The “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving” event is part of the Trump administration’s attempt to use the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to rewrite America’s history, turning it from one that champions the Enlightenment values of natural rights, equality, and self-government to one that requires Americans to accept that some people are better than others and to defer to their leaders.

This was not Congress’s intent when it established a bipartisan America250 commission in 2016 “to plan and orchestrate the 250th anniversary of the Signing of the Declaration of Independence.” But shortly after he took office for the second time in January 2025, Trump and his loyalists began to take over the planning for the nation’s birthday celebration.

As Dan Friedman and Amanda Moore of Mother Jones explained, right-wing operatives, including the company that staged the January 6, 2021, rally near the White House before the attack on the U.S. Capitol, jumped into the management of America250. But Trump chafed under the idea of congressional oversight and a pretense of bipartisanship, so in December 2025 he created his own new organization, Freedom 250.

Congress appropriated $150 million for the Department of the Interior to distribute to organizations for celebrations of the 250th. Of that money, America250 has been allocated $50 million and Freedom 250 has been allocated $100 million, although as of February, America250 had received only $25 million. Freedom 250 has also solicited donations in exchange for access to Trump. According to Karissa Waddick of USA Today, sponsors include ExxonMobil, Mastercard, Deloitte, Palantir, and IndyCar. Donors can also request anonymity.

As Kenneth P. Vogel, Lisa Friedman, and David A. Fahrenthold of the New York Times explained in February, Freedom 250 has planned events that showcase Trump rather than important events and themes in the nation’s history. Those include an IndyCar race around the National Mall, the construction of a triumphal arch near the Lincoln Memorial, an Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the White House lawn on Trump’s 80th birthday in June, and today’s “Rededicate 250” event.

President Trump was golfing today, but he, along with Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, spoke on video to the crowd, assuring them that the United States of America was founded as a Christian nation. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) spoke in person. All but one of the nineteen clergy and faith leaders who spoke were Christian, and most were right-wing evangelical Protestants.

The video of Trump the organizers played was the same one he recorded three weeks ago for “America Reads the Bible.” The passage was 2 Chronicles 7:11–22, one Christian nationalists believe marks the U.S. as a Christian nation, when the Lord says to Solomon: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

But the United States of America was not founded as a Christian nation. The Founders were quite clear about that. In the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli, ratified unanimously by the Senate just a decade after the Constitution went into effect, U.S. leaders said “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion” and has “no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of” Muslims. They went on to say that “no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between” the U.S. and Tripoli.

Thomas Jefferson, the key author of the Declaration of Independence, and James Madison of Virginia, the key thinker behind the Constitution, both wrote explicitly about the importance of keeping the government separate from religion. Jefferson wrote that “religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship.” “[T]he legitimate powers of government reach actions only,” he wrote, “[and] not [religious] opinions.”

In 1785, Madison explained that what was at stake in keeping the state and religion separate was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights, including those enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and codified in the Constitution.

Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants.

Rather than basing the United States on religion, the nation’s founders and framers, as well as Americans of later generations, sought to instill in Americans reverence for the nation’s core political values, especially the right of self-government and the checks and balances that made that self-government possible. In speeches and memorials, novels and poems, they emphasized the sacrifices Americans had made to protect the values embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

That civic religion unified the nation, but it did more than that. It also instructed Americans on the rights and duties of citizens who live in a nation that rests on “We the People.” They must think for themselves, question elected officials, and take an active role in their government.

Replacing Americans’ civic identity with Christian nationalism destroys that vitally important understanding of the role of citizens in a democracy. Instead, it demands that Americans do as they are told, turning them into subjects.

The theme of obeying the leader runs deep in Trump’s politics, and in MAGA more generally. The Bible passage Trump read on video today emphasizes obedience, warning the chosen people that if they “forsake my statutes and my commandments, which I have set before you,” then they will be destroyed. Cowboys for Trump founder Couy Griffin read the same passage at the January 6, 2021, insurrection, suggesting that overturning democracy for Trump was obeying the Lord. Laura Jedeed of Firewalled Media reported that vendors at today’s event handed out buttons that said: “WIVES SUBMIT, HUSBANDS LOVE, CHILDREN OBEY.”

But blindly obeying authority has never been the story of America.

From its origins in resistance to the British government, the story of America has been the opposite of obeying. It has been about questioning, debating, criticizing leaders, and working to build “a more perfect Union,” as the Framers charged us to do. The story of America is how those who believed in the principles of democracy, those ideals articulated by the Founders however imperfectly they lived them, have struggled to make the belief that we are all created equal and have a right to have a say in our government, come true.

—

Notes:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/white-house-prayer-250-birthday-rcna345326

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/us/politics/freedom-250-trump-donors.html

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/02/america-freedom-task-force-250-trump-anniversary-history-smithsonian-kennedy-center/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/02/12/freedom-250-funding-foreign-money/88596100007/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2026/05/17/thousands-expected-rededicate-250-prayer-jubilee/

https://www.npr.org/2026/05/17/nx-s1-5825003/trump-christian-national-mall-prayer-service-250

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/bar1796t.asp

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-01-02-0027

https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/virginia-declaration-of-rights

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-08-02-0163#JSMN-01-08-02-0163-fn-0014-ptr

https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9806/danbury.html#:~:text=The%20unedited%20draft%20of%20the,was%20an%20offense%20to%20republicanism.

https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9806/danpre.html

X:

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Three years after the Brown v. Board decision, in the face of massive resistance to desegregation in the South, President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 to protect the right of Black Americans to vote, using the federal government to overrule the state laws that limited voter registration and kept Black voters from the polls. To prevent the passage of the first federal civil rights legislation since 1875, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond launched the longest filibuster in U.S. history, speaking for 24 hours and 18 minutes.

(Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) broke Thurmond’s record on March 31 through April 1, 2025, speaking for 25 hours, 5 minutes, and 59 seconds, but his speech was not a filibuster.)

Southern Democrats known as “Dixiecrats” managed to weaken the measure, but Senate majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson (D-TX) managed to wrestle the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through Congress, and Black Americans and their white allies began trying to register Black Americans to vote.

But the law proved too weak to force white registrars to allow Black voters onto the rolls, and by 1961, activists with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”) were at work in Mississippi to promote voter registration. In 1964 they launched the “Freedom Summer,” bringing college students from northern schools to work together with Black people from Mississippi to educate and register Black voters.

Just as the project was getting underway, three organizers—James Chaney, from Mississippi, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner from New York—disappeared outside Philadelphia, Mississippi. Lyndon Johnson, president by then, used the popular rage over the three missing voting rights workers to pressure Congress into passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, designed to try to hold back the white supremacists and to make it possible for Black Americans to register to vote. The measure passed, and on July 2, Johnson signed it into law.

On August 4, investigators found the bodies of the three missing men. Ku Klux Klan members working with local law enforcement officers had murdered them and then buried the bodies in an earthen dam that was under construction.

And still, white officials refused to accept the idea of Black voting. In Selma, Alabama, where the city’s voting rolls were 99% white even though Black Americans outnumbered white Americans among the 29,500 people who lived there, local Black organizers had launched a voter registration drive in 1963, but a judge stopped voter registration meetings by prohibiting public gatherings of more than two people.

