The New Republic

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 30 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

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

Donald Trump lost a few big cases at the Supreme Court on Monday. He also won a big one. But judging by the extended eruption of rage that followed after those losses, those are the cases he really cared about. And you can see why. In one of those losses, the court allowed states to continue counting ballots that arrive after election day, and that probably cuts off one of the pathways he was eyeing to help steal the midterms. Yet at the same time, his one victory was pretty substantial and underscored again the long-term crisis that the Supreme Court has thrust us into by continually expanding the power of this president.

We’re getting into all of it with Lisa Graves, former counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee, who writes about the Supreme Court. Lisa, good to have you on.

Lisa Graves: Greg, thank you so much for inviting me.

Sargent: So let’s start with Trump’s losses. The Supreme Court rejected his appeal of a $5 million verdict in favor of E. Jean Carroll after a jury found he’d abused her. It blocked him from firing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook without cause. And in the biggest loss of all, the court upheld a Mississippi provision that counts mail-in ballots that arrive late, which will deliver a real blow to Trump and Republican efforts to invalidate mail ballots in this fall’s midterms in many other states. Lisa, what’s your basic reading on that last one?

Graves: Well, the Watson case is one where, had the Roberts court ruled in favor of Trump, it would have caused further chaos for the elections. We’re already seeing some of the chaos the Roberts court has caused through the Callais decision and related rulings this spring around the maps and the redrawing of maps in the former Confederate states. But in this instance, the Roberts court said no to the effort of the RNC and Trump to block the counting of ballots that are postmarked by election day but that arrive after.

And obviously, people don’t have any control over how long it takes for the mail to be delivered. And it’s been increasingly slow in recent years. And in numerous other ways, the postmark is the thing that counts. It’s the thing that can’t be altered. And so it’s a really reliable indicator of whether a ballot is on time based on the postmark. And the reality is that even though the press covers election night in the sort of horse-race coverage of who won and who lost, those are projections, because in reality, in many counties across the country, particularly in cities, it takes days to actually count and verify those ballots.

And also there’s an opportunity for people to cure their ballots if they cast provisional ballots, come in later that week with their ID if they didn’t have one with these new ID restrictions. And so it’s not unusual at all for the counting of ballots that are postmarked by election day, and the ballots that are cast on election day, to be counted in the days after the election. Trump, as you point out, was counting on the court siding with him and the RNC to try to disrupt the counting of those ballots.

Sargent: This loss really triggered Trump’s anger more than anything else. He exploded in an extended rant on Truth Social. He said this:

“In light of the tremendous loss in the Supreme Court today concerning Voter’s Rights, and the fact that ‘people’s’ votes are allowed to be counted LONG AFTER an Election is over, it is more important than ever to pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT!”

Lisa, it’s very rare that Donald Trump admits that he lost, but there he admitted it. And I also thought it was useful that he said straight out that he doesn’t think people’s votes should be counted. That’s very helpful. I think that’s a very clear window into how he saw this.

Graves: Yeah, that’s right. Those in the law would call them admissions against interest, that he confessed those things. And this idea that he’s concerned about voters’ intent—if he were concerned about voters’ intent, he would try to ensure that those votes get counted when people mailed them on or before election day. But of course, as you point out, he also used this to pivot to his pressure campaign to try to get the SAVE Act passed, which is really about trying to save his presidency by making it harder for millions of Americans to vote.

A lot of women—not me—took their husbands’ names when they married. And so their birth certificate is not the same as their driver’s license. And the SAVE Act would make it harder for millions of American women to vote if they can’t show, at that time or in registration, that they are who they are, even if they’ve been voting for years or decades using either their driver’s license or their residence—regular voters.

And so that SAVE pressure point is something Trump has been obsessed with over the last few days in particular, because I think, again, he sees this as a way to try to control the outcome of the election, even though millions of Republican voters would also be affected by this deeply misguided and reckless SAVE Act.

Sargent: This ruling—what it does is, provisions like this one that allow the counting of mail ballots that arrive after election day will now remain in place in many states, including ones with big elections in them this fall. And this is the critical point. For instance, if Democrats win a couple of crucial House seats in California, their path to the majority becomes easier. There are a few other states, maybe New York and Texas, where the upholding of this provision could really matter in the midterms.

It’s obvious Trump and Republicans were hoping to use the slow counting of mail ballots to try to steal those elections outright. They were going to combine this counting of late-arriving votes with an effort to get the Postal Service to slow the delivery of votes, but that’s all been thwarted. That was a big chunk of their plan, wasn’t it?

Graves: That’s a great point, Greg. And we already saw Trump try to run this game plan in Los Angeles with the attacks on the process for counting ballots after the most recent elections in California, including in the mayoral race.

So we know that I think he was itching to deploy that same tactic to discredit elections everywhere by claiming that this is somehow fraudulent, or the results aren’t fair if the votes are counted after election day—even though, as you and I both know, votes are almost always counted after election day, because that’s how long it takes to count the votes.

Sargent: He really hates the counting of votes. I want to dwell a little bit on his use of this moment to push the SAVE Act. It’s really revealing. He responds to this loss on mail ballots by demanding again that Republicans pass voter suppression legislation. But the thing is, Lisa, he has explicitly said this voter suppression legislation is necessary to holding power in the midterms.

So he’s more or less confirming outright that he understood this mail ballot case as a way to block voters from delivering a negative verdict on his presidency, and as a way to block voters from having their say in the midterms. It’s just right out in the open. It’s striking how direct it is, isn’t it?

Graves: It really is. And it’s appalling, quite frankly. Because we’ve never—well, I guess we did in 2020—but before Donald Trump, we never had a president who sought to attack the idea of voting. Obviously, there was litigation around Bush v. Gore and whether those recounts could continue in the southeastern counties of Florida. But that was couched not as just hostility to counting these ballots.

And the thing about this particular circumstance is that, had the Supreme Court ruled in his favor, it would have cast in doubt early voting across the country. Because by setting election day as a particular day, Congress wasn’t intending to say that only ballots cast that day at the polling place could count. That’s not been the practice in the United States for literally more than a century. The first real major mailed ballots were during the Civil War, as the Civil War was going on. And so this is a long-standing part of American history. But Trump doesn’t care about history. What he cares about is power.

And he’s been joined in this attack on voting by mail, and on the potential outcome of this election, by Mike Johnson, who made really clear just the other day how, if Democrats were to win, there would be oversight of Donald Trump. And he said out loud something like, I’m your protection—we’re going to protect you from consequences. Which is also really morally appalling.

Sargent: Protecting you from accountability is what they mean.

Graves: Yes. And the fact is that that’s what representative government is about. That’s what House elections are about. Every two years we get a chance—or at least we’re supposed to get a chance—to do a course correction. And people seem to want a very real and significant course correction.

But between Donald Trump, Mike Johnson, and then the Roberts court’s rulings on Callais and the voting maps cases, what we see are Republican elected officials, or Republican-appointed officials, trying to squeeze and change the rules of the game midway to preserve Donald Trump’s power. Despite all of the extraordinarily outrageous things that Donald Trump has done on an almost daily basis, they seem determined to protect him at any cost—even the cost of representative government itself.

Sargent: Absolutely. But now we have to get to the bad part. The court ruled that Trump has the power to fire independent regulators, which is really going to increase Trump’s power over independent agencies and enable him and MAGA to bend agencies to his corrupt will more easily. The court carved out this exception for the Federal Reserve. Putting that aside for a sec, can you explain why this ruling on all the other agencies is such a disaster?

Graves: Well, it really is a disaster. And I wrote about some of this in my book, Without Precedent, which describes how John Roberts, the chief justice—who made an indelible image in people’s minds during his confirmation process, where he said he was just going to be a fair umpire calling balls and strikes—but in fact, he’s used the judiciary, used his post on the court, to advance some of these really fringe theories into law. And one of those fringe theories is the unitary executive theory.

It was invented during the Reagan administration. And we know that John Roberts was a Reagan revolutionary. He was at the top of the Justice Department at the beginning of Reagan’s term. He was then in the White House counsel’s office. Then he was in the George H.W. Bush administration as the political deputy in the SG’s office. And back then, what they were trying to do was to maximize presidential power.

And now, as a judge, what we’re seeing is John Roberts overturning decades, nearly a century, of legal precedent. Congress had passed this law saying that they wanted to make sure that there were independent agencies—that if the agency had sort of legislative components to its work, like the Federal Trade Commission, in terms of trying to implement Congress’s will of protecting against these mergers, and now they’re mega-mergers in the twenty-first century—that the president could not just fire someone without cause.

And the thing about what Roberts has done, along with his fellow Republican appointees in the Slaughter case, is that it has ripped away the power of Congress to create these independent agencies. And remember, the job of the president isn’t to invent the law. His job, the oath he takes, is to faithfully execute the law. Trump, for the most part, is not actually faithfully executing the law. From day one, minute one, after being sworn in, he started basically asserting that he could just change the law.

But in this instance, with mergers—this is an area where, like I said, going back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Supreme Court had said, no, you cannot fire your predecessors’ appointees. It’s just not allowed. We want these agencies to do their job independent of who is the president. And what Roberts has done is change the law radically, dramatically, to empower Trump to have more power than almost any president in the twentieth and twenty-first century has had.

Sargent: Well, let’s step back for a second and really home in on that bigger point. Trump rages wildly over his losses and he attacks the court over them, but he actually got his way in the manner that’s probably most significant in the long term—not for these midterms, but in the long term. And I think that tension captures where we are, which is that Trump’s expectation is so strong that he’ll get his way from the Supreme Court, that the Supreme Court will continue to give him power, that he treats it as unusual and even outrageous when the court occasionally doesn’t do that.

