Political News

For years, some of Alaska’s most vulnerable children have faced harsh conditions for months at a time in locked psychiatric facilities. A new law aims to change that.

The legislation, HB 36, follows a 2023 Mother Jones investigation that found that the state’s Office of Children’s Services routinely placed foster kids at North Star Behavioral Health, Alaska’s only private psychiatric hospital for minors, when there were no available foster homes. Despite North Star’s troubling track record of assaults, escapes, and the routine use of seclusion and chemical restraints, foster children have been admitted to the facility hundreds of times in recent years. Some stayed for months after they were ready for discharge.

HB 36, which passed into law Monday and goes into effect in 90 days, will require a court to review a foster child’s placement at a psychiatric hospital within seven calendar days to determine if that child meets criteria for hospitalization. (Until the legislation passed, a preliminary injunction required a hearing within 30 days, but the hearings were sometimes delayed.)

“When this started showing up publicly, that made folks pay attention to it.”

Anchorage Democratic Rep. Andrew Gray, who first introduced the legislation in 2024, has said that the bill was inspired by Mother Jones’ reporting, as well as his own experience as a foster parent. Current and former foster youth rallied around the legislation, with dozens traveling to Juneau over the past three years to meet with lawmakers and testify about their experiences.

(Universal Health Services, the psychiatric hospital chain that owns North Star, did not respond to questions for this story but has said in the past that it adheres to policies intended to keep patients safe.)

“It was basically all-out chaos at the hospital,” says Amanda Metivier, who directs the nonprofit Facing Foster Care in Alaska. “When this started showing up publicly,” she said, “that made folks pay attention to it.”

But for Metivier and other foster care reform advocates, the legislative win was bittersweet. Last week, Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed HB 52, another bill that aimed to protect vulnerable youth at psychiatric hospitals and had broad bipartisan support. It would have required the state’s health department to conduct unannounced inspections of psychiatric hospitals, including interviewing at least half of the hospital’s minor patients, and to provide annual reports to the legislature on the use of seclusions and restraints, among other things. Rep. Maxine Dibert, the Fairbanks Democrat who introduced the legislation, has said the bill was inspired in part by the prevalence of Native children in psychiatric facilities. 

“Everyone knows we’re going to be inspected, and we all get instructions on what we need to do to check boxes for the inspection—not to actually fix the problems.”

In a letter to the house speaker, Dunleavy explained that he vetoed the bill because “psychiatric hospitals are already subject to strict regulatory and accreditation standards, and this bill adds duplicative inspection, reporting, and notification requirements in statute.”

Legislators attempted to override the veto on Friday but were four votes short of the necessary two-thirds majority. Rep. Zack Fields, an Anchorage Democrat, noted that even some North Star employees supported HB 52. Currently, the health department conducts announced inspections at the facility; in his floor speech speech, Fields anonymously quoted a North Star employee, who said that “everyone knows we’re going to be inspected, and we all get instructions on what we need to do to check boxes for the inspection—not to actually fix the problems.”

Notably, North Star hired a lobbyist, Dianne Blumer, who was paid $41,000 in each of the past two legislative sessions to advocate on “issues related to mental health, workforce, background checks and State of Alaska budget.”

The institution of vulnerable youth in Alaska is a well-documented, long-standing problem. A landmark Department of Justice report in 2022 found that the state was violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by unnecessarily institutionalizing children far away from their families, often for months on end. Two years later, a state supreme court ruling concluded that children in state custody “are at substantial risk of being hospitalized for longer than they need, or when they do not need to be hospitalized at all.”

It’s one of the Supreme Court’s most palpable fears: Somewhere, somehow, a government official might one day be held personally accountable in some way for their official conduct—or, more accurately, their misconduct. A new case at the court will likely be the latest demonstration of the court’s pro-impunity mindset.

The justices agreed on Monday to hear Nielsen v. Watanabe in the upcoming term, which starts next October. The case will give the court an opportunity to further narrow what are known as Bivens claims, which allow for people to sue federal officials for damages under increasingly narrow circumstances.

The plaintiff in the case, Ketei Watanabe, was a prisoner at a federal prison in Honolulu in 2021. During that time, he was “brutally assaulted” in a “gang-related fight,” according to his brief for the justices. After the fight, he told multiple prison officials, including nurse Francis Nielsen, that he had suffered significant injuries and was in a great deal of pain.

Nielsen and other officials declined to obtain specialist treatment for Watanabe or to transport him to a local hospital for treatment. Instead, his filings said, Nielsen gave him over-the-counter pain medication. “Several months after the attack, Watanabe finally received an x-ray: It showed that he had a fractured coccyx and that bone chips had migrated to surrounding soft tissue areas,” his brief explained to the court.

Even after this diagnosis, Watanabe alleged, Nielsen and other officials refused to provide him with outside medical treatment and he did not obtain proper medical care until his release from prison three years after the initial fight. The Supreme Court has previously held that prisons have a duty to provide medical care for prisoners under the Eighth Amendment. Accordingly, Watanabe sued the officials in federal court for their alleged mistreatment.

What happens when a government official violates your constitutional rights in some way? If they are a state or local official, like a police officer in a major city, you might file a Section 1983 lawsuit in federal court for damages. That Reconstruction-era law allows people to sue state and local officials in federal court in their personal capacity for violating a federal constitutional right. (More on this later.)

If a federal official violates your constitutional rights, on the other hand, there are very few ways to hold that official personally accountable. Congress has not enacted a Section 1983-style law for suing federal officials, though there have occasionally been proposals to do so. Nor do other congressionally enacted remedies, like the Federal Tort Claims Act, allow people to pursue damages against specific officials who violate their constitutional rights.

Watanabe instead relied upon an implied cause of action rather than an explicitly created one. This approach became more common after the 1971 case Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Most people just call the case Bivens for short. In Bivens, federal agents searched the home of a New York man without a warrant and arrested him on drug-related charges. Bivens sued the agents in question in federal court for violating his Fourth Amendment right to be free from unconstitutional searches and seizures.

The narcotics agents argued that they could not be sued in their personal capacity because Congress had not created a cause of action to do so. The Supreme Court, led by Justice William Brennan, sided with Bivens. While Brennan acknowledged that the Fourth Amendment “does not in so many words provide for its enforcement by an award of money damages for the consequences of its violation,” he concluded that Bivens could rely upon an implied cause of action instead to vindicate his violated rights.

Between 1971 and 1980, the Supreme Court applied that reasoning to two other contexts: gender-discrimination lawsuits by congressional staff under the Fifth Amendment and, as relevant for Watanabe’s case, prisoner lawsuits over improper medical care by prison officials under the Eighth Amendment. The latter is grounded in the 1980 case Carlson v. Green. In Carlson, prison officials effectively killed an asthmatic prisoner by holding him in conditions over doctors’ protests, denying him treatment for an asthma attack for roughly eight hours, and then giving him substandard care until he died.

Since Carlson, the Supreme Court’s increasingly conservative majority has gone out of its way to clip the wings of Bivens claims. Justices ranging from Warren Burger to Neil Gorsuch have argued that, under the Constitution’s separation of powers, it is Congress’s responsibility to create causes of actions to vindicate constitutional rights, not the judiciary’s. To that end, they have effectively refused to extend Bivens to new contexts while also—for reasons known only to the justices—declining to overturn Bivens altogether.