Selma voting rights activist Amelia Boynton invited the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the city to draw national attention to its struggle, and he and other prominent Black leaders arrived in January 1965. For seven weeks, Black residents made a new push to register to vote. County sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2,000 of them on a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a “literacy” test. Not a single person passed.

Then, on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed man, 26-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson died eight days later, on February 26. Black leaders in Selma decided to defuse the community’s anger by planning a long march—54 miles—from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression.

On March 7, 1965, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. They fractured the skull of young activist John Lewis and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.

On March 15, President Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. “Their cause must be our cause too,” he said. “[A]ll of us…must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.

Under the protection of federal troops, the Selma marchers completed their trip to Montgomery on March 25. Their ranks had grown as they walked until they numbered about 25,000 people. That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members who tailed her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.

A bipartisan majority of Congress passed the Voting Rights Act by a vote of 77–19 in the Senate and 333–85 in the House. Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on August 6. Recalling “the outrage of Selma,” Johnson said: “This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.”

And yet, on April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court gutted the protections for the Black-majority districts Congress provided for in the Voting Rights Act after years of weakening the law in other ways. In its wake, Republican-dominated southern state legislatures are rushing to redraw their district lines to dilute the votes of Black Democrats.

Today, thousands of Americans, including eighteen members of Congress, traveled to Selma and Mongomery to call Americans to action to protect voting rights. Pastor Kenneth Sharpton Glasgow told Joseph D. Bryant of Alabama news site AL, “This moment is bigger than Democrats or Republicans. This is about democracy itself. This is about whether Black communities, poor communities, rural communities, formerly incarcerated people, and marginalized voices will continue to have representation and political power in America.”

Speakers united around the theme that those trying to gerrymander their way into control of Congress in defiance of voters had reawakened a movement. “They think they can draw us out of power,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told an audience in Montgomery.

“They do not know the sleeping giant that they just awakened. Because it is not a coincidence, and our whole country must understand, that it was not until voting rights were ratified in this country that we got the Great Society. Because when Black Americans have the right to vote and that vote is protected, our schools get funded. When voting rights are protected, healthcare gets expanded. When voted rights are protected, our country moves forward. And Montgomery, that’s what they’re actually afraid of. They’re afraid of us coming together. They’re afraid of us protecting one another.”

—

Notes:

https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/research/online-documents/civil-rightAs-act-1957

https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2026/05/mass-mobilization-expected-in-selma-montgomery-this-weekend-after-supreme-court-decision.html

https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2026/05/church-buses-and-charter-buses-are-heading-to-selma-and-montgomery-for-a-reclamation-of-power.html

https://www.booker.senate.gov/senator-bookers-marathon-speech

Bluesky:

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In an interview with Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity that aired today, Trump said: “It’s the two great countries. I call it the G-2. This is the G-2. I think it’ll go down as a very important moment in history.”

Former China director on the National Security Council Julian Gewirtz, who served under President Joe Biden, told the Washington Post reporters: “Xi has done something Chinese leaders have been working toward for decades—bringing an American president to Beijing as an undisputed peer. Xi used the opulent optics of the visit to make clear to the world that China and the United States are the two dominant, equally matched superpowers. There is no going back.”

Xi has said before he thinks “the East is rising and the West declining.” Referring to that idea Thursday, before the two leaders met in Beijing, Xi made it clear he sees the U.S. as a declining power and pondered, “Can China and the United States overcome the ‘Thucydides Trap’ and create a new paradigm of major country relations?”

The Thucydides Trap is a theory, put forward by Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, that when a rising power threatens to replace an existing power, the conflict between the two tends to spark a war.

As if to illustrate that the U.S. is a declining power, the Chinese media downplayed the importance of a visit from a U.S. president. As James Palmer of Foreign Policy noted, on the day Trump arrived, the main story on the front page of the state-run English-language newspaper China Daily was the visit of the president of Tajikistan the day before. The Chinese Communist Party newspaper featured Trump’s visit on page 3.

Trump seemed to miss the larger context of the honors he so clearly enjoyed, telling the Fox News Channel’s Brett Baier that the summit was a success and that the most significant win for the United States was “relationship. It’s all about relationship. I have a very good relationship with President Xi and with China. And it sounds like something that doesn’t mean anything, but it’s everything in dealmaking and problems we’ve solved. The two of us have solved a lot of problems between— that somebody else would have maybe done very badly with. We’ve solved a lot of problems over the years.”

Tamara Keith and Jennifer Pak of NPR noted that Xi did not return Trump’s personal praise, speaking instead about relations between the U.S. and China.

Keith and Pak also reported that Trump boasted the visit had produced “some fantastic trade deals, good for both countries” and told Sean Hannity of the Fox News Channel that China had agreed to buy soybeans and Boeing aircraft, before adding: “I sort of, I think it was a commitment. I mean, you know, it was sort of like a statement, but I think it was a commitment. It’s a great thing. It’s a lot of jobs.”

China has not commented on any promised purchases. It did warn that if the U.S. mishandles the question of Taiwan, a self-governing island Beijing claims, it could put the “entire relationship” between the U.S. and China in jeopardy, and that “the most important issue in China-U.S. relations” is Taiwan. The U.S. did not mention Taiwan in its own readout of the meeting.

Trump had stayed quiet on social media while in China, but once he left the country he had things to say. Somebody must have explained the meaning of Xi’s Thucydides Trap comment, but rather than taking offense, Trump on May 14 said Xi “was referring to the tremendous damage we suffered during the four years of Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration, and on that score, he was 100% correct. Our Country suffered immeasurably with open borders, high taxes, transgender for everybody, men in women’s sports, DEI, horrible trade deals, rampant crime, and so much more!

“President Xi was not referring to the incredible rise that the United States has displayed to the world during the 16 spectacular months of the Trump Administration, which includes all-time high stock markets and 401K’s, military victory and thriving relationship in Venezuela, the military decimation of Iran (to be continued!)—Strongest military on earth by far, economic powerhouse again, with a record 18 trillion dollars being invested into the United States by others, best U.S. job market in history, with more people working in the United States right now than ever before, ending country destroying DEI, and so many other things that it would be impossible to readily list. In fact, President Xi congratulated me on so many tremendous successes in such a short period of time.

“Two years ago, we were, in fact, a Nation in decline. On that, I fully agree with President Xi! But now, the United States is the hottest Nation anywhere in the world, and hopefully our relationship with China will be stronger and better than ever before!”

At 4:52 this morning, Trump turned back to his plans for remodeling Washington, D.C. He announced that he intends to put his “NATIONAL GARDEN OF AMERICAN HEROES” in West Potomac Park, then after claiming that the people playing golf at his Doral club “are absolutely in love with” the 22-foot gold statue of him recently installed there, posted above a picture of himself walking with Xi:

“China has a Ballroom, and so should the U.S.A.! It’s under construction, ahead of schedule, and will be the finest facility of its kind anywhere in the U.S.A. Thank you for all the support I have been given in getting this project going. Scheduled opening will be around September of 2028. The man I am walking with is President Xi, of China, one of the World’s Great Leaders! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Trump appears desperate to be included as an equal in the world of strongmen, apparently not understanding that America’s strength was always about its alliances.

