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2026-04-22 15:34:25 UTC

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President Donald Trump is once again attacking members of the Supreme Court. Trump lamented that Democrats should be happy with their tight-knit minority on the Supreme Court in a post on Truth Social Wednesday morning. “The Democrat Justices stick together like glue, NEVER failing to wander from the warped and perverse policies, ideas, and cases put before them,” he wrote. “They ALWAYS vote as a group, or BLOCK, even that new, Low IQ person, that somehow found her way to the bench (Sleepy Joe!),” the president wrote, referring to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.“The Republican Justices don’t stick together, they give the Democrats win after win,” he wrote, complaining about the recent decision on tariffs and the upcoming decision on birthright citizenship. Trump continued to claim that no other country in the world “is stupid enough” to offer birthright citizenship, which is not true. “No, certain ‘Republican’ Justices have just gone weak, stupid, and bad, completely violating what they ‘supposedly’ stood for,” Trump wrote. Clearly the president believes that justices should put their politics over their commitment to the law. Trump’s post came shortly before the Supreme Court released its latest rulings Wednesday, neither of which was the birthright citizenship ruling. But it’s clear Trump is stressed.He was first triggered Tuesday by James Carville, a fossilized political consultant who hasn’t managed a successful campaign since 1992. Speaking on his podcast last week, Carville said that if the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress, they should grant statehood to Puerto Rico and Washington, as well as expand the Supreme Court to 13 seats. Trump called Carville a “wacko.”“If they pull off adding these two States, these Country Destroying Sleazebags will dominate politics in America, if we even have a Nation left, for 100 years,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday.Trump insisted in his Tuesday post that Democrats already had control over the Supreme Court, despite the obvious conservative majority. “They are an immovable force, and there is nothing that can be done to change that. Frankly, I respect that, a lot!”
https://newrepublic.com/post/209377/donald-trump-supreme-court-tariffs-birthright-citizenship

2026-04-22 14:40:53 UTC

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President Donald Trump’s social media venture is sinking, and its MAGA CEO just bailed. Trump Media & Technology Group, which oversees Truth Social, announced Tuesday that cow enthusiast and former Representative Devin Nunes is stepping down after more than four years with the company. The news of his departure was authored by Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who sits on the company’s board and runs a trust managing the president’s 115 million shares in the venture. In a statement on Truth Social, Nunes said it was the “appropriate time” for new leadership with merger and media experience to “steer Trump Media through its current transition phase.” The company’s stock price has fallen from $58 per share on its first day of trading in March 2024 to $9.82 after closing Tuesday. Last year, the company had just $3.7 million in revenue against a staggering net loss of $712 million.While Trump has made Truth Social his main communications platform, it doesn’t seem to have helped his company in any way. A $6 billion merger with TAE Technologies, a fusion power company, in December to create one of the first publicly traded nuclear fusion companies gave Trump Media stock only a brief boost. As of February, the company was considering spinning off Truth Social in another merger with Texas Ventures Acquisition III Corp., a shell company designed for mergers. The new interim CEO of Trump Media, Kevin McGurn, happens to be the CEO of Texas Ventures. While Trump Media’s news release didn’t mention the merger, it seems like Trump might dump his once promising cash cow pretty soon.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209372/trump-media-ceo-leaves-massive-stock-collapse

2026-04-22 14:19:20 UTC

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The Department of Justice rescinded a number of subpoenas Monday, just days after they were issued as part of the agency’s nascent perjury case against former CIA Director John Brennan.Over the weekend, prosecutors issued subpoenas requiring witnesses to testify before a grand jury in Washington. This came as a surprise to some veteran prosecutors, as witnesses will typically be interviewed by the FBI before they are brought before a grand jury, according to The New York Times. The DOJ did not offer an explanation for the rescission Monday. Law enforcement indicated that they had opted to schedule voluntary interviews instead. Last week, Maria Medetis Long, chief of the national security section for the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami, was removed from the investigation after she reportedly expressed doubts about the probe. The department then brought in Joseph diGenova, a Trump loyalist who has been outspoken about Brennan’s alleged guilt, to take over the case. He was sworn in on Monday, so it’s unclear whether he was involved in the decision to issue subpoenas. The prosecutors in the Southern District of Florida are looking into allegations that Brennan lied to Congress about his role in crafting an intelligence assessment about Russian efforts to interfere on Donald Trump’s behalf in the 2016 presidential election. The U.S. attorney’s office in southern Florida has already issued 30 subpoenas as part of a sprawling conspiracy investigation into Trump’s perceived political enemies. Those cases are set to land on the desk of the same judge who handed the president a get-out-of-jail free card: Aileen Cannon.This sudden rescission is part of a wider trend of unprecedented prosecutorial missteps by Trump’s Department of Justice, undermining numerous civil and criminal cases.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209368/department-justice-blunder-donald-trump-john-brennan

2026-04-22 10:00:00 UTC

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You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here. The news media’s coverage after October 7, 2003, defended and legitimized Israel’s destruction of Gaza and killing of tens of thousands of civilians, says journalist Adam Johnson. In his new book, How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, Johnson details how outlets such as The New York Times and CNN often used terms like “massacre” and “barbaric” to describe the initial Hamas attack but would not use similar language to describe Israeli military offenses that killed hundreds of people in Gaza. The news media, Johnson argues, also wrongly portrayed President Biden as powerless to restrain Israel. Johnson argues that the mainstream news media played a powerful role in making liberal Americans who usually care deeply about human rights less concerned about the indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209294/media-failed-palestinians

2026-04-22 10:00:00 UTC

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Over the weekend, the New York Times published a fairly explosive investigation into the birth of the Supreme Court’s modern shadow docket. Traditionally used for procedural decision-making, the shadow docket has, over the last several years, acted as a back door for SCOTUS to make key policy decisions more or less on the fly—or at least without spending months or years considering briefs and oral arguments and writing out signed and detailed opinions. The Times’ reporting focuses on what was, at the time, a shocking move: the unexplained decision, deliberated over for just a few days, to grant a stay of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which would have established a national system for controlling greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. If Obama’s rule had gone into effect, power plants would have had to reduce their emissions in line with state-specific targets, designed to meet federal goals. Thanks to SCOTUS, the plan was never implemented. The Court’s use of the shadow docket signaled both a bleak future for the Clean Power Plan, and a radical shift in how that body makes decisions. As my colleague Matt Ford wrote this week, the shadow docket has, in recent memory, “transformed from a simple administrative mechanism into a major roadblock for progressive governance.”At the core of the Times’ reporting are 16 pages of previously unpublished discussions among the justices. While these may not be the full extent of their debate on the matter, as Ford points out, they show Chief Justice John Roberts forcefully arguing to bypass precedent and grant petitioners’ request for a stay on the Clean Power Plan before the legal merits of the rule had been decided on by a lower court. The Trump administration came to power a few months later. Before the case could be formally decided, the White House got to work dismantling the Clean Power Plan from the inside. Eventually, in 2022, SCOTUS’s ruling in West Virginia vs. EPA limited that agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act—a prelude of sorts to its broader attack on the administrative state. The fact that the decision credited with giving birth to the modern shadow docket concerned a climate change regulation hardly seems incidental; corporate polluters have long funded the right’s remarkably successful crusade to control the judiciary branch. A closer look at the Times documents shows just how seriously SCOTUS took polluting industries’ arguments.In making the case to his colleagues for the urgency of granting the stay, Roberts wrote that it was important to do so because the Clean Power Plan would constitute “the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the power sector—net costs have been estimated to run as high as $480 billion from 2017-2031.” To support this assertion, he cited a 2014 report by NERA Economic Consulting. That study was prepared by NERA for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, and several other industry groups whose members would have been subject to the Clean Power Plan. The report’s authors qualified that it had “not been independently verified, unless otherwise expressly indicated,” and that they made “no representation as to the accuracy or completeness” of the information it was based on, only that such information was “from sources we deem to be reliable.” Such caveats are relatively standard fare for these kinds of reports. What is notable is that it’s one of the few sources Roberts cites as justification for a decision that would upend decades of Supreme Court precedent. Damningly, Roberts himself seemed aware of the limits of the report. He noted that “the sources of those analyses,” including another from Energy Ventures Analysis Inc., “lead me to believe that their figures are likely at the high end of a possible cost range.” “That is one view,” Justice Sotomayor replied. “A likely biased view, as the Chief’s memo recognizes.” A cursory look at the organizations that sponsored the NERA report lends some credence to Sotomayor’s assessment. Coal producers Murray Energy and Peabody Energy, for instance—two petitioners that sought a stay of the Clean Power Plan—were, in 2016, members of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, or the ACCCE. American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, whose members at the time included Koch Industries Inc., had given $135,000 to the Republican Attorneys General Association, or RAGA, by September 2016—up from $50,000 throughout all of 2015. Republican Attorneys General from West Virginia, Texas, and nearly all of the 22 other states that sued to stop the Clean Power Plan in 2015 were RAGA members. Among RAGA’s major donors at the time was the Judicial Crisis Network, a group closely associated with longtime executive vice president of the Federalist Society, Leonard Leo. As ProPublic has reported, Leo helped pick or confirm Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court, and advised Trump on the nominations of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Sotomayor’s saying the NERA report was “likely biased,” in other words, might have been a serious understatement.Roberts’s phrase, “the most expensive regulation ever,” never appears in the NERA report, but it has been a favorite talking point for polluters challenging the Environmental Protection Agency. The National Association of Manufacturers, or NAM—which enthusiastically backed Roberts’ nomination to the Supreme Court—boasted in its 2014 annual report about its success in perpetuating the idea that a proposed EPA rule on ozone pollution would have been “the most expensive regulation of all time.” The group had good reason to be proud. “From the Speaker of the House of Representatives to almost every major news outlet in America, the NAM’s message opposing the EPA’s proposed ozone standard carried far and wide,” the business lobby bragged. “The NAM defined the message and set the tone about how much the unforgiving new ozone standard could raise energy prices, hobble economic growth and hurt job creation.” NAM commissioned the study it used to make that case from NERA Economic Consulting. After its release, the NAM annual report added that the group’s energy team “toured the country, forging partnerships with allies in key states to counter the standard.” Not long after SCOTUS granted its stay of the Clean Power Plan, in 2017, President Trump relied on yet another NERA report to justify pulling the United States out of the Paris Agreement, which stated, somewhat fantastically, that the implementation of the agreement “could obliterate $3 trillion of GDP, 6.5 million industrial sector jobs and $7,000 in per capita household income from the American economy by 2040,” as Trump paraphrased. That report was prepared by NERA for the American Council for Capital Formation Center for Policy Research, a non-profit research affiliate of the American Council for Capital Formation. The latter group has received generous funding from the Koch network, the John M. Olin Foundation, and other key fossil fuel–tied backers of the right-wing legal movement.The fact that Roberts references an industry-backed NERA report isn’t a smoking gun so much as confirmation of a well-documented fact: that the right’s corporate-backed war against climate and environmental regulations is central to its broader anti-democratic project. For decades, the profits that flow from the coal, oil, and gas industries have financed the right’s crusade against majority rule, including the Clean Air Act and the other vestiges of the New Deal state that spurred them into action nearly a century ago. The courts offer polluters an especially tantalizing end-run around democracy. Trying to change laws and regulations through lobbying and campaign donations is a lot harder than influencing a handful of judges who can simply invalidate them.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209318/chief-justice-john-roberts-shadow-docket-fossil-fuel-lobby

