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In spring 1970, Bernardine Dohrn, the 28-year-old leader of the radical leftist group the Weather Underground, declared a “state of war” against America. “Black people have been fighting almost alone for years,” she argued. “We’ve known that our job is to lead white kids into armed revolution.”

The declaration kicked off the Weather Underground’s yearslong bombing campaign against institutions of “American injustice,” including the New York Police Department headquarters, the State Department building, and the Pentagon. Young white Weatherwomen would dress as secretaries, plant incendiary devices in bathrooms, set timers, and walk out undetected. Later, someone would call in a warning to evacuate the targeted building before the bombs went off; there were never any fatalities. The goal was to draw attention to the Weather Underground’s causes—fighting for an end to the war in Vietnam and to racism at home.

In the 1960s, when Dohrn was studying at the University of Chicago, she had participated in the civil rights and anti-war movements in legal ways. As a law student in 1966, she conducted research on Chicago slumlords for Martin Luther King Jr. and marched with him through all-white neighborhoods to promote integration. She joined Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, in 1967 and traveled the country to provide advice to college students on how they could legally avoid conscription. But after King’s assassination and the My Lai massacre, Dohrn and many other white student activists in the SDS opted for militant action. “There’s no way to be committed to nonviolence in the middle of the most violent society history has ever created!” she told an SDS crowd in 1968. The next year, she split off a faction of the SDS into the Weathermen, committed to solidarity with the Black liberation struggle and with the Vietcong and other guerrillas fighting American imperialism abroad.

Dohrn became a counterculture hero and a symbol of anxiety over how America could turn a well-educated, middle-class white girl into a violent revolutionary. In fall 1970, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover called her “The Most Dangerous Woman in America.” She became the fourth woman in history to be placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, replacing Angela Davis. Along with her partner, Bill Ayers, also a member of the Weather Underground, she would spend nearly a decade as a fugitive, frequently changing identities and apartments and low-paying jobs, moving from city to city, all while remaining dedicated to the idea that the only worthwhile response to injustice is militant struggle.

But by the end of 1980—five years after the fall of Saigon, and with Ronald Reagan recently elected president—Dohrn felt that “the world had moved on.” It was time for her and Ayers to surface. The federal conspiracy charges against the two had long since been dropped, thanks to the FBI’s use of illegal surveillance tactics in the COINTELPRO program, but Dohrn was still wanted in Illinois on misdemeanor charges stemming from her role in a 1969 SDS uprising in Chicago called “the Days of Rage.” Her lawyer worked out a plea deal for probation, and she and Ayers drove from Harlem to Chicago so she could turn herself in.

For Dohrn and Ayers, the strongest motive to leave the fugitive lifestyle behind was the fact that they had two additional passengers in their blue station wagon: their sons Zayd, almost four, and Malik, not yet one. In his new book, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground, Zayd Ayers Dohrn, now a playwright and professor at Northwestern University, returns to what he calls “one of the most challenging tasks of my early childhood”—“understanding my mother’s revolutionary commitment.” Through interviews with his parents and their fellow radicals, as well as access to family documents and thousands of pages of newly declassified FBI documents, Dohrn pieces together his parents’ motivations, the extreme personal costs of their actions, and their conflicted loyalties—to the movement on the one hand and to their young family on the other.

Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young, which takes its title from the 1969 Jefferson Airplane song “We Can Be Together,” represents Dohrn’s second attempt to understand his family’s revolutionary history. In 2022, he released a 10-part podcast series with Crooked Media called Mother Country Radicals, which traces his parents’ radicalization in the 1960s and involvement in the Weather Underground in the 1970s, tells the story of the group’s rise through the counterculture, and explores its collaborations with groups like the Black Panthers and its splinter cell, the Black Liberation Army.

The book’s structure highlights the tension between his parents’ dedication to changing the world and their responsibilities toward their family; each section of the book opens with a chapter set during Dohrn’s early childhood. The effect is to highlight the burdens of being raised underground, “living on the margins of society, under assumed names, with no school or regular place to call home, all to fight for ideals that were too abstract for us kids to begin to understand,” as Dohrn puts it. Both he and his brother were born at home and lacked birth certificates. As a toddler, Zayd learned from Ayers how to spot undercover FBI agents and plainclothes cops (“even disguised in long hair and scruffy jeans, undercovers usually wear cheap leather loafers, well-shined”). He recalls that “the closest I ever came to feeling totally safe in my family” was when they were together on the road, in flight.

Growing up as the child of two Weather Underground revolutionaries also meant that Dorhn’s childhood education revolved around “radical lesson[s]” about race, class, and gender. Both boys were named for “freedom fighters”—Zayd for Zayd Shakur, a member of the Black Liberation Army killed in a shoot-out with New Jersey state troopers in 1973; Malik to honor the middle names of both Shakur and Malcolm X. “My parents always made it clear, even when my brother and I were still toddlers, that the only acceptable purpose in life, given our gender and skin color … was to find a way to fight for a better world,” he writes. “They showed us, in books and stories and by direct example, that white people in particular had a moral responsibility to be militant comrades in the struggle for Black liberation.”

But while Dohrn makes clear his own leftist politics in the book, he didn’t choose to take up his parents’ brand of activism. He has carved out a more solitary path as a writer, observer, questioner. In a chapter about attending a protest against Operation Desert Storm with his parents as a teenager, Dohrn reflects on this split: He has always understood the necessity of mass protest, but he is temperamentally “suspicious” of crowds. He goes on to surmise that this characteristic could be “a reaction against my parents—their willingness to be swept away by a movement, to sacrifice their free will and agency, and even their own morality, in the name of mass solidarity.”

