fortunately, I’m Dr. Trump, and I have a treatment plan,” the depiction says.

The video then showcases deepfakes of several actors, comedians, and talk show hosts who have been vocal critics of the president and his policies, including The View hosts Rosie O’Donnell and Whoopi Goldberg, as well as Robert De Niro, Julia Roberts, Edward Norton, and John Leguizamo.

“I really was unsure I could help some of these people. They were so far gone, I wasn’t really sure,” Trump’s avatar says after several fake testimonials.

Trump then encourages viewers to “turn off fake news” and “just have a Diet Coke like me.”

The president has proven himself to be a big fan of AI-generated media, though the practice has frequently landed him in trouble. In May, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s executive assistant, Natalie Harp, was the inner circle figure primarily responsible for the president’s late-night social media binges. Over the last several months, Harp has reportedly shared an AI-generated video that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, and an AI-generated image of Trump as Jesus Christ.

Trump took down both posts after they spurred immense public backlash. In the former instance, Trump claimed he did not see the section of the video that racistly mocked the former president and first lady. A White House official blamed the mistake on an editing error. In the second instance, Trump claimed he thought he was being shown as a doctor.

White House officials deleted photographs of the crowds at Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair kick-off rally after the president raged at the dismal turnout.

“We’re told that the aerial image of the crowds from his rally last week enraged him so much that officials ended up deleting them,” CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported Wednesday evening.

Dozens of attendees were seen flocking toward the exits during Trump’s kick-off address, but the president insisted the event was “packed to the brim.”

Photographs of the event showed that there was a crowd, but not a very big one, and certainly not the 45,000 that Trump claimed on social media.

Attendance at Trump’s supremely underwhelming Great American State Fair has remained visibly low, as the festivities have been beset by technical difficulties, lame programming, and disappointing weather delays.

White House staff are reportedly concerned that Trump’s rally planned for the Fourth of July will spark yet another presidential meltdown.

That rally is scheduled to take place outside on the National Mall, as temperatures in Washington are forecast to reach a stifling 100 degrees (at least). The rally will be punctuated by a massive fireworks display, currently scheduled to begin at 11 p.m. Unlike in past years, attendees will not be able to bring coolers to help beat the heat.

Chief Justice John Roberts famously promised that he would run the highest court like an impartial umpire calling balls and strikes. Instead, Roberts and his fellow Republican appointees have studiously moved forward a radical agenda. This term, the justices in Roberts’ six-three majority not only advanced their priorities, they accomplished them. As a result, Americans now live in a different constitutional order. The court reshaped the government, shifting it away from a multiracial democracy and toward a racially-stratified autocracy. 

The Roberts Court is predictable. Not because it follows the law, but because it never passes an opportunity to push its ideological vision. Once you know where Roberts and his colleagues want the country to go, you can figure out how almost every relevant case will end. The roadmap is simple.

First, Roberts and the majority fundamentally disagree with the premise that we have three co-equal branches of government. They believe in the idea of a “unitary executive” with total control over the machinery of government, with the justices themselves serving as the main check on the president. The biggest loser is Congress. Despite it being designed as be the most powerful branch, the court takes every opportunity to trample legislative authority. Second, this court has allies it seeks to help whenever it can, namely, the Republican Party, President Donald Trump, and the wealthiest Americans and the businesses they run. Finally, this majority is animated by a dislike of the Reconstruction amendments, civil rights laws, and using the laws or the Constitution to protect disfavored groups. If they have a chance to strike a blow to a minority group, they take it.

This term, the court didn’t move the ball down the field, they scored tournament-changing goals. In two major cases, Roberts and his allies can claim victories for the conservative movement decades in the making. The country is already feeling the consequences. 

The message to Trump was clear: the law is not binding, and we will not stop you from ignoring it.

First, on April 29, the court effectively killed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a law that for 61 years guaranteed racial minorities a political voice. In Louisiana v. Callais, the court ruled that states can gerrymander communities of color so that they never have a shot at electing their choice of representative. Not only did the court deal a death blow to the VRA, its ruling also took away Congress’ ability to enforce the 15th Amendment’s prohibition on racial discrimination in voting. The Reconstruction amendments are worth little if the court won’t enforce them and Congress can’t. Yet the Callais decision all but forecloses Congress’ ability to protect voters of color. “I can’t even imagine what statute Congress would enact protecting racial equality in voting, especially when it comes to dilution, that would survive a Supreme Court judgment that will rely on Callais,” said Berkeley law professor Bertrall Ross.

Some Republican-controlled states immediately set about eliminating majority-minority Congressional districts ahead of this year’s midterm elections, including in Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee. But that’s only the beginning. Not only will Congress grow whiter as GOP states, mostly in the South, draw Black and brown people out of power as they were free to do before the VRA, but so will state and local governments. Legislatures, school boards, municipal councils—states can now cut minorities out of all levels of government, rendering them, effectively, subjects rather than equal citizens. 

In another case that is an earthquake to government, the court eliminated independent agencies in Trump v. Slaughter. This case fundamentally shifted the balance of federal powers in America, neutering Congress and handing vast new authority to the president. It’s an anti-democracy, pro-corruption decision that will affect everyone. 

Since the country’s earliest days, Congress has had the ability to create what we now call independent agencies, insulated in various ways from direct presidential control. These proliferated in the 20th century as the federal government adapted to the exigencies of modernity. In 1935, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the constitutionality of independent agencies whose members can only be removed by the president for cause, as opposed to political disagreement. Relying upon this decision, Humphrey’s Executor, Congress created dozens of independent agencies over the last 90 years, to regulate everything from major mergers to the safety of consumer products. Until Monday, these agencies were run by bipartisan, multi-member commissions whose members have removal protection.

But on June 29, the court’s 6-3 majority declared that the president can remove the heads of these agencies for any reason. It overturned Humphrey’s Executor and effectively handed all the powers of these agencies over to one man. It’s clear where this will lead: allies and donors can ask for favors when it comes to any regulatory decision that concerns them, and the president can reward them. Likewise, the president can weaponize these agencies—which were supposed to be insulated from presidential politics—for his own political and financial gain. If any commissioner chooses not to act at the president’s behest, Trump can simply remove them. In fact, the opinion may ripple down from the commissioners to the civil servants who work for them. The ruling’s logic, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in dissent, could lead the court to overturn civil service protections and herald a return to a spoils system.

The decision is not just a boon to corrupt government and presidential power, it is a body blow to Congress. The legislative branch is simply not equipped to make every regulation, decision, or adjudication necessary to carry out its laws. As a result, it created agencies to do that work. And in some cases, Congress determined the agencies should have at least some insulation from presidential control. By taking away that independence, the court has done violence to Congress’ ability to ensure its laws are followed. Lawmakers can still hold hearings if they are concerned about an agency’s actions, or even withhold funding—although doing that undercuts its ability to see that its laws are carried out. This decision is a “nuclear bomb for the separation of powers,” Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck wrote. If the president doesn’t want to follow the law, there’s little Congress can do to enforce its directives. 

In his majority opinion in Slaughter, Roberts lets his loathing for Congress spill onto the page. He chided Congress for “taking more power for itself” by creating independent agencies, and decried how they result in an “‘increased subservience to congressional direction.’” But ironically, it is the court that is grabbing power. The only explicit exception to its holding is the Federal Reserve Board, which the court claimed had a different history, but which was transparently an acknowledgment that placing the board’s monetary decisions under one man could destroy the economy. The 6-3 majority reserved the right to exempt other agencies from presidential control on a case by case basis, placing their own judgement about the necessity of independence over Congress’. 

This disdain for Congress was a theme in three major immigration cases, in which the same GOP-appointed majority let the administration ignore laws passed by Congress commanding how the president should implement immigration laws. In a decision that will have massive human consequences, the majority allowed the Trump administration to eliminate Temporary Protect Status for Haitian and Syrian immigrants, even though, in the case of TPS for Haitians, the administration did not follow the rules Congress laid out to legally end such a designation. Now, Trump can unilaterally take legal status from some 1.3 million people without following the required process. The court’s message to the president was clear: the law is not binding, and we will not stop you from ignoring it. In a case over the rights of asylum seekers, the court ruled the administration doesn’t have to process asylum seekers as mandated by law if border officers can simply block them from physically stepping into the US. Finally, the court gave immigration officers more discretion to take away a lawful permanent resident’s green card at the border, a decision that, in Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s words, undermines the “benefits and security that come with having” that status. In all three cases, the president’s prerogatives took primacy over the law.

The court is a single vote away from undoing our nation of equals.

As if going after Congress’ ability to enact voting rights laws, to determine who carries out its laws, and the legitimacy of its immigration laws wasn’t enough, the court dealt a serious blow to its authority to enforce rules it attaches to its spending. Under the Constitution, Congress can spend money for the “general welfare,” which is called spending clause legislation. Sometimes these laws dole out money, but come with strings attached: Famously, highway funding requires states to set the drinking age at 21. But in a case called Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections, the 6-3 majority weakened Congress’ ability to enforce such rules.

One such spending clause law requires that prisons that receive federal funds respect inmates’ religious rights. In violation of this law, guards in Louisiana shaved the head of an incarcerated Rastafarian man, despite the religious dictate that he not cut his hair. The court found that the former inmate, Damon Landor, could not sue the guards. This will likely result in more disregard for prisoners’ religious rights. But the broader picture is even more troubling. “The Court reduces some of Congress’s greatest legislative achievements—federal laws that secure civil rights, environmental stability, healthcare, and more—to nothing more than the wheelings-and-dealings of an especially wealthy private party,” Jackson warned in her dissent. If Congress can’t enforce the terms of its spending, it has lost an enormous source of power, with victims left in the lurch.