Yesterday, members of Congress and Pentagon officials both were blindsided by the sudden decision by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to cancel the deployment of 4,000 troops to Poland after the troops were already on their way and much of the necessary equipment was already in Poland. Poland is a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally. The U.S. troops were going there as part of a nine-month rotation in which they would have trained with NATO allies.

Congress has tried to beef up the U.S. presence in Europe, warning that reductions would invite Russian aggression. Last year it passed a law limiting the number of troops Trump could withdraw from Europe and the circumstances under which he could do so.

Former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe Lieutenant General Ben Hodges told Paul McLeary and Jack Detsch of Politico that the Army’s role in Europe “is all about deterring the Russians, protecting America’s strategic interests and assuring allies. And now a very important asset that was coming to be part of that deterrence is gone.” Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) posted: “Once again the President and Pete Hegseth show that they are not committed to security in Europe. Actions like this make us less safe and embolden [Russia’s president] Vladimir Putin. At every turn the two of them cower to Russia.”

European allies have worried for years now about Russian aggression. A signal that the U.S. is losing interest in NATO allies heightens that concern, especially coming, as it does, less than two weeks after Hegseth announced the U.S. will withdraw 5,000 troops from military bases in Germany following German chancellor Frederich Merz’s criticism of Trump’s handling of his war on Iran.

Today Connor O’Brien of Politico reported that the Republican chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services committees were surprised and angry at the news that Hegseth was recalling the troops from their deployment in Poland. At a hearing with Army officials—who said they had only been informed of the decision days ago—House Armed Services chair Mike Rogers (R-AL) said: “We don’t know what’s going on here, but I can just tell you we’re not happy with what’s being talked about, particularly since there’s been no statutory consultation with us.”

Committee member Don Bacon (R-NE) said the canceled deployment “is a slap in the face to Poland; it’s a slap in the face to our Baltic friends. It’s a slap to the face of this committee.”

But Trump seems more interested in acting like an autocrat than in consulting Congress, a body that his ally Steve Bannon has compared to the Duma, the Russian assembly that does what Putin tells it to. In addition to the extraordinary corruption already public, Bill Allison and Jess Menton of Bloomberg reported yesterday that a new financial filing shows that in the first quarter of 2026, Trump or his investment advisors made more than 3,700 trades—over 40 a day—“totaling tens of millions of dollars and involving major companies that have dealings with his administration.”

Allison and Menton note that Trump did not move his assets into a blind trust with an independent manager, as his predecessors did if they traded in stocks at all (former presidents Biden and Barack Obama did not). Instead, his sons Don Jr. and Eric manage the business as it operates in areas that are directly related to government policies decided by Trump himself. Trump invested in major companies with business affected by what he decided to do, including Nvidia, Intel Corp, Netflix, Paramount Skydance, Warner Bros Discovery, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon.

Wall Street executives told the journalists they were “baffled” by the high volume of trades and concerned about the appearance of conflicts of interest. “All of this raises questions that you’d rather not raise as a president,” wealth manager Matthew Tuttle told the reporters. “So now people are asking why is he buying Nvidia and other companies now? When you’re the president you know everything, so any stock you buy, there’s a huge question mark.”

White House spokesperson David Ingle told the reporters that Trump “only acts in the best interests of the American public” and that “[t]here are no conflicts of interest.”

—

Notes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/05/15/beijing-summit-yields-chinese-goal-equal-footing-with-us/

https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/05/15/trump-xi-summit-china-us-presidential-visit/

https://www.npr.org/2026/05/15/nx-s1-5822512/trump-china-xi-summit-takeaways

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/03/world/asia/xi-china-congress.html

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5878959-xi-trump-taiwan-leverage/

https://thehill.com/policy/international/5877843-thucydides-trap-xi-jinping-china-trump-us-taiwan/

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/07/compromise-defense-bill-trump-europe-troop-withdrawals-00680407

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/01/hegseth-withdrawal-us-troops-germany-00903551

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/14/poland-pentagon-hegseth-troop-withdrawl-surprise-00922169

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/15/poland-troops-congress-driscoll-00923303

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/republican-and-democratic-lawmakers-criticize-canceled-deployment-to-europe-7c4218db

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-second-term-policies-gifts-494731c7?mod=RSSMSN

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-14/trump-bought-nvidia-boeing-microsoft-in-flurry-of-transactions

YouTube:

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TrumpsTruth.org:

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This alleged push against fraud is part of an old playbook the Republicans have used since at least 2000 in which they accuse the Democrats of their own weak points and misdeeds.

This play was often associated with Republican strategist Karl Rove, but in 2024, Caroline Wazer of Snopes noted that it is most usually associated with Nazi propaganda in the 1930s. Accusing opponents of what you, yourself, are doing, muddies the waters and makes it hard for real accusations against you for the same thing to stick.

Experts say fraud in federal programs is a real problem but that it is carried out primarily by transnational criminal organizations, not by individual recipients. Republican rhetoric claims a high rate of “improper payments,” but the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services itself stresses that “improper payment measurement is not a measure of fraud.” Rather, that term identifies payments where the paperwork provided by the state or provider was incomplete. Those numbers have been high recently because the government allowed states greater flexibility during the Covid-19 public health emergency.

According to the nonpartisan Maine Center for Economic Policy, MaineCare is overseen by both state and federal agencies, and the most recent federal review found that only about 0.1% of total program spending was in incorrect payments. Indeed, last month, Reed Shaw of Just Security noted that the administration’s claim to be rooting out fraud appears simply to be a new way to punish perceived political enemies that might have a better chance of getting through the courts than the administration’s previous attempts did.

Accusing Democrats of fraud will also accomplish the political goal of muddying the waters to make it harder for voters to see that the Trump administration is the most corrupt U.S. administration in history. And concern about voters’ perceptions of corruption must be uppermost in the minds of administration advisors right now, since new Hungarian prime minister Péter Magyar’s landslide victory over Trump ally Viktor Orbán was driven in large part by voters’ fury at Orbán’s corruption.

Muddying the waters for voters is the best the Trump administration can hope for because, for all the administration’s claims to be fighting fraud, Trump’s corruption is mind-boggling.

He has fired or demoted twenty inspectors general—the people key to oversight—and in 2024 alone the people he has since fired or sidelined identified more than $50 billion in waste and abuse. Matthew Purdy and Luke Broadwater of the New York Times noted in March that in both terms as of March 2026, Trump has also pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 70 donors or allies who were convicted of fraud. One, Philip Esformes, was convicted of stealing $1.3 billion from Medicare.

Steven Greenhouse of The Guardian reminded readers today that in January, David D. Kirkpatrick of the New Yorker reported that the Trumps have pocketed about $4 billion, primarily through cryptocurrency enterprises. Greenhouse notes that Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr. have invested in a drone manufacturer that is trying to sell weapons to Gulf countries currently at risk from the war their father started in Iran, and that the Pentagon recently awarded a $24 million contract to a robotics startup for which Eric is the “chief strategy advisor.”