Dohrn empathizes with his parents’ political motivations, weighing the personal and moral costs of revolution, while refusing to write off the idealism that powered it. “All of us kids who grew up in the underground know intimately the costs and tragedies of that struggle,” he writes. “But if all we inherit is their failure and tragedy, then we lose the value of their hope and idealism. Their youthful courage and fierce commitment to a cause. And the motive force of their wild and radical imagination.”

And though Dohrn doesn’t dwell on recent events, he does note that Americans today are facing “a new era of American authoritarianism and racial reckoning, a new moment of widespread resistance and impetus for radical change”—a time when idealism and principled resistance is indispensable. It’s hard not to think of the nonviolent protesters and legal observers who have been met with harassment, violence, and even lethal force, as they came together to protect their neighbors from Donald Trump’s ICE surges in the last year. At a time when exercising one’s constitutionally protected right to protest can come with mortal danger, how do activists balance what they owe to the world against what they owe their families, especially their children?

Dohrn’s parents had always told him a relatively neat story about where they placed the dividing line between activism and raising a family. When he was born, they assured him, they had forgone political violence in order to devote themselves to raising him—even if it didn’t always feel that way.

When his parents came out of hiding in 1980, it seemed that they were choosing to give up their roles to dedicate themselves to their sons. As Dohrn writes, that was the narrative he absorbed from family as a child:

If my mom and dad had done things in the past that were dangerous and illegal—I knew they had done them for the right reasons. To help people. To make the world a better place. And I trusted that they had stopped taking those terrifying risks after I was born. They had always told me—and I believed, as one of the first tenets of my childhood faith—that my brother and I were their first priority, the center of their hopes and dreams for the future.

But the statement Bernardine Dohrn read after surrendering in a Chicago courtroom in 1980 made clear that becoming a mother had not softened her revolutionary ideals. “I regret not at all our efforts to side with the forces of liberation,” she said. “The nature of the system has not changed. Given the system which perpetuates such harsh oppression and suffering, rebellion is inevitable and continuous. And I remain committed to the struggle ahead.”

Less than two years later, her family would be left to grapple with her revolutionary commitments when she was locked up in a federal jail in Manhattan, held in contempt of grand jury for refusing to testify against her comrades in the Black Liberation Army, against whom the government was trying to build a racketeering case. She would spend seven months incarcerated. Zayd was five years old when his worst fear as a child—that his mother would be caught and taken away from him—came true. “As the days of our separation stretched into weeks and then months—as it went from sudden rupture to bleak routine—I started to wonder how my mother could continue to choose loyalty to her friends over love for us,” he writes. “I didn’t understand the legal subtleties of her case, but I knew she was making a choice—day after day after day after day—not to come home.”

The “myth” Zayd and Malik were raised with was that their parents “gave up on political violence. They stopped bombing buildings and breaking people out of jail…. They told us they had committed themselves to love for us, to a different kind of future.” But while researching Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young, Dohrn would learn that his father participated in a jailbreak in 1979, when Bernardine was pregnant with Malik. He would learn that, around that same time, his mother participated in an identity theft scheme to aid white female members of a Weather Underground splinter group, who were in turn offering solidarity to a cell of the Black Liberation Army, itself a splinter group of the Black Panthers.

His parents would be forced to confront just how perilous it could be to continue to act as movement soldiers while starting a family when their comrades Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert received lengthy prison sentences for their roles in a 1981 armed robbery with members of the BLA that resulted in the deaths of two police officers and a security guard. Boudin and Gilbert’s son, Chesa, was only 14 months old at the time. Dorhn and Ayers adopted Chesa and raised him alongside Zayd and Malik.

Some of the most affecting passages of the book come as Dohrn challenges his father to confront the risks he took even after Zayd’s and Malik’s births. “I am seventy-six years old, and I have felt the most vivid sense of having survived and squeaked through again and again and again,” Ayers said. “The sense Bernardine and I always had was, there but for fortune. Because we were all living on the edge.”

In truth, his parents had been thinking for several years about how raising children could fit into their political vision. A Weather Underground communiqué from December 1970 holds hints of the parenting philosophy. Earlier that year, three Weathermen died in an accidental explosion of hundreds of pounds of dynamite in a West Village townhouse—dynamite that the New York cell of the group was planning to use at an officers’ dance at Fort Dix in New Jersey, which could have been deadly not just to members of the military but to civilians, as the Weathermen did not plan to call in a warning. In the aftermath, Bernardine reflected on a new path forward for the underground: “the townhouse forever destroyed our belief that armed struggle is the only real revolutionary struggle.” Instead, the group was thinking seriously “about how hard it will be to fight in Amerika and how long it will take for us to win.” In the meantime, she wrote, she suggested a turn to the personal and domestic:

People have been experimenting with everything about their lives, fierce against the ways of the white man…. They’ve moved to the country and found new ways to bring up free wild children. People are forming new families ... they are units of people to trust each other both to live together and to organize and fight together.

As Dohrn explains, the idea that “having children was revolutionary” was drawn from the Black liberation movement. His mother would go on to take inspiration from Assata Shakur, a member of the BLA, who in 1974 gave birth to a daughter conceived with a fellow BLA soldier behind bars. Sha­kur later explained how she thought about having a child when she saw the world as a “terrible, terrible place”: “I thought about my mother. My grandmother. My great-great-great-grandmothers. And what they must have thought about as slaves bringing life into this world. And we just decided that we were going to live, you know?”

