Size of “Gash” in Reflecting Pool Keeps Changing, as Told by Trump
The size of the “slit” cut into the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool just keeps growing, according to President Trump in interviews and his own social media posts. But so far, no one has been able to find any evidence that it exists at all.
On Saturday, Trump posted on Truth Social that “vandals” had damaged the pool, and that they would now have to drain it in order to make repairs. He claimed it “worked perfectly” before it was attacked.
“They took some form of knife or blade, and put a 250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade of what took so much work,” Trump wrote.
But by Monday, the size of the “gash” had grown to 300 feet, according to another post. And on Tuesday, the president said that the cut was 350 feet long.
Q: You mentioned yesterday that the Interior Dept has video and photos. We reached out to them and they haven't shared it with us
TRUMP: They will share it. They've arrested I think 6 people on the reflecting pool. So, the reflecting pool looks fantastic. Somebody went in with a… pic.twitter.com/tsIGNDlo2L
Though Trump’s claims keep getting more and more outlandish, he refuses to share photos of the problem, or any evidence that anyone vandalized the pool. CBS News went and inspected the pool and found no evidence of the gash, whether it be 250, 300, or 350 feet.
We checked again and still no sign of a 350-foot gash as President Trump alleges. Our @CBSMornings 🌞 report: pic.twitter.com/h2WA9L6ZrF
— Ed O'Keefe (@edokeefe) June 23, 2026“One thing we still can’t find is any evidence of a gash along the floor of the pool,” said CBS’s Ed O’Keefe Tuesday morning. “Despite that, the Interior Department is taking steps to drain the pool again, and fix it again.”
Trump has already spent over $16 million renovating the pool—who knows how much it will cost to drain and repair it all over again? American taxpayers continue to shoulder the financial burden of another of Trump’s slapdash vanity projects.
The Supreme Court Deals Major Blow to Congressional Authority
In a single opinion, the Supreme Court on Tuesday took a swipe at Congressional authority while at the same time stripping some victims of religious violations the ability to sue over illegal treatment. The decision weakens a law guaranteeing freedom of religious expression in federally-funded prisons. But with time, the ruling may prove far more disastrous and far-reaching, unleashing illegal behavior that both Congress and the victims are powerless to prevent.
The decision achieves this dual result by limiting Congress’ authority to require that terms in its funding laws can be enforced through private suits against the individuals who violate them—making it harder for Congress to give these laws teeth and for victims to seek damages. The Constitution “may confer on Congress the power to spend money for the general welfare,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in his majority opinion, but “it does not ‘endow Congress with [any] power to regulate conduct.’”
The majority’s decision demotes certain legislation to a mere contract.
This attack on Congress and the victims of unlawful behavior stems from a violation of one man’s religious rights while in a federally-funded prison. A former inmate with the Louisiana Department of Corrections, Damon Landor is a devout Rastafarian who follows the religious command not to cut his hair. When he was transferred to a new facility, Landor worried that the intake guards might shave his head, so he brought along a paper copy of a court case explaining his right to keep his hair long. The prison guards threw it in the trash, held him down, and shaved his head. Congress had passed the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act to protect inmates against such abuses, and in that law, gave inmates like Landor the right to sue the individual guards who violated his rights. So in this case, Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections, Lander sought damages under RLUIPA from the guards who shaved him.
Critically for this case, Congress enacted RLUIPA in 2000 under its broad Constitutional authority to spend money for the “general welfare,” or what is known as its Spending Clause authority. In today’s 6-3 decision along partisan and ideological lines, the court’s Republican appointees threw out Landor’s suit and, more broadly, limited Congress’ authority under the Spending Clause. In time, Landor and RLUIPA may prove to be vehicles through which the court’s conservative wing limits Congressional authority—while leaving victims of illegal behavior, like Landor, unable to seek damages.
Spending clause legislation is a common exercise of Congressional authority. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent points out, Congress has used the clause to protect people in federally funded nursing homes and people receiving emergency care at federally funded hospitals. It powers the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s ban on discrimination in federal assistance, combats pollution under the Clean Air Act, and protects Medicare and Medicaid patients’ rights.
Yet the crux of the majority’s decision in Landor is to demote Spending Clause legislation to, essentially, a mere contract between the federal government and the party that receives the funds. Even though the Constitution says no such thing, the Roberts Court declares that Spending Clause legislation can only be enforced against violators who consent to be held liable, in the same way a contract is only valid of both parties consent. Under the court’s new holding, if, as in this case, prison guards violate RLUIPA, Congress’ only enforcement mechanism is to withdraw the prison’s funding. It’s a cramped vision of Congressional authority that could ultimately allow states and individuals to overrule Congress’ ability to govern.
The Democratic appointees found the notion ridiculous. The Spending Clause gives Congress the “power to legislate, not merely to negotiate,” read Jackson’s dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. “The Court reduces some of Congress’s greatest legislative achievements—federal laws that secure civil rights, environmental stability, healthcare, and more—to nothing more than the wheelings-and-dealings of an especially wealthy private party.”
This case is in line with the Roberts Court’s broader project to grow the powers of the president and Supreme Court while limiting Congress’ authority. Often, this happens through decisions that take powers once exercised by Congress and hand them to the president or the courts. But in this case, the court went directly after Congress’ power to pass laws.