Even as Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is acting as a chief negotiator for the U.S. in the Middle East, he has been trying to raise $5 billion from investors there for his investment firm. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, a sovereign wealth fund overseen by Saudi Crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), has already invested $2 billion with Kushner.

And then there are Trump’s vanity projects to remake the national capital. As Greenhouse notes, corporations and billionaires have dropped millions of dollars in donations for Trump’s ballroom where the East Wing used to be and his proposed presidential library in Miami. In December 2025, Karen Yourish, Kenneth P. Vogel, and Charlie Smart of the New York Times estimated that Trump had raked in more than $2 billion for his projects or causes, more than half a billion of it from 346 people who each gave at least $250,000. Some of those people have received presidential pardons, others have been given jobs, and all have received access to the president.

On May 11, Jonathan Allen, Peter Nicholas, Matt Dixon, Henry J. Gomez, and Allan Smith of NBC News reported that Trump is using the planned Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event to be held on his birthday on the White House lawn as a new way for donors to funnel money to him. Although the UFC is paying for the event—and expects to lose as much as $30 million on it—and although tickets are technically free, Trump is picking who gets most of the tickets.

Sponsorship packages that include ringside seats have been selling for $1 million or more. Neither the White House nor the UFC would comment on where the money is going. A Republican lobbyist told the NBC News journalists: “It’s basically been added to the list of approved entities to give undisclosed money to and get credit with Trump. They are raising a sh*t ton of money and have used it as another unofficial vehicle for corporate donors to give and gain favor with Trump.”

And now Trump is in China on a state visit on which he took along seventeen CEOs of companies—many of which do business in China—including billionaires Elon Musk and Tim Cook of Apple. Together, the members of the delegation are worth more than a trillion dollars. Trump also took his son Eric, who runs the family business. As economist Paul Krugman said today, “He might as well have been walking around Beijing with a sign that says—in block capitals, of course, this is Trump—BRIBE ME.”

On Tuesday a group of Miami residents sued Trump, his library fund, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Miami Dade College and its trustees, and Florida officials to stop the construction of Trump’s presidential library, charging that state officials violated the Constitution’s emoluments clause when they transferred almost three acres of prime waterfront land, worth between $67 million and $300 million, to Trump’s library foundation for $10. Trump has already said he wants to build a hotel on the site rather than a traditional library.

Andrew Duehren and Alan Feuer of the New York Times reported Tuesday that the Department of Justice was working with Trump to settle his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) after a contractor during Trump’s first term leaked tax returns from thousands of wealthy individuals to the media. The Department of Justice and Trump were eager to settle before the judge in the case could rule on whether the case was valid, a decision that could easily go against Trump since he was both the plaintiff and, as the person overseeing the IRS, the defendant in the lawsuit.

This evening, Katherine Faulders, Peter Charalambous, and Alexander Mallin of ABC News reported that Trump is in talks to drop the lawsuit in exchange for the government’s establishing a $1.7 billion fund to compensate those of Trump’s allies who claim they were harmed by the Biden administration’s alleged “weaponization” of the Department of Justice. Those eligible for payments from this taxpayer-funded account would include nearly 1,600 people convicted of committing crimes related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, people Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of shortly after he took office in January 2025. While Trump himself will probably be barred from direct payments, entities associated with him will not be.

A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team told the ABC News reporters: “President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.”

—

Notes:

https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/fact-sheets/fiscal-year-2025-improper-payments-fact-sheet

https://www.mecep.org/blog/7-things-to-know-about-the-political-attacks-on-mainecare/

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/karl-marx-enemy-quote/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/us/politics/vance-medicaid-fraud-california.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/14/us/politics/medicaid-fraud-vance-republicans-maine.html

https://calmatters.org/health/2026/05/trump-medicaid-fraud-freeze-california/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fraud-costing-us-government-as-crime-rings-use-stolen-identities-60-minutes-transcript/

https://www.justsecurity.org/136098/trump-administration-fraud-problem/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/world/europe/peter-magyar-hungary-viktor-orban.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/us/politics/trump-administration-doj-watchdog-reuveni.html

https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/trump-administrations-undercutting-of-oversight-hurts-taxpayers-and

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/us/politics/trump-fraudsters-pardons.html

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/14/trump-drain-the-swap-billionaires

https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/trumps-profiteering-hits-four-billion-dollars

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/company-backed-by-trump-sons-looks-to-sell-drone-interceptors-to-gulf-states-being-attacked-by-iran

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/business/jared-kushner-affinity-mideast-funds.html

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/22/us/politics/trump-donors-fundraising-benefits.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/cage-match-tickets-trump-ufc-fight-white-house-rcna342904

https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/article/nvidias-jensen-huang-is-a-late-addition-to-trumps-china-trip-joining-elon-musk-tim-cook-and-others-201120985.html

Paul Krugman

Why Did Trump Take Elon Musk to China?

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5 days ago · 2321 likes · 316 comments · Paul Krugman

https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2026/05/13/6-billionaires-worth-a-combined-1-trillion-join-trump-on-his-china-trip/

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/13/florida-trump-library-lawsuit-miami-00919438

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/05/13/trump-library-project-faces-suit-around-hotel-remark-land-transfer/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/business/trump-suit-irs.html

https://abcnews.com/US/trump-poised-drop-irs-suit-launch-17b-weaponization/story?id=132962661

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In the past, the Supreme Court has recognized that the right to vote alone does not necessarily fulfill the aims of the law. It’s possible—even easy—to dilute the votes of Black Americans to make it impossible for them to elect a candidate they support. Sometimes, then, in order to guarantee Black representation in government, states have had to create districts that are made up primarily of Black Americans. The court has condoned this practice, upholding the idea that in such a case, the state has a compelling reason to draw districts according to race. In the past, the court saw the creation of majority-minority districts as a way to comply with the Voting Rights Act, guaranteeing that Black voters can elect the lawmakers they prefer.

But in 2024, a “non-Black” voter in Louisiana challenged a new majority-minority district drawn so that the state’s congressional delegation might include two Black legislators out of the six allocated to the state. Those districts were designed to remedy the fact that although one third of the people who live in Louisiana are Black, the state has never had a Black senator, and no congressional district other than the majority-Black district has elected a Black representative. The state hasn’t had a Black governor since Reconstruction.

On April 29, by a vote of 6–3, with the right-wing justices in the majority, the Supreme Court declared Louisiana’s construction of a majority-minority district unconstitutional under the Fifteenth Amendment. It was, they said, an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. And, as the court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019, the federal courts have no business addressing partisan gerrymandering.

Immediately, Louisiana governor Jeff Landry declared a state of emergency to stop the state’s congressional primary election, which was already underway. His declaration has thrown the election into chaos as 45,000 ballots already cast won’t be counted, and the ballots already sent out will still include the race that Landry has now postponed.

Since then, other Republican-dominated states have rushed to pass mid-decade gerrymanders that will shut Democrats out of power.