By the time Dohrn was born in 1977, the Weather Underground had dissolved. “Without the moral gravity of opposition to the Vietnam war, and with the cultural zeitgeist shifting against them, the group was isolated and adrift, increasingly vulnerable to the purity tests and infighting that have always afflicted progressive leftist movements,” Dohrn explains. His parents needed to find a new sense of purpose, a new way to make sense of their pasts and to move forward in a future they had not imagined living long enough to see.

In his conversations with his parents and through revisiting their letters, statements, and other documents, Dohrn comes to understand that his parents did not see their commitments to the larger world and their commitments to their children as contradictory. “Asked to choose between solidarity and family, revolution and romantic or familial love, my parents and their comrades chose the cause every time,” he writes. “This bothered me for a long time—it still bothers me, as a son and as a father—but I’ve come to think that, in my parents’ minds, the two ideas are inseparable: the fight to build a better world is a manifestation of their hopes for the future; the revolution itself is a birthright to pass on to their children and their children’s children.”

This is a complicated legacy, one that can come with devastating consequences, as evidenced by the fates of many from the radical underground of the 1960s and 1970s, who died or were imprisoned and left behind young children. But it opens up an enduring set of questions. What is worth fighting for? And who should be prepared to fight, when they have obligations to care for family? Is fighting for a better world also a fight for one’s children?

In today’s episode, MS NOW’s Steve Benen makes a strong case that Donald Trump has corrupted the process of awarding disaster aid to states. Trump has been rejecting aid requests from blue states at a lopsided rate. But this week, Trump announced that he’s awarding aid to Democratic-run swing states with critical gubernatorial, Senate, and House races in them. But here’s the key: As Benen details, in these announcements, Trump openly linked the awarding of aid right to his preferred candidates, even suggesting voters should reward them for securing the money. Trump blurted out the scheme, which Benen calls “breathtaking” in its “brazenness.” It all comes as New York Times polls find Democrats highly competitive in six key Senate races that no one expected to be close. Trump’s numbers are abysmal across these battlegrounds, particularly on the economy, even though he won five of them in 2024. Benen explains why Trump’s scheme matters, why the new polling is brutal for him, and why both developments neatly capture this moment. Listen to this episode here.

On a hot, sunny day in California, I crawled into the tiny cockpit of a small Cessna aircraft to fly around one of the state’s most active volcanoes, Mt. Lassen.

Video by Peter Berger

I wasn’t looking for lava. The volcano in Lassen Volcanic National Park hasn’t erupted in more than 100 years. Instead, I was looking for the telltale signs of herbicide spraying across vast stretches of forestland. I’d already seen it from the ground: seemingly endless expanses of land devoid of plant life because glyphosate—a.k.a. Roudup—or similar herbicides were deployed to kill everything except young tree saplings being grown for timber. But it was hard to fully get a sense of the scale.

What would it look like from the sky?

I knew record amounts of glyphosate were being sprayed in California’s forests, much of it in the wake of the megafires that have hit the state in recent years. For our Mother Jones investigation, my colleague Melissa Lewis and I analyzed more than 5 million state records and found that the state’s fastest growing market for the controversial chemical was to spray forestlands.

That’s when the scale of the destruction hit me.

As the cramped little plane took off from an airfield in Chico, with me sitting in the co-pilot seat, I had to fight the urge to nervously press my feet down, because they rested on pedals that—insanely to my mind—could send the plane careening off in some unwanted direction. Pilot Gary Kraft, who’d agreed to take me up as part of his nonprofit EcoFlight’s mission to show people nature from the sky, initially said not to worry about the pedals, but then, sternly, warned me against pressing on them. I didn’t need to be told twice.

As our Cessna ascended, my anxiety waned, and the birds-eye beauty of the volcanic landscape took shape. Mount Lassen marks the southern end of the Cascade Range, and the northern beginning of the Sierra Nevada mountains. This confluence of sparsely populated mountains is among the most majestic in a state brimming with natural beauty.

The plane headed out of the farm-rich Central Valley and took us over oak-studded foothills, cut with deep canyons whose cascading creeks are home to some of the state’s last remaining spring run chinook salmon—a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. 

Soon, the oak trees gave way to the Christmas-shaped trees so many of us associate with the mountains, towering conifers like firs and cedars. And that’s when the scale of the destruction hit me.

First, we spotted the dead hillsides where two of the state’s largest infernos—the 2021 Dixie Fire and the 2024 Park Fire—had burned across mountainsides.

Wildfire-scarred woodlands in Northern California.EcoFlight

Then, there it was: the telltale signs of herbicide spraying. All the trees had been cleared, and rather than fresh spring grasses and green bushes, the mountainsides hosted nothing but dirt. 

Landscape with the telltale signs of herbicide spraying.EcoFlight A hillside with signs of glyphosate spraying.EcoFlight

The United States Forest Service and timber companies say they use glyphosate to reforest land after it is harvested by loggers. They say killing all other plant life helps trees regrow faster by reducing competition for sunlight, water, and soil nutrients. In Lassen National Forest, the federal government plans to spray about 10,000 acres.

Our reporting showed that private timberland around Lassen was the state’s heaviest sprayed forestland in recent years. Seeing the destruction from the sky, mountainside after mountainside, this scale of lifeless earth felt surreal—like I was watching a movie about some other planet.

One supposed fact that glyphosate proponents repeat a lot is that the herbicide binds with soil, meaning it won’t move and contaminate other places. Yet a 2020 study by the US Geological Survey found it in 74 percent of American streams tested. Peer-reviewed studies also have found the herbicide is toxic to fish and other aquatic life, like those spring-run Chinook salmon. The Environmental Protection Agency has said it likely harms 93 percent of endangered species. And the World Health Organization has called glyphosate a probable human carcinogen.