It’s possible that Congress can get around this swipe by adding language to spending laws requiring, in the case of RLUIPA, that guards at federally funded prisons explicitly consent to personal liability under the law—providing that ingredient necessary to a contractual obligation. The majority decision acknowledges such a workaround could allow Congress to once again authorize private suits. But as the court pursues its limited view of legislative authority, such promises are unlikely to broadly preserve Congress’ Spending Clause powers.
One reason to be suspicious is that the majority’s decision invokes paeans to federalism and states rights—principles that the court has turned to in the past to gut civil rights laws. If Landor prevailed in his argument that the guards are liable under RLUIPA, Gorsuch writes, it “would be inconsistent with principles of state sovereignty and a federal government of limited and enumerated regulatory powers.” Perhaps, consent alone, achieved by Congress tweaking the language of Spending Clause legislation, will be enough to satisfy the majority’s objections to Landor’s suit and others like it.
But Landor‘s limits on legislators and citizens are no outlier. Just one year ago, the court, in another Gorsuch opinion, limited individuals’ ability to protect certain rights as Medicaid recipients through private suits. And on the same day as Landor, the same six-justice majority broadly interpreted one law in order to green light certain suits by oil companies, while shutting the courthouse doors to victims of human rights abuses under another law, the Alien Tort Statute.
“So tally today,” University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman posted after the court released its opinions, “victims of human rights violations & beneficiaries of public benefits programs can’t sue. oil companies can.”
Trump Had Bonkers Plan to Add Giant Fist to National Arch
The “Arc de Trump” could have had a giant fist attached to it.
One design that President Donald Trump proposed for his $15 million glamor project involved placing an enormous fist atop the 250-foot Arc de Triomphe dupe, according to a new book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan titled Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.
The fist would have served as a visual reminder of Trump’s response to his attempted assassination at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024.
“As the president showed off his models to a visitor one day in October, he puzzled over the details, including whether the arch should include a platform to take in the view,” Haberman and Swan wrote.
“Privately, he had also been asking confidants what he should have on top of the arc,” the section continues. “Should it be, he mused, a large replica of his ‘Fight, fight, fight!’ fist?”
The book also highlights the arch’s enormous size, which would “dwarf” both the original, 162.5-foot arc in Paris, which was built at the direction of Napoleon Bonaparte to commemorate the military achievements of the French empire, and the 200-foot Arch of Triumph in Pyongyang, which was erected to commemorate the 70th birthday of North Korea’s totalitarian founder Kim Il Sung, as well as the nation’s resistance to Japanese occupation during World War II.
Other suggestions that have been since removed from the proposed design include a replica of Lady Liberty and a pair of eagles sitting atop the proposed arch, which would have added to its height.
The project is still going through a review cycle, but Trump officials have indicated that they want the site up and running by July 2028, six months before Trump’s term is set to end.
Trump’s arch has faced enormous opposition. If it breaks ground, it will physically situate Trump’s legacy between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, interrupting a hallowed conversation between the president that ended slavery and the soldiers that sacrificed their lives in order to do so.
The EPA Relied on an Influential Glyphosate Study Even After Learning Monsanto Was a “Ghost Writer”
The US Environmental Protection Agency has known for nearly a decade that an influential 2013 scientific paper that concluded glyphosate is safe was actually ghostwritten by developer Monsanto. But the agency never informed the public and continued to rely on it, according to an EPA memo obtained by Mother Jones and revealed here for the first time.
The EPA cited the compromised paper as evidence that the world’s most widely used herbicide glyphosate—the key ingredient in Roundup—is safe to use in its 2020 assessment, despite its own internal investigation that concluded the research paper hid Monsanto’s role as an author. Now, nearly ten years after the agency came to its conclusion, the paper’s publisher, Taylor & Francis, said it has opened its own investigation into whether the paper was ghostwritten following a formal request made by a Harvard professor and her research associate to retract the study, as first reported by Retraction Watch last week.
The EPA’s Inspector General’s Office opened its investigation into the research paper in 2017, a few years after the paper was published in the influential science journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology with independent toxicologists Larry Kier and David Kirkland listed as its authors.
The Monsanto employee was therefore a “‘ghost writer’ which is a form of research misconduct.”
But the EPA memo concluded that Monsanto and one of its employees—with the financial backing of a consortium of other glyphosate manufacturers—seemed to have contributed key criteria including the “intellectual content” of the report. The Monsanto employee was therefore a “‘ghost writer’ which is a form of research misconduct,” according to the memo, which was written by a US special agent in the EPA Inspector General’s Office’s crimes division. The memo does not make clear whether Monsanto disclosed to the consortium, known officially as the Glyphosate Task Force, that it would be a “ghost writer” on the report.
This is the latest example to emerge of Monsanto’s concerted efforts to sway public understanding of its blockbuster herbicide glyphosate. In December, another influential review article that had found glyphosate to be safe was retracted after the publisher announced the paper’s authors had not disclosed Monsanto’s role. And a Mother Jones investigation about glyphosate being sprayed in forests found other examples of Monsanto’s hand in secretly orchestrating research papers. Now, Taylor & Francis said it is investigating both the 2013 research paper and a second peer-reviewed 2015 article also published in its journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology to assess whether they were ghostwritten by Monsanto employees.
Bayer, the German chemical company that purchased Monsanto in 2018 and continues to generate billions of dollars of revenue from Roundup every year, said in a statement that the EPA memo’s “allegations about the Kier & Kirkland paper was based on a limited set of documents that didn’t include elements such as sworn testimony from the authors.” Aside from the sworn testimony, it’s unclear what, if anything else, should have been included given the Inspector General relied on company emails and documents made public during litigation.