On the final day of the term, the court struck down one of Congress’ last standing campaign finance rules, giving the wealthiest Americans another way to influence politicians. The ruling in NRSC v. FEC limits how Congress can guard against corruption through campaign finance regulations, and specifically allows wealthy donors to circumvent the $7,000 limit they can directly give to a candidate by routing over half a million to them through the party apparatus. As Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent warns, this promotes corruption, degrades our system of government, and substitutes the court’s judgement for Congress’. Again, because the biggest winners are Republicans and billionaires, and the loser is Capitol Hill, this 6-3 outcome was predictable. 

Just as the Roberts Court has dedicated itself to destroying the VRA and ending independent agencies, it has likewise taken every opportunity to weaken campaign finance laws, allowing billions of dollars to flow into American elections, reorienting American politics toward rewarding the biggest donors. Callais, Slaughter, and NRSC v. FEC are all creatures of this 20-year agenda. All three cases rely almost exclusively on other Roberts court decisions. Again and again, they fail to find any help for their arguments that date back to before Roberts’ 2005 ascension to the high court. (The only exception is that Slaughter uses a 1926 case, Myers v. United States—but it’s a contrived reliance that takes the precedent beyond its bounds and ignores its deep and well-documented flaws.) The combined result of the rulings is stunning: these major cases have rolled back civil rights and reshaped the government in the image of the current permutation of this court. 

The conservative bloc also continued its march against civil rights for minorities. Beyond Callais, the court upheld state laws that ban transgender women and girls from participating in school sports. The decision locks transgender girls and young women out of the educational and social benefits of athletic competition in 27 states with bans, continuing this court’s anti-transgender turn. But all girls and women are likely to be affected. The court’s reasoning would logically extend to laws that treat the sexes differently, enabling more laws that discriminate on the basis of sex.

Though the court gave Trump massive wins over the course of the term, it held back when it deemed the consequences too potentially damaging to the economy. These losses for Trump demonstrate an understanding of what is best for the president and his allies, even if he doesn’t agree. In particular, Trump claimed the power to impose emergency tariffs on any nation, as well as the power to fire governors of the Federal Reserve over flimsy allegations. Both would have enormous economic consequences that would imperil Trump’s reigning political coalition. So in two opinions, both by Roberts, the court struck down most of his tariffs, and it blocked his attempt to immediately remove Lisa Cook from the Fed. (The Cook decision was narrow, leaving the robustness of Fed independence uncertain.) 

Hanging over the entire term was a case over the Trump administration’s attempt to take birthright citizenship away from the children of temporary visitors and undocumented immigrants. The policy, an executive order signed on Trump’s first day back in office, violates the first sentence of the 14th Amendment, which states unequivocally that “all persons born” in the country and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens. This sacred provision overturned Dred Scott and with it the era of inherited status. There is no American dream—the idea that anyone born here can get ahead through hard work—if all Americans are not born citizens on equal legal footing. Perhaps because this case struck at the heart of what this country is and what it stands for, it was widely presumed that a large majority would strike down Trump’s unconstitutional order and uphold the 14th Amendment. 

But when the decision came down on June 30, it was shockingly close. A bare majority, 5-4, ruled that birthright citizenship applied to virtually all people born in the country. Though spared this time, the closeness of this case did not settle the issue but brought on more nativist, anti-immigrant agitation on the part of Trump and his allies. Justice Brett Kavanaugh invited Congress to limit birthright citizenship, writing that he believed lawmakers could redefine citizenship. The decision is a warning that the entire project of multiracial democracy and legal equality hangs by a thread. 

The court ended a term in which it disempowered minorities and shifted power to the wealthy, to the president, and to itself, by unambiguously showing just how radical it is—a single vote away from undoing the basic tenet of a nation of equals. The court not only made radical changes to our system of government: it showed how much worse it could get.

On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the historic Civil Rights Act during a nationally televised ceremony at the White House. Flanked by members of Congress and activists, including Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Johnson signed the most far-reaching piece of civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. “It may be true that you can’t legislate integration…

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Trump officials misled people who wanted to donate to a bipartisan initiative to mark the U.S.’s 250th anniversary, redirecting them to donate to the administration’s own group instead, according to a congressional investigation released Thursday.

A report released by House Democrats, based on newly obtained documents and whistleblower accounts, said that the White House repeatedly steered donors towards Trump’s Freedom 250 setup instead of the America250 effort set up by Congress ten years ago.

Some donors and sponsors who sought to send funds to America250 were told by the Trump administration that they didn’t have a “green light,” and pressured them to redirect their money to Freedom 250. Freedom 250 also reached out to America250 donors with donation requests, confusing some corporate executives who didn’t know the difference between the two groups, the Democrats’ report states.

“I’m a lawyer, and I know better than to pronounce that a crime has been committed,” Representative Jared Huffman, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, told The Washington Post. “But I do know the elements of fraud, and there is evidence of all those elements here.”

The report goes on to detail how Freedom 250 officials explicitly steered money away from America250 towards projects favored by Trump, who undermined a bipartisan plan to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary to the benefit of himself and his allies.

For example, America250 had received a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to fund Freedom Trucks, mobile museums that would travel around the country with lessons on American history. That grant was transferred to Freedom 250, which produced its own version of the trucks with history lessons that present a distorted image of U.S. history.

Democrats accuse Trump allies of steering away $75 million worth of taxpayer funds originally allocated by Congress to America250. The leftover money is expected to be kept by the White House. And Freedom 250’s staff is made up of many former employees of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, which harvested user data.

Officials of the bipartisan America250 say now that they have shifted their efforts towards events outside of Washington, D.C., while Freedom 250 handles events in the nation’s capital. But the split has confused legislators and corporate leaders, and caused tensions between the two efforts, according to the Post.

Thanks to Trump, America250’s grants, educational initiatives, and volunteer programs have been overshadowed by Freedom 250 efforts. Officials expect to make up for their lost funds through more private donations, but the president has effectively ruined what could have been a unifying, nonpolitical celebration of the U.S. at a time when the American people could really use it.

Manny Rutinel’s victory this week in Colorado’s primaries has set up a once-unthinkable scenario: This November, in one of the most crucial swing races in the country, a former vegan activist will face off against a cattle rancher in a district dominated by meat processing giant JBS.

Rutinel, a 31-year-old member of the Colorado House of Representatives, beat his more moderate opponent, Shannon Bird, earlier this week in yet another victory for insurgent progressives. But as he now pivots to the general election, he’ll be facing Republican Gabe Evans, and an onslaught of attacks over his past statements on animal rights and meat consumption.

The eighth district, created in 2021 by the state’s independent redistricting commission, is Colorado’s only swing district, and swingy it is—voters in the district elected a Democrat in 2022 by less than 1,600 votes and Evans in 2024 by less than 2,500 votes.

“It’s reasonable to think that [the district] will just switch back and forth with whatever party is having a good year that year,” said Seth Masket, professor of political science at the University of Denver. “Given what we’ve seen in other elections this year, I think there’s a very good chance it swings to the Democrats.”

The district, which includes the northern suburbs of Denver and stretches north into more rural communities, is a major agricultural region. JBS, the world’s largest meat processing company, is one of the district’s biggest employers. Evans himself owns a small cattle herd and is a self-described beef producer.

As a student at Yale Law School, Rutinel gave an interview to a campus publication calling animal agriculture “a horrific, exploitive industry.” That same year, he told a legislative committee in Connecticut that “the globe must dramatically shift away from animal products and toward fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains and nuts.”

Since running for Congress, Rutinel has backtracked , saying that he is no longer a vegan, and that “it’s important for me to be able to enjoy the delicious products that Colorado ranchers make.” He’s also stopped calling for Medicare for All and a ban on fracking.

Republicans are already jumping onto Rutinel’s vegan past. After Rutinel won his primary, the regional press secretary for the National Republican Campaign Committee posted a photo on X of Rutinel as a college student, shirtless and carrying a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) sign. “He is a far-left vegan activist who wants to end animal agriculture,” the post reads.

Meat occupies an almost sacred space in American politics—and a particular obsession with it on the right is nothing new. Already this cycle, Republicans have attacked Texas Senate candidate James Talarico over his past comments about reducing meat consumption: “this freak wants to BAN BBQ,” Sen. Ted Cruz wrote in an X post. In response, Talarico leaned into meat eating, posing for a photo in a Texas flag shirt while eating barbecue. At an event, he said “I deny all accusations of veganism.”

“Republicans will just be working to portray him as out of step, as too far left for Colorado. That is to some extent what they’re trying to do now with going after vegetarianism,” Masket said about Rutinel. But he’s not terribly worried that Rutinel’s vegan past will hurt his campaign. Unlike in Texas, Masket said, vegetarianism and veganism are well-established and understood in Colorado, and the more important dynamic in this election will be voters’ dissatisfaction with Trump, he said.

“November is going to be, particularly at the congressional district level, a referendum on the Trump administration,” agreed Robert Preuhs, the chair of the political science department at Metropolitan State University of Denver. The outcome in the eighth district in particular, he added, will “depend to some extent on what the Trump administration does between here and November and the extent to which Dave Evans feels comfortable endorsing those actions.”

Rutinel has established himself as a forceful critic of the Trump administration, campaigning adamantly against Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and criticizing Bird for her committee vote against a bill that would prohibit local law enforcement from collaborating with ICE.

Rutinel also took a strong stance on artificial intelligence (AI). In 2025, he was a sponsor of a bill that would protect whistleblowers who sought to disclose AI safety issues. Public First Action, an AI-safety PAC, covertly supported Rutinel by giving $2 million to Latino Victory Fund, Transformer reported on Wednesday. A PAC funded by Chris Larsen, a billionaire cryptocurrency firm founder, also spent $980,000 on the race in favor of Rutinel.

Analysts say Rutinel now faces a difficult balancing act: moderating his positions enough to appeal to swing voters, while also keeping his base energized. He’ll have help: the Democratic Party is expected to spend heavily to try to flip this district. The race may wind up being a test of whether culture war issues—like Rutinel’s past veganism—will matter more to swing voters than ICE and Trump’s record.

