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The Department of Homeland Security has proposed a massive increase in citizenship application fees as the Trump administration’s latest move to upend legal immigration. 

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services proposed a rule Monday that would raise the fee for a paper citizenship application by 75 percent from $760 to $1,330, and the fee for an online application by 80 percent from $710 to $1,280, according to Newsweek. 

The proposed rule would also make it more expensive to seek a hearing challenging a denied naturalization. If adopted, the rule would raise the fee for an appeal from $830 to $1,475 by paper, and $780 to $1,425 online. 

Under the proposed rule, the government would scrap fee waivers and a reduced fee option for individuals experiencing financial hardship. The changes would present a significant financial hurdle for lower-income immigrants, further transforming legal immigration into a privilege for the extremely wealthy and a money-making scheme for the federal government. 

This proposed rule is yet another way the Trump administration is attempting to curb legal immigration. The government has already stacked the deck with immigration judges bent on denying asylum claims, curbed the refugee program, and imposed steep price increases on H-1B visas.   

By Anna Maria Barry-Jester for ProPublica After the Trump administration upended the world’s largest foreign aid provider last year, terminating thousands of programs and firing nearly all of its staff, its plan for the agency was clear: Eliminate it entirely. But because it is a congressionally created agency, President Donald Trump needed lawmakers’ permission to do so.

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A federal judge has blocked an attempt by the Trump administration to subpoena Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and other state officials, calling it an effort to “harass and retaliate against them.” In a ruling unsealed Monday, U.S. District Judge Patrick Schlitz found the “dominant purpose” of the subpoenas was to “coerce Minnesota officials into assisting the federal government with enforcing civil…

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President Donald Trump has struck out nine times in court in his quest to obtain voter registration data from states, reports Democracy Docket.

On Thursday, a federal judge threw out the Department of Justice’s lawsuit seeking voter data from Maryland.

“This Court joins every court to have addressed this issue in concluding that an [statewide voter registration list] is not a record or paper that a state must produce to the United States under the CRA,” District Judge Stephanie Gallagher wrote in the ruling.

The DOJ’s quest to weaponize voter registration data as part of its immigration crackdown has not been going too well. So far, it has not prevailed in a single case: The suits have been dismissed in California, Oregon, Michigan, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Arizona, Wisconsin, Maine, and now Maryland.

And these dismissals aren’t just coming from Democratic-appointed judges. Five of the nine judges were appointed or renominated by Trump, including Gallagher.

The DOJ could still see a victory: It has sued 31 states and Washington, D.C. Outside of lawsuits, the DOJ has sent letters to all states asking for their voter rolls. At least 16 Republican-led states have complied, according to Democracy Docket.

The administration’s quest for complete, uncensored voter data is chilling—especially because they won’t provide a legitimate reason for this federal overreach, although some reporting hints at their plans. Over the course of the Maryland lawsuit, DOJ officials refused to answer the judge’s questions about what the agency planned to do with the data.

The Trump administration is holding millions of dollars of Homeland Security funds hostage unless states agree to stop using electronic ballots and prove voters are citizens before they vote, CNN reports.

Trump is demanding that states carry out manual election audits at the administration’s direction, use their preferred system to verify citizenship, and promise to gradually end the use of electronic ballots—all things that could lead to actual voter fraud. States that rebuff Trump would lose 20 percent of their grants, which could be millions of dollars in security funds.

These grants help states prevent terrorist attacks, support infrastructure, and ready themselves for natural disasters. DHS has granted this funding to states for years, no questions asked.

But now, as the president approaches a potentially disastrous midterm, this funding is contingent on state governments completely changing their election apparatuses so that Trump can continue to delegitimize factual polling and push his baseless claims of voter fraud. This isn’t the first time the Trump administration has dangled funding above states’ heads to make them capitulate to its agenda, and it likely won’t be the last.

“I expect [the new requirements] will be blocked in the courts,” former Justice Department lawyer David Becker told CNN.

It’s the latter half of June, which means everyone is bracing for disaster, thanks to the Supreme Court saving all the big cases for the end of the term. This year, they’ve sat on a lot of them, though they do this so often now that having 17 cases remaining is actually lower than previous years. Two opinions issued last Thursday weren’t ones everyone is waiting on with a mixture of worry…

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A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | What do inflation and Iran have in common? Trump screwing up.