Since the late 1990s, studies by non-industry scientists showing glyphosate can damage genetic material in lab tests have set off a debate about whether the herbicide can cause cancer. According to the EPA Inspector General memo, a consortium of 25 glyphosate manufacturers wanted to publish their own research paper citing unpublished internal studies conducted by company scientists that showed glyphosate does not damage DNA.
“But once they had pulled all of the various studies together on genotoxicity for this review paper,” wrote the special agent in the EPA memo, “it was hard to present a ‘story’ that glyphosate was not genotoxic, because of ‘…the complicated ‘noise’ out there,’”—meaning the growing debate about whether it causes cancer—and “‘the story as written stretched the limits of credibility among less sophisticated audiences.’”
So “to add credibility to the proposed manuscript” they decided to pay a scientist named David Kirkland—considered a “heavy-hitter in the area of genotoxicity”— to be one of the named authors, along with scientist Larry Kier. The report that was eventually published presented Kier and Kirkland as the “sole” two authors who were “independent” of Monsanto and the consortium.
Yet there was another person helping shape the paper’s assessment: a Monsanto employee named David Saltmiras, according to the EPA memo. While all three of their names are redacted in the memo, they are found in now-public company emails that were exposed during litigation brought by people who said glyphosate made them sick.
In one of those emails from 2012, Kier said they should include Saltmiras as a co-author. “He is very deserving of this recognition and he was a co-author on the original literature review manuscript which was a predecessor to this publication,” Kier wrote.
Kirkland, in an email response, replied that if they included Saltmiras as a co-author they would no longer be “independent” of the company, and in that case he doubted the scientific journal would publish their report.
The Inspector General determined they hid Saltmiras’s contributions. “Because [Saltmiras] does not appear as a co-author on this manuscript, Monsanto’s involvement is also hidden,” wrote the US special agent, whose name was also redacted from the memo. The EPA memo continued: “Monsanto does have a vested interest in portraying glyphosate as a safe to use herbicide…By not making their involvement known in the manuscript discussed above, and the revenue generated by the sales of glyphosate products on a global basis, Monsanto appears to have a conflict of interest.”
The EPA memo concluded that the study’s named authors, Kier and Kirkland, “were not ‘the authors [which] had sole responsibility for the writing and content of the paper.’” The unnamed Monsanto employee Saltmiras “was a co-author of this report” for his substantive contributions on behalf of Monsanto, but was only named “in the acknowledgement section of this manuscript.”
“Why cite this paper when they knew that it was ghostwritten?”
Kier could not be reached for comment, and Saltmiras referred questions to Bayer, his current employer. Kirkland disputed the EPA memo’s findings. “I believe the memo is incorrect and I reject the claim. Our 2013 paper was NOT GHOSTWRITTEN,” he wrote an email. Saltmiras “did not contribute to or influence the analysis of the reports I reviewed,” he added in a later email.
Yet two researchers, Harvard professor Naomi Oreskes and Alexander “Sasha” Kaurov, who study corporate influence on science and who looked at the company emails made public during litigation came to a similar conclusion that the paper was ghostwritten. “The authors tried to mislead the public intentionally,” said Kaurov, a research fellow at Motu Economic & Public Policy Research in New Zealand.
And he questions why the EPA would have continued to rely on it. “It’s upsetting. Why cite this paper when they knew that it was ghostwritten?” asked Kaurov.
For instance, in the EPA’s revised “Evaluation of Carcinogenic Potential,” issued as part of its glyphosate assessment that concluded the herbicide was safe in 2020, the agency relied on the 2013 report for its data and its summaries of 16 other studies, meaning the agency accepted the compromised review as essentially a collection of studies finding that glyphosate was safe to use.
An EPA spokesperson in a statement wrote that its review of glyphosate “evaluated more than 6,000 studies across human-health and ecological disciplines, and its determinations reflected that full body of evidence.” But the agency did not respond to the question of why it continued to rely on the 2013 study despite concluding it was ghostwritten. The spokesperson confirmed that the agency never informed the public or other regulatory agencies abroad about that discovery.
The 2013 paper did make its way abroad: The European Food Safety Agency also cited the Kier and Kirkland study for its 2023 re-assessment of glyphosate that determined the herbicide is safe.
Evidence that glyphosate may be harmful to health continues to mount: Recent studies suggest the herbicide could contribute to metabolic disorders, brain inflammation, and damage to the gut microbiome. Notably, after a group of environmental and labor groups filed a lawsuit challenging the EPA’s 2020 assessment that glyphosate was safe to use, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the EPA’s safety assessment, ruling that the agency’s “errors in assessing human-health risk are serious” and “most studies EPA examined indicated that human exposure to glyphosate is associated with an at least somewhat increased risk of developing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma,” a type of cancer. The EPA, which is currently relying on its 1993 safety assessment of glyphosate, is expected to release an updated review of the herbicide this year.
And Bayer is now on the hook for more than $12 billion in payouts to people who say the herbicide made them sick. The Supreme Court is currently considering whether to shield Bayer from some of these lawsuits. The Trump administration, which reportedly said in 2017 that it had “Monsanto’s back on pesticides regulation,” also intervened in the Supreme Court case to support Bayer. As Bayer argued in court, the company believes it should largely have immunity from lawsuits since the EPA concluded that glyphosate products were safe.
But it’s now becoming clearer that the EPA came to that conclusion based in part on compromised scientific research that Monsanto secretly orchestrated.
“It’s just sad,” Kaurov said.