Tennessee governor Bill Lee, a Republican, immediately called the Tennessee legislature into emergency special session to get rid of the state’s only Democratic member of Congress, the one representing Memphis. Sixty percent of the people who live in Memphis are Black. Once back in session, the Tennessee lawmakers repealed their own law that prohibited mid-decade redistricting. Then, on May 7, they cracked Memphis into three districts, diluting Black votes by swamping them with voters in white suburbs. The state had similarly cracked Nashville in 2022, flipping that seat, as well, from Democratic to Republican.

“Tennessee is a conservative state, and this map ensures that our congressional delegation reflects that,” Republican state senator John Stevens said. “This is about allowing Tennessee to maximize its partisan advantage.”

On May 8 the Virginia state supreme court voted along partisan lines to strike down a plan Virginia voters had approved to redraw the state’s congressional districts temporarily to favor Democrats as a way to counteract the Republicans’ partisan gerrymanders in Texas, Florida, Ohio, and other states.

The court majority argued that the redistricting measure was invalid because, as Amna Nawaz and Ali Schmitz of PBS explained, the Virginia constitution requires the General Assembly to pass a constitutional amendment twice: once before a legislative election and once after. This should guarantee two different sets of eyes on any such amendment by letting the people elect new lawmakers between the votes. But when the General Assembly passed the measure the first time, early voting was already underway. Thus, the court said, it was not “before” a scheduled election.

On May 11, a week before elections are due to start there, the Supreme Court cleared the way for Alabama to use a 2023 district map that lower courts ruled unconstitutional because it diluted Black voting by spreading Black voters across three districts, thus violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In an unsigned one-paragraph order, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower courts to reevaluate in light of the Callais decision.

On May 12, Tennessee House speaker Cameron Sexton removed all the House Democrats from standing committees, saying they had behaved in a way “aimed at disrupting the democratic and legislative processes” as they protested the mid-decade redistricting that broke up Tennessee’s only majority-Black, Democratic district. As Tennessee state representative Justin J. Pearson notes, this decree removed “every Black elected official in the state legislature from any committee we served on” and stripped “nearly 2 million Tennesseans from the representation they deserve” in the Tennessee state legislature.

On May 13—today—Georgia governor Brian Kemp called a special session of the Georgia General Assembly for June 17 to redraw Georgia’s congressional maps before the 2028 election. He said it was too late to change Georgia’s maps for 2026, but that the Callais decision requires Georgia to change its electoral maps.

Also today, Louisiana legislators advanced a congressional map eliminating one of the state’s two Black-majority districts. South Carolina governor Henry McMaster is expected to call for a special session to eliminate the state’s only Black-majority district and only Democratic seat, and Mississippi governor Tate Reeves said Mississippi lawmakers would eliminate the state’s only majority-Black district before 2028.

Jim Saksa of Democracy Docket assesses that redistricting could net Republicans between 16 and 18 seats in Congress in 2026, while the Democrats will likely pick up six, at least so far: five in California and one in Utah where a court demanded a redrawing of districts. Many of these redistricting plans are being challenged in the courts, and it remains possible that not all of them will flip, but G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers assesses that the Democrats will have to win congressional elections by 3–4 points in order to win a majority.

We are watching, in real time, the creation of a one-party state in the American South.

We have been here before.

The actual name of what we know as the Voting Rights Act is “AN ACT To enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and for other purposes.”

In the wake of the Civil War, Americans tried to create a new nation in which the law treated Black men and white men as equals. In 1865 they ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing enslavement except as punishment for crimes. In 1868 they adjusted the Constitution again, guaranteeing that anyone born or naturalized in the United States—except certain Indigenous Americans—was a citizen, opening up suffrage to Black men. In 1870, after Georgia legislators expelled their newly seated Black colleagues, Americans defended the right of Black men to vote by recognizing that right in the Constitution.

All three of those amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—gave Congress the power to enforce them. In 1870, Congress established the Department of Justice to do just that. Reactionary white southerners had been using state laws, and the unwillingness of state judges and juries to protect Black Americans from white gangs and unscrupulous employers, to keep Black people subservient. White men organized as the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize Black men and to keep them and their white allies from voting to change that system. In 1870 the federal government stepped in to protect Black rights and prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan.

With federal power now behind the Constitutional protection of equality, threatening jail for those who violated the law, white opponents of Black voting changed their argument against it.

In 1871 they began to say that they had no problem with Black men voting on racial grounds; their objection to Black voting was that Black men, just out of enslavement, were poor and uneducated. They were voting for lawmakers who promised them public services, like roads and schools, that could only be paid for with tax levies. Black voters, they said, were ushering in socialism.

Former Confederates declared it their duty to “redeem” the South from “Black rule,” by which they meant the Republicans and third parties in which white men and Black men worked together for policies that benefited workingmen, policies like education and workers’ protections. White Democrats argued that because such parties, even if overwhelmingly white, could win only with Black votes, they represented “Black rule.”

By 1880 the South was solidly Democratic, and it would remain so until the mid-1960s as white southern Democrats worked to silence the voices of Black Americans in the South to cement their own control over the region. In 1890, fourteen southern congressmen wrote a book to explain to their northern colleagues why Democrats had to control the South. Why the Solid South? or Reconstruction and Its Results insisted that Black voters who had supported the Republicans after the Civil War had perverted the government by using it to give themselves services paid for with white tax dollars.

Later that year, a new constitution in Mississippi started the process of making sure Black people could not vote by requiring educational tests, poll taxes, or a grandfather who had voted.

Eight years later, there was still enough Black voting in North Carolina and enough class solidarity with poor whites that voters in Wilmington elected a coalition government of Black Republicans and white Populists. White Democrats agreed that the coalition had won fairly, but about 2,000 of them nonetheless armed themselves to “reform” the city government. They issued a “White Declaration of Independence” and said they would “never again be ruled, by men of African origin.” It was time, they said, “for the intelligent citizens of this community owning 95% of the property and paying taxes in proportion, to end the rule by” Black men.

As they forced the elected officials out of office and took their places, the new Democratic mayor claimed “there was no intimidation used,” but as many as 300 African Americans died in the Wilmington coup. In the years to come, white Americans would continue to maintain control of politics through violence. They considered it a public duty to purge society of Black Americans, taking photographs of themselves at lynchings.

The region white Democrats ruled at the beginning of the twentieth century enforced white supremacy with extralegal violence. That racial domination helped white Americans swallow the South’s dramatic inequality. A few wealthy men dominated the region, while most people were poor: southerners had about half the average per capita income of the rest of the nation.

It was this world Congress addressed when, after more than 80 years in which state legislatures refused to acknowledge the Fifteenth Amendment, it passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, finally taking seriously the amendment’s charge to “enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

In their 2018 book How Democracies Die, political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt noted that democracies depend on members of each party recognizing the legitimacy of their partisan rivals. Even if they disagree with each other, each recognizes the others’ members as loyal to the nation and accepts their legitimacy as lawmakers if voters elect them. Democracy also depends on parties refusing to use the tools of government to destroy the ability of their partisan opponents to win elections.