But the big story is that Trump and his appointees on the Supreme Court, and the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, have conspired to vastly inflate the power of the president and arguably of the court as well, at the expense of Congress.

Isn’t that the big story? That it’s just basically whittled away Congress and reduced it and diminished it while inflating the power of the presidency and inflating the power of the court itself. They’re like allied in this effort, it seems to me.

Graves: Well, you’re exactly right. What we’re seeing is an imperial president being created by an imperial court. What we have is a sort of cult of judicial supremacy where Roberts is basically acting like the kingmaker. He is the one who invented and orchestrated his fellow Republican appointees to come together to give Donald Trump unprecedented immunity from criminal prosecution for his so-called official acts, to allow him to commit crimes. That is extraordinary. It was unprecedented, and it has created the sense of entitlement of Donald Trump in this new term.

So it basically pardoned him when he was not in office, helped sweep him back into power by sending a signal to the American people that he did no wrong, in essence—could do no wrong, and then has empowered him.

And the bookend for that is that this court, through the shadow docket, has ruled in Donald Trump’s favor 90 percent of the time, while the lower courts of different presidential appointments have been ruling against him on a lot of these issues, because they are contrary to the Constitution, to statutes, regulations, legal precedents, and contracts in many instances.

And so what we see here is a Supreme Court majority, six to three—five of them served in the executive branch. They cut their teeth trying to expand and defend presidential power. And now they’re using their posts on the Supreme Court to expand presidential power from the bench, to invent new rules and ignore long-standing precedents to do so.

And in doing so, they also are carving out for themselves this notion that they are the deciders. They are the real people in power, and they are unaccountable to the American people. Which is why I, and an increasing number of my colleagues, are supporting an all-of-the-above strategy on court reform.

Sargent: Well, that is an absolutely awful occurrence, what we’ve seen happen—the big-picture occurrence. I just want to be sure we don’t take away from the importance of Trump losing on mail balloting, because we are going to need a Democratic Congress to challenge the state of affairs. And with these rulings, with the ruling on mail ballots, it has become somewhat more likely that we get that Democratic Congress, right?

Graves: Yes. The fact that they cannot stop ballots from being counted that are postmarked by election day—that is a big victory for the American voter. And it also takes place in the context of this court basically putting its thumb on the scale in these re-gerrymandered maps in ways that may already help Trump. But it’s not a done deal, because Republicans have lost a number of these special elections. And the turnout rates for Democrats versus Republicans in the primaries—there’s been a real disparity in terms of enthusiasm for Democratic candidates and lack of enthusiasm for some of these Republicans.

So, no matter the court’s intervention in general, people are clamoring for change. And this ruling by the Roberts court in the Watson case on mail-in ballots does protect the ability to have ballots be counted as they have been year in and year out for decades before Donald Trump became president.

Sargent: So here’s the bottom line then. With this imperial president getting enabled by this imperial court, as you put it, we’re going to need Congress to discover its power. And if Democrats can win one chamber or both chambers—which is hard but possible—they are going to have to use every last shred of power that they can lay their hands on. Lisa Graves, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much for coming on. That was just great stuff. Beautifully put.

Graves: Thank you so much, Greg. It was a joy to be on your show.

In late April, Virginia voters narrowly approved an aggressive gerrymander that would have given Democrats a largely unbeatable advantage in 10 of the commonwealth’s 11 U.S. House seats, counteracting GOP power plays in Ohio, Missouri, and North Carolina. Democrats exulted. “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time,” a triumphant House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared. Data nerds proclaimed that Democrats had fought the mid-decade redistricting wars to a draw, and maybe even won. The Bluesky brigades rejoiced that their side had strapped on boxing gloves for a change.

The good feelings didn’t even last until May. Eight days after the Virginia vote, the U.S. Supreme Court completed its war on the Voting Rights Act with Louisiana v. Callais, unleashing lawmakers across the South to shatter districts that ensured Black representation across the old Confederacy and carve them into safe seats for Republicans. Florida, anticipating the court’s decision, moved first. Alabama, and Tennessee quickly followed. So did Louisiana, which canceled its congressional primaries after thousands of votes had already been cast.

Then, Virginia’s conservative-leaning state Supreme Court delivered the final insult, finding a technicality that allowed it to invalidate the referendum and the new 10–1 map.

There are lessons to be learned here, and if Democrats are serious about maximal warfare, or interested in rescuing government by and for the people, they must digest those lessons and stiffen their spines. They will need to fight back and enact big reforms, both locally and nationally, that reinvigorate and strengthen American democracy, all with the same speed and relentless determination that Southern lawmakers bring to ripping apart Black districts.

We might have one chance. It’s not now, although what we do now is important. It’s in the first 100 days of a 2029 trifecta, when for once electoral wins, electoral reforms, and political will may all align. But even if Democrats win that 2029 trifecta, they can’t lull themselves into declaring a premature victory. The project of saving American democracy will require a massive lift: redistricting, court expansion, and additional states, at once. Hard as it may be, however, we have no choice. Because if you think the redistricting power play this year is bad, just wait. The road to controlling the U.S. House and the White House after that gets decidedly more difficult.

There is a looming time bomb for Democrats hidden in the reapportionment that will follow the 2030 census. Defusing that—overcoming the census, the Supreme Court, and the filibuster with a package that ensures competitive elections and majority rule, just in the nick of time—will require the kind of coordinated, decisive action not seen since Die Hard or Speed.

Here’s the problem: Everything that the Democrats do in 2028 to level the redistricting playing field could be negated post-census. They could win or hold the House thanks to new maps in New York, California, and Illinois, then hand all those seats over to Texas and Florida anyway.

Winning a trifecta and then enacting redistricting reform through the minoritarian Senate, and protecting it from a court that has spent more than a decade tilting maps and electoral rules toward the GOP, are not merely options. They are existential.

Just do the math. Imagine that Democrats in 2028 claim four more seats in California, three in New York, and one apiece in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, and Wisconsin. Then consider the consequences if Democrats hand each of these seats—along with one in Rhode Island—over to Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Utah, and Idaho after the 2030 census. Because if current population projections hold, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.

William H. Frey, the legendary Brookings Institution demographer, has developed three different models for what the 2030 census could look like, depending on how population patterns and immigration politics work out over the next five years. They range only in the magnitude of bleakness: Will California lose three or four seats? Will Texas gain four or just three? Will New York lose two, or just one? Will Florida gain three, or just two?

Frey cautioned in an interview that much remains unknown, particularly the state-by-state consequences of the Trump administration’s immigration policy that have thrown an historic kill switch on population growth nationwide. But what’s clear is that migration out of New York, California, and the industrial Midwest, coupled with low-to-zero immigration growth, come with what could be a historic migration of political power, almost all of it heading South.

“It should be on people’s minds more,” said Democratic strategist Adam Jentleson. “That’s why we need to run up our margins as much as we possibly can in every election, because this is exactly what happened to us in 2010. We had these two great cycles in 2006 and 2008, and then we just got our asses handed to us in 2010 ... and all the power we won, it evaporated.”

Somewhere between 12 and 14 seats will move away from states where Democrats are likely to draw the lines. The South, currently mapped almost entirely by the GOP, would have its largest number of House seats ever, some 40 percent of the entire body. The Northeast and industrial Midwest, meanwhile, would reach historic lows, abandoned for warmer climates and cheaper housing.

The House math gets more difficult when you add that dozen to the 19 that the GOP could pick up via Callais, which only highlights the urgency of reform. Yet the problem runs deeper than the House. When those seats move toward the Sun Belt and GOP-dominated Western states, presidential electors relocate with them—a shift that will transform the Electoral College map.

The brutal math of House apportionment combined with gerrymandering. A Senate weighted toward whiter, rural states, when 70 percent of the nation will soon live in 15 states. Twenty-five states that voted for Donald Trump three times, with 50 GOP senators: Right now, a majority means winning everyplace else, then expanding the map. A conservative supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court will be with us into at least the 2050s, if Republican justices strategically retire and allow Trump and a GOP Senate to name replacements.

There is no easy way out of this structural mess that Democrats find themselves in. First, it requires winning elections and taking advantage of a weakened president and unpopular GOP in 2026. Then, it’s adding to those majorities in 2028 while building a mandate for change that restores fairness everywhere, beginning with redistricting and the House. As Democrats learned in 2021, 50 senators and the White House will in no way be enough for the heavy reform lift that will follow. “You’re going to need votes to spare on big-ticket agenda items and structural reforms, like the filibuster itself, or making D.C. a state,” says Jentleson.

The good news is that much of what is broken and unrepresentative can be fixed by statute, given a Democratic trifecta and the political will to use it.

The good news is that much of what is broken can be fixed by statute, given a Democratic trifecta and the political will to use it. Two Democrats who have introduced far-reaching, visionary reform packages believe that the moment might be now.

Moreover, there appears to be significant energy in the party for the project. Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland said that he’s never seen this much interest in proportional representation from his colleagues. Representative Don Beyer of Virginia, along with Raskin and a handful of other legislators, have co-sponsored the Fair Representation Act for almost a decade now. It’s the most complete national solution to end gerrymandering and would create a more proportional House with larger, multimember districts and ranked-choice voting. According to their vision, every district nationwide becomes a swing district, and every delegation would more closely represent the politics and racial demographics of every state. Members who have never wanted to talk about it in the past are now asking Raskin how it works.

After years of experiencing a radical restructuring of our constitutional order by way of presidential usurpation and a runaway court, Raskin said, Americans are ready for a pro-democracy restructuring that makes institutions accountable and elections matter. A proportional House is just a matter of passing a law, no constitutional amendment required. The program would protect the right to vote everywhere; add Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico as new states; and maybe even include Supreme Court reform. “Ultimately, we need to get to independent nonpartisan commissions with multimember districts and ranked-choice voting all over the country,” Raskin said. “Those are some of the things we need to put on the table along with the national popular vote for president.”