Changes to federal student loans expected to affect millions of borrowers took effect July 1. A part of President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” these changes mean the end of some payment plans and new limits for graduate loans. Along with the end of the Biden-era SAVE plan, the changes are expected to raise the cost of payments for millions of borrowers. “The main concern is the…

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Please join the team that makes it possible for your friendly neighborhood comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug to exist in this hostile Trumpverse! JOIN US IN THE INNER HIVE, and be the first kid on your block to get each week’s Tom the Dancing Bug comic – before it’s published anywhere. * Sign up for the free weekly newsletter, The Tom the Dancing Bug Review! Not nearly as good as joining the…

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

Temperatures on the ocean surface have hit a record high, raising fears of another burst of extreme heat this summer.

On June 21, temperatures outside the polar regions exceeded the extraordinary highs observed at the same time in 2023 and 2024, the Copernicus Climate Change Service said on Wednesday.

It warned the new peak would probably bring “consequences for weather patterns, global climate, and marine ecosystems,” not least because it would coincide with the earliest phases of an El Niño event they forecast to be the strongest in decades.

In 2020, the heat being added to the oceans was equivalent to about 5 Hiroshima bombs per second. Last year, it was closer to 11 .

When the previous ocean record for June was set in 2023, scientists described the trends as “worrying,” “terrifying,” and “bonkers” because they were so far outside their expectations. That presaged an El Niño and a period of devastating global heatwaves, floods, and storms.

That 2023 record has now been surpassed and much of the world is once again seeing an alarming rise in temperatures. Last month, the UK and many other countries in Europe sweltered amid new heat records while Antarctica experienced unprecedentedly balmy winter conditions.

Although the focus is usually on land temperatures, oceans give a fuller picture of how much the climate is being pushed out of balance by human-caused warming.

Surface temperatures are affected by solar radiation, water currents, and the buildup of heat in the depths.

Oceans absorb more than 90 percent of the excess energy in the Earth system, which is primarily caused by burning fossil fuels, such as oil, coal, and gas. That imbalance hit a record 23 zettajoules last year, more than double the average of the previous two decades.

As a result, the oceans are warming at an accelerating rate. In 2020, the amount of heat being added to the oceans was equivalent to about five Hiroshima bombs per second. Last year, it was closer to 11 Hiroshima explosions per second. The UN’s secretary general, António Guterres, has warned “Earth is being pushed beyond its limits.”

Scientists said it was too early to say whether the sea surface heating would prove temporary or even worsen because annual peaks are usually registered in July and August.

But Carlo Buontempo, Copernicus director at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, warned it could indicate the beginning of a new phase, leading, once more, to uncharted territory: “With ocean temperatures at these levels and El Niño on the horizon, we are likely to see more temperature records fall in the coming months.”

Copernicus is part of the EU’s space program.

The Supreme Court dealt Big Brother a blow on Monday with a landmark ruling for digital privacy rights in Chatrie v. United States. Conservative Justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch joined the liberal bloc of Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in finding that smartphone location data is subject to privacy protections under the Fourth Amendment. Though consequential, the case has gone largely overlooked amid this week’s deluge of high-profile rulings, including the decision to block President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order attempting to overturn the guarantee of birthright citizenship. It marks the Court’s first decision on digital surveillance since 2018, when it found that law enforcement’s warrantless search of cell site location history violated the Fourth Amendment.

To better understand the implications of Chatrie, I hopped on the phone with Stevie Glaberson, director of research and advocacy at Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology. The Center filed an amicus brief in the case alongside the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU. Glaberson helped break down Chatrie and what the Court’s ruling means in an age of growing digital surveillance.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

At the center of Chatrie is law enforcement’s use of a “geofence warrant” to identify the potential suspect of a bank robbery in 2019. What are geofence warrants, and how do they differ from regular search warrants?

A geofence warrant is one of the kinds of warrants that people sometimes refer to as “reverse warrants.” When you think about a traditional warrant, the police are supposed to have particularized suspicions—they’re supposed to be going to a neutral decision maker, like a judge or a magistrate, to show their reasons for suspecting that a certain person or a certain place has evidence of a crime that they’re investigating.

In the case of geofence warrants, [the police] don’t have a particular person in mind, and they sort of work backwards from a location. They draw a line around that location and ask the company, in this case Google, for all the devices that can be found within that location at the relevant time.

In this case, the police drew a line around the bank and asked Google for all of the devices that could be found within that space during the time the robbery occurred. That space didn’t just involve the bank. There was a church in the immediate area, and there might have been people’s homes or other businesses.

Have police increased their use of geofence warrants in recent years? How long has this search tactic been used?

“What was happening here is something that the founders could not have imagined when they were debating the Fourth Amendment.”

This technique did not exist previously. It’s only possible because of the way technology works now, and a big part of what the Court said in its opinion is that what was happening here is something that the founders could not have imagined when they were debating the Fourth Amendment—a kind of surveillance and a kind of police investigation that would not have been possible. It was not previously possible for the police to retroactively tail all of us into private businesses and homes, throughout our days, at this level of granularity.

The interesting thing about the Chatrie case is that the particular three-step process that happened here, Google had already said that they are no longer doing it the same way. But that does not mean that there are not other ways for the police to access this type of information.

Can you explain that three-step process ?

The more common thing is for police to just ask a company or a person for a specific thing in a specific location. Here, the warrant described this three-step process that, once the judge approved it, Google and the police would just go through [the data] on their own without returning to the magistrate. 

First, Google would look in that physical location, the box the police had drawn, and return anonymized information about all the devices. The police would then look at what Google gave them and try to narrow down which of the devices they wanted more information about. In this case, the initial step returned 19 devices. And the police said, Okay, we want information about these nine. 

And what’s important to note is that in this case they were only looking for one suspect. So, at each of these steps, they’re getting the data of people that are affirmatively not the suspect. And it’s important to recognize that these kinds of searches could draw in all of us, regardless of any suspicion or not. 

So the police asked Google for more information about those nine accounts to look at where else those devices went before and after the crime. The identities of the people were still not being revealed to the police, but they could now see two hours of really granular location information about all the places those devices came from and went to during that period. Google captures location data once every two minutes, and it’s pretty precise about where a person is. It also can capture elevation data—if this person went to the doctor’s office on the third floor, rather than the insurance salesman on the tenth floor. 

“We found…that the majority of American adults, as of 2021, were in Department of Homeland Security immigration databases and could be located by ICE and CBP.”

From that return of nine sets of more granular information over two hours, the police then were supposed to look through that and identify the devices they wanted unmasked, to learn the identities of the people who owned those devices. And in this case, they didn’t just ask for the person they eventually prosecuted, Mr. Chatrie. They asked Google to de-anonymize three accounts—so, once again, people who affirmatively were not then the suspect.

What did the Supreme Court have to say about this process?

Six justices got in line behind the idea that the decision [from a lower court] should be vacated—that a search did happen here according to the Fourth Amendment and needs to be more closely reviewed. Five justices signed on to the main opinion written by Justice [Elena] Kagan. And Justice Gorsuch wrote his own opinion that gets to the same place, but through a different avenue.

Justice Kagan’s opinion goes through the most recent, really seminal opinion on Fourth Amendment privacy in the digital era, which is Carpenter. That’s a case about cell site location information, which is pretty similar to the Google location history that was at issue here. And the majority opinion decides that, in accordance with Carpenter in 2018, a search did occur here when the government went to Google and asked for all of this information, and so we need to look very closely at whether the warrant that the police got was appropriate. The opinion leaves for another day the questions that will ultimately resolve the case about whether the warrant itself was appropriate, but it decides that, for purposes of the Fourth Amendment, the government did conduct a search here.

One thing that’s really important about this decision is that it says a third-party doctrine does not apply in this case. The third-party doctrine is an exception to the Fourth Amendment that risks really swallowing the rule for all of us in today’s digital economy. It’s the idea that once you voluntarily share information with someone else, a third party [like Google], you lose all reasonable expectations of privacy in that information and the Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply. And in this case, Justice Kagan’s opinion really importantly says the third-party doctrine does not apply here—just by using a cell phone the way cell phone users do, we don’t give up our rights to our private information.

What are the broader implications of the Court’s ruling? Do you expect this case to have a ripple effect?

So if you read Justice [Samuel] Alito’s dissent, he basically says this is coming for all digital surveillance—which in our book is probably a good thing, but he says it as though it is a terrible thing.

I think this is probably the most significant Supreme Court ruling on the Fourth Amendment since Carpenter. What practical impact it will have remains to be seen, but I think it is an incredibly important development that the Supreme Court is not just extending the third-party doctrine to to all cases and saying that the introduction of a layer of corporate interaction in our lives removes all expectations of privacy.

Because basically, in the last few decades, every single thing we do—from communicating with our families to managing our finances to even thinking our own private thoughts—corporations have sort of wormed their way into all of those processes and are mediating all of our human interactions, sometimes the most sensitive facets of our lives.

“Everybody should recognize that placing these limits on police and on government is vital…for community and for democracy.”

And if the mere fact that a corporate tool was in the middle of all of that meant that we had no expectation of privacy whatsoever, that would be the exception that swallows the Fourth Amendment. I don’t know whether this opinion will meaningfully change our day-to-day, but it is a step in the right direction to say that the Fourth Amendment really does still mean something. Privacy is still a value, and one that we’re going to protect.

It seems like people are increasingly aware of and concerned about surveillance, but thinking about things like First Amendment concerns, why does this decision matter for everyday people who haven’t committed or aren’t suspected of having committed any crimes?

All of these techniques—from geofence reverse location searches to police use of facial recognition technology—impact all of us. The companies and the police and the federal government don’t necessarily distinguish when they vacuum up information—when they buy information from data brokers, or when they use facial recognition on a crowd, they don’t distinguish between folks that they have a particular interest in and folks that they don’t. They are just vacuuming up information on everybody.