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Former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard may have been taking orders on political decisions from Chris Butler, the leader of a group many former members have called a cult, according to a new investigation from The Washington Post.

So far, Gabbard’s allies in the Trump administration have been largely silent about the report that the person they placed in charge of the CIA, FBI, and NSA may have been taking directives from a man many former followers view as a cult leader.

As Gabbard is no longer a part of the Trump administration, perhaps her former colleagues feel no pressure to weigh in. But conservative commentator Meghan McCain defended Gabbard on X Sunday afternoon.

“What absolute unpatriotic vile trash this attack on @TulsiGabbard is. They wont cover her releases on Fauci or bio labs—both things that threaten the safety and wellbeing of the American people, but spend time and space vomiting this washed up nonsense anti-Hindu bigoted crap,” McCain wrote, referring to Gabbard’s release of documents “exposing” Dr. Anthony Fauci for supposed actions taken during the Covid-19 pandemic on Friday, her last day on the job.

Reporter Jon Swaine gained access to a trove of emails that appeared to show memos from someone within the Science of Identity Foundation, or SIF, directing Gabbard during her time in Congress. When Swaine compared the directives to Tulsi’s voting record, legislative proposals, and media statements, he found “unmistakable parallels.”

Butler’s followers practice a form of Hinduism known as Hare Krishna, and his politics when he founded SIF did not belong squarely in one political camp: “He inveighed against Muslims, homosexuality, gun control and public schools, but also promoted environmentalism and anti-capitalism,” the Post reported.

After two months with no answers from Gabbard’s office, Swaine informed Gabbard that he would be proceeding with the story. Two days later, Fox News reported that Gabbard would be stepping down from her position as director of national intelligence.

On her last days in office, a spokesperson gave a statement: “The attacks on Director Gabbard’s faith and loyalty are not only false—they are a blatant example of anti-Hindu bigotry.”

Anyone caught tampering with Donald Trump’s Washington-area restoration projects could be on the hook for significant prison time.

The president warned against vandalizing the monuments and statues that his administration has been trying to clean ahead of America’s 250th anniversary. In a Truth Social post, Trump pledged that anyone caught will face up to 10 years in prison.

“Please remember that there is a 10 year prison sentence for the destruction, or even the attempted destruction, of such things—Which will be fully enforced!” Trump wrote Monday.

Federal law already stipulates that damage to federal property exceeding $1,000 is classified as a felony. As such, the penalties are steep, possibly including a significant fine, a prison sentence of up to 10 years, or both. Those charged with damaging federal property to the tune of less than $1,000 could face a misdemeanor and a one-year prison sentence.

At least five people have been arrested for allegedly vandalizing the pool as of Saturday night, a Trump administration official told CBS News. Five citations were also issued, bringing the grand total of post-renovation citations issued at the site to 14.

In the same message, Trump claimed that the lining of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool had suffered a “300 foot long gash”—an inexplicable jump from the 250-foot-long damage he described Saturday.

He added that “chemicals have been illegally placed in the water” and complained about the “8647” etched into the National Mall. He further suggested that the damage was “probably inspired by Dirty Cop, James Comey,” who was indicted by a federal grand jury in April for sharing a photo of seashells to his Instagram account that similarly spelled out “8647,” a tagline that Trump and his allies have claimed insinuates a desire for Trump’s death.

Trump’s Treasury Department says that Iran can now sell oil, stripping decades of U.S. sanctions policy in one fell swoop—and it’s not clear that the United States is getting anything in return.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Monday that the U.S. had issued a “temporary 60-day general license authorizing the production, delivery, and sale of Iranian oil,” in return for the country’s commitments to maintaining “free and open transit” in the Strait of Hormuz and admitting inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The sanctions waiver allows Iran to sell its oil at market rate, after decades of having to sell it at a reduced price to buyers willing to dodge U.S. sanctions. Shockingly, the license also allows U.S. refineries to import Iranian oil—reversing more than 40 years of strict sanctions, and giving Iran’s economy a much-needed boost.

Sanctions relief is a key component in the 14-point memorandum of understanding between the two countries. Iran has yet to actually deliver on any of its promises, however.