2026-04-22 09:57:58 UTC

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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 22 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.It’s getting harder for Donald Trump’s propagandists to defend his handling of the war. Trump has been saying that a deal with Iran is near, yet Trump officials are leaking that his public outbursts have only made it harder to reach an agreement to end the conflict. Amid those realities, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt went full cult on Fox News. She viciously attacked the media for being insufficiently worshipful of Trump’s glory, and she unleashed an obsequious monologue that was plainly designed to lift Trump’s spirits. All this underscores that even if Trump gets a deal, it’ll be extremely hard to spin this adventure as a success. So how bad a catastrophe is this shaping up to be? We’re unraveling all this with former National Security Council and State Department veteran Emily Horne, one of our go-tos on these topics. Emily, nice to have you back on.Emily Horne: Thanks for having me, Greg.Sargent: So we’re getting close to the expiration of the two-week ceasefire. And as of this recording, JD Vance’s trip to negotiate a peace has been postponed after Iran failed to respond to the American position, though this could restart at any time. There’s a lot of confusion around the status of the Strait of Hormuz. Emily, can you explain where we are and bring us up to date on the current sticking points and everything else?Horne: Talks are off. There’s no plan for when or if they’ll restart. The Strait of Hormuz continues to be controlled by the IRGC—the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—which is the real source of power in Iran. It continues to control the Strait of Hormuz. And it’s IRGC missiles and drones that killed 13 U.S. troops, attacked U.S. embassies and diplomatic facilities across the Middle East, attacked Gulf oil and data center installations across the region, and whose damage Trump political leaders at the Pentagon are really continuing to cover up even as they’re insisting that victory is at hand.So when you hear this administration talking about their conversations with the regime and how there may or may not be peace at hand, I think it’s really important to remember they often don’t know what the heck it is they’re talking about, because they confuse who really holds the power in Tehran these days. It’s really striking to me when I hear this administration talking about the regime change that U.S. strikes have brought about and the destruction that they have leaked on things like the Iranian Navy and the Iranian Air Force. Those were never power centers to begin with. So when they’re going out and bragging about them on Fox News, they don’t really know what they’re talking about. And it’s a real tell to negotiators in Iran that the people who are showing up at the table really have no idea what they’re doing—that this is total amateur hour. Sargent: Total Art of the Deal stuff. Well, CNN reports that the U.S. and Iran had appeared close to a deal, but then Trump started making all kinds of public statements to reporters and on Truth Social. He said Iran had agreed to a bunch of things that Iran hadn’t actually agreed to. Trump officials privately told CNN that this was detrimental to the talks. One official said this: “The Iranians didn’t appreciate POTUS negotiating through social media and making it appear as if they had signed off on issues they hadn’t yet agreed to and ones that aren’t popular with their people back home.” Emily, this seems really damning—not just on the substance, but also because officials are leaking this about Trump. What did you make of all of that?Horne: So the only thing that was surprising to me about this CNN story was that the headline suggested that the parties had at one point been close to a deal, which the story itself doesn’t even actually support. That was probably some editor who wanted to make it seem like there was higher drama and that Trump’s social media creative writing projects over the weekend and his random phone calls to random reporters had somehow interrupted something that was actually going well—when in fact it wasn’t. JD Vance doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. Steve Witkoff, the president’s golf buddy—no diplomat. You know, the president’s son-in-law can’t negotiate anything except a deal with crypto leaders in the Middle East that’s going to enrich himself. These people don’t know what they’re doing and they barely even tried at the Islamabad talks. They were on the ground for less than 24 hours, where they washed their hands of the whole thing and said that it was a failure.So it’s not surprising that the whole thing fell apart. It’s not surprising that the president was tweeting about it in real time and calling up random reporters and bragging about it in real time when there was an effort to get things back on track after that first round failed. And it’s not at all surprising that the Iranians took one look at all of this amateur-hour nonsense and said, okay, well, even if they did agree to do something, even if we did manage to negotiate with these yahoos, who is to say that the Americans would keep their word—because Trump is not giving anybody a reason to think that he’s serious about any of this.Sargent: Trump’s red lines seem to be that Iran has to halt all uranium enrichment and turn over its stockpile of material entirely, whereas Iran doesn’t want to do those things and wants total control over the Strait of Hormuz. Is that about right? Is that about the size of who wants what?Horne: Yes, that’s basically correct. Now, one of the things that makes this complicated, though, is that there are lots of elements who have influence within the Trump administration who want these talks to go even further, who want even more maximalist demands from the U.S. side. And so it’s a constantly moving target, which—I want to be clear, I’m not advocating for the Iranians here—but from the Iranian perspective, which, a good diplomat and negotiator thinks about—what’s on the mind of the people on the other side of the table—it makes it really hard for them to know which end is up. It makes it really hard for them to know that the United States is going to actually keep its promises and that it’s not going to keep moving the goalposts. And Iran needs to retain some sort of leverage going forward, right? Because of the sort of legacy of mistrust with the United States, which means it would be hard for Iran to get anywhere close to the maximalist demands that the United States has.Sargent: Yes. And again, the demands and the leverage I think are different now than they were eight weeks ago. You know, the Tehran toll booth that is the Strait of Hormuz—some analysts estimate that it could generate over $200 billion a year for Iran when normal traffic resumes. And that’s a chokehold that Iran has now learned that it can control and use to strangle global shipping and global energy supplies. Arguably, that gives Iran far greater leverage over global affairs than it would even have had with nuclear weapons, at least until global energy flows fully adjust. And analysts expect that that could be years, if ever.Well, okay. So this is the situation that Karoline Leavitt is dealing with. Now listen to what she said on Fox News.Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): He’s the negotiator in chief. And to all the critics in the media, the Democrats, the Panicans out there—you doubted he would win in 2016 and you were proven wrong. You doubted he would return to the Oval Office in 2024. You were proven wrong. I remember last year fighting with journalists from the podium about the president’s ability to strike a deal to end the war in Gaza and bring home all the hostages. And again, they were proven wrong. I suspect this time is going to be no different, Sean.Sargent: Emily, this is so absurd on so many levels. Trump very well may get a deal, maybe even soon. But the question is, will there be any scenario in which this is a good overall outcome for the United States, right? What did you make of all that?Horne: I hear an answer like that and I hear a spokesperson who knows that she has a really bad hand of cards to play. And so instead of trying to play that bad hand, she’s just attacking the person sitting on the other side of the table from her. She’s not engaging with any of the—I think the very reasonable and substantive questions that people on all sides of the aisle have about what does success look like in this conflict, when are gas prices going to go down, why does Iran have all this leverage now that it didn’t have eight weeks ago. She’s just refusing to engage with any of that and attacking anyone who asks her questions about it. But it’s really telling that she’s refusing to answer the questions and going on the offense.Sargent: That kind of opens up a window on how Fox propaganda works, I think, because if you watch Leavitt delivering these types of monologues and tirades, you’ll see footage in the background of the United States blowing stuff up, right? They always have that boom this, boom that, boom that—like the videos that they show to the president, apparently—but they’re showing them to Fox News viewers. And so you can kind of see where they’re going with the propaganda, which is to essentially say, okay, nevermind the fact that Iran has this leverage that they didn’t have eight weeks ago. Just look at how Trump is blowing things up and look how powerful he is. And then she just goes on this sycophantic rant, and you can kind of see exactly how they’re trying to manipulate the Trump base, right? Horne: I mean, sure, but that in five bucks will buy me a gallon of gas.Sargent: Well, right, exactly. Well, let’s listen to more of Leavitt. Here she runs through all the destruction Trump has rained down on the Iranian military. Then she says this.Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): Yet the American media is still trying to say that the United States is in a worse-off position than we were at the start of this, that Iran still poses a threat. It’s all a bunch of nonsense. They are rooting against this president and therefore our country. And it’s really despicable to watch. The facts are the facts. President Trump has been the steady leader our country needs throughout this entire endeavor. And again, thanks to the success of the military operation and his hardline negotiating style, we’re on the brink of a deal. And if not, the president as commander-in-chief still has a number of options at his disposal that he’s unafraid to use. And President Trump has proven before—he does not bluff. When he makes a promise, he follows through on it. And I’m not sure why, after 10 years of covering this president, the American media still cannot understand: when President Trump says he’s going to do something, he’s going to do it.Sargent: My favorite thing about this is the description of Trump’s threat to destroy an entire civilization and commit major war crimes as a, quote-unquote, “hardline negotiating style.” But that aside, Emily, is it true that Trump is in total control of the situation or not? It seems like—yeah, the Iranian military has been badly degraded and yeah, Trump made a lot of things go boom, but like, he’s not actually in control of the situation, is he?Horne: I think that the IRGC is watching clips like this and gloating, because Karoline is revealing just how little this administration understands Iran and understands war and understands leverage and they could not be more thrilled that she is out there talking about the destruction of things like Iran’s Air Force and Navy, when it’s in fact the IRGC that is functionally in charge of the government and the military apparatus in not just Tehran, but increasingly controlling global affairs when it comes to things like the global energy market and regional security. All they can do is point at things that are blowing up and say, look, we did that. Like they’re asking for extra credit on a school assignment for particularly good drawing assignment. It’s just really disgusting.And to your point earlier—speaking of disgusting things—we can’t lose sight of what an utter game changer it is that the president of the United States has threatened to use the U.S. military to commit a genocide. And didn’t just do it once, by the way. This clip is Karoline, his spokesperson, going out there and saying that he’s perfectly willing to do it again. That means that the United States of America is functionally a rogue state on the global stage. And we’re going to be dealing with the repercussions of that, certainly for the rest of our lives, probably for our kids’ lives as well—that our country has threatened to exterminate a civilization, a country of 93 million people, the vast majority of whom have nothing to do with the havoc that the IRGC is wreaking across the region. These are ordinary people who just want to raise their families and work and worship and live in peace and dignity. And every single person who was hearing that in Tehran is hearing a threat to extinguish their lives and kill everyone they know. I’m appalled as an American that that is something that my president is going out and talking about on the world stage in my name. We should all be appalled by that.Sargent: We should. And Trump keeps repeating this over and over. And I want to get into the repercussions of this, because if you follow Trump closely, you’ll note that he says things like he’s going to blow up every power plant and every bridge in Iran if Iran doesn’t do our bidding. And he keeps using that language. Now, that is an explicit threat to commit massive war crimes—it’s not right, it’s not even ambiguous. Like, even Pete Hegseth, who’s a bloodthirsty maniac, actually has a little bit of sense on this stuff, and he tries to keep it a little ambiguous. He says, we’ve got a whole list of legitimate targets we’re going to knock out, right, which seems to mean targets that have some sort of military function, which could be, you know, a bit of a borderline case on whether it’s war crimes or not. Donald Trump does not try to finesse it at all. He says, in essence, I will absolutely commit war crimes by blowing up every plant and every bridge. What are the repercussions of that?Horne: I mean, they’re horrific to think about. First of all, God help us all if he actually does it. And I pray that day will never ever come. But then let’s think about what happens if it does turn out that that is an empty threat. One, you’ve destroyed the moral credibility of the United States—not just as a moral force for good in the world, but as a source of stability, as a source of leadership. How are future generations going to look back at this moment? And how are we as people going to be dealing with the fact that the president is doing this in our name? That’s a pretty big question that we all should be asking ourselves right now. And it’s not too soon, by the way, to start asking ourselves what does accountability look like when this is all over? And I’m still enough of an optimist to believe that there will be a morning after for this administration. So I’m thinking a lot these days about what does accountability and what does reconciliation with accountability look like as we’re getting to that morning after.But there’s also the point that this is the position of a fundamentally weak president in this moment. To make a massive empty threat and not follow up on it—the world is watching that. The Iranians are watching that. The IRGC is watching that. And given the level with which Iranian propaganda has been able to mock this president for all of his many foibles and failings, I’m sure that they’ll find a way to mock him not being able to follow up on his threat to annihilate an entire civilization too.Sargent: Well, yes, there will be a morning after, and it may come a lot sooner than people think if Democrats can win the House and possibly the Senate. But just to sort of close this out—we’re in this strange situation where they keep telling us Trump has absolute mastery over the situation, as if he’s only agreeing to negotiate with Iran out of his own benevolence. If that were the case, though, then wouldn’t Trump be able to simply dictate the terms? There’s just an inherent absurdity to all this that I think is worth surfacing and looking at.Horne: Absolutely. And you know, going back to those clips of Karoline Leavitt—you know, honestly, sometimes I feel a little bit sorry for Karoline. She’s got this sick, crazy old man of a boss and he’s making these crazy rants on social media. He’s threatening genocide. He’s picking fights with the Pope. And it’s her job to go out there and publicly defend stuff that would make most people her age go, I don’t know, maybe we should talk about hiding grandpa’s car keys. And then I remember it’s not car keys at stake. It’s literally America’s nuclear launch codes. And then I no longer feel sorry for her or anyone else who is still choosing to defend this shit.Sargent: So, Emily, as we were recording this, it turns out that Trump just announced that the ceasefire will be extended indefinitely. And we don’t seem to know exactly what that means for the talks, but can you kind of play out where this all goes from here?Horne: So obviously this news just broke as we were recording. What this appears to be is an acknowledgement from President Trump that Iran holds all the cards here, and that he is extending a ceasefire with Iran until Iran submits a proposal to end the war permanently. The statement that he put up on Truth Social says, “Pakistan has asked us to hold our attack on the country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.” So that, to me, says a couple of things. One, they’re acknowledging—and I think this is good for the world—that despite Karoline Leavitt’s threats today to destroy the entire civilization of Iran, that’s not going to happen. So let’s acknowledge that not doing genocide is a good thing. But apart from that one good thing, this seems to me to be a total caving to all of the leverage that Iran has been able to accumulate in the last eight weeks.I think it’s upsetting to see that we wound up in a place where—after 13 American soldiers were killed in IRGC attacks, where our diplomatic facilities were attacked, where a lot of the damage is still being hidden by the Pentagon, where we have all seen our gas and energy prices rising with no end in sight, where global trade has been disrupted, where our credibility has been shredded—this is the best that we’ve got: the maintenance of the status quo, and the timetable is now on Iran to put together a proposal while the U.S. is out of ideas for how to resolve this.Sargent: It sure looks that way. And we’ve got to think that at least he isn’t carrying out the threat of genocide, which is a weirdly positive thing.Horne: I don’t want to give him credit for it though, Greg, honestly. The damage of destroying America’s reputation on the global stage, of making us into a rogue state that threatens to annihilate our enemies—that damage has been done and can’t be undone. Even if in this particular moment it doesn’t look like the crisis that’s most at hand.Sargent: Well, who says Trump didn’t accomplish anything? He accomplished that. Emily Horne, awesome to talk to you, folks. Check out Emily’s Substack—it’s called Spin Class. Emily, always a pleasure to talk to you.Horne: Thanks, Greg.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209356/transcript-leavitt-goes-full-cult-fox-war-leaks-humiliate-trump

