The New Republic

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 26 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

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

This week, Donald Trump kicked off his celebration of our country’s 250th anniversary on the National Mall. It didn’t go well. Trump’s first event was widely described by the media as sparsely attended, and as one account noted, he actually asked for more people to attend the next rally. What’s amusing about this is that it came after Fox News worked really hard to pump up the event.

Trump and Fox both know that for the sake of their broader MAGA project, it’s absolutely imperative that this gala succeed. And that’s why it’s heartening that it’s doing so poorly. Matt Gertz of Media Matters has a good piece digging into the Trump-Fox dynamic around the 250th anniversary celebration, so we’re going to get into all of it with him now. Matt, good to have you back on.

Matt Gertz: Good to be here.

Sargent: So on Wednesday night, Trump’s so-called Great American State Fair had something like a launching event. NBC News put attendance at more than a thousand—not great. The Post said the crowd “thinly covered an area that’s smaller than some summer outdoor movie screenings.” Really not great. Matt, can you just set the stage here? What was this particular event and why was it so important?

Gertz: This was the kickoff event for what’s called the Great American State Fair. The idea is to create what’s effectively a world’s fair, but for each of the individual states, down on the National Mall.

Originally this was supposed to be a big concert with a bunch of different artists who were scheduled to play. But as it became more and more clear that these Freedom 250 events are extremely partisan, the artists decided to drop out. And eventually Trump kind of threw up his hands and said, instead of having this concert, we’re going to launch the state fair with what he called the greatest rally ever. It doesn’t seem to have worked out that way.

Sargent: Certainly not. And Donald Trump himself seems very sensitive to the low turnout that this first event showed. Here’s what he said at the event about that. Listen.

Donald Trump (voiceover): Then on July 4, we will have the greatest show of all on the National Mall. Your favorite president will be speaking. So please show up. Because if we have two empty seats, you know what’s going to happen? The fake news is going to say he didn’t fill out the arena. Now, I’ll be speaking—I’ll be very proudly speaking—as we ring in our 250th year with the largest fireworks display in world history.

Sargent: Matt, you know, he’s not exactly wrong. We damn well will make an issue of this if turnout really is bad, just as we’re doing right now. But there’s actually a reason for that. He tried to turn a celebration of America’s 250th birthday into a Trump rally.

This is like the epitome of personalist rule—turning this into an imperial, dictatorial display of self-glorification. It’s important that Americans reject this and not show up to this. Can you talk about that?

Gertz: I mean, I think what we have here is a president who does not respect any sort of separation between himself and the country at large. And so he views the idea of celebrating the nation’s birthday as one and the same with celebrating himself.

I think there’s no clearer way to see that than how he decided to kick off the festivities with what he personally described as a rally speech—a partisan speech in which he sort of ran down what he claims are his accomplishments and talked about himself, rather than the nation, rather than what brings us together. And that becomes more and more fraught as he becomes more and more unpopular.

Sargent: Yeah. And Fox News is really participating in the personalist side of this, hyping this event as a great thing for Donald Trump, as opposed to a great thing for the United States of America. And Fox is using this event to attack critics of the president. Let’s listen to a few examples. Here’s Kayleigh McEnany.

Kayleigh McEnany (voiceover): I’m very excited about tonight because Trump has said this is going to be the greatest rally he has ever done. And I’ve been to a lot of his rallies. But if he’s saying this is the greatest rally he’s ever done, I’m here for it.

Now let’s listen to Fox contributor Joe Concha.

Joe Concha (voiceover): There’s one party, it seems, Jesse, that is patriotic, even jingoistic, about the United States of America. And then there’s another party that is as angry as Rosie O’Donnell and George Conway. I mean, they are equally as petulant. They are downright miserable about the country, if not themselves.

And now let’s listen to Laura Ingraham.

Laura Ingraham (voiceover): So the entire lead-up to July 4, I consider it one big trigger warning to the Mamdani minions out there. Because after all, they’re happiest when foreign flags are flying. Because of them, red, white, and blue—the big extravaganza is like sunshine to a vampire.

Sargent: Matt, before we get into what all that means, can you kind of walk us through how Fox has been hyping this and what they’ve been saying in addition to those three there?

Gertz: There was a big push leading up to Trump’s speech on Wednesday night from Fox to put as much attention on it as possible. Several hosts did their shows from around the National Mall.

It’s been a tough few months for people who have to carry water for Donald Trump every night. And I think the idea here was that this would be an easy win for them, that they could focus on what they love to do—bashing Democrats, calling them unpatriotic, saying that they hate America. They spent a bunch of time using the New York primaries and the victories by more progressive candidates there as evidence of this.

And basically, they’re trying to use what should be a celebration of the Declaration of Independence, of America’s 250th birthday, as a partisan wedge issue, as a cudgel against the Democratic Party, while simultaneously talking up Donald Trump and his ability to pull a huge crowd and get them together for a big rally. So the failure, I think, of the kickoff event is a pretty big problem for them in the medium term as they try to keep that message going over the next 10, 12 days.

Sargent: It isn’t just that Fox is being partisan and using it as a cudgel against Democrats. Fox is kind of all in on this more sinister project, which is to make the celebration of the United States of America’s 250th anniversary synonymous with the celebration of Trump himself.

So they’re all in on the personalist, dictatorial, cult-like nature of what Trump actually wants to do here. You have watched Fox News for a long time. They are very willing participants in that project. Can you talk about that sort of more sinister goal that they seem to be pursuing?

Gertz: Yeah, I mean, they are the propagandists for Donald Trump. They are the people who get the base rallied, who get them excited, terrified, ready to march to the polls in November. And if that doesn’t work, who knows really what comes next.

They have access to their own network’s polls, which show that he is very, very unpopular on literally every issue. But they very rarely talk about that. They very rarely talk about the worst findings from those polls. They won’t talk about, you know, when he gets booed at a Knicks game—they’ll pretend that hadn’t happened.

And I think what underlies all of that is this idea that because Donald Trump is really so popular, the polls showing otherwise are all fake or discounted. What that means is that the only way you can get election results that don’t show him winning is through fraud, through rigging.

And so by refusing to help their viewers come to grips with the reality that the public at large is not on board with what Donald Trump has done, they’re really setting the stage for any effort that the president takes to subvert the results in November. And that, I think, is the most worrying aspect of this.

Sargent: Absolutely. And I do think it’s worth airing this once again, even though we’ve talked about it before, because it just never gets old. Every time Fox News tells the truth about Trump’s unpopularity by broadcasting their own polls, the network’s own polls, which they pay for, right? It’s supposed to be something that turns them into a real news organization. Here they’re gathering their own data to assess the state of the country.

Every time they do that, Donald Trump tells them to fire their pollster. And so they have to be extremely sensitive to what happens when they tell Fox viewers the truth about Trump’s tailspinning unpopularity, basically.

Gertz: I think that’s exactly right. I think what we’ve seen from the Dominion filings—the filings in the defamation case that Dominion Voting Systems filed against Fox News because the network was lying about how it was rigging the election—we see from the internal communications that were released in that case that people at Fox are very acutely aware that Donald Trump has the potential to damage their brand, to scare away their viewers, and to make their paydays come to an end.

And so because of that, there’s a reflexive desire to present the rosiest possible picture of the world for Donald Trump to consume, because he is part of that audience. He is watching all the time, and they’re all very aware that at any moment he could declare some sort of crusade against them.

Sargent: I want to pick up on something you said before about the effort to mobilize the base, because this seems like it really gets at the core of this in an important way. You mentioned that Fox News is seeing this as sort of a lead-up to the midterm elections. Now, the problem that they face is that Donald Trump is unpopular, including with elements in the MAGA coalition. Even non-college whites seem to be turning on Trump over the economy, for instance. That’s one of his most loyal groups.

He’s losing the groups that came to him temporarily in 2024 due to inflation and the post-COVID shock and so forth. All the Fox polling seems to show that the MAGA coalition is splitting along those lines.

And they know they’re heading into a midterm where, as it is, the pattern is always that the party out of power has all the energy and the party in power doesn’t have the energy. And so they’re looking at an absolute—they’re seeing events like this and the tarring of the left as unpatriotic over this event as the real sort of panacea for them heading into these potentially disastrous midterms, correct?

Gertz: I think that’s right. It very much reminds me of the lead-up to the 2018 midterms, where Fox was spending a lot of its airtime warning their viewers that if Democrats were able to take back the House or the Senate, that—effectively they were saying that a mob will come to your house and murder you.

It’s the similar sort of attempting to create some excitement from the base to go to the polls to stop the Democrats, even if they can’t get them excited about the Republicans. They’re hoping that they can use fear to mobilize that audience and get them to the polls on election day to keep the Republicans in power.

Sargent: One of the most amazing things about your piece was you got into how Fox News has reacted now that the turnout was pretty bad at the first go-around of this thing. Can you talk about that? They just kind of suddenly went quiet, in essence.

Gertz: Yeah, it’s been as sparse as the crowd. For all of the lead-up that they had, on the day of the event, the morning after was extremely quiet. They’ve spent very little time discussing any of this. Which I think tracks with their effort to shield viewers from understanding how unpopular the president is. If you can only get like a thousand people to come to this rally, then he must be in pretty sad straits.

Sargent: I would think that Donald Trump took notice of this, took notice of the fact that Fox News barely covered the aftermath of this thing, don’t you think?

Gertz: I think so. He put up a Truth Social post in which he claimed that 45,000 people actually showed up. And it’s got on it these photos where you can really just tell that it’s like a low angle that tries to make it look like a huge crowd. But the space that he’s filling is actually quite small. If you’ve been to the Washington Mall, the actual area that had people in it is tiny by comparison.

But I think this brings us all back to the first weekend of the first Trump administration, where Sean Spicer went out to say that this was the biggest inauguration crowd in the history of the world, when in fact everyone could tell that Obama’s was much bigger.