We found in our research that the majority of American adults, as of 2021, were in Department of Homeland Security immigration databases and could be located by ICE and CBP. So, at a practical level, it impacts all of us, and it has really serious implications on our ability to live our lives and do the things that we want to do together. Because very quickly information about one of us becomes information about a whole group of us, and the police can use these kinds of techniques to surveil and track us from afar, without our knowledge, and identify when we go to protests or come together in community.

So everybody should recognize that placing these limits on police and on government is vital to maintain any kind of any hope for communal action for community and for democracy.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 2 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

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

This week, The New York Times released a batch of polls showing Democrats within striking distance of winning enough Senate races to win control. One big finding was that Donald Trump’s numbers in these states are absolutely abysmal. Small wonder, then, that Trump is taking some corrupt new steps to give Republican candidates a big boost. Steve Benen of MS Now noticed a really intriguing pattern. In several states, Trump is directly linking the approval of disaster aid right to his endorsements of GOP candidates in some of the most contested races.

That’s not how this is supposed to work, but it opens a window on something to watch for, which we’re talking to Steve Benen about today. Trump will surely scale up his use of the government to boost GOP fortunes in coming months, and God knows how he’s going to do that. Steve, good to have you back on.

Steve Benen: Thanks, Greg. It’s great to be here.

Sargent: So let’s just start off really simply. Steve, how is the president supposed to make decisions about disaster aid to states? And has he doled out disaster aid in an equivalent way to blue and red states?

Benen: Right. The foundational question here is exactly that. There’s a system in place that has been in place for generations. When it comes to federal disaster aid, presidents and their administrations are just simply supposed to make these decisions on the merits. Does a state deserve, and does it need, federal disaster aid? And if it does, great. If it doesn’t, then no. But that’s how it’s always worked, in a bipartisan and objective way.

Even in Donald Trump’s first term, we didn’t necessarily see any major controversies or scandals surrounding the politicization of disaster aid. However, over the last year, year and a half, it’s been much different. Politico reported in March—a report that I think really bears repeating:

Donald Trump approved just 23 percent of disaster funding requests from states with Democratic governors and Democratic senators, while at the same time, over roughly the same period, states with Republican governors and Republican senators had their requests approved 89 percent of the time.

Twenty-three percent, less than a fourth, for blue states; 89 percent, nearly nine out of ten, for red states. Now, it’s a dramatic, indefensible ratio, and it speaks to the fact that it’s really been corrupted and politicized in a way that has never existed before in the federal government.

Sargent: Well, you noticed this pattern in addition to this. In recent days, Trump announced huge amounts of disaster aid to at least six states. Most of them were red; two of them were swing states, Michigan and Wisconsin, and I want to focus on those for now. Let’s take Michigan first.

Trump said this on Truth Social: “I am pleased to announce that the great state of Michigan has been approved to be given $32 million in its disaster declaration request.” Trump added: “The people of Michigan are in good hands with Trump-endorsed Mike Rogers, who is running for U.S. Senate, and John James for governor.”

Steve, it’s true that Trump also cited the Democratic governor in the tweet, but she’s not running for anything. And he did boost two critical GOP candidates: Senate hopeful Mike Rogers and gubernatorial hopeful John James. Can you explain why you see that as corrupt?

Benen: You know, there was a point last year we saw some hints along these lines, where Trump would talk about the fact that he’d approved disaster aid for, say, Missouri, for example, and he would emphasize the fact that he won Missouri’s electoral votes in his previous elections, suggesting there was a connection between his political support in the state and his eagerness to provide federal relief for that state. But now he’s just dropped the pretense. There’s no real sense that maybe he’s just being coy or being subtle about any of this.

Here we have an instance in which he’s talking about approving federal disaster aid and literally, explicitly, and overtly including an endorsement for various candidates aligned with his White House, as if they’re interconnected in ways that, as far as he’s concerned, are inextricable.

Sargent: Yes. And let’s move to Wisconsin now. And here Trump was even more blatant. He posted this: “I just spoke with Congressman Tom Tiffany, who has my complete and total endorsement for governor, and informed him that the great state of Wisconsin has been approved to be given $22.6 million in its disaster declaration request.”

Steve, here he makes it sound as if this Republican candidate for governor helped deliver this money to the state. And Trump also says the people of Wisconsin are in good hands with him, and then also cites Congressman Derrick Van Orden, who is locked in an absolutely key House race. He’s just blurting it out right in public.

I want to be clear that all these races we’re talking about here—Michigan Senate and governor, Wisconsin governor and congressman—are really critical races, and they’re toss-ups. Your thoughts on all this?

Benen: The brazenness of it all is just breathtaking. I mean, here we have a situation in which we have a competitive state, arguably the most competitive state in the nation, Wisconsin. We’ve seen it over and over again in recent election cycles. And so instead of acknowledging the Democratic governor’s role in perhaps requesting federal disaster relief in the first place, Donald Trump just ignores that and makes a connection between this congressman who had nothing to do with the process and the money that’s going to the state and communities in the state that need the aid.

And so there’s no real pretense here. There’s no sense of propriety at all. It’s making a direct connection between a congressman running for governor who enjoys the president’s support and the money that the Trump administration is now providing to the state.

So I hope your listeners can appreciate the fact that it has never worked this way. We’ve never had a system in place in which a White House or any administration has necessarily made this connection, made this direct tie between endorsing a candidate and the federal disaster relief.

I mean, it’s scandalous. To my mind, it’s borderline impeachable, that we’d have this kind of indefensible connection between two things that should have nothing to do with one another.

Sargent: Yeah. And if you put this in the larger context, it really gets thrown into stark relief. He’s badly stiffed Democratic states of disaster aid relative to Republican states over much of his second term. And here he’s doling this out to these swing states, arguably precisely because they have very competitive and important races in them, right?

I mean, it’s not that much of a leap to say that’s why he approved the aid to them. He’s trying to create the impression that these candidates played a major role in delivering this federal money to these states.

Benen: Right. And we’ve had a series of controversies over the last year and a half—and I think that you and I have talked about this before—in which we’ve seen the administration and the White House being accused of misusing federal resources for political purposes to achieve electoral goals, which in itself is scandalous. And here we have more evidence to consider as part of these broader allegations.

Is the White House making decisions as it relates to federal disaster funds for the purposes of affecting the outcomes of elections? And if so, that’s the sort of thing that maybe the next Congress might want to investigate in more detail—maybe hold a congressional hearing or oversight hearing or two as it relates to this.

This is the sort of thing that can resonate, I think, with most people, because there’s an understanding: we don’t do that in the United States. We don’t connect communities that are affected by disasters, and the money that the people in those communities need and deserve, with electoral strategies and campaign strategies. Those two things should never be mixed.

And yet we have reason to believe that that’s exactly what’s happening here. And I feel like it’s incumbent upon lawmakers and policymakers to get answers to these questions, because really, if this is happening in our name, it is a scandal that should help define Donald Trump’s second term.

Sargent: Now, you singled out a number of other states. It’s not quite as clear that these are ones with competitive races, but they do have races in them. And in these cases, you found there really is an apparent connection between the decision to award the aid and the political fortunes of Republicans in these states. Can you talk about these other places that you looked at?

Benen: Sure. Let’s look at Kansas, for example. Now, Kansas, as your listeners will know, is a pretty reliable red state, but yet it has a Democratic governor, and it requested federal disaster relief. Now, fortunately, the president approved that disaster relief, to the tune of $5.5 million.

But when he did so, he specifically acknowledged Senator Roger Marshall, a close presidential ally who just happens to be running for reelection in 2026, and didn’t mention the governor. And then he took the additional step of mentioning Ty Masterson, the GOP candidate in the gubernatorial race for 2026.

Now, there was no need to mention Marshall or Masterson. But again, here we have a situation in which the president’s preoccupation is not with the people who need the aid or the communities that have been affected by natural disasters. What he’s prioritizing is the fact that there are these Republicans who are aligned with his White House who are on the ballot in the fall.

That’s the focus. That’s the priority. That’s the message that he wants to get through—that he’s approving this aid, and he wants people to make that connection between the federal emergency assistance and the candidates that are going to be on the ballot.

Sargent: Yeah, you did look at some other states, and you really drew a convincing pattern. Let’s just talk about the polls for now, though. The New York Times surveyed six Senate races. Democrats are ahead in North Carolina and up by a hair in Maine, tied in Texas, and just behind in Alaska, Iowa, and Ohio.

That puts Dems in striking distance of winning the four of these contests that they need to win to take the upper chamber, though they’re, I think, still clearly the underdogs for Senate control. Steve, I think on balance that polling’s pretty good news. Nobody really expected Dems to be this competitive in these particular states, many of which are red. What did you think about these findings?

Benen: Yeah, I think that last point that you mentioned a moment ago is exactly the key. If we look at this in the context of, say, where we had the political landscape two months ago, or really six months ago, or maybe even a year ago—the idea of a Democratic Senate getting elected in the 2026 midterms was absurd. It was not something that people were thinking about, wasn’t something people were talking about.

Democratic hopes were focused on the House, which seemed more plausible, more realistic, given the fact that there’s really a small GOP majority right now. And given historical trends, it seemed likely that Democrats were able to pick up enough seats to gain a majority and take the speaker’s gavel away from Mike Johnson.

The Senate was a long shot. It just seemed like it was out of left field and not really part of the conversation. That has changed considerably. There are contests now that are very much in play that people weren’t even thinking about at all. States like Alaska, Texas—these are states, even Iowa. The New York Times poll that you just referenced showed Iowa being very competitive, and that’s another state that is now generally seen as a red state that is now very competitive at the Senate level.