2026-04-21 20:36:28 UTC

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In September 2024, the Teamsters, whose strutting fool of a president, Sean O’Brien, had been gifted the month before with a prime time slot at the Republican National Convention, took a dive on endorsing a presidential candidate. It was the first time the Teamsters had not endorsed since 1992, and a thoroughly irrational choice, given that Donald Trump opposed labor rights during his first term and, unsurprisingly, has continued to do so in his second. After Trump was elected, O’Brien was rewarded with the selection of his favored candidate, former Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Republican of Oregon, for labor secretary. She turned out to be a total, scandal-plagued hack, and on Monday she joined the procession of departing Cabinet officials—Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and now Chavez- DeRemer—judged too corrupt, or perhaps (in the case of Bondi) not corrupt enough, to serve the most corrupt president in American history.Chavez DeRemer is by far the least well-known in this (notably, all-female) cavalcade, probably because people seldom pay much attention to the labor secretary. Her initial reception among labor unions was mildly favorable, with AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler taking note that she’d been one of only three House Republicans to cosponsor the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would expand labor rights for private-sector unions, and one of only eight to cosponsor the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, which would do the same for public-sector unions. It was encouraging to observe some opposition to Chavez-DeRemer in the business world and among conservative GOP legislators. “She’s one of them,” Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, told Politico. “She’s pro-union.”But it turned out Tuberville (now running for Alabama governor) had little to fear. At her confirmation hearing, Chavez-DeRemer hedged obligingly on her support for the PRO Act, calling the bill “imperfect” and explicitly rejecting a crucially important section of it that would overturn state right-to-work laws. She also dodged questions about whether she’d support raising the minimum wage from the current hourly $7.25, in deference to Trump’s studied inscrutability on the matter. (In 2016 candidate Trump took so many contradictory positions on the minimum wage that The Washington Post published a guide to them; in-office Trump has effectively opposed any raise, most notably by canceling a Biden-era executive order requiring federal contractors to increase their hourly minimum to $15.) Chavez-DeRemer demonstrated sufficient loyalty to Trump’s agenda that in the end only three Republicans opposed her; Tuberville voted to confirm. As secretary, Chavez-DeRemer logged a mediocre enforcement record, reducing, for example, the number of concluded compliance actions against wage and hour violations from an average of 21,000 under Biden to 17,000, and reducing the number of compliance actions against the worst performers (“low wage, high violation industries”) from an average of 842 under Biden to 649. Republican Labor secretaries get rewarded for reducing enforcement and thereby reducing the government burden on private enterprise, so if Trump considered Chavez-DeRomer’s record at all before pushing her out (probably he didn’t), he would have regarded it favorably. Chavez-DeRemer also dutifully pressed forward with Trump’s deregulatory agenda, including a potentially disastrous proposed rule to open up 401(k) plans to risky investments that is effectively a bailout for private equity—and an especially high priority for Trump.What tripped up Chavez-DeRemer in the end was an impressive series of alleged personal ethical lapses. In January, The New York Post’s Josh Christenson reported that the Labor department’s inspector general (former Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, Republican of New York, a former police detective) was investigating an “explosive complaint” alleging that Chavez-DeRemer was pursuing an “inappropriate” relationship with a department underling, and (per the Post) had “welcomed her alleged paramour at least three times to her DC apartment and twice into her hotel room while traveling.” The hotel room was at Las Vegas’s Red Rocks Casino Resort and Spa, reported the Post’s Christenson, and the Post possessed photos and videos showing them there. The complaint, per Christenson, said the hotel had additional footage of the illicit couple (not seen by the Post) engaging in “unprofessional behavior,” and that the alleged lovebirds visited Las Vegas not once but twice in 2025. The presumptive underling/boy-toy (subsequently reported to be a member of Chavez-DeRemer’s security detail; cherchez le bodyguard!) told Christenson: “I got lawyers, so I’m not gonna talk to you. I have nothing to say.”According to the report, the complaint further alleged that Chavez-DeRemer had committed “travel fraud” by directing her chief of staff, Jihun Han, along with her deputy chief of staff, Rebecca Wright, to “make up” justifications for official trips so that Chavez-DeRemer could visit family or friends. The Post further reported that Chavez-DeRemer was a “boss from hell” who made subordinates run personal errands for her. Oh, and the complaint said Chavez-DeRemer was observed drinking during the workday in her office, where she kept a stash of champagne, bourbon, and Kahlua Alcohol consumption is quite the emerging leitmotif in stories about Trump Cabinet members! Three days after Christenson’s bombshell story, Politico’s Nick Niedzwiadek reported that Han and Wright had been placed on administrative leave. Later, Chavez-DeRemer’s bodyguard and her advance person were placed on leave, too.If you think that’s tawdry, you ain’t heard nothing yet. The Post’s Christenson followed up with a report that Chavez-DeRemer took subordinates to an Oregon strip club while out of town on official business. Then The New York Times followed up with an even ickier story that “at least two female staff members” at the Labor department said that Chavez-DeRemer’s anesthesiologist husband, Shawn DeRemer, “had sexually assaulted them,” through inappropriate touching. In one instance, the Times’s sources said, Shawn was recorded on security cameras embracing one of the women for an extended period of time. The Washington Metropolitan Police Department were called in and filed a police report noting “sexual contact against her will.” Unsurprisingly, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro decided not to prosecute (too busy no doubt trying to bring Fed Chair Jerome Powell to justice), but Shawn was, at least, banned from the building.At some point, Dad allegedly got into the act as well, according to a March 4 report by Rebecca Davis O’Brien of The New York Times. Richard Chavez, per O’Brien, texted a young female Labor department employee (we’ll call her YFL): “Hearing u/r in town. Wishing you would let me know. I could have made some excuses to get out and show u around. Please keep this private.” YFL then replied, “Will do, no need to worry!” to which Richard replied, “When are u leaving an where u staying.” A few weeks later YFL texted not Richard but Shawn: “I’ve been having so much fun traveling with LCD and being in the moment for everything!! I promise from now on I’ll check in.” To which Shawn replied: “You better. I was feeling forgotten. I figured you were still in church repenting after your exposure to the demon state of Oregon.”Chavez-DeRemer was scheduled to meet Tuesday with the inspector general for an extended interview. She resigned instead. That sounds to me like an excellent call on her part.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209341/lori-chavez-deremer-resign-sleaze