Bayer, Roundup’s manufacturer, insists it is safe when used according to the EPA-approved label. In 2020, the EPA deemed glyphosate reasonably safe for people and the environment, but a collection of labor and environmental groups sued, arguing that the EPA was wrong and hadn’t properly conducted its review. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, saying the agency did not provide adequate evidence for its conclusion. The EPA is now in the process of reassessing the herbicide.

But even as the federal government works to make that determination, the spraying of environmentally sensitive forestlands is continuing at a breakneck pace. And the impacts of all this spraying, which only recently came to the public’s attention following our yearlong investigation, will undoubtedly take years or even decades to fully assess.

Back in May, Republicans telegraphed their midterm strategy, and it had nothing to do with affordability or competent governance. “A couple more states redistricting in a way that’s helpful for us, move into the summer with America 250, and a midterm convention at some point,” a “very senior Republican strategist” told NOTUS. “I think we’ve got some good touch points to kind of keep that…

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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. Trump refuses to move on after massive fail on birthright citizenship He’s a toddler who can’t handle being told no. The Constitution is clear on birthright citizenship. Alito doesn’t care. Anyone born in the United States is a citizen. The end.

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

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Are you having trouble keeping track of all of the ways that President Donald Trump is desecrating Washington, D.C., with his signature blend of shoddiness, cronyism, bad taste, and grift? There are many, so we should all forgive ourselves for not catching his latest White House project: a new helipad. Of course, like most things with this administration, we only learned about this by…

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President Donald Trump shocked Americans Wednesday when he claimed to have spoken to former President Theodore Roosevelt.

Speaking at the opening ceremony of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota, Trump announced to the crowd that he’d just spoken with the 26th president, who died more than 100 years ago.

“I even had a conversation with Theodore Roosevelt,” Trump said. “I said, ‘What did you think about the Panama Canal? Do you consider that your greatest achievement? How do you feel about the fact that the Democrats gave the Panama Canal away to Panama for $1?”

Trump: "I even had a conversation with Theodore Roosevelt. I said, 'What do you think about the Panama Canal? Do you consider that your greatest achievement and how do you feel about the fact that the Democrats gave the Panama Canal away to Panama for $1?'" pic.twitter.com/nP0ox7ensO

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 1, 2026

Despite what many people on the internet seemed to think, the 80-year-old president was not publicly sundowning. He was referring to an interaction he’d just had with an eerie, lifelike AI simulation of Roosevelt.

A video posted by Special Assistant Margo Martin showed Trump listening intently as the fake Roosevelt reminded Trump that “the nation comes first.”

“Well, I appreciate those words, those words are fantastic,” Trump said. “I just want to say it was an honor to be with you today, we are taking a little bit of a tour of some of the fantastic things you’ve done.”

.@POTUS interacts with AI President Theodore Roosevelt at the Theodore Roosevelt Library in North Dakota 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/4ISRo2Tsbj

— Margo Martin (@MargoMartin47) July 1, 2026

There’s something deeply sad about watching the 47th president speak to a computer-generated version of the 26th. It has a similar effect to watching your elderly grandfather chat with a young, hot single on an online forum: It’s not real, grandpa. Now, go back to bed.

Trump’s fascination with AI presidents is nothing new. The president’s lackluster Great American State Fair features its own AI George Washington to chat with attendees—what few of them there are.

Trump has previously used his praise for Roosevelt to push his agenda to “take back” the Panama Canal—which, along with the threatened annexations of Greenland and Canada are at the heart of his disastrous “Don-roe Doctrine.”

Despite the countless problematic aspects of the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup—power-hungry fascists and the wealthy elite grabbing every ounce of political and monetary gain they can imagine at the expense of fans, national team players and staff, workers, and more—there are a few inspiring stories that I have been following. 

Among them: A national team playing in its first World Cup, outplaying established opponents with their spirit and tactics; a friendship between residents of a Kansas town and the national team players training there; and a young player showing the world what his sister always saw in him. 

As Jules Boykoff, a former US men’s national team and professional soccer player—and current politics professor at Pacific University in Oregon—told me just before the tournament started, soccer has the power to spark new connections within our communities and organizing. More simply, it can be fun.

Cape Verde’s ascent to the knockout stages

Cape Verde, a nation of about 530,000 people (about the same population as Atlanta), qualified for its first World Cup last year. This year, they earned draws against their three group stage opponents: Spain, one of the favorites to win the whole tournament, Uruguay, and Saudi Arabia. Vozinha, the goalkeeper, had a star performance against Spain with seven saves and gained 14 million followers on Instagram as a result, but beyond that, the Verdean team genuinely challenged Spain during the match in ways that they had no answer to.

Against Uruguay, Cape Verde scored its first two goals—including Kevin Pina’s stunning, long-distance free kick that punished their opponents’ flimsy defensive wall—and the team created much better chances to score than Saudi Arabia. 

Prior to the start of the tournament, Cape Verde was projected to have the fourth-lowest chance of making it out of the group stage behind Iraq, Curaçao, and Haiti. They beat the odds with flying colors and will play Argentina, led by perhaps the greatest player of all time, Lionel Messi, on Friday. 