In the 2017 case Ziglar v. Abbasi, for example, the justices imposed a new test on Bivens claims that required lower courts to consider whether they arose in a “new Bivens context,” which is highly disfavored, or if any “special factors” should deter courts from extending Bivens to that new context. In practice, this gives lower courts a variety of tools to block new Bivens claims and narrow the handful of existing grounds for them.

In Watanabe’s case, Nielsen and his co-defendants argued that the Bivens claim against them should be rejected under the Supreme Court’s recent tests. Watanabe’s experience is a far cry from the sustained and deliberate misconduct that led to Carlson’s death in the 1980 case that expanded Bivens to the Eighth Amendment context, they claimed. They claimed that Carlson was merely a “wrongful-death case” rather than an overarching cause of action for insufficient medical care. Alternative dispute-resolution mechanisms, the defendants argued, should also count as a “special factor” against expanding Bivens to this supposedly new circumstance.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals saw things differently. “Watanabe alleged official action to the same degree of specificity as that alleged in Carlson—‘acts and omissions’ that were deliberately indifferent to Watanabe’s serious medical condition,” a three-judge panel concluded. “Such alleged official actions include the refusal to transport Watanabe to an outside hospital and the failure to provide him competent medical attention.” Accordingly, they sided with Watanabe.

Nielsen and the other prison officials have good reason to think that the justices will now side with them. If there is one word that sums up the Roberts Court’s approach to power, it is “impunity.” Over the last few decades, the justices have used qualified immunity to greatly weaken Section 1983, the statutory analogue to Bivens for claims against state and local officials in federal court, despite an avalanche of criticism for the judge-made doctrine by academics, lower-court judges, and even a few members of the high court itself.

Taken together, the justices’ position is that Bivens is unacceptable because it is Congress’s responsibility, not the courts’, to create federal causes of action. When Congress does create those claims, however, the justices’ position is that the courts must sharply narrow them through judicially-created doctrines like qualified immunity. Judicial power can only make it harder, not easier, for people to hold accountable those officials who violate their constitutional rights.

Even beyond that specific context, the justices have consistently made it harder to hold government officials accountable over the last 20 years. They have repeatedly struck down criminal convictions of state and local officials under federal anti-bribery laws. They have closed the doors of the federal courts to those disempowered by racial and partisan gerrymandering. They even ruled two years ago that presidents can commit crimes without fear of prosecution, in part because the Supreme Court had previously held that presidents cannot face civil lawsuits either.

The overall effect of the Supreme Court’s rulings is a government where officials can often inflict incredible harms on people without any meaningful recourse—in the courts, at the ballot box, or through later prosecutions. Nielsen’s argument, stripped down to its barest essentials, is that prisoners under his care should only be able to invoke the Eighth Amendment against him if they die. I am skeptical that the Bill of Rights’s drafters went to the trouble of ratifying ten amendments for such paltry protections.

In Bivens, Justice Brennan quoted Chief Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison to explain the fundamental reasoning of his decision. “The very essence of civil liberty,” he had written, “certainly consists in the right of every individual to claim the protection of the laws, whenever he receives an injury.” The court may ultimately side with Watanabe. After all, they have maintained recently that Bivens and Carlson are still good law. But it is hard to not doubt that they will move further away from Marshall’s simple wisdom—and from the basic protections of the Constitution itself.

“It was Game of Thrones,” says George Osborne. The former Tory chancellor of the exchequer was talking about the fateful referendum 10 years ago, on June 23, 2016, on whether the United Kingdom should remain in or leave the European Union. Or rather, he was talking about one man in particular, and Osborne’s comparison was just right. For Boris Johnson, the referendum—in fact, all of politics, even all of life itself—was a game, although also an opportunity. The one thing it wasn’t to Johnson was a serious matter with grave implications for his country.

Just how grave we can now see. Every warning about the malign consequences of leaving the EU has been justified. This is not the place for detailed economic analysis with statistics and tables, but just to take one example, and a detached transatlantic view, a paper published last year by American academic economists, chiefly at Stanford, compares the U.K.’s performance since the referendum with those of similar countries and reckons that the U.K. economy is 8 percent smaller than it would have been had we remained inside the EU.                                       

Our particular problems are a grossly inflated financial sector that produces a disproportionate amount of tax revenue but is particularly vulnerable to a crisis such as that of 2008, along with a larger postindustrial economy characterized by low education, low skills, low investment, low wages, low growth, and low productivity. These wouldn’t have been cured merely by remaining in the EU, but they have been patently aggravated by leaving.

One obvious and undeniable consequence of the referendum has been political chaos. In the 40 years from 1976 to 2016, there were in all six British prime ministers. In the decade since the referendum, there have also been six. And soon there will be a seventh, with Sir Keir Starmer having thrown in the towel on Monday. He will presumably be replaced by Andy Burnham in a kind of coup. It’s yet another in a series of coups, a Labour premier kicked out as a succession of Conservative premiers— Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss—were before him. This latest change cannot be justified by any serious belief in Burnham, whose political résumé is far from stellar—a member of Parliament for 15 years (when he loyally and repeatedly voted for Tony Blair’s criminal and catastrophic invasion of Iraq); a minister for a few years; an unsuccessful candidate for the Labour leadership not once but twice; and then mayor of Greater Manchester, where his achievements were genuine but quite modest, such as improving the bus and railway services. His only real selling proposition is that he’s not Starmer.

And all of this stems from that fateful day 10 years ago. The referendum campaign remains one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life. To be clear, I say that as a Remainer, but not just because of that. One might sometimes feel like the American pol years ago who said, after losing an election, “The people have spoken, God damn them,” but one can accept defeat after a fair fight. But the Brexit referendum was anything but fair. It was a squalid exercise in demagoguery or plain mendacity.

A riveting two-part BBC program, Brexit: A Very British Civil War, is the latest in the long line of brilliant documentaries produced by Norma Percy, an American adornment of British broadcasting. Her oeuvre includes important additions to our knowledge of the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia and conflicts in the Middle East, but my favorite may be the Watergate series, made 20 years after Richard Nixon’s resignation, which is not least a comic masterpiece, as all the old burglars and bunglers revisit, and try to explain away, their malfeasance.

There is a certain similarity in the Brexit program, even if there’s nothing at all funny about the consequences. It all came about because of the internal politics of the Conservative Party. Once upon a time it was the Tories who were the Europhiles. One Tory prime minister, Harold Macmillan, made the first attempt to join what was then the European Economic Community, or Common Market, in 1963, before he was blackballed by Charles de Gaulle. Another, Edward Heath, did join in 1973. And as is often forgotten, it was one more Tory, Margaret Thatcher (yes!), who ratified the Single European Act in 1986 establishing the single market.

After her fall, a group of Tory M.P.s began a guerrilla campaign against further European integration, and they harried John Major during his troubled prime ministership from 1990 to 1997. When David Cameron became Conservative leader of the opposition in 2005, he told his party to “stop banging on about Europe,” but his words went quite unheeded. Every poll showed, over many years, that “Europe” was one of the least important questions for most British voters, although immigration, which was sometimes connected to the EU, mattered much more. And yet for the same gang of Tory M.P.s, the EU was the one subject that dominated their lives, and they were relentless in pursuing it.

