May 28, 2026
It’s an excellent bet that future books and films made about the Trump Era will begin with an image of the White House this week. The world-famous Rose Garden has been replaced with a patio that looks like one at Mar-a-Lago. The East Wing is rubble. And on the sweeping South Lawn, right outside the front door of the White House, construction is underway on a massive Ultimate Fighting Championship arena for cage matches to be held on Trump’s 80th birthday.
Now treating the nation’s capital as his property, Trump appears to be leaning on his past role as a real estate developer as a solution in Iran remains elusive, inflation in the U.S. climbs, and his popularity drops.
In addition to turning back to real estate, Trump seems to be lashing out to reassert his dominance over those who have hurt him.
Last night, Hannah Rabinowitz, Paula Reid, and Kara Scannell of CNN reported that the Department of Justice under President Donald J. Trump has launched a criminal investigation into whether 82-year-old E. Jean Carroll, the journalist who successfully sued Trump for defamation and for sexual assault, committed perjury in her testimony by saying she was not being paid to launch the lawsuit when it turned out later that billionaire Reid Hoffman had paid some of her legal fees and expenses.
Trump also refiled his $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal over its publication of an article describing a card for sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s fiftieth birthday. The card shows a crude sketch of a girl, bearing words that refer to “certain things in common” and saying, “A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
Trump’s lawsuit says that the article damaged his reputation and that the card is fake, although it came from Epstein’s estate. The estate later provided a copy of the card to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which published it on its own website.
U.S. District Judge Darrin P. Gayles tossed out the original lawsuit last month, saying that Trump came “nowhere close” to establishing that the article’s authors acted with “actual malice” to defame him, but said Trump could amend the lawsuit and refile it. Yesterday, he did.
On Tuesday, Alan Feuer of the New York Times noted that Trump’s politicization of the Department of Justice means grand juries as well as judges appear to be losing faith in the department. Although it is a common saying that prosecutors can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, government prosecutors have had trouble getting the indictments Trump wants against his perceived political enemies.
In part this is because Trump has replaced career prosecutors with inexperienced loyalists, as Feuer notes, but it is also because of trumped-up charges against people like former FBI director James Comey and the six Democratic lawmakers who released a public video reminding military and intelligence personnel that they must not obey illegal orders.
Federal judges have been accusing prosecutors of misconduct, most recently in a case last week in Chicago in which a grand jury indicted six people, including a Democratic congressional candidate, for interfering with a federal agent and conspiring to interfere with a federal agent at a protest at a detention facility.
As Julie Bosman of the New York Times reported, U.S. District Judge April Perry dismissed the case after she discovered that prosecutors had talked to individual grand jurors outside the courtroom and removed those jurors who refused to indict, as well as apparently overstating the strength of the evidence against the defendants. After making these maneuvers, the prosecutors then tried to hide evidence of them by redacting the transcripts from the grand jury.
Judge Perry said: “I have read hundreds, if not thousands, of grand jury transcripts involving prosecutors who are the most junior of prosecutors to several U.S. attorneys who appeared before the grand jury. I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.”
If Trump can end the rule of law, he can do as he wishes.
At least some of what he appears to want is corrupt dealings that put money into the pockets of himself and his family members. Today Robert Faturechi of ProPublica reported that Trump’s trade advisor Peter Navarro personally pressured the Pentagon to loan $620 million to Vulcan Elements, a small North Carolina startup company in which Donald Trump Jr. has a financial stake.
Navarro and Don Jr. appear to be close, and a Pentagon official told Faturechi that “[t]he call came from the White House: We have to get this done.”
According to Faturechi, the Pentagon invested $620 million in Vulcan, a rare-earth magnet company, and another $80 million in its partner ReElement. The Commerce Department provided another $50 million in incentives, and the government took a $50 million stake in Vulcan.
When Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm 1789 Capital invested in Vulcan in August 2025, the company was worth about $200 million. After the government investments, that valuation jumped to around $2 billion. Bloomberg reported last week that the investment in ReElement might not go through because of concerns over its ability to scale up its technology.
A spokesperson for the Pentagon told Faturechi that the Vulcan deal was sped up as defense officials balance “lightning speed with rigorous diligence to close high-impact deals that directly strengthen America’s defense and empower our warfighters.”
And yet, despite their evident attempt to warp the U.S. legal system to their own purposes, Trump and his MAGA loyalists insist that they are the ones against whom the Department of Justice has been used. That is their justification for the $1.776 billion slush fund for paying off those who were convicted of crimes for their participation in Trump’s schemes to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Last night, a group of thirty-five former federal judges took on that slush fund.