Lawrence, Kansas, residents connect with Algerian national team players and fans

At the start of the World Cup, a video of two Lawrence residents enthusiastically welcoming Algerians to town after the national team set up their training camp there went viral. If you didn’t get the chance to watch it, one resident explains to a reporter that he attended what appears to be a fan event because he was “so happy” that “they chose our town for their base camp.” While both he and another resident said in the interview that they didn’t know much about Algeria, they were already adopting their fan chants: “1, 2, 3, vive l’Algerie,” or “1, 2, 3, long live Algeria”—a phrase with ties to Algeria’s fight for independence from French occupation. 

Local outlets have done some great reporting on the new Kansas-Algeria bond, which I highly recommend you give a read.

The friendship has led to some of my favorite videos to come from the tournament:  

Bless this man, his excitement about Team Algeria and their base camp in Lawrence, Kansas, is just

— Anne Thériault (@annetheriault.bsky.social) 2026-06-13T03:35:16.643Z

Algerian fans chanting THANK YOU LAWRENCE

— Rodger Sherman (@rodger.bsky.social) 2026-06-28T19:20:03.383Z Ivory Coast’s star winger Yan Diomande plays a great tournament for his first fan

I sometimes find myself searching for the personal stories of the soccer players I enjoy watching. Diomande plays for the major German club RB Leipzig; his story in the Players’ Tribune, a platform that publishes first-person stories from athletes, really moved me.

You should take a look at it yourself—his words are so powerful that any description I come up with wouldn’t do it justice—but Diomande talks about his sister Roxanne, who believed that he would become a great soccer player, taking him to tryouts for professional teams, and about his shock and grief when Roxanne died at the age of 15 after someone spiked her drink at a party. Yan Diomande has achieved so much at just 19 and is attracting the attention of the best teams in the world.

His dribbling is mesmerizing, and his decision-making after the dribble—whether that be a pass or shot—is impressive for how early he is in his career. His Ivory Coast teammates are so cleverly organized and look to get him the ball often to cause chaos in the opposing team’s defense. 

Given that, I still think about one quote from Diomande’s story, entitled “Dear Roxanne”: “Everything I do on a football pitch, it’s for you.”

Although the Ivory Coast lost 1-2 against Norway on Tuesday, he and his teammates have achieved so much, reaching the knockout stage for the first time in their World Cup history.

President Donald Trump loves to keep reaffirming women in his close circle, and it looks like the latest one to come into the public discourse is his assistant, Natalie Harp. The young blonde’s proximity to Trump is nothing new, but following the release of “Regime Change” by journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, her peculiar relationship with the president has garnered some eyes…

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Donald Trump added billions to his net worth in the year and a half since his return to the presidency—much of it paper wealth in the form of cryptocurrency, but plenty of it in hard cash paid to him by business partners, including the investment firm run by the United Arab Emirates’ national security advisor.

In total, it appears that Trump added about $2.2 billion to his net worth in 2025—by far his most lucrative year in the presidency, and far more than in 2024, when he reported earning about $600 million.

Trump filed required personal financial disclosure forms on Tuesday evening that revealed his earnings, but there are some major caveats—most of the gained wealth is in the form of cryptocurrency or crypto-related businesses, and the crypto industry has had a steep decline since the start of this year, led by crashing Bitcoin prices.

And the forms do reveal some new details. Trump was closely involved with the launching of a Trump meme coin cryptocurrency shortly before taking office, but it wasn’t clear how much that had earned him. On his new forms, Trump disclosed earning $635 million from a company called Celebration Coins, which is believed to be behind his meme coin.

While Trump was paid for the creation of the coins and was awarded a significant number of them, the coin’s price has collapsed from a high of $44 on his inauguration day to $1.69 on Wednesday. No matter the price, Trump’s stake in the coin is all profit to him—but a recent analysis found buyers of the coin had likely lost in the neighborhood of $700 million trying to trade on $Trump coins.

There’s another $290 million in cryptowallets that appear to be associated with Trump’s other crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, but again, the price of the WLFI cryptocoin has also dropped by about 65 percent since the end of 2025. And as with the meme coin, an analysis suggests that investors in WLFI may have lost as much as $700 million.

One very real bit of wealth Trump added in 2025 was $65 million from sale of equity in World Liberty Financial, a deal that was reportedly the sale of 49 percent of the company to a firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoun bin Mohammed Al Nahyan, the brother of Mohamed bin Zayed, the ruler of the United Arab Emirates. Sheikh Tahnoon is the UAE’s national security advisor as well as the chairman of several of the wealthy country’s investment funds.

Reaping large sums of money from overseas sources was a theme on Trump’s disclosure. In addition to the money from Sheikh Tahnoun’s fund, Trump also reported huge payments for lending his name to a slew of new Trump-branded properties around the world. And it appears he has signficantly upped his fees.

In 2014, Trump signed a deal with a Dubai-based company called DAMAC to build a golf course with his name on it—over the course of the next four years, he earned somewhere between $2 and $10 million for the deal. In 2025 alone, DAMAC paid Trump $12.5 million, including $5 million a piece, just to use his name on two new Trump properties.

And it wasn’t just DAMAC, which is owned by Emirati billionaire Husain Sajwani, who has frequently appeared at Trump’s side at Mar-a-Lago and has been given special access at Trump’s inaugurations. Trump was paid more than $25.2 million by a Saudi development firm for the use of his name on properties in Dubai, Saudi Qatar, and Oman. Partners in India, Vietnam and the Phillipines added even more money to Trump’s pocket for using name there, the reports show.

While those are impressive numbers, Trump’s war in Iran, just across the Strait of Hormuz from his Oman development, has reportedly helped sink other potential deals, including one deal in Australia.