Following the 2010 election, in which the Tories won a plurality of parliamentary seats but not an outright majority, Cameron and Nick Clegg, leader of the ardently Europhile Liberal Democrats, formed what someone called the Brokeback Mountain coalition. But then, as another observer pointed out, that movie does not end happily, and so it proved.

As his next move, or misstep, Cameron tried to quiet those colleagues who were still banging on by promising a referendum on continued British membership. But he made the promise hoping that he wouldn’t have to keep it. If the coalition held after the next election, he could plead the Lib Dems’ support as a way out. In 2015, to general surprise, the Tories won an outright majority, and Cameron was impaled on his promise.

Even then, having called a referendum he didn’t want, Cameron still expected to win it—and he wasn’t alone. He tried to gain concessions from the EU, but the other European leaders, while not wanting the U.K. to depart, had almost had enough of endless British plaints and special concessions. In particular, German Chancellor Angela Merkel refused to budge from the sacred principle of free movement of people within the EU. It was unfortunate, not to say disastrous, that this coincided with the bloody strife in Syria and the consequent huge flood of refugees trying to escape from that country and get into Europe.

All Cameron could do was fall back on saying that to leave would still be economically damaging for the country. Although plainly true, and amply justified by events since, that quite missed the point. “It’s the economy, stupid” must be one of the stupidest political slogans ever coined, but it underlay the Remain campaign’s great mistake. Dry economic arguments simply didn’t cut it.

Although I would never say that we Remainers were “the best” and that Leavers were “the worst,” the rest of Yeats’s line applies all too aptly: Remainers lacked all conviction while the Leavers were filled with passionate intensity. More than that, we Remainers forgot what Raymond Aron, the great French politicologue, said toward the end of his long life: It is a denial of the entire experience of the twentieth century to suppose that people will reject their passions in favor of their interests. 

And then there are the individual roles played 10 years ago. Whatever one thinks of Nigel Farage, the leader of the anti-European United Kingdom Independence Party at the time, or his gruesome sidekicks who made us shudder again as we saw them on the recent BBC show, they had always opposed British membership of the EU, so they can’t be accused of cynical calculation. And they were fighting wholeheartedly to win the referendum.

Not so some others. Important parts were played by Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, the two most prominent Tories who deserted Cameron and campaigned for Leave. Both of them had been journalists before they entered Parliament as Conservatives. In 2004, Gove wrote an essay in the Spectator, where he is now editor, on what being a Conservative meant to him, which included the enjoyable line, “Rudi Giuliani is a conservative, and a hero to conservatives like me.”

Ten years ago, Gove wrote another long and supposedly weighty essay making the case against membership of the EU, while Johnson wrote not one but two columns, one making the case for Leave and the other for Remain. He claims this was to clear his mind before coming to his decision, which really means that he was weighing up which suited his personal ambitions better. The very idea of “a principled belief held by Boris Johnson” is what logicians call a closed category, like “a square circle.”

Above all, what the BBC program confirmed was what many of us suspected at the time—that both Tories supported Leave while expecting to lose, but hoping that the campaign would strengthen their own positions within the Conservative Party. That was made clear by Johnson’s and Gove’s respective former wives, Marina Wheeler and Sarah Vine. The latter has already told us, as a supposedly amusing story, that on the morrow of the referendum, she said to her then spouse, “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off” (a cinematic allusion: vide Michael Caine in The Italian Job).

And all this is what Osborne, the chancellor who was a leading Remainer, meant by Game of Thrones. It was all a struggle for advantage and position, quite unrelated to any serious consideration of the national interest, and when they won the referendum they didn’t know what to do next. 

Ten years on, and everyone is unhappy. Any election or referendum is potentially fraught and divisive, but that was peculiarly true of June 23, 2016, which divided the country in the harshest ways, between young and old, educated and “the poorly educated” whom Donald Trump says he loves. If the vote had been confined to citizens over 60, or those who had left school without qualifications, Leave would have won with a much larger majority; if to those under 30 or to university graduates, then it would have been an easy victory for Remain.

By what ought to be a contradiction—but then whenever has political life followed a logical course?—those who gave us Brexit with its lamentable consequences and ought to be execrated have surged ahead. That specifically means Reform UK, the latest iteration in a line of Europhobic parties led by Nigel Farage, which was recently polling around 25 percent, while the possibility of Farage becoming prime minister was seriously discussed. But the special election in Makerfield that sent Andy Burham back into Parliament saw the Reform vote collapse, and that bubble might have burst at last.

Even now the winners of the referendum are as baffled as the losers. A frankly risible ad in the right-wing Daily Telegraph has just announced a “Big Debate” to be held in London on June 29, with a panel of well-known Brexiteers, Daniel Hannan, Allister Heath, and Allison Pearson, on the question “How to Make Brexit a Success”—after 10 years! This is in itself an acknowledgment that it has been a failure so far, which is what most people now think, however they voted then. For some years past, a consistent and substantial majority in polls say that they regret Brexit, but there’s nothing that can be done about it.

Maybe we shall see the same panel discussing how to make Brexit a success in another 10 years’ time. Until then, amid economic decay and violent rioting in the streets, I keep thinking of the words “Referendums are the device of dictators and demagogues.” Who said that? Why, it was Margaret Thatcher, 50 years ago, and she never spoke a truer word.

Working-class Americans are worried that AI will eliminate jobs, including their own, and they want the government to step in with a massive retraining program for affected workers—funded in part by a tax on large corporations that replace workers with AI.

That’s one of several key takeaways from a new poll commissioned by Working Families Power, an organizing, advocacy, and research group that partners with the Working Families Party. The survey, released exclusively to The New Republic, also shows that people are suspicious of data centers, particularly their impact on energy costs, and they support temporary limits or even moratoriums on new centers. That isn’t so surprising given the protests against data centers around the country, but it’s yet another reminder of the huge opportunity for the Democrats in the rising populist rage against Big Tech.

So far, they’re largely missing it.

Working Families Power partnered with the Justice Research Fund to contact 2,511 working-class registered voters, oversampling in swing districts. To identify those voters, they used a rigorous definition of working-class that includes family income, education level, type of work, homeownership status, and whether someone has financial security to fall back on if they lose their job. It’s a far more exacting definition of working-class than simply sorting out voters without a college education, as many surveys and analyses do, and one that identifies voters who are suffering most from the affordability crisis.

The poll shows that 73 percent are “concerned” that AI will lead to job losses in the United States, while 62 percent worry it could “affect their own job, household income, or jobs of people close to them”; 58 percent think it will hurt working-class families overall. Among the jobs that a majority said AI would hurt are truck drivers; retail and service workers; office and administrative workers; and writers, designers, and other creative workers.

Huge majorities, 80 percent and more, want government support for retraining and education programs for those who lose jobs due to AI. They want regulations requiring corporations to give notice before replacing jobs with AI, and to be taxed to contribute to these programs. They also want to share in any benefits from AI through increased pay, shorter workweeks, and stronger benefits. Seventy-three percent agreed with this statement: “AI should work for working people, not just make billionaires richer while everyone else worries about losing their job.”