It’s the sort of thing that drives Trump crazy. He can’t stand that he had such a small audience. And I think, as the clip you played shows, he’s voicing that a little bit. I think we can expect some sort of push to try to get more people to show up for the big July 4 event that’s planned.

Though I have to be honest with you, Washington, D.C. on July 4 is not a pleasant place to be. And they are predicting an extreme heat wave late next week. So we’ll see how all of this goes. But it doesn’t seem likely to turn out well.

Sargent: It sure doesn’t. I would assume he’s going to get better turnout than he got here. And as you say, there’ll be this big push, but who knows? Just to close this out, I think we should bear down on this point, which is Donald Trump isn’t calling for people to show up at this thing on July 4 solely because he wants adulation and big crowds, right?

Although of course he does want those things, and it drives him absolutely insane when he doesn’t get them and when others get larger crowds. This is just a fact of Trump’s tortured psyche. We know this.

I think there’s something else going on too, though. What Donald Trump wants is lots and lots of Americans, a big swath of the American people, to buy into the project here—to buy into the depiction of the United States of America’s 250th anniversary as this kind of personalist celebration of him, as this effort to turn it into an imperial, dictatorial, self-glorifying extravaganza. And that’s why it’s important that Americans not show up.

He wants lots of Americans to buy into that conflation of America with him. And we can’t do that. Can you talk about that?

Gertz: Sure. I think what’s important here is, when we talk about America’s birthday, we’re not dating it to when the first president took office. We’re not dating it to the establishment of the Constitution, we’re not dating it to the victory over the British. We’re dating it to the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

And that’s because we are traditionally a nation that is more than its blood and its soil. We are a creedal nation that holds these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that we have certain unalienable rights like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We form governments to secure those rights, and they operate with the consent of the governed.

These are principles that we as Americans are all supposed to share. They’re ones that we try to live up to, often failing throughout our history, but that everyone from suffragettes to civil rights leaders has sought to expand to a larger share of the population.

What Donald Trump, what the MAGA movement has done over the last several years is try to take away what makes America special—to make this a country that is about the people who have lived here for a long time, the “heritage Americans,” quote-unquote. And that is just really anathema to our entire history.

And to let Donald Trump and his movement seize control of the American story and cast off everything that truly makes it a great country would be, I think, a huge error, and one that I’m not sure we could really return from.

Sargent: In fact, you could even argue that in very important respects, Trump and the MAGA movement fundamentally don’t accept many of the principles that the Declaration embodies. And so that’s why this is quite literally a celebration of him more than these ideas, right?

Gertz: Yeah. I mean, you just can’t imagine Donald Trump credibly speaking on the importance of the consent of the governed or of the fundamental rights of man. He just doesn’t have that broader context, that understanding of what America is all about. And that, I think, is a real shame.

I think the fact that we are not going to be able to have a real celebration of America’s 250th birthday—one that respects how far we have traveled, how far we have to go to live up to those words—it’s a real shame that this is what we’re going to get instead. A would-be authoritarian ruler trying to make it all about himself.

Sargent: You can’t even imagine Donald Trump credibly talking about the Declaration’s promise of equality either. Matt Gertz, all very beautifully said. And folks, let’s hope this thing is a total disaster, as it looks like it’s going to be. Matt, thanks so much for coming on. Great to talk to you.

Gertz: Thanks for having me.

An expanded transcript of the interview on which this article is based is available here.

So, Marc Elias, what are you most worried about Donald Trump getting up to between now and Election Day?

“What we’ve seen from Donald Trump in the past is that he starts with lies, then he increases the rhetoric behind the lies, then you see the legal process,” Elias told me and my wife, Carol Butler, in an interview this spring. “And then when he fails in the legal process, we have violence. And I think that we are on that progression. He has lied about voting, he has now upped the rhetoric for all of the SAVE Act, which began as a proof-of-citizenship law. It’s now become a voter suppression, voter purge, ban on mail-in voting, trans-targeting law, right? So when he loses in court in the cases I referenced, and he’s not able to pass this law through Congress, as we’ve discussed, I think he’s going to escalate further.”

Elias, of course, is the indefatigable Democratic election lawyer and founder of the website Democracy Docket, which tracks voting litigation in the United States. Elias is the right person to be tracking voting litigation, for the simple reason that he’s directly involved in most of it. He explained: “The Department of Justice is suing to get access, essentially, to the unredacted voter rolls in all 50 states. And they’re suing 30 of those states, and we have intervened to oppose them in all of those states.” He’s won so far in Oregon, California, and Michigan. He and his team await verdicts in the other states. And he noted, on the downside, that as many as 17 states, including Texas and Florida, quickly complied with Justice’s request. (On June 22, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration could not pool data with states to verify voters’ citizenship, noting that states like Texas were already “actively” using it to check voter registrations and had flagged eligible voters for removal.) “It’s just gonna be a knife fight from here to the end,” Elias said.

A knife fight, he predicted, that will almost surely find its way to the Supreme Court in some form. One likely form: In March, the court heard arguments in Watson v. Republican National Committee, in which it will rule on the constitutionality of a post–Election Day grace period for mail-in ballots. Mississippi is one of 15 states that provides for such a period. The RNC cites an 1845 law defining Election Day as one specific day. A decision is expected this term, by late June.

“The argument broke down into two predictable camps,” Elias said. “You had the three most conservative justices that seem likely to rule for the RNC. You had three liberals who are not going to. And then the question is, What are [Brett] Kavanaugh, [Amy Coney] Barrett and the chief justice going to do? And I think they are hard to read.” The decision could affect thousands of votes, and in close elections, that could matter.

This brings us back to Trump and his plans and the possibility of violence. If Trump tries to send ICE agents to the polls, Elias said his group would fight it. He also thinks ICE’s techniques might be more subtle: “Let’s assume that they’re not at the polling place, but rather, they are occupying all the parking lots, and they are closing off the streets.… You’re now being told you’re going to have to park a mile away and walk to the polls, right? So don’t underestimate the amount of voter suppression they can impose, simply through their chaos and contrived inconvenience.”

And finally, Carol asked, while you and other insiders are working to stop Trump from stealing the election, what can regular citizens do?

“I always say this to every audience I speak to,” he said. “There are things that lawyers can do which are unique to lawyers. There are things that elected officials can do that are unique to elected officials. There are things that philanthropy can do that are unique to philanthropy, but everyone, no matter who they are, no matter what their job, no matter how much they have or don’t have, they do have a town square that they can stand out in and speak out.

“Now, some people have really big town squares. You know, they own major media publications. Other people have smaller town squares. It may be just their social media feed, it may be their dinner table, it may be their bridge club or the bowling league they belong to, but everybody’s got some place where they can speak out and be heard. And what everyone needs to do is to use that town square to call out what Donald Trump is up to and what is happening to our democracy. And No Kings Day is a great opportunity for people to do that, but it is only one day out of a year. And so my ask for everyone is for them to use every opportunity they have to speak out on the issues of democracy and free and fair elections.”

Because if we don’t have free and fair elections, he concluded, nothing else good can happen—none of the other crises that confront us, from climate to reproductive rights to you name it, can be addressed.

“Because I think if we have free and fair elections,” Elias said, “Democrats are going to take control of the House and the Senate, and they’ll do quite well downballot, but if Donald Trump is able to, in the darkness of the night, rig the elections through unfair districts or suppress the vote through executive orders that go unchallenged, or make it impossible for people who have hourly jobs to be able to vote because there are long lines or because the streets are closed off, then he will have won. All of us can become ambassadors for access to voting by posting on social media, calling their friends, or texting their text chain with their college roommates. And so that’s the thing that I ask everyone to do.”

The following is a transcript of a conversation between election rights lawyer Marc Elias, TNR’s Win McCormack, and Carol Butler. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Marc Elias: Donald Trump’s going to impose provisions [attacking voting rights] through executive orders. He issued a voting executive order last year that we were successful in striking down, and we will succeed in striking [the next] one down.… The Department of Justice right now is operating like his private law firm and is seeking to obtain confidential voter data from all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia.

Win McCormack: Oh, I thought it had stopped with Georgia and Arizona.

Marc Elias: No, no. So those are the ballots that they’re seeking from 2020. They have seized the ballots from Georgia from 2020, and they have [sued to get] the ballots from Arizona from 2020, but the Department of Justice is suing to get access, essentially, to the unredacted voter rolls in all 50 states. And they’re suing 30 of those states, and we have intervened to oppose them in all those states. And so I think that’s one of the big battles to focus on, because if you want to run a voter-turnout program, you need the voter files, but if you also want to run a voter suppression operation at scale, you need the voter files. We’re entering the season in which we will see lots of different state laws by Republican legislatures try to suppress voting rights, and we’re litigating against those. We’re going to see more efforts by the administration, perhaps, to deploy federal paramilitary like [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. And we’ll have to be prepared to litigate against that. It’s just gonna be a knife fight from here to the end.

Carol Butler: Can I ask a question on the private voter roll data? I know that a lot of [states’ attorneys general] have been filing lawsuits. Have some A.G.s been beaten in court anywhere on this yet? Have there been any victories on that?

Elias: Seventeen states turned them over voluntarily. Thirty states and D.C. have fought [back]. In the 30 states that have fought, we have intervened to defend voters in all 30. We have won alongside the A.G.s in Oregon, California, and … Michigan. There are three states that have dismissed their claims. So we are awaiting decisions in the other states

McCormack: And is there anything in the law that actually gives [Republicans] the right to have what they want?

Elias: No. [Laughter.] They’re claiming their versions of the law that let them have access to this, but this is unprecedented, and there’s a reason why we’re 3 and 0, and soon to be 4 and 0, then 5 and 0, and then 6 and 0. Look, they are trying to bully these states in ways that you see them try to bully states in other arenas. The challenges are that the Department of Justice can literally litigate everywhere. But for every state that opposes this, we also have states like Florida, Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi that are voluntarily complying with these requests. And that’s going to be a challenge as we go forward, because we assume—everyone assumes—that where there is voter suppression, we are necessarily fighting against the federal government. But remember, most voter suppression is actually fighting against states where either the state itself or the Republican National Committee or Republicans are doing it.