The forms also appear to show a new deal—Trump reports being paid $2 million in a non-refundable development deal by a company called Base Co. LTD. According to a report in a Korean business publication in February, the Trump Organization and a large Korean construction company signed an agreement to work together, and Eric Trump was hosted at a lavish dinner attended by top Korean politicans and business executives.

Trump also listed hundreds of investments in stocks. Many of these appear to be standard blue-chip stocks or municipal bonds that might appear in any diversified portfolio, recent stock trading disclosures show Trump has been investing in companies and then lauding the company’s products in speeches.

While the forms require Trump to disclose earnings, debts and valuations of his businesses, it doesn’t necessarily require him to report profitablity. While crypto has far surpassed Trump’s traditional busineses of hospitality and real estate in terms of importance for his wealth, it’s not necessarily clear whether his Trump properties are thriving.

What is clear is that Trump has taken some of his new cash and used it to get rid of old debts—in the last year, he has paid off mortgages on his Seven Springs golf course and his 40 Wall Street commerical building in New York City. He also paid off a personal mortgage on a house next to Mar-a-Lago, which he purchased from his sister in 2018 for $18.5 million.

That mortgage repayment actually raises another potential caveat about all of Trump’s newfound wealth—Trump loves to say everything is worth more than it is. That house he bought for $18.5 million eight years ago? This year, Trump listed it as being worth an open-ended and optimistic “over $50 million.”

President Trump gloated Wednesday about lifting restrictions on 90 acres of protected land so that he could help along the recently finished construction of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota.

“During my first term it was a privilege to sign the bill that helped get this incredible project underway, and transferring 90 acres,” Trump said at the ceremony for the library’s opening Wednesday. “We took it right out of the federal government. We ripped it away from the federal government, they don’t know it’s missing. They still haven’t figured out what the hell happened.”

The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Foundation bought 90.3 acres of protected land from the U.S. Forest Service in 2021, after a bill supported by President Trump triggered the sale in December 2020.

Aside from the sale, Trump has significantly rolled back environmental protections that Roosevelt championed during his tenure, weakening the Endangered Species Act and exposing 86 million previously protected acres to drilling and development.

Trump on taxpayer funds for the Roosevelt library: "We ripped it away from the federal government. They don't know it's missing. They still haven't figured out what the hell happened." pic.twitter.com/vJiwYEC4BS

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 1, 2026

President Trump has lost three legal cases in 24 hours.

First the Supreme Court struck down his executive order banning birthright citizenship on Tuesday morning because it violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. Then, hours later, a federal judge dismissed the White House’s effort to acquire New Hampshire’s voter information. After that, two federal judges shut down the president’s restrictions on a student loan forgiveness program.

On New Hampshire, U.S. District Judge Joseph LaPlante found the administration’s request to get the state’s voter registration list infringed the Civil Rights Act’s provisions on federal election records. LaPlante also ruled that the Justice Department couldn’t find any real violations of the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which created standards for states’ voter registration lists and voting systems, to merit access to the voter rolls.

It’s the tenth time the DOJ has lost a case in which it sought voter information from a state government. Judges have ruled against the Trump administration in Arizona, California, Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin, and dismissed a Georgia effort because it was filed in the wrong city.

On student loans, federal judges appointed by President Biden in Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts blocked Trump’s attempt to reshape the Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which helps those who work for the government or nonprofit organizations. Trump attempted to prevent public service workers from getting student debt relief if their work had a “substantial illegal purpose” in the eyes of the administration. A coalition of nonprofit organizations joined 20 states to file a lawsuit against the rule, claiming that Trump’s Department of Education could target organizations that go against the president’s personal views, such as those dedicated to immigrant rights and transgender health care.

“The Department cannot create new criminal prohibitions through rulemaking,” U.S. District Judge Myoung Joun ruled in Massachusetts, stating that the department didn’t have legal authority and could be violating the Constitution’s First Amendment. “Indeed, the record further demonstrates ‌that the ⁠Final Rule has already chilled protected speech.”

In Washington, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali struck down the rule in a case brought by four nonprofits that work for immigrant rights. The Trump administration’s response to the student loan rulings seemed to prove the judges’ point.

“The Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program is intended to support Americans who serve the public good, not to subsidize organizations that engage in terrorism, facilitate illegal immigration, or support the mutilation of children,” Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent complained in a statement.

In all, these rulings show Trump’s contempt for the Constitution and that federal courts seem to be the only branch of government willing to prevent the administration from flouting it, as Republicans in Congress are unwilling to stand up to the president. Trump will have to come to terms that some of his favorite policies aren’t backed up by U.S. law.

Donald Trump is still trying to stiff E. Jean Carroll, according to the columnist’s attorney.

Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s lawyer, wrote in a court filing Tuesday that Trump’s legal representative had called her the day prior asking for another delay to the $5 million sum Trump owes the writer. Later Monday, Kaplan said she informed Trump’s team that “Carroll does not consent,” and asked whether Trump would comply with the immediate disbursement of funds.

Carroll has a long and unfortunate history with the president. Trump was found liable by a jury in May 2023 for having sexually assaulted Carroll in the mid-1990s, for which she was awarded $5 million in damages.

He subsequently lost his defamation case against her the following January, when a judge ruled that Trump had continued to defame the advice columnist by denying the assault on the basis that she wasn’t his “type,” and by accusing her of making up the allegations against him for the benefit of her book. A jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in that case.

But Carroll hasn’t yet seen a dime from either case. In May, a federal appeals court allowed Trump to continue staving off his payments until the Supreme Court decided whether or not to pick up the case. The court made their decision Monday, rejecting Trump’s challenge and allowing the verdict to stand.