DHS Changes the Rules for Iran’s World Cup Team Yet Again
The Department of Homeland Security is finally allowing the Iranian World Cup soccer team to travel to match locations a day early—something that nearly every other participating country in the tournament has been able to do. But, they still won’t be allowed to stay overnight after their games on U.S. soil.
“Ahead of the match in Seattle on June 26, the Iranian team will be allowed to come in match day minus two, so two days before the match. They’ll be asked to leave the day that the match wraps up, so the evening of the match,” a DHS spokesperson told NBC. “Again, the President wants to make sure that we’re talking about what actually happens on the pitch … A lot of that is making sure that things are safe and secure, not just around the stadiums, but around base camps and training sites.”
This decision comes after the Trump administration first denied the visas of 15—then 11—team assistants, blocking them from even entering the U.S.. And the team itself was essentially booted from the country right after their matches in Los Angeles on June 15 and June 21, forcing them to stay in Tijuana, Mexico, rather than their abandoned base camp in Tucson, Arizona, as originally planned, or actually near the city they’re playing in. And they still have to go through hours of security checks each time they enter the U.S. from Mexico.
This constant back-and-forth is detrimental to both the performance and the morale of the players, who have nothing to do with the U.S.’s ongoing war on Iran.
“I think it’s not good for the football,” said team captain Mehdi Taremi last week. “In [the] World Cup, you have to prepare good for the next game, which is a lot of stress for the players and the staff and everyone. But we don’t have that support, and I think FIFA have to help us more than this. Let’s see what’s going to happen in the future.”
Iran qualified for the World Cup in spring of 2025, months before the joint U.S.-Israeli attack that started the war in February.
Elizabeth Banks To Star as Ms. Frizzle in Live-Action THE MAGIC SCHOOL BUS Movie
- Elizabeth Banks will finally get to star as a live-action Ms. Frizzle in Legendary’s Magic School Bus movie from Detective Pikachu’s Rob Letterman.
Elizabeth Banks is still ready to take chances, make mistakes, and get messy. Her next big screen outing will see her finally stepping into some pretty big shoes. She will play Ms. Frizzle in a live-action The Magic School Bus movie. And if that news sounds familiar it’s because we first reported it six years ago.
Peacock
Scholastic, Legendary Pictures, Banks’ Brownstone Productions, and Marc Platt Productions are teaming up to bring the animated kids’ icon to theaters. Legendary, which recently acquired the rights to the project, is once again turning to Rob Letterman to adapt a big IP. He previously handled Legendary’s 2019 Detective Pikachu. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Letterman is writing a treatment for the film. He will also direct. He also has a history with Scholastic, as Letterman wrote 2015’s Goosebumps.
While his involvement is new, Banks’ is not. She was first attached to a live-action take on The Magic School Bus in 2020. It was in development at Universal and was supposed to be a hybrid live-action/animated take. It’s unclear what approach Legendary will take with its adaptation. It’s also unclear how the movie might attempt to fit into the history of the cartoon, which originally starred Lily Tomlin as the colorful and energetic teacher who takes her students on amazing adventures via her magical school bus. Netflix’s The Magic School Bus Rides Again reboot that launched in 2017 starred Kate McKinnon as Ms. Frizzle’s younger sister. Tomlin also reprised her role as the original teacher on the sequel series.
Scholastic
Could Banks’ version of the character be related to both of them? Or will her live-action Ms. Frizzle be entirely separate? We’ve had a long time to consider that question. Hopefully we’ll soon get an actual answer with a movie that has been waiting a long time to go on a big screen adventure.
Editor’s Note: Nerdist is a subsidiary of Legendary Digital Networks
The post Elizabeth Banks To Star as Ms. Frizzle in Live-Action THE MAGIC SCHOOL BUS Movie appeared first on Nerdist.
Santa Cruz County business filings: Week of June 23
Businesses operating in Santa Cruz County must register with the county clerk. Lookout Santa Cruz reviews the public filings from local businesses to report on new businesses starting in the area.
Here is what’s new in local business recently.
New businesses- A.M. MANAGING & CONSULTING was registered at 138 Victoria Lane, Aptos, by Angela Renee Manson as an individual business on June 8.
- DREW’S USED TOOLS was registered at 5000 Scotts Valley Dr., Suite 4, Scotts Valley, by Te Woo Kim as an individual business on June 8.
- COAST2COAST FIREPLACE SERVICE was registered at 20 Laurel St., Watsonville, by Juan Daniel Morales Aguirre as an individual business on June 8.
- EUCASEA was registered at 142 Baldwin St., Santa Cruz, by Christy Natsumi LLC as a limited liability company on June 8.
- CASTRO PRODUCTIONS was registered at 824 Encino Dr., Aptos, by Jacob Jean Glenn as an individual business on June 8.
- MERIDIAN COFFEE AND ELIXIR BAR was registered at 2910 Leotar Circle, Santa Cruz, by Santa Cruz Ski Lodge LLC as a limited liability company on June 9.
- ROOTED MEDICINALS LLC was registered at 66 San Tomas Way, Watsonville, by Rooted Medicinals LLC as a limited liability company on June 9.
- FOR HOP’S SAKE BREWING was registered at 317 Oak Creek Blvd., Scotts Valley, by James G. Johnson as an individual business on June 9.
- SC MOBILE MARINE AND AUTOMOTIVE was registered at 1870 Wharf Rd., Capitola, by Michael Devon Aylsworth as an individual business on June 9.