Illinois Representative Sean Casten sees all of this as a long overdue corrective that would actually make Congress functional and more representative. “The Founders didn’t actually create a representative democracy,” he pointed out. “They created one representative chamber, another nonrepresentative chamber, a Supreme Court that’s not representative at all, and refused to allow most Americans to vote. The Americans they did allow to vote, they didn’t trust to vote for senators or presidents. We’ve not fixed all that stuff yet.”

Under his plan, only 12 additional senators, elected by a national popular vote, would require a constitutional amendment. Everything else is just fixing a statute. Tweak the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, and suddenly the size of the House can be adjusted to the population again, as it was every decade before its passage. It’s effectively undoing the Apportionment Act, he said, and the larger House also negates any GOP reapportionment advantage in the Electoral College. Amend the Judges Act of 1925, and it’s easy to change the mix of cases that the U.S. Supreme Court is allowed to hear. The shadow docket, all of it, gone.

For Raskin, the key is to figure out the proper sequencing for all these “powerful and provocative ideas.” But all of them are linked. Everything happens or nothing happens. And if nothing moves through both chambers in the first 100 days of a Democratic trifecta, the likelihood of the reapportionment time bomb detonating—and the GOP’s adding hefty advantages in the House and Electoral College to its control of the Supreme Court and its demographic edge in the Senate—only deepens.

The most pressing change may be to abolish the filibuster. As Jentleson suggested, although nothing moves through the Senate without first addressing the filibuster, none of these structural reforms will stick without shifting the balance of the judiciary. “You need to not just win power, but you are going to need to hold those majorities for at least a few years beyond if you are really serious about the structural reforms that are necessary,” he said. Thankfully, the appetite and scope of what even centrist members will consider have been expanded, he pointed out, by the Callais decision and the behavior of the court. It’s now impossible not to see that “if you pass ambitious structural reforms, but the Supreme Court is still six to three, it’s just going to be a matter of time until they undo those reforms.”

There seems to be political will for big structural reform. Raskin points to D.C. statehood, the For the People Act, and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act winning near-unanimous majorities among House Democrats as proof that it exists. Those reforms met their end due to the filibuster. “We had a very similar national conversation after the first Trump election, and we had a very similar mass mobilization of people saying, ‘This is unacceptable,’” Casten observed. “We then signed almost none of that into law, because the Senate said it was more important to protect the rights of 40 senators than to protect the rights of 330 million Americans.”

There’s one other hardball play, should the Senate block reform again, or if Democrats fail to win the Senate back. What would happen if the president refused to report the census apportionment to the House? If Congress rewrote the statute governing the transmission of the numbers? Or if the clerk of the House simply declined to certify it? These have been ceremonial tasks in the past. But as Republicans have taught us, they need not be. Which is to say: The choice is clear. It is either big, structural reform or a constitutional, existential crisis.  

In the wake of victories by candidates who New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed, Senator Joe Manchin complained, “The extremes are driving the conversation while the majority of Americans are being left behind.” Responding to criticism of an article that the paper ran about one of those winning candidates, Darializa Avila Chevalier, The New York Times’ official account said on X, “The Times has been documenting the increasingly extreme viewpoints on both sides of the political spectrum for years.” Centrist Democratic politicians and center-left columnists are urging the country to reject both socialism and MAGA. 

But the idea that America now has a far left that is equally dangerous and radical as  the far right is entirely wrong, no matter how many powerful people and institutions hint or claim otherwise. America’s extreme right wing is by far the country’s big problem, and it’s hard to address that problem when powerful elites insist that the trouble is with “both sides.”

Why is this analogy so far-fetched? First of all and most importantly, the political left in America believes in and practices democracy. Until leftists collectively try to use judicial and then violent means to overturn an election that they clearly lost, as MAGA Republicans did in 2020, I don’t want to hear any bullshit false equivalences between leftists and MAGA conservatives. Conducting free and fair elections and respecting their results is fundamental to democracy. MAGA’s leader, Donald Trump, refused to accept the 2020 results, as did dozens of Republican members of Congress and state officials. To this day, Republicans tiptoe around the issue to the point where they can’t even give a straightforward answer to the question, “Did Joe Biden win the 2020 election?”

In contrast, Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Socialists of America, Avila Chevalier and other powerful people and groups on the left don’t deny Trump was elected in 2024. And it’s not just ignoring election results. The socialist left is trying to win power the democratic way—getting average Americans to vote for their candidates. The MAGA right is trying to gain and expand their power through gerrymandering, voting restrictions, and other undemocratic means. They’ve spent years making up claims of voter fraud. 

I’m pretty sure the Times and the centrist Democratic who sing the “both sides” song know all that. It’s unfortunate that they choose not to distinguish between pro-democracy people with bold policy views and anti-democracy people with bold policy views. 

Let’s move to the allegedly “extreme” agenda of the far left. Avila Chevalier, Mamdani, and other socialist politicians are pushing ideas like abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, cutting U.S. funding for Israel’s military, and limiting corporate monopolies. Much of their agenda is extremely popular because it takes on the rich and big corporations, as Americans desperately want. Some of those ideas are more contested. 

But guess what? None of that is anywhere as radical as giving an unelected billionaire (Elon Musk) the authority to fire federal workers, unilaterally shuttering federal agencies, and using the presidency to enrich yourself and your family. That’s what Trump has done over the last year and half. At least leftist politicians like Mamdani are open and honest about their controversial ideas. Trump and MAGA Republicans implement a radical agenda that they hide from voters during campaigns—just think back to the president’s constant lying about knowing nothing about Project 2025. 

Yes, some on the left, including Avila Chevalier in the past, advocate abolishing prisons, police, and borders. These are ideas that are truly radical. But ideas seem less outlandish after they have happened. And the right has managed to turn some extreme notions into U.S policy: the right to a “well regulated” militia in the Second Amendment actually means that virtually any restriction on gun ownership is illegal; the right to free speech means billionaires and corporations can spend almost unlimited funds on political campaigns; the constitutional amendments passed in the wake of the Civil War should be interpreted in ways that make it easier to force Black people from Congress. I am not sure that the wildest dreams of the DSA are much more radical than the policies stated in the aforementioned Project 2025 that is being implemented every day. 

Finally, any equivalence between the socialist left and the MAGA right falls apart when you consider the huge differences in power between the two sides. There are probably two dozen House Democrats, a dozen mayors, five senators, and two Democratic governors who would attend a DSA conference. And most of them would not call themselves socialists. In contrast, MAGA Republicans control the White House, about half of the seats in Congress, half the governorships, and at least two seats on the U.S. Supreme Court (Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito). Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, another socialist who won a congressional primary in New York last week, will be something like the 250th and 251st most powerful Democrats in Washington next year. MAGA Republicans are the president, vice-president, and top policy adviser to the president (Stephen Miller). MAGA Republicans are the dominant faction in one party; socialist Democrats are a minority bloc in another party. Anyone suggesting that the two blocs are anywhere close to each other in influence is either stupid or dishonest. 

The centrists annoyed by the left aren’t stupid. They are conflating the socialist left with the MAGA right as a rhetorical tool. The media, traditional Democrats, and swing voters will reject Mamdani and his ilk if they are convinced that socialists will be as destructive to America as Trumpists. But this misleading centrist rhetoric has real consequences. What America desperately needs is socialists, traditional liberals, independents, and pro-democracy conservatives to disagree with one another during Democratic primaries but then join together to defeat the MAGA right in general elections. That unity can’t happen if anytime centrist Democrats lose a primary they act as if a socialist candidate winning is as dangerous as a MAGA candidate winning. It’s not. I plead to those on the center left to stop calling people extreme unless they are trying to end democracy in America. 

In 2013, McDonald’s generated some ghastly publicity when it came out that the fast-food giant was advising burger flippers to go on food stamps. Why didn’t McDonald’s, a multinational corporation that generates more than $26 billion in annual revenue, simply pay its burger flippers a living wage? The answer in most (but not all) cases was that, appearances to the contrary, most McDonald’s burger flippers don’t work directly for McDonald’s. They work for McDonald’s franchisees—independent, mostly small businesses that contract with McDonald’s Corporation to lease and operate one or more McDonald’s restaurants according to a mind-bogglingly specific set of rules that guarantees every McDonald’s will be indistinguishable from every other McDonald’s.

McDonald’s is not an isolated example. Over the past half-century, corporate America has systematically shed low-wage workers, either by offshoring them, contracting out their work, or designating them as independent contractors. Only rarely today will a large corporation employ someone earning less than $30,000. That’s not because corporations have gotten more generous but because they’ve gotten more wary of assuming responsibility for low-wage workers. Off-loading them spares corporations bad publicity, and in effect allows them to delegate routine labor violations to much smaller companies that can easily liquidate and/or rename themselves if they run into serious legal trouble.

The contractors don’t try very hard to disguise the nature of the service they provide. In a Pulitzer-winning series on migrant child labor for The New York Times, Hannah Dreier reported that Packers Sanitation Services Inc. pitched itself on its website as being able to “take the liability and risk off your facility’s record.” Packers was as good as its word when the Labor Department in February 2023 fined it $1.5 million for assigning migrant children to overnight shifts in 13 meatpacking plants in eight states. Packers took nearly all the heat, while most of the Fortune 500 companies that owned the plants involved—Tyson, Cargill, etc.—went unpunished. Packers then “rebranded” itself as Fortrex and moved its corporate headquarters from Kieler, Wisconsin, to Atlanta. Problem solved.