A day after a Pennsylvania man was arrested for making a “hit list” of twenty Democratic legislators he called “communist infiltrators” and threatened to shoot, as President Trump calls Democrats “traitors” and as southern states destroy the ability of Black Democrats to elect representatives, the echoes of the past are deafening.

Although the parties have switched sides, the story is the same. Now, as then, a minority is disfranchising voters because it knows its ideas are unpopular and it cannot win on the merits of its policies. What it can do, though, is to deliver white supremacy to its followers in hopes that it will be enough to make them ignore the economic system that is leading them to ruin.

As Joyce White Vance noted tonight in Civil Discourse, Georgia Senate minority leader Harold Jones II reacted to the news of Georgia’s special session for redistricting by saying: “If Republicans ever used their power to help Georgians, they wouldn’t have to waste time and money redrawing the maps every few years to keep their majorities.

“June will be our third redistricting since 2021. Republicans need to undo their last gerrymander because it wasn’t good enough to keep their waffling political party in power. Most parties would try out some new ideas. Republicans choose to strip political power from Black people and undo the progress the South made in the last 60 years.

“Let’s sum it up for everybody. The biggest bloc of middle and working class voters are Black people. When Republicans strip Black people’s political power away, it doesn’t just strip one community of power. It strips political power from every single middle and working class person and hands it over to billionaires and big corporations. That’s what redistricting means for you.”

—

Notes:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-243_f20h.pdf

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-109_21o3.pdf

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-350/pdf/COMPS-350.pdf

https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/fairness-justice/what-louisiana-v-callais-means-voting-rights-act

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/louisiana-v-callais-the-republicans-justices-are-getting-ready-to-finish-off-the-voting-rights-act

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/louisiana-governor-suspends-active-election-to-allow-for-gerrymander/

https://tennesseelookout.com/2026/05/07/tenn-passes-new-potential-9-0-gop-u-s-house-map-eight-days-after-scotus-guts-voting-rights-act/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/virginias-supreme-court-tosses-voter-approved-redistricting-plan-in-blow-to-democrats

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-clears-path-alabama-redraw-congressional-map/

https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/05/court-clears-way-for-alabama-to-use-congressional-map-blocked-by-lower-court-as-racially-discrim/

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/grants-alabama-request-speed-adoption-new-congressional-map-midterms-rcna344526

https://www.cbsnews.com/atlanta/news/brian-kemp-georgia-special-session-redistricting-supreme-court-ruling-2028-maps/

https://newsletters.democracydocket.com/south-carolina-revives-trump-backed-redistricting-push?ecid=ACsprvsyQfFcpU9aFn7KwXpTtvLEqqyHKc0YssrhcBf-AGRkfpWe6O24PUkH9VBIJloBoytjwlgF&utm_campaign=13200977-Free%20Newsletter%20Emails&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=418687548&utm_content=418687548&utm_source=hs_email

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/after-callais-and-virginia-republicans-are-ahead-in-trumps-gerrymandering-war/

https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/12/article/30876

https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/man-arrested-for-making-terroristic-threats-against-20-pa-elected-officials/4401079/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/12/trump-late-night-social-media-posts

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (Crown: 2018).

Hilary A. Herbert, et al. Why the Solid South, or, Reconstruction and Its Results (Baltimore: R.H. Woodward & Company, 1890), at:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Why_the_Solid_South_Or_Reconstruction_an/UYk_AQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Why+the+Solid+South&printsec=frontcover

New York Times, January 21, 1890, p. 4 and November 9, 1898.

Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance

The Redistricting Race To The Bottom

Southern states continue to push redistricting as far and as fast as they can, seemingly for no purpose other than the incessant desire to please an audience of one. First, the table setting: Here’s where things stand tonight…

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5 days ago · 680 likes · 65 comments · Joyce Vance

Strength In Numbers

Democrats now have to win the House vote by 4 points due to Republican gerrymandering

Strength In Numbers is a reader-supported publication. Paying members get articles like my weekly Deep Dive, bonus premium posts like this one, and access to polling crosstabs and trendlines before other readers. If you want more data-driven independent political journalism, join our community today as a…

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9 days ago · 133 likes · 23 comments · G. Elliott Morris

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Over the course of three hours last night, he posted on social media fifty-five times. Those posts accused a number of those Trump considers his personal enemies, including former president Barack Obama, of treason; claimed that investigations of the ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives were an attempt to damage Trump; insisted the 2020 presidential election was stolen; reposted a fake quotation from Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) accusing Obama of making a personal fortune of $120 million from the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare; labeled Obama and others “traitors” and called for their arrest; and demanded to know why acting attorney general Todd Blanche hadn’t indicted any of those people yet.

This morning, he started in again with a long screed attacking the New York Times for its coverage of his alterations to the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and insisting that Democratic presidents Obama and Joe Biden had “botched” renovations that he was now fixing for “a ‘tiny’ fraction of the cost!” He posted an AI image of Obama, Biden, and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) apparently swimming in a filthy version of the reflecting pool with the caption: “Dumacrats Love Sewage.” Then he posted an image of himself on the $100 bill. And then he was back to calling House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) “Low IQ.”

After posting a number of AI images showing the U.S. military destroying the Iranian military, Trump posted: “When the Fake News says that the Iranian enemy is doing well, Militarily, against us, it’s virtual TREASON in that it is such a false, and even preposterous, statement. They are aiding and abetting the enemy!”

Then he posted an image of a map with Venezuela overlaid with the U.S. flag. The caption read: “51st State.”

Trump seems to be comforting himself by lashing out at his perceived enemies and insisting he is competent and popular. Before he left for China today, he claimed: “We have Iran very much under control. We’re either going to make a deal or they’re going to be decimated. One way or the other, we win.”

Mosheh Gains, Courtney Kube, and Monica Alba of NBC News reported today that if Trump decides to restart major combat operations against Iran, military leaders are considering renaming the operations with a new name, like “Operation Sledgehammer,” to suggest those operations would be different than the current “Epic Fury.” They argue that renaming the military operation would restart the clock of the 1973 War Powers Act that requires congressional authorization to continue it after sixty days, a deadline that ran out on May 1.

War Powers Act expert Brian Finucane, who was a lawyer for the State Department, commented: “Nope. Changing the name of the authorized war with Iran does not alter the application of the War Powers Resolution’s 60-day clock.”

In the meantime, there is no apparent movement toward opening the Strait of Hormuz, even as numbers released today by the Department of Labor show that inflation in April hit its highest level since 2023. Trump’s own intelligence agencies assessed earlier this year that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon and that Iran’s leader had not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003. An assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency said that Iran would not be able to reach the U.S. with an intercontinental ballistic missile until 2035.

Nonetheless, the administration and its supporters appear to have settled on the idea that the cost of the war has been worthwhile because the U.S. was under imminent threat of nuclear attack by Iran. When a reporter asked Trump today, before he left for China, to what extent Americans’ financial situation is motivating him to make a deal with Iran, he answered:

“Not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran—they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing—we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.”

A CNN/SSRS poll released today shows that 70% of Americans disapprove of the way Trump is handling the economy.