McCormack: So the Republican National Committee can come in and intervene in states?

Elias: Well, the RNC runs voter suppression programs to try to prevent people from voting, and they also bring litigation to try to make voting harder. There’s a case [Watson v. Republican National Committee] that was just argued in the U.S. Supreme Court, in which the RNC sued Mississippi to try to make mail-in voting more difficult.

McCormack: Well, I heard somebody on MS NOW last night saying that, regardless of what happens with the Save America Act [a suppressive “voter ID” bill that would also give the Trump administration a federal surveillance system of voters], they have a very well-worked-out plan for doing what they want to do. Is that what you were referring to before, or is there more to what they said?

Elias: There’s more to it. What we’ve seen from Donald Trump in the past is that he starts with lies, then he increases the rhetoric behind the lies, then you see the legal process, and then when he fails in the legal process, we have violence. We are on that progression. He has lied about voting, he has now upped the rhetoric for all of the SAVE Act, which began as a proof-of-citizenship law. It’s now become a voter suppression, voter purge, ban on mail-in voting, trans-targeting law. So when he loses in court in the cases I referenced, and he’s not able to pass this law through Congress, as we’ve discussed, I think he’s going to escalate further. Ultimately we’ll see some type of violence, I fear. Whether it’s what we saw after the 2020 election or what we saw in Minneapolis with ICE agents, Donald Trump’s rhetoric never tries to take the temperature down, and he knows that if there are free and fair elections, his side will lose.

McCormack: Is it true, though, that he could send ICE in—but he couldn’t send them in bearing guns?

Elias: If he sends ICE to the polls at all, there are going to be lawsuits to try to prevent it. Just as we saw in Minneapolis, there’ll be legal efforts to try to stop it. So I don’t want anyone to lose hope. We’ll fight back.

And just to be clear, I’m not just worried about armed ICE officials at the polls. In some respects, if there were armed ICE officials at your local polling place, it probably wouldn’t prevent you from voting. But let’s just imagine a counter-hypothetical. Let’s assume that they’re not at the polling place, but rather, they are occupying all the parking lots, and they are closing off the streets. Now you’re not facing the prospect of parking and then going into a poll where there’s armed ICE agents. You’re now being told you’re gonna have to park a mile away and walk to the polls. Don’t underestimate the amount of voter suppression that they can impose simply through the chaos and contrived inconvenience. You saw that in Minneapolis. It’s not just where ICE was operating, engaging in efforts to do enforcement. It was blocking streets. It was breaking the windows of cars. It was harassing and swearing at law-abiding citizens. It was the tear gas. It was all of that—if you imagine, around Election Day, [that] would have a really big impact on voting, having nothing to do with guns at the actual polls themselves.

McCormack: I can see that. I can particularly see them trying to interfere with people getting to the polls. There was a little bit of that in Florida, in 2000, trying to prevent people from getting [to] vote.

Elias: So this is the thing. The Republican Party, as a private organization, has been running voter suppression programs for decades. What’s different is that, in addition to the RNC running voter suppression programs and their right-wing allies running voter suppression programs, we may very well have the federal government running a voter suppression program.

McCormack: We could have violence at the polls. [Trump] is willing to go that far. I’m going to write a series of columns on this. I just wrote one wherein I said that Minneapolis showed that he would back down if enough agitation were organized against him.

Elias: I think that’s true. He’s not immune from public opinion. Don’t get me wrong, no politician is immune from public opinion. The question is, though, how quickly did he back down? The thing about elections is they’re very temporal events. Generally, the period from early voting to vote counting, even in a state with a lot of early voting, is really narrow. And every day that goes by—as Carol knows from her days running Senate campaigns when I first met her—the one thing every campaign has the least of is time. You hit Election Day, and it’s over. I worry that even if public pressure is against him, it still doesn’t mean that it’s not going to create some amount of voter suppression in the meantime.

Butler: Can I ask a question? Having spent a lot of time now in Oregon using its great vote-by-mail system—say we win in the courts. Isn’t there an awful lot of other nonsense [Republicans] can get up to that interferes with vote by mail? I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I don’t even trust the post office anymore.

Elias: The truth is that every kind of voting system has its pluses and its minuses. One of the downsides with voting by mail is, obviously, it is dependent on the mail. You have a U.S. Postal Service that continues to cut back on mail service, continues to extend the delays for mail service, and as you point out, Donald Trump has, at this point, appointed not just [the] Postmaster General but others on the board of governors. That is not to say people shouldn’t vote by mail. It’s just to say that we need to go into the next few months understanding that whatever Donald Trump can weaponize, he will try to weaponize. We need to just understand that this is a feature of the era in which we live and not put our head in the sand and act like it doesn’t exist.

Butler: So, Mark, you’re going to be battling in court, and obviously anything that people can do to support you in that is a good thing. What else do all of us need to be thinking about doing? How do we best fight back?

Elias: I always say this to every audience I speak to: Obviously, there are things that lawyers can do which are unique to lawyers. There are things that elected officials can do that are unique to elected officials. There are things that philanthropy can do that are unique to philanthropy. But everyone, no matter who they are, no matter what their job, no matter how much they have or don’t have, they do have a town square that they can stand out in and speak out.

Now, some people have really big town squares. They own major media publications. Other people have smaller town squares. It may be just their social media feed, it may be their dinner table, it may be their bridge club or the bowling league they belong to, but everybody’s got some place where they can speak out and be heard. What everyone needs to do is to use that town square to call out what Donald Trump is up to and what is happening to our democracy. No Kings Day is a great opportunity for people to do that, but it is only one day out of a year. My ask for everyone is to use every opportunity you have to speak out on the issues of democracy and free and fair elections, because without free and fair elections, you’re not going to solve any other problems. You’re not going to solve the problems of climate change, the economy, reproductive health—none of those things are going to be solved if we don’t have a functioning democracy.

I think if we have free and fair elections, Democrats are going to take control of the House and the Senate, and they’ll do quite well downballot. But if Donald Trump is able to, in the darkness of the night, rig the elections through unfair districts, or suppress the vote through executive orders that go unchallenged, or make it impossible for people who have hourly jobs to be able to vote because there are long lines or because the streets are closed off, then he will have won. All of us can call that out. All of us can become ambassadors for access to voting by posting on social media, calling their friends, or texting their text chain with their college roommates. That’s the thing that I ask everyone to do.

Butler: You were talking about him doing stuff in the darkness of the night. How big a problem is it, in your mind, what’s happened to the media and media coverage?

Elias: I could talk endlessly about the failures of the corporate-owned legacy media. They have completely normalized what he has done in two respects. When he says Republicans “should take over” voting, that should be front-page news. That is not just a normal thing to say. It violates his oath of office; it violates the Constitution. If it was happening in any other country, it would receive the treatment by our media that it should, and instead, it largely gets treated as, “Well, Donald Trump said this, and Democrats say that,” and so forth. The second thing is that they just don’t cover democracy issues and the threats that are posed to our electoral system in the way in which they cover other items that are much less important but which don’t offend the people who are buying CBS News and now CNN and others like that. You cannot be paying tens of millions of dollars to settle bullshit lawsuits against Donald Trump and also have people believe that you’re actually standing up for democracy against him.

American progressives may have felt a twinge of sympathy or even support last week for Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as she became the umpteenth target of one of Donald Trump’s churlish social media fusillades. Trump claimed she “begged” him for a photo op; she fired back that that was ridiculous.

It was amusing, but it was also a bit aberrational, because in general, the right-wing Meloni is Trump’s ideological ally. Instead, it’s the 41-year-old leader of the Italian Opposition (an official role), socialist Elly Schlein, whom progressives in the United States and elsewhere should be learning about. Schlein hopes to beat Meloni in Italian national elections, which must be held before the end of 2027.

We’re involved in a global battle between left and right, liberal democracy and populist authoritarianism. And the reality is that the global right has been much better at aligning together than the left. Steve Bannon is an architect of this, starting early in the first Trump term to organize international forces to do his bidding. With Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán felled by democratic forces in his own country, Meloni now stands as the most important right-wing leader in Europe.

The U.K. will elect a new prime minister this year. Italy will be the next big one. Meloni’s defeat in 2027, a year before the U.S. presidential elections, would send a powerful message to Republican leaders in the U.S. and to corporate interests so closely aligned with the right wing in Europe and here at home.

Schlein, who won her party’s leadership unexpectedly in 2023, is hardly the prototype of an Italian politician. A gay woman with a Jewish Ukrainian American father and an Italian mother, she was raised in Lugarno, Switzerland. She holds triple citizenship: American, Italian, and Swiss. She attended the University of Bologna, the oldest university in the world, engaging there in left-wing movement politics as she built a base of support outside the traditional party structure before surprising the old guard with her leadership victory of the Partido Democratico (Democratic Party, or P.D.) three years ago.

She began that leadership campaign 20 points behind. “When I was elected, we had just hit our historically lowest in the polls,” she said in an interview. “There were many people betting on the end of the party or a split.” Schlein says she sought to “rebuild the credibility of the party on two basic issues: the defense of the public health care system and minimum wage, and the fight against precarious jobs.”

I sat with her recently on a sweltering early summer day in the Central Rome party headquarters, where we talked for nearly two hours as she covered a range of topics with no notes. The P.D. is an amalgam of previously large parties in Italy that includes the former Communist Party of Italy, or PCI; the Socialist Party; and the Christian Democrats (the latter two are former ruling parties, while the PCI was once the largest Communist party in the Western world). Today, the P.D. is the largest party in a coalition including smaller parties with diverse political positions that Schlein must corral to succeed, especially on foreign policy and defense spending.