- CAPITOLA HOTEL was registered at 210 Esplanade, Capitola, by Capitola Inn, LLC as a limited liability company on June 9.
- PLEASURE POINT DESIGN was registered at 2825 S. Rodeo Gulch Rd., Suite 10, Soquel, by PPD Multimedia LLC as a limited liability company on June 10.
- GOPHERS LIMITED was registered at 317 Las Lomas Dr., Royal Oaks, by Neil Benjamin Evans as an individual business on June 10.
- EL BUEN TACO was registered at 101 Civic Center Dr. #314, Scotts Valley, by Gerardo Velasco Morales as an individual business on June 11.
- SIDEWALK was registered at 4637 Scotts Valley Dr., Scotts Valley, by Patricia Pollock as an individual business on June 11.
- DEMARK STUDIO was registered at 3611 Portola Dr., Santa Cruz, by Davis Maddry Architecture Studio as a corporation on June 12.
- VILLALOBA ESTATE was registered at 2570 Freedom Blvd., Watsonville, by Jose Villanueva Martinez as an individual business on June 12.
Have news that should be in Lookout Briefs? Send your news releases, including contact information, to news@lookoutlocal.com.
MORE LOCAL COVERAGEThe post Santa Cruz County business filings: Week of June 23 appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.
Jared Kushner Helped Make This Mess in Iran While Making a Mess of Money
It was clear, almost from the start, that President Donald Trump’s unilateral decision to launch a war against Iran would be his greatest strategic blunder yet. Nearly four months later, Tehran’s repressive regime remains entrenched and more radical than ever. The mullahs still have their enriched uranium and plenty of drones and missiles, and now they’ve shown the world they have a kill switch for the Strait of Hormuz—and much of the global economy.
If the current peace negotiations stick, they likely will leave us where we were before, only at the cost of more than $100 billion, thousands of Middle Eastern lives—and 13 American ones, plus hundreds injured—and whatever bit of our allies’ goodwill Trump hadn’t squandered already.
Yet Trump isn’t the sole owner of this fiasco. There was Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, who helped cajole him into greenlighting the attacks. And closer to home, there were the two inexperienced US envoys who led the pre-war negotiations with Iran, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, and whose bumbling talking points accelerated America’s lurch into armed conflict—and strategic calamity.
“I’d describe [the MOU] as a strategic defeat for Kushnerism…It shows the catastrophe of this war.”
Kushner and Witkoff’s starring role has been nearly forgotten in the months since Iran backed the United States into a corner by closing the strait. Kushner in particular brought epic conflicts of interest to the negotiations, not only because of the billions of dollars he was soliciting from Iran’s regional foes for his investment fund, Affinity Partners, but also because of his cozy, decades-long relationship with Netanyahu, who even visited the Kushner family’s home when Jared was a kid. (Here’s a timeline.)
Kushner proselytized Bibi’s claim that Iran was weeks, if not days, away from building a nuclear weapon—a view widely dismissed by nuclear experts—and appeared naive as to how the Iranians negotiate. His antipathy toward Tehran was no secret. According to author Andrea Bernstein, Kushner bonded with the dictator of the United Arab Emirates over their mutual loathing of Iran long before the UAE began bankrolling his firm. But Trump wasn’t troubled by his team’s inexperience, ineptness, or conflicts of interest. Kushner, Netanyahu, and the other Iran hawks got their way, resulting in America’s greatest humiliation on the global stage since the Iraq War.
The widely discussed Memorandum of Understanding has only confirmed this defeat. Among its 14 points are assurances that the United States will begin lifting its punishing sanctions on Iran—which it just did, at least temporarily—and that Tehran will regain access to frozen funds worth at least $24 billion. The MOU also says that US and regional allies will develop a “definitive, mutually agreed plan” for Iranian reconstruction that’s worth at least $300 billion.
This leaves questions aplenty: Who will cover the $300 billion tab? How will that money be dispensed and to whom? What restrictions will be placed on the funds? How much of it will be shouldered by the US public, which has already paid at least $132 billion, per Moody’s Analytics, for Trump’s unnecessary war?
Kushner has kept largely mum about the MOU, even amid suggestions that he could profit personally from the deal. But experts familiar with his role in pre-war negotiations had some thoughts. “I’d describe [the MOU] as a strategic defeat for Kushnerism, if we can talk about Kushnerism,” Jonathan Guyer, program director at Eurasia Group’s Institute for Global Affairs, told me. “The way I’d conceptualize it is sort of this mix of pro-Israel policies and corporate transactionalism…It shows the catastrophe of this war, and the failure of the negotiations that he and Witkoff were pursuing with the Iranians.”
Russia, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, and Israel all came to view Kushner as an asset they could cultivate—one who would represent their interests to the president.
The lead-up to the war helped make Kushner, now a billionaire, even richer, but the outbreak of armed conflict, and its outcome, has dealt a blow to Kushner’s geopolitical worldview. “If you go back to Breaking History, his memoir, one of the core arguments is that Iran is a bad actor that can’t be dealt with, and we have to muster this coalition against them,” Guyer said. “That’s why I think this is really a strategic defeat, because all these ideas that Kushner has been putting across since Trump’s first term have been totally shown to be not workable.”
The memo, notably, does nothing to lessen Iran’s ability to create a nuclear weapon in the future. It “kicks the most difficult nuclear issues down the road,” Kelsey Davenport, director of nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, told me. “The scope of Iran’s nuclear program remains unclear, there is no defined process for eliminating the highly enriched uranium, and there is little detail about US priorities for verification. The United States and Iran still need to overcome significant gaps to reach a deal.”