In a separate filing Tuesday, Kaplan asked a judge to implement an expedited payment schedule for the sum that Trump owes Carroll. She referred to a June 2023 filing in which both parties agreed that Carroll could collect if the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

Kaplan added that, by this point, the $5 million sum had accrued an additional $779,783 in interest, raising Trump’s initial debt to nearly $5.8 million.

Nonetheless, Trump has continued to make a target out of Carroll. In May, the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into the writer, probing whether Carroll committed perjury in her previous cases against Trump.

White House staff are reportedly concerned that Donald Trump’s Fourth of July rally is a recipe for disaster—one that will send the president into yet another meltdown. 

The remarkably low turnout for Trump’s Great American State Fair has sparked serious worries that the president’s massive rally planned for Saturday will also be a dud, multiple sources told CNN Wednesday.  

The rally is scheduled to take place outside on the National Mall, as temperatures in Washington are forecasted to reach a stifling 100 degrees. 

One official familiar with the event told CNN that there would likely be large groups of people who reserved tickets for Trump’s address but don’t end up attending. Empty seats means that viewers are likely in for another presidential temper tantrum—a sorry celebration for the country’s 250th anniversary. 

The rally will be punctuated by a massive fireworks display currently scheduled to begin at 11:00 p.m. And unlike in past years, attendees will not be able to bring coolers to help beat the heat. 

“I do not understand why we are doing this so late,” one White House official told CNN, adding there were still ongoing efforts to fix the timing. “I’m really not sure who thought this was a good idea.”

So far, Trump’s Great American State Fair has been supremely underwhelming, and beset by technical difficulties, lame programming, and disappointing weather delays. Trump has raged in the face of bad reviews and lied about the visibly low attendance.

Internally, those in Trump’s orbit have begun pointing fingers about the president’s own Fyre Festival (except people actually went to Fyre Festival). “The mistake here was not driving attendance,” one person close to the White House told CNN. “It was an ‘if you build it, they will come’ mentality that failed.”

It’s been a very long week for Beatriz Armada, the Venezuela operations manager for the humanitarian nonprofit Humanity and Inclusion. Hers is just one of many non-governmental organizations that have been responding to the devastation of two massive earthquakes that struck Venezuela last week, which have left, by a conservative estimate, some 1,700 people dead and thousands injured, with more than 15,000 displaced from their homes.

Many survivors who were pulled from the rubble needed amputations, Armada told me, a further challenge for Venezuela’s health care system—and health care workers in Caracas were affected as well, making it “very complicated to be able to give medical attention,” she said.

Armada told me that around 38 structures related to health care infrastructure had been decimated by the earthquakes, including one that specifically provided help for disabled people, who are disproportionately impacted by earthquakes.

“There was nothing left of the entire building, and so many people with disabilities who lost their lives in this, in this particular space,” Armada said.

One disabled man and his family that Armada spoke to lost everything in their home, including hard-to-replace equipment “that he would normally need to be able to have dignity.”

“We’re mobilizing resources to be able to more directly support people with disabilities,” Armada said, including with mobility devices and rehabilitation, “which is also quite a main need at the moment.”

Armada says she’s heartened by the responses of people across other parts of Venezuela, where people are also being transferred for medical care, and by international support. She hopes it doesn’t end prematurely.

“We need this [support] to continue in the upcoming months, because I think it’s going to take months, or even years, to be able to fully recuperate from,” Armada told me.

President Donald Trump is downplaying the more than 235% increase in his annual income since his second term began, a clear attempt to obscure the pattern of corruption among his administration. According to newly released financial disclosures, Trump reported $622 million in revenue in 2024. That jumped to more than $2.2 billion last year. But when he was asked about the massive…

Source

The MAGA-verse has begun to attack pregnant women in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 5–4 ruling to uphold the birthright citizenship clause of the Constitution, which holds that nearly anyone born on U.S. soil is an American citizen, regardless of where their parents are from.

Their new suggestion: Ban all pregnant foreigners from entering the country.

“If you have birthright citizenship, it means if a person comes here nine months pregnant to go look around at some things, in a couple of weeks that is the mother of a lifetime American citizen—and a direct line into American cash and welfare for the rest of that child’s life,” White House adviser Stephen Miller hollered at Jesse Watters on Fox News Tuesday evening.

“Mr. Miller, are we banning pregnant women from America? Are we banning foreign pregnant women?” Watters asked with a laugh.

“Well, what I’m saying, Jesse, is that you have to now think very carefully about who you let into your country, even on a temporary basis, because the possibility [for] birth tourism … when people come here just to have babies on American soil.”

Watters: Are we banning pregnant women from America?

Miller: You have to think carefully on who you let into the country. There’s a lot of things we have to take a hard look at. pic.twitter.com/mazrvtLhxa

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 1, 2026

“Everybody should agree that it’s a violation of our laws if your intent in coming here if you’re pregnant is to have a child to become a United States citizen,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Wednesday, calling birth tourism a “booming industry.”

“Just saw a pregnant Haitian woman at the grocery store. Called ICE immediately,” right-wing content producer Matt Morse wrote. “Can’t take any chances, these days.”

“The State Department should IMMEDIATELY cease to give out visas to pregnant applicants,” MAGA Representative Lauren Boebert said. “Sorry, Birth Tourism cannot continue.”

Some took the suggestion to an even more extreme level, calling for sterilization of all foreign visitors.