“What we’re seeing from results like this is that AI might be the biggest political realignment issue of our lifetime,” said Ravi Mangla, a spokesperson for Working Families Power and the Working Families Party. “It’s rare that you see numbers where there is 70, 80 percent agreement in a polarized country like this, and for the vast majority of people to agree that the government needs to step in and do something about AI job loss, that AI companies need to be paying for infrastructure and energy costs, and that there needs to be mass retraining, as well as benefits for workers who are laid off because of AI. That’s a level of agreement across politics that we don’t really see on anything.”

Mangla said Working Families Power doesn’t see enough candidates and officials addressing these widely held concerns. “[They] are not taking what is a political layup,” he said. “Neither party, right now, is rising to the occasion.”

Voters’ concerns extend to data centers. They’re worried that their growth would lead to increased utility costs, and 60 percent want a pause on construction to study their impacts. At the moment, only Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have released a comprehensive plan to address these concerns. The Congressional Progressive Caucus’s New Affordability Agenda also addresses issues like AI-driven surveillance pricing, and its chair, Texas Representative Greg Casar, supports taxing AI companies to pay for a jobs program. But the anger at Big Tech over AI is more expansive, and largely untapped on the campaign trail.

Professor Alondra Nelson, the founder and director of the Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, said these results confirm what many in her field have been arguing for a long time. “The costs of AI transformation should not be passed on to the public while profits flow exclusively to shareholders and executives. That’s not innovation—that’s extraction,” she said in an email.

Nelson said we need transparency first, because we’re still not sure how AI is affecting business and hiring practices. She said she’s encouraged by new tax policy ideas from the Center for Shared AI Prosperity, which include new taxes on wealthy people whose fortunes derive substantially from AI industries and requiring more contributions from AI firms to help affected workers.

The federal government is not pursuing such protections, and in fact the Trump administration and Republican-controlled Congress have tried to block states from regulating AI at all. “State legislatures are moving faster than Congress on some of these questions,” Nelson said. “That experimentation matters—which is precisely why we should resist any federal preemption of state-level AI regulation. Ultimately, though, we need federal standards establishing a floor of protection for working families, regardless of zip code.”

That’s especially true because the potential benefits of AI remain unclear, as tech evangelists simultaneously promise unimaginable abundance and warn of potential doom. “Even the tech CEOs and AI CEOs can’t tell you what’s going to happen,” Mangla said. “They will say this might destroy civilization or humanity. They’ll say outright that this will cause massive job loss. They are actually conceding to the massive risks and potential faults of this technology, and yet they’re resistant to commonsense policies that will actually protect people and that will allow people to continue to live their lives and earn a decent wage.”

A lot of the potential solutions, such as regulating companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, taxing them more, and providing a safety net for workers, are traditional progressive asks. But Mangla said the polled voters don’t see these as partisan solutions—just necessary ones. Working-class Americans don’t want to halt AI innovation, as the the poll shows, but they don’t want it to come solely at their expense.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 23 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

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

Donald Trump is growing angrier over the strange saga involving his plan to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which is beset with an algae problem and with peeling paint. In a series of posts, he’s raged at a journalist for reporting on it, fulminated that vandalism is the real problem, and hailed a series of arrests that have now taken place there, which are really bizarre and raise lots of unanswered questions.

This whole sorry tale is taking on much broader significance than you might expect. It’s displaying many of the pathologies of this whole presidency and this broader moment in America—from the megalomania to the incompetence, to the corruption, to the sheer tinpot banana republic vibe that’s settled on our nation’s capital. Michael Tomasky, the editor of The New Republic, has a good new piece digging into the subtext of this saga, so we’re working through all of it with him today. Mike, good to have you back on.

Michael Tomasky: Nice to be with you, Greg. Thanks.

Sargent: So before we get to the discussion of the arrests, can you quickly sum up one point for us? You argue in your piece that the Reflecting Pool saga is a real presidential scandal. I wondered if you could just recap the story up until the arrests—how we kind of went from having the Reflecting Pool as we’ve always known it to having one full of algae and peeling paint.

Tomasky: Sure. Well, I gather that it did need work, drainage work, and that part of it is legitimate. And something was done under Obama that did cost a lot more, $35 million, and it didn’t fix the problem the way it was supposed to. So that may be part of Trump’s motivation. But his real motivation is his vanity and getting something, putting his stamp on Washington in advance of the America 250 celebrations, but just in general, for time immemorial.

So he puts his name on the Kennedy Center, he puts his name on the Institute for Peace, and of course tearing down the East Wing and putting up that ballroom without any permits, without any of the normal processes that are supposed to come into play when you do something like that to a landmark historic building. And the arch in front of the Arlington Cemetery.

So here we are. I don’t know why it had to be blue. Nobody really understands quite why it had to be blue. These people did a swimming pool for him in Virginia that was blue and he liked it, so it suddenly needed to be blue. It’s been green for a century. And now it’s become this disaster with the no-bid contracts and the massive cost overrun. He started out talking about $1.7, $1.8 million. It’s now nudging up against $15 million.

And he said it was going to take a week and now—where is it?—six weeks, two months, and it’s going to go on and on.

Sargent: And where did the algae come from? Can you just kind of take us up to the present? And I feel like that’s such a richly symbolic thing. He’s the “Drain the Swamp” president. He was talking about making this thing crystal clear, right? Making the water crystal clear, transparent, as it were. And he’s utterly failed at that.

Now, I don’t know to what degree that’s his fault. Nature’s a complex thing, in fairness to Donald Trump. But it just seems perfectly symbolic in a way that it’s now filled with this infestation.

Tomasky: Totally symbolic. And am I a marine horticulturalist? No, I am not. But I know this much just from reading about this. Until those Obama renovations, the source of the water for the Reflecting Pool, which is 18 inches deep around the edges and as deep as 30 inches in the middle, was Washington, D.C.’s drinking water supply. Then it changed, so that the source of water was the tidal basin.

The tidal basin is the smallish body of water—it’s about the size of a lake, for people who don’t know Washington—and it’s where the Jefferson Memorial sits and where the cherry blossom trees surround it. So the water comes from the tidal basin. So there’s algae. There’s algae in water that comes from nature. Go figure.

Sargent: OK, so Trump is getting angrier about the situation. In the last few days, he’s tweeted about the arrests we’ve seen at the Reflecting Pool. As of Saturday night, we’ve seen five people arrested and charged with vandalism. A number of others issued citations, according to the reporting.

But what’s going on here is really murky, as it were. One of those detained is saying he reached into the pool to feel a piece of the liner that had become detached from the pool bottom. Another person was detained after taking a piece of paint out of the water.

Mike, these don’t seem like Antifa vandals to me. Do we know anything more than this? And what does your gut tell you about what’s really going on with these arrests?

Tomasky: In the case of the first gentleman, that’s a guy named David Hearn. I wrote about his saga in my piece today. And this got quite a lot of coverage over the weekend. He was out on a bike ride. He’s a former U.S. Olympic athlete—a canoeist, a canoe racer. And he was out on a long bike ride. I saw it described variously as 50 miles, 64 miles.

I ride my bike sometimes on Saturdays too. Fifteen is a good Saturday for me, a really good Saturday. So this guy—and he’s 67 years old—so he’s in some kind of shape. And he was an Olympic athlete. I doubt he’s stealing pieces.

He said this piece of the rubberized liner was partially detached and he reached into the Reflecting Pool just to see how it felt. And the next thing he knew, he said, he was in handcuffs.