The US lifted sanctions against Iran temporarily on Monday as high-level talks continued in Switzerland, the New York Times reported. The status of the talks remains unclear; Kushner is present, but has refrained from commenting on negotiations, while Vice President JD Vance and the regime were sending opposing public signals on Iran’s willingness to allow UN inspectors into their nuclear facilities. (“Progress on Nuclear Issues is Muddy,” the headline noted.)
There’s a two-month timeline set for the negotiations, and with Kushner still deeply involved, no telling whether they will succeed. “It is possible to get an effective nuclear deal in the next 60 days, but it will require the Trump administration to rethink its negotiating process,” Davenport said. “Witkoff and Kushner need to engage in direct, sustained negotiations and listen to nuclear experts who understand what is necessary for an effective nonproliferation agreement. In past talks, Witkoff and Kushner’s technical incompetence led the Trump administration to miss critical opportunities to engage Iran and recognize where Tehran was demonstrating flexibility.”
The bungled negotiations, with Kushner at center stage, were but the latest in a litany of failures attached to him. As I wrote in an excerpt of my upcoming book for Mother Jones, Kushner has a knack for failing up. He flopped as a media owner and made a badly timed bet on a New York City office tower that became a financial albatross around his family’s neck for more than a decade.
Indeed, his attempts to bail his family out of that reckless investment helped seed the foreign financial entanglements that have made his role as a US diplomat so problematic. Russia, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, and Israel all came to view Kushner as an asset they could cultivate—one who would represent their interests to the president.
Kushner’s sole diplomatic achievement during Trump’s first term was the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states. But the accords sidelined Palestinian interests and thus have been cited, alongside normalization talks with Saudi Arabia, as a primary factor in Hamas’s catastrophic attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which prompted Israel’s destruction of Gaza.
Even Trump’s Board of Peace, with Kushner as an executive board member, has been little more than a pay-to-play racket for foreign regimes to remain in the administration’s good graces.
With the Iran War, Kushner has unleashed yet another costly failure—this time, for all of us. The only shock is that anyone familiar with his story would be surprised by the outcome.
Did Trump get a special waiver to use a new obesity drug?
The health-focused news outlet STAT on Tuesday published a bombshell report that suggests President Donald Trump may have used his position of power to obtain a powerful new obesity drug not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration. According to the report, the FDA in April allowed one 79-year-old man to obtain Eli Lilly’s retatrutide, an experimental weight-loss drug…
White House Flips Out Over Report Trump May Be on Weight Loss Drug
A White House spokesperson flipped out Tuesday after he was quoted failing to deny a report suggesting President Donald Trump may have been given early access to a weight loss drug.
A STAT report Tuesday found that one 79-year-old man had received special access to retatrutide, a powerful new weight loss drug—prompting speculation that the individual in question was none other than the president of the United States.
White House spokesperson Kush Desai publicly lashed out at STAT’s Lizzy Lawrence, who in her original report, noted that Desai did not explicitly deny that Trump was the patient in question.
“Because this has to be spelled out for @LizzyLaw_, who has proven herself to be an unserious gossip columnist, this application was not for the President,” Desai wrote on X Tuesday after the story quickly gained national attention.
“Thank you for clarifying. I asked you, the FDA, and HHS multiple times yesterday whether this application was for the President. No one answered my question directly,” Lawrence replied.
“We shouldn’t have to bat down baseless speculation for you to not print it. Any reporter with standards would understand this,” Desai wrote. “Are you going to now go ask this idiotic question to the ~4 million Americans in this age cohort and then speculate about them being the application?”
As a White House spokesperson, it’s Desai’s responsibility to respond to queries from the press. As TNR contributor Nina Burleigh pointed out on X: “If you don’t want to do your job, maybe stop taking taxpayer funds…”
Desai did little to dismiss the story when it first came across his desk and originally referred STAT to the Department of Health and Human Services, which didn’t offer a denial either.
In fact, Desai may have fueled further questions about the president’s health. When the 79-year-old patient requested “compassionate use” access to retatrutide in April, it was to treat refractory obesity with obstructive sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension.
Asked whether Trump has obstructive sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension, Desai originally told STAT a White House memo on Trump’s most recent medical evaluation “covers this.” It does not.
Mythos discovers 'Squidbleed,' a memory leak that's gone undetected since Clinton era
DHS Still Has a Civil Rights Team. Aliya Rahman Is Testing It.
When Aliya Rahman’s lawyers approached her about filing a complaint with the civil rights office of the Department of Homeland Security, she almost laughed in their faces.
“It’s hard to imagine that sending a letter to DHS to ask them to respect our civil rights will do anything,” said Rahman, a disabled US citizen who was dragged from her car and detained by DHS agents during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. Today, Rahman, who also has an ongoing civil tort claim against DHS, filed that complaint anyway.
On January 13, ICE agents detained Rahman as she tried to drive to a doctor’s appointment, punching out the window of her car and carrying her by her arms and legs, ignoring her requests for mobility and communication aids, which Section 504 of the federal Rehabilitation Act is meant to guarantee. Eventually, the pain caused her to black out in her cell. Rahman contends that the agents’ aggressive treatment violated her civil rights as a disabled person.
“I asked for my cane and was told no, pulled up by my arms, and prodded forward in leg irons by an agent saying ‘Walk! You can do it. Walk.’”
“We request that DHS take corrective action to not only redress these violations, but also to ensure all individuals with disabilities who interact with DHS officers are treated with dignity and respect,” Rahman’s lawyers wrote in their complaint.