And so taken together, we start to see a path. Now, it’s not an easy path, especially given that there are 53 Senate Republicans and it would take a lot. But at the same time, given historical patterns, if there’s a serious enough backlash to the status quo—we have a very unpopular president, we have a MAGA agenda that is generating all kinds of pushback and protests nationwide—those factors, you put them together, coupled with the fact that people aren’t satisfied with the state of the economy or the war in Iran, you start to wonder: maybe the Senate can be flipped, given the right circumstances. It’s no longer unrealistic.

Sargent: Yes, and here’s what’s critical about these numbers from The New York Times. Trump himself is polling terribly in these states. On the war with Iran, across these six states, only 38 percent approve of his handling of it, while 59 percent disapprove. On gas prices, it’s 33 percent to 63 percent. And across these six battlegrounds, only 36 percent approve of his handling of the cost of living. And on that, his approval is 24 percent among independents.

Steve, I want to stress this. Trump won five out of these six states. We’re talking about places like Ohio, Iowa, Alaska, Texas. These are red states. And he’s in the thirties on the cost of living, and in the twenties on that among independents. That’s why these races are competitive. What do you think of that?

Benen: I think that if I were a Republican official right now, or if I were a GOP strategist looking ahead to the fall, I would be sweating. In fact, I would be losing sleep, because these numbers are abysmal. It would be one thing if we were looking at the polling in Vermont and Hawaii, and we saw Democrats with a big advantage, and we saw widespread opposition to the White House and its agenda. That would be expected and not necessarily alarming.

But for Republicans, what you just emphasized is exactly right. In red states, in states where Donald Trump won by large double-digit margins without even having to break a sweat, he is not only deeply unpopular, but there’s a rejection not just of him, but of his policies, of the effects of his policies, and the way in which his presidency is unfolding—the way that people are just dealing with the crises that are unfolding in their daily lives, that Donald Trump is ignoring.

You know, Mr. “I love inflation,” or “I love the inflation.” This is not a winning strategy, it’s not a winning message. And really, the party doesn’t have anything to run on except maybe their opposition to DSA candidates, which is really not going to be enough to get them very far.

Sargent: Yes. And by the way, I want to stress this number as well, on the Times polling. In these six states, only 35 percent say the economy is good, while 63 percent say the opposite. That’s really terrible, again, in states that Trump largely won, right?

Benen: Exactly. Year in and year out, especially in the wake of the pandemic, the economy is really the driving force that we see overriding every other consideration. There is an affordability crisis. We’ve seen weak job numbers, we’ve seen weak GDP growth.

Donald Trump ran for office saying that voters can expect an immediate economic boom on day one of his second term. He’s obviously failed spectacularly to live up to those promises. And voters have noticed.

There’s only so many ways that you can lie to people about their own wallets, about their own paychecks, about the bills that are piling up on their desks. And so really, I’m at a loss to explain what the White House can do about this, other than maybe hope that the ballroom is a lot more popular than it is now.

Sargent: I want to highlight still more findings here. Voters in each of these six states said the most important issues to them by far are jobs, the economy, inflation, the cost of living. The Times says this: by a 14 percentage point margin, voters in these battlegrounds said that Trump’s policies have hurt more than helped. And 52 percent of independents said Trump’s policies had hurt; only 22 percent said they had helped. Again, in states Trump won mostly, almost all of them.

Benen: Right. And I think that the significance of that is that the White House strategy over the last year and a half has been to blame Biden every time these questions have come up. Every time they’re confronted with another poll, another controversy, another pushback from Congress about the state of the economy, they say the same thing: no, no, no, let’s blame Joe Biden, let’s blame Kamala Harris, let’s blame the past.

But this poll indicates that that talking point, that pushback, simply does not work. People are looking at the effects of Trump’s agenda, of Trump’s policies, of what Trump has been able to deliver. And they’re saying, you know what? I’m not better off. I was better off before. Things are worse. The value of my dollar is worse. Every time I go to the grocery store, it’s worse. Every time I fill up the gas tank, it’s worse.

And so they can’t blame Biden when Americans are looking at the status quo and realizing that over the last year and a half, Trump has failed to deliver, and things are not better than they were. Despite his promises, despite everything he said he was going to be able to do, he hasn’t been able to do it, and people have noticed.

Sargent: OK, let’s tie this back to the broader theme of this episode. Again, we’ve been discussing how Trump, in a very blatant way, is kind of corruptly tying disaster aid to states right to Republican candidates in these states. Again, the larger context here being that he had been stiffing Democratic states in the past, and all of a sudden he’s now granting aid to the ones where he wants to boost the Republican candidates. I think this is all a sign that we’re going to see a real ramped-up effort to use the government in every conceivable way possible to try to swing these midterms.

The obvious stuff would be maybe using ICE or even the military to send in troops basically to create a sense of crisis. But that’s only the most prominent and dramatic thing that he could do. What we’re seeing with this pattern you identified is that there are subtle things he can do as well. Where do you think this is going to go?

Benen: I think that we should be expecting an all-of-government approach in the coming weeks and months. Because really, RFK Jr. has hit the campaign trail and is going to competitive districts and making connections between HHS and local elections, local officials running for statewide offices.

And so if HHS is doing it, and now we see FEMA resources, and then we see ICE across the board, I think what we can expect in the coming weeks is a federal government that is focused exclusively on helping Republicans win elections. Period, full stop. That is what is unfolding in real time right now.

I think it’s only going to get worse, especially as the polls show Democrats with an advantage—and especially as polls show Democrats with a stronger lead, I think the anxiety in Republican circles will intensify. The panic will lead to more abuses, more corruption, more misuse of resources. And I think it’s something that Americans need to be keeping a close eye on, because this is happening in their name. These are their resources. This is their government that’s being abused. And it’s a scandal that’s unfolding before our eyes, the likes of which we have not seen in modern history.

Sargent: And just to wrap this up, what’s really intriguing about the whole situation is that Trump has to blurt out the corrupt scheme right in plain sight, precisely because he wants voters to draw these connections. He wants voters to say to themselves, in these places, OK, it’s because of John James that Michigan is getting all this aid, or it’s because of Derrick Van Orden in Wisconsin, or the Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate, that Wisconsin’s getting this aid.

It’s sort of an intriguing situation in that sense, isn’t it? That he goes out of his way to blatantly blurt out the scheme right in plain sight in order to get voters to draw the link, right?

Benen: Right. He has no choice. I mean, the corruption doesn’t work if it happens in secret. He has to make it public—and I’m saying this deliberately—in order for people to vote the right way. He can’t keep it secret. He has to expose it in order for the scheme to work.

My fear is that as far as he’s concerned, he is above reproach. He is literally unimpeachable. He cannot be held accountable for his own actions, because as far as he’s concerned, he’s never been held accountable for his own actions. And according to the Supreme Court, he can’t even be prosecuted even after leaving office, so long as there’s some fig leaf about this being official acts. And so as far as he’s concerned, he can get away with it because he can’t be held accountable.

My hope is that if there is, say, a Democratic House next year, perhaps even a Democratic Congress, he will soon learn that he can be held accountable—that there is a Congress that will hold hearings, that will consider impeachment, that will consider penalties that will actually matter. Because up until now, he has gotten away with so much.

Sargent: I’ve said this before on this show, and I’m going to repeat it again: there is one body of people out there who can actually hold Trump accountable, and it’s the voters. We really need them to do that. We really need it, Steve. Steve Benen, always great to talk to you. Thanks so much. Good flag on this stuff, by the way.

Benen: Thank you, Greg. I appreciate it.

The roundabout known as Memorial Circle, at the west end of the Arlington Memorial Bridge, is among the more forgettable patches of public grass in Washington, D.C.—one that drivers whizz past on their way into Virginia or over the Potomac River toward the Lincoln Memorial. This spring, surveyors staked it out with pink flags, mapping the site of what President Donald Trump has promised “will be the GREATEST and MOST BEAUTIFUL Triumphal Arch, anywhere in the World.”

In the Roman era, passing through a free-standing arch—its attic and friezes crowded with reliefs depicting military victories and the spoils of war—meant taking a historical tour of some of the empire’s greatest triumphs. The aim of the so-called Independence Arch is less clear. The 250-foot-tall structure is supposedly intended to honor America’s semiquincentennial, but when asked whom it’s being built for, Trump replied, “Me.” (Some observers have thus taken to calling it the “Arc de Trump.”)

Trump, like a Roman emperor, is obsessed with building and renaming things in his honor. The arch has not begun construction, but the same can’t be said for his massive ballroom, for which he leveled the East Wing of the White House with nary an approval. Dulles International Airport may be next. Trump also had his name etched into the Kennedy Center (since removed, to comply with a court order) and the U.S. Institute of Peace (still there). He has plans for a National Garden of American Heroes on the National Mall, and he even wants people to think of him when they peer into the peeling, algae-infested Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

In Trump’s attempt to remake an already great capital, he brings to mind one twentieth-century leader in particular: Benito Mussolini.

If, when in Rome, you were to take the subway south from the historic center, past the point where noisy tourists thin out, you would surface in a sea of massive white marble and travertine buildings—a neighborhood almost too geometrically perfect, and eerily out of place in a city known for its narrow streets and warm ochre or burnt orange walls. This is the Esposizione Universale Roma, or EUR: a fascist, megalomaniacal dreamland founded by the Italian dictator in 1937.

Mussolini’s construction obsession, like Trump’s, was about etching himself into the historical record. (Il Duce also liked putting his name on things, like the obelisk in Rome’s Foro Italico—or the avenue beyond, which is paved with mosaics spelling out “DVCE” again and again.) The EUR was intended to prove Italy’s might and the success of fascism to the entire world: a sprawling exposition space for the 1942 World’s Fair, where Mussolini would receive representatives from every nation—not unlike Trump’s $600 million ballroom, where visiting heads of state will encounter gilded Corinthian columns and gold-inlaid ceilings. But the most revealing thing about the EUR, and what connects it most directly to Trump, is what Mussolini was trying to replace.