He also had the misfortune of this right-wing journalist named Emily Miller, who’s gone back and forth between One America News and The Washington Times and local Fox over the years, happened to be there, I guess, and videotaped him and maybe showed it to park police or something like that. I don’t know. It’s all, as you say, very opaque.

And why these people are being arrested—it’s just not clear yet. As far as I know, talking on Monday afternoon, the park police and the Department of the Interior haven’t commented on these arrests.

Sargent: Amazing. And CBS reports that one of the people arrested was the same individual who Trump accused in one of his tweets of using a knife to carve a 250-foot gash into the facade. Mike, 250 feet is nearly the length of a football field. And the choice of the 250 number sure sounds suspiciously like an echo of the 250th anniversary that this Reflecting Pool is supposed to be a part of. So it sort of seems like maybe that number was rattling around in Trump’s head or something.

Now, again, maybe someone did do this. I can’t seem to find evidence of it. But does it seem likely to you that someone would try to carve something that long into the facade—like a 250-foot-long line?

Tomasky: No, it doesn’t seem likely, but you never know. I could believe that there are people who aren’t fans of Trump out there who might vandalize this thing because it’s become such a symbol to him. I can believe that. But if that’s true, tell us. Show us the evidence. Give us the names and tell us what they did.

I don’t support people damaging federal government property, especially historic landmarks like that. I’m sure you don’t either. I’m sure nobody listening to us does. If somebody did that, arrest them, charge them, prosecute them, sic Jeanine Pirro on them. But show us the evidence first.

And so when Trump tweets over the weekend about vandals, I’m sorry—the man has been known to make things up from time to time. And so we’re going to regard that skeptically until there’s evidence.

Sargent: So Trump is getting angrier about the situation in a series of tweets. On Friday, he tweeted that, “Lightweight ABC reporter Jonathan Karl was seen sticking his hand into the pool and trying to rip the rubber off of the surface.” Jonathan Karl had merely been reporting on this whole fiasco.

Trump also raged that the “radical left lunatics, most likely Dumocrats who have spent their lives trying to ruin this country”—he basically said they were more or less responsible for this thing in some sense.

And then on Saturday, he tweeted that “disgraceful vandalism” has marred the project, calling this an affront to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, while characterizing his handling of the whole thing as impeccably perfect.

One more tweet—on Monday, he said the only project of his that’s been vandalized is the Reflecting Pool. And then he talked about a “300 foot long gash” carved by vandals. So it’s apparently gotten 50 feet longer.

Mike, Trump really seems to be spiraling downwards with this stuff. What do you make of it?

Tomasky: He really is. And it’s just such a perfect Trumpy obsession. It’s a minor thing that to him is a very major thing because it’s about his self-image, his self-regard, his monstrous yet very fragile ego. All these things that he puts on display before us, the American people, constantly every day—about how he’s going to destroy a civilization, about how ICE is doing a magnificent job, about how all his enemies belong in jail, about the personal vendettas that he’s pursuing through the office of the presidency, which are totally inappropriate and completely impeachable offenses.

All of these things are just about his ego, again, which is huge, as we all know. But what’s important here is the fragility of it. And that’s why he gets so defensive. And that’s how a gash grows from 250 feet to 300 feet. The Reflecting Pool, I believe, is about 600 feet long. So if he ever posts that it was a 700-foot gash, then we’ll know that couldn’t possibly happen—unless maybe the person went up and back. This is just his psychodrama that is bananas.

It’s the same thing at work when we watch those Cabinet meetings and they go around the Cabinet table and they all have to offer praise of him, each more effusive than the last, each saying, no, you deserve two Nobel Prizes. No, three Nobel Prizes. Four Nobel Prizes and two Pulitzers, sir.

It’s just a preposterous situation to be in in a democratic country. And this is the point I’d like to make. This is the kind of thing that happens in dictatorships. It’s not supposed to happen in a democratic country, in a democratic republic. We’re not supposed to have this kind of a leader who is so fragile and breakable.

We’re supposed to have processes that are democratic, that give people input into what’s going to happen with the eastern side of the White House, that give people input into the renaming of a venerated cultural institution that’s been here in the nation’s capital for 60 years.

The people are supposed to have input into these things. And they’re supposed to go through processes. And yes, experts, the much-reviled experts, are supposed to be able to weigh in on this stuff.

But Trump, of course, knows better than everybody. And that’s just not a small-d democratic impulse or way to go about doing things.

Sargent: Yeah, and I think your piece got at that really well, the larger importance of this whole thing. And I just want to flag for people—what was really telling to me was the way Trump talked about the project. I forget at which event it was, but he was essentially talking about the contractors on the project in almost precisely the same tone and with the same posture that he would about one of his own real estate projects.

And I think that’s the essence of this, which is that Donald Trump doesn’t get on some very basic level that this stuff is not his. This is not an imperial capital. It is the capital of a republic. And as a result, he doesn’t own this stuff. He is a steward of it, a temporary steward. And as you say, there are processes. But in a way, this whole story shows somebody trying to dispense with that larger idea.

Tomasky: Right. He wants to be the czar. That’s probably the best historical analogy that we can come up with. I went to St. Petersburg once in June. And it was like 50 degrees there anyway. And I walked around the Hermitage, which of course is beautiful and magnificent, the art and all that stuff. But I also walked around that place thinking—I asked my tour guide, I said, how many people lived here? And she said, six. The czar and his family.

And it was as gilt-edged in gold as the Oval Office now is. But that’s how Trump thinks of himself. And that’s what he wants to be. He wants to be a czar. And that’s what all these things that he’s trying to do to Washington prove. And it’s really very, very distasteful.

And by the way, I only mentioned this very quickly and you just alluded to it, but we should spend a little bit more time dwelling on the no-bid aspect of these contracts. That’s sewer corruption. That’s just basic corruption 101. You can’t do that. You can’t let out no-bid contracts.

One of them was, ironically, to a place called Greenwater, which is really funny. That’s the Gafaro guy from Ohio. Then the other one was the swimming pool people from Virginia who did the pool at his golf club in Virginia. But these were both no-bid contracts.

And one of the two, I think the first one—David Fahrenthold of The New York Times reported, he’s so good at this sort of thing—is charging a 20 percent profit margin into their contract when the normal profit margins on this kind of work for the federal government are six to 12 percent. But they just padded it, and the guy’s a donor of Trump’s, a donor and a neighbor in Palm Beach, and he just padded it up to 20 percent and got the contract without any competitive bidding.

That alone is an impeachable offense right there. Boom. There’s just no question about it. I don’t know, what are they going to—if the Democrats take the House, what are they going to impeach him on? I mean, there’s 46 possibilities.

Sargent: Right. And your piece really made the point very well that if this were just an ordinary moment, that would be a huge scandal. But since we’re in this really extraordinary moment, it isn’t.

I want to close on this thought, which kind of pulls all this together, I hope. One of the consistent things in the reporting here has been that many people are just stopping by the Reflecting Pool to look at the algae and the peeling paint, to almost marvel at the spectacle of it. And you did that too, right? You stopped by and marveled at the spectacle of it.

And I think for a lot of people, what they’re actually marveling at is what Trump has done to our country—how all this didn’t have to happen, how it’s all just rooted in megalomania and incompetence and corruption and derangement.