2026-04-21 18:42:38 UTC

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Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego should be commended for some excellent fact-checking of Trump crony Kevin Warsh on Tuesday.Warsh is Trump’s pick to be the next chair of the Federal Reserve after Jerome Powell’s term expires in May. During Warsh’s Senate committee confirmation hearing, Gallego tried to suss out whether Warsh was going to put the president’s political interests ahead of the country’s economic health.“Earlier today, you said to Senator [John] Kennedy that President Trump never demanded you to cut interest rates in your job interview. Is that your sworn testimony?” Gallego asked.“That is, Senator,” Warsh said.“Well, someone here is lying, then,” Gallego replied. “It’s either you or President Trump. Because in an interview with The Wall Street Journal of December 12, President Trump confirmed he pressed you on your commitment to support interest rate cuts.”Gallego helpfully cited the Journal article for Warsh: “During a 45-minute meeting … the president pressed Warsh on whether he could trust him to support interest-rate cuts if he were chosen to lead the central bank, according to people familiar with the meeting. Trump, in the Journal interview, confirmed that reporting.”Warsh responded by claiming the reporters who wrote the story—Meridith McGraw, Nick Timiraos, and Brian Schwartz—were fibbing:“Senator, there’s, of course, a third alternative. You cite a couple of reporters for a leading financial newspaper.… I think those reporters either need better sources, or better journalistic standards.”GALLEGO: Earlier today, you told Sec. Kennedy that Trump never demanded you to cut interest rates. Is that your sworn testimony?WARSH: That is, senator.GALLEGO: Okay. Well someone here is lying then. Because Trump confirmed he pressed you on interest rate cuts. pic.twitter.com/AKoEK3uWrj— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 21, 2026Of course, the cited “source” here is Trump himself, which Gallego pointed out, asking if that meant Warsh thought Trump was lying. Warsh began to reply before Gallego unfortunately cut him off and moved on. Gallego did ask Warsh what he would say if the Journal verified all of its reporting, to which Warsh repeated the same unsatisfying point about journalists needing better sources and standards.Warsh has previously worked on Wall Street, as an economic adviser in the George W. Bush administration, and as a Fed governor from 2006 to 2011. With a net worth in the hundreds of millions, he would be the richest Fed chair ever, which feels fitting for a presidency that seems to be about the rich laughing in the face of working Americans as much as possible.Trump would love to see a Powell replacement as soon as possible. Trump appointed the mild-mannered, bespectacled Powell in 2017, but Powell has since drawn the president’s ire by being boringly responsible and refusing to cut interest rates. Trump has even weaponized the Department of Justice by subpoenaing Powell over a federal building renovation (a judge tossed the lawsuit out). In the face of mounting pressure, Powell has not wavered. His quiet resistance to the president has made him something of a cult hero among Democrats, who have crafted a few social media fancams in his honor.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209319/federal-reserve-chair-nominee-donald-trump-interest-rates

2026-04-21 15:51:42 UTC

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President Donald Trump’s nominee to chair the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh, tried to dodge questions Tuesday about his financial ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Committee, Senator Elizabeth Warren asked Warsh about more than $100 million in investments that he has “refused to disclose to ethics officials and the public,” specifically assets held in vehicles called “THSDFS LLC” and the “Juggernaut Fund.” Warren directly asked the Fed chair nominee whether any of his assets had to do with President Trump or his family, the Chinese government, money laundering, or Jeffrey Epstein.Warsh refused to answer, saying only that he would sell those investments if he was confirmed. Warren pressed further, asking specifically if Warsh would tell the committee if he had financial ties to Epstein.“Are you refusing to tell us if you have investments, for example, in vehicles set up to advance Jeffrey Epstein? Is that what you’re telling us—you just won’t tell us?” Warren asked.Warsh again didn’t answer the question.“Senator, what I’m telling you is that those assets that you represent at Juggernaut will be sold if I’m confirmed before I take office and sign the oath of office,” Warsh said.WARREN: That's not my question. Are you refusing to tell us if you have investments in vehicles set up by Jeffrey Epstein?KEVIN WARSH: Those assets will be sold if I'm confirmed pic.twitter.com/aCzH5C0ACl— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 21, 2026Warren then asked if he would “at least disclose how you would plan to disclose and divest these secret assets,” citing a scenario in which a billionaire looking for inside information from the Fed would cut him a check for $100 million. Warsh still would not answer the question, instead saying that he had come to an agreement with the Office of Government Ethics to divest his assets. Warsh’s name has popped up a couple of times in the government’s Epstein files. While that doesn’t implicate him in any of Epstein’s crimes, it does show that they traveled in the same circles. Warsh, who would become the wealthiest Fed chair in more than 100 years if confirmed, is married to billionaire heiress Jane Lauder, granddaughter of Estée Lauder and daughter of Republican donor Ronald Lauder. Is Warsh being evasive because he’s trying to dismiss those connections, or is it because he actually has assets connected to the notorious criminal?
https://newrepublic.com/post/209317/trump-fed-chair-kevin-warsh-epstein-investments

2026-04-21 15:10:01 UTC

@nprofile…pyzj
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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth doesn’t think soldiers living and fighting together in close quarters or aboard warships need to take the flu vaccine.“Under the disastrous Biden administration, this Pentagon waged an unrelenting war on our warriors on many fronts, including when it came to denying them simple medical autonomy, and the freedom to express their religious convictions,” Hegseth said in a video statement posted on Tuesday morning. “Under President Trump … we’re seizing this moment to discard any absurd, overreaching mandates that only weaken our war fighting capabilities. In this case, this includes the universal flue vaccine, and the mandate behind it.” The War Department is once again restoring freedom to our Joint Force. We are discarding the mandatory flu vaccine requirement, effective immediately. pic.twitter.com/9K5W8g0NsD— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) April 21, 2026This is a developing story.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209312/hegseth-ends-flu-vaccine-mandate-military

2026-04-21 14:19:15 UTC

@nprofile…pyzj
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President Donald Trump doesn’t sound particularly optimistic ahead of peace talks with Iran. Speaking on the phone to Joe Kernan of CNBC’s Squawk Box Tuesday morning, Trump signaled that the U.S. was ready to resume attacks if negotiations with Iran were unsuccessful.“Well, I expect to be bombing, because I think that’s a better attitude to go in with, but we’re ready to go. I mean the military is raring to go,” Trump said.Asked if he planned to extend the ceasefire if talks were unsuccessful, Trump replied: “I don’t want to do that. We don’t have that much time.”None of this sounds like what someone who is expecting a deal would say. And Trump’s vow for more violence comes after administration officials revealed that the president’s comments have hurt negotiations with Iran.The U.S. nearly upended peace talks Monday after it seized a cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has demanded the immediate release of the cargo ship and vowed retaliation. Iran has reportedly told regional mediators that it still plans to send a team of negotiators to Islamabad Tuesday, but Tehran has refused to publicly confirm that the country will come to the table.Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf warned Monday night that Iran was also ready to resume fighting. “We do not accept negotiations under the shadow of threats, and in the past two weeks, we have prepared to reveal new cards on the battlefield,” he wrote on X.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209300/donald-trump-threatens-bomb-iran-peace-talks

2026-04-21 13:07:02 UTC

@nprofile…pyzj
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President Donald Trump’s addiction to social media posting is hurting negotiations with Iran. Talks last weekend seemed to be going well, with a deal close to being reached. But then, Trump went online and claimed that Iran had agreed to specific provisions such as handing over all of its enriched uranium, making similar comments to reporters over the phone. Iranian negotiators then publicly denied those claims and announced they weren’t preparing for more talks, saying that the U.S. was unserious.Unnamed Trump administration officials told CNN that Trump’s posts and statements to the media have had a negative effect on efforts to end the war with Iran, fueling mistrust from the Iranian negotiators. “The Iranians didn’t appreciate POTUS negotiating through social media and making it appear as if they had signed off on issues they hadn’t yet agreed to, and ones that aren’t popular with their people back home,” one person who was familiar with the negotiations told the news outlet. Trump’s remarks in the press didn’t help either. To Bloomberg, he claimed that Iran had agreed to an “unlimited” suspension of its nuclear program, and he told CBS News that Iran had “agreed to everything” and would remove its enriched uranium with help from the U.S. In an interview with Axios, he said “I think we will get a deal in the next day or two,” with another meeting “probably” coming on the weekend.Whether any of these details were true or not, airing them out in public before an agreement was reached was not wise, and probably gave the Iranian government less of a reason to take the U.S. in good faith. But don’t expect the president to change anytime soon. On Tuesday, he threatened to resume bombing Iran, just as Vice President JD Vance was expected to leave for peace talks in Pakistan.“I expect to be bombing. The military is raring to go,” Trump said on CNBC, setting a deadline for a peace deal to be reached in the next 24 hours.KERNEN: You're saying you need at least the prospect for a signed deal today or tomorrow or else you would resume bombing Iran?TRUMP: Well, I expect to be bombing. The military is raring to go. pic.twitter.com/yRRZzOZhzV— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 21, 2026
https://newrepublic.com/post/209293/trump-iran-comments-derail-peace-talks