Warm, wonkish, and unpretentious, Schlein is passionate about politics and ideology, weaving a narrative completely opposite to that of her nemesis, Meloni. Her international collaborators include Senator Bernie Sanders, Brazilian President Luis Inácio Lula de Silva, and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. She’s quite familiar with U.S. politics, having volunteered twice for Barack Obama’s presidential races.

Schlein’s base mirrors much of the Italian left (and much of the international left), with core support coming not from working-class voters but from the intellectual elite in the big cities. “It’s a huge problem for them to speak to the voters who are living in the small cities in the rural zone,” Professor Marc Lazar, of Rome’s Luiss University, told me. But capturing the working class and poorer sectors of Italian society from Meloni is a must for Schlein if she is to be victorious for a party that hasn’t won a national election since 2016.

Italy is Europe’s third-largest economy, yet it is also one of the continent’s poorer nations. Largely dependent on exports, it’s been hard hit by Trump’s tariffs policy and the Iran war. Think Italian wine, pasta, olive oil, and designer fashion—all of which rely on the U.S. as the largest market. The choice for producers is to earn less on each product or charge more.

But the most critical vulnerability for Italy’s economy is the mess created by Trump in the Strait of Hormuz, an avenue through which most of Italy’s imported gas flows. The Italian economy is overly dependent on natural gas imports.

All of this should make Meloni vulnerable for reelection in 2027. Her pro-market policies have proven problematic for Italy. She expanded privatization of Italy’s health care system, already one of the weakest public systems on the continent. She is privatizing higher education, expanding the casual workforce, and opening detention centers for migrants—though in Albania, not Italy, using outsourced Italian police.

This latter project of Meloni’s, according to Schlein, underscores Meloni’s ill-conceived policies. The somersaults she has turned to try to keep her initial idea intact would put Trump to shame. “Understand how she works with propaganda while facts are somewhere else,” Schlein told me. “She said they would host asylum-seekers in these centers—36,000 migrants a year. It was clearly against European law and the Italian Constitution.”

After the European courts ruled that Meloni’s government couldn’t wholly reject asylum-seekers inside Italy, Schlein said that Meloni, “instead of declaring failure,” moved already detained migrants from Italy to Albania. “With taxpayer money for her propaganda, she prolongs the suffering” and subcontracts the work at a much higher cost.

And the numbers are ridiculously low: “not 36,000 a year, but 536 migrants in two years,” Schlein said, quoting data from the Italian president’s office. “Since these detainees can’t be returned to their home countries directly from Albania, Italy will have to pay to have them come to Italy and then deport them,” she added.

Meanwhile, Schlein has her governing agenda ready with “five main priorities: health, education, decent jobs, industrial policies, digital, and the ecological transition, in a way that redistributes the benefits of renewable energies.”

Employment opportunities for Italian youth are minimal, as are incentives for women in the workforce. “After four years of Meloni, our growth rate is at zero,” Schlein says. “It’s the image of the complete failure of the economic and social policies of a right-wing nationalist government.… Progressives cannot accept this. We must readapt those rules to fight a new form of exploitation, especially of the young generation.”

It’s an understatement to point out that a national campaign between two women is unprecedented in heavily patriarchal, Catholic Italy. Meloni echoes the American right wing in promoting what she considers traditional family values (though she herself is separated from her former partner, with whom she had a daughter out of wedlock). She regularly touts: “I’m Giorgia, I’m a woman, I’m a mother, I’m a Christian!” Schlein’s retort is: “I am a woman. I love another woman. I am not a mother, but I am not less of a woman for this.”

It’s hard to say how well this riposte might play. Support for same-sex unions hit a high of 80 percent in Italy in one 2025 poll. And yet, Italy remains the only country in Western Europe where same-sex marriage is not legal.

Schlein will try to build her case more around policy than emotion. “The right wing talks a lot about the support of traditional families and traditional values,” she told me, “but they are cutting funds for kindergartens, and they blocked a proposal of the opposition that aims at having, like in other European countries, five months of paid parental leave for both parents.”

The digital economy and AI are also on Schlein’s mind, where she has an ally in another leader in Rome: Pope Leo. “I think this last Papal Encyclical … shows the risks of this unregulated progress of technology,” she said, referring to the pope’s recent forceful statement on technology and the global economy. She also wants to “ensure that the added value and benefits of technology are equally shared through society, and are redistributed, which is a fundamental word for the left and progressives in general.”

Schlein endorses an EU-wide platform on AI and digital, as a matter of “national security,” asking “what can France, Italy, Spain, or Germany do alone when you have 500 billion investment on AI in the U.S. and 500 billion investment from China?” She proposes a European research center, across the 27 EU countries. “Otherwise, we’re out of the game.”

Having served in the European Parliament, Schlein describes herself as “so passionate” about European federalism. “None of the big challenges we have ahead of us, including wars, inequalities, climate change, public health, different pandemics,” she believes, can be handled by one European country.

Schlein says that unlike Meloni, she would not have capitulated to Trump’s demand that NATO allies expand military expenditure to 5 percent of their gross domestic product, because it “will be the end of the economy and welfare of this country. Meloni should have done what [Spanish Prime Minister] Pedro Sanchez did and said, ‘I am loyal to the alliance. I will respect all the capacity objectives set by NATO,’ but not give in to Trump.”

Defense and military policies are precisely where Schlein must stealthily maneuver among the left coalition. There are internal contradictions among these parties, regarding pacifism, the willingness to be part of a European Defense Pact, and on strategy regarding Ukraine and Israel-Palestine.

Schlein told me: “We should continue to support Ukraine as we always did with Partido Democratico.… Putin has rewritten borders with the use of military force.… Trump is too sensitive … to the arguments of Putin. You cannot negotiate a just and lasting peace without the people who were criminally invaded sitting at the table.”

On the Middle East, Schlein tries to navigate a policy that defends both Israelis and Palestinians. “We were all happy about a ceasefire. But the problem we saw in the peace plan, so called, from Trump is that there were two important points missing—the end of the illegal occupation in the West Bank, and a clear perspective for the recognition of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.” She said Hamas “cannot be the future of Gaza” and that the Palestinian Authority “must go through reforms.” Meanwhile, “[Benjamin] Netanyahu and his extremist ministers,” along with Trump, must be held accountable for violating international law, she said.

So, can she defeat Meloni? Two recent elections offer a split analysis. Meloni suffered a major loss attempting to change the Italian Constitution in March to reduce the judiciary’s role. Schlein told me this vote succeeded with “an intergenerational bridge.” Young people who don’t turn out in force did this time at 67 percent, along with voters over 60, to defeat Meloni. It’s precisely the type of alliance Schlein needs to win in 2027. In municipal elections held in late May, however, the right largely held off the left’s challenges, with significant wins in Venice and Reggio Calabria.

But Schlein’s optimism and energy are contagious. Without doubt, she has mobilized a forlorn left. “The match is on. We are competitive,” she smiled. Importantly, she has expressed a willingness to run in a primary election with other parties in the alliance, assuming a victory will bring her greater credibility, and she believes “is the best solution for us to keep the coalition united.”

Before we parted, Schlein showed me her bracelet, “Testardamente Unitari,” meaning “Stubbornly United,” which she said she wears all the time, underscoring her determination. It’s the prerequisite she needs to beat Meloni, challenge Trumpian policies, and help stave off Steve Bannon’s dream of a MAGA-fied Europe.

The Supreme Court paved the way for the Trump administration to deport more than 350,000 Haitian and Syrian nationals in the United States who were previously protected by Temporary Protected Status designations. In doing so, the court effectively blessed Trump’s bigotry towards Haitians and dealt potentially catastrophic damage to federal civil-rights laws.

The court’s ruling in Mullin v. Doe dealt with two separate issues. One was whether Congress had barred the plaintiffs from seeking judicial review of the Secretary of Homeland Security’s decision to revoke the TPS designation for both Haiti and Syria. The other was whether the Haiti TPS revocation was illegal because it was made with a racially discriminatory purpose.

Both countries at issue experienced tremendous upheaval in the 2010s. Haiti experienced a devastating earthquake in 2010 that killed as many as 160,000 people and destroyed large swaths of the country and especially the capitol, Port-au-Prince. The ensuing social and economic crisis fueled political unrest and ubiquious gang violence. Gunmen stormed the presidential compound and killed Haitian President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, and the country has yet to elect a constitutional successor.

Syria also saw massive civilian displacements during its thirteen-year civil war, which began in 2011 as a protest movement against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. More than 650,000 people died in the ensuring conflict. Assad fled the country in 2024 as rebel forces captured Damascus. While the new government has built ties with major powers to end economic sanctions and rebuild the country, much of Syria’s economy and infrastructure remains in ruins.

Federal law allows the secretary of homeland security to grant temporary protected status—also known as TPS—to foreign nationals inside the United States when they are unable to return to their home countries due to extraordinary circumstances, like natural disasters or civil wars. While the law does not create a pathway to permanent residency or citizenship, it does generally protect TPS recipients from deportation without some other cause.

The Obama administration invoked TPS for Haitian and Syrian nationals in 2010 and 2012, respectively. Under federal law, the secretary of homeland security must conduct a review every 18 months to determine if the country in question “no longer continues to meet the conditions for designation.” The law requires the secretary to “consult with appropriate agencies of the government” before reaching that determination.

Since TPS status can hinge entirely on an executive-branch official’s determination, those protected from removal by it became a logical target for Trump officials after they retook power last year. The second Trump administration has dedicated itself to ethnically cleansing the United States, both by shutting down legal pathways for immigration and by removing as many non-white people from the country as possible through deportation.

To that end, the Trump administration has constructed a vast network of deportation warehouses to pressure people to leave by holding them in unsanitary and unsafe conditions. It has dismantled the nation’s refugee-resettlement program with the sole exception of white Afrikaners from South Africa. It has even claimed the power to abolish birthright citizenship by executive order; the Supreme Court will rule upon the legality of that step later this month.