The Brandeis economist David Weil labeled this phenomenon “the fissured workplace,” in an influential 2014 book of that name whose thesis was that changes in the structure of corporate hiring that are typically thought of as efficiencies are actually a conscious effort to evade union drives and government-guaranteed labor protections, such as child labor prohibitions and payment of minimum wage, overtime, Social Security tax, and unemployment tax. Weil did his best to reverse that trend when he ran the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division under President Barack Obama. But when President Joe Biden renominated Weil for that post, the International Franchise Association, or IFA, a lobby group founded by franchisors and still dominated by them, campaigned against Weil and won sufficient support from the Senate GOP and three Senate Democrats (Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, who later became independents, plus Senator Mark Kelly) to defeat Weil.

The IFA has had a much easier time during President Donald Trump’s two terms in office, as demonstrated by a proposed Labor Department regulation severely limiting the circumstances under which a corporation can be held accountable for work done on its behalf under the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, or FLSA, which governs minimum wage and overtime. (A separate joint-employer standard under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act governs union organizing and other concerted activity, and is enforced by the National Labor Relations Board.) The nonprofit Economic Policy Institute, in a public comment sent last week to the Labor Department, estimates that the proposed rule would affect about 15 million workers in “fissured establishments,” of which about 10 million would be the employees of franchisees, and that the rule would cost these workers almost $1 billion annually.

Prior to Trump, the Labor Department followed a guidance document on joint employment drafted in 2015 by Weil. Regarding “vertical joint employment,” wherein an employee works for Company B, which in turn is contracted to Company A, Company A would be designated a joint employer when “the economic realities show that” the worker is “economically dependent on” Company A. This was less an interpretation than a description of what the FLSA actually says. Weil noted that the FLSA defined an employer very broadly as “any person acting directly or indirectly [italics mine] in the interest of an employer in relation to an employee.” (You can look it up.)

But after Trump came into office in 2019, his Labor Department tore up Weil’s guidance and issued a regulation that defined an employer as interacting only directly with an employee. If Company A did not hire and fire a worker for Company B, or schedule that worker’s time, or dictate that worker’s specific work conditions, or set that worker’s wages, or maintain that worker’s employment records, then Company A was not a joint employer. This departed quite blatantly from the statutory language—so much so that a federal court later threw the Trump rule out.

Now the second Trump administration is taking another whack at a Labor Department joint-employment rule, and if any substantive difference exists between Trump’s earlier version and this new one, I can’t see it. Once again, the regulation contradicts the language of the Fair Labor Standards Act by saying that indirect control over employees isn’t good enough to establish that Company A is a joint employer.

The best case the business lobby can make in defense of Trump’s proposed rule is that although it contradicts the statute, it captures the federal government’s past reluctance to enforce it, especially with respect to franchising. In what follows, I rely heavily on an excellent new book, Chains of Command: The Rise and Cruel Reign of the Franchise Economy, by Brian Callaci, chief economist at the nonprofit Open Markets Institute.

When fast-food franchising took off in the 1960s and 1970s, it was often judged in violation of antitrust law, which did not permit collusion between Company A and Company B. The franchisors answered that prohibitions on such “vertical restraint” did not apply because Company A and Company B were essentially the same company. Judges didn’t always buy that, but it was kind of true. Indeed, for a long time the Small Business Administration refused to give loans to Company Bs on the grounds that these weren’t small businesses at all but rather the equivalent of branch offices for Company As.

Unfortunately, franchisors simultaneously contested responsibility for labor violations at Company B by arguing, no, actually, these are two separate companies … which was kind of not true. Yes, Company B signed a licensing agreement to run a fast-food joint for Company A on certain (quite extensive) terms. But Company A could later change that contract’s terms without requiring any sign-off from Company B. It was essentially sharecropping (Callaci more politely likens it to tenant farming), wherein Company B, after being sucked dry by Company A, eked out razor-thin profit margins by squeezing employees. Company A didn’t have to care very much about whether Company B was profitable because it took its money off the top.

Granted, there have been a few franchisee success stories wherein Company B purchased multiple franchises and scaled up sufficiently to earn a real profit. But most Company Bs are single-restaurant operations that barely get by. Callaci quotes one franchise consultant describing the sort of franchisee Company A was looking for:

An entrepreneur makes the worst franchisee. You might think that they would do well, but it is just the opposite. For one thing, they’ll never listen to you.… You don’t want any creative thinkers, either. Again, these people will not follow your system, and instead they’ll look for ways to do their own thing. You want someone who follows the rules.

Ouch.

Fast-food franchising became the behemoth it is today because of an FTC rule in 1979 that gave Company A a get-out-of-antitrust-jail-free card so long as Company A was fully transparent to Company B up front about what a terrible deal it was agreeing to. Franchising also got a boost from the adoption of the “consumer welfare standard,” which said antitrust violations occurred only if consumers were harmed. If franchisees or burger-flippers were harmed, it didn’t matter.

Today the consumer welfare standard is on its way out, but that transition is not happening quickly. Fast-food franchisors used to argue that it didn’t matter how much Company B abused its workers because they were just kids working after-school jobs. But that stopped being true some time ago. Now fast-food employees are mostly grown-ups, often with families, and their best recourse, if they can’t make ends meet, is to go on welfare. Trump’s proposed joint-employer rule will impoverish these workers even more.

“Under President Donald J. Trump’s leadership, America is safer than it has been in over a century,” a White House press release declared in January, claiming the “monumental turnaround” stemmed from Trump “reversing the chaos and carnage unleashed by Radical Left Democrats” and by his administration “ridding the streets of savage criminal illegal aliens, backing law enforcement, and bringing back order where incompetent Democrat politicians surrendered to anarchy and despair.”

Putting aside the racism and xenophobia in that statement, the key word is “reversing.” The administration has been selling hard the idea that Trump, who ran in part on a law-and-order platform, has stepped in and calmed the chaos of our cities, restoring peace to streets made unsafe by naïve Democrats who care more about protecting undocumented immigrants than American citizens. Last week, Trump crowed on Truth Social, “D.C., Memphis, New Orleans, all down to record lows, and quickly!”

He and his acolytes not only are taking credit for the drop in crime, but using it to excuse or hand-wave away a host of transgressions, from the National Guard troops that still occupy the streets of D.C. to ICE raids that continue to break up families and trample on human rights. They even use it to rebut critiques that have no relation to public safety.

In a recent appearance on ABC’s The View, Vice President JD Vance responded to questions about the administration’s whitewashing of U.S. history and its efforts to dilute minority voting power by arguing that it was actually doing more for minorities because crime in D.C., whose population is around 42 percent Black, is down. And FBI Director Kash Patel, during a Senate hearing last month, responded to a question about his indecorous behavior at the recent Winter Olympics—where he chugged a beer with the U.S. men’s hockey team—by holding up a sheet of arrest and crime stats, stating that the murder rate had fallen around 20 percent last year. (The following day, he was busted by MS NOW for inflating those arrest numbers.)

But guess who’s actually responsible for the drop in violent crime? Democrats, by and large—and it predates the Trump administration.

Last September, Trump woke up and fired off the following message on Truth Social: “CHICAGO IS THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD!” That’s not true, but no matter. Trump was going to send in the National Guard to clean things up. “We’re going in,” he told the press later that day. “This isn’t a political thing. I have an obligation. When 20 people are killed over the last two and a half weeks, and 75 are shot with bullets, there’s no place in the world, including—you can go to Afghanistan, you can go to places that you would think of—they don’t even come close to this. Chicago is a hellhole right now. Baltimore is a hellhole right now.”

Sure enough, a month later, he sent guardsmen into Chicago and kept them there for three months before the Supreme Court intervened.

I’m not going to argue that Chicago hasn’t had a crime problem, but the data is very clear: The city has been getting dramatically safer. After hitting a quarter-century peak of 804 murders in 2021, the number fell to 719 in 2022, 623 in 2023, 587 in 2024, and 416 last year. The city not only halved its murder rate in four years, but hit its lowest number since 1965. This was likely achieved in part through Mayor Brandon Johnson’s restructuring of the Chicago Police’s detective bureau, his appointment of an effective superintendent in Larry Snelling, and the increased spending and attention given to mental health care and crime prevention programs.

Baltimore witnessed an even more remarkable drop, going from 334 murders in 2022 to 262 in 2023, 202 in 2024, and finally 133 in 2025—a 60 percent decline in just three years. Mayor Brandon Scott, who took office in late 2020, has focused on getting guns off the street and supporting community programs, which target the young people most prone to join gangs and commit violence, providing them with mentors and resources to prevent crimes from ever happening.

As for Washington, D.C., which Trump claims to have singlehandedly made safe by deploying the National Guard, the capital did see a 32 percent reduction in homicides from 2024 to 2025. But this followed from the previous year, when the city hit a 30-year low in violent crime, including a 32 percent decline in murders from 2023 to 2024, long before Trump’s troops arrived. Like Chicago and Baltimore, D.C.’s mayor over this period, Muriel Bowser, was a Democrat.

These drops are actually part of a larger national trend. Homicides have been falling across the nation since Covid—that is, since well before Trump’s second administration. The greatest decreases have been in cities, and 34 of America’s 40 largest cities are run by “Radical Left Democrats,” as Trump would put it. While the Covid pandemic may have fueled an aberrantly high rate, there’s also no doubt that crime fell drastically under President Joe Biden, and experts, such as Ben Struhl of the University of Pennsylvania’s Crime and Justice Policy Lab, credit Biden-era community-based violence intervention programs, or CVI programs, for making a major difference. “The evidence is strong,” he told The New York Times, “for citywide strategies that contain these programs.” These include community funding programs established in Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.