2026-04-21 10:00:00 UTC

@nprofile…pyzj
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Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu share a lot of traits. They are both solipsistic, mendacious, narcissistic, and paranoid megalomaniacs who perceive themselves as victims of a cabal of elites. Now they share something else: They have lost a war together. Driven by vanity and hubris, the U.S. president and Israeli prime minister miscalculated Iran’s mettle, and now their mutually inflicted failure is causing them considerable political harm at home. What started as a Smith & Wesson partnership has degenerated into a Thelma & Louise ending.In the U.S., there has been no rally-around-the-president effect from this war. Every day, another poll shows Trump’s approval rating hitting a new low and support for the war below 40 percent. As The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend, his public “bravado” is a mere mask for his private fears about the damage the war is doing to him as he stares down the November midterm elections that appear certain to cost him unified control of Washington. Meanwhile, in Israel, Netanyahu is getting clobbered on all sides. The New York Times reported Friday that “the prime minister’s critics, and even some of his allies on the right, have seized on ... his inability to resist Mr. Trump’s pressure” to end the war. Netanyahu’s coalition, like Trump’s, is also lagging in polls in an election year. “A core element of Mr. Netanyahu’s appeal to voters—the argument that his close bond and strategic mind meld with Mr. Trump make him uniquely equipped to ensure Israel’s security—now appears far less convincing,” the Times noted. As reporting from the aforementioned outlets has shown, Netanyahu prodded and, some might say, dragged Trump into a war America had no interest in. In that sense, Netanyahu is responsible for Trump’s political damage. But with all due respect to Netanyahu’s swindling qualities, you can’t really “drag” the president of the United States into a war he does not want to participate in. A willing, even enthusiastic Trump joined Netanyahu in what he thought was a cool video game in which the other side would surrender quickly. Because the war failed to achieve anything close to Netanyahu’s fantasy scenarios of Iranian capitulation and regime change, Trump in fact inflicted major political damage on Netanyahu. Trump entered this war without clear and attainable objectives, without public support, without coherently defined deliverables, and with no overriding American interests at stake. A war that he justified as “preventing Iran from becoming nuclear” is now mainly an effort to reopen a shipping corridor that was wide open before he launched the war. History will judge him harshly on this adventure, but Trump may not be defined solely by the failed Iran war. However ill-conceived and impulsive it was, it’s one among many of his destructive, incomprehensible, self-inflicted political debacles. Netanyahu is an entirely different opera. For him, the Iran war is an epic calamity. This was his once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and it has amounted to very little. Iran was the defining issue of his career. It was his political raison d’etre, the epitome and culmination of how he interprets history and his self-ordained image as the protector of Israel. For him, every year is 1938 all over again, Tehran is Berlin, and he is Winston Churchill. In this respect, this war was his Normandy D-Day, and the invasion failed. Here was a near-perfect strategic alignment and confluence of elements: a jittery, impressionable American president willing to collude; overwhelming American-Israeli military and technological superiority; a weakened Iran under severe economic strain and diminished geopolitical stature. But, and not for the first time in his strategic assessments, Netanyahu got it wrong. His assumptions about how the war would transpire were fundamentally flawed. His rosy scenarios of regime collapse have not come to fruition, and he wrongly dismissed the possibility of Iran upending the military asymmetry and shutting the Strait of Hormuz. And it is unlikely Netanyahu will ever get another opportunity like this. But who is most to blame? A peculiar phenomenon has emerged among both Trump’s and Netanyahu’s supporters: It’s the other guy’s fault.MAGA voters need to reconcile how Trump, who promised to never engage in “forever wars,” decided to attack Iran—so they conclude he was duped by an external actor. Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s hardcore supporters accuse Trump of not going the distance and eventually dumping Israel. In the one of the few countries in the world where Trump is popular, he is now a disappointment.In the last 15 months, Netanyahu has developed total dependency and reliance on Trump, lubricated by deep fealty. Some of it was politically motivated: from his ardent neoconservative tendencies, his affinity to anti-Clinton Republicans (Newt Gingrich and the Evangelicals), his anti-Obama association with the Tea Party movement, his speech to Congress in 2015 against the Iran nuclear deal, and his intrinsic and cultural disdain for anything “liberal.” Some of it comes from the grievances and sense of victimhood he shared with Trump: persecuted by a left-wing cabal, hated by the media, resented by the judiciary, and detested by elites. But a lot of it was genuinely about Iran. Netanyahu accurately identified Trump’s megalomania as a vulnerability he could exploit. Trump is amenable to extreme sycophancy and all you need to do is massage his ego, fan his anger at his predecessors, and promise him a huge win.How many times has Netanyahu tried to dupe Trump? For most of 2017 and into 2018, Netanyahu prodded Trump to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear deal that Barack Obama struck in 2015. He believed that if Trump ripped it up and imposed crippling sanctions, Iran would come crawling and beg for a better deal. In May 2018, Trump unilaterally withdrew. Over the next seven years, Iran increased its uranium enrichment centrifuges from 200 to 19,000 and accumulated approximately 1,000 pounds of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity. In March 2025, Israel violated the ceasefire in Gaza and Netanyahu reassured Trump that it was a temporary resumption of war to destroy Hamas. In June 2025, Netanyahu convinced Trump to attack Iran’s military nuclear facilities. “We obliterated their nuclear capabilities,” Trump ceremoniously announced, with Netanyahu declaring that we “set them back decades.” The stage was set for the biggest manipulation of them all: the all-out war against Iran that began in February.As a general rule of political and international relations writing, wars cannot and should not be determined to have been a “success” or a “failure” while they’re ongoing or in their very immediate aftermath. But there are immediate takeaways from the Iran war when comparing the stated goals and the actual results. The Middle East is less safe, and the global economy is less stable. Iran has discovered something—its power to control the Strait of Hormuz—that’s much more effective than nuclear capability or a network of terror proxies. It has also exhausted the U.S. military’s resources and bruised its ego; shattered the business model of the Arab Gulf States; and merely by surviving the onslaught of bombs, caused Israel to become even more of a pariah state.Trump and Netanyahu, in their infinite delusions of grandeur, expected this to be a quick win that would buoy their respective political fortunes. They probably envisioned being showered with praise by their countrymen and the media, and relished the thought of rubbing the victory in their opponents’ faces. The exact opposite has happened instead, and they have no one to blame but themselves—and each other.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209271/trump-netanyahu-iran-war-political-damage