In keeping with that goal, Trump also issued an executive order last year that instructed executive-branch officials to take a more “limited” approach to TPS designations. Then-Secretary Kristi Noem announced soon thereafter that she would be terminating the TPS designations for Haiti and Syria. A group of TPS recipients responded by suing her and the department to challenge her decision on multiple grounds. (Markwayne Mullin, who replaced Noem as secretary earlier this spring, is now the lead defendant.)

Congress, using its jurisdiction-stripping powers, had included a provision in the statute to forbid courts from exercising “judicial review of any determination of the [secretary] with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state.” As a result, the TPS recipients had no ability to challenge the designation itself—for example, to argue that it was not yet safe to return to their home country.

Instead, the TPS recipients argued that they weren’t challenging Noem’s determination itself. Instead, they argued that she had illegally reached that determination by improperly following the law’s consultation requirement with other federal agencies. Alito, writing for the majority on Thursday, argued that the judicial-review bar applied to the entire deliberative process. “If the final agency action is unreviewable, then so too are subsidiary determinations,” he concluded. “This important principle ensures that challengers cannot avoid a judicial-review bar by creative pleading or clever lawyering.”

In the Haiti case, the district court also found that the TPS designation was illegal on Equal Protection Clause grounds because race was a motivating factor. It applied the Supreme Court’s test from the 1977 case Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corporation, which requires courts to evaluate whether race was a “motivating factor” by, among other things, looking into “evidence of intent” that can include “contemporary statements” by key officials.

It is not surprising that the district court ruled against the administration because Trump is vehemently and publicly racist towards Haitians. Accordingly, the court concluded that Trump had acted, “at least in part, with racial animus” because the president “repeatedly invoked racist tropes of national purity.” Findings like this are typically subject to clear-error review by appeals courts. In other words, they aren’t supposed to be overturned as long as they are “plausible,” Kagan noted in her dissent.

With Trump, that should be an easy threshold. “The evidence [the plaintiffs] have offered includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print,” Kagan noted. “Indeed, one measure of the President’s way of speaking about Haitians is to compare it with the majority’s, which is unfailingly respectful.”

She cited Alito’s assertion that “poverty and deprivation are no reflection on character, and there is no justification for denigrating the character of Haitians who suffer from and bear no responsibility for their country’s ills.” At the same time, Kagan also quoted from Trump’s public comments about Haitians at length:

Haitians are “eating the dogs . . . . They’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live [in Springfield, Ohio].” And: Haitians are also eating “other things too that they’re not supposed to be.” And: Haitians in the United States “probably have AIDS.” And: Haiti is a “shithole country,” which is “filthy, dirty, [and] disgusting.” And: Haitian immigration is “like a death wish for our country.” And: Haitians, along with some others, are “poisoning the blood” of our country. And: “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries” like “Haiti [and] Somalia”? “Why cannot we have some people from Norway [and] Sweden?” The majority briefly replies that those remarks are not “overtly racial,” but it is hard to know what that means. Haitians are Black. (Norwegians and Swedes not so much.)

Alito, along with his five colleagues, divided up Trump’s statements into four categories. Some “express strong objections to the immigration that this country has experienced in recent decades” and to “many of the immigrants who have come here, particularly those who have come […] illegally,” which Trump “associate[s] with crime and other social ills.” Alito could have hardly sanitized them more than if he had used Clorox.

Other statements, Alito claimed, “express great displeasure with TPS” in general or “broadly denigrate the countries for which TPS designations have been granted—including Haiti—portraying them as hellish places to live.” Finally, Alito noted, some of Trump’s comments “malign Haitians who have come to the United States.” If only there were a shorter word to describe that.

After completing this act of transmutation, Alito then insisted that “none of the cited statements by either the president or the secretary was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications.”

This is a deeply disturbing assessment on two levels. First, it is historically and linguistically illiterate. “The references—of filth, disease, and primitiveness—are shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes,” Kagan continued, quoting from precedent. “It is hard to imagine the statements being made today of any White community.” A Martian who arrived on Earth yesterday might be forgiven for not hearing echoes of Nazi Germany when the president says that a minority group is “poisoning the blood” of our country. Six Supreme Court justices have no excuse.

Alito and the court’s other conservative justices are more than capable of discerning discriminatory intent from public officials’ remarks in other contexts. In 2012, he and his conservative colleagues joined an opinion by then-Justice Anthony Kennedy that inferred anti-religious bigotry from a member of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission for using the word “despicable” to describe a Christian baker’s refusal to sell wedding cakes to a same-sex couple. Trump’s language towards Haitians was considerably stronger than that. Indeed, the court’s conservatives routinely ascribe discriminatory intent in other religious-freedom cases where legitimate policy rationales are given.

Second, and perhaps more ominously, Alito’s opinion completely butchers the Arlington Heights test, which is commonly used in civil-rights cases. Under that test, the plaintiffs should prevail so long as they can prove race was a “motivating factor,” even if it wasn’t the sole or primary factor. Alito flipped the rule around by claiming that Trump’s remarks “expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications.” In short, any pretextual explanation for Trump’s comments could overcome the interpretation that they were racist.

Arlington Heights did not anticipate that a president would be as openly racist as Trump. It anticipated a more subtle search, which is why the court in 1977 urged judges to take into account the “historical background” of a policy, as well as a “specific sequence of events leading up to a challenged decision” and “departures from the normal procedural sequence.” The court’s decision came in a case involving zoning policy just over a decade after the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s passage. It envisioned applying to subtle forms of racial discrimination after the demise of overt ones.

Alito, once again, got it backward. The search for context as described by Arlington Heights was meant to identify racist rationales that might be otherwise cloaked by officials. To Alito, however, that search is actually meant to find pretexts to exonerate Trump. “Because application of that standard calls for consideration of the context in which a challenged statement was made, the immigration context is an important factor,” he wrote.

Kagan and her fellow dissenting justices thought this to be ridiculous. “No very ‘sensitive inquiry,’ of the kind Arlington Heights compels, is needed to see them for what [Trump’s statements] are; judges, as we often say, are ‘not required to exhibit a naiveté from which ordinary citizens are free,’” she explained.

This is hardly new territory for Alito: He performed the same pretzel-twisting to make it impossible to bring racial-gerrymandering claims in Louisiana v. Callais earlier this term. At the same time, rewriting Arlington Heights in this fashion is arguably worse because, unlike Callais, it applies in a much wider range of legal contexts. If the court’s reworked test applies outside of the immigration context, it could excuse a much greater range of bigotry by public officials, veiled or otherwise, than the current status quo.

Alito further excuses Trump’s remarks by claiming the plaintiffs themselves had given Trump a race-neutral reason by citing “the present administration’s general stance on immigration.” (As I’ve noted before, Alito has a hobby of sorts of making disfavored litigants act against their own interest.) He noted, puckishly, that the Trump administration had ended TPS for a wide range of countries from Asia, Africa, and South America and took this as evidence of a lack of racist intent.

“Most would regard this as a racially diverse group of countries, but [the plaintiffs] see them all as ‘non-white’ nations,” Alito claimed. “They claim that TPS has not been terminated for any predominantly white nation, and they therefore infer that the reason for the termination of the TPS designation for Haiti was having a predominantly nonwhite population.”

But, Alito noted, the reason that they haven’t done so is because no European country, except for war-torn former parts of Yugoslavia, had ever fallen under TPS and lost it. (Ukraine currently has one, he noted, but it won’t be up for review until later this year.) “The great majority of countries granted TPS have ranked among the poorest nations of the world, and no European nation falls into that category,” Alito coyly observed.

In the end, it comes as no real surprise that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority takes no issue with Trump’s description of Haiti as a “shithole country,” nor that it finds no racist motivation in describing them as eating people’s pets or poisoning the blood of the American Volk. They don’t see Trump’s remarks or actions as racist because they apparently agree with him.

For nine months I’ve been making a stink about the Trump administration’s imminent sale of the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, which houses the richest store of New Deal murals in Washington, D.C., including a series of Ben Shahn frescoes, situated along both sides of a 70-foot lobby corridor, that would be very, very hard to remove (and require a great deal of expertise to preserve). Shahn judged these murals “the best work I’ve done,” and I don’t disagree; they’re stunning to see in person.

Now there’s good news to share. On Thursday the General Services Administration, which manages real estate for the federal government, signaled for the first time that it wants to cancel the sale, based on an aspect that I didn’t know about—and which has nothing to do with the Cohen being (in the words of Gray Brechin, founder of the nonprofit Living New Deal) “a kind of Sistine Chapel of the New Deal.”

Earlier this month I was able to report a tiny glimmer of good news—two House Republicans had voted for an appropriations amendment introduced by Rep. Chellie Pingree, Democrat of Maine, to compel public release of a GSA feasibility study about refurbishing the Cohen. The amendment failed, but it was the first signal that we might see some bipartisan interest in saving the building. (For my earlier pieces about all this, click here, here, here, and here; see also follow-up coverage in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and USA Today.)

This week’s news is much better, and from the unlikeliest forum—a public meeting of the Public Buildings Reform Board, an independent government agency that, in a May 2025 report recommended the Cohen building’s sale and gave no indication that the Cohen was anything other than a cavernous and underutilized structure that nobody would ever miss. I have a strong suspicion that the PBRB didn’t know at the time about the Cohen’s art works (which in addition to the Shahns include important art works by Philip Guston, Seymour Fogel, and others).

Now, Ben Peters of The Washington Business Journal reported Thursday, the PBRB is putting the brakes on the sale. At the end of last year the Trump administration was so hot and bothered to unload four properties in Washington’s Southwest quadrant, including the Cohen, that the White House started soliciting bids—illegally, I might add—to demolish the buildings (since the land is what real estate developers really crave). The demolition didn’t happen, but this spring two of the four buildings were sold at, respectively, one-tenth and one-fifth of market value (in a local market for commercial real estate that was already seriously depressed). A third building outside the Southwest quadrant, the Old Post Office, also sold below market, but that’s a more complicated story of kleptocratic self-dealing by President Donald Trump.