Rahman described how ICE agents harmed her in congressional testimony organized by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.): “Shooting pain went through my head, neck, and wrists when I hit the ground and people leaned on my back…I was carried face down through the street by my cuffed arms and legs while yelling that I had a brain injury,” Rahman said:
“Agents repeatedly had to stop and ask how to do tasks. I received no medical screening, phone call, or access to a lawyer. I was denied a communication navigator when my speech began to slur. Agents laughed as I tried to immobilize my own neck. I asked for my cane and was told no, pulled up by my arms, and prodded forward in leg irons by an agent saying “Walk! You can do it. Walk.” Agents did not know if the facility had a wheelchair. When I was finally placed in one to be taken to interrogation, an agent taunted: “You were driving right? So your legs do work.”
Section 504 prohibits discrimination against disabled people in programs and organizations that receive federal funding, which includes ICE. But Rahman’s experience, her lawyers said, was “not an aberration.” In one 2022 complaint, a Border Patrol officer allegedly took away the crutch of a child they apprehended and didn’t provide an alternative. Between 2019 and 2023, at least seven people with mental health disabilities were placed in solitary confinement in ICE custody. And in 2025, a Deaf DACA recipient was reportedly denied access to an American Sign Language interpreter for weeks.
DHS’ Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL), an internal body meant to investigate exactly these types of abuses, was gutted by then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in March 2025, reducing its workforce from over 150 full-time federal employees to fewer than 40 a year later, nearly all of whom are contractors.
DHS spokespeople did not provide current employment figures when asked, but stated that all of the office’s “All of the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties’ “legally required functions continue to be performed, but in an efficient and cost-effective manner and without hindering the Department’s mission of securing the homeland,” further alleging that “these offices obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining DHS’s mission. Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often functioned as internal adversaries.”
Before CRCL was functionally dismantled, a complaint like Rahman’s would be read by its staffers, who would then issue recommendations. Now, though, she doesn’t necessarily expect that it will be read at all. “I don’t think I’m going to hear from these folks,” Rahman said. “Typically, what they do is put out social media content when they’re mad at me.” (DHS has issued posts implying that Rahman’s conduct was criminal.)
“I’m still rocking my supervillain braces, my shoulders aren’t healed yet,” Rahman told me June 22, showing off her shoulder support gear. “I’m just trying to put my body back together.”
Thanks to her injuries, Rahman can only leave the house two or three days per week, she said. But as she heals, she’s become an advocate for others who have been detained or harmed by ICE, particularly those who are also disabled, many of whom don’t have the privileges she does: that she is a citizen, that she has savings, that she speaks English and has access to lawyers.
“Many of them also had disabilities or chronic illnesses that were impacted by how they were handled, or they developed them afterwards,” Rahman said, and have learned—like her—that disclosing their disabilities can draw officers’ ridicule rather than accommodation.
“People will say things like, you’re not disabled, you wear eyeliner,” Rahman said. “The guy inside [Whipple Detention Center] was like, ‘Your legs work, you were driving, right?’” Online, she sees families with autistic kids saying that they are terrified of any interaction with law enforcement. She doesn’t blame them.
“I experienced people doubling down on violence when I raised that I was disabled, and that is not a society we can live in,” Rahman said.
Anti-ICE Protesters Sentenced to Decades in Prison for “Terrorism”
Anti-ICE protesters in Texas were sentenced to at least 50 years in prison Tuesday on terrorism charges, The Guardian reported. The case was widely seen as a test of whether the Trump administration would be able to enact its crackdown on dissent over its immigration policies.
Last July 4, activists set off fireworks at a detention center in Alvarado, Texas, and some of them vandalized cars, slashed tires, and broke a security camera. When a police officer arrived and drew his weapon, one person shot him in the shoulder from the woods.
Five of the protesters were sentenced to 50 years in prison and one was sentenced to 70 for providing material support to terrorists. The person who shot at the police officer was sentenced to 100 years for attempted murder, according to the Texas Standard.
President Donald Trump and his administration have claimed that the activists were part of an “antifa cell” in north Texas, even though antifa is not one specific group or organization. Most of the protesters didn’t know each other well, and were connected through a local left-wing book club and gun group.
This case was the first time that federal prosecutors have attempted to convict protesters against the Trump administration on charges related to domestic terrorism. With the White House’s attempt to criminalize protest, it likely will not be the last.
Musk would rather sue than hear about how many kids he’s killed
Trillionaire Republican donor Elon Musk is threatening to sue California congressman Ro Khanna, a Democrat, after Khanna mentioned the death toll associated with Musk’s actions at the Department of Government Efficiency. In an appearance on the “I’ve Had It” podcast, Khanna said that DOGE, the project launched by President Donald Trump and overseen for most of its existence by Musk…
Thanks, America
A cartoon by Pedro Molina. Related | Trump wants July 4 to feel more like Jan.
Cowboy Tom Cruise Hits ‘Em with the Hard Truth In New DIGGER Footage
- A balding cowboy Tom Cruise “hits ’em with the hard truth” in new footage from Digger.
- We haven’t seen much from Digger yet, but we are absolutely intrigued.
Hey, do you know who Tom Cruise is? It’s possible you have heard of him because he’s been one of the biggest movie stars for more than 40 years. Well, if you don’t remember who he is or any of his movies, Warner Bros. has you covered, because its short new teaser trailer for Digger is also an homage to Tom Cruise’s career.