2026-04-21 10:00:00 UTC

@nprofile…pyzj
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There is something absurd about hearing a character in a movie utter the title of the movie they’re in out loud. It’s a moment that can be played for laughs, but it’s just as hard not to smirk when a film that takes itself seriously calls itself by its own name. Many filmmakers will go out of their way to avoid this moment of clunky announcement. You never hear, for example, Daniel Day-Lewis snarl, “Welp, there will be blood,” or Leonardo DiCaprio mutter, “You know, man, it’s always just one battle after another.”HBO’s new limited series DTF St. Louis observes no such prohibition. In the world of the show, “DTF St. Louis” is a hook-up app for married people looking for discrete adulterous encounters. It’s the catalyst for the entire sweet and sordid affair that takes up this show’s seven episodes. We hear Clark Forrest (Jason Bateman) and Floyd Smernitch (David Harbour) discussing it, and their joint interest in exploring it, in one of the show’s numerous timelines. Both men, suburban husbands and fathers, are unfulfilled in their sexual lives. So they make a pact to revitalize their lives together through online love. And we hear police investigators explaining and interrogating it after Floyd’s mysterious death in another of those timelines. The app’s logs are a key archive of evidence for Detective Homer (Richard Jenkins) and Detective Plumb (Joy Sunday) as they try to figure out what exactly happened to Floyd.DTF? DTF. They met on DTF. I got a hit on DTF.The mantra-like repetition of this title is, thus, perfectly explicable in plot terms, but it also leads the viewer to notice how many other different notable terms or phrases characters repeat over and over again to each other onscreen. Cornhole. Outback Steakhouse. Quality Garden Suites. Nicer plates and bowls for the household. Finish First. B out the B. Watermelon Breeze. No way, José. Jamba Juice. DTF St. Louis. There is a touch of smugness in the portrayal of these Midwestern suburbanites who pay such linguistic reverence to the names of the strip mall chains that litter their commercial thoroughfares, but there’s also something more. Characters repeat these loaded phrases—each tied to a meaningful event in the story of love, friendship, and infidelity that we watch unfold—until they are more sound than word. It’s the stylistic signature of DTF St. Louis—language that becomes gesture that becomes feeling.A prose poem? I hesitate to use too literary an analogy, as there are aspects of DTF St. Louis that are pretty willfully goofy, and I’m not entirely sure every tonal movement it makes is either effective or well chosen, but there’s really no other experience on TV quite like it right now. Words and phrases repeat, but so do images, sometimes achingly gorgeous ones, stitched through the series like embroidery.I have an allergy to media about suburban ennui and adultery. But I will also admit that DTF St. Louis hypnotized me. The show begins, and it seems like a murder mystery or a suburban infidelity melodrama or a male friendship cringe comedy. It is indeed all of those things, and several more besides that reveal themselves over time. But the rhythm and pace of the show does not belong to or emerge from any of those genres. Its repetitions, its quick vignettes, its narrative haltingness and teasing, its many gemlike moments of visual beauty—the show builds out of these disparate and interconnected blocks of text, gesture, feeling. I will admit that I was resistant to this show at first. I have an allergy to media about suburban ennui and adultery—it’s hard to come up with new things to say about a topic so well trodden over many decades. But I will also admit that DTF St. Louis hypnotized me. Does it have anything new to say about the stir-crazy horniness of middle-aged middle-class white people? Maybe. But the way DTF St. Louis says what it has to say is utterly original and irresistible. That’s enough for me. DTF St. Louis is one in an increasingly long list of recent prestige TV series about the crisis of contemporary masculinity. In fact, it airs on a cable channel—HBO—that, over the past two years, has essentially become a one-stop-shopping narrowcast boutique of narratives of male loneliness and anxiety. The Rehearsal, The Chair Company, Rooster, Task, The Pitt, the forthcoming Richard Gadd series Half Man—these series are all variations on a theme, and DTF St. Louis, for all of its formal eccentricity, slots right in among them. Like many of these series, it’s an alternately critical and credulous examination of what exactly the hell is the matter with men these days.DTF’s take on this discourse is, as its characters like to repeatedly say, “complex.” At its heart are Clark and Floyd. Clark is a successful local meteorologist for a news station in St. Louis. He lives in the imaginary West County suburb of Twyla, MO, with his wife and two children in a large and lovely, if sterile, new construction home. He is a measly kind of man, soft and sensitive, acquiescent to his family, but also blocked up. He greets everyone with ingratiating good cheer, but he’s also possessed by a kind of twitchy nervousness. He rarely finishes a sentence, hanging, instead, on his conversation partner to fill in the rest. Bateman does an unnerving but effective job of transmuting his characteristic smarm into something a little more fragile.To Floyd and his wife Carol (Linda Cardellini), though, Clark is a glowing image of stability. Floyd is a bit of a lovable loser. He is an American Sign Language interpreter who works onscreen with Clark. He describes himself as overweight, out of fighting trim, and that’s only the beginning of his manifold problems. He is a doting stepfather to Richard, a sad young boy with devastating behavioral issues. He wants to regain his lost intimacy with Carol, but there are two problems that we find out about right away. The first is that Carol has taken on a job as a little league umpire to make some extra money, which they need because they are deep in debt. It’s not that Floyd objects to this as a threat to his masculine status as a breadwinner but that Carol’s umpire uniform turns him off. The second reason for their cold snap in the bedroom, though, is that Floyd, for reasons that it will take the entire season to unfold, has a debilitatingly crooked penis. I’ve already listed a number of storytelling genres—mystery, erotic thriller, buddy comedy—that DTF St. Louis incorporates. One of them, maybe the most structurally important, is the dick joke. So, these lost boys turn to DTF St. Louis, and the promise of midlife sexual awakening it brings. It’s hard to summarize what actually happens after that, largely because “what happens” is revealed piece by piece, with events thoroughly shuffled out of chronological order. DTF St. Louis creator Steven Conrad—who is the sole writing and directing credit on every episode—borrows and blows out a contrivance that I most closely associate with Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad: Each episode, from the very first, features scenes from every other episode. That means that the convoluted, devastating final moments of the series—as well as dozens of other moments—are stealthily interspersed as elliptical cutscenes all the way through. When we first encounter those images—Clark riding his recumbent bike on the dark streets, for instance, or Clark and Floyd embracing in the nude—it’s unclear where and when they’re from. The show’s quick-cutting and lyrical editorial style makes this pattern seem perfectly natural in the pilot. But it means that, every time we see a set of images, we learn more about them. Every time we watch a scene with a little extra time at the front or back, or from a slightly different perspective, we understand something different about them. The story moves forward, but through recycled images and moments that gain meaning and feeling over time. Jamba Juice. Quality Garden Suites. No way, José.This is a portrait of radical male vulnerability, of the kind of soul-entwining friendship we are told is hard for men to strike up at this age. The basic outline is that, soon, Clark and Carol embark upon an affair of their own, while Floyd begins—first accidentally and then on purpose—to explore the possibility of “intimacy play” with other men. Those paths crisscross and converge in expected and unexpected ways, forming a kind of homespun love triangle that it takes every minute of all seven episodes to fully appreciate and understand. Then, in the end—as we’re shown in the pilot—there’s Floyd’s dead body, an empty can of poisoned Bloody Mary, and a Playgirl magazine centerfold with the model’s face scratched out.What’s never unclear on this show is that the real love story here is between Clark and Floyd. These men share everything, they support each other 24 hours a day, they are kind to each other in ways that will eventually baffle the investigating detectives. This is a portrait of radical male vulnerability, of the kind of soul-entwining friendship we are told is hard for men to strike up at this age. “I’m just fucking lonely, man,” Clark tells Floyd. “I’m lonely as shit.” DTF St. Louis is a show about the side effects of Clark and Floyd’s deceptively simple and incredibly complex cure for male loneliness. Then there’s Carol. Since Freaks and Geeks, Linda Cardellini has become one of the greatest and most dependable TV actresses of her generation. She is, in this show, sultry and silly, cold and furious, whimsical on occasion, and righteously cutting. Her performance in her umpire gear is a massive comic achievement, her diminutive head rolling around atop the bulky chest pad, her arms slicing out to call strikes—she’s like a silent film comedian. And while Carol’s woundedness and frustration and awakening desire are as important to DTF’s narrative as anything else, so too is her ultimate marginality. She is the wife of a mixed-up, depressed man and the mother of a mixed-up, depressed son. When she and Clark meet up for sex, Clark calls the assignations “dream sessions,” because the room becomes a space for them to realize their (sexual) dreams. But Carol doesn’t really have any hot dreams of her own. The only ones she can come up with are about ways she can rescue her lost husband and lost son. Even still, Carol’s screen time fully dwarves that of Clark’s wife and children. They barely factor in the story at all, not even into the many conversations Clark has with Floyd about his guilt. He feels guilt about cuckolding Floyd and about hurting Floyd’s feelings, but little guilt about his betrayal of his own family. Late in the series, Clark tells the investigators that his affair with Carol was, “a reaction against my own life.” He goes on to recall the gentle #GirlDad scene of braiding his daughters’ hair as they share their lives with him. Despite the sweetness of these moments, he feels removed from them, asleep. “You cannot be there with your daughters in these precious moments, thinking about yourself and your things,” he said. “Come on, you gotta be present.” And yet, Clark is not present. Or rather, he’s present elsewhere. Clark only has eyes, and a heart, for Floyd. And part of this show’s tragedy and romance is in witnessing Clark devote, and then sacrifice, his life (daughters included) for him.There is a heart-flaying generosity to the way Clark and Floyd melt into each other, a deep selfishness to their self-love. A criticism many commenters brought up about Martin Scorsese’s funereal gangster epic The Irishman was that the film’s few women were radically marginalized onscreen. In particular, Scorsese cast the outstanding Anna Paquin to play the daughter of the aging hitman protagonist played by Robert DeNiro. But Paquin has only a single line in the film. Why have her there, why put her in those scenes, looming in a corner, if you’re going to ignore her? The answer—for many, an insufficient one—is that this is a film about the sustaining and suffocating embrace of male friendship. That the titular Irishman’s enmeshment in the “family” of the Italian mob gave him a sense of belonging and acknowledgment he’d never had, but that it came at the expense of any kind of relationship at all with his actual family. At the end of that film, as those men that filled his life are killed in their turn or die of old age, he is left alone, lonely, without the daughter he kept at the margins of his life. The cure for male loneliness is fatal if taken in too high a dose.DTF St. Louis tells a similarly dire story in a form that is deceptively enlivening. Its quick disorienting cuts, its uplifting seventies pop soundtrack, the electricity of its leads—we don’t feel, here, the dread and horror of mortality that suffused every second of The Irishman. But it’s all a feint. It’s possible, it turns out, to give too much of yourself, to escape an airless co-dependency only to reproduce that same airlessness elsewhere. It’s possible to be so kind that it’s cruel. Carol keeps saying that Floyd is “the sweetest man,” but he is as dismissive of her struggle and pain as he is attentive to Clark’s. There is a heart-flaying generosity to the way Clark and Floyd melt into each other, a deep selfishness to their self-love. They find something in each other only to lose everything. You know, man, it’s always just one battle after another.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209187/dtf-st-louis-utterly-original-drama-male-loneliness

2026-04-21 09:00:00 UTC

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On Monday, Donald Trump exploded in telling tirades. In one, he raged that he (just he) is winning the war “BY A LOT” and bizarrely stressed that “I’m in charge!” In another, he emphasized that he feels “under no pressure whatsoever” to reach a deal with Iran. Why is Trump so fearful of appearing to lose control? Well, The Wall Street Journal has a striking new report relating that gas prices and the war recently had the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis “looming large in his mind. He’s “grappling behind the scenes with just how badly things could go wrong.” In short: He fears looking like Jimmy Carter as the midterms approach. Indeed, Politico reports that prices have some Republicans sounding “alarm bells” about this fall. We talked to The Lever’s David Sirota, narrator of the “Master Plan” podcast, whose new season focuses on the hyper-powerful presidency. We discuss Trump’s growing fears that events are slipping from his grasp, how this is rooted paradoxically in his assertion of an imperial presidency, how decades of failure led to this moment, and how Democrats can run against his imperial rule. Listen to this episode here.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209287/trump-secret-war-fears-leak-gop-grows-unnerved-alarm-bells

2026-04-20 20:49:24 UTC

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Republicans are fighting over expelling some of their own members of Congress. Representative Cory Mills, under investigation by the House Ethics Committee over allegations of assaulting women, soliciting sex workers, lying about his military service, and profiting from federal contracts as a member of Congress, has drafted a resolution to expel his colleague, Representative Nancy Mace, from Congress after she tried to expel him and three other members of Congress last week. A source told NOTUS, which first reported the news, that the resolution would highlight an incident at Charleston International Airport in South Carolina, last year, in which Mace yelled at TSA agents and security officers, calling them “fucking incompetent.” The resolution could bring up any other number of Mace’s scandals. The South Carolina representative is also facing her own House Ethics Committee investigation over allegations that she collected $12,000 in congressional reimbursement funds that she wasn’t eligible for, and ordered her staff to buy her alcohol late at night, clean her house, and promote her on forums as one of the “hottest women in Congress.”The congresswoman took to X after news of Mills’s resolution broke, posting that he “lied about his military service, has been accused of beating women, has a restraining order against him, and has allegedly been stuffing his own pockets with federal contracts while sitting in Congress. As a survivor, I will always stand up and right the wrongs of others. He is only coming after me because he knows he’s next.”Mace last week also targeted Democrat Eric Swalwell and Republican Tony Gonzalez, who ended up resigning rather than face expulsion resolutions from Congress. Swalwell faced numerous allegations of sexual assault and misconduct, while Gonzalez sent sexually explicit messages to two aides and had an affair with one who later committed suicide. The fourth representative in Mace’s crosshairs is Democratic Representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, who faces an expulsion vote this week over allegedly misusing Federal Emergency Management Agency funds. For now, the infighting in the Republican caucus undermines their already razor-thin control of the House and makes it appear that petty squabbling is taking precedence over serious ethical issues.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209280/house-republicans-target-each-other-expulsion