Over the weekend, the Iranian military briefly shuttered trade through the Strait of Hormuz, citing Israel’s continued ceasefire violations in Lebanon. While Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi announced that mediators delivered “major progress” to end the fighting in Lebanon, neither Hezbollah nor Israel are actual signatories to the U.S.-Iran peace deal. It’s still unclear how that conflict will resolve, meaning the future of the entire agreement, and the strait, remains unclear.

As for visits from IAEA inspectors, the memorandum of understanding asserts that Iran will commit to “down-blending” its enriched nuclear material under the agency’s supervision, but details on that process have been scarce. Notably, the supposedly major milestone is something the U.S. had already won—and then lost under Trump.

Outbound Senator John Cornyn is getting candid about Donald Trump.

The former GOP whip described the instability fueled by the White House in a Semafor interview published Monday, lamenting about how talking with the president isn’t “particularly useful” because “he can and will” flip his opinion depending on whoever he last spoke to.

“The president seems to revel in chaos, which is so different from any other leader that I’ve ever seen. I don’t know about you, but I like to minimize the chaos in my life,” Cornyn told Semafor. “He just seems to revel in it. We’ve seen even recent evidence of it on the [Director of National Intelligence].”

Cornyn was referring to Trump’s sudden cancellation of a Senate confirmation hearing for Jay Clayton—the president’s pick to run the Office of National Intelligence—via a Truth Social post mere hours before the hearing was set to take place last week.

Trump tapped Clayton earlier this month as DNI in place of acting Director Bill Pulte.

Pulte’s leadership had sparked a maelstrom in Congress. Democrats refused to renew FISA Section 702, a federal spy bill, until Pulte was replaced by someone with legitimate national security experience, as the position requires by law.

Clayton, unfortunately, does not satisfy that requirement either. The former law professor and corporate crisis management counsel has no national security experience to bring to the role.

Yet rather than quell the furor, Trump opted to make the stalemate even more difficult for his congressional allies by tacking his dead-in-the-water voter ID bill, the Save America Act, onto negotiations over the lapsed spy statute.

Cornyn has become a more vocal critic of the president since he lost his primary runoff last month to Trump’s preferred candidate, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Cornyn’s race was a gamble and a loss for the GOP: One of the party’s most prolific fundraisers, Cornyn had done much to support other Republican candidates over the course of his 24-year legislative career, bringing in more than $400 million for auxiliary races. The lost cash flow, paired with Trump’s waning popularity and dismal economic offerings, could bode poorly for the Republican Party come November.

The United States drifted further toward becoming a fascist state over the weekend, when at least five people were arrested at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, in Washington, D.C., on dubious vandalism charges. The arrests came after President Donald Trump said the problems with the Reflecting Pool, including a massive algae bloom and its peeling blue paint, were the fault of vandals…

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JD Vance blamed Iran’s “trash talk” for nearly torpedoing peace talks on Sunday, after aggressive comments from President Trump caused Iran to pause negotiations.

“What we told the Iranians yesterday is that when you guys engage in what us millennials might call ‘trash talk,’ you can’t expect the president of the United States not to respond, and not to correct the record,” Vance said on Newsmax Monday morning.

JD Vance: "What we told the Iranians yesterday is that when you guys engage in what us millennials might call trash talk, you can't expect the president of the United States not to respond and not to correct the record." (Trump threatened to assassinate Iran's negotiators… pic.twitter.com/33ruf7JNZt

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 22, 2026

As Vance met with Iran’s parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf and other Iranian officials in Switzerland, the president was firing off insults from miles away.

“Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble. If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social Sunday.

The comments were seemingly triggered by Iran’s threats to close the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israel’s continued bombing of Lebanon, which Iran claims is a violation of the 60-day ceasefire deal.

Trump told Fox News journalist Trey Yingst Sunday morning that he spoke with Iranian officials over the phone about the closure, telling them, “You close it and you won’t have a country … you won’t even make it back to your f—ing country.”

"We'll take over the rest of your country ... I'll blow the shit out of them" -- here is Trey Yingst's entire segment about the bonkers phone call he says he had with Trump this morning that apparently included threats to assassinate Iran's leadership, impose draconian US tolls… pic.twitter.com/RLi9bos14Q

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 21, 2026

In response to these comments, Iranian state media declared the talks had been paused.

“They would do better to be careful about their statements,” Qalibaf said after Trump’s comments, according to PBS. “Our armed forces are prepared to respond to them in a different manner. They may keep talking, it is we who act.”