The mock-ups of the arch that were approved last month by the Trump-packed Commission of Fine Arts are pure neoclassical pastiche: a heavy attic with the inscription “One Nation Under God,” topped by a winged “Lady Liberty” flanked by two eagles (all three in gold, of course). It recalls a form perfected by Rome’s conquering generals and, much later, borrowed by Napoleon for the 164-foot Arc de Triomphe in Paris. The antecedent is precise, and almost every strongman since has been inspired by the same playbook, knowingly or not. But no one in the modern era understood the power of pulling from ancient architecture more instinctively than Mussolini.

“An architecture made of arches and columns is easily understandable by the masses,” explained Paolo Nicoloso, a historian and the author of Mussolini, Architect, which examines the dictator’s role in shaping major construction projects during the latter part of his reign.

Nicoloso notes that Mussolini, who ruled from 1922 until his execution in 1945, used architecture to perpetuate two narratives that were crucial to his power: that of Romanità or Romanness, the belonging to a great and civilizationally essential nation; and his own personal legend, as the man delivering or returning greatness to a people that had ostensibly been denied it. “Fascism governed through myths,” he said. “This myth made people believe that, after almost 2,000 years, a new people of world rulers, Mussolini’s Italians, was reborn with the regime” and was “once again set to dominate the world.”

At first, in seeking broad consent from the public, Mussolini’s government built schools, nurseries, opera houses, and homes for the disabled, but Nicoloso says Mussolini later pivoted to more “daring” projects, reaching for a more traditionalist style, closer to the classical idiom of Rome, to cement his rule. The EUR was to be the crowning achievement of his architectural projection of power, a celebration of 20 years of fascism and the rebirth of the new Roman Empire.

While he involved a coterie of the most brilliant architects of his era, Mussolini was also personally invested in the EUR, conceiving it as a modern reinvention of imperial glory fused with rationalism, Italy’s answer to the international modern movement—a synthesis the regime would name the Stile Littorio. Today, walking down the wide boulevards flanked by leggy Roman pines, the effect is both impressive and jarring: The form is unmistakably ancient and familiar, yet the scale and the cold geometric repetition feel subtly, deliberately alien. It is, in a word, uncanny.

The best example and the area’s most remarkable monument is the six-story Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana. Romans call it the Square Colosseum, which tells you most of what you need to know: It’s exactly what you would get if you compressed the most famous round arena on earth into a rectangular box and stood it on one end. What better way to make an impact on the masses than to put your own twist on one of the most striking ancient landmarks in the world?

The palace highlights the absurdity of the entire project. Mussolini was ruling from Rome, one of the most beautiful, historically significant cities in the world, and the actual Colosseum was a few miles up the road, not to mention real imperial ruins scattered across the city. And yet, he decided that the city he ruled needed a new center, built by him, that would make everything that came before look like a prelude to his arrival. So he spent a fortune raising a second Rome on the edge of the first—because the past, to be useful, had to be remade as his.

Rather than accepting his place in a long line of leaders who had shaped the city before him, Mussolini wanted to eclipse them entirely by moving Rome’s center of gravity away from the legacy of everyone who had come before him and anchor it to himself instead. Trump is doing the exact same in D.C. Where previous presidents understood themselves as stewards of an institution greater than themselves, and were honored to become part of a long line of American presidents, Trump wants to be its culmination—the most important name in a city full of important names.

Mussolini, like Trump, had plans to build a triumphal arch of sorts in the EUR, to be called the Arch of the Empire—a towering parabola of steel and aluminum, not unlike the Gateway Arch built in St. Louis in the early 1960s. It never got built, like much of what Mussolini had planned for the EUR: Construction of the district began in 1938 and continued through Italy’s entry into the war in 1940, but fighting drained the regime’s resources and the 1942 World’s Fair was ultimately canceled.

Only one building was fully completed before the war: the Palazzo degli Uffici, whose entrance still bears a bas-relief depicting Rome’s history from Romulus and Remus through to Mussolini himself, on horseback, at the bottom. The other half-finished marble palaces were occupied by the Germans after the fascist government fell in 1943, then by the Allies after Germany’s defeat. The postwar Italian government—backed by Washington, which preferred Christian Democrats to antifascist partisans and Communists, who would have likely razed it to the ground—finished the neighborhood in time for the 1960 Olympics, sticking to Mussolini’s original plans. The bones of the quarter remained his, and the idea of EUR endured.

The myth of Mussolini the tireless builder, founder of cities, survived the man precisely because his buildings all over the country did. Architecture, the most patient form of propaganda, kept making its case long after the propagandist was gone and his ideology shunned. That, no doubt, is also the 80-year-old Trump’s intention.

Nicoloso is careful not to flatten the comparison between Mussolini and Trump. The latter, he emphasized, is volatile in a way Mussolini was not, and it is hard to know whether his plans for the Memorial Circle arch “reflect a coherent plan or merely a whim.” That Trump should reach for classical architecture, “a time-tested, age-old instrument of power in the digital age, is certainly striking,” Nicoloso remarked, but he added: “I doubt that the extraordinary fascination that architecture held for the masses a century ago has the same hold on digital man today.”

The ideologues behind Trump’s construction push suffer no such hesitation. Chief among them is Justin Shubow, president of a small Washington nonprofit called the National Civic Art Society, who helped draft Trump’s executive order last August titled “Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again,” a revival of a near-identical order from Trump’s first term, which President Joe Biden scrapped.

A critic rather than a practicing architect, Shubow has long argued that the architecture of American democracy was hijacked some 75 years ago by a modernist elite contemptuous of “ordinary people,” and calls brutalism, the raw-concrete style of midcentury government buildings, “aesthetic pollution.” Praising Trump’s order, he wrote that “since the mid-20th century, Modernist mandarins controlling government architecture have been forcing ugly designs upon us.”

Shubow’s argument has genuine populist purchase because it is half true. Federal Washington is overwhelmingly neoclassical, and the midcentury turn to modernism was a real break from it. Americans associate government buildings with columns and domes because that is what they mainly were and are today. (And to be fair, Shubow’s view of Washington’s brutalist buildings is widely held among locals.)

The Founders saw their fragile new republic as the heir to Athens and republican Rome, and they wanted the buildings to say so. Thomas Jefferson modeled Virginia’s Capitol building on a Roman temple precisely to claim that lineage in stone. The U.S. Capitol, the White House, the Supreme Court, and the earlier memorials along the Mall used classicism as an argument that the United States belonged among the self-governing republics of antiquity.

“Monuments can do different kinds of work politically under different circumstances,” said Reinhold Martin, a professor of architecture at Columbia University and co-editor of Architecture Against Democracy: Histories of the Nationalist International.

Martin draws a distinction between buildings that mainly do something and buildings that mainly mean something. The dams of the Tennessee Valley Authority, built under the New Deal, are monumental as well as functional, public works for the general welfare. “In the case that we’re faced with now in the United States, we’re dealing mostly with symbols,” he explained. Referring to Trump and his cronies, Martin added, “In the world of architectural language, they are trying to transcend to a previous era and identify with ancient classicism, what they perceive as the heart and soul of the civilization, which is usually some form of mythic civilization.”

For Martin, the style is not the scandal so much as the spirit behind it. Gold laid on gold, a ballroom bolted onto the White House where the East Wing once stood, grandeur measured by the ounce, an arch meant to overshadow both the monuments of the National Mall and Arlington National Cemetery. He calls it “a form of barbaric kitsch, because the term that applies most directly to these arches and the ballrooms is a kind of aesthetic barbarism.”

Trump’s obsession with building “classical” monuments is, like Mussolini’s was, an overcompensation his country doesn’t need. If he were the ruler of a small, young nation, the impulse to borrow historical grandeur by raising gilded Roman arches would at least partially make sense. But the United States, on the 250th anniversary of its independence, should be secure enough in its identity and culture not to have to ransack the pasts of other countries. France, after all, built the Arc de Triomphe during its imperial era, but it does not build new ones (well, not “classical ones,” anyway). Confident nations let their old monuments stand and build forward. The United States deserves a president with the vision to do that—or, at least, one who is less susceptible to revisionists and more concerned with building a public legacy that’s worth carving into marble.

The Palestinian farmers and their children came on foot up the terraced hillside near the town of Halhul in the high country of the West Bank, carrying shears to prune their grapevines. With them came Israeli activists from Bnei Avraham (The Children of Abraham), a religious peace group. From above came other Israelis, at least two men carrying assault rifles, along with teenage boys, from a settlement outpost on Halhul’s land, some of the boys with spray canisters in hand, and then the fierce stink of pepper spray was in the air and an old man and a girl lay on the ground, wounded by spray in their eyes, their pain caught in shaky video footage from an activist’s phone.

The settlers, as if they were the ones in danger, alerted an army unit, and soldiers arrived, bearing a military document that declared the area off-limits to civilians. They ordered the Palestinians and the activists to leave—but not the settlers. By the day’s end, eight Palestinians were arrested and held for hours, one of them for days. One of the Israeli activists was questioned by police and released on condition that she not enter the West Bank for 15 days, as if keeping her away would prevent trouble. 

Pruning the vines—on which the farmers depend for their livelihood, all the more so since being barred from working in Israel after the Hamas attack from Gaza of October 7, 2023—is essential to ensure the yield. But they remained unpruned.

This picture of one day in the West Bank, in the lush farm country between Hebron and Bethlehem, is pieced together from the accounts of two of the activists and one of the Palestinians, from the brief video footage, and from an oblique response from the Israel Defense Forces spokesperson’s office to my questions. It’s a scene in the ongoing saga of Halhul’s vineyards, and in the larger story of settler harassment and violence.

But it’s also part of the story of a growing number of Israelis engaged in a form of activism known as “protective presence”: accompanying Palestinian farmers and shepherds, putting themselves at risk of arrest and injury, and in doing so bringing settler terror into the spotlight of Israeli media and political debate.