Over $325 billion of ARPA’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package went directly to state, local, and tribal governments. The Biden administration encouraged grant recipients to use some of these funds on public safety, and these governments responded by injecting over $10 billion toward that purpose—not just for enforcement efforts, but for proven CVI programs.

Many cities put this to great effect. The most powerful example may be Boston, which is experiencing its lowest crime rate in nearly seven decades under Democratic Mayor Michelle Wu. Police Commissioner Michael Cox largely credited the city’s CVI tactics, declaring, “The Boston Police Department continues to rely on the community as our most valued partner in public safety in the city.” That effort has included over 4,000 officer-attended community events and new programs to empower young people and stop crime before it happens.

Adding to ARPA’s impact, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act not only increased funding for prevention programs, but expanded access to mental health facilities, strengthened background checks for gun purchases, and closed the “dating loophole” that allowed perpetrators of domestic violence to get guns.

This is all libtard propaganda, though, if you ask the White House. When The Hill’s Sarah Fortinsky dared in February to suggest that Biden’s legislation helped reduce murders, deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson called the claim “absurd,” insisting that “crime is dropping because of President Trump’s law-and-order policies. Any suggestion otherwise is simply not based in reality.”

The irony is surely lost on her that the most lawless administration in American history, led by the most criminal U.S. president ever, is trying to take credit for a crime drop that it’s had little or nothing to do with. But that is the reality. The “carnage and chaos” around this country is being largely caused by Trump and his goons, and there is no bigger “hellhole” in America right now than that white neoclassical building at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—the one with the literal hole right next to it.

For most people, one of the highest-funded police departments in the country suing its own city for $67.6 million would sound absurd. In St. Louis, it is reality. This spring, the state-controlled St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners filed a lawsuit claiming that tens of millions of dollars from the city’s settlement with the National Football League over the departure of the Rams should be diverted to the police department. The board argued that the settlement funds, along with city reserves, should count as “general revenue” under Missouri law, which would require the city to divert 25 percent of the settlement to policing under a 2025 law.

Earlier this month, a judge rejected that argument, ruling that money received and accounted for in prior years does not suddenly become current-year revenue simply because the police department wants access to it. But the board, joined by Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, intends to appeal the ruling.

After the unexpected windfall from the Rams lawsuit, city officials and residents spent years debating how to use the money. Under Board Bill 22, which is advancing through the city’s Board of Aldermen, the funds would go to repairing homes damaged by last year’s tornado, helping displaced residents find housing, demolishing unsafe buildings, rebuilding North St. Louis neighborhoods, repairing sidewalks and streets, upgrading aging water infrastructure, redeveloping vacant properties, and supporting small businesses. The settlement is a rare opportunity to make investments that cities often struggle to afford through ordinary annual budgets, but the police board’s position is that tens of millions of those dollars should be diverted to policing instead. The consequence of a board win in the lawsuit would be less money for rebuilding neighborhoods and more money for an institution that already consumes nearly a third of the city’s general revenue—and generates millions more in legal liabilities, settlements, judgments, and overtime costs.

The details are specific to St. Louis, but the underlying dynamic is far more widespread. The lawsuit offers a revealing look at the extraordinary fiscal and political power police departments enjoy in U.S. cities. At a time when local governments are struggling to fund schools, parks, housing programs, public health initiatives, transit systems, and basic infrastructure, a police department that already consumes a substantial portion of municipal resources is attempting to use the courts to suck even more funding away from other city services.

The board is pursuing this funding shift even as taxpayers already bear an enormous range of police-related costs that rarely appear in discussions about police budgets. When politicians and police advocates talk about police spending, they usually mean appropriations. They point to the department’s annual budget and argue that officers need more personnel, more equipment, or higher salaries. But policing’s true price tag extends far beyond the amount formally allocated to a department each year.

Cities also pay for police misconduct settlements. From judgments entered against officers and departments for excessive force to outside counsel hired to defend misconduct suits, to litigation arising from unconstitutional arrests, wrongful imprisonment, and protest crackdowns, the public bears the consequences of police misconduct long after the underlying incident has faded from public attention.

In St. Louis, those costs have been substantial. The city has paid millions of dollars in police misconduct settlements and judgments over the last decade. For example, it paid approximately $5 million to undercover officer Luther Hall after he was beaten by fellow officers during protests following the acquittal of former officer Jason Stockley. Hall was a St. Louis police officer working undercover when members of the department’s notorious “Civil Disobedience Team” attacked him, leaving him with serious injuries. A jury later awarded Hall nearly $24 million in damages against one of the officers involved. The city also paid millions more to settle claims arising from an infamous “kettling” operation in which officers indiscriminately arrested protesters, journalists, legal observers, and bystanders. Publicly documented misconduct settlements and judgments alone amount to tens of millions of dollars.

The department has other significant expenses outside of its annual budget. Recent city budget records show policing already consumes close to 30 percent of St. Louis’s general revenue. Meanwhile, police overtime spending has repeatedly blown past budgeted amounts, costing taxpayers millions more than anticipated.

Yet none of those costs seem to matter when police officials describe the department’s financial situation. The board’s position is effectively that no matter how much policing already costs the public, the police department is entitled to more. That attitude has become even more striking since Missouri restored state control over the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department in 2024.

Supporters of state control argued that local officials could not be trusted to prioritize public safety, and claimed the solution was to exclude key decisions from the oversight of the majority-Democrat city government and place them in the hands of a board appointed by the majority-Republican state government. Under this arrangement, local taxpayers fund the police department but have little control over how that money is spent. When disputes with the city government arise, the board can turn to state officials and the courts to extract additional resources. This current litigation is an example of that dynamic in action.

Taxpayers are effectively paying both sides of the dispute, funding the police board’s effort to obtain more money while simultaneously financing the city’s effort to defend itself. At the same time the board has been pursuing $67.6 million from the Rams settlement, it has also proposed double-digit raises for command staff. The proposal includes raises of 16 percent for lieutenants, 18 percent for captains, 20 percent for majors, and 22 percent for lieutenant colonels. City officials have warned that because of pay-parity requirements, the proposal could trigger nearly $6 million in additional spending when corresponding raises for firefighters are included.

Every dollar directed toward one function of government is a dollar unavailable for another. That reality applies to housing departments, health departments, libraries, schools, sanitation services, and parks; but in cities across the country, police institutions are often treated as exempt from the tradeoffs that govern every other part of municipal government.

Across the country, police unions and departments operate as political actors whose primary objective is securing ever-greater fiscal protection from democratic accountability. When cities attempt to reallocate funds or increase oversight, police organizations mobilize and aim the familiar “weak on crime” rhetoric unrelentingly at any politician who threatens their dominance. Nearly every other public institution is expected to justify its spending, but police budgets are often treated as presumptively legitimate and perpetually insufficient.

Public school teachers pay for basic classroom supplies out of their pockets, libraries have to scrape and beg for every scrap of funding, and public infrastructure wastes away, while any attempt to rightsize the police budget is treated like a five-alarm fire. This political asymmetry helps explain why police budgets have often remained resilient even in periods of fiscal stress. It also helps explain why a police board could look at a major municipal settlement and conclude that the money should belong to them.

The fight over this $67.6 million is about much more than a budget formula. The lawsuit is a test of whether city residents can decide how to spend their own money or whether the police’s trump card will continue to drain communities of vital services. And the implications are nationwide. For years, debates about policing have focused on questions of crime, accountability, and public safety. The St. Louis lawsuit highlights a different question that deserves equal attention: How much public money is enough?

The answer from the police board is pretty simple. Whatever the city has, the police should get more of it. Everyone else can go without.

Donald Trump lost three big cases at the Supreme Court on Monday. His appeal of E. Jean Carroll’s verdict failed. He was blocked from firing a Federal reserve official. And most important, the court upheld the counting of late-arriving mail ballots. He ranted wildly over these losses. On the last one he exploded in a long and angry tirade, seething over the “powerful Communist Movement taking place in our Country” and demanding again that Republicans pass onerous voter suppression. It’s clear why: This deals a major blow to Trump-GOP hopes of stealing the midterms by invalidating untold numbers of votes. Yet Trump won big at the court, too, securing the power to fire independent regulators at will. We talked to Lisa Graves, a former Senate Judiciary Committee counsel who writes about the Supreme Court. We discuss what the ruling on mail-balloting does, why it will thwart a major piece of the Trump-GOP election-rigging scheme, how Trump and the Supreme Court are teaming up to empower themselves at the expense of Congress, and how a future Democratic Congress can fight back. Listen to this episode here.

The White House’s July 4 celebration is about to blow the ceiling off of Washington—and not in a good way.

Government workers were spotted by independent journalist Amanda Moore on Monday using forklifts to move pallets full of fireworks around the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool ahead of America’s semiquincentennial.

The location was not an oddity, as the federal government has traditionally chosen the Reflecting Pool as its primary launch site. What is exceptionally unusual is the amount of firepower behind the 250th celebration.

Donald Trump promised earlier this month that he would launch “the LARGEST FIREWORKS SHOW IN HISTORY” on Independence Day 2026. By the numbers, it’s not even close: A typical July 4 show in the nation’s capital uses roughly 17,000 to 20,000 shells for a 17-minute show, according to figures collected by The Washington Post.

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

Pyrotecnico, the Pennsylvania-based vendor responsible for the show, told the Post that it would “not only” be a “once-in-a-generation patriotic spectacle but a landmark moment in fireworks history.”

The previous record was held by Manila in the Philippines, which earned the Guinness World Record title in 2016 for lighting 809,000 fireworks during a New Year’s Eve event.