Ultimately, Iranian negotiators did not walk away, and the talks were able to continue. Vance said the talks resulted in “a lot of good progress,” and had laid the groundwork for a final deal. But rather than acknowledge that this progress happened despite Trump’s comments, Vance blamed the Iranians for the holdup. “There was a little bit of threatening, there was a little bit of whining, but at the end of the day the talks continued and we made great progress,” he said.

Vice President JD Vance announced Monday that International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors would be allowed back into Iran in a “major milestone and a first step in permanently ending a nuclear weapons program in Iran.” There’s just one problem.

Speaking at a brief press conference about the “great progress” made in negotiations in Switzerland over the weekend, Vance offered few details about the plan for inspections of nuclear sites.

The vice president did not offer specifics on what kind of access IAEA inspectors would be granted, or how frequently their inspections would take place. He simply said that IAEA inspectors could visit Iran “this week, maybe as soon as today.” Iran has yet to confirm, according to Axios.

The 14-point memorandum of understanding doesn’t add much clarity: The agreement asserts that Iran can not produce or acquire a nuclear weapon, and that Iran will commit to “down-blending” its enriched nuclear material under the supervision of IAEA inspectors.

Vance’s supposedly major milestone is already something the U.S. had already won—then lost under Trump.

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action included the “most comprehensive and intrusive IAEA weapons inspection system ever negotiated,” according to the Center for International Policy. Trump withdrew the United States from the deal in 2018, allowing Iran to resume its enrichment program. In January 2020, Iran announced it would no longer place limits on uranium enrichment after the assassination of Qasem Soleimani at Trump’s direction.

Following the U.S. and Israel’s military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites in June 2025, the Iranian parliament passed a law suspending its cooperation with the IAEA altogether. In September, Iran agreed to allow the agency’s inspectors back into the country. Inspectors had previously visited Iran as recently as December 2025, but received limited access to the country’s nuclear sites.

It’s not even clear that Vance’s announcement was the product of the weekend’s negotiations.

Last week, U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff reportedly told U.S. lawmakers that in agreeing to the MOU, Tehran had drafted a letter inviting IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi to bring inspectors into the country.

Alan Greenspan, the jazz-playing U.S. Federal Reserve chair who was celebrated for engineering a decade of prosperity but later shared the blame for a devastating financial crisis, died Monday. He was 100. Greenspan died died from complications of Parkinson’s disease, said his wife of 29 years, NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell. “To me he was my husband, who shaped my life from our…

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Multiple images mocking President Trump and his cabinet have been projected onto walls and sidewalks in Washington, D.C., as the nation’s capital continues to reject the leadership on Pennsylvania Avenue ahead of the president’s Independence Day celebrations.

One projection near the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool depicts Senator Mitch McConnell as a turtle and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as a crocodile crawling around in a swamp. Another shows White House adviser Stephen Miller as a bat hanging from the ceiling of the Lincoln Memorial. There’s Senator Ted Cruz depicted as a sex worker wearing “Trump” underwear, Vice President JD Vance as some kind of worm, and old footage of Trump and sex predator Jeffrey Epstein together at an event.

At the Kennedy Center, a two-minute video was projected showing a mugshot of Epstein with the words “No one bends the knee like the GOP,” followed by images of Trump administration officials, including FBI Director Kash Patel, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and former Attorney General Pam Bondi labeled “guardians of pedophiles.” Another Kennedy Center projection showed the letters “Donald” being rearranged into the word “pedo.”

Did you guys see this?? There are projected images popping all over D.C. adding to the swamp theme. 🤣 pic.twitter.com/jypEeszT7y

— ᗰᗩƳᖇᗩ (@LePapillonBlu2) June 22, 2026

The guerilla art collective VJayBombs, who posted footage of the projections to its Instagram page, is said to be behind the display. The group gained attention earlier this year during Trump’s State of the Union address, when it projected a looped video satirizing the speech onto the Los Angeles Downtown Medical Center.

This isn’t the first time this term that D.C. has seen anti-Trump political art in its public spaces. The anonymous group Secret Handshake placed at least four statues around the city depicting Trump and Epstein together, and someone tried to cut “8647” into the grass on the National Mall last week.