As Maegan Vazquez of the Washington Post reported, the former judges, appointed by members of both political parties, asked U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams to reopen the legal case Trump, his oldest sons, and the Trump Organization brought against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for a “judicial review of the extraordinary—and historically unprecedented—circumstances presented by this litigation and by the collusive ‘settlement’ that invokes this litigation as the legal justification for its terms.”
Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization dropped the lawsuit after Williams appeared to question whether it was actually a legitimate lawsuit, since Trump was both the plaintiff and the person in charge of the IRS, then announced they had reached a “settlement agreement” with the Department of Justice. Williams was clear in her order closing the case that there was “no settlement of record” in it.
The judges expressed concern that the Trumps were manipulating the judicial system, “which threatens to undermine confidence in the administration of justice.” They suggested that “this ‘case’ that the parties purport to have ‘settled’ is itself a fraud on the Court.” They also maintain that “this ‘settlement’ is a product of collusion and is itself a fraud on the Court,” and that “[f]raud on the court is established by clear and convincing evidence.”
“The parties have used this lawsuit—which was never an adversarial proceeding over which the Court even had jurisdiction—as a means to allow a ‘commission’ controlled by the President to dole out $1.776 billion in taxpayer dollars without constitutional or congressional authority to do so, and to confer unlawful private benefits to the President and his family by purportedly prohibiting the United States from prosecuting any and all claims against them.”
“To be clear,” the judges wrote, “the parties’ settlement was not, and never will be, legally justified.”
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Notes:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/26/ufc-arena-white-house-trump-birthday
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.693830/gov.uscourts.flsd.693830.59.0_2.pdf
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/28/trump-epstein-suit-wall-street-journal-00941055
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/21/us/chicago-ice-protesters-charges-dropped.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/26/us/politics/trump-justice-department-grand-juries.html
https://www.propublica.org/article/donald-trump-jr-vulcan-deal-white-house
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.706172/gov.uscourts.flsd.706172.63.0.pdf
Of course they’re manipulating the judicial system. They’ll manipulate everybody and every system possible. Everyone, speak up so this madness of a reality stops!
Resource below to easily contact all of Congress - Be LOUD. Trump/the administration is dangerous for our country 💔🤍💙
Use/share this spreadsheet (bit.ly/Goodtrouble) to contact members of Congress, the Cabinet and news organizations. Call. Write. Email. Protest. Unrelentingly.
Reach out (beyond your own) to as many in the Senate and House as you can. All of this is bigger than “I only represent my constituents” issues.
Comments/reactions help keep this bumped ✊
E. Jean Carroll took criminal/rapist Donald to court twice and she won twice.
The two juries ordered Donald to pay her tens of millions, which Donald, who does not believe in law, has been refusing to pay.
But he does believe in law as an instrument to terrorize decent citizens. But this is an old story – criminal/rapist Donald repeating himself. So in order to see behind these repetitions, I’d like to return to something Heather said in hers yesterday.
This, the menace of the southern enslavers in the 1850s, and the emergence of Jim Crow in the 1870s, has appeared – or reappeared – often in Heather’s. History is never past. It abides, as the conceits of the enslavers yet spur billionaires pushing their wealth gap, as Jim Crow conceits further embolden today’s white supremacists, by Republicans killing voting rights of people of color, or by justices of the Long Dong Clarence court protecting today’s dark money.
I’ve also been reading Nabokov’s “Pnin” (first time). His examination of an artist in it also reminds us how, in our looking at what seems simple in front of us may teem with many other vitalities, from air in motion to reflections of light.
And yet we have elites lying to us, denying any roles for the complicated so we see only as simply as they do. These elites may be those like criminal/rapist Donald, who for years indulged spurious lawsuits. They may be those who measure life only by abstraction, commodification, and numbers, or those for whom all questions A)-B)-C)-D) always admit but one correct answer.
For more on elites routinely lying – and damaging many – see Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America”; Arlie Russell Hochschild’s “Stolen Pride,” Jane Mayer’s “Dark Money,” George Packer’s “The Unwinding,” Diane Ravitch’s “The Language Police,” Sarah Smarsh’s “Bone of the Bone,” Matt Stoller’s “Goliath: The Hundred-year War between Monopoly Power and Democracy,” and Sheldon Whitehouse’s “The Scheme.”