But rules around Washington’s celebration are likely to make the spectacle an unpleasant evening for local spectators. The Department of Homeland Security has classified the ceremony as a National Special Security Event, the same security classification used for presidential inaugurations, since Trump is expected to deliver remarks in person ahead of the display.

That will forbid a long list of typical July 4 accoutrements, such as chairs, coolers, balls, frisbees, aerosols, metal or glass containers, lighters, vapes, and even spray sunscreen, reported WTOP News.

Beyond that, federal workers will also be fighting Mother Nature, which is expected to shatter weather records by bringing triple-digit temperatures to Washington amid a historic heat wave this weekend.

President Donald Trump launched into a rant about communism as the biggest threat to the United States, after being triggered by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Speaking to reporters in the White House, Trump was asked whether he was concerned by Mamdani assenting to be made the “poster child” for socialism.

“I think it’s a big threat to our nation, actually, because it’s not socialism, it’s really communism,” Trump said.

“I think it’s the biggest threat to our nation there is, maybe since our founding. That includes World War I, World War II, September 11th. It includes the, uh, Pearl Harbor attack. I think this is the biggest threat,” Trump said. “People will smile when I say that, but the smart people are gonna say, ‘You know, he’s probably right.’ It’s basically introducing communism into the United States of America.”

Reporter: Mamdani said he was open to being the poster child for socialist candidates.

Trump: It's really communism. I think it's the biggest threat to our nation since our founding—that includes World War 1, World War 2, September 11th. It includes the Pearl Harbor attack . I… pic.twitter.com/NR3p3CZ9r0

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 29, 2026

Clearly, Trump needs a bit of a history lesson. “Who’s gonna tell him about World War Two?” historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote on X.

Does Trump honestly think communism is the biggest threat to the U.S.? The president is obviously rattled by all of Mamdani’s recent victories in New York City—and his growing popularity with voters.

Last week, Trump had a meltdown after a slate of democratic socialist candidates endorsed by Mamdani won their primary elections in New York.

The president also fumed after the city’s Rent Guidelines Board passed a rent freeze, enabling Mamdani to make good on one of his key campaign promises, help tenants living in the city’s nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments, and get under the skin of a former NYC slumlord.

There was good news and bad news from the Supreme Court on Monday. We’ll start with the former. In an extraordinary 5-4 ruling in Trump v. Cook, the court held that President Donald Trump cannot summarily fire a Federal Reserve governor without cause, thereby shielding the nation’s central bank from direct presidential control.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote for the court, held that Congress could lawfully shield Federal Reserve members from removal without cause because of the Fed’s unique role in American governance. In doing so, he and the other justices in the majority—Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberal members—sidestepped some of the court’s normal procedural hurdles.

“We see no reason to leave the public in limbo, or to sow doubt as to the status of one of our nation’s (and the world’s) most important financial institutions,” he explained in his majority opinion, quoting from precedent. “Although we appreciate that others may see matters differently, we would not so quickly unsettle this ‘special arrangement sanctioned by history.’”

Unfortunately, the court’s deference to Congress on removal protections applies only to the Federal Reserve. The court’s conservative majority simultaneously held that Trump could fire Democratic appointees at the Federal Trade Commission in Trump v. Slaughter, clearing the path for him to wield much greater influence over other financial regulatory agencies.

The 6-3 decision is a generational victory for the conservative legal movement, which has spent the last few decades trying to bring independent federal agencies under the heel of Republican presidents. The high court also overturned a New Deal-era precedent that allowed Congress to protect the leaders of federal financial regulators from dismissal without cause in Slaughter. In doing so, it opened some of the nation’s most important governing institutions to the day-to-day whims of a corrupt president.

Taken together, Cook and Slaughter divided the Supreme Court into three camps. One of them, represented by the court’s three liberal justices, would have upheld the status quo for independent federal agencies. In their view, Congress can give certain federal agencies a measure of independence from the White House by only allowing the president to fire the agencies’ leaders for cause.

This also happened to be the status quo for at least the last century of American history. In 1935, the Supreme Court ruled in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States that the president could not lawfully remove a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Prior to Slaughter, no president had sought to dismiss a FTC commissioner, either for cause or without it.

While presidents have the power to remove executive-branch officers by default, the Humphrey’s Executor court reasoned, Congress could impose limits if the agency in question also exercised “quasi-legislative” or “quasi-judicial” power. Agency independence became particularly important with financial regulators as a check on corruption and safeguard of public confidence.

“Congress and more than a dozen Presidents have relied on Humphrey’s to construct a workable government, creating many other agencies in the FTC’s tradition,” Sotomayor explained in her Cook dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Today, this Court undoes centuries of political practice and concludes that all three branches of government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time. Its conclusion is wrong.”

Last year, Trump began to challenge Humphrey’s Executor by firing the heads of certain federal agencies without cause. The president had long sought to exercise more direct control over federal agencies, though he lacked the interest or drive to do so during his first term. After his return to power last year, Trump ended the Justice Department’s post-Watergate tradition of independence, staffed other agencies with personal loyalists, and sought to remove Democratic appointees of multi-member regulatory agencies.

The Supreme Court proved eager to help him wage this war against what conservatives had long derided as the “administrative state.” The justices effectively signaled that Humphrey’s Executor was a dead letter in a shadow-docket ruling in Wilcox v. Trump. (The court also addressed the Federal Reserve in that case, but we’ll come back to that later.)

Technically, however, that ruling remained the law of the land when Trump dismissed FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter last year. Slaughter challenged her dismissal in federal court, noting that Congress had insulated commissioners like herself from presidential removal without cause and that Humphrey’s Executor remained good law. The Trump administration argued that the Supreme Court had repeatedly narrowed Humphrey’s Executor, particularly in recent years, and that it was finally time to scrap it altogether.

“Although it is up to the Senate to decide whether to confirm those with whom the President would prefer to work, neither Congress nor the courts may saddle him with those with whom he cannot work,” Roberts wrote for the court. “Subordinates who exercise the President’s power are subject to removal by him. Then, and only then, can they remain accountable to the President, and the President to the people.”

To reach this conclusion, Roberts crystallized a rigid interpretation of the separation of powers. He spun a tale of the Constitutional Convention where early American luminaries reached “the Decision of 1789,” which gave the president a broad power to remove subordinate officers at will. Roberts pointed to the 1926 ruling Myers v. United States, in which then-Chief Justice William Howard Taft—a former president himself—asserted a broad removal power over congressional encroachments since Reconstruction.

Congress may establish independent agencies “to assist it with its functions,” Roberts claimed, but could not “foist those agencies upon the president, and thus deprive him of the ‘executive power vested [in him] by the Constitution.’” The president-as-victim framework is a defining trait of the unitary executive theory, which often paints the executive branch as an avatar of the popular will that is shackled by a burdensome legislature and a meddlesome court.

Indeed, in Roberts’ opinion in Slaughter, the legislative branch is framed as a disembodied, eldritch force that constantly tries to undermine the executive. “Since its creation in 1914, the FTC has accumulated vast rulemaking, enforcement, and adjudicatory powers under more than 80 statutes,” Roberts noted at one point. One might also describe that as the legislative process. To the conservative majority, however, Congress is treated as some kind of natural force to be endured and resisted, like rust or erosion.

What is actually being washed away is a century of American governance that brought individual prosperity and economic growth, even if Americans did not actively realize it. “Today, the majority replaces 90 years of proven, workable practice with a half-baked theory of executive power that is simultaneously all encompassing yet also subject to necessary but undefined exceptions,” Sotomayor wrote in her Slaughter dissent. “The one thing that does appear to be clear going forward is that chaos will follow.”

The second camp is Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who sided with their conservative colleagues in Slaughter but formed a majority with the liberal justices in Cook. They sought to harmonize a unitary executive with the practical necessity of the Federal Reserve’s independence.

Lisa Cook, the latter case’s titular plaintiff, became the first Black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors when the Senate confirmed her appointment in 2022. As one of the board’s seven members, Cook is charged with overseeing the nation’s monetary system. She also automatically serves on the Federal Open Markets Committee, which is best known for setting interest rates.

Since its establishment in 1913, the Fed has served as the nation’s de facto central bank. Congress sought to protect its decision-making process from day-to-day political meddling by only allowing governors to be removed by the president for cause. Lawmakers hoped to avoid a scenario where a president would install pliant governors who would prioritize the White House’s short-term political interests over the long-term stability of the American financial system.

Past presidents have obeyed the law even when they sharply disagreed with the Fed’s decisions. That century-long status quo came to an end after Trump was elected to his first term in 2016. The president had long advocated for lower interest rates that would make it easier for businesses to borrow money. While lower interest rates can stimulate economic growth in the short term, the Federal Reserve is also charged by Congress with ensuring that inflation stays within a 2 percent growth rate.

Things came to a head in 2018 and 2019 when Trump openly criticized Jerome Powell, the then-Fed chairman, for supporting higher interest rates to cool what economic experts saw as excessive asset prices. Trump himself had appointed Powell to the chairmanship in 2018, only to sour on him as Trump’s trade war with China dragged on the economy. In one notable Twitter post in the summer of 2019, Trump publicly questioned whether “our bigger enemy” was Powell or Chinese President Xi Jinping. (It was unclear whether “our” referred to the United States or to Trump himself.)

Ironically, Powell turned out to be the most competent public servant appointed by the first Trump administration. He received widespread and bipartisan praise for stabilizing the American economy as the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged American businesses and workers. Powell is also credited with managing the “soft landing” by raising interest rates enough to cool inflation during the Biden administration but without short-circuiting economic growth.