With more than 12.7 million members across some 46,000 churches, the Southern Baptist Convention is massive. As easily the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, it’s also one of the loudest voices in American religious life—it also runs six of the nation’s 10 largest theological seminaries, which train future pastors. As Bob Smietana, a veteran religion reporter with Religion News Service, told me last week, the SBC’s sheer size “gives them some kind of clout that other people don’t have.”

Or as William Wolfe, the president of the Center for Baptist Leadership, a group that aspires to make the SBC more conservative, put it to me in a phone call this weekend, “When the Southern Baptist Convention sneezes, the whole country says, ‘Excuse me.'”

Because of the SBC’s size, it’s also extremely influential politically—which is where the Center for Baptist Leadership, which Wolfe created with a handful of fellow SBC members, comes in. “The left wants to subvert or fracture southern Baptists as a political conservative voting blocks,” he says. “We don’t want to let them do that.”

“The left wants to subvert or fracture southern Baptists as a political conservative voting blocks. We don’t want to let them do that.”

There are signs that Wolfe and his allies are succeeding. Earlier this month, when tens of thousands of representatives from SBC churches met in Orlando for the annual conference, the group voted in favor of codifying an official ban on women pastors (though most SBC churches already allow only male pastors), affirmed robust immigration enforcement, and acknowledged the United States’ history of “sins such as slavery, racism, abortion, injustice, and sexual immorality.”

The group also elected a new president, Florida pastor Willy Rice, who is theologically and politically conservative, and has railed against critical race theory and decried the “woke riptide” in the denomination. The Center for Baptist Leadership endorsed Rice for SBC president; Rice has appeared on Center for Baptist Leadership podcasts and at events hosted by the group. Shortly after the meeting, on the Center for Baptist Leadership’s podcast, the group’s president, William Wolfe, hailed Rice’s victory as “the end of the SBC being steered by weaponized empathy.”

Indeed, the SBC appears to be making a significant course correction in the form of a sharp rightward tack—a major victory for Wolfe and his small but vocal group of right-wing leaders within the SBC, some of whom have ties to an ascendant movement of self-proclaimed Christian nationalists.

Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, submits a motion regarding women pastors during the Southern Baptist Convention on June 9 in Orlando.Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP

The Center for Baptist Leadership emerged in early 2024 from what Wolfe and his colleagues see as a dangerous departure in the SBC from the conservative values—traditional family structures, clearly defined gender roles, a belief in the infallibility of the Bible—that have grounded the denomination since its founding. Over the last decade, the SBC moved toward the center, influenced by social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and the movement to expose sexual abuse and harassment.

Wolfe and his colleagues oppose SBC leaders whom they see as “caught up in the spirit of the worldly ‘MeToo’ movement, DEI ideology, and social justice signaling,” according to the group’s website. Those misguided aims, the Center for Baptist Leadership claims, have led to a scourge of problems, including women pastors, financial secrecy, and an obsession with blaming the SBC as a whole for the sex abuse scandals in individual churches, thereby bringing “perverse, anti-Christian standards of justice to judge claims of abuse.”

But it isn’t just church matters that the SBC seeks to influence—it’s also national politics, a goal that Wolfe is well qualified to achieve. As I wrote two years ago:

Wolfe served in the first Trump administration both as the deputy assistant secretary of defense and as director of House affairs at the Department of State. He is also an alumnus of Heritage Action, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, the arch-conservative think tank behind Project 2025, whose chief architect, Russell Vought, posted on X that he was “proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism.” A few months later, the Bucks County Beacon uncovered a lengthy online manifesto on the goals of Christian nationalists. The document, which listed Wolfe and Joel Webbon as contributing editors and Oklahoma Sen. Dusty Deevers as a co-author, called for “civil magistrates” to usher in “the establishment of the Ten Commandments as the foundational law of the nation.”

Wolfe told me he believes that SBC members would largely agree with those sentiments. “It’s something Baptists historically believe, that we should be involved in politics and we should be unashamed about bringing our Christian beliefs and presuppositions into the political square,” he said. He said he could imagine a version of a Christian America where people of other faiths held office, though he noted that some Baptist founders “thought that only Christians should be able to hold elected office.” On the issue of women voting, he declined to weigh in, stating only, “I think that the 19th amendment was duly enacted and is the law of the land.”