Settler attacks on Palestinians have escalated drastically in recent years, according to human rights groups, especially since Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power at the end of 2022 as the head of an extreme right-wing government. A key factor has been the coordinated effort by settler groups to expand beyond suburban settlements to take physical control of much more land and to drive Palestinians off it. To do so, they’ve established small outposts, typically a single family accompanied by a few teenage boys—the so-called hilltop youth—who engage in farming and especially in grazing sheep, goats, and cattle over wide areas. A few outposts have been removed by Israeli authorities. Most have enjoyed support, including grazing permits and security equipment, such as all-terrain vehicles, from government bodies.

Over the three years of 2023 to 2025, 185 new outposts were set up in the West Bank, according to Hagit Ofran of the Peace Now movement’s Settlement Watch project, and researcher Dror Etkes of the Kerem Navot organization. (“Kerem Navot”—the vineyard of Naboth—is a reference to the Biblical story of how the evil King Ahab and his wife, Jezebel, stole a poor man’s land.) By the end of last year, these outposts had taken de facto control of an eye-popping more than 264,000 acres, nearly one-fifth of the entire West Bank, Ofran told me.

To do this, settlers have engaged in tactics ranging from fencing off grazing land and stealing agricultural tools to attacking farmers in their groves during harvests to rampages through villages. The violence reached a peak this spring when public attention in Israel was focused on the constant missile alerts of the war with Iran. During the six weeks of that conflict, the Yesh Din (There Is Law) human rights organization tallied 378 incidents of settler violence, with 200 Palestinians injured and eight shot dead.

On a recent day, I drove from Jerusalem with Gilles Alexandre, a 73-year-old member of the Jordan Valley Activists, to the pasturelands on the slopes above that valley in the northeast corner of the West Bank. Alexandre’s group works with about a dozen small Palestinian communities in the area, each consisting of one large family or several and their livestock, some living in semipermanent tents. A larger number of communities have abandoned their encampments under settler pressure. The rains were unusually good last winter, but outpost settlers regularly block hungry herds from reaching the high grass.

At a place known as Hamamat Al Malih, settlers allegedly stole 350 sheep last summer, taking what they could manage, killing the rest, and leaving the corpses in the fields. The last family of Palestinian herders gave up and left the spot early this spring. A small schoolhouse still served about 60 Palestinian children from the area until one night in April, when parties unknown bulldozed the building. Afterward, on a Jordan Valley Activists’ WhatsApp group, a member shared a picture of a book he’d found in the wreckage: an Arabic translation of Hebrew poet Leah Goldberg’s classic Room for Rent, a fable meant to teach children acceptance of people different from themselves. (Later, when I asked a spokesperson for Israel’s national police force if the sheep rustling or the school demolition was being investigated, I received the Kafkaesque response that he could only answer if I supplied the file numbers of the investigations.) We found only concrete and metal rubble, and a broken swing set and seesaw in the silent playground.

In a field a few miles from the ruins of the school, we met Nitsan Michaeli and two other activists, along with two Palestinian shepherds grazing their 800 sheep. Michaeli wore a loose shirt and pants, a wide-brimmed cloth hat, and a trim grey beard framing his deeply tanned face; he carried a staff and a cell phone and had a body camera hooked to the straps of his backpack.

A few minutes earlier, he said, a pair of settlers riding a dirt bike and a four-wheel ATV had approached. When Michaeli blocked their path and started filming them, the settlers left, most likely because they feared the effect of photographic evidence of whatever they had planned. For most of the Israeli public, what happens in the West Bank, an hour’s drive or less from their homes, might be “beyond the mountains of darkness,” to use an ancient Hebrew phrase. But videos posted on social media with Hebrew texts and shared with Israeli journalists are bringing the range war onto Israelis’ television and phone screens—and recruiting more activists who will film yet more testimony of what is increasingly and accurately described within Israel as Jewish terror.

In some cases, though, protective presence simply means putting oneself between the attackers and Palestinians. In December 2023, Alexandre was spending the night at Al Farisiya, another herding community in the northern Jordan Valley. Assailants who invaded the encampment at two in the morning blasted pepper spray in his eyes, continuing to attack him with stones after he collapsed, and severely beat another Israeli volunteer who tried to protect him. With the activists’ help, though, the Al Farisiya community has resisted expulsion.

Michaeli began accompanying herdsmen 10 years ago, after the first outpost appeared in the area. That was the start of the Jordan Valley Activists. Today the group has over 100 volunteers from around Israel, with as many as 20 in the field at any time. Since October 7, as attacks increased, more people have joined and have begun spending nights as well as days with the herding communities.

Other groups work elsewhere in the West Bank, a geographic division of labor. They are engaged in a battle of attrition in the face of settlers who have the stronger hand, at least as long as this government is in power.

Yet protective presence is the bravest and probably the most effective Israeli resistance to settlement I’ve seen. I’ve covered settlement in the occupied territories for over 40 years, and I wrote the authoritative history of how the disastrous project began. Since the start, there have been Israelis who opposed settlement. Yet while they spoke, and wrote, and voted, and held protests, the supporters of settlement built roads and homes, and they moved in and stayed. The protective presence volunteers are in fact present, in the West Bank, connected to Palestinian communities, making them visible to other Israelis.

Bnei Avraham stands out because its volunteers are overwhelmingly young—and religious. The group began in 2022; the following year it became part of the newly formed Hasmol Ha’emuni (The Faithful Left) movement, which seeks to reclaim Judaism from the revanchist reading of the religious right that has become the most visible face of the settlement movement.

Efrat Reubinof, one of Bnei Avraham’s founders, spent her teen years at a girls’ boarding school she described a “flagship” of hard-line Orthodoxy and nationalism, and later continued her religious studies at an academy for young women in a West Bank settlement where the curriculum included visits to outposts. In a process of “questioning all sorts of things I grew up with,” she told me, the turning point was attending, “out of curiosity,” a dialogue seminar of Palestinian and Israeli women in Germany, and hearing “firsthand what it’s like living under the occupation in the West Bank.”

Roei Kleitman, another of the founders, says that Bnei Avraham chose to focus on the region around Bethlehem and Hebron in the southern West Bank in part because many of its members had earlier studied in the prominent religious academies in settlements in that area. The group decided to work with farmers in large, established communities such as Halhul that can withstand pressure to leave but are in danger of losing their farmlands. There, he says, the Israeli activists can “join the impressive struggle of Palestinians who believe in nonviolent resistance.”

The activists have, however, regularly been the target of violence. “Settlers have thrown stones at us, sprayed us with pepper gas,” says Reubinof. “I’ve been pushed, and kicked,” she says, and pauses a quarter of a second before adding, “and touched, like, in a harassing way.” But “if we hadn’t been with the Palestinians,” she said, the settlers “also could have shot at them.” Reubinof is speaking to me at a sidewalk table outside a tiny Jerusalem café on a peaceful evening, yet her voice is the narration of a completely different scene, the confrontation outside Halhul where settlers descended from an outpost and she was recognized by soldiers as the activists’ leader and arrested.

“It feels like a duty,” she says, “to stand and resist and say” to the settlers, “No, you don’t represent me, you aren’t connected to the religion that I believe in.”

Bnei Avraham’s first contact in Halhul was Mohammad Shaban, who owns 15 acres of vineyards. When the first volunteers came, he told me, many people in the town said “they don’t trust Israeli people,” believing that “they are all the same.” Then the townspeople saw that when the farmers and activists managed to reach vineyards together, the Israelis worked harder than anyone else, and Bnei Avraham volunteers were injured in confrontations. During Ramadan, Shaban invited the Israelis to an iftar meal with Halhul residents. Halhul children met Israelis who were not soldiers, and religious Israelis who were not settlers. Shared meals became a ritual. On a day that I visited Halhul with a dozen volunteers, I listened as, over a meal of hummus and pita, Kleitman and Shaban compared the stories of Moses in the Bible and the Quran.

“We became like a family,” says Shaban. “They became famous in Halhul.” And beyond: Palestinian communities keep contacting Bnei Avraham asking for help. The number of volunteers is now over 150.

In parallel, protective presence activists have boosted coverage in the Israeli media of settler violence. Shaban notes that Bnei Avraham has brought journalists from the mainstream daily Yediot Aharonot to Halhul. A columnist for the paper’s weekend magazine recently accompanied activists to another West Bank town, Tarqumiyah. A recent hour-long report by Israel’s public TV channel on attacks on Palestinians by settlers serving as army reservists began with an interview with Bnei Avraham’s Kleitman.

An ex-general, working with activists, has brought retired high officers and security officials to the northern Jordan Valley. Veteran military correspondent Ron Ben-Yishai accompanied four former generals on such a tour and wrote in Yediot Aharonot that the settlers were engaged in “ethnic cleansing” of much of the West Bank, carrying out the strategy of the far right with Netanyahu’s cooperation. This is a simple, uncomfortable fact, but Ben-Yishai’s voice makes it harder for centrist Israelis to ignore.

The coverage is crucial, because a strategy of nonviolent resistance succeeds by arousing a much larger political constituency against an evil. On a day-to-day level, protective presence volunteers may enable shepherds and farmers to hold on. Stopping the campaign of violence and expulsion depends on national politics: first, on turning Netanyahu and his allies out of power in this fall’s election, and second, on ensuring that the very diverse coalition likely to succeed them is under public pressure to reverse this government’s policy toward settlers and Palestinians.

 The activists willing to put their bodies on the line are a conduit through which the picture of what is happening to Palestinians in the pastures and farmlands of the West Bank reaches the living rooms of Israelis. Covering settlement has sometimes pushed me toward despair. With the protective presence activists, I allowed myself to hope. 