While Trump had stopped criticizing Powell in 2020 and redirected his energies to other matters, the president returned to office in 2025 on a mission to bring the Fed to heel. The White House moved quickly to destroy the Justice Department’s traditional independence upon taking office by staffing it with Trump’s former personal lawyers; the Supreme Court also cleared the way for Trump to remove protected Democratic appointees at a wide range of federal agencies during Trump’s first year.

At the same time, the Supreme Court signaled that it would not brook an attack on the Fed’s independence. In Wilcox, the aforementioned shadow-docket case, one of the Democratic appointees on the National Labor Relations Board who had been removed by Trump warned that her ouster could pave the way for an attack on the Fed. Not so, said the justices. The Fed, they wrote, “is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”

Trump did not get the message. Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Financial Agency, spent the summer of 2025 accusing various Democrats and Trump political targets of mortgage fraud. Among them was Cook, though the allegations against her appear dubious at best. In August, Pulte referred her to the Justice Department for prosecution. Trump used the referral as a pretext for her dismissal.

At Trump’s behest, federal prosecutors in D.C. also opened a criminal investigation into Powell claiming that he had misled Congress about a renovation project at the Federal Reserve’s headquarters. Powell announced in a video message in January that he had been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury over the claims. Amid significant blowback on Capitol Hill, even among Republicans, the Justice Department dropped the spurious probe in April.

Roberts, this time in Cook, leaned heavily on the idea that the Fed was a true constitutional successor to the First and Second Banks of the United States. This is only somewhat true: The early republic’s central banks were structurally quite different than the Fed is, and they operated in substantially different economic contexts. No matter, the chief justice wrote, because the linkage is enough to give a “history and tradition” rationale for distinguishing the Fed from the FTC.

“It is true, of course, that this tradition has not stood still; as Justice [Clarence] Thomas notes, the Federal Reserve is more powerful than its predecessors, managing a vastly more complex economy in a vastly more complex world,” Roberts explained, referencing his colleagues’ dissent. “We see no reason, however, why our central bank ought to be ‘trapped in amber’ any more than any other aspect of our constitutional scheme.”

Roberts did not directly reference the court’s Slaughter ruling in his majority opinion and focused largely on Myers. Reconciling the two decisions instead fell to Kavanaugh in his concurring opinion. His reasoning is largely pragmatic: the Fed “occupies a unique role in the U.S. Government and maintains critical responsibility for the stability and success of the U.S. and world economies,” and it also “follows in a distinct historical tradition of central bank independence that has long coexisted with Article II.”

All of which brings us to the third camp. Neither Roberts nor Kavanaugh proved persuasive to the court’s other conservatives, who chose ideological purity over the nation’s financial stability. “Today’s decision is an unprecedented incursion on the executive branch,” Thomas complained in his dissent. “Neither the parties nor the court can point to a single time in American history that this court has upheld an injunction against the President’s removal of an executive officer. In the 237-year history of our Constitution, this court has, by all accounts, never done so.”

Other conservative justices were more cautious. Justice Samuel Alito, in a concurring opinion joined by Gorsuch, suggested that the court could have granted Trump’s request for a stay and left a host of constitutional questions for future briefing. This would have had the practical effect of removing Cook from office, which in turn would effectively decide the case. (Other officials who were denied interim relief often resigned rather than live without a paycheck indefinitely during litigation.)

Alito’s response to Roberts’s concerns about the stability of the American financial system was essentially one step short of denying them. “Granting a stay on the ground set out above would have had no such effect,” he speculated. “It would have simply returned the case to the courts below so that the litigation could continue in the normal course.” If the markets only responded to cold logic, this would be a stronger argument. Instead they would have likely drawn the easiest conclusion: the Fed’s independence, once rock-solid, was no longer indisputable.

It must be stressed that the outcome in Cook is, indeed, good news. The ruling does not represent the end of the road for Cook herself, who must continue to defend herself against allegations of mortgage fraud. But it does send a strong signal from the high court to the country—to markets, to banks and businesses, and  most importantly to presidents—that the Fed’s independence remains functionally intact. It is easy to scoff at this, but financial crises never limit their damage to the people responsible for them. It’s not hard to see Roberts’s invocations of the dangers of “leaving the public in limbo,” or otherwise “sowing doubt,” as a nod toward preventing panic in the marketplace.

At the same time, Slaughter represents a landmark victory for the conservative legal establishment. It will allow presidents to exert unchallenged control over major financial regulators like the FTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as a host of other independent agencies like the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Communications Commission. It enshrines a radical expansion of presidential power into the law of the land and further diminishes Congress’s central role in the American constitutional order. 

“Many do not share the court’s rosy appraisal of the past century,” Thomas complained towards the end of his Cook dissent. Rarely is the conservative legal movement described so succinctly. Both the American economy and Americans’ quality of life grew by leaps and bounds over that timespan, thanks at least in part to competent regulatory institutions that combined the executive branch’s flexibility with the legislative branch’s stability. The party is now over.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the daytime television host tapped by President Donald Trump to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, doesn’t understand how health insurance works.

Speaking on Fox News Monday in front of the president’s desolate fairgrounds, Oz presented his proof that the Obamacare marketplace was plagued by fraud—and in the process revealed how little he actually knows about health insurance.

Oz claimed that of 23 million people who were signed up for the Affordable Care Act—commonly known as Obamacare—40 percent of enrollees had never actually used their insurance.

“It raises, again, the reality that there are many people who are signed up who are getting paid for, but don’t believe they have the insurance, don’t know they have insurance, don’t want the insurance,” Oz said.

Dr Oz on ACA "fraud" -- "Of the people who signed up, 40% never use the insurance. Let me ask you, John, you have health insurance -- do you use it once a year? In Obamacare right now 40% of the people ostensibly signed up never use the insurance ... we have a lot of fake people… pic.twitter.com/UsN5fGbyP8

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 29, 2026

Of course, that’s not really how health insurance coverage works: just because you have it doesn’t mean you actually use it. The only “reality” that Oz’s statistics raised was that health care in this country is way too expensive.

“Over 50% of insured Americans struggle to afford seeing a doctor, and 1 in 4 insured Americans skip medical treatments because of out-of-pocket costs,” Melanie D’Arrigo, director of the Campaign for New York Health, wrote on X. “The actual fraud is Americans being price gouged on healthcare.”

Many Americans on Obamacare marketplace plans struggle to pay their deductibles, or out-of-pocket costs, which have surged to record highs in 2026 and increase by more than $1,000 on average year over year. Still, more Americans are now choosing high-deductible plans after Trump stripped essential health care subsidies.

Over the weekend, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the Trump administration had uncovered more than one million people who were enrolled in Obamacare without Social Security numbers on file. Oz claimed that it was part of a plot by shady insurance agents to enroll unsuspecting—and potentially fake—Americans for Obamacare plans in order to collect “millions of dollars” in improper fees.

“The reality is we have a lot of fake people on the policies. We want them off because they don’t want the insurance, they’re covered elsewhere, or at least they never wanted to be in the program,” Oz told Fox News Saturday.

President Donald Trump still won’t say whether he’ll sign a bipartisan housing bill that’s coming to his desk Monday, declaring it “a big yawn” compared to his voter suppression bill.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office Monday, Trump brushed aside mention of the legislation, which aims to boost housing supply and address affordability issues.

“Big deal. It’s a yawn,” Trump said. “Some people say it’s wonderful. To me, compared to the SAVE America Act, just about everything is a big yawn,” Trump said.

Trump on Housing Bill: To me, compared to the Save America Act, everything is a big yawn! pic.twitter.com/Z49vLFK1WP

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 29, 2026

The SAVE America Act would require voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote, and a photo ID when voting. Citizenship is already a requirement to vote, and instances of noncitizens voting is incredibly rare. Plus, the bill as written doesn’t have enough support to pass the Senate; making it law before the housing bill, like Trump wants, is essentially impossible.

“I think it’s so unimportant by compared to the SAVE America Act. I think the SAVE America Act is exactly what it says—it’s saving America from crooked elections. And the housing bill is a bill that can get approved, they worked on it long and hard. It’s very bipartisan—that means the Democrats like it,” Trump said, seemingly insinuating that the bipartisanship of the housing bill was a flaw.

Reporter: What are your plans for the housing bill?

Trump: I don’t know. I think it's so unimportant compared to the Save America Act. Democrats like it. They are getting things that I wouldn’t necessarily agree to. I made a lot of money with housing. pic.twitter.com/8aQYHfEPs0

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 29, 2026

“They’re getting things that I wouldn’t necessarily agree to,” he continued. “Nobody knows more than housing in the history of the presidency, nobody did well like me in housing. I made a lot of money with housing. But when I look at that bill, it’s a bill. But when I look at the SAVE America Act, it’s about saving America,” Trump said, demonstrating his ability to read.

Republicans and Democrats alike are looking to the passage of the housing bill for a pre-midterm reputation boost. Republicans have a lot riding on this in particular. However, it seems like Trump would rather talk about his glory days as a slumlord than help out the vulnerable members of his own party—not to mention the millions of Americans who can’t afford homes.

The Colorado Supreme Court on Monday unanimously rejected three ballot measures that would have allowed Democrats to redraw the district map in their favor before the 2028 elections, dealing a blow to national party efforts in the gerrymandering race kick-started by President Donald Trump.

The decision blocks Democrats from securing a map that would have likely given them three more seats in the House of Representatives. Under the proposed new map, the only safe Republican district would be that of Representative Lauren Boebert.

The Supreme Court rejected the ballot measures on the basis of the state’s constitutionally mandated “single subject” policy, which requires measures to only handle a single issue.

“Changing long-settled law by modifying the timing, frequency, criteria, and entity responsible for congressional redistricting represents a significant change beyond the proponents’ stated central purposes [of] … congressional redistricting by adopting a new temporary map,” Chief Justice Monica Márquez said in one of her opinions.