On X, where he has 96,000 followers, Wolfe is a firebrand, regularly arguing against religious tolerance and multiculturalism: “The idea that ‘all religions deserve equal respect’ is one of the most disastrous lies of the modern age,” he fumed last week. On the same day, in another tweet, he wrote, “Mass migration is biological warfare waged by secular globalist elites against the native Christian peoples of the West.”

In our phone call, Wolfe stressed that his tweets don’t necessarily reflect the work of the Center for Baptist Leadership. But he also reaffirmed his social media statements, calling religious pluralism a “recipe for disaster” and arguing that “there are people who want to see native Christian Western populations diminished and negatively impacted by third-world migration.” He said he saw Hungary as an example of a country that has successfully handled immigration. “Hungary is a spiritually dead country in many ways, but it’s preserved its Christian heritage,” he said. “It’s preserved its people—they’ve not allowed their people to be replaced by millions of migrants.”

Last year, the extremism watchdog group Right Wing Watch posted a video of Wolfe quoting a scripture passage. There are times when “even the God of peace proclaims by his providence, ‘to arms!’” he says. “If we have ever lived in a point of time in American history since then that we could argue that now is a time ‘to arms’ again, I think we are getting close.”

When I asked Wolfe what he meant by the statement about Christians being called to arms, he said it was more general than specific. “It was just sort of a basic point of Christians have been in that situation before many times throughout the centuries,” he said. “Maybe we’ll find ourselves in a position like that again.”

Wolfe isn’t the Center for Baptist Leadership’s only powerful connection to the Christian right. The fiscal sponsor of the group is American Reformer, an online magazine founded by Josh Abbotoy, an entrepreneur who also runs a venture capital firm that aims to build a Christian techno-utopian community in rural Appalachia. Abbotoy, who also serves as a visiting scholar at the Center for Baptist Leadership, told me via email that he sees the recent votes at SBC as indicative of a sea change in how Christians are beginning to relate to the broader culture. “I think we are starting to see a shift toward a cultural insurgency model,” he wrote to me, “in which evangelical leaders strategically adjust to the reality that broader society has become less amenable to Christian values.”

Michael Clary, a Kentucky pastor and Christian nationalist who serves on the advisory board of the Center for Baptist Leadership, also sees the SBC as needing a more muscular faith. In an email to me, he bemoaned a modern, excessively passive Christian culture, in thrall to a “loser theology” that demanded that the church “retreat into pietistic ghettos while we watch the world burn.” Instead, he wrote, Christians “should bring their convictions into public life, including their votes, their advocacy, and their cultural engagement.”

And there are signs that the SBC’s ties to Christian nationalists extend beyond the Center for Baptist Leadership. Consider Al Mohler, a prominent SBC leader who has served as president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky since 1993. He has witnessed decades of social change, but put forth this year’s amendment to ban women pastors. He appeared last week on the podcast of Doug Wilson, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist pastor—though not a member of the SBC—who presides over a small fiefdom in Moscow, Idaho. Mohler expressed frustration with what he considered a misconception that Baptist forefathers were “some kind of strict separationist when it came to Christian morality and the society.” Baptists, he said, actually had a lot in common with Christian nationalists like Wilson. “I have been calling for maximum Christian influence in the public square my whole life,” he said.

Smietana, the religion reporter, noted that the Center for Baptist Leadership’s contingent at the annual meeting, “didn’t have huge numbers.” The group’s budget isn’t publicly available because they exist under the financial umbrella of American Reformer, though Wolfe told me the organization is run “on a shoestring.” Still, Smietana said, “the group has really influenced the narrative and the public relations,” he said, through its social media presence, podcasts, and relationships its leaders have built with influential SBC members. The election of Rice and the other conservative victories, he said, “are a real win for them,” and a signal that the broader SBC may be open to their agenda.

Nathan Finn, a religion professor who leads the Institute for Faith and Culture at North Greenville University, a Baptist college in South Carolina, was careful not to overstate the Center for Baptist Leadership’s influence on the SBC. But he did acknowledge that it reflected a growing movement within the larger denomination toward a “populist distrust of institutions and elites.” 

The amendment that Mohler proposed to officially ban women pastors hasn’t been adopted yet; SBC leaders will hold the final vote at next year’s convention in Indianapolis. For Wolfe, this year’s meeting was confirmation of Center for Baptist Leadership’s influence—and a sign to continue the crusade. “Conservative reformers in the SBC aren’t the fringe,” he tweeted. “We are the representatives of what the broad base of grassroots Southern Baptists think & want. We are the center. Time to assume it and act accordingly.”