Trump is, however, thinking about his own financial situation. Tonight Andrew Duehren and Alan Feuer of the New York Times reported that the Department of Justice is in talks to settle Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service for damages after a contractor during Trump’s first term leaked tax information, including his, to the media.

The judge in the case has ordered Trump’s lawyers and the Department of Justice to file briefs by May 20 explaining why this is a true case in which the two sides are opposed when Trump both is the plaintiff and runs the agency that is the defendant. If they settle before then, the judge will not be able to say much about whether the case was valid in the first place.

Duehren and Feuer note that the Department of Justice has fought similar cases brought because of the leak, arguing that the government can’t be held liable for something a contractor does. The government settled a case with hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin in 2024 by making a public apology.

The New York Times journalists report that one of the options for settling with Trump would be for the IRS to drop any audits of Trump, his family members, or his businesses. Since 1977, IRS policy has been to conduct a mandatory audit of the sitting president every year, although it failed to audit Trump’s taxes for his first two years in office during his first term. Clearly, he would like for it to fail to audit his taxes this time around as well.

The special treatment certain people enjoy in the U.S. that enables them to get around accountability was in the news earlier today, too, as the victims of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein testified before a panel made up of the Democrats on the House Oversight and Reform Committee. The top Democrat on the committee, Robert Garcia of California, began the day by introducing a new report called “The Price of Non-Prosecution.” It explained that the sweetheart deal U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Alexander Acosta—later Trump’s secretary of labor—negotiated with Epstein to protect him from federal prosecution left him able to continue his sex-trafficking operation and to expand it.

The survivors recounted their anger and frustration when they discovered the federal government had made a secret deal with Epstein. One survivor, who identified herself as Roza, detailed how Epstein sexually assaulted her over three years when he was supposed to be serving a jail sentence. She broke down as she recounted how the Department of Justice under then–attorney general Pam Bondi continued that favoritism, exposing her name publicly while leaving the names of the perpetrators’ names redacted.

“I stepped forward along other survivors hoping those who allowed this to happen will be held accountable. I kept my identity protected as ‘Jane Doe.’ I woke up one day with my name mentioned over 500 times. While the rich and powerful remain protected by redaction, my name was exposed to the world. Now reporters from across the globe contact me. I cannot live without looking over my shoulder. I can only imagine the long-term impact this ‘mistake’ will have on my life.”

In Tennessee today, Tennessee House speaker Cameron Sexton removed all the House Democrats from standing committees, saying they had behaved in a way “aimed at disrupting the democratic and legislative processes” as they protested the mid-decade redistricting that broke up Tennessee’s only majority-Black, Democratic district. As Tennessee state representative Justin J. Pearson notes, this decree removed “every Black elected official in the state legislature from any committee we served on” and stripped “nearly 2 million Tennesseans from the representation they deserve” in the Tennessee state legislature.

“We will not stop fighting,” state representative Justin Jones posted. “We will not stop getting in good trouble. We will not go back!”

—

Notes:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/inflation-could-hit-4-next-month-and-stay-elevated-for-rest-of-year-economist-warns

https://apnews.com/article/iran-us-israel-uae-iron-dome-f3d5738853111cfc80985c157edab7c3

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/pentagon-considering-re-naming-iran-war-sledgehammer-ceasefire-collaps-rcna344630

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-us-attack-iran-trump-administration/

https://www.dia.mil/Portals/110/Documents/News/golden_dome.pdf

https://www.factcheck.org/2025/06/trump-gabbard-comments-on-iran-nuclear-capability/

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-not-thinking-american-finances-iran-talk-rcna344785

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28114951-cnn-poll-conducted-by-ssrs-affordability/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/business/trump-suit-irs.html

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/27/1145579351/why-did-the-irs-neglect-to-audit-trump-during-his-first-2-years-in-office

https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/imo/media/doc/the_price_of_non-prosecution.pdf

https://pro.stateaffairs.com/tn/politics/house-democrats-committee-removal

https://www.actionnews5.com/2026/05/12/multiple-tn-democrats-stripped-all-committee-assignments/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/12/jeffrey-epstein-survivor-palm-beach-hearing

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As Judd Legum of Popular Information explains, on June 16, 2025, Trump’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric announced the launch of a new, gold plated, Trump smartphone, “proudly designed and built in the United States.” It would be available in August 2025 for $499. Its website urged customers to “pre-order” the phone by depositing $100 toward it. Don Jr. said the phone would be “American hardware, built in America, without the potential of…[a] backdoor into the hardware that some of our adversaries have installed in there.”

And yet a disclaimer on the website said the Trumps and the Trump Organization were involved only in the branding of the phone; they had nothing to do with the design, development, manufacture, distribution, or sales of the item. As Legum notes, the idea of a superior U.S.-made phone was always a fantasy, and within two weeks the phone’s description changed from “MADE IN THE USA” to “designed with American values in mind.”

The phone never shipped, and on April 6, Trump Mobile updated its terms to say the $100 deposit was not actually a deposit for a pre-order, but rather “a conditional opportunity if Trump Mobile later elects, in its sole discretion, to offer the Device for sale.” It went on to say the deposit “does not lock in pricing, promotions, service plans, taxes, fees, shipping costs, or other commercial terms” and that “[e]stimated ship dates, launch timelines, or anticipated production schedule are non-binding estimates only.”

A new phone has recently gotten clearance from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Trump Mobile executives say they are waiting for approval from T-Mobile, the company whose network Trump Mobile wants to use. Legum points out that T-Mobile relies on the federal government for approval for business activities, creating an enormous conflict of interest.

Donald Trump has always ridden to power by projecting an image of dominance. He could maintain that image thanks to the people who covered for him: his father, Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, and in his first presidential term—as Sidney Blumenthal reminded readers in The Guardian today—Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who filtered the options Trump received; chief of staff General John Kelly, who made a pact with Mattis that one of them would always stay in the country to stand in the way of Trump’s impulses; and National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, who stopped Trump from signing disastrous executive orders, sometimes going so far as to steal them off his desk.

In Trump’s second term, though, those people who curbed his worst impulses have been replaced with yes-men, and there is no one to protect him from the fallout.

Over the weekend, Trump took to social media to complain bitterly about the demise of his tariffs, about Iran, and about political opponents; to boast about his changes to the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and about the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) mixed martial arts event he plans to host in front of the White House on his 80th birthday; and to try, once again, to project dominance.

Trump complained twice that in its decision declaring his “Liberation Day” tariffs of April 2025 unconstitutional, the Supreme Court had not included a sentence saying, “Any money paid to the United States of America does not have to be paid back.” That sentence, he insisted, “would have saved America 159 billion Dollars!” He complained about his Supreme Court appointees Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett and suggested he should “PACK THE COURT! I’m working so hard to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, and then people that I appointed have shown so little respect to our Country, and its people. What is the reason for this? They have to do the right thing, but it’s really OK for them to be loyal to the person that appointed them to ‘almost’ the highest position in the land, that is, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court.”

He warned them to vote his way on the question of birthright citizenship because “A negative ruling on Birthright Citizenship, on top of the recent Supreme Court Tariff catastrophe, is not Economically sustainable for the United States of America!”