No, we have no reason to think Tom Cruise is dead or even dying. Warner Bros. has merely decided the best way to promote its new film is by highlighting that it features a mega star. But Digger has enough going for it that it doesn’t need to rely only on Tom Cruise’s star power. The film comes from two-time Oscar-winning director Alejandro G. Iñárritu. He also wrote the screenplay with Alexander Dinelaris & Nicolás Giacobone, and Sabina Berman.
Digger also has an absolutely loaded cast. Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Jesse Plemons will all join Tom Cruise in the comedy.
Warner Bros.
Nerdist Take: Tom Cruise’s Digger Is About to Be Bonkers
Judging by the little we’ve seen from it, Digger looks bonkers in the best way and Tom Cruise seems wild in in it. What exactly is going on with Cruise’s brash, balding cowboy? Digger‘s official synopsis gives us an idea of the wild ride we’re very eager to dig into. From Warner Bros:
Digger tells the tale of the most powerful man in the world as he embarks on a frantic mission to prove he is humanity’s savior before the disaster he’s unleashed destroys everything.
A powerful man who thinks he’s humanity’s savior but who is really going to destroy everything? Wonder where they came up with an idea like that. I….I wonder… But one thing is for sure: Digger will likely give us a Tom Cruise we’ve never seen before.
I also wonder when we’ll get a full trailer for Iñárritu’s trailer. While we can certainly appreciate a nice little career retrospective for Tom Cruise, we’re much more interested in his next film. And we’ll get to see Cruise in full bald glory this fall when Digger comes to theaters on October 2, 2026.
The post Cowboy Tom Cruise Hits ‘Em with the Hard Truth In New DIGGER Footage appeared first on Nerdist.
Did Trump Get Special Access to Retatrutide?
While members of his cabinet stuff sauerkraut down their wives’ handbags to maintain diets, speculation is suddenly mounting over whether President Donald Trump may have received early access to retatrutide, the potent experimental weight-loss drug from Eli Lilly eagerly anticipated by millions.
The questions come amid a new report in STAT News pointing to a certain 79-year-old man with special insider connections who somehow managed to gain access to retatrutide, which has not received FDA approval, through the agency’s “compassionate use” program. You know, the kind of powerful individual with extraordinary ties to the Food and Drug Administration, as well as Eli Lilly, the same pharmaceutical company Trump bought stock in through the end of March and has partnered with the Trump administration to hash out pricing structures.
The White House on Tuesday denied that Trump was the applicant who made the retatrutide request. Eli Lilly, meanwhile, declined to outright deny the report. “In rare situations, when individuals can’t join a clinical trial and have run out of treatment options,” a spokesperson for Eli Lilly told Mother Jones, adding that the company does “not comment on the specifics of individual cases.”
None of which is likely to quell the theory. After all, Trump, according to his most recent health evaluation, just about hits the threshold of clinical obesity; he approvingly refers to GLP-1’s as the “fat shot” and has publicly complained about the high costs of accessing weight loss medications in the United States. Trump has also been something of a pioneer when it comes to experimental drugs. In 2020, after infamously suggesting people could inject themselves with bleach if they got infected with Covid, the president opted for an unapproved antibody treatment after testing positive himself months later.
But perhaps the biggest tell is the president’s unflinching record of indifference when it comes to outcries over inappropriate behavior, general shadiness, and conflicts of interest. So did Trump use the levers of power to gain unusual access to retatrutide? Time will tell if the president starts to debut a trimmed-down physique. It’s either that or the kimchi.
Anthropic’s Claude Tag is learning your company, one Slack message at a time
Remember That Time Trump Said He “Probably Should” Take Ozempic?
A mysterious, well-connected 79-year-old man has gained sole access to an experimental obesity drug created by Eli Lilly.
The outlet that first reported the early access, STAT, speculated that the patient could be Donald Trump, in no small part due to the president’s unabashed support for weight-loss drugs, which has extended to suggestions that he and his staff should take what he calls “the fat drug.”
In January, the president told The New York Times that while he hadn’t yet taken Ozempic or Wegovy, he “probably should.”
Trump tips the scale at 224 pounds, according to his 2025 physical results published by the White House. At 6-foot-3, that puts his Body Mass Index in the overweight category. The data suggests Trump has slimmed down since his first term: In 2020, he weighed 244 pounds, which placed him firmly within the BMI’s obesity range.
Throughout his second term, Trump has expressed a keen interest in weight-loss drugs and has even directed his administration to lower their costs.
In April 2025, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr told CBS Mornings that Trump had “ordered” his department to bring the costs of GLP-1 drugs down in America to compete with European prices.
Months later, in November, Trump announced that the prescription costs of Ozempic and Wegovy would come down by hundreds of dollars if purchased through his discounted prescription drug marketplace, TrumpRx.
Trump has even used his own officials as props to promote the drugs. During the White House event unveiling the TrumpRx arrangement, Trump said he was “thrilled” with manufacturers Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, and proceeded to conduct a fat-shaming round-robin of his underlings to determine who was already on the weight-loss drugs.
“Secretary Howard Lutnick. You take any of this stuff, Howard?” Trump asked his Commerce Secretary at the time.
“Not yet,” Lutnick replied.
“OK, good,” Trump said before going back to reading names of people on his team. “CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz—he doesn’t take it. Food and Drug Administrator, Commissioner Marty Makary, and Director of Medicare Chris Klomp. And we have Steve.… Where’s Steve? Is he here? Head of public relations for the White House? He’s taking it.”