Now, Colorado is out of the redistricting wars. So far, the only blue states that have approved a redistricting measure are California and Utah. But the groundwork has been laid for other states to do the same before 2028.

DOGE may be dead, but its employees are still alive and kicking—and they’ve been quietly rebuilding sensitive federal websites in a way that may violate federal law, The Guardian reports.

The National Design Studio (NDS) is a governmental agency established via executive order last August, and is full of former DOGE employees. It operates four federal websites: ndstudio.gov, trumprx.gov, realfood.gov, and trumpacounts.gov.

The sites are used for passport applications, getting prescription drugs, children’s savings accounts, and voter registration. Until The Guardian contacted NDS about their operations, all four websites ran visitor-tracking software configured to evade traditional privacy tools. And they still don’t have the public filings required by federal privacy laws.

In its investigation, The Guardian also found that NDS’s spending isn’t listed on the federal contract database, making its contracting opaque.

In the meantime, the group is potentially giving the White House access to information about Americans that it normally wouldn’t have: NDS’s passport application site bypasses the State Department’s site, and the agency has built a copy of vote.gov.

Altogether, these sites route sensitive information through a system that the White House apparently controls, and they’re doing it without oversight.

Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb and Trump supporter, leads the agency, which is staffed by the same hiring authority that ran DOGE. Gebbia was at DOGE himself for six months in the first half of 2025, and at least two other former DOGE staffers work with him: Greg Hogan and Akash Bobba, one of DOGE’s original engineers.

According to The Guardian, several photos and a video on the NDS website also appear to show none other than Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, the young DOGE-er who allegedly exposed millions of Americans’ Social Security data.

Once again, the Trump administration is giving people with a “move fast and break things” mentality access to incredibly sensitive data on the American people—and seems like it’s trying to do it all in secret.

The chief attraction at Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair made people sick on Monday.

One of the events at the country’s semiquincentennial was a pancake-eating competition that had its four participants gagging and heaving after they’d stuffed themselves with the batter-rich flapjacks. An intern at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Douglas Ford, won the competition, though footage of his success didn’t make it look easy.

Fox News noted that the eating contest was made more difficult by a heat wave that has gripped Washington. The conservative network also ironically referred to the all-you-can-eat competition as a celebration of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement in a chyron.

the marquee attraction at Trump's fair today was a pancake eating contest where the contestants were gagging and nearly puking. 'Murica! pic.twitter.com/KQyoRk7fWD

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 29, 2026

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

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

MAGA world is incensed after Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice Amy Comey Barrett sided with the liberal justices—and even wrote the majority opinion—rejecting the Trump administration’s attempt to gut mail-in voting.

The court on Monday ruled to uphold a Mississippi law allowing mail-in ballots to be counted up to five days after the election, so long as they were postmarked by Election Day. The decision effectively saves similar grace periods around the country, especially in big Democratic states. That was enough to set off Republicans.

“A shockingly wrong opinion,” wrote Republican Senator Eric Schmitt. “Justice Barrett joins with the liberal justices to hold that federal election law does not preempt states who allow late mail-in ballots to be counted. This is terrible for election integrity. Another reason we must pass the full SAVE American [sic] Act.”

“Remember Election Day?” said GOP Representative Abe Hamadeh. “This disastrous SCOTUS decision, authored by Justice Barrett, guarantees we’ll keep drifting away from it—as our sacred elections get bogged down by endless mail-in ballots and never-ending counts.”

Trump supporters outside of Congress made their discontent clear, as well.

“Barrett. AGAIN. WTF,” former Fox News host Megyn Kelly wrote.

“Amy Coney Barrett was a gigantic fucking disaster of a Supreme Court appointment. Absolutely horrible in the long run. She totally forgot who appointed her to the Court,” right-wing influencer Joey Mannarino said. “Scum of the earth.”

“Barrett is the biggest conservative judicial disaster since Souter,” conservative writer Hans Mahnke commented. “The difference is that few conservatives expected much from Souter whereas Barrett was supposed to be the future of the Court. The worst part is that she’ll be there pushing leftist policies for another 40 years.”

This isn’t the first time the Trump appointee has seemingly backstabbed the movement that put her in position to be nominated for the Supreme Court. Conservatives also raged against Barrett last year after she joined the court’s liberal justices in dissenting against a decision granting Trump emergency relief to use the “Alien Enemies Act” to deport immigrants at whim.

President Donald Trump crashed out Monday after the Supreme Court wouldn’t let him off the hook for the $5 million he owes E. Jean Carroll.

In a tirade on Truth Social Monday, Trump lamented the Supreme Court’s decision to reject Trump’s appeal of a verdict finding him guilty of sexually abusing and then defaming Carroll.

“Surprisingly, the Supreme Court declined to ‘review’ a Fake Case brought against me by a woman I never met (Decades old celebrity photo line, standing with her husband, does not count!),” Trump wrote.

“This Case is really against the United States of America, and all it stands for, and should never be allowed to happen to another President, or Candidate to be!” Trump continued.

Of course, the case has nothing to do with America, but about Trump’s specific actions. Carroll, a former writer, accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in 1996. When she spoke out publicly against him, he claimed the case was “a complete con job” and a “hoax and a lie.” In 2022, she sued him for both sexual abuse and defamation, seeking damages, and the jury agreed with Carroll that Trump was liable.

Trump had appealed the decision, claiming the case was tainted by the inclusion of “highly inflammatory” evidence—including testimony from two other women who claimed Trump assaulted them, and the infamous Access Hollywood tape.

Trump also railed against the state of New York for creating a temporary law that allowed adult sexual assault survivors in New York to file a civil case against an abuser, no matter when the assault took place, “in order to wrongfully ‘nab’” him.

“It was tailormade, and this Injustice cannot be allowed to stand!” he wrote on Monday.

A new poll has revealed that Americans’ favorite politicians are also the ones that conservatives bellyache about the most.

A Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll published Monday asked Americans to rate a dozen contemporary political figures on a scale of zero through 100, with the bottom of the scale representing “coldness” and the top of the scale representing “warmth.” The winners, by and large, were Democrats.

Leading the popularity contest was former President Barack Obama, with an average rating of 54 on the reputation thermometer. Behind the 44th president was Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Party at large, and Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in that order.

Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also polled high, earning a 42 and 41 rating, respectively.

Two Democrats fell towards the bottom of the poll: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who received a 36 rating, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who came in last in his party with a 30 rating.

Republicans generally fared much worse than Democrats. Among them, State Secretary Marco Rubio came in first with a 41 rating. Behind him was Vice President JD Vance and President Donald Trump, who each received an average rating of 38.

Elon Musk, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and ex-Fox News star Tucker Carlson fared even worse than the team in the White House, and scored less than 36 across the board.

Per our new polling out today, the most popular politicians in America are…

Barack Obama
Bernie Sanders
Zohran Mamdani
Pete Buttigieg
Jon Ossoff
& Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Trump is tied with Elon Musk and Hakeem Jeffries, Schumer and Carlson in lasthttps://t.co/vGWqUvS0Pk pic.twitter.com/9Zmb1SHxki

— G Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris) June 29, 2026

The poll follows a pivotal moment for the burgeoning Democratic Socialists of America, which saw two of its New York-area candidates win big in primaries across the state last week: Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez. Both of them, as well as Mamdani-endorsed Brad Lander, beat out candidates endorsed by Democratic leaders such as Jeffries and Schumer. Their success underscores a new chapter in left-wing politics in the U.S., and illustrates that candidates tied to Democratic leadership have lost their sway with traditionally Democrat voters.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the Fourth Amendment protects individuals’ right to privacy when it comes to their phone location data.

The justices ruled 6–3 to send a Virginia bank robbery case back to the lower courts for review in light of its decision. In 2019, Okello Chatrie was convicted of robbing a credit union after police saw him using his phone in the security camera footage of the bank. They then used a “geofence warrant,” which compels tech companies to provide law enforcement with data from all devices at a specific place and time, to identify Chatrie.

Geofence warrants are regularly used, and let the government demand location data and records from anyone near a crime scene, without needing to identify an individual target.

Government lawyers argued to the court that Chatrie did not have a “reasonable expectation” of privacy, since he had willingly shared his location with Google.

But the Supreme Court rejected that argument. Justice Elena Kagan wrote the opinion for the majority, and conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts joined.

“A cell-phone user is not to be viewed as sharing private information with third parties—which then can be freely passed on to the government—just by doing the ordinary things cell-phone users do,” Kagan wrote.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor concurred, writing, “even short-term monitoring” of a person’s physical movements can provide “a wealth of detail about [his] familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.”

The ruling is a win for data privacy, and will make it harder for the federal government to access personal information stored in the cloud without getting a specific warrant.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor slammed her conservative colleagues on Monday for making President Donald Trump more powerful than a king.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority scrapped Humphrey’s Executor, a high court precedent that established Congress could limit the president’s ability to fire executive officials of independent federal agencies, and allowed Trump to remove Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission.

In a scathing dissent, joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan, Sotomayor warned that Trump had just become more powerful than the English monarch whose Parliament “often restricted the Crown’s ability to remove even high-level royal officers.”

“The text of the Constitution, along with its history, the longstanding practices of the political branches, and the precedents of this Court, make clear that Congress may limit the causes for which the heads of Commissions like the FTC can be removed by the President,” Sotomayor wrote. “In holding otherwise, the Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”

Sotomayor argued that there was simply no way that the decision was Constitutional, because the country’s founding framers had “‘never intended’ to give the President ‘the complete set of powers’ that the English Crown held, let alone more.”