On Saturday morning, the president’s social media account posted AI images of exploding Iranian drones beside an image of blue butterflies with the caption “Drones Dropping Like Butterflies.” Then it posted another AI image of a U.S. vessel shooting down drones with the caption “Bye Bye, Drones.” Then it showed a flotilla of ships with Iranian flags on the surface of the ocean under the caption “Obama/Biden” beside an image of those ships on the bottom of the ocean under the caption “Trump.” Then it showed an AI image of Trump on the bridge of a ship watching Iranian ships exploding. Then it showed another image of “Iran’s Navy” on the ocean floor.

The account posted a long screed about the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the 2015 agreement between Iran and the U.S., United Kingdom, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the European Union to limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for relief from sanctions. Trump pulled the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, and this weekend Trump rehashed false right-wing talking points about the deal to claim that former president Barack Obama was “a weak and stupid American President” who worked for Iran.

Trump’s account posted an AI image of Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker gorging on junk food under the caption “JB is too busy to keep Chicago safe!” It posted two clips of former FBI director James Comey, whom the Department of Justice under Trump has criminally charged for posting a photograph of seashells spelling out “8647.” Trump called him “A Dirty Cop!!!” He went after California representative Ro Khanna and warned: “The Radical left Dumacrats must fail—our Country is at stake!”

Trump’s account posted two AI images of a UFC fight surrounded by a stadium-style audience in front of the White House. Then it posted five images of the Washington, D.C., reflecting pool colored electric blue, one of which claimed Trump had renovated it in a week for just $2 million. A number of posts championed his proposed ballroom on the site where he bulldozed the East Wing of the White House.

But by far the most frequent postings on the president’s social media account over the weekend were praise for Trump himself. In addition to posting “Excellent Poll Numbers. Thank you!” he reposted stories saying that he had delivered “remarkable leadership” and is “Master of the Deal,” that he is one of the top three presidents in U.S. history, or “WITHOUT A DOUBT THE GREATEST PRESIDENT WE HAVE EVER KNOWN.” A number of posts called him “The Greatest of All Time.”

But just as with Trump Mobile, the clock is running out and the advertising isn’t working.

On May 7, Catherine Rampell of The Bulwark called Trump “an economic serial killer, whacking firms left and right.” She noted that Trump’s tariffs, along with deportations of farm workers and cancelling of foreign food aid programs, led farm bankruptcies to rise 46% in 2025 from the previous year, and now higher costs for diesel, fertilizer, and other products because of the Iran war are putting farmers under even more pressure.

Similarly, tariffs have cut into manufacturing jobs, and corporate bankruptcies last year were at their highest level in more than a decade. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is paying almost $2 billion to stop wind projects and has cancelled or stalled dozens of other renewable energy products. Customs and Border Protection is supposed to issue tariff refunds beginning on May 12, but the money will not go to consumers. It will go to the “trade community.”

Trump’s war on Iran, undertaken alongside Israel, has not delivered the fast regime change Trump promised, either. Instead, it has mired Trump in a war Iran appears to have little interest in permitting the U.S. to leave, at least not without confirming a new global order that benefits Iran.

In The Atlantic yesterday, neoconservative foreign policy scholar Robert Kagan ranked the Iran debacle as worse than Vietnam. There will be no going back to a world in which the Strait of Hormuz is open, he writes. Iran is now a key player in the region, China and Russia are strengthened, and the U.S. is “substantially diminished.” Anyone can see that “just a few weeks of war with a second-rank power” drastically reduced American weapons stocks, opening the way for aggression from China or Russia, while “the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started.”

Last week, the U.S. proposed a one-page memorandum to establish a framework for later talks on Iran’s nuclear ambitions, offering to lift sanctions and release billions in Iranian funds in exchange for opening the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians responded over the weekend, reiterating their determination to control the strait and calling for reparations for damages caused by the war, in addition to an end to the naval blockade and the unfreezing of Iranian assets. On Sunday afternoon, Trump posted: “I have just read the response from Iran’s so-called ‘Representatives.’ I don’t like it—TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!”

Today Trump told reporters the Iran proposal was a “piece of garbage” and warned that the ceasefire is on “massive life support where the doctor walks in and says ‘Sir, your loved one has approximately a 1% chance of living.’” And yet Trump is relying on that ceasefire to justify his refusal to ask Congress for authority to continue his war on Iran. Under the 1973 War Powers Act, Trump had 60 days to get congressional approval after informing Congress of the attack, and that period ran out on May 1.

Gas prices have jumped more than 50% since the war began and now average more than $4.50 a gallon. Although Trump has downplayed concerns about higher prices, today Nancy Cordes of CBS News reported that he is planning to suspend the federal gas tax to bring down the cost of gasoline. But, Cordes notes, doing so would require Congress to agree and would cost the federal government about a half a billion dollars a week in revenue at a time when the national debt is skyrocketing. It crossed $39 trillion in March just five months after hitting $38 trillion and is on track to hit $40 trillion before the midterm elections.

On Saturday, Julian Borger reported in The Guardian that tensions between Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu are high. Former Israeli diplomat Alon Pinkas noted that Trump stopped mentioning Netanyahu by the end of March and left Israel out of the loop on ceasefire negotiations in April. Pinkas noted that if Trump lashes out at Netanyahu, he will look like he was manipulated into going to war, while Netanyahu has tied himself to Trump at a time when the prime minister must hold an election before October. “This affects Netanyahu politically and this affects Trump politically,” Pinkas told Borger. “In other words, they have screwed each other pretty badly.”

Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post noted last week that, apparently determined to convince Americans all is going well, Trump is putting words in our mouths. Around Washington, D.C., signs are appearing that show Trump in a hard hat near construction scaffolding and read: “Thank you, PRESIDENT TRUMP.”

—

Notes:

Popular Information

We were promised a gold-plated Trump phone

On June 16, 2025, President Trump’s two eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, announced the launch of Trump Mobile. The new venture’s flagship product was “a sleek, gold smartphone engineered for performance“ called the T1 Phone. The pair announced Trump Mobile at Trump…

Read more

7 days ago · 594 likes · 48 comments · Judd Legum

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/11/republicans-trump-popularity

The Bulwark

The ‘America First’ Corporate Graveyard

IN THE MIDST OF AN ENERGY CRISIS, the Trump administration is paying companies to not build more energy infrastructure…

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11 days ago · 891 likes · 185 comments · Catherine Rampell

https://content.govdelivery.com/bulletins/gd/USDHSCBP-415c8e9

https://fortune.com/2026/03/18/how-big-national-debt-39-trillion-trump-promises/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-interview-suspending-gas-tax-iran-war/?linkId=941331742

https://thehill.com/policy/international/5871568-iran-us-peace-proposal-response/

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/05/iran-war-trump-losing/687094/

https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/11/world/live-news/iran-war-proposal-trump

https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Oil-Prices-Jump-After-Trump-Rejects-Irans-Peace-Proposal.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/2026/05/07/signs-thanking-trump-in-washington/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/09/tensions-emerge-bejamin-netanyahu-donald-trump-alliance

https://trumpstruth.org/

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