At Thursday’s hearing, according to Peters, board member Michael Capuano said that “Our analysis shows that absent an identified anchor tenant with Southwest, the market is not ready to absorb all of this additional square footage.” Translation: We just staged two embarrassing fire sales in Southwest, so maybe we’d better slow the hell down. According to Peters, board members also expressed concern that the federal government has not yet agreed with the local District government on a master plan to redevelop the Southwest neighborhood.

But I haven’t even told you yet the really good news.

Making an appearance at the hearing was Rich Butterworth, senior analyst and adviser with the GSA’s Office of Real Property Utilization and Disposal and a career civil servant. Butterworth said (this is Peters’ paraphrase): “Infrastructure complications with the 1.2 million-square-foot Cohen Building at 330 Independence Ave. SW are prompting officials to potentially consider pulling it from a disposal list and instead attempt to reinvest in the property for continued government use.”

Having been focused on the Shahn murals throughout my reporting, my first thought on reading this was that “infrastructure” is a very odd word to describe precious art. But it turns out Butterworth wasn’t talking about any of the building’s murals or friezes. He was talking about the difficulty posed by the fact that the Cohen has a sort of Siamese twin, the Mary E. Switzer Memorial Federal Building, which houses staff for the Health and Human Services department, and which the federal government does not intend to sell.

The Switzer and the Cohen were built simultaneously, in roughly the same Egyptian-Revival-Meets-Art-Deco style, on opposite sides of C Street. They were designed by the same architect, Charles Z. Klauder, probably best known for building the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh. And it turns out Klauder, when he designed these twin buildings, decided to save Uncle Sam a little money by having them share certain underground guts—heating and electrical equipment, I’m told, and some other utility-related gewgaws.

Apparently the two buildings are conjoined sufficiently that separating the Cohen from the Switzer in order to sell it would cost the federal government a lot of money that nobody gave a moment’s thought to until five minutes ago. Well, maybe the GSA thought about it, quietly. But Senator Joni Ernst, who wrote an amendment into a water resources bill last year requiring the Cohen’s sale, almost certainly did not. (She didn’t know about the art, even though the Cohen is situated a mere two blocks from the Capitol.) To sell the Cohen, Butterworth informed the committee, wouldn’t save the government money; it would cost the government money, because, he said, it would be “extremely expensive to replicate or sever those utilities.” Butterworth continued:

While a lot of people would like to see this building disposed of — and given its underutilization rate, we understand why — our thought is, unless we can solve that problem, that might be a building that’s better reinvested in and get back to a utilization rate that would make sense and justify the level of investment.

The way to save the Cohen, it turns out, is to save a bunch of dirty pipes and cables and ducts that you can’t even see because they run underneath C Street. With this revelation, Butterworth just made it a whole lot easier for Congress to stop the sale. Let’s raise a glass to the remarkable foresight of Charles Klauder.

“We remain concerned,” Mary Okin, assistant director of The Living New Deal, told me, “since the building is still on the accelerated disposal list, but we welcome any public announcement suggesting the building is not going to go up for sale.”

I do too, and I think probably we’re going to get one.

After Donald Trump kicked off his personalized celebration of America’s 250th birthday with a rally on the National Mall on Wednesday night, news accounts described the event as very sparsely attended. Trump himself practically begged for more people to show up to the next event set for July 4. Amusingly, this comes after Fox News madly hyped the Wednesday rally in an effort to drum up excitement. But then, as Matt Gertz of Media Matters reports in a good piece on all this, Fox grappled with the bad initial turnout by largely avoiding any discussion of it. We think that’s pretty revealing. So we talked to Gertz about all of it: We discuss why Trump’s gala is so important for the broader, more sinister Trump-Fox project that’s underway, the real reason Trump-Fox want our the 250th anniversary to be a celebration of Trump’s “personalist” rule, and what it will really mean if it’s all a bust. Listen to this episode here.

Earlier this week, the Senate and then the House passed the biggest housing bill in decades by veto-proof margins, and it was set to be signed by President Trump on Wednesday before he abruptly cancelled the ceremony and demanded Congress first pass his voter-suppressing SAVE America Act. But where, literally, is the bill right now? There seems to be some confusion about that—and it has major implications for the bill’s fate.

Michigan Congresswoman Lisa McClain, who chairs the House Republican Conference, said Thursday the bill was on Trump’s desk. If so, that means he has 10 days to sign or uselessly veto it, and if he does neither it could either automatically become law or die by the “pocket veto,” depending on whether Congress is in session on day 10. (I know, it’s confusing.)

“It’s been sent to the president’s desk, [and] it’ll pass in ten days if he doesn’t sign it, is that your understanding?” Leah Vredenbregt of Gray Media asked McClain.

“Yep,” she replied.

But multiple outlets report that the House has not, in fact, sent the bill to Trump.

“House GOP leaders *still* have not sent the housing bill to the White House, I’m told—so the 10-day clock still has not started,” Semafor’s Eleanor Mueller wrote Thursday morning. “Trump and [House Speaker Mike] Johnson are expected to discuss when to send the bill—and start the clock—at their meeting this afternoon, I’m told.”

The same remained true hours later.

“This is not correct,” Punchbowl News’s Jake Sherman wrote in reference to McClain’s comments. “The House Republican leadership has not sent the president this bill yet. It is not ‘on his desk.’”

This confusion is as strange as it sounds. Why would McClain claim that it’s on the president’s desk if it isn’t? And if it’s not on his desk, which means the ten-day countdown has not begun, then when is Johnson planning to send it to him? Is he waiting to do so until he knows Congress will be in session on that tenth day, rather than on July 4th recess?

Someone must have the answers, but McClain certainly does not.

A federal judge has blocked parts of President Trump’s executive order attempting to restrict mail-in ballots as the midterm elections approach. 

The order, challenged in court by 23 states and the District of Columbia, was struck down Thursday by Obama-appointed Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. She argued that the Constitution empowers states and Congress to oversee elections, not Trump. 

Trump’s order, signed in March, would force the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Postal Service to make lists of all voters eligible for mail ballots, and to make sure anyone not on the list doesn’t get one. 

“The States alone determine voter-eligibility requirements, subject only to the outer limits of the Constitution,” Talwani wrote in her decision. She also noted the high risk of error involved in the endeavor, writing that the federal government lacked “the ability to create complete and accurate lists of the U.S. citizens residing in every State.”  

“Donald Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional Executive Order sought to undermine eligible voters’ ability to make their voices heard in our democracy. Our Constitution is clear: the authority to set our election rules belongs to the states,” Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro wrote on X after the ruling. “The right to vote is the foundation of our democracy, and I will take on anyone—up to and including the President—who tries to undermine that fundamental right.”

The president has long railed against mail-in ballots as fraudulent, a baseless claim used to justify any fairly lost election. And while Trump’s order was initially allowed to go through in May, this new court ruling will be a significant obstacle for his plans, which could disenfranchise thousands of legal voters. 

“Trump’s vendetta against mail-in voting, which is safe and secure, is about picking who can vote and avoiding accountability,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer chimed. “Democrats will continue fighting every day to block all of Trump’s illegal actions and ensure that Americans can freely cast their ballots this year.”

Trump has yet to comment on the ruling.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the Senate last year that a trip to Samoa in 2019 right before a deadly measles outbreak had “nothing to do with vaccines.” New evidence from The Guardian suggests he may have lied.

In emails between Kennedy’s team and Samoan officials, one of Kennedy’s colleagues said they were on a “mission” to investigate the island’s medical records. There had been a 10-month pause in vaccinations after two infants died due to a tainted MMR vaccine, and anti-vaccine activists gained interest in the island as a potential case study in the health of vaccinated versus unvaccinated children.

“The mission involves health informatics evaluation from medical record data from all hospitals and clinics in Samoa to evaluate outcomes associated with the recent discontinuity in vaccinations,” Dr. Michael Graven, who worked at Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, wrote in a 2019 email. “Mr. Kennedy asked me to join this mission as I have performed health informatics initiatives in 48 other countries over 40 years.”

This stands in direct contrast with how Kennedy repeatedly described his work to the Senate. In response to questioning from Senator Ron Wyden during his confirmation hearings last year, Kennedy said, “I went there, nothing to do with vaccines. I went there to produce a medical informatics system with digitalized records in Samoa and make health delivery much more efficient.”

But the emails obtained by The Guardian tell a different story. Graven said in emails that he and Kennedy planned to spend weeks collecting data in Samoa, but the two ended up leaving just a few days after arriving. Antone Greubel, a State Department employee who was stationed in Samoa, sent an email on June 4 to his colleagues: “Based on conversations with my contacts RFK and Dr [Graven] fell far short of their goal to influence Samoan government vaccination policy.”

A few months after Kennedy’s visit, a measles outbreak killed 83 people out of a population of around 200,000, most of them children under five.

President Trump, who definitely has not read all of the media coverage of the weak attendance at his rally on the National Mall on Wednesday night, insists that the event was “packed to the brim.”

“The Crowd was incredible last night, packed to the brim — At least 45,000 people were there, with a huge Television and online audience. I wish we were able to have an even larger area, which we will be able to do on July 4th when I’ll be speaking again,” the president wrote Thursday afternoon on Truth Social. “The airplane flyovers and music were fantastic. Everybody stayed right until the end of my Speech because they loved hearing about a truly successful America.”

Images of the rally, which kicked off the Great American State Fair, show that there was ample space to move around. Footage also shows that multiple people left right in the middle of Trump’s speech and did not stay “right until the end” as the president claimed. At least one person fell asleep.

Trump:
“The crowd was incredible last night packed to the brim. Everyone stayed right until the end of my speech because they loved hearing about a truly successful America.”

Not everyone 🤣👇 pic.twitter.com/GETPb3THi4

— Marlene Robertson🇨🇦 (@marlene4719) June 25, 2026

Trump has long enjoyed inflating his crowd numbers. He has claimed his July 4, 2019 speech and his infamous J6 rally in 2021 were both bigger than the 250,000-person March on Washington in 1963. Neither was true.