I strongly suspect that this story, the Reflecting Pool, just like the ballroom, has immense symbolic importance to ordinary people in a way that we still haven’t gotten our heads around. And I just wanted you to talk a little bit about that.

Tomasky: The day I rode my bike down there, I took a couple photographs of it just for my own amusement. I posted one on Facebook and I said, well, this looks pretty green to me—something kind of offhanded.

I post political-ish things on my Facebook feed from time to time. And it’s interesting because it’s not my New Republic readership. This is old high school friends, many of whom are MAGA, many of whom have politics basically like mine. So it’s a mix and I get to see a mix.

Usually when I post a political kind of thing on Facebook, 50 people either give it a like or have some kind of comment. Seventy, 80 people. This one—the last time I looked—870 responses.

Sargent: I really do think it has that sort of importance for people. It really represents this presidency and what’s happening to this country under this presidency, don’t you think?

Tomasky: Yeah, it really does. And it’s just such an emotionally potent symbol for people. Most people have been to Washington when they were in eighth grade, or later they brought their families here. And you’re sitting there right in the shadow of the beautiful, tasteful, grand but not opulent or self-regarding memorial to our greatest president—and I mean Lincoln. The Washington Monument is up the way, but it’s a little farther away.

Yeah, to our greatest president and to a very humble man, and to a man who probably, if he could come back, would say, you built that for me? Why? Donald Trump will want something three times that size. As indeed the arch—it’s not quite three times, but the Lincoln Memorial is about 130 feet high at its peak and this arch is twice that.

So yeah, this is really important. And it’s why—and to conclude on a point that you often make in your writing and podcasting—this is why Democrats shouldn’t just let this one slide and just talk about affordability or whatever. No, you can walk and chew gum, Democrats. Talk about this stuff. People care.

Sargent: People really care about it. And just to underscore the point one last time, I really wonder whether this sort of thing—the tearing down of the East Wing of the White House, the piles of rubble that are on everybody’s phones all across the country, the kind of viral nature of this imagery, the viral nature of the imagery of the algae in the Reflecting Pool—I do wonder whether people are sort of in some deep sense reconsidering republican, small-r republican governance and saying to themselves, that thing was pretty cool that we’ve lost.

Do you think that’s maybe going on? Do you think that’s what’s happening?

Tomasky: I hope so. I don’t know, but I hope so. Twenty-five percent of the country is always going to support him no matter what, maybe 30, maybe a little more. But I’d like to think that the people whose politics aren’t like yours and mine, but people who aren’t terribly political, have enough of a civic impulse running through them that this bothers them. And that even if they can’t quite exactly articulate to themselves why, they know something about this isn’t right—this isn’t how stuff’s supposed to go down in the United States of America. I think they do. Enough of them anyway.

Sargent: Really well said, Michael Tomasky. It was a pleasure having you on. Folks, if you want to read what Mike wrote about this—and you should—the piece is up at NewRepublic.com. It’s called “Vandalism at the Reflecting Pool? Yes, It Was Committed by Donald Trump.” Well said, Mike. Thanks for coming on.

Tomasky: Enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.

Donald Trump’s renovation of the Reflecting Pool is a major fiasco, and it’s getting him angrier. In Truth Social posts, he raged at a journalist for covering the story. He fulminated that vandals had cut at 250-foot gash in the facade (which is entirely unverified). He hailed multiple arrests at the scene. He even angrily threatened 10 years in jail. Yet these arrests are only growing more questionable. One man detained is a 67-year-old former Olympian who said he just wanted to examine the peeling coating. Another person detained said she was merely pulling a piece of paint out of the water. These explanations, plus the tenuousness of Trump’s claims of vandalism, suggest a darker turn in the story. We talked to New Republic editor Michael Tomasky about his good piece on this whole mess. We discuss why Trump doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt on the arrests, why this story has deeper resonance for many ordinary people, and what it captures about Trump’s effort to destroy republican governance and turn Washington into an imperial capital, with himself in the role of “czar.” (After we recorded, Trump kept on raging.) Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

As the political climate gets increasingly noxious for President Donald Trump and his captured Republican Party, it’s becoming clearer that Democrats are favored to retake the House this November. The Senate is a tougher lift, but it’s no longer just in play. Democrats may now be the slightest of favorites to win it. That is a remarkable state of affairs. Democrats are operating on largely…

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A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. Republicans only like an Iran deal if Trump’s name is attached It’s amazing how opinions change depending on who introduces the deal. Why Republicans suck at being patriotic Patriotism is about a lot more than just being strong and powerful.

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A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | MAGA kooks are drowning in dirty reflecting pool conspiracies…

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Like the Strait of Hormuz, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has exposed the limits of the power of the United States of America: President Donald Trump is also losing his war against algae.

In the face of thriving algal blooms and peeling “American flag blue” paint, the National Park Service on Monday began draining the pool for repairs. A contractor performing the work told E&E News that those repairs would not be done by July 4. The prior rehab, which Trump rushed to complete via no-bid contracts and more than $14 million in spending so far, has failed.

Trump, though, has blamed the problems on vandalism. And he has dispatched a hodgepodge army of law enforcement to protect the pool from “Radical Left Lunatics,” who he has said should face “Years in jail!”

Observing the action at the pool over much of the long weekend, we did not spot any antifa dumping algae, as MAGA conspiracy theorists allege. The hot temperature, shallow water and flawed filtration system means the green Scenedesmus algae can conquer the pool without human help.

There were, however, lots of cops. Walking around the pool at about 4 p.m. ET on Saturday, we counted at least seven US Marshals, some in “fugitive task force” tactical gear. They were supported by around 30 local police officers, volunteers who said they had been deputized for 30 days by the Marshals Service to help provide security for 250th anniversary celebrations. They came from Oklahoma City; Idaho Falls; Sarpy County, Nebraska; as well as Ontario, Wayne and Monroe counties in New York. They were mostly standing in the shade, and friendly. Some were hoping to catch Nationals game on a day off. They seemed sort of bored.

The cops were coordinating with a handful of Park Police officers and maybe a dozen National Guard troops from Georgia and Louisiana, who were patrolling the pool in small groups. Over the last few days, agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have also appeared poolside.

On Saturday, there were issues with radio frequency connections, so a mounted Park Police officer rode a white horse between groups of officers to share information on potential threats to the pool. He was less chatty than the volunteer officers, but he said that the horse’s name was Delilah, and that she was 21 years old.

The officers explained that visitors could take paint chips, but peeling paint still attached was forbidden.

In the pool, seven or so Park Service employees, wearing boots, waterproof overalls and NPS hoodies for the sun—it was about 86 degrees and sunny—were vacuuming up algae using pumps attached to long poles. (They had by then given up pouring in hydrogen peroxide.) Machines were pushing what looked like white foam into the water: the “high-tech nanobubble ozone technology” that the administration has claimed would kill the algae. Generators powering the pumps hummed loudly as green-tinted water poured out into drains on the Mall.

Another dozen or so uniformed Park Service employees looked on from the shade. On the north side of the pool, a duck and eight ducklings sat on the edge of the water. A park ranger sitting nearby said neither the algae nor cleaning efforts would hurt them.