2026-04-20 19:24:51 UTC

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The man who just committed the deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. in the past two years had a previous weapons conviction—so how did he get his hands on another gun? Shamar Elkins, a 31-year-old father, shot and killed his seven children and their cousin Sunday in Shreveport, Louisiana. The victims’ ages ranged from three to 11, CNN reported. He also critically injured two women: his wife and the mother of the eighth child. But in March 2019, three years after he finished a seven-year stint in the Louisiana Army National Guard, Elkins was arrested for firing a 9-millimeter handgun 300 feet away from the fence line of a school where children were playing outside, KTBS reported. Elkins was charged with illegal use of weapons and carrying a firearm on school property. He pleaded guilty to the illegal weapons charge, and the second, more serious charge was dismissed. Elkins was placed on probation for 18 months but walked away without a permanent firearms ban.Elkins was also charged with driving while intoxicated in 2016, CNN reported. The state of Louisiana has a 10-year ban on firearm possession after certain felonies—crimes of violence, sex crimes, drug crimes, burglaries, for example—but not all felonies. The crime to which Elkins pleaded guilty sat beneath this legal threshold. Because Elkins’s 2019 conviction for illegal weapons use only resulted in probation, his record fell short of the legal threshold for a permanent firearms ban under U.S. federal law, according to the International Business Times. Elkins was able to legally own a firearm again after his probation ended.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209277/louisiana-shooter-able-get-gun-prior-convictions

2026-04-20 13:05:44 UTC

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Iran says it won’t be participating in negotiations with the U.S. after it seized an Iranian cargo ship near the Strait of Hormuz. “While claiming diplomacy and readiness for negotiations, the U.S. is carrying out behaviours that do not in any way indicate seriousness in pursuing a diplomatic process,” said Esmaeil Baghaei, a spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, on Monday, saying that the U.S. “violated the ceasefire from the beginning of its implementation.” President Trump bragged on Truth Social Sunday that the Navy destroyer USS Spruance intercepted the Iranian cargo ship Touska in the Gulf of Oman, claiming that the U.S. “stopped them right in their tracks by blowing a hole in the engine room.” The ship has been captured by the Marines, which Trump said is under Treasury sanctions for “illegal activity.” The two-week ceasefire between Iran and the U.S. is set to expire on Wednesday, and a senior Iranian source told Reuters that the U.S. blockade on Iranian ports was undermining the prospect of negotiations, and that Iran’s “defensive capabilities,” including missiles, were not open for discussion. Meanwhile, the U.S. is sending a delegation to Islamabad, Pakistan, including Vice President JD Vance, envoy Steve Witkoff, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Pakistan is deploying 20,000 police, paramilitary, and army personnel to secure the talks, but it could all be for nought if the ceasefire collapses and Iran refuses to take part in talks.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209257/trump-derails-iran-ceasefire-seized-ship-strait-hormuz

2026-04-17 18:34:17 UTC

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Donald Trump is in “discussions” to settle a $10 billion lawsuit with the Internal Revenue Service over the release of his tax returns.The president’s lawyers asked a judge Friday to extend key deadlines on the multibillion lawsuit against his presidential administration, but hidden within the pages of the legal filing was a profound detail: that the president has been in talks with his own government staffers to “avoid protracted litigation.” “Good cause exists to grant an extension in this matter while the Parties engage in discussions designed to resolve this matter and to avoid protracted litigation,” Trump’s lawyers argued. “This limited pause will neither prejudice the Parties nor delay ultimate resolution. Rather, the extension will promote judicial economy and allow the Parties to explore avenues that could narrow or resolve the issues efficiently.”Any payment from Trump’s lawsuit against the government would be doled out to him via taxpayer funds.The suit alleges that the IRS and Treasury Department during Trump’s first term did not do enough to thwart Charles Littlejohn, a former contractor for the IRS, from leaking the tax returns to the press. Littlejohn leaked 15 years of Trump’s tax returns to The New York Times in 2019. The documents were published by the paper of record the following year, in September 2020, two months before the presidential election.Trump’s attorneys have argued that, despite the fact that Littlejohn was classed as a contractor, he acted as a “joint employee” of the two agencies. They further asserted that the government was liable for Littlejohn’s actions due to the IRS’s “extensive, detailed, day-to-day supervision” of his behavior.The legal challenge has raised numerous ethical quandaries, chief among them the apparent conflict of interest in the case. Legal experts have questioned whether a president can sue his own administration to pocket taxpayer money, and have expressed doubts about whether Trump’s Justice Department can appropriately defend the financial institutions.A group of former government officials filed an amicus brief in February that challenged the suit’s core claims. Those officials included former IRS Commissioner John Koskinen and former National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson. Together, the cohort argued that Trump’s lawsuit contains “significant legal flaws” and risks becoming “collusive litigation.” This story has been updated.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209230/donald-trump-settle-irs-10-billion-lawsuit-tax-records

2026-04-17 14:07:00 UTC

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GOP leadership tried and failed to force President Trump’s long-term Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) extension through the House in the dead of night on Friday, as 20 Republicans joined Democrats to derail both the five-year and 18-month renewal plans for the contentious spying program. Instead, after back to back failed votes, they agreed to a mere 10-day extension shortly after 2 a.m.“We just defeated [Speaker Mike] Johnson’s efforts to sneak through a 5-year FISA authorization tonight,” Democratic Representative Ro Khanna said. “Now, they will have to fight in daylight.” Four Democrats, including Jim Hines, broke with the party to try and help Johnson force the original FISA plans through. Not only did they fail, they drew even more attention to the surveillance bill that has been criticized by both the left and right for years. “Speaker Johnson (R-LA) and Rep. Jim Himes (‘D’-CT), in EXTREMELY poor form and bad faith, tried to sneak through a FISA reauthorization missing key privacy protections at 2am last night,” Drop Site News’s Julian Andreone wrote on X. “This was a deliberate and bipartisan attempt to subvert the democratic will of the American people, turning over mass surveillance powers to Trump, including the ability to monitor your emails, search history, online dating matches, and even buy your commercial data.” The vote now heads to the Senate, even as the program expires on Monday.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209202/republican-revolt-vote-trump-fisa-surveillance-plan

2026-04-17 09:00:00 UTC

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In today’s episode, George Conway argues that as improbable as it might seem right now, congressional Republicans will ultimately decide they have no choice but to remove Donald Trump from office before his term ends. Conway, the former GOP lawyer turned Trump critic, is running for Congress as a Democrat. One of his ads is a montage of all the horrors that Trump has unleashed, followed by Conway’s promise to be a different kind of congressman in response. In our conversation, Conway explains why he thinks Republicans will eventually decide Trump has to go and talks about how he’ll push for impeachment immediately if elected. Conway also lays out an accountability agenda that includes impeaching many Cabinet officials, criminal referrals for high-level Trump administration officials, and extensive other reforms designed to prevent anything like this from ever happening again. Listen to this episode here.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209194/trump-will-removed-office-sooner-think

2026-04-16 17:51:20 UTC

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Franklin Graham, one of the most prominent evangelical leaders in the country, is siding with Donald Trump amid his recent Christian controversies.The president has received nationwide backlash since Sunday for sharing an AI-generated image that depicted him as Jesus Christ. Graham brushed off the blowback in a statement on X Thursday, arguing that he didn’t believe Trump would “knowingly depict himself as Jesus,” and that he accepted the White House’s explanation: that Trump thought the heavenly portrayal suggested that he was a doctor rather than the messiah.“When I looked at the illustration, I didn’t jump to the same conclusion as some,” Graham wrote. “There were no spiritual references—no halo, there were no crosses, no angels. It was a flag, soldiers, a nurse, fighter planes, eagles, the Statue of Liberty, and I think this is a lot to do about nothing.”But many of Trump’s Christian supporters saw something else: the president, dressed in white and red robes, encircled in light, holding light, and sharing it with the fallen.“I’m not a Catholic, I’m an Evangelical, but I appreciate how President Trump has defended religious freedom for people of all faiths, including millions of Evangelicals and Catholics in the U.S. and around the world,” Graham continued. “He is the most pro-Christian, pro-life president in my lifetime, and he doesn’t shy away from it.”Graham then chimed in on Trump’s ongoing feud with Pope Leo XIV, who has upset the administration by advocating for peace instead of war. Graham wrote that he hoped the pope “would have the opportunity to thank the President for his efforts to protect religious liberty for Catholics and people of all faiths.”Trump has expressed no interest in connecting with the pope. Speaking with reporters outside the White House Thursday afternoon, Trump remarked that he doesn’t think it’s necessary to meet with the leader of the Catholic Church—a decision that could seriously injure his Republican allies in the midterms.The Catholic Church has 1.42 billion baptized members around the world, with more than 70 million in the U.S. Roughly 20 percent of Americans identify as Catholic, making it the second most popular religion in the country behind Protestantism.But there’s another possibilityL that Trump is merely playing coy with his disinterest in meeting the pope. The president was evidently irked by news that David Axelrod, former Obama strategist, visited the Vatican last week and had reportedly discussed efforts to get the 44th president and the Chicago-born pontiff in a room together.Failing to meet the pope would make Trump the first modern president to break from the longstanding American tradition, which has remained intact since President Woodrow Wilson started it in 1919.Meanwhile, even fervent MAGA politicians were not impressed by Graham’s defense.Former Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said that the evangelical missionary’s thin excuse was “one of the worst things [she’d] seen,” and included a warning from Matthew 7:15-20 about false prophets.“Franklin Graham of all people, who is frequently at the [White House] and with Trump, should be leading Trump to be a Christian, NOT telling other Christians that Trump did nothing wrong when he committed blasphemy,” Greene wrote on X. “Trump knows what he is doing. He knows what he posted. He knows how to manipulate his followers. And he’s not sorry, he never apologized. Instead he lied, and said he was a doctor, which is also absurd.”A Franciscan friar that spoke with CBS News earlier this week said that “no one” should try to “put themselves in the person of Christ.” “I think that’s a little bit of a problem,” the robed friar said. This story has been updated.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209169/far-right-christian-franklin-graham-pope-thank-donald-trump