Alligator Alcatraz, the infamous Florida detention camp, will be closed, Governor Ron DeSantis said on Thursday.

DeSantis said the detention center, where immigrants described worms in their food, floors flooded with sewage, and enormous bugs, was not meant to be a permanent installation, the AP reported.

“It served its purpose for the time,” DeSantis said at a press conference.

Alligator Alcatraz was hastily erected nearly a year ago, and has been described by many as a concentration camp. The detention center was temporarily closed earlier this month in advance of hurricane season, and lawyers said that they didn’t hear from their clients being held at the facility for over a week. The detainees have since been scattered between South Florida, California, Arizona, Louisiana, and Texas, reported the AP.

Rumors began in May that the detention center would soon be closed, after Florida officials told President Donald Trump that it cost $1 million each day to operate.

Though one symbol of Trump’s inhumane immigration crackdown is disappearing, the mass deportation campaign continues. ICE is still terrorizing neighborhoods, and Trump’s assault on free speech and dissent is well underway.

DeSantis said at the press conference that 21,000 people were deported through Alligator Alcatraz. That’s 21,000 people who had to endure toilets that didn’t flush, bugs in their food, sweltering heat, and freezing cold—treated like “rats in an experiment,” as one detainee told CBS.

Elizabeth Warren had to explain to President Trump’s pick to lead the White House Council of Economic Advisers that 4.2 percent is more than 3.4 percent.

At a confirmation hearing Thursday for Christopher Phelan, the Democratic senator was making the point that inflation is outpacing wage growth, thereby diminishing Americans’ purchasing power.

“You’ve already told me inflation is 4.2 percent, right? What’s the annual wage growth right now?” Warren asked Phelan, an economist at the University of Minnesota.

“I do not have that in front of me right now,” he said.

Warren sighed. “It’s 3.4 percent. So let’s put this one together. Is 4.2 higher than 3.4?” she asked.

“I will repeat what I said, which is: Real wage growth in this administration is positive,” Phelan said, ignoring Warren’s obvious point that inflation was rising faster than wages.

“Right now families are falling behind,” Warren replied. “These are facts that come out of the Trump administration, they’re there for anybody to see. And you can’t bring yourself, as the person who sits there and says, ‘I want to be the head of the Council of Economic Advisors,’ to give objective economic advice, and you can’t even say ‘yeah, inflation is running higher than wages right now.”

“I think this person has disqualified himself,” she concluded.

Here’s video of the exchanged, via The Bulwark:

Sen. Warren: "What's the annual wage growth right now? It's just a facts question."

Phelan: "I do not have that in front of me right now."

Warren: "It's 3.4%. So let's put this one together. Is 4.2% higher than 3.4%?"

Phelan: "I will repeat what I said, which is real wage… pic.twitter.com/G01jYmgPYX

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) June 25, 2026

President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Michael Boulos, sat in on official meetings in the United Arab Emirates because he’s a good friend, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said.

Rubio met with UAE leaders while on a diplomatic trip to the Middle East. Boulos, Tiffany Trump’s husband, was apparently there to see his brother.

“He was there to see his brother that lives here—he was just there to see me and catch up,” Rubio later told reporters while in Kuwait City.

“But there was a working lunch, right?” one reporter asked.

“There was, but he wasn’t—the conversations around him had to do with—he was just here because his brother lives here, and I’m a good friend of Michael’s, so we had a chance to catch up,” Rubio stammered.

Marco Rubio on why Trump's son in law, Michael Boulos, who has no government role, was in his official meetings in Kuwait: "He was just here because his brother lives here and I'm a good friend of Michael's, so we had a chance to catch up" pic.twitter.com/YsSGoomMe3

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 25, 2026

The working lunch in question was attended by UAE President Mohamed Bin Zayed. Boulos was pictured sitting next to Rubio in the middle of the table.

“Met with UAE’s President @MohamedBinZayed in Abu Dhabi, where we discussed President Trump’s MOU with Iran, efforts to secure full and safe transit through the Strait of Hormuz, and regional stability,” Rubio posted on X Wednesday, sharing a full photo of the group.

Boulos is a businessman with no government role. But that hasn’t stopped the president’s close relatives from meeting with world leaders before. Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump broker deals across the globe, which definitely doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that daddy is the president.

The Supreme Court has delivered President Trump two significant victories in his mass deportation campaign.

On Thursday, the court’s conservative majority voted 6-3 in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado to approve the “metering” policy, which allows Border Patrol agents to turn away migrants seeking asylum from the Mexican side of the southern border. The policy—introduced under the Obama administration and heavily expanded under Trump—will put the asylum hopes of hundreds of migrants and refugees at risk.

“We hold that an alien who is standing in Mexico does not ‘arriv[e] in the United States’ by attempting, and failing, to set foot in this country. An alien ‘arrives in the United States’ only when he crosses the border,” Alito wrote in the majority opinion.

In another 6-3 ruling, Mullin v. Doe, the conservative majority approved the Trump administration’s decision to end Temporary Protective Status for Haitian and Syrian immigrants, putting them at greater risk of being deported back to the dangerous situations they fled from under TPS. These are both countries that the State Department has deemed too dangerous for Americans to travel to.

“The Supreme Court’s decision to strip TPS from Haitian and Syrian communities is a betrayal of our values and of the promise our country made to protect people from displacement and harm,” New York Attorney General Leticia James wrote after the ruling. “I’ll never stop fighting for our immigrant neighbors and loved ones.”

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the biotechnology corporation Monsanto on Thursday, saying the company did not have to include a cancer warning on a pesticide label. In a 7–2 ruling which crossed ideological lines, the justices wrote that a federal pesticide regulation shields the company from lawsuits from people who allege that their cancer was caused by Roundup, the weed killer in question.

Regulating glyphosate, the potentially cancerous ingredient in question, is a hot-button issue for the Make America Healthy Again crowd. And they’re not happy.

In April, Vani Hari, also known as The Food Babe, rallied outside the Supreme Court against Monsanto. On Thursday, she wrote on X, “I am literally sick. This is a devastating blow to every family that trusted our justice system.”

“Every elected official now has a choice: stand with families harmed by toxic chemicals or stand with the corporations that profit from them,” she wrote.

For MAHA, the Supreme Court case is a betrayal: The White House sided with Monsanto in the case, and President Donald Trump signed an executive order earlier this year promoting glyphosate production. Glyphosate is one of the most common pesticides used in agriculture, and Trump framed his executive order as a way of protecting Americans’ food supply.

Alex Clark, a “wellness” podcaster and Turning Point USA member, similarly lamented the ruling on X.

“Today the Supreme Court made it impossible for people who develop cancer after using Roundup to sue Bayer for failing to warn them about the potential cancer risk,” she wrote. “The Trump administration URGED and PLEADED the Court to reach this result to protect a FOREIGN chemical company—and it did at the expense of Americans. What happened to America First?”

Bayer, the company that owns Monsanto, is German.

If MAHA feels like the Trump administration has abandoned them, it may mean trouble at the polls. Kelly Ryerson, an activist who goes by “Glyphosate Girl,” told MS NOW that the ruling may not push MAHA to the left—but that doesn’t mean they’ll keep backing Trump.

“They’re not going to vote; they’re going to be done with voting,” she warned before the ruling.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson just accused the Supreme Court of caring more about guns than the actual law.

The court issued a 6–3 decision Thursday along ideological lines to scrap Hawaii’s law prohibiting gun owners from taking their weapons onto private property without obtaining express permission. In a dissent written by Jackson and joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Jackson argued that the court had failed to faithfully apply its own jurisprudence.

“Today’s decision makes one thing clear: The Court’s objective is protecting guns, not consistently preserving any principle of law,” she wrote.

Jackson argued that the court had incorrectly applied, and obscured the purpose of, a two-step legal test to prove if the Second Amendment had been violated, established in New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen.

At step one of Bruen, the court must determine whether the “plain text” of the Second Amendment covers the challenged action. Jackson claimed that it didn’t. The law being challenged, Act 52, required gun owners to receive affirmative consent from a property owner before bringing their firearm onto private property.

“This case is about property rights, not gun rights,” Jackson wrote.

“There is no constitutional right to enter private property without the owner’s permission, let alone with a firearm,” she added. “So the question this case presents is merely how a property owner must communicate his decision to exclude or to invite armed carry, including whether a State may alter the background property-law rules that set the default as one or the other. The Second Amendment has nothing to say about that.”

Additionally, Jackson argued that the challenge also failed at step two of Bruen, which requires the government to justify the regulation by showing it is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of regulating firearms. But Hawaii’s history must also be taken into account, Jackson argued, as there is no tradition of concealed carry on the islands. “In this way, Hawaii’s use of its prerogative to protect the interests of its residents is consistent with its own traditions,” she wrote.

In obscuring Bruen, Jackson argued the court had opened the door to more chaos. “From this day forward, it will be difficult to view Bruen as anything more than a fig leaf,” she wrote. “The Court’s effort to rein in judicial discretion has resulted in an arbitrary rule that unleashes judges to thwart gun regulation at every turn.”

Two ICE agents harassed a poll worker on Election Day, demanding she remove social media posts they claimed threatened federal agents, according to Syracuse.com.

Paigelynne Gonyea, a poll worker in Syracuse, New York, said she received a phone call Tuesday from two ICE agents asking to meet with her. Not wanting to meet with them alone, she invited them into her work. “I’ve seen the news, especially in Minnesota,” she said. “And I didn’t want anything to happen to me at all.”

The ICE agents arrived with copies of her social media posts and driver’s license, and handed her a warning notice alerting her that they were investigating her for allegedly threatening ICE personnel. “They tried to scare me into signing it while I was working,” she said. The agents told her to “remove and/or discontinue” the behavior, according to the notice, which Gonyea shared on Instagram.