From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, tourists took pictures of the scene. A band, in traditional Polish garb, prepared to play folk music for a holiday marking the summer solstice. A tourist shop nearby sold $18 water bottles with stickers advertising Freedom 250, the semi-private group Trump is using to organize highly personal celebrations linked to the 250th anniversary.

By the pool, a person in a pink frog costume brandished a “Team Algae” sign and heckled two National Guard troops. “Let’s go algae, let’s go,” the frog chanted, along with something about “pond scum.”

A small boy, in an ice cream cone shirt, asked his mother if the critics were protesting the algae. “No,” she answered. “They’re mad at the president.”

“Did he mean to grow the algae?” the boy asked. “No,” she said. Then they went to get ice cream.

Near one of the drains, an older couple, maybe in their sixties, picked through the grass nearby for loose pieces of blue paint, having first checked with the Park Police that doing so was permissible.  

The officers explained that visitors were allowed to put their hands in the water. They could even take paint chips that were already detached. But peeling the paint still attached to the pool was forbidden.

The administration said Monday that Park Police have made five arrests and issued five citations for alleged vandalism. But an officer on the scene Friday evening said that they had also detained more than 20 people, in many cases without further action, for suspected pool tampering.

On Sunday afternoon, Trump posted that he had “just inspected the pool” and decried the vandalism he said he observed.

“WOW, who would do such a thing?,” Trump wrote. “SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE!”

The president, though, didn’t view the pool from the ground. He appears to have formed his impression from a helicopter as he returned to the White House from Camp David.

Down below, one of the ducklings was photographed floating dead in water. (Experts note that most ducklings in the wild die before reaching maturity, so it’s not clear whether the algae or chemicals used to clean the pool were to blame.)

On Saturday around 5:30 p.m., the radios of the marshals we were walking past barked. “One male, black shoes, white socks, currently being detained,” someone said. “Eleven Charlie moved to intercept.” Two officers sped away in a golf cart.

Across the pool, Delilah galloped toward a group of National Guard troops surrounding a young man, in white socks, seated with his ankles crossed on the grass by the north side of the pool. A Park Police cruiser, siren on, pulled up.

By the time we made it around, a half dozen of the local police, seven National Guard troops and a couple Park Police officers surrounded the suspected vandal in a semi-circle, facing a small crowd of onlookers.

After a few minutes, they let the guy go. He declined to give his name. But he said he was from Indiana, and that he had stuck his hand in the water and pulled out a piece of floating paint. The officers had suspected that he pulled it off. He received a citation, he said. He walked off with his family, looking embarrassed.

The cops dispersed. There was a big pile of poop where Delilah had stood. In the water, the feds kept vacuuming the algae.

The administration’s efforts to force states to let President Donald Trump control elections keep getting shot down by courts unwilling to warp the Constitution to grant Trump’s wishes, so it’s changing tactics. If they can’t win on the law, they’ll win with the purse strings and illegally withhold money from states that won’t comply with Trump’s conspiracy-addled demands.

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On the morning of Father’s Day, seven cars of ICE agents barreled through Santa Barbara, California, and detained anywhere from nine to 11 people, including one U.S. citizen.

The Santa Barbara Independent reported that three of the people detained were mariachi musicians, according to a spokesperson for an activist group that had been following the agents. The musicians may have been in the act of serenading fathers as part of a Mexican immigrant Father’s Day tradition, or on their way to do so.

As part of the action, ICE agents reportedly detained a U.S. citizen before releasing him at a nearby hospital. They also bear-sprayed a woman who was part of an ICE-monitoring organization through the rear window of her car.

Activists trailing ICE said that the agents didn’t just arrest people in the city but also sped down the streets in the early morning, and did donuts with their cars under the highway for 15 minutes. When they got on the freeway, the activists reported that the agents were going over 100 miles an hour.

Meanwhile, the Santa Barbara police chief, Kelly Gordon, had no idea ICE was in town. “We didn’t have any calls for service from 1 a.m. that were remotely close to what was being alleged on the Westside,” she said.

Planned Parenthood is on the path to having its funding restored thanks to Republican chaos in Congress.

The nonprofit health care organization could regain access to federal funds as soon as July 4, exactly one year after the Senate parliamentarian allowed Republicans to pass a one-year ban on national funding for the program, NOTUS reported Monday.

Amid all the chaos related to the Iran war, economic fallout, severed alliances over Trump’s midterm election endorsements, and a lapsed federal spy bill, Republicans have been unable to galvanize their party to vote to extend the limited ban.

“I think at this point, it’d be unlikely,” Montana Senator Steve Daines told NOTUS.

One possible pathway to advancing the anti-abortion agenda item would be to find a vehicle such as a third reconciliation bill to pass the ban, though Daines recognized that such bills are “hard to pass.”

Anti-abortion groups are pushing GOP lawmakers to find a way to pass a reconciliation bill regardless.

“Budget reconciliation remains the only viable legislative path to continuing to defund Big Abortion businesses like Planned Parenthood,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, wrote in a letter to Senate Republicans last week.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has signaled that he intends to push for a third reconciliation bill in the near future, even as other top Republicans reject the idea. Senators Mitch McConnell and Susan Collins have already said they don’t see it happening.

“I think it’s safe to conclude there will not be another reconciliation bill,” McConnell, the chair of the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, said during a hearing earlier this month.

Louisiana Senator John Kennedy also said he didn’t believe a third round of budgetary efforts would garner much support from the party, considering the difficulty the party faced during attempts to muster a second bill. “It’s not looking real good,” he told reporters.

Planned Parenthood is the nation’s largest abortion provider, but that’s not the only service it offers. The nonprofit provides critical services such as physicals, cancer screenings, STI testing, and birth control access, and it does not use public funds to provide abortion care. Performing abortions with federal funds is already illegal based on the parameters set by the Hyde Amendment, which became law in 1976.

More states are pulling out of President Trump’s “Great American State Fair,” citing financial constraints.

Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon, and North Carolina—the last of which Trump won in 2024—have each declined to send a representative to the festival, which is supposed to feature a 600-square-foot themed booth on the National Mall for each state and kick off on Thursday with sixteen days of festivities. The six states all have Democratic governors.

“Given the significant costs associated with participating in the Great American State Fair, we chose to focus on supporting local efforts here in Washington state for this very important commemoration,” Washington Lieutenant Governor Denny Heck told The Hill. Fair organizer Freedom 250 has claimed that there are no cost requirements per state.

Luke Harkins, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek’s press secretary, pointed to “growing concerns that the event in Washington, D.C., is shaping up to be a more partisan affair than originally presented.” And Massachusetts Governor Maura Healy proclaimed that “everybody’s bailing on” Trump’s fair. Fellow blue states California, Colorado, and New York will be present.

This Freedom 250 festival has been a mess from the beginning, and it really hasn’t even gotten started. From the first wave of announced performers pulling out, to entire states, it’s becoming less and less clear what this event will even look like. Nevertheless, Trump is insisting that the show must go on.

“On July 4th, at The Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, in beautiful and safe Washington D.C., we are going to host the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all, a ‘TRIBUTE TO AMERICA,’” Trump wrote on Truth Social last week. “Starting at 7 P.M. EST, this HUGE Celebration will honor our Country’s People, Spirit, Strength, Resolve, and Triumphs. With the backdrop of the Lincoln Memorial and surrounding the beautifully new Reflecting Pool, more than 300 Members of our strong and talented Military Bands, Orchestras, and Ceremonial Units, will perform Patriotic Melodies and American Classics, and my Playlist.”