Being president of the United States is by far the most lucrative business venture of Donald Trump’s checkered business career. The June 30 release of his financial disclosure report makes this official. Trump has turned the American presidency into an extractive industry. In 2025, Trump mined more than $2.2 billion in income from being president, most of it from crypto, from which he extracted $1.4 billion. That’s all the more remarkable when you remember that crypto entered a slump last year and that investors in Trump’s crypto ventures who were not members of the Trump family lost $2.3 billion, according to a June 9 investigation by Tom Bergin of Reuters. It’s almost as if Trump’s ability to draw income from business ventures did not depend on those ventures being successful!

A cynic might observe that Trump’s special treatment is no different from that of American chief executives in the private sector who are similarly insulated from failure. But Trump’s payday puts theirs in the shade. The only CEO whose compensation exceeded Trump’s last year was Elon Musk, who (for now) is a category of one. Musk’s $158 billion pay package from Tesla last year was more than 15 times larger than the combined pay packages of the other 391 chief executives surveyed in late June by The Wall Street Journal.

If we set Musk aside, the highest-paid chief executive in the Journal’s ranking was Shankh Mitra, chief executive of Welltower, “a real estate investment trust focused on senior housing and healthcare.” Let’s leave for another day the ethics of harvesting a vast personal fortune from the physical and mental decline of one’s fellow human beings. My point here is that Mitra’s obscene pay package last year of $821 million was less than half of Trump’s $2.2 billion. Plus, I bet Mitra had to put in at least some actual work.

I observed a year ago that Trump is America’s first rentier president. A rentier is someone who makes his money through the possession of assets rather than the exertion of labor. Rentiers are capitalism’s nepo babies. Prior to Trump, the main rentier occupations were real estate and finance. Trump himself was a classic rentier capitalist, a rich kid who joined the family real estate business, exaggerated his success to a credulous tabloid press, and inherited $413 million from his more successful father. Trump moved the family business from dowdy apartment buildings in Brooklyn and Queens to luxury apartments and hotels in Manhattan and beyond, but many of these went bankrupt. In 2018, The Economist concluded Trump would have made more money had he been a more conventional rentier and invested daddy’s money in index funds.

The rentier presidency is a much more lucrative proposition than rentier capitalism, and one with which index funds can’t possibly compete. Crucially, there is no index fund that lets you acquire a stake without investing money or labor. During the 2024 presidential campaign the Trump family acquired a 60 percent stake in World Liberty Financial and was granted 75 percent on net revenues from token sales. (The Trump family stake in the company, the less valuable part of this deal, has since fallen to 38 percent.) Trump did not pay for these privileges, yet last year he earned more than $594 million from them. Neither is there any evidence, according to Reuters’ Bergin, that Trump ever paid for his stakes in the crypto firms ALT5 Sigma, American Bitcoin, or Celebration Coins. This last alone netted Trump more than $636 million last year.

The business press often notes these days that Trump has become less a real estate investor than a crypto investor. But to call Trump a crypto investor is a misnomer because investors, um, invest. Trump doesn’t invest. He receives.

Nor should we call Trump a media investor, because Trump didn’t pay one cent to acquire his majority stake in Trump Media & Technology Group. This company owns Truth Social, on which Trump posts his late-night rants, and “has engaged,” Michael Hiltzik observed last March in The Los Angeles Times, “in a number of baroque financial transactions.” It works out well for Trump that he didn’t put money into Trump Media & Technology Group because it lost $715 million last year on revenue of $3.7 million. Yet Trump’s stake in this money-losing venture somehow remains, according to his latest filing, worth more than $50 million. Nice work if you can get it.

The business model for a rentier presidency might puzzle the untutored, given the extensive losses involved. Why would anyone invest with the president of the United States? Some of them are just suckers, still bedazzled by the phony business-genius image he created during 14 TV seasons of “The Apprentice” and “Celebrity Apprentice.” But others derive value in other ways. The United Arab Emirates bought a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial for about $500 million, then dropped another $2 billion on a World Liberty Financial stablecoin, and in return got an export ban lifted on AI computer chips. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao found various ways to boose World Liberty Financial, including giving the firm some software free of charge, and snagged a presidential pardon. Other examples of Trump auctioning off government policy are too numerous to mention, but Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, provided a pretty good overview in a recent floor speech (video and transcript).

Often what’s paid to Trump is protection money against some non-specific future harm. That explains ABC’s $16 million settlement of a baseless defamation suit Trump brought against George Stephanopoulos, and CBS’s $16 million settlement of a baseless election-interference suit Trump brought over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris. These were shakedowns for Trump’s presidential library. The ABC and CBS windfalls landed there, according to the financial disclosure, along with a $24.5 million settlement with Meta over Trump’s post-January 6 suspension from Facebook and Instagram, and a $22 million settlement with Google over Trump’s post-January 6 suspension from You Tube.

People often speculate that Trump ran for president in 2024 in order to stay out of jail. That’s certainly possible. But I’m more inclined to think he did it to stay out of bankruptcy court. It’s hard to remember, but as recently as March 2024 bankruptcy looked like a real possibility for the ex-president, at least to me. At that time Trump was worth a mere $2.6 billion, according to Forbes, and his net-worth trajectory over the previous decade was downward.

What a difference a presidential election makes. By March 2026 Forbes put Trump’s net worth at $6.5 billion. In 2024, according to last year’s financial disclosure, Trump earned more than $622 million. In 2025, according to this year’s financial disclosure, Trump earned more than $2.2 billion. How does a full-time politician increase his wealth by $4 billion over two years and his income by $1.6 billion over one? To ask the question is to answer it. And on top of everything else, he gets free housing.

Restricting legal immigration has been an all-consuming priority for President Donald Trump in both of his administrations. During his first term in office, Trump unsuccessfully attempted to rescind legal protections for migrants from several countries fleeing from violence, environmental disasters, and other extreme conditions. With the Supreme Court decision this week allowing the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for Haitians and Syrians, the future of the program as a whole is at risk.

Removing TPS for approximately 330,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians is fundamentally a humanitarian issue, potentially forcing thousands to return to unsafe and even life-threatening circumstances in their home countries. But it will also have a dramatic economic effect within the United States, as the loss of workers and consumers will resonate in communities of all sizes throughout the country.

“They’re workers, they’re taxpayers, they’re consumers, they’re community members. And removing them not only impacts the workforce but their families, and their employers, and the local economy,” said Steven Hubbard, senior data scientist at the American Immigration Council.

Around 1.3 million people from 17 countries are protected through TPS, according to the latest data available from the Department of Homeland Security, as of March 31 last year. These designations are only in place for a finite period of time and must be extended by the government to continue. In 2025, the Trump administration terminated TPS for 10 countries, and four more countries have designations set to expire this year. The Supreme Court decision makes it much more likely that litigation challenging Trump’s efforts to end TPS for other countries will be successful.

“Employers will have to let those people go if they want to stay on the right side of the law, and in theory that group of people is expected to leave the country,” said Tara Watson, director of the Center for Economic Security and Opportunity at the Brookings Institute. “I don’t think most of them will, unless they are apprehended by [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement], but it’s going to have a pretty big impact just because of the magnitude of the change.”

The impact of the Supreme Court’s decision could be felt almost immediately. Employers will have to fire Haitian and Syrian laborers who are only authorized to work through TPS. The loss of these protections could have a profound effect on the health care industry, and specifically in elder and home care, which employs a large number of Haitian workers. The health care industry is facing an ongoing labor shortage, meaning that it may be difficult to replace the jobs lost because of the termination of this program. TPS individuals also participate in construction, agriculture, hospitality, and retail industries in large numbers, and have a higher rate of workforce participation than U.S.-born individuals.

“Many have been living and working in the United States for years, and even probably for decades,” said Hubbard. If employers lose workers who may have years of experience in a particular field, it could be difficult to find replacements, he added.

A report by the American Immigration Council found that TPS individuals paid $10.3 billion in state and local taxes in 2021. Through their taxed income, they help bolster programs from which they themselves cannot benefit, including Social Security, Medicare, and safety net supports for low-income households. Since 2001, TPS individuals have contributed $20 billion to Social Security, according to the criminal justice and immigration advocacy organization FWD.us. The primary Social Security fund is facing insolvency by the end of 2032, according to an updated estimate from the fund’s trustees based in part on a projected decrease in immigration.

“They aren’t consuming as much in public benefits as people sometimes think, and are contributing fiscally to the economy,” Watson said about TPS holders. “Taking away this pipeline of resources for [Social Security] seems like a mistake at this particular moment.”

Then there are the knock-on effects for local economies. The surge in immigration enforcement operations in several cities in 2025 resulted in more job losses than they would have seen otherwise, according to the Brookings Institute. This included jobs in the arts and entertainment industries, which have fewer immigrant workers than other sectors. This could be an indication of how the loss of TPS holders could also affect even seemingly tangential industries.

Moreover, according to estimates from FWD.us, TPS holders contribute $29 billion annually to the American economy overall. In 2021, TPS holders had $8 billion in spending power, which can be used for necessities such as groceries and rent. The economic impact was especially great in Florida, California, Texas, and New York, where the bulk of TPS holders are concentrated; in the first three states, this population had more than $1.1 billion in spending power. The influx of TPS individuals in smaller cities, such as Springfield, Ohio, has bolstered local economies.

“If you think about communities—they require a tax base, they require people having income, because once they have income they spend it locally,” Hubbard said. “When that’s taken away, that can have negative consequences for many communities.”

TPS individuals have few and complicated pathways for staying in the U.S. legally, and the Supreme Court has rubber-stamped many of Trump’s efforts to limit methods for migrants to receive asylum or permanent residence. Many of them also live in households with U.S. citizen residents; according to FWD.us, TPS holders live with U.S.-born children. The consequences for this younger generation could be severe, particularly if their households are losing a wage earner.

“Their parents went from having regular formal sector jobs to not having those jobs and being at risk of deportation, so that’s going to affect a lot of children,” said Watson.