Gonyea frequently posts about immigration on social media. She believes the investigation was prompted after she shared a news article in January identifying Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good. “I think today is a great day for Jonathan to be indicted,” she wrote in the caption.

Gonyea did not believe that her post or caption qualified as doxxing. “I didn’t dox his personal information, such as address, phone number,” she told Syracuse.com.

Ross, who was only placed on three days of administrative leave for shooting Good in the head, chest, and arm, faced virtually no consequences for killing an innocent woman in broad daylight. It appears that federal law enforcement now view pleas for actual justice as some kind of threat.

“For ICE to come to me over a social media post just feels very 1984 to me,” Gonyea said. “They definitely should have known better to not go into a polling place, even if I said it was OK.”

Kevin Ryan, the Republican Elections Commissioner, spoke with polling employees about whether it was a hoax, and confirmed with the Department of Homeland Security that a visit had been made.

Dustin Czarny, the Democratic Elections Commissioner, said that election law prohibits anyone but poll workers, elections inspectors, and voters from entering a polling place. “There’s no role for law enforcement officials to be inside a polling place unless they are responding to an emergency of some kind,” he told Syracuse.com. “There is no indication of that here.”

Gonyea’s experience is just the latest example of how far federal law enforcement is willing to go to silence critics of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts. Earlier this week in Texas, a man received a 30-year prison sentence for transporting leftwing zines linked to a protest at ICE’s Prairieland Detention Facility. Others involved in the protest received sentences of up to 50 years.

Additionally, the intrusion of ICE agents into a polling place on Election Day should raise serious red flags amid concerns that Trump could use federal law enforcement to intimidate voters in future elections.

Two filings in separate slush fund cases last week threaten to reignite the political firestorm in Congress over the fund and its prospective use to handsomely reward January 6 offenders.

In a case challenging the fund brought in the Eastern District of Virginia, Judge Leonie Brinkema had handed the Department of Justice a clean way to close out Floyd v. Department of Justice, the case challenging Trump’s $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund.

Without exactly ordering Justice to do anything, she offered the department an off-ramp: if Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, Jr., and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent file a declaration, under penalty of perjury, stating that they will not take any action to create or operate the fund and that it “will not proceed in any manner, or under any name,” it would, in her words, “avoid any further litigation in this civil action.”

The alternative, Brinkema made clear, was that she would issue a scheduling order and require DOJ to answer the complaint by July 17.

DOJ filed its response to the offer last Friday. Rather than submit the requested declaration, DOJ argued that the declarations were “unnecessary” in light of Blanche’s unsworn verbal assurances in Congress that the DOJ won’t go forward with the fund. The department argued those words sufficed to moot the case and that Brinkema’s request “implicates serious separation of powers concerns.”

That separation-of-powers argument is the filing’s most blustering move, and its weakest. DOJ leans on so-called apex-doctrine cases holding that senior officials shouldn’t get dragged into litigation when their testimony is available through other channels. That doctrine is meant to keep litigants from harassing busy executives over matters peripheral to their actual duties. It’s not a real separation-of-powers principle.

But Blanche and Woodward aren’t peripheral here. Woodward signed the settlement agreement himself, an unusual move clearly meant to impress Trump, and Blanche put his own name on the filings defending it. Having made themselves the line attorneys on this deal, they can hardly now claim their testimony is marginal.

Moreover, DOJ’s obstreperous response keeps the focus on the question it doesn’t want to answer rather than the question it does. Although Brinkema entered a preliminary injunction not long after receiving the complaint, the five plaintiffs have an uphill road to climb to establish standing. The plaintiffs are two individuals, a city (New Haven), and two public-interest organizations. They’ve been harmed by the administration’s zealous immigration initiative but their claims of individualized injury based on the slush fund itself are tenuous.

On the other hand, the administration has a weak hand to play for the mootness argument. Their adamant, repeated contention is Blanche’s unsworn verbal assurances that the DOJ won’t go forward with the fund suffice to moot the case. Under any conventional mootness analysis, this isn’t a moot settlement agreement. The test is whether the defendant has shown it is “absolutely clear that the allegedly wrongful behavior could not reasonably be expected to recur.” And the burden falls on the party asserting mootness and is especially “heavy” if based on voluntary dismissal, as it was here.

Blanche’s unsworn assurances, coupled with the refusal to formalize them, don’t begin to cut it legally. For starters, Blanche already has made clear that Trump’s every wish is his command. And Trump continues to insist that he favors the fund: He recently told Meet the Press that “if it was up to me, I’d pay them the kind of money that they deserve.”

Trump here isn’t simply the final authority. He is also the beneficiary of a supposed settlement agreement, which is akin to a contract. That makes it his prerogative to enforce. Until Trump, the actual beneficiary of the settlement, agrees to rescind it, DOJ’s say-so doesn’t make the fund disappear as a legal matter.

More fundamentally, the legal question on the table is not what Blanche said to Congress. It’s whether those words, combined with DOJ’s adamant refusal to put anything in writing, are enough to make the settlement agreement moot as a matter of law. Brinkema is well within her rights to conclude they are not. The same day DOJ filed its response to her, a group of 35 retired federal judges filed a brief replying to a brief Trump had filed for the plaintiffs in the case, including his sons and companies.

That case sits before Judge Kathleen Williams in the Southern District of Florida, where Trump’s original lawsuit against the IRS was dismissed in May after a “settlement” that conjured the Anti-Weaponization Fund into existence.

The 35 judges’ reply brief treats DOJ’s abandonment of the fund not as evidence the dispute is over, but as fresh proof that it was never real to begin with. As they put it, the fact that one “side” of the supposed dispute could unilaterally scrap a $1.776 billion settlement term without so much as a revised written agreement makes it clear the parties colluded, in which case a federal court can’t hear it. In other words: The very retreat DOJ is offering Brinkema as proof of mootness, retired judges in Florida are offering Williams as proof of collusion.

Far worse for DOJ and Trump’s lawyers, Williams is weighing whether both sides defrauded her with the contrived filing and settlement, a finding that could brand the agreement bogus and expose the lawyers who signed it to sanctions. She hasn’t ruled yet, and she may stop well short of taking on such a bitter fight, with the 11th Circuit in a position to countermand her. But the question is now squarely hers to answer.

Two weeks ago, in a separate filing opposing the plaintiffs’ TRO motion, DOJ made essentially this same mootness case on the same Blanche testimony, and I wrote at the time that the argument was headed straight into a buzzsaw. Its strategy since has been to tell Congress and the courts “no worries” because the fund is dead. But that’s far from true as a legal matter, and it’s also no response to the possible fraud on the court that the lawyers perpetrated.

The fund collapsed last month under bipartisan political pressure, after Republican senators balked at funding compensation for people who assaulted police officers on January 6. Enough of them seemed willing to take Blanche’s word for it and drop the subject. But if the courts reject DOJ’s mootness claim, that reopens exactly the controversy Blanche’s testimony was supposed to close. The fund would be undead, again the living nightmare that Republicans and the administration thought they had buried.

Some are calling it the Democratic Tea Party. While establishment Democrats are still downplaying Tuesday night’s primary wins by democratic socialists, progressives say that the New York victories of Claire Valdez, Brad Lander, and Darializa Avila Chevalier represent a new era in Democratic politics.

“I think this is a preview for the national Democratic Party,” said Usamah Andrabi, the communications director for Justice Democrats, a progressive group which endorsed Valdez in New York’s 7th district and Avila Chevalier in New York’s 13th. “Democratic leadership needs to wake up to the fact that they are clearly out of step with their most active, vocal, and energized base of voters.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, on the other hand, spent Wednesday trying to downplay the fact that candidates endorsed by democratic socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani beat the ones Jeffries had endorsed.

“The mayor and I agree to strongly disagree about some of his endorsements, and he’s got work to do in terms of the conversations that he’s going to have with members of Congress moving forward,” Jeffries told reporters on the Hill on Wednesday.

Jeffries backed incumbent Representatives Adriano Espaillat and Dan Goldman, who lost to Avila Chevalier and Lander, respectively.

The results are arguably personal for Jeffries: On Tuesday night, a group of DSA members chanted “You’re next,” threatening to run a socialist against him in 2028. In fact, the socialist organization almost challenged Jeffries this cycle, but Mamdani said that trying to unseat Jeffries would be a distraction from DSA’s “affordability agenda.”

When asked if he was concerned about being unseated in 2028, Jeffries said: “When you ask me a serious question, I’ll give you a serious answer.”

Representative Rashida Tlaib, a democratic socialist herself, told The New Republic that she’s looking forward to having new allies in Congress. “I welcome them, and I’m looking forward to working with them to get Medicare for All passed, to try to get clean water and clean air for our families,” she said. “I’m proud of them,” she added.

Other Democrats’ reactions might best be described as circumspect. Representative Ro Khanna, a progressive who didn’t endorse in the New York races, gave an optimistic, if vague, statement to The New Republic when asked about the results. “We need a bold progressive vision for 2026 and 2028 and a new deal for our time,” he wrote in a message.

The jury is still out on whether Tuesday’s results are isolated to New York or indicative of a broader shift in the Democratic Party. Progressive strategists are hoping it’s the latter.

“I think this meaningfully advances an entire progressive agenda,” said Andrabi, pointing to how the soon-to-be House members could push for Medicare for All and block military funding to Israel.

“New York City Democratic primaries are a specific thing in that New York DSA has an incredibly strong ground game, Zohran Mamdani is incredibly popular, and it’s a very blue area,” Ryan O’Donnell, the executive director of Data for Progress, admitted. “But I think there’s also a lot of things that can be extrapolated nationwide.”

O’Donnell cited Data for Progress polls that found that voters see candidates who don’t stand up to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, as untrustworthy on other issues and that democratic socialist policies like Mamdani’s have nationwide appeal.

He shared Andrabi’s optimism that these victories would push the direction of the party: “When you see victories as large as these, and when you grow your numbers in Congress, it tends to change parts of the party more broadly.”