“Several ways forward here  given the choice of Roberts/Barrett to nullify the 14th Amendment and extra-constitutionally replace it with their own language,” The Federalist co-founder Sean Davis wrote on X. “Deny entry to all pregnant foreigners.… Deny entry to all female foreigners.… Require sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry.”

The same party that harangues single women about the low birth rate is now threatening any pregnant woman in this country who isn’t a citizen—the consequences of which could be devastating.

Former CIA Director John Brennan is suing the Trump administration, claiming that their investigation into him is a vindictive prosecution.

Brennan, who is under investigation by the Justice Department, is seeking to make sure the administration preserves all records pertaining to that investigation. In the lawsuit, filed Wednesday in federal court, he expressed concern that the DOJ wouldn’t preserve records and communications that would allow him to take legal action in the future if the administration decides to prosecute him.

“Administration officials from the Acting Attorney General to the FBI Director and the Counselor overseeing the Brennan investigations have been publicly declaring Director Brennan a criminal, not only before securing a conviction in court but even before a full investigation and an indictment,” Brennan’s attorneys wrote. “And, certain officials in the Department of Justice are engaging in demonstrably irregular prosecutorial activity in order to gin up a case that will satisfy the President’s direction.”

Brennan wants President Trump, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, federal prosecutors in Miami who have investigated him, and intelligence officers to preserve any records related to him. The Southern District of Florida U.S. Attorney’s Office is reportedly involved in investigating Brennan and has hired John Yoo, a former DOJ official from the Bush administration famous for legally defending torture after 9/11, to consult on a case that may concern Brennan.

One DOJ prosecutor who expressed doubts about the investigation into Brennan, Maria Medetis Long, was removed from the case in April. Long is chief of the national security section for the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami, and would normally be involved in a case concerning intelligence. This suggests that Brennan may have a point about the DOJ’s interest in him having to do with Trump wanting to punish anyone he perceives as an enemy.

In response to lawmakers’ ongoing questions about ICE’s surveillance practices, a previously unpublicized letter to Congress reveals Homeland Security officials are taking an increasingly evasive approach when asked if the Trump administration created a database of protesters labeled as “domestic terrorists.”

The administration has repeatedly denied that DHS maintains a specific database of US citizens who protest ICE operations or photograph federal agents. But this letter, which was addressed on May 22 and comes amid mounting litigation over ICE’s alleged intimidation of protesters, appears to sidestep the question of a standalone protester database entirely.

“ICE does not independently approve adding individuals or entities to the U.S. government’s Terrorist Screening Dataset (TSDS),” John Cooper, Assistant Director of ICE’s Office of Congressional Relations, wrote in response to a February inquiry from Sen. Ed Markey (D–Mass.).

The TSDS is a publicly known, interagency terrorist watchlist that is not maintained by ICE and was not the subject of Markey’s questioning. The letter is the first time ICE has publicly mentioned the TSDS in response to questions about a potential protester database.

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In February, Todd Lyons, then-acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, appeared before the House Homeland Security Committee and testified emphatically that ICE was not surveilling US citizens.

“There is no database for protesters, sir,” Lyons told Rep. Lou Correa (D–Calif.), who asked Lyons about threats ICE agents made on camera to legal observers in Maine. “I can assure you there is no database that’s tracking United States citizens.”

“The public deserves clear and consistent answers about ICE’s surveillance activities and its infringement of Americans’ civil liberties.”

Lyons echoed these statements again in an April 21 letter to Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D–Fla.). But this time, he added a caveat for law enforcement investigations: “Where individuals decide to go beyond protected speech and commit crimes against federal personnel and property or threaten, or forcibly impede, assault, or interfere with lawful operations, ICE remains steadfast in exercising its authority to investigate and prosecute violators.” Put simply, Lyons denied that ICE was keeping a “separate, standalone database” of protesters, but admitted the agency had “collected information” on citizens suspected of breaking federal law.

These carve-outs were already broad and vaguely defined enough to raise concerns among civil liberties advocates. Now, while evading Markey’s specific questions about an ICE database, Cooper’s letter raises new concerns that anti-ICE protesters and legal observers are, in fact, being added to the TSDS based on so-called “antifa” activity.

Cooper’s May letter went on to cite a “whole-of-government process,” administered by the FBI, in which nominations to the TSDS are reviewed and approved “based on federal criteria derived from statutory definitions of terrorism.” Notably, President Trump designated “antifa”—which is not a single group and generally defined as anyone who is against fascism—as a domestic terrorist organization in September. And in May, as my colleague Sophie Hurwitz reported at the time, the White House released a new counterterrorism playbook that “prioritize[s] the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”

Today, in a letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Acting ICE Director David Venturella, shared exclusively with Mother Jones, Markey and Rep. Frost are demanding answers.

“ICE’s shifting and carefully worded responses prevent Congress and the public from determining the extent of ICE’s surveillance activities,” Markey and Frost wrote. They pressed Mullin and Venturella on whether “DHS, ICE, or any component agency of DHS” is “maintaining their own database, list, or record of individuals engaged in protest activity, outside of the TSDS” or creating any “record of individuals identified as threats to officer or facility safety, including those who have not been accused of any crime.” The congressmen also requested a copy of an internal ICE memo, first reported by CNN in January, that instructed agents to “capture all images, license plates, identifications, and general information on hotels, agitators, protestors, etc.” for inclusion in a “consolidated form.”

“These attempts to evade congressional oversight are unacceptable,” Markey and Frost wrote. “The public deserves clear and consistent answers about ICE’s surveillance activities and its infringement of Americans’ civil liberties.”