President Donald Trump’s approval rating is nearing doomsday levels for the GOP, with the pollster American Research Group on Monday releasing a survey showing just 30% of Americans approve of the job he’s doing in office. It’s difficult to put into words just how bad things have to get in this polarized political climate for a president to reach 30% approval. To get that low it means you’re…

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A federal judge has blocked the Department of Homeland Security from continuing to “haphazardly” create a database of millions of Americans it knew was “inaccurate” in order to purge noncitizens from voter rolls.

U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan on Monday sided with the League of Women Voters, who’d challenged Trump’s directive to expand the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.

In order to update the SAVE database, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services obtained Americans’ Social Security numbers from the Department of Government Efficiency—where some employees were accused of misusing Americans’ sensitive information—and combined it with citizenship data that “they knew to be unreliable,” Sooknanan wrote.

“Since then, states have partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information,” she wrote in a 75-page ruling. “All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”

Sooknanan ruled that the Trump administration had violated protections enshrined in the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedures Act.

Since SAVE was updated, numerous voters have been falsely declared noncitizens, threatened with removal from voter registration rolls, and in some cases, referred to the DHS for possible criminal investigations. Sooknanan found that these misidentifications qualified as, at the very least, “a lesser form” of defamation, and said the administration’s arguments to the contrary “border on absurd.”

Despite Vice President JD Vance’s claims, Iran’s state media says it will not allow nuclear inspectors into the country, complicating the agreement made between the U.S. and Iran.

“The US Vice President’s claim regarding the return of [International Atomic Energy Agency] inspectors to Iran is false.… In the Swiss negotiations, there was no discussion about the presence of inspectors in the country,” an X post from the state-affiliated Fars News Agency said in Farsi on Monday, citing an unnamed “informed source.”

Earlier on Monday, Vance announced that as part of the ongoing peace talks between Iran and the U.S., Iran would allow IAEA inspectors back into the country for the first time since July 2025. Iran suspended cooperation with the agency after the U.S. bombed its nuclear enrichment facilities.

Alongside the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, allowing IAEA inspectors into Iran was a condition of the peace deal, according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. In exchange, the U.S. planned to temporarily lift sanctions on Iranian oil.

“In line with the ongoing productive talks in Switzerland, Iran has committed to free and open transit in the Strait of Hormuz and to permit International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors into their country,” Bessent posted on X Monday morning. “As part of the framework, Treasury has issued a temporary 60-day general license authorizing the production, delivery, and sale of Iranian oil.”

However, the White House and Tehran don’t seem to be on the same page. According to the “informed source,” inspectors were never on the table as part of the negotiations. Meanwhile, Iran may soon be able to finally reap the benefits of selling its oil at market price after years of U.S. sanctions.

This deal was already pretty sweet for Iran—but if it doesn’t have to let inspectors in, it’s even more unbalanced. Isn’t it great to have such an accomplished dealmaker as president?

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche really, REALLY doesn’t want to put it in writing that the slush fund is dead. He won’t put it in writing for Congress, and he won’t put it in writing for the federal court handling one of the cases challenging the fund. Why not? Well, you see, there’s simply no need! Per the Department of Justice, the court can just look at Blanche’s congressional…

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The White House has insisted that acquiring Greenland is necessary for America’s national security—but it seems that some Trump officials believe it would primarily benefit American seafood buffets.

A Trump official and Texas venture capitalist, Thomas Dans, was identified by the Danish government as one of three Americans running private “influence operations” in Greenland, according to The New Yorker. (Dans is the twin brother of Project 2025 author Paul Dans.)

Dans was appointed by Trump in December to serve as the chair of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, a federal agency founded in 1984 to establish national policy as it relates to scientific advancement in the Arctic. Dans had previously held the position during Trump’s first term, as well.

In 2024, Dans founded American Daybreak, a nonprofit promoting U.S. business abroad. He continues to run the nonprofit, according to his LinkedIn profile, and has leveraged both positions to venture to Greenland numerous times.

But the take that Dans offered The New Yorker regarding the proposed foreign takeover was less than inspiring. In a predominantly off-the-record interview, Dans offered the potential commercial benefits to seafood franchises like Red Lobster as the primary reason to take over Greenland.

“My view is that the United States could take all the seafood Greenland could produce, and cut out the middleman, and keep it from China—and you could bring back all-you-can-eat shrimp at Red Lobster,” Dans said.

Dans has been a significant fixture in MAGA world’s Greenland agenda since before Trump returned to power. He was the organizer of a “tourism trip” that sent Donald Trump Jr., far-right political pundit Charlie Kirk, and Trump administration staffer Sergio Gor to the island in January 2025, according to an analysis by Responsible Statecraft. That trek ended in several humiliating revelations, including reports from local media that Trump Jr. reportedly convinced homeless residents to wear MAGA merchandise in exchange for food.

Two months later, in March, when Greenlandic outrage stumped his efforts to send Usha Vance to a dogsled race in Sisimiut, Dans was irate.

“American Daybreak, and I personally, were very disappointed by the negative and hostile reaction—fanned by often false press reports—to the United States supporting Greenland and hoping to learn about its culture, tradition, and people,” Dans wrote in an extended missive on X at the time. “These press stories and Greenlandic officials’ overreaction are harmful to the strong relationship, based on mutual respect, shared interest, and courtesy, that the United States has long enjoyed with Greenland and hopes to expand upon.”

Days later, Greenland’s various political parties set aside their differences to unite under a singular goal: opposing U.S. aggression.

A federal judge has killed the Trump administration’s attempt to subpoena Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and other state leaders, finding that the Justice Department used the subpoena to force them to capitulate to their demands regarding Operation Metro Surge in January—which saw federal agents kill two American citizens, Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

“Initiating a criminal investigation in order to harass political opponents or to coerce them into taking official action-particularly official action that the federal government cannot directly require those political opponents to take-is a blatantly unlawful and unethical use of the grand-jury process,” Judge Patrick Schiltz wrote. “The only question, then, is whether the challenged subpoenas were issued for one of these forbidden purposes. The Court has no doubt that they were. On the other hand, the Department has struggled—without success—to identify a single plausible investigatory justification for the subpoenas.”

Walz, Frey, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her were each subpoenaed in January on the grounds that they were impeding federal agents from doing their jobs. The subpoenas also accompanied weeks of vitriolic rhetoric from the administration regarding Somali-Americans and immigrants.

“Today’s ruling is a victory for the rule of law and our democracy. A federal district judge found that the U.S. Department of Justice’s investigation into me and other Minnesota elected officials was politically motivated, unconstitutional, and meritless,” Walz wrote on X after the news. “The U.S. Justice Department is pursuing criminal investigations into the President’s political opponents. This case was just one example of that, but we are seeing daily reminders of this administration’s lawlessness - in Minnesota and around the country. We all must continue to seek justice and uphold the rule of law. I will never stop exercising my constitutional rights to stand up for Minnesotans and the American freedoms that we hold dear.”

“Subpoenaing political opponents because they spoke on behalf of their constituents violates the core tenets of our democracy and human decency,” said Frey.

The Trump administration has yet to respond to Judge Schlitz’s ruling.