2026-04-16 15:38:47 UTC

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President Trump has canceled $11 million in funding to Catholic Charities in Miami for taking care of immigrant children as he continues to feud with Pope Leo XIV, who has criticized Trump’s mass deportations and the war in Iran.The federal government has worked with the organization since the first Cuban exiles arrived in south Florida. The government, through the Office of Refugee Resettlement, has paid the nonprofit for years to house immigrant kids who arrive in the U.S. without any adult guardians. The operation runs in a similar way to foster care, independent from state agencies, and the government notified the charity in March of its decision.“The U.S. government has abruptly decided to end more than 60 years of relationship with Catholic Charities in the Archdiocese of Miami,” Archbishop Thomas Wenski of the Miami Archdiocese said in a statement to the Miami Herald’s editorial board. “The Archdiocese of Miami’s services for unaccompanied minors have been recognized for their excellence and have served as a model for other agencies throughout the country.”Wenski added: “Our track record in serving this vulnerable population is unmatched. Yet, the Archdiocese of Miami’s Catholic Charities’ services for unaccompanied minors has been stripped of funding and will be forced to shut down within three months.… It is baffling that the U.S. government would shut down a program that it would be hard-pressed to replicate at the level of competence” shown by the organization.The Department of Health and Human Services told the newspaper that the refugee office is handling about 1,900 unaccompanied minors daily, compared to a peak of 22,000 during the Biden administration.“ORR is closing and consolidating unused facilities as the Trump Administration continues efforts to stop illegal entry and the smuggling and trafficking of unaccompanied alien children,” said HHS spokesperson Emily G. Hillard. It’s unclear how many children are in the Catholic organization’s care, and what will happen to the children if their full-service child welfare program in Miami-Dade County is forced to close.Trump has blasted the pope for being “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy,” but the administration’s criticism of the church’s immigration stances goes back even further. In January 2025, Vice President JD Vance suggested that Catholic bishops were more worried about their federal funding than administration policies. It would seem that Vance’s words back then have now become the administration’s policy.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209153/trump-defunds-catholic-charity

2026-04-16 14:09:35 UTC

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Pope Leo XIV continued preaching a message of peace Thursday, telling an audience in Bamenda, Cameroon, that “the world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants, yet it is held together by a multitude of supportive brothers and sisters.”The pope is touring Africa, and delivered his speech in a country in the midst of a civil war that has killed more than 65,000 people and displaced over 500,000. But the comments also come just days after President Trump, upset that the pope vocally opposes the war in Iran, called him “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.”Though the pontiff didn’t mention Trump by name, he condemned leaders who “manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”For those that haven't seen the video of the pope telling trump indirectly 😂 pic.twitter.com/4mP7tdsQlt— Necessary-Cliff (@theos_mafia) April 16, 2026It’s a continuation of the pope’s response to Trump on Monday, when he told reporters that “I have no fear of the Trump administration or speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do, what the Church is here to do.”“We are not politicians. We don’t deal with foreign policy with the same perspective he might understand it, but I do believe in the message of the Gospel, as a peacemaker,” the pope said on Monday. “I don’t think that the message of the Gospel is meant to be abused in the way that some people are doing.”One would think that a man who claims he ended multiple wars wouldn’t get offended if the pope calls for peace, but Trump has not engaged in any religious introspection this week, instead inciting a backlash from his Christian supporters by posting an AI image of himself as Jesus, which he later deleted, and then reposting a picture of Jesus hugging him. He probably knows deep down that he is actually a major source of conflict in the world right now.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209151/pope-leo-tyrants-manipulating-religion-feud-trump

2026-04-16 10:00:00 UTC

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On February 4, 2026, The Washington Post’s Ukraine correspondent, Lizzie Johnson, announced on X that she had been laid off, via email, “in the middle of a warzone”—left behind in Kyiv by a ruthless wave of layoffs at the Jeff Bezos–owned paper. Johnson’s stranding at the imperiled fringes of America’s once sturdy network of European allies seemed to perfectly embody the pending collapse of another empire, America’s formerly sprawling newspaper industry. Where once an array of informants, stringers, correspondents, editors, newsrooms, and foreign bureaus had splayed across the country and the world, now all that remained was a handful of big city papers, cannibalizing themselves and each other in order to survive, while on occasion leaving former staffers behind like weapons cast off from an army in retreat.The Post’s self-immolation was, of course, hardly the first wave of devastating cuts to America’s newsrooms—nor was Johnson’s stranding the first time that foreign correspondents who deserved better found themselves unemployed. As Elisa Tamarkin tells us in her mesmerizing Done in a Day: Telex From the Fall of Saigon, her father was one such causality, left jobless decades earlier, after the Chicago Daily News closed in 1978. This was despite Bob Tamarkin having been, in his editor’s words, “promoted to trench coat”—industry slang for a dedicated, in-country foreign correspondent—full time, three years earlier. On April 30, 1975, he had managed to be the last American reporter to flee the fall of Saigon and one of the first to “telex” his story home, one of the triumphs of the Daily News’s 70-year-old foreign bureau, and among its last. Yet though Done in a Day is in part an elegy for the newspaper business, Elisa Tamarkin resists turning the book into a straightforward hagiography. What results instead is a startlingly original meditation on the last day of the U.S. War in Vietnam and the end of the newspaper business—one that makes clear that, as much as newspapers were one of the great triumphs of modern civilization, they were also intimate partners in the violence that civilization seems to so endlessly produce.The Chicago Daily News was part of the U.S. War in Vietnam from the start, or indeed, from before the start, with veteran war reporter Keyes Beech arriving in the early 1950s, when the war against Vietnamese independence still technically belonged to France. The truth, of course, was that the Daily News was there because the French war was also an American war, with U.S. money and political support backing Paris’s efforts to keep Vietnam from unifying under the popular Communist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh. The News was one of the first U.S. papers to open a Saigon bureau, just as it had been among the first U.S. dailies to establish its own comprehensive foreign news service a half-century earlier. This was the idea of turn-of-the-century publisher Victor Lawson, who saw an opportunity to permanently embed his own reporters in foreign locales, a “man on the spot” rather than the in-and-out “spot reporting” of the wire services. Newsmen (and they were almost all men to start) could then become like locals, covering the world, as the pioneering Chicago reporter Ben Hecht wrote, “with the enthusiasm … brought in Chicago to four-eleven fires, basement stabbings, love-nest suicides and all the other hi-de-ho doings outside the norm of living.” This was reporting where, as Tamarkin writes, “if you listened you could hear the language of Dickens, Twain, Carlyle, and Rabelais, only breezier, like they were drunk.” As much as newspapers were one of the great triumphs of modern civilization, they were also intimate partners in the violence that civilization seems to so endlessly produce.It’s hard to escape the romance of all this—a world of Graham Greenes and Martha Gellhorns, trench coats (or in warmer climes like Vietnam, as Tamarkin notes, cotton or linen twill jackets with extra pockets for pens and notebooks), cocktails on the veranda of the hotel where “everyone” was staying, and meetings in humid back alleys with informants whose faces are covered in shadow. All to be tapped out on a typewriter and sent home to a newsroom that prided itself on producing the “writer’s newspaper,” providing the story of the day—the “literature” of the day even—“done in a day,” as the paper’s unofficial motto put it. The daily paper, as Hecht suggested, was “a kind of shrine” that had “to be constructed and worshipped, then forgotten, then built again the next day,” all with a flair for “the whiplash phrase … sonorous syntax and bull’s-eye epithet.”Bob Tamarkin, as his daughter tells us, was there at the end. Arriving in Vietnam in January 1975, Tamarkin began reporting from Saigon amid what Henry Kissinger allegedly called the “decent interval”: the period after the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops in 1973 and the collapse of the South Vietnamese government in April 1975. Saigon was thus already, from a reporter’s perspective, something of a ghost town, emptied of the hundreds of journalists of earlier years, the war now largely fought by Vietnamese, not Americans. Antiwar activists like Rolling Stone editor David Harris—who flew in in January to protest continued U.S. support for the Saigon regime—couldn’t even get themselves arrested anymore, while reporters like Tamarkin demurred in covering their daylong protest in front of the U.S. Embassy. The “story was dead,” said one of the remaining reporters, and no one at home seemed to care. This changed as winter turned to spring and a new offensive of the Communist People’s Army of Vietnam, or PAVN, gathered steam, crushing U.S.-backed South Vietnamese forces in the Central Highlands and moving south toward Saigon. Reporters and writers started to pour back in—“tout le monde was there.… Le Monde was there,” noted one—only to have to immediately start flooding back out as the offensive became a rout and the “final” end grew near. Hunter S. Thompson made it a couple of weeks, arriving on April 8 and leaving on one of the last commercial flights on April 24, right before PAVN began shelling the airfield. Tamarkin meanwhile saw his colleague Keyes Beech through the crowd surrounding the U.S. Embassy and over the wall to the waiting Marines on the final day, remaining for a few hours more himself to witness the absurd scene: looters breaking into the embassy grounds as half-burned classified documents were caught up by the rotors of the escape helicopters and then drifted down from the sky to the sound of “White Christmas” (the song signaling to Americans and their allies that it was time to go). Tamarkin made it out on the last helicopter that carried civilians and, upon arriving on the USS Blue Ridge, banged out his “Diary of S. Viet’s Last Hours,” one of the first in-depth accounts of the fall of Saigon to reach American readers. Within a few years, the decline of the newspaper too turned into a rout. The Daily News closed all its foreign offices in 1976 and then its own doors two years later—meanwhile other papers were cutting their foreign reporting “to the bone,” with international news having “almost reached the vanishing point” (as famed correspondent Peter Arnett put it) in most dailies, and the foreign correspondent “a vanishing species,” according to mid-’70s media scholars. The papers themselves would shutter in alarming numbers as the decades progressed, victims of corporate consolidation and hedge-fund machinations, a process grimly documented in a “morgue of final editions” (images of final font pages running from 1978 to 2025) that Elisa Tamarkin includes at the end of the volume—a visual testament to the crumbling cornerstones of popular literate culture.It’s a simple enough story—one that, again, would be easy to romanticize—but as Tamarkin notes, that would be to mistake the perspective of the reporters, of the “West,” for the only one. Writing of her father, she describes how “his dispatches,” while honest and critical of U.S. officials, “never rose to an acknowledgment of the cause—of revolution and liberation—of the other side of the fall” of South Vietnam. They were usually just “Reds,” engaged in the various actions of warmaking, right up to and including smashing into Saigon and ejecