Iran Latest

Israel struck Iran early today, hours after Iran fired missiles at Israel — the first such exchange since a ceasefire between the US and Iran took effect in early April. Both Iranian and Israeli officials said they have halted offensive operations for now.

President Trump called on both sides to stop, writing that Israel and Iran “must immediately stop ‘shooting.’”

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who is helping mediate the US–Iranian talks, urged restraint, writing on X that the negotiations were close to their “final objective.”

LA Mayor Race

Nithya Raman will likely face LA mayor Karen Bass in the general election in November. Former reality star Spencer Pratt came in third, which eliminated him as a candidate.

Pratt initially led on election night, but Raman closed the gap as the counting of the ballots continued. She overtook Pratt yesterday, and currently leads by about 3,100 votes.

About 83% of ballots have been counted, and a winner of the second spot has not been officially certified.

California’s count is slow by design. State law allows mail-in ballots to be counted if postmarked by Election Day and received within seven days, and officials process them in the order they arrive.

Some Republicans, including Trump, have called the count “rigged” without offering evidence.

Trump Nominates Blanche for AG

President Trump today formally nominated Todd Blanche to be attorney general. The Senate must confirm him.

Blanche has led the Justice Department in an acting capacity since April, when Trump fired Pam Bondi. Before that, he served for more than a year as deputy attorney general, the department’s second-ranking official, overseeing federal criminal prosecutions and national security operations.

His nomination comes days after he told Congress and federal courts that the department’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund,” which would pay Trump allies who say they were targeted by the Biden administration, is not moving forward. Some GOP senators had objected to the fund and had said they looked forward to questioning Blanche after his formal nomination.

Blanche previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer in several criminal cases.

DOJ Goes to Court Over Fund

The Justice Department has urged a federal judge not to permanently block the “anti-weaponization fund,” despite Blanche’s statement that it would not go forward.

The plaintiffs in the case — including a former federal prosecutor and a prominent government watchdog group — argue the fund is unconstitutional because it is a taxpayer-funded payout Congress never approved, open only to people who say a Democratic administration wronged them. The judge froze the money so none could be spent before she rules, and set a June 12 hearing on whether to extend the block.

The fund came out of a “settlement” between Trump, two of his sons, the Trump Organization, and the IRS — which Trump oversees in his capacity as president — after Trump dropped a $10 billion lawsuit claiming the IRS failed to stop leaks of his tax records in his first term.

In a filing last week to the federal district court in Virginia, DOJ lawyers said no money had been moved to the fund and no members of its five-person decision panel had been named, which made the case “moot and premature.”

Senate Passes Immigration Bill

The Senate has approved roughly $70 billion to fund ICE and Customs and Border Protection through the end of Trump’s term.

Republicans used the budget reconciliation process, which needs only a simple majority in the Senate and bypasses the filibuster. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (AK) was the only Republican to vote against it.

The bill faced bipartisan challenges. It took a marathon 18-hour session because Democrats — joined by some Republicans — kept trying to attach language barring the “anti-weaponization fund.” None of those amendments passed.

The package now goes to the House, which could take it up as early as this week.

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Books often expand our minds and foster empathy by introducing us to people, places, cultures, and perspectives we haven’t encountered or considered before. This 500-piece banned books puzzle from Uncommon Goods features a curated collection of titles written by underrepresented voices in literature, many of whom have been impacted by book bans. It highlights more than 60 titles, including Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, There There by Tommy Orange, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, and more. Piece the puzzle together, and then add the books to your reading list!

Trump Ballroom Donors Won Billions in Federal Contracts

President Trump has promised his new White House ballroom will not cost taxpayers anything and that private donors are paying for it. But many of the same donors have benefitted from the Trump administration.

More than half of the private donors who have helped fund President Trump’s White House ballroom project won new or expanded federal contracts worth over $50 billion in the past six months, according to a report by Public Citizen, a nonprofit watchdog.

The report looked at the 21 donors the White House has disclosed plus six identified by news outlets, and found that 14 received contracts. Defense contractor Lockheed Martin won the most, about $43.8 billion. Consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton received $4.2 billion, and data company Palantir got just over $1 billion. Other donors awarded contracts include Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Parsons, a defense and technology firm.

The White House has not said how much each donated to the $400 million, 90,000-square-foot ballroom project being built where the East Wing stood before Trump demolished it last year.

Judge Blocks Trump Limits on Immigrants from 39 Countries

A federal judge in Rhode Island has blocked Trump administration policies that denied asylum and other immigration benefits to people from 39 countries.

The policies, set late last year, did four things: they paused all asylum decisions nationwide, halted other immigration benefits — work permits, green cards, citizenship — for people from the 39 countries, reopened benefits already granted to people from those countries for possible reconsideration, and told officers to treat coming from one of those countries as a “significant negative factor.”

A coalition of immigrant service groups and labor unions sued in March.

In a 135-page opinion, Chief Judge John McConnell wrote that the administration violated federal law and left immigrants in “indeterminate legal limbo.”

Trump Walks Out of Interview

Trump walked out of an interview with NBC News anchor Kristen Welker after she pressed him for evidence of his false claims about the 2020 presidential election. The interview aired on Meet the Press yesterday. In it, Trump repeated the debunked claims about the 2020 vote and the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.

During the tense exchange, Trump also claimed there was fraud in the ongoing vote count for California’s primary elections, pointing to races still uncounted days later. Asked for evidence, he said, “All I have to do is look.” After Welker asked what evidence he had for saying that, he shot back, “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid.” When Welker kept pressing, Trump, annoyed with Welker’s persistence in asking for evidence, abruptly told his aides in attendance (not seen in the clip), “Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling,” and left.

States Try to Block Merger

California, New York, and other states are preparing a lawsuit to block Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion purchase of Warner Bros., Reuters reported last week. The states are expected to argue that the deal would be anticompetitive and combine two of Hollywood’s major remaining studios into one company with outsized market control.

Paramount Skydance already owns Paramount Pictures, the Paramount+ streaming service, and CBS News. If regulators approve the deal, it would also own Warner Bros. studio, CNN, and HBO. Thousands of actors, writers and directors have signed a letter opposing the deal, warning it would shrink jobs and the number of films made in an already contracting industry. The merger would cut the number of major US film studios to four.

The company is controlled by the Ellison family, which includes billionaire and Trump ally Larry Ellison.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta has led the effort to block the purchase, and has also opened an investigation into the proposed merger. His office said last week that the state’s investigation remains active but declined to comment further.

Not politically. Literally.

For six days, no one seemed to know exactly where the governor was. His staff told reporters he was hiking the Appalachian Trail, which immediately became a phrase American politicians would never again be able to say with a straight face. The problem, as the country soon learned, was that Sanford was not walking through the woods. He was in Argentina, visiting the woman with whom he was having an affair.

Then came the press conference.

Sanford stood before cameras and did what politicians in sex scandals used to do: he confessed, wandered through a rambling apology, invoked God, family, failure, and forgiveness, and tried to explain how his private life had become public business. The whole thing was painful, awkward, and impossible to look away from.

But at the same time, it had all the drama we love in a political scandal — disappearance, deception, romance, taxpayer questions, international travel, a wounded spouse, a public apology, and a euphemism — “hiking the Appalachian Trail” — that sounded like it could only have been thought up by a team of late-night comedy writers.

It also looked, at the time, like the kind of scandal that could end a political career.

And in some ways, it did; at least for a bit. Sanford resigned as chair of the Republican Governors Association, was censured by the South Carolina legislature, and became a national punchline. And yet he finished his term as governor and later won a special election to return to Congress in 2013. The affair badly damaged him, but it did not erase him.

And it revealed something significant: Americans are less consistent about infidelity scandals than we like to pretend.

When shame still (kinda) worked

For a long time, the basic script of a political sex scandal was pretty easy to follow.

First came the rumor. Then the denial. Then the evidence. Then the mortifying press conference, usually staged with a spouse who looked like she had been dragged there by the full force of political consultants. The politician apologized to his family, his constituents, and, if polling looked especially grim, “the people who believed in me.” Then came the question that mattered most: Could he survive the shame?

Sometimes the answer was no.

Gary Hart was the cautionary tale for a generation of politicians who thought private recklessness could stay private. In 1987, the Colorado senator was the early frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination. Then came reports about his relationship with Donna Rice and the now-famous photograph of Rice sitting on Hart’s lap after sailing on Monkey Business, a yacht the two partied on with dozens of friends. The details were almost too perfect for political theater. While policy fights, bad debates, or weak fundraising quarters traditionally sank candidates, Hart’s campaign was swallowed by the idea that voters had learned something essential about his judgment. He dropped out of the race soon after.

Two decades later, Eliot Spitzer offered a different version of the same lesson. Spitzer had built his career as a hard-charging prosecutor and “sheriff of Wall Street,” the moral avenger who promised to clean up other people’s misconduct. Then, as governor of New York, he was linked to a high-end prostitution ring and identified in reports as “Client 9.” The hypocrisy was too clear, the contrast too brutal. The man who made his name prosecuting vice and corruption had been caught in the kind of conduct he had spent years condemning. Within days, Spitzer resigned.

John Edwards followed the same broad pattern in 2008, only with an even darker personal edge. He was caught having an affair while his wife, Elizabeth, was battling cancer. Even worse, he fathered a child with Rielle Hunter, denied it, and then got pulled into an ugly cover-up involving campaign money, loyal aides, and public humiliation. Edwards had built his national brand around empathy, family, and “two Americas.” The scandal made him look like a fraud in both of them.

In each case, the details mattered. Hart looked reckless. Spitzer looked hypocritical. Edwards looked cruel. Sanford looked ridiculous. These were not identical scandals, and they did not produce identical punishments. Sanford eventually returned to Congress. Spitzer later tried, unsuccessfully, to rebuild a political career. Hart reentered public life in advisory roles. But each man absorbed real political damage because the scandal seemed to reveal something larger than sex.

That was the older model. Infidelity became politically dangerous when it could be translated into a public character flaw: bad judgment, abuse of power, hypocrisy, recklessness, cruelty, deception. The affair was just the spark for a larger conversation about fitness for office.

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Content Warning: This episode contains subject matter that is not suitable for children.

One day, instead of typing up something passive-aggressive, I asked him about it. I knew a lot about Lex at this point but had never understood how his job and his personality made it difficult for him to be super responsive.

Here’s the context that I missed: Lex has a job that keeps him “on” all day, talking to hundreds of people, managing a thousand emails a day. While I see texting as a nice break from work that lets me get bite-sized pieces of connection, he sees every unread text message as another item to check off his to-do list. His unreads climb into the hundreds, and the backlog itself becomes one more reason to dodge his phone. And our social batteries are very different, so the amount of communication we wanted from each other didn’t match either.

We all do this. We take how we want to be treated and assume it’s universal: that people want to communicate the way we do, that they share our capacities and priorities. And when those things don’t line up, we judge them for not meeting expectations they never knew about, or decide we’ve done something wrong.

When we feel ourselves getting it wrong, we go looking for a rule. Social media is full of them — Five Things to Ask a Partner, Four Things to Never Say to a Friend Who’s Struggling, Why You Should Never Answer a Text with a Call. A lot of it comes from a good place but is also confusing and contradictory. One post tells you to never ask how you can help, just bring dinner. The next tells you to never bring something without asking first. There’s no universal rule for how to treat people, because people aren’t universal. We reach for one anyway, because following a rule is easier than having the conversation.

Growing up, we’re all taught the importance of putting ourselves in other people’s shoes. And that is good advice for creating empathy. But it isn’t always great advice when it comes to supporting other people, because we assume that people want to be treated how we want to be treated. In reality, it’s better to treat people how they want to be treated.

When psychologists Tal Eyal, Mary Steffel, and Nicholas Epley ran 25 experiments on this, they found that imagining yourself in another person’s position didn’t make people better at reading what the other person felt. It just made them more confident they were right. The one thing that improved accuracy was asking. Which, I know, is an annoying answer.

One of the best ways to get information about someone is to ask them. There is no shortcut. So I want you to pick one person whose behavior has been bothering you and ask them something specific. Not “Are we good?” but “Do you prefer texting or are you more of a phone call person?” or “When something hard is going on, do you want me to check in or give you space?”

Then tell them the same kind of thing about yourself — how you like to be reached, what helps when you’re having a hard time, whether you want people to bring up conflict.

With Lex, this conversation took maybe ten minutes. He told me that if anything were actually wrong, he’d call. I told him I’d stop reading his silence as a verdict. It ended years of me keeping score in my head over a difference in wiring that had nothing to do with how he felt about me.

I know these conversations can feel embarrassing (or, with a partner, unromantic), but they make a huge difference in the quality of your relationships.

Welcome back to the weekend community open thread. Join the conversation in the comments below and share what’s on your mind, talk about what’s happening in the news, or anything you’d like. The floor is yours, and this is your space to connect with one another.

This community is for paid subscribers, and we’d love to have you join us! The goal is to create a safe and welcoming environment for everyone, which means speaking to and treating each other with respect in the comments.

Thanks for being part of our community!

— The Preamble Editorial Team

For something so woven into American life, 911 is surprisingly young — younger than color TV. It arrived after Alaska and Hawaii joined the union in 1959, and after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech of 1963.

Life before 911

Before 911, calling for emergency help was a genuine hassle. Until the 1960s, Americans relied on a patchwork of local seven-digit numbers — one for police, another for the fire department, another for an ambulance. You were expected to know them, or to go hunting through a phone book, which is not what you want to be doing when your kitchen is on fire or your uncle just fainted at a barbecue.

The push for something better came from the rising national alarm over crime in the 1960s. In 1967, a major federal panel — the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, appointed by Pres. Lyndon Johnson to study the American justice system from top to bottom — delivered its findings. Tucked into that sweeping report was a simple recommendation: there should be a single number people could call to reach the police, the fire department, or the ambulance in an emergency. The rationale was to save precious minutes hunting for a separate set of 7-digit numbers during an emergency.

The job of actually making that happen fell to the Federal Communications Commission, the agency that regulated the country’s phone lines. In the 1960s, AT&T was a near-monopoly that owned the wires, the switches, and the network itself. So in late 1967, the FCC sat down with AT&T and asked it to find a workable number, fast. AT&T came back with 911. It was short, easy to remember, and — conveniently — had never been used as an area code or local prefix, so it wouldn’t resemble a normal call. Which raises a good question: Why not 111? In those days, telephone switching equipment treated a leading “1” as the signal for a long-distance call, so a number starting with 1 could have confused the system. The 9 wasn’t an accident either — it sat far around the rotary dial, hard to dial by mistake.

And then there’s the question of who would actually pick up the phone when someone dialed 911. The calls would need to go to a public safety answering point, a call center where dispatchers would receive those calls and route them to the appropriate unit — police, fire, or ambulance services.

A surprisingly slow rollout

The first real 911 call was placed on Feb. 16, 1968, in Haleyville, AL — and it was a small company that beat the telecom giant to the punch. After AT&T announced its national 911 plan, B. W. Gallagher of the small Alabama Telephone Company decided to go there first, wiring up the new phone equipment within a week. The first call ran from the city hall to the police station. Haleyville has been bragging about it ever since: a highway sign reads “Where 911 Began,” and the original red rotary phone sits in a glass case in City Hall.

But despite Alabama’s pioneering system, the rest of the country didn’t start dialing 911 right away. For one primary reason: money. Installing the actual equipment and building the call centers was left to state and local governments, and many smaller or rural areas either couldn’t afford it or decided it wasn’t worth the cost. And the upgraded version — “enhanced” 911, which automatically shows a dispatcher the caller’s number and location — was a separate, pricier add-on.

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Congress didn’t formally make 911 the nation’s universal emergency number until 1999. The 911 system had been built for landlines, and the explosion of mobile phones in the late 1990s disrupted that model and forced federal action. The 1999 Wireless Communications and Public Safety Act formally established 911 as the single nationwide emergency number for both landlines and cellphones.

According to the National Emergency Number Association, Americans place an estimated 240 million 911 calls a year — more than 1,200 every minute — and most now come from cellphones rather than landlines. Modern dispatch centers can often locate callers by GPS, and many areas now accept emergency texts — useful when speaking out loud isn’t safe.

As 911 became the number that people associated with needing help, they began to use it for a host of non-emergency problems they were trying to solve. For example, in 2009, a Florida woman named Latreasa Goodman called 911 three times because a McDonald’s had run out of Chicken McNuggets and wouldn’t refund her money. (She later said she was embarrassed by the media attention.)

But here’s the twist that makes those calls worth thinking about. In 2019, a dispatcher in Oregon, OH, took what sounded like another silly one — a woman calmly ordering a pizza. The dispatcher nearly brushed it off, but then Tim Teneyck — on the job for 14 years — realized it was a call for help, according to the Oregon police chief. The woman couldn’t speak freely because her abuser was in the room, and “ordering a pizza” was the only way she could ask for help without tipping him off. Police arrived with their sirens off, and the man was arrested.

It worked because that one dispatcher was paying close attention. After the incident, local dispatchers began to receive training for coded messages and active listening.

Beyond America

The rest of the world has its own share of emergency service numbers, and the sheer variety of them is interesting. In the United Kingdom, the number is 999. It launched in London in June 1937. It came out of tragedy: a 1935 house fire on a London street killed five women, and a government committee concluded Britain needed a single, instantly recognizable number. India now has a single national emergency number like 911. It’s 112, but traditional emergency numbers are still in use: 100 for police, 101 for fire, and 102 or 108 for ambulances. Across the European Union, 112 works as a single continent-wide number.

Huh, you might think: if a leading “1” was such a problem, how do India and much of Europe use 112 today? The “1” trouble was likely a quirk of America’s 1960s telephone equipment, not a universal rule. By the time the EU and India adopted 112 — decades later — phone networks had gone digital, and a leading “1” no longer carried any special meaning.

The numbers differ, but one aspect is universal: When someone is in crisis, somebody picks up the phone. And in the end, that is all that matters.

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This article was originally published by In Pursuit.

During her tenure as First Lady (1809-1817), Dolley Payne Todd Madison was one of the most well-known people in the new United States and certainly the most well-known woman. Her fame persisted through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and continues into the present day. When we think of Dolley, the word “hostess” crops up repeatedly to explain her achievements, most notably her large, weekly receptions. It is all too easy to dismiss her just as the organizer of fabulous parties. If we place Dolley’s social work in the context of the larger political culture of the early United States, however, we see its importance: Dolley carefully constructed a social world that became an unofficial sphere where friends and enemies could resolve some of their differences and translate political ideas into concrete action.

During the American Revolution, male politicians determined that the nation’s new government would be based on a theory called “republicanism.” In contrast to Old World courts ruled by powerful kings, like “The Sun King” Louis XIV of France, the founders of the United States envisioned a weak government that depended on virtuous legislators who were united in pursuit of the common good. A side effect of republicanism’s assumption of a single common good was that any difference of opinion was seen as traitorous. In the years after independence, Americans discovered that their own inability to tolerate disagreement was proving disastrous for a nation that had barely begun. Cracks began to appear during George Washington’s presidency as Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson battled over the meaning of the nation’s common good. In this “all or nothing” atmosphere any kind of cooperation with “the enemy” was regarded as the deepest betrayal. No wonder congressmen quarreled among themselves, sometimes fighting to the death.

As early as 1800, it was clear that a government based on a theory that all the governing men could agree on a single common good was not working. Effective politics requires compromise and cooperation. In the glare of the official spotlight, congressmen could not be seen making alliances or reaching across the aisle. This is where the unofficial sphere comes into play. The social sphere—a drawing room, a parlor, an intimate gathering, or a large party—provided opportunities for connection that republican political theory made nearly impossible.

Unofficial spaces have a long history in kingly courts and even presidential ones, but the political culture of Washington City needed them even more urgently. Even before James Madison took office in 1809, Dolley set her sights on the Executive Mansion, the setting for her most influential creation—an unofficial sphere for a new political system. James’s predecessor, Thomas Jefferson, had deliberately discouraged large, inclusive events; in his time, the Executive Mansion was a lonely house on a hill. In contrast, Dolley and architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe designed lavish rooms intended for entertaining large groups. Before her restructuring, there was no one place in the capital city that could hold all the official men. Dolley made sure that her rooms could entertain everyone in town.

Her most notable innovation was her weekly receptions. They were so popular that attendees called them “squeezes.” Every Wednesday evening, anyone in Washington City was invited to socialize in a freewheeling atmosphere much like a modern cocktail party. At times, up to five hundred people squeezed into Dolley’s dazzling Oval Room.

In the soft candlelight of “Mrs. Madison’s Wednesday nights,” the tense debates on the floor of Congress melted away. Using the distractions of food, wine, and music, legislators could propose, negotiate, and make deals. Quite quickly, the official men of Washington saw the political opportunities offered by the drawing rooms. For instance, if a politician had a visitor or constituent in town, what better way to impress them by a visit to meet the president and the famous Dolley?

Once a week, anyone in town had access to James Madison. Never before or since has a president been as accessible. But perhaps even more importantly, all the men of the government had access to each other. Consequently, a lot of “meat and potatoes” politicking went on during those Wednesday night festivities, including the gathering and dispensing of information, especially about the prospect of a second war with Great Britain.

Access and information are the lifeblood of politics. Several categories of political work that happened at the drawing rooms became institutionalized in the two-party system, including patronage and lobbying. Politicians were not the only ones to take advantage of this unofficial opportunity. Anyone seeking a job, looking to promote a project, or presenting a petition for a piece of legislation knew where to go to further their cause.

Part of the power of the squeezes was their regularity: they were an institution. People could count on them as “a place to see and be seen,” as one astute observer put it. These events became so important to the workings of the government that on more than one occasion, Dolley left her sickbed to preside. Even the death of the vice president, George Clinton, did not stop the party. Dolley had created a political center, important to everyone who was anyone. Fittingly, the Executive Mansion acquired a nickname: “the White House.”

The “unofficial sphere” of women and social events also served deeper social and psychological purposes. Congressmen might rail at each other in the halls of government, dueling and fighting in the streets, but at Mrs. Madison’s squeezes they had to behave. Consequently, the lawmakers got to know each other as human beings. Women in political families forged social relationships across the aisle and worked together on various charity and patronage projects. It was hard to cast one’s political opponent as the embodiment of evil if you shared a drink with him and if your wives and families socialized with each other regularly. Washington lawmakers began to understand that, even though someone might disagree about a political issue, they could still have the public good at heart. By being in company together on Dolley’s common ground, men could begin to build their own common ground.

Bit by bit, under Dolley Madison’s watchful eye, members of the government began building a ruling class and shoring up what would become a two-party system, a hallmark of our democracy. Before the word, let alone the concept, of bipartisanship entered American politics, Dolley Madison, like a master politician, understood that working together had to be part of the system. These early leaders were learning how to collaborate, how to be prudent rulers when they were in power, and how to be an informed dissenter when they were not. They discovered ways they could foster their own political and party identities without tearing the nation apart.

These are the skills that would prove to be crucial in later decades when the United States became a modern nation, a power player in the world. By the 1820s, the founding men’s experiment in “pure republicanism” had given way to an American democracy with two parties and a strengthening federal government. That this transition happened smoothly in the new capital city was thanks to Dolley’s efforts to create spaces and opportunities to politic in strikingly modern ways.

The flaw in the founders’ plans was to imagine that political business should take place only in the official sphere. The “official sphere” encompasses political decisions and actions. Official spheres are public; think of press releases and congressional sessions. The unofficial sphere is about the process of politics and is often situated in more private spaces. Serious consideration of Dolley Madison’s efforts demonstrate that the healthiest political system must have a place where politicians can think creatively about political solutions and to see each other as human beings.

Catherine Allgor, Ph.D., is President Emerita of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

In Pursuit is a landmark initiative of More Perfect, a bipartisan alliance of 43 Presidential Centers, National Archives Foundation, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Karsh Institute for Democracy at the University of Virginia, and more than 100 organizations working together to protect and renew our democracy as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and beyond.

SCOTUS Backs FCC Against AT&T, Verizon

The Supreme Court ruled today that the Federal Communications Commission can fine companies without first giving them a jury trial. The 8–1 decision upheld more than $100 million in penalties against AT&T and Verizon.

In the opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that FCC “forfeiture orders” — fines assessed through internal FCC proceedings rather than a trial — do not violate the Constitution’s Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial, because they are not final. A company can refuse to pay, which would then force the government to file a collection action in federal court. That collection action would then entitle the company to a jury trial and a fresh review of the case.

The FCC fined AT&T $57 million and Verizon $46.9 million in 2024, finding they failed to protect customers’ location data. Both companies paid under protest, then challenged the FCC’s procedures, arguing that the Constitution required a jury trial before the agency could impose such fines.

Justice Clarence Thomas dissented from the majority’s decision, arguing the companies had no assurance they would ever get the jury trial they were entitled to.

House Passes Resolution to Limit Trump’s Iran War Powers

The GOP-led House passed a resolution yesterday seeking to limit President Trump’s ability to continue the war with Iran. Four Republicans joined nearly all Democrats in the 215–208 vote. The measure directs Trump to withdraw US forces from the conflict unless Congress votes to declare war or authorize military action.

The War Powers Resolution of 1973 requires a president to end hostilities within 60 days unless Congress declares war or authorizes force. That deadline passed on May 1. The Trump administration has claimed it does not apply because hostilities ended when a ceasefire with Iran took effect in April, though the ceasefire has repeatedly been violated by both sides.

The Senate advanced its own resolution last month but has not held a final vote. The House measure now heads there as well.

The House passed its measure as a concurrent resolution, which Congress uses to state its position. It still needs the Senate to pass it as well — but even if the Senate does, it would not go to the president for a signature. Its legal force is disputed. A 1983 Supreme Court ruling found that Congress’s actions are binding only if they clear both chambers and are presented to the president. The Senate is separately advancing its own version. If enacted, it will carry the force of law.

Trump to Nominate Blanche as Attorney General

President Trump said he will nominate acting attorney general Todd Blanche to lead the Justice Department permanently.

Trump announced the decision at a White House dinner yesterday evening and praised Blanche’s work as acting attorney general. He said he would formally submit the nomination today. The post requires Senate confirmation.

Blanche has run the department since his boss, Pam Bondi, was ousted as attorney general in April. He previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer in several criminal cases.

As acting attorney general, Blanche has pursued Trump’s priorities. The department secured an indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, one of Trump’s perceived enemies. Blanche also defended a settlement that shields Trump, his family, and their businesses from certain IRS audits.

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I’m so excited to share that my new children’s book, We Are Mighty, is here, and the response has been amazing — it’s a New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller! It tells the true stories of twelve real people from America’s past — some famous, most not — who saw what needed doing and did it. It’s a book about courage, hope, and the quiet ways ordinary people can change the world. If you’d like to share that message with a child you love, I’d be so honored for you to buy a copy.

Senate Advances Immigration Bill Without Ballroom Funds

Senate Republicans dropped $1 billion in funding tied to President Trump’s White House ballroom from an immigration enforcement bill.

The Senate voted 53–46 yesterday to begin debate on the roughly $70 billion bill, which funds ICE and the Customs and Border Patrol. Republicans are moving it through reconciliation, a process that lets a simple majority pass a budget bill and bypass the 60-vote threshold needed to defeat a filibuster.

The bill has been stalled for weeks over two obstacles. The Senate parliamentarian ruled that the ballroom money could not stay in a reconciliation bill, which meant that keeping it in would have let Democrats force a 60-vote threshold. Several Republicans also objected to the separate $1.8 billion Justice Department “anti-weaponization fund” to compensate people who say they were wrongly prosecuted by the federal government. The chamber advanced the bill only after acting attorney general Todd Blanche told a House panel earlier this week that the administration would drop the fund. A series of amendment votes is expected before a final vote.

The amendment votes are taking place during a Senate “vote-a-rama,” an often marathon series, sometimes all night, of rapid-fire votes on proposed changes to a budget reconciliation bill.

Trump Order Strips Protections From 8,000 Federal Workers

President Trump signed an executive order yesterday making it easier to fire about 8,000 federal workers.

The order moves senior employees in policy-related jobs into a new category, Schedule Policy/Career, formerly known as Schedule F. Workers in the new category lose the right to appeal firings and other personnel actions to the Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent board that hears federal employee disputes. They can effectively be fired at will.

Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees federal hiring, said the change is about accountability. He said employees can hold any political views, but those views cannot interfere with carrying out the administration’s policies.

The change faces several lawsuits, including one from the advocacy group Democracy Forward, which argues the order exceeds the president’s authority, violates federal civil service laws, and strips workers of due-process protections under the Constitution and the Administrative Procedure Act.

Israel and Lebanon Agree to Renew Ceasefire

Israel and Lebanon agreed yesterday to renew their ceasefire after US-mediated talks in Washington. The agreement, reached after two days of negotiations, also creates pilot security zones in southern Lebanon.

The intended security zones will be placed under the exclusive control of the Lebanese Armed Forces and off limits to the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah, according to a joint statement from the US, Israel, and Lebanon.

The ceasefire depends on Hezbollah halting all attacks and withdrawing from the South Litani Sector — the area in southern Lebanon between the Israeli–Lebanese border and the Litani River.

Hezbollah was not part of the talks. Hours after the deal was announced, Hezbollah struck northern Israel, and Israel retaliated with strikes in southern Lebanon.

A halt to Israeli attacks in Lebanon is one of Iran’s key demands in its own talks with the US on ending the war between them. Iran has insisted any deal with the US must also address the strikes in Lebanon.

John Bolton to Plead Guilty in Classified Information Case

Former national security adviser John Bolton has agreed to plead guilty to a felony count of retaining classified national security information. He has also agreed to pay a $2.25 million fine under a plea agreement with federal prosecutors, according to multiple news reports.

Bolton, who served as national security adviser during President Trump’s first term before becoming one of his most outspoken critics, was indicted last year on 18 counts related to the alleged retention and transmission of classified information.

Prosecutors alleged that Bolton shared sensitive government information, including diary-style notes containing classified material, with family members over several years. The notes reportedly included information from intelligence briefings, meetings with foreign leaders, and other national security matters.

The charges against Bolton carry a potential sentence of up to five years behind bars, though the agreement could allow him to avoid prison. Any sentence must be approved by a federal judge.

A hearing is scheduled for June 26 in federal court in Maryland.

Protests Continue Over Kushner-Linked Resort in Albania

Thousands of Albanians have protested in the capital, Tirana, this week against a luxury resort linked to Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law.

The $1.6 billion project, led by Kushner’s investment firm Affinity Partners, would put hotel complexes on the uninhabited island of Sazan and along the protected Vjosa-Narta coast in southern Albania.

Protestors oppose development because of the Vjosa-Narta wetland, which is home to flamingos, seals, and sea turtle nesting sites. It is also a stopover for migratory birds. Protesters and environmental groups want construction halted, citing threats to the area’s ecosystems. The dispute escalated after developers fenced off public access to a local beach.

Albania’s anti-corruption prosecutors have opened an investigation into how the land was acquired and sold to investors. The Albanian government has said the project will boost tourism, create jobs, and support the country’s economic development.

Glaude also poetically weaves historical threads and voices throughout his new book. We get to know American stories like that of Moses Gordon. Gordon was enslaved until he escaped to Philadelphia and lived free for ten whole years, enjoying his divine right to live and pursue happiness by marrying his love and raising a family. When he was recaptured thanks to the Fugitive Slave Act, Moses chose to drown himself rather than live as a slave again.

I spoke with Glaude about how the anniversary should inform politics and activism. We also spoke about his past political stances (such as not supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016) and how to balance the political demands of citizenship with the challenges of life.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Natasha S. Alford: You recently headed to Mississippi in response to the attack on voting rights in the South and across the country. Talk to me about what you saw and how that mobilization impacts your assessment of America right now.

Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: It was an extraordinary experience. On a rainy Wednesday in Jackson, MS, thousands of people showed up at the convention center and they’re upset, they’re angry. But that anger isn’t manifested in a simple expression or a nostalgic longing for a movement in the past. It is really a kind of preface to an ongoing organizing effort and mobilizing effort.

What I saw very clearly is that Black Mississippi has an infrastructure to do exactly what needs to be done. They use protest as a mobilizing effort, as a kind way of dramatizing the event, dramatizing education needed in order to position themselves to respond. They said this is a math problem. We have to determine what is the exact number of voter registrations that we need — how many do we need to get registered, and how many did we need to turn out in each county?

So, I came away from Mississippi inspired. Mississippi is always a metaphor for the country, predictions of the nation. It’s such a beautiful state, and it is so cool at the same time. I was on fire as I got on the plane to come back to New Jersey.

Alford: As you talk about the granularity, the skill, all that went into the organizing, how do you see this movement in relation to the Democratic Party? What do you think the party can learn from what you saw?

Glaude: Congressman Benny Thompson was there, and Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, was there. Jonathan Jackson was there from Illinois. So it’s clear to me that the Democratic Party will benefit from the surge of Black voters, from the turnout of low propensity Black voters as they ramp up the underground effort.

But I think the motivation isn’t reducible to the aims and ends of the party. I think that motivation is really bound up with an understanding of Black political power. That will impact how the Democratic Party moves forward. We can no longer be a captive electorate. The party can’t just take our support for granted. Because our rate of turnout matters in terms of victory or defeat.

So, if we’re going to do any kind of autopsy of what happened in the presidential campaign, and we’re going to do an analysis of what’s happening throughout this house right now, it has everything to do with how Black people orient themselves in the political process and how the Democratic Party will orient itself to Black people.

Alford: At one point, you took a public stance saying that you were not supportive of Hillary Clinton during her 2016 run. You explained essentially this idea of wanting more from Democrats and not wanting the same.

There’s been a segment of the internet that has tried to hold you to account for that position and connect it to the election of Trump. How do you respond to that?

Glaude: You know, to be honest with you, it was hurtful. Some people said that my anger was performative, that I’m the kind of intellectual that performs for the white gaze. It was painful in a certain way. But I also understand the internet for what it is. It’s a very kind of manufactured environment, and the idea is to shut you down.

One thing I could say, and I’ve admitted it over and over again, is that I overestimated white America. I didn’t think white America would elect someone so grossly unqualified to be the president of the United States. I should have known better. But I’m not going to apologize for wanting better for Black people.

But then you say, Wait a minute, wait a minute. What you’re trying to argue is that Black voters were supposed to turn out for Hillary Clinton at the same level that they turned out for Barack Obama? That was historic, that turnout. And when you look at the data, we turned out, we actually returned to 2004 numbers in terms of the turnout for Hillary Clinton.

Alford: We know that Black people were insisting upon our freedom and our humanity from the start and having white allies and people who changed their hearts. That was all part of this larger puzzle of factors that advanced legislation to end slavery. In 2016, “allyship” was the big buzzword. What do you think allyship looks like right now?

Glaude: I think we need to interrogate what we mean by “allyship.” If you are committed to justice without exception, then we’re all in this battle together. Solidarities aren’t presupposed. They’re made. They go in and out of existence all the time. That’s at the heart of politics. We have to build solidaristic movements across groups, across various interests.

In pursuit of justice, in light of the problems that we confront, I think we think of allyship and bind it up with philanthropic enterprise as a kind of charitable gesture. In the book, I have a chapter entitled “Freedom Is a White Man’s Gift.” And because somebody believes that they own freedom, that they can give it and take it away, oftentimes a fight for justice presumes that some people are doing something for us as opposed to with us.

So I think we need to get clear on our conception of justice without exception. We need to understand that freedom doesn’t belong to any one of us to give or to take away, right? It is a practice that we evidence in solidaristic efforts to bring about a better world for us and our children and our child’s children.

Once we get that as the basic premise, we can go about doing the work together, it seems to me, but we’re not charity cases. We’ve never been charity cases. “Don’t give me alms,” Frederick Douglass said. “I want justice without exception.”

Alford: I remember I was getting chills when I was reading the part of your book where you document Frederick Douglass saying, “What happens when Northern whites and Southern whites start to bond again?” It reminded me so much of 2016, when there were the white folks who were like, “We want to be your allies!”

But then that 2024 election came and, for some, it was just easier to be white Americans as their primary identity. Despite all of that investment in allyship and moving the country forward, people just retreated. I’m sure you thought of that as you thought of Douglass’s speech.

Glaude: Of course. In the book, particularly near the end, I’m echoing Douglass in 1875. So I’m speaking to the country in 2025 on the eve of 2026, right?

I remember writing it in December because it was a manic process. Something possessed me, Natasha. I wrote the book in nine months. So I’m writing and I’m speaking, trying to call attention to what we’re going to experience come July 4, in many ways trying to pull Douglass’s voice in my own to speak to this moment, because we know what they’re going to do come July 4.

We know that they’re going to try to render us invisible or make us play bit parts in the story of the country. But one of the arguments I make in the book is that even as America is trying to tell itself this fake story, this storybook version of itself, we’re always speaking back. We never allow that story to stand on its own.

You know, just six years ago, we were in the midst of a racial reckoning.

They renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza. Folk were doing all of this stuff and in the blink of an eye, look where we are. And the only thing you can say is that either folk were lying or folk didn’t have any place to land with their rage. So they just submitted to business as usual. And so I’m trying to capture that in the book. The book is angry, but it’s also loving.

We’re in this 250th year and we have to raise our babies in this again.

Alford: Do you think we have to tap into that anger? On social media, people are expressing that they can’t stay enraged because they’re trying to live.

But I almost feel that the anger is necessary to wake up and to realize what is happening, what is being taken from us. It’s almost as if there was a certain group who understood the stakes when the news hit and then the other folks just sort of kept going with business as usual.

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Glaude: This is true. It’s hard because you still have to bury your dead. You have to take care of your old, aging parents. You have to make sure your kids are doing okay. Life is still “lifing” in the midst of all of this. But I’ve been blessed, Natasha, over the last decade to teach my James Baldwin seminar during the Trump years. I teach his nonfiction, and I did it this year as I was writing the book.

There was a student who was so earnest. She described her vexed relationship to the country. One minute she loves the nation, the next minute she loathes it. And she was trying to find resources in Baldwin’s notion of love over the course of his entire career. And she dropped this line on me that just hit me so hard that I wrote it, I used it in the book. She said, “Maybe hope isn’t what we need to reach. Maybe we just simply need to tell the truth with love lit by rage.”

Tell the truth with love, lit by rage.

Alford: If you are writing an additional chapter for America, U.S.A., 50 years from now, what describes how Americans acted in this moment to actually preserve and recreate democracy?

Glaude: At the end of the book, I resist the temptation to offer solutions. I say that we simply need to make a choice. Either we’re going to be a beacon of freedom or we’re going to be a white republic.

Now we can debate what being a beacon of freedom is, but we can’t be a beacon of freedom and a white republic without contradiction. So, 50 years from now, I hope that I’m able to write in an afterword that we made a choice to finally rid ourselves of the contradiction.

That we deconstructed the idea of “white America” that has distorted and disfigured our democratic lives from the founding to now. Now, what that will look like in terms of policy, what it will look like in terms of on-the-ground politics, I’m not sure. But what I do know is that if we make that choice, it will free us from the shackles that have bound us since the nation’s inception.

Alford: You noted that you wrote this book while your mother was battling cancer. What did it teach you about the balance between your citizen duty and personal duty as a son to be doing both at the same time?

Glaude: Oh, it’s such a great question, such a hard question. You know, in the midst of the political matter, life still “lifes.” You can use it as a verb, right? We still have to live.

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That means we’re not only tending to aging parents or parents who used to… How can I put this, Natasha? I thought my parents were invincible. And to live long enough to see that they’re shaky, that they’re not as healthy as they once were, that they’re vulnerable, and to be witness to it...

At the same time we have to endure the madness of our politics, you still have to pay your bills. You still have to take your kids to college. You have to do all the things that life demands. But you can’t put your head in the sand. Even though life still goes on, you have to address the circumstance of one’s living because it has an impact on how you, in fact, tend to the people you care for.

There are these concentric circles. There are the people right in front of you. There’s a circumstance that impacts the way in which you tend to them. So it matters with regards to health care policy. It matters in terms of the local hospitals. It matters with terms of insurance. It matters in terms of the property tax. It matters in terms of the grocery bill, because they’re on fixed income. You know what I mean? So these policy realities impact the very way in which we care for the people we love.

You know what? I’m so thankful that my father was a postman for 30-plus years. He was the second African American hired at the post office in Pascagoula, Mississippi. And he was a shop steward. He led the local union. And they had wonderful insurance. And that insurance is helping them in this time of need. Think about that in relation to the current health care crisis.

So that’s a way of saying, you got to tend to your folk. You got to care for them. You got to pull them close, but you can’t put your head in the sand because the policy decisions that are being made will impact how you tend to them.

Justice Department Drops “Anti-Weaponization Fund”

The Trump administration is abandoning a proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” after facing bipartisan criticism in Congress.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told a House appropriations subcommittee yesterday that the Justice Department is “not moving forward with the fund, period.”

The fund had been created to pay people who say they were unfairly targeted by past administrations. It grew out of a “settlement” of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns during his first term. The same “settlement” bars the IRS from reviewing the past tax returns of Trump, his family and his businesses. Blanche said that part has not changed.

The fund had already been challenged in court. A federal judge in Virginia temporarily blocked it. In Florida, US District Judge Kathleen Williams reopened Trump’s IRS case after 35 retired federal judges argued the suit was a “fraud on the court,” and she ordered Trump’s lawyers to respond by June 12. It is not clear right now whether those cases will proceed.

Primary Results

Two major California primary races remained undecided, with a Republican and two Democrats vying for a top-two finish in the governor’s primary, and the race to challenge Los Angeles’s incumbent mayor yet to be called.

Republican Steve Hilton and Democrat Xavier Becerra have emerged as the leading candidates in California’s open primary, where the top two finishers advance regardless of party, with Democrat Tom Steyer third. Becerra is a former US health secretary and state attorney general; Hilton is a Trump-endorsed former Fox News host; and Steyer is a billionaire investor. Votes are still being counted.

In Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass, a Democrat, advanced to the general election in November, but the identity of her challenger remains undecided. Republican Spencer Pratt, a former reality TV star, led for second place in early returns, with Democratic city councilmember Nithya Raman gaining as late ballots were counted.

Scott Pelley Fired from 60 Minutes

CBS News fired veteran correspondent Scott Pelley yesterday, shortly after he criticized the program’s new leadership at a staff meeting.

Pelley, who spent 37 years at CBS News and joined 60 Minutes in 2004, was told by newly installed executive producer Nick Bilton that he was terminated “for cause effective immediately.” Bilton, a former tech journalist, wrote that Pelley’s opposition to the show’s new direction was evident.

In a meeting earlier this week, Pelley challenged recent firings at the program and accused CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss of “murdering” the show.

In a statement, Pelley said the network’s new owner was casting the program aside to “curry… favor” with the Trump administration. Paramount Skydance is seeking the administration’s approval for its proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which includes CNN, a frequent target of Trump. Pelley also said new management had told him to “inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.”

Newsbreak

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Supreme Court Lets Alabama Use New Map for 2026

The Supreme Court is allowing Alabama to use a congressional map that lower courts found intentionally discriminated against Black voters.

In an unsigned 6–3 emergency decision yesterday, the court blocked a lower-court order that had required Alabama to use a court-drawn map. The majority said federal courts should not “alter the election rules on the eve of an election” and that the lower court had wrongly inserted itself into Alabama’s preparation for its 2026 elections. The Supreme Court also said the lower court had misread the court’s recent ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which struck down a second majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana, ruling it was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

The 2023 map, drawn by Republicans, leaves one majority-Black district instead of two. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented, writing that the majority “double[d] down on chaos” and disregarded findings that the map intentionally discriminated. Alabama has set a special congressional primary for August 11 under the new map.

DOJ Investigates George Santos for Insider Trading

Former Rep. George Santos is under federal investigation for alleged insider trading on the prediction market Kalshi.

Regulators are examining bets he placed on whether he would attend President Trump’s State of the Union address in February. Santos said publicly that he planned to go, but then didn’t show up. He didn’t disclose that he had bet on Kalshi that he would not attend. Prediction markets let users wager real money on future events such as elections, sports, and weather.

Kalshi flagged the trades, froze his account, and referred the matter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees these markets, and to the Justice Department. Both are investigating.

Santos, a New York Republican, was expelled from Congress in December 2023. He was sentenced in April 2025 to more than seven years in prison for wire fraud and aggravated identity theft tied to his 2022 campaign. He served less than four months before Trump commuted his sentence.

Iran and US Trade New Strikes; Kuwait Airport Hit

The US and Iran exchanged fresh strikes around the Persian Gulf today. An Iranian drone attack damaged Kuwait’s main airport, killing one person and injuring 63. Kuwait briefly closed the airport before resuming operations.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said it targeted US forces in the region, including the headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet, in retaliation for earlier US strikes. CENTCOM said US forces downed a wave of Iranian drones aimed at troops in Kuwait.

The US military said it then struck an Iranian military ground-control station on Qeshm Island, in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s foreign ministry called the US strikes a ceasefire violation.

Pentagon Hires Convicted Rioter

The Pentagon has appointed a man convicted in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol to a position in an office that oversees highly classified military operations.

Elias Irizarry, who was 19 at the time of the Capitol riot, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge related to his participation in the attack. A picture released by the Justice Department showed Irizarry looking over a wall outside the Capitol on the day of the attack.

Two people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post, which first reported the appointment, that positions in the office typically require top-secret security clearances.

Defending the appointment, acting Pentagon press secretary Joel Valdez described Irizarry as “a qualified, patriotic young professional” and said the Defense Department was “proud to have him as a political appointee.” The unit where Irizarry has been assigned — the Office of Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, irregular warfare and counterterrorism section — oversees special operations forces in counterterrorism and special reconnaissance.

FBI Kills Man Holding Hostages in California

The FBI fatally shot a man early this morning who had held 10 people hostage inside a downtown Bakersfield, CA, building after a roughly 12-hour standoff.

All the hostages were freed and none was harmed, the Bakersfield Police Department said.

Authorities said Anthony Scott Searles-Harris, 41, was an Army veteran and a convicted sex offender.

The standoff began yesterday afternoon when police responded to a bomb threat at the four-story building, which houses a Chase Bank branch and school district offices. Police said the man barricaded himself inside with several people. Two hostages were released yesterday during negotiations. The suspect’s identity and motive have not been released, and authorities have not said how many people were held.

Last month, the Justice Department announced a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund,” born from the settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. According to a Justice Department statement, the fund would have the power to issue “formal apologies” to and compensate people who claim they were victims of politically motivated government investigations. In exchange for dropping their lawsuit, President Trump and his family would receive such an apology.

The backlash to the fund was immediate. And after weeks of public criticism, lawsuits, and a temporary block by a federal judge, yesterday Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that the administration would not be moving forward with it (though other key elements of the settlement likely still stand, including immunity from prosecution by the government for Trump and his family). But the retreat misses the point. The fund’s mere announcement did more work than the fund itself ever would have.

The fund’s real purpose

The unusual origins of the fund initially fueled concerns about corruption and political patronage. Critics argued that the arrangement would have been an unprecedented blurring of the line between public policy and private grievance, transforming a settlement involving the president’s own claims into a vehicle for advancing a broader political agenda — and that the agenda was clear.

While the administration insisted the fund would have been open to anyone, the intended constituency was never seriously in doubt. Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys chairman convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role on January 6, said he’d expected to seek between $2 million and $5 million. Before the fund was canceled, hundreds of other pardoned rioters were also expected to file claims.

This was never simply about money. It was never about mere loyalty, or grift, or rewarding the base. Those things are present, but they are not the architecture. The fund’s deeper purpose was to accomplish something pardons cannot: to reframe not just what happened to January 6 defendants, but what January 6 itself was.

A pardon is mercy. It forgives punishment while leaving the underlying verdict intact. Compensation is something categorically different. It suggests the prosecution itself was wrong — that the people charged weren’t criminals who received clemency, but victims who deserve restitution.

If you accept the argument that the prosecutions were unjust, then what the defendants did wasn’t wrong. If what they did wasn’t wrong, then January 6 wasn’t an attack on democratic certification — it was a legitimate act of resistance by people who believed, with cause, that the election had been stolen. The fund wasn’t just meant to rehabilitate the rioters, it intended to retroactively validate the premise that sent them to Washington in the first place.

This is the rewrite the administration appears to be actually after. In pursuit of the same goal, the Justice Department has already mass-deleted its own news releases about January 6 prosecutions that took place during the Biden administration, including cases involving defendants who drove electroshock devices into officers’ necks and attacked police with metal flagpoles. The erasure is part of the same project, which asks Americans to see those defendants differently: not as people who committed crimes and later received clemency, but as people who were wronged by the government.

But the narrative is difficult to reconcile with the record established in court. More than 1,000 January 6 defendants pleaded guilty. Many admitted entering restricted areas, obstructing Congress, or assaulting police officers. Some expressed remorse. Others acknowledged they had been swept up in false claims about a stolen election. In the months and years after the attack, a number of defendants publicly stated that they believed they had been misled by Trump’s election-fraud narrative.

That same narrative extended beyond the Capitol attack, and the administration has gone to bat for others who took up his cause.

Trump has championed Tina Peters, the Colorado county clerk convicted of breaching election equipment in pursuit of voter-fraud claims. Because her conviction was a state crime beyond his clemency powers, Trump issued a symbolic pardon and cut hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to pressure Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, to commute her sentence. Polis ultimately did, and Trump celebrated on social media: “FREE TINA PETERS!”

After being released this week, Peters immediately resumed promoting claims that the election had been stolen. The pattern is the same: cast the prosecuted as persecuted, and the prosecution itself becomes evidence of the conspiracy. The legal system didn’t hold wrongdoers accountable. It targeted patriots.

The same logic has animated Trump’s attacks on election officials who rejected his fraud claims and his continuing insistence that the 2020 election was stolen. Viewed in that context, the anti-weaponization fund was not simply about January 6. It was part of a broader effort to vindicate the movement that emerged from Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election.

Compensation as counter-narrative

This past weekend, former Vice President Mike Pence accused the administration of using the fund to whitewash the history of January 6.

His personal experience of that day undoubtedly colors his opinion: during the Capitol attack, rioters erected a gallows outside the Capitol and chanted “Hang Mike Pence” after he refused Trump’s demands to block certification of the election. Secret Service agents rushed Pence and his family to safety as the mob moved through the building.

“I mean, it’s deeply offensive to me,” he told CBS in an interview, “that you could have a fund that could even possibly compensate people who assaulted police officers or vandalized the Capitol on January 6.”

His objection cut to something precise: governments compensate victims of terrorism, discrimination, and wrongful imprisonment. They do not compensate people convicted of attacking democratic institutions — unless the point is to argue, officially, that those institutions were the actual wrongdoers.

The officers who defended the Capitol that day understand this with particular clarity. Harry Dunn and Daniel Hodges — both injured during the assault, both plaintiffs in a lawsuit to block the fund — argue that compensating people who attacked the Capitol violates the constitutional prohibition on using federal funds to pay debts incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States. But their objection goes beyond the legal argument. They were confronting a specific inversion: that the people who attacked them might collect government checks certifying that they were the ones who suffered.

That is not reconciliation. It is the state endorsing a counter-history years in the making. It moved through various phases — denial, then minimization, then the beginning of the reversal, with Trump describing convicted January 6 federal defendants as “hostages“ throughout the 2024 campaign, casting them as casualties of a corrupt system.

The fund represented the next phase: material and institutional confirmation. When the Justice Department itself creates a compensation mechanism for January 6 defendants, it is not merely making a political argument. It is inserting that argument into the machinery of government, giving it the weight of official policy.

The irony — and symbolism — are hard to miss. The administration argues that the justice system was weaponized against its supporters. Yet one of the defining features of Trump’s second term has been the use of government power against many of the officials who investigated January 6 and Trump himself.

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FBI personnel involved in January 6 investigations have faced scrutiny, reassignment, or dismissal. Career Justice Department officials connected to Trump-related investigations have been pushed out. Former prosecutors, investigators, and public officials involved in cases touching Trump have become targets of new inquiries, public attacks, and demands for accountability. By targeting the investigators themselves, the administration is completing the inversion: if the people who built the cases were the wrongdoers, then the people they prosecuted were, by definition, the victims.

The backlash

The response to the fund made clear that the administration’s message was coming through unmistakably — and many weren’t on board.

Ethics watchdogs condemned it. Democratic lawmakers introduced legislation to kill it outright. A federal judge temporarily blocked it entirely.

And, critically, the opposition crossed party lines. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he was “not a big fan” and did not “see a purpose for that,” while Republican senators warned Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche that the fund threatened to become a political liability.

Even some of the fund’s most obvious beneficiaries expressed ambivalence. Jacob Angeli-Chansley, the so-called QAnon Shaman, called it corrupt. The rewrite project had been made too visible, too transactional. But that’s different from saying the underlying narrative was rejected.

In fact, during his remarks stating that the fund wouldn’t move forward, Blanche still doubled down on justifying the idea behind it: “The reasons for the fund—it’s something that President Trump talked about for a long time, which is the fact that there were a lot of people in this country who had their government weaponized against them,” he said. “The reasons for the fund ... remain as important as [they] were before.”

Indeed, though the fund itself didn’t survive, a signal has already been sent — to the movement, to future actors, and to the historical record. The issue was never really about $1.776 billion. It was about who gets to write the meaning of what happened between November 2020 and January 6, 2021 — and whether the government itself can be made to ratify one answer.

Trump understands, even if his critics sometimes don’t, that legitimacy is not just a legal category. It is a narrative one. Control the story of who was wronged, and you control the story of what the wrong was.

Each piece, on its own, can be explained away. Together, they suggest something more deliberate: a sustained effort to make the official version of January 6 a matter of genuine dispute. Not necessarily to win the argument, but to ensure the argument never ends.

The White House has proposed new rules that would give President Trump’s political appointees a far larger role in deciding how billions of dollars in federal grants are awarded and whether recipients keep their funding.

The roughly 400-page draft guidance, released last week by the Office of Management and Budget, would require a senior political appointee at each agency to review every discretionary grant to make sure it advances Trump’s policy priorities. The rules would make any scientific recommendation related to a grant merely advisory. Right now, panels of independent scientists score grant proposals, and federal agencies typically follow them. Under the new rules, however, a political appointee could overrule the experts and approve or reject a grant on their own.

The proposal bars federal money from funding diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and efforts that conflict with the administration’s positions on sex and gender, and would make it easier for grants to be canceled.

Judge Says “8647” Protest Flag Is Protected Speech

A federal judge in Washington, DC, barred the National Park Service from forcing an anti-Trump protest group to take down a flag reading “8647,” rejecting the government’s claim that the message was a threat against President Trump.

The group, Accountability Now USA, has held a round-the-clock anti-Trump vigil for months near the George Gordon Meade Memorial on Constitution Avenue, across from the federal courthouse and within walking distance of the Capitol and the National Mall. It obtained a Park Service permit in April. Last week, Park Police said that the flag needed to be removed or their permit would be revoked. The group then sued.

US District Judge Randolph Moss issued a two-week restraining order yesterday, writing that the government had shown no real basis to treat the flag as a threat rather than protected political speech. The order lets the group keep flying the flag while the case continues.

The judge noted the slang term “86” dates to 1930s soda-counter culture and that the original meaning of “86” was to throw out, get rid of, or refuse to serve someone. The Trump administration argues that the term “86” means to kill someone, and that “47” refers to Trump as the 47th president. Taken as a whole, they say “8647” is a threat to assassinate the president.

The phrase is also at the center of a separate case. In late April, the Justice Department indicted former FBI director James Comey, saying an Instagram photo he posted of seashells arranged to spell “8647” was a threat against the president.

Pentagon Declares Its Press Office a Classified Space

The Pentagon has designated its press office a classified space, barring reporters from an area they have used for years.

Until now, the press office was an open room where credentialed journalists could walk up to the desks of military public affairs staff without an escort. Under the new designation, that access ends. Reporters can reach press officials only by appointment.

Acting press secretary Joel Valdez said the office was reclassified because speechwriters who handle classified material now share the space, adding that journalists would no longer be allowed in.

This is at least the third move to limit Pentagon press access under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The department first said reporters could not cover defense matters unless the information was officially released. In protest, most news outlets turned in their badges rather than agree. A judge has struck down that requirement, but the news outlets that walked out have not gone back. The Pentagon subsequently imposed an escort policy saying that news outlets must be accompanied anywhere they go in the building. It is now being challenged in court.

Report: Hegseth Blocked Promotions of Female and Minority Navy Officers

Defense Secretary Hegseth blocked the promotions of at least nine Navy officers who had been chosen for one-star admiral by a board of senior admirals.

At least three of those removed from the promotion list are women and two are Black men. The revised one-star-admiral list, released in late May, has 22 nominees and includes no women, even though women make up about 21% of the active-duty Navy. It includes only two nonwhite officers, though racial minorities are about 38% of the force.

By Pentagon rules, the defense secretary can pull officers from a promotion list only for moral, mental, physical, or professional failings.

Pentagon chief spokesperson Sean Parnell said promotions “are given to those who have earned them” and that the department would never weigh a service member’s race or gender.

The move echoes a similar one in March, when Hegseth removed two Black and two female Army officers from a one-star-general promotion list.

Newsbreak

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Appeals Court Sides with Current Transgender Troops

A federal appeals court ruled yesterday that the Trump administration’s ban on transgender military service was illegal.

The ban grew out of an executive order Trump signed in January 2025 that directed the military to bar service by people whose gender identity differs from their sex, which he called inconsistent with military readiness.

The 2–1 ruling, from a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, affirmed a lower court decision that found the policy likely violates the Constitution. The appeals panel said the policy was designed to exclude people based on their gender identity.

The administration had argued that military leaders need broad authority to set personnel standards and that the restrictions were necessary for readiness. Hegseth said in a social media post that the administration would likely appeal. The decision does not immediately lift the ban because of a Supreme Court order that allowed the Pentagon to enforce the ban while litigation continues.

Rubio Sets US Conditions for Iran Talks

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a Senate committee this morning that Iran will get no sanctions relief until it makes major concessions on its nuclear program, including limiting or ending uranium enrichment and discussing the fate of its stockpile of existing enriched uranium.

He was testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the State Department’s 2027 budget. Rubio asserts that Iran has agreed to discuss parts of its nuclear program, while Iran says current talks are focused only on reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

At the committee hearing, Rubio said reopening the Strait of Hormuz — a key oil route largely shut since the war began — would be only a first step in reaching a peace deal.

Trump Names Bill Pulte Acting Intelligence Chief

President Trump today named housing official Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence, replacing Tulsi Gabbard. She announced last month that she would step down effective June 30 to care for her husband, who has cancer.

Pulte currently leads the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and oversees mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Trump said Pulte would retain those positions while serving as the nation’s top intelligence official.

Pulte has no known national security or intelligence background. The director of national intelligence oversees 18 agencies. Since the role is temporary, Pulte can serve without Senate confirmation for up to 210 days.

Pulte has used his position as director of the FHFA to push for federal investigations of several of Trump’s perceived foes. He referred New York attorney general Letitia James, US Sen. Adam Schiff, US Rep. Eric Swalwell, Fulton County (GA) district attorney Fani Willis, and Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook to the Justice Department over allegations of mortgage fraud. All denied the accusations. Only James was charged, but a federal judge later dismissed the case.

In 2021, the people of Maine found themselves in the middle of a fierce political battle. The question was whether a 145-mile transmission corridor designed to carry hydropower from Quebec into Massachusetts should be allowed to run through the state. Some Mainers supported the project; others opposed it.

But local voices were soon drowned out by a tidal wave of outside spending. Energy companies and electric utilities on both sides of the fight — including foreign-government-owned entities — spent nearly $100 million trying to shape the outcome of the ballot fights related to the corridor.

In response, Maine voters and lawmakers tried to reassert control over their own elections. The state enacted measures barring foreign-government-influenced companies from spending in state elections and later passed a bipartisan law limiting contributions to political action committees to $5,000. But the limits voters and lawmakers fought and organized for didn’t survive — federal courts struck down both efforts, citing Supreme Court precedent that protects political spending as First Amendment activity.

The same story has played out time and again across the country. Lawmakers and ordinary citizens respond to how elections are changing — the hundreds of millions of dollars spent, the dark money flowing in from unknown interests — and they decide to do something about it. Then a federal court steps in.

Soon, the Supreme Court will decide National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, one of the most closely watched campaign finance cases to reach the Court in years. The case asks whether federal limits on spending coordinated between political parties and candidates violate the First Amendment — a technical-sounding question with real-world implications.

Reasonable minds can disagree about whether the federal laws at issue are effective, or even necessary. But there’s a far bigger, more consequential question at stake in this case: Why is the Court involved in this dispute in the first place? Should our elections be regulated by a handful of federal judges — or by voters and their elected representatives?

For most of American history, the answer was clear: we the people, and the representatives we elect. The Court’s meddling in our nation’s campaign-finance policy is a fairly modern invention, and it ignores two centuries of our history.

Thankfully, the Constitution gives us a way to answer back.

Democracy before Buckley

Americans have long debated how to keep our elections free, fair, and insulated from corruption. These questions were debated and addressed in legislatures around the country — and not once in our first 200 years did the Supreme Court strike down any state or federal law concerning money in politics.

This judicial restraint was well rooted in founding-era philosophy. Courts were meant to serve as a check, not a substitute, for representative government, stepping in only when lawmakers made an egregious, unjustifiable error or clearly defied the expressed will of the people. They were never meant to referee routine disagreements over policy.

That all changed in the 1970s. In 1971, bipartisan supermajorities in Congress passed the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) in response to growing public concern about money in politics. The law strengthened federal campaign-finance rules at a time when modern campaigns were becoming more expensive and media-driven, and voters had limited ability to know who was financing federal elections. President Richard Nixon signed the bill into law, and the core provisions were further strengthened in 1974 after the Watergate scandal. President Gerald Ford backed the updated version — which included new limits on contributions, independent expenditures, and self-funding — acknowledging the “unpleasant truth” that “big money influence has come to play an unseeming role in our electoral process.”

But those reforms did not stay in the hands of Congress for long. They were soon challenged in Buckley v. Valeo, the 1976 case in which the Supreme Court first began to depart from that long tradition of judicial restraint — setting in motion 50 years of court-made rules over how money functions in our elections.

The road to Citizens United

Buckley was brought by Sen. James Buckley, then a US Senator from New York, and others who argued that FECA’s limits on campaign contributions and spending were a restriction of free speech. At first, the core provisions of FECA seemed likely to withstand the claims brought in Buckley: in 1975, the United States Court of Appeals upheld the law, writing that it would be “strange indeed” if “the wealthy few could claim a constitutional guarantee to a stronger political voice than the unwealthy many.”

A year later, the Supreme Court disagreed, setting a radical new precedent in the process.

For the first time in American history, the Court ruled that political spending was a protected form of free speech; limits on spending amounted to limits on expression. With that precedent, the Court effectively appointed itself the nation’s final authority on all questions of campaign finance and corruption.

The Court has been increasing its power (and compounding its error) ever since. Citizens United, the 2010 decision that expanded on Buckley by permitting unlimited political spending by corporations and unions, is the most famous example, but it is far from the only one. Again and again, federal courts have used the First Amendment as a pretext to strike down commonsense laws passed by Congress and the states — from contribution and spending limits to anti-corruption safeguards and state efforts to protect elections from foreign-influenced money.

Every few years, a new case; every few years, another guardrail is dismantled. The result is a steady transfer of authority away from voters, Congress, and the states and toward lawyers, litigants, and courts — changing not only campaign-finance law but the relationship between voters and the institutions meant to represent them. The results have been disastrous.

Elections for sale

Since Buckley, the cost of winning elected office has exploded.

In 2024, almost $20 billion was spent across local, state, and federal races. The next year, a single judicial seat in Wisconsin drew more than $100 million in spending, much of it from out-of-state actors. Indeed, nearly 80% of 2024 campaign contributions came from just over 1% of the population; last cycle, nearly one-fifth came from just 300 families. Much of that money moves through super PACs, dark-money nonprofits, and other intermediary groups that can obscure the original source of funding — making it nearly impossible for voters to know who is really trying to shape elections.

But the damage is not measured in dollars alone. When voters see elections shaped by vast sums of money they cannot trace and voices they cannot identify, it corrodes their confidence that the system is still working for them. The rise of big money crowds out free speech, stifles competition, and suppresses meaningful debate; it stokes anger, cynicism, division, and gridlock. It’s no wonder only 17% of voters trust the federal government to do the right thing, while more than 80% say the influence of money in politics is a threat to our elections.

Many elected leaders have tried to respond to the crisis, most notably in the states. But nearly every meaningful attempt at the state and local level to set some rules has faced litigation, and laws in dozens of states have been struck down: spending limits, disclosure rules for dark-money groups, bans on corporate and foreign money alike.

It’s not just new attempts at reform. Montana offers a stark example.

For generations, Montana had some of the strongest anti-corruption laws in the country. In the 1890s, a group of mining barons known as the “Copper Kings” used money to bend the government to their will — through massive campaign contributions, political pressure, and, when necessary, outright bribery.

One of them, William Andrew Clark, eventually bought a US Senate seat by distributing $272,000 to state lawmakers responsible for picking the senator. This was before the ratification of the 17th Amendment in 1913, when Americans established the direct election of senators.

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By the early 1900s, Montana voters had had enough. They passed the Montana Corrupt Practices Act in 1912. It banned corporations from dropping money into elections. That rule remained in force for nearly a century.

After Citizens United extended Buckley’s money-as-speech theory to corporations and unions, Montana tried to defend its law by its hard-earned history. The Montana Supreme Court upheld the law, but the Supreme Court disagreed. And they didn’t even bother hearing oral arguments.

They dismissed 100 years of Montana’s history with a one-paragraph, two-sentence decision on the basis of Buckley and Citizens United.

Nobody voted for this system. We did not choose to submit ourselves to rule-by-judges. But we are not powerless.

The way back

When Americans disagree with the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution, we are not stuck with that interpretation forever. Article V offers a way for voters and their representatives to have the final word: amendments proposed by Congress and ratified by the states. We have used that remedy on eight occasions when the Court was out of step with Americans on issues like state sovereignty, slavery, taxation, and voting rights. Again and again, amendments have restored authority to the people when judges moved in the wrong direction.

That is the mission of American Promise, an organization I cofounded in 2016. We’ve built a nationwide movement behind the For Our Freedom Amendment, a measure that would restore the ability of state and federal lawmakers to set reasonable rules around political spending. It would not mandate any particular contribution limits, disclosure rules, or regulatory framework. It would simply return these questions to voters and their elected representatives — where they belonged for nearly two centuries.

There have been serious legal efforts to persuade the Court to revisit the Buckley-Citizens United campaign-finance doctrine, but these have hit dead ends. In several decisions after Citizens United, the Court made it clear that the Justices would not reconsider their approach. Some future, different Court is always possible, but Americans are dealing with the grave consequences of systemic corruption now. Even another 5–4 decision one way or the other leaves the power to decide the rules in the hands of judges rather than the people.

The core constitutional question about money in politics now is, Who makes the rules? Since the Buckley case 50 years ago, the Court has said lawyers and judges make the rules. The result has been a disaster for American representative government. Only a constitutional amendment can get the question of who decides right: the American people and our representatives in the states and Congress.

To many Americans, amending the Constitution can sound impossible — especially in a divided country. But that skepticism is not new, and our history should encourage us. In 1899, The Washington Post declared the Constitution “practically unamendable.” Fourteen years later, the nation ratified two major Progressive Era amendments.

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Amendments have often come at moments much like the one we are experiencing now: after long periods of public frustration, institutional strain, and a growing demand for structural change. That pattern is beginning to emerge again. Twenty-five states — from Vermont and California to Utah and Montana — have now formally called on Congress to advance an amendment addressing the crisis of money in politics.

The most recent states to formally back the constitutional-amendment solution include Oklahoma and Idaho, and support continues to grow as lawmakers across the political spectrum come to recognize that our current system serves all the wrong people and interests.

NRSC v. FEC is not the last campaign-finance case the courts will hear. But the end of this story will not be written in a courthouse. It will be written by Americans working through their states, their representatives, and the amendment process itself to return these questions to where they belong.

Jeff Clements is co-founder and CEO of American Promise, the cross-partisan nonprofit advancing the national effort to pass a constitutional amendment addressing money in politics.

Setbacks for Trump on “Anti-Weaponization Fund”

The Justice Department’s $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund” is on hold after rulings from two federal courts. According to the Trump administration, the fund was created to pay people who say they were unfairly targeted by past administrations — a claim Trump has long made about himself and his allies. It grew out of a “settlement” of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns during his first term.

After the fund was announced, groups and individuals sued to block its creation. They argued the fund is unlawful and unconstitutional because Congress never authorized the spending. US District Judge Leonie Brinkema temporarily barred the government from setting up the fund and set a June 12 hearing on whether to keep it blocked.

In Florida, US District Judge Kathleen Williams, who oversaw Trump’s IRS suit, reopened the case and gave Trump’s lawyers until June 12 to respond to a complaint from 35 former federal judges. They call the “settlement” a “fraud on the Court,” arguing it was never a real dispute: Trump sued the IRS, an agency he oversees as president, and then dropped the case. The Justice Department announced a “settlement” with Trump while Williams was still weighing whether the suit was genuine. The deal also shielded Trump, his family, and his businesses from IRS claims over past tax returns.

Judge Halts Kennedy Center Closure

A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from closing the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for repairs and ordered Trump’s name removed from the building and its website.

Trump fired the previous board of the Kennedy Center last year and filled it with allies, including Second Lady Usha Vance, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, and adviser Dan Scavino. The new board elected Trump as chair and renamed the venue the “Trump Kennedy Center.”

In response, Rep. Joyce Beatty — an Ohio Democrat and ex officio member of the Kennedy Center board — sued to challenge both the renaming and the closure.

“Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” wrote US District Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington, DC. He ruled that the board’s March 16 vote to close the center for about two years was “ill-informed.”

Trump criticized the ruling and said the government would pull out of the renovation and return control of the institution to Congress. The center’s leadership has said it will appeal the ruling.

US and Iran Trade Strikes as Ceasefire Frays; Israel Threatens Beirut

Iran has suspended talks with the United States, citing Israel’s continued strikes in Lebanon. The two countries have been holding Pakistani-mediated negotiations to turn a fragile ceasefire in the conflict into a permanent end to the war.

The US military said today it had bombed radar and drone-control sites in Iran over the weekend, after Iran shot down an American MQ-1 Predator drone. US Central Command said the strikes hit Iranian air defenses and two attack drones, and that no US troops were hurt.

Iran, meanwhile, said it had launched a retaliatory strike, and Kuwait said its air defenses had opened fire early today to intercept incoming drones and missiles aimed at US forces there.

Newsbreak

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Graham Platner’s Sexually Explicit Texts

About a week before Maine’s June 9 Democratic Senate primary, frontrunner Graham Platner is facing reports that he sent sexually explicit texts to several women early in his marriage.

Platner, an oyster farmer and Marine Corps veteran, is the presumptive Democratic nominee.

According to both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, discovered the texts on his phone in the spring of 2025. That August — shortly after Platner launched his campaign — she shared them with the campaign’s then–political director, Genevieve McDonald, during internal vetting to determine whether they posed a risk. The texts were sent before Platner launched his campaign. The couple accused McDonald, a former state lawmaker, of leaking the information to the press. McDonald has resigned from the campaign.

Platner has not denied the existence of the texts. The Platner campaign has rejected the “sensationalization of several private facts relayed by a former confidante to journalists.” Accounts also differ on the scope: McDonald claims Platner texted as many as a dozen women, while a campaign official put the number at up to six. The messages stopped before the campaign launched, the official said.

This is not Platner’s first controversy. He has apologized for a tattoo widely identified as a Nazi symbol, which he says he covered after recognizing its meaning, and for past Reddit posts that critics say downplayed sexual assault.

Protests Outside New Jersey ICE Detention Center Continue

Several protesters were arrested overnight for defying a curfew outside Delaney Hall, a privately run ICE detention center in Newark, NJ.The roughly 1,000-bed facility has drawn more than a week of protests in support of detainees, who advocates say have been on a hunger strike since late May over conditions inside.

Democratic members of Congress who toured the facility last week described poor conditions. Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York said detainees are given small portions of food that “very often” contain maggots, and that medical care is insufficient, with the only medication offered being Tylenol. One woman, he said, had a lump in her breast but was still waiting on a mammogram more than a month into her detention.

The Department of Homeland Security denies there is a hunger strike or that conditions are poor, calling the protests a political stunt.

New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport said protesters who came “armed with helmets, shields, or gas masks” and refused orders to leave by the 9 p.m. curfew were arrested. She did not say how many were taken into custody or whether they will face charges.

ICE Agent Wanted in Minnesota Arrested in Texas

An ICE agent charged in Minnesota with shooting a Venezuelan immigrant and lying about it has been arrested in Texas. The agent, Christian Castro, 52, was taken into custody last week by Texas Rangers after Minnesota investigators tracked him there. He is now awaiting an extradition hearing.

Castro faces four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime in the January 14 shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis. Prosecutors say video evidence contradicted Castro’s claim that he fired in self-defense.

DHS Backtracks on Green Card Applications

The Department of Homeland Security now says that most green card applicants will not be required to leave the US while their applications are pending.

On May 22, US Citizenship and Immigration Services issued a directive suggesting that most temporary visa holders and others living in the US would generally have to return to their home countries to complete their green card applications, except in “extraordinary circumstances.”

Late last week, DHS said that guidance was not a blanket change and that immigration officers would continue to decide on a case-by-case basis whether an applicant must apply from abroad.

Trump to Headline 250th Fair After Artists Pull Out

President Trump will headline the opening ceremony of the Great American State Fair, a 250th-anniversary celebration on the National Mall in Washington, after several artists withdrew from its concert lineup.

Freedom 250, the Trump-backed group organizing the event, said over the weekend that Trump will kick off the celebration on June 24, the day before the fair begins its run from June 25 to July 10. Artists including Martina McBride, Bret Michaels, Young MC, and the Commodores have pulled out, with several saying they were misled about the event’s political ties. Freedom 250 is billed as nonpartisan but was launched by Trump, but the artists who withdrew said they’d been misled and that the event was, in fact, political.

In a social media post, Trump separately suggested canceling the concert series altogether, saying he would rather hold a “Make America Great Again” rally than feature “overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear.”

The Democrats’ 2024 autopsy does something more awkward. It arrives late, incomplete, covered in disclaimers, and accompanied by the party’s own warning label. On every page, the report says it reflects the view of the author, not the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and that the DNC “was not provided with the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data” for many of the claims inside it.

That is not usually how an institution sounds when it is confidently diagnosing itself and planning to right the wrongs of the recent past.

As political science professor Seth Masket put it in a sharp review, the report often reads like a document still waiting for someone to prove its claims. His title captured the strangest feature of the whole thing: “No evidence provided for this claim.” The phrase appears so often in the report’s margins that it becomes less a comment than a mood.

The rollout only made the story stranger. The DNC released the long-suppressed 192-page document, but then quickly distanced itself from the findings. DNC Chair Ken Martin said the report did not meet his standards or those of its readers, even as he released it amid pressure for transparency. The handling of the report — as well as its lack of substance — triggered calls for Martin to resign, with critics arguing that he mishandled a report that was supposed to help the party understand its 2024 loss.

So, yes, the report is flawed. Deeply. But that may be why it is useful.

The document may not fully explain why Democrats lost in 2024, but it does reveal a party struggling to say out loud what it fears might be true: its old coalition no longer behaves like a coalition.

The coalition is sending warning signs

The report’s strongest material is not buried in one stunning revelation. There is no secret switch to flip, no magic chart, no hidden smoking gun explaining how Donald Trump returned to the White House. Instead, the report keeps circling the same uncomfortable problem from different directions.

Democrats are losing trust with voters they long assumed to be reachable, winnable, or reliably theirs.

The report argues that Democrats have suffered from “a persistent inability or unwillingness to listen to all voters,” and says the party has lost relationships with working Americans, local communities, state parties, rural voters, and parts of the country Democrats tend to ignore.

It calls for a ten-year strategy to “organize everywhere to Win Anywhere,” with a renewed focus on Middle America and the South. The report says many voters in those places do not see themselves reflected in the Democratic vision of America.

That is consultant-speak, but the underlying problem is real enough.

The Democratic Party still has many broadly popular policy positions. Voters have supported Democratic-aligned ballot measures on abortion rights, Medicaid expansion, minimum wage increases, paid leave, and redistricting reform, sometimes in states where Democratic candidates keep losing. The report points to this gap directly, arguing that Democratic policies can win even when Democratic candidates cannot.

That should terrify party leaders more than a bad poll.

A voter who rejects your policy is one kind of problem. A voter who likes your policy but does not vote for your party is another.

The warning signs are scattered across the report. It describes a “male voter problem.” It says rural losses are mathematically insurmountable if Democrats want to win beyond a shrinking map. It warns that irregular voters need persuasion, not just last-minute turnout reminders. It says Democrats cannot assume Latino voters, especially younger Latino men, are automatically part of the party’s base.

The report makes several of these claims without enough evidence, which is exactly the problem Masket and others flagged. But the broader pattern is hard to dismiss. Trump improved with Latino voters in 2024, particularly Latino men. Republicans continued making gains with non-college voters. Democrats remained strong with college-educated voters, especially in metropolitan and suburban areas. The old demographic bargain that powered so much Democratic optimism after Barack Obama’s elections has become much less automatic.

For years, many Democrats operated with an implicit theory of the future: hold the Obama coalition, add suburban voters repelled by Trump, wait for younger and more diverse generations to expand the map.

That theory was not crazy. It helped Democrats win the House in 2018. It helped Joe Biden win in 2020. It helped Democrats perform better than expected in 2022.

But a theory can work perfectly until it doesn’t.

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Thankfully the sicknesses ran their course before we made any permanent decisions. We all started sleeping again, and the life I’d been ready to tear apart turned out to be fine. I had just been sick and sleepless for weeks, and my body had been trying to figure out what was wrong.

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barret says your brain’s first and most important job is to keep you alive. So when it calculates that you’re short on the building blocks that keep your body running — sleep, food, water, connection, movement — it registers this as a threat to your life. At first it just tells you you’re tired. But when you keep overriding that, have another bad night, skip another meal, your brain stops trusting the simple answer and reaches for a bigger one. A depleted brain starts to say, “Something is wrong” (why else would you keep ignoring its signals?), and then it goes looking for what.

Soon it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle. The more depleted you get, the worse your brain is at telling ordinary exhaustion from real catastrophe, so it keeps reaching past the obvious answer for the alarming one. From the inside, you can’t tell that your brain is doing this. If you’ve ever been furious at your partner and then eaten something and felt differently, you know what I’m talking about. “Hangry” is a real thing.

You can probably feel my advice coming. I wish I had something more exciting to tell you, but it is so important it bears repeating. Take care of your body’s basic needs before you assume something is wrong with your life. I know you’ve heard a thousand times about the importance of sleeping well, eating enough, drinking water, and spending time with loved ones… usually from someone with a supplement to sell. But we keep putting it off, telling ourselves we’ll sleep or go outside once we’re through the hard part. Usually the hard part is that we haven’t taken a break.

Sobriety gave me a checklist for exactly this, called “HALT”: before you do anything you can’t undo, ask whether you’re hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. It was developed to help people avoid relapsing, but I find it applies to most mental health struggles. Because even if you do have incredible tools from books and therapy, they won’t be useful if you have no energy.

So the next time something in your life feels enormous, I want you to run through your basic needs. When was the last time you connected with a loved one? When was the last time you ate a full meal or drank a glass of water? When you stepped away from screens and took a deep breath outside? If you can’t remember, meet the need before you make a decision. It won’t fix the actual problem, but it can keep you from making a permanent call during a temporary low.

Most of what felt unbearable that winter felt unbearable at 3 a.m., a sick kid finally asleep on my chest, my mind running the worst-case version of everything. By morning, after coffee and a real stretch of sleep, the same thoughts were things I could handle.

It’s Saturday, so that means it’s time for our weekly community open thread. This is your space to gather, get to know each other, and talk about anything you’d like — the news, what you’re doing for fun this weekend, or fascinating things you’re reading or watching. Drop it all in the comments down below.

This community is for paid subscribers, and we’d love to have you join us! The goal is to create a safe and welcoming environment for everyone, which means speaking to and treating each other with respect in the comments.

Thanks for being part of our community!

— The Preamble Editorial Team

—The Preamble team

In May 2011, a married New York congressman named Anthony Weiner accidentally tweeted a photo of his crotch in tight gray boxer briefs to all of his Twitter followers. He had meant to send it as a DM to a 21-year-old woman — not his wife — in Seattle. Weiner deleted the tweet within minutes, claimed his account had been hacked, and spent the next several days telling the press, with a straight face, that he could not “say with certitude” whether the underwear in the photo was his. Ten days later, he tearfully admitted it was and resigned from Congress. Given the congressman’s name, this whole sordid episode could’ve been called many things — but what did the press name it? “Weinergate.”

More than a decade later, a far more serious texting scandal would get a “-gate” of its own.

On March 11, 2025, Senior officials in the Trump administration — including JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and then–National Security Adviser Mike Waltz — were on an encrypted Signal group chat called “Houthi PC small group.” The group was coordinating airstrikes against the Houthi militants who had been attacking commercial ships in the Red Sea and lobbing missiles at Israel in retaliation for Israeli strikes on Gaza. Waltz, who coordinated the chat, accidentally added the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg.

For four days, no one bothered to ask who “JG” was inside the chat. Hegseth shared details about the timing of strikes and what kinds of weapons were being used. Goldberg quietly left the chat on March 15 and then wrote an exposé on the details.

And, of course, the press named the incident “Signalgate.”

From an infamous sexting debacle to a war-planning group chat, we’ve now slapped “-gate” on the end of countless scandals across politics and pop culture: Weinergate, Signalgate, Nipplegate, and the list goes on. It started with Watergate in the 1970s. But how did a building in Washington end up having its name attached to nearly every act of misconduct in the United States — and occasionally abroad — for the last half century?

The short answer: a burglary, a humor magazine, and one very prolific newspaper columnist.

It started with an actual building

The Watergate is a complex of offices, apartments, and a hotel that sits along the Potomac River in Washington, DC. In 1972, it was also home to the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. On June 17 of that year, the DNC offices were ransacked. At first it just looked like a break-in. But after arrests were made, one of the five burglars, James McCord, said in court that he had retired from the CIA.

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That surprised a reporter from The Washington Post. Bob Woodward and his colleague Carl Bernstein began to dig. Eventually, they learned McCord wasn’t just a former CIA man — he was the salaried security coordinator for President Nixon’s reelection committee, and was also under contract to provide security services to the Republican National Committee. The Post ran the story the next day under the headline “GOP Security Aide Among Five Arrested in Bugging Affair.”

What Woodward and Bernstein eventually uncovered was a sprawling spying and cover-up operation directed by Nixon’s reelection campaign. Almost immediately, the political press started using “Watergate” as shorthand for the entire scheme. From then on, it was no longer just the name of the hotel, it was the name of the very scandal itself.

But here’s the twist: Watergate alone didn’t give us “-gate.”

The magazine that did it first

The first time anyone took the suffix off the Watergate building and stuck it onto a different scandal, it wasn’t a newspaper. It was a comedy magazine. National Lampoon — the monthly humor magazine that began publishing in the 1970s and would later spawn a generation of Saturday Night Live writers — ran a joke in a fake news roundup tied to a visit to the US by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. The anecdote, appearing in the August 1973 issue, imagined a scandal rocking the Kremlin, one the magazine called the “Volgagate” — the Volga being Russia’s most famous river. The joke was that liberal officials in the USSR had been caught removing bugs from telephones, mixing actual letters and telegrams from Soviet citizens in with the usual phony ones, and telling the truth to foreign newsmen, among other things.

The universal scandal name

The person who relentlessly used “-gate” as the all-purpose scandal suffix was William Safire — Nixon’s former speechwriter, who reinvented himself as a New York Times columnist after his old boss resigned. Safire spent the next three decades attaching “-gate” to scandals involving his political opponents: Billygate in 1980 (about President Jimmy Carter’s brother, Billy, who engaged in unregistered lobbying and financial dealings with the Libyan government), Travelgate in 1993 (about the firing of seven employees in the travel office of the Clinton White House — allegedly to allow friends and campaign donors to take over), Whitewatergate of 1994 (about the Clintons’ Arkansas real estate investments), and on and on.

So why did Safire keep reaching for “-gate”? Writing in New York Magazine, columnist Noam Cohen offered a theory: that by relentlessly attaching it to the scandals of Nixon’s successors, Safire was diminishing his guilt by association. Safire came close to confirming this himself. He told author Eric Alterman that he had used “-gate” so freely partly to minimize the impact of the crimes his old boss committed.

Others picked up the habit, though a tad slowly. But here’s the part that surprises people: the suffix did not spread right away. For roughly two decades, “-gate” stayed mostly Safire’s lingo. Other writers used it now and then, but sparingly. The press tried Nannygate in 1993, when two of Bill Clinton’s attorney-general nominees were found to have hired undocumented immigrants as household help. But these examples were scattered. As an analysis by The Conversation points out, the great majority of “-gate” scandals are far more recent — the suffix’s first three decades produced only a small share.

In September 2013, aides to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie ordered lane closures on the George Washington Bridge — allegedly as political payback against a local mayor who had refused to endorse Christie’s reelection. Thousands of commuters spent days stuck in traffic. One aide’s now-infamous email read: “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” It was that specific email, paired with the absurdity of a sitting governor allegedly weaponizing a bridge against a small-town mayor, that locked in the name. The press settled on the name “Bridgegate” within days.

While many “-gates” involve corruption, sex scandals, and national security risks, the suffix has been applied in lots of less serious incidents involving politicians too. One notable time was in 2019, when MSNBC’s Chris Matthews was interviewing then–Rep. Eric Swalwell and there was an audible noise mid-interview. You know where this is going, right? Yes, that was dubbed “Fartgate.” (Swalwell denied passing the gas.)

Beyond politics

Not all “-gates” are political. Sometimes they’re about football. In January 2015, the NFL accused the New England Patriots of using slightly underinflated footballs during the AFC Championship game against the Indianapolis Colts. Underinflated balls are easier to grip, especially in cold weather. Quarterback Tom Brady got suspended for four games. The Patriots denied intentionally cheating. The story broke on a Sunday, and within days, sports columnists, talk-radio hosts, and Twitter (now X) had collectively settled on the same name: “Deflategate.” The suffix did all the work — readers understood immediately that this was an NFL cheating scandal, even if they didn’t know the specifics.

And that wasn’t the first football-related “-gate”: During the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, a wardrobe malfunction briefly exposed Janet Jackson’s breast on live TV and was instantly called “Nipplegate.”

Though the term originated in the US, the folks across the Atlantic have taken a fancy too.

During the Covid-19 lockdowns, while ordinary Britons were banned from social gatherings, including most hospital visits, reports surfaced that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s staff at 10 Downing Street had been holding parties. Lots of parties, including the prime minister’s 56th birthday bash. The name “Partygate” was a British coinage — British tabloids and newspapers used it first.

The Metropolitan Police issued 126 fines to 83 people over gatherings on eight separate dates. Johnson received one fine personally, making him the first sitting UK prime minister to be penalized for breaking the law while in office.

The suffix shows no sign of slowing down. Watergate established its meaning. Signalgate, Deflategate, Partygate, and the hundreds of small-stakes -gates in between have made it something closer to a reflex.

And to think — somewhere in a humor magazine office in 1973, a writer banged out a Volga River joke and went home for the day. Five decades and several countries later, the joke is still going.

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We discussed:

• Harrison’s petty nickname for his predecessor, Martin Van Buren;

• why Harrison’s 1841 warnings about political parties and polarization ring uncomfortably true today;

• the way economic insecurity has been shaping elections since America’s earliest days;

• how log cabin-shaped hard cider bottles helped invent modern campaign merch;

• the surprisingly direct line between Andrew Jackson and modern debates about executive power;

• how John Tyler set a key precedent for what happens when a president dies in office;

… and more. Our conversation was part of our work with In Pursuit, a project started for America’s 250th anniversary and designed to bridge the gap between history and today’s challenges, and make history accessible to all.

Press play to listen.

For more on William Henry Harrison, you can read my essay here.