President Donald Trump furiously accused The New York Times of supposedly “treasonous” reporting about his disastrous peace deal with Iran.

In a series of posts on Truth Social Sunday, Trump ranted about the Times after it published an analysis of the president’s war in Iran: “What Changed After Almost 4 Months of War? Analysts Say Not Much.” The article highlighted that Trump’s deal failed to achieve any of his war’s objectives: eliminating Iran’s nuclear program, destroying its ballistic missile stockpile, annihilating Iran’s navy and security infrastructure, and installing a new regime.

The president disagreed.

“Their Military is DONE, their Navy is GONE, their Air Force is GONE, their Launching Pads, Missiles, Drones and Manufacturing of same, is almost GONE, their top two sets of Leaders are GONE, their Inflation is at 250%, their Economy is BROKEN, their Soldiers aren’t being paid, the Hormuz Strait is OPEN, THE OIL IS GUSHING, and the U.S. Stock Market and Jobs are at record HIGHS,” Trump wrote. “That’s what’s CHANGED, you corrupt and unethical cowards, and MORE!!!”

In reality, Iran shuttered trade through Strait of Hormuz yet again over the weekend, citing Israel’s ceasefire violations in Lebanon.

But Trump didn’t care about any of that. Instead, he shared a post by Senator Lindsey Graham, who echoed the president’s claim that the reporting had revealed the outlet’s “bias.”

“The way the Corrupt and Failing New York Times is covering stories on a very battered and beat up Iran, through FAKE & MADE UP ‘FACTS’ is, in my opinion, ‘TREASONOUS,’” Trump wrote in yet another post.

“I will be adding all of their false and ridiculous reporting to my multi Billion Dollar lawsuit against them. They are Criminals!”

In October, Trump refiled an abridged version of his dismissed $15 billion defamation suit against the Times, alleging that reporters at the paper had sought to undermine his reputation as an entrepreneur and reality television star.

What began as a restoration project for the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has resulted in multiple arrests.

At least five people have been arrested for allegedly vandalizing the pool as of Saturday night, a Trump administration official told CBS News. Five citations were also issued, bringing the grand total of post-renovation citations issued at the site to 14.

In a post on Truth Social the same day, President Donald Trump said that the monument would likely have to be drained another time in order to address the damage, which he said included the use of a “knife or blade” to put a “250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade.” He also claimed that individuals that participated in the destruction poured “corrosive and destructive chemicals” into the pool. He said that all those caught participating deserved “years in jail.”

“Work will begin immediately on fixing the seriously vandalized Reflecting Pool,” Trump wrote in a separate post on Sunday. “I just inspected it, and could only say to myself, and those gathered around me, WOW, who would do such a thing? SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE! We will fix it?”

The White House has so far spent nearly $15 million to rid the Reflecting Pool of algae ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary, but the multimillion-dollar project appears to be another dud. Within days of refilling the pool earlier this month, the algae was back.

The Department of the Interior blamed the algae’s resurgence, in part, on residual algae that had accumulated in the pool’s pipes, which were apparently neglected during the cleaning process. CNN also found abnormally high phosphate levels in the pool after sampling its water. An algae researcher at the Smithsonian described the chemical imbalance as a “field day” for algal growth.

Park workers have tried to address the endemic issue with a smattering of different solutions. On Tuesday, park workers in hi-vis vests were spotted dumping gallons of hydrogen peroxide into the Reflecting Pool. A close-up of their equipment revealed that they were using a 12 percent concentrate, a level that can cause problems if inhaled and burns if the chemical touches the skin, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Hydrogen peroxide is generally considered less environmentally destructive as its compounds readily break down in water, but the high concentration could nonetheless pose a risk to some of the pool’s frequent visitors, such as ducks or other birds. One dead baby duck was caught floating in the pool over the weekend, though the cause of death was unclear.

In a report shared first with The 19th, three top Senate Democrats say Trump and Republicans have ‘taken a wrecking ball’ to childcare. By Grace Panetta for The 19th Three top Senate Democrats are accusing the Trump administration and Republicans of “taking a wrecking ball” to childcare programs, highlighting the issue in a midterm year where many Democrats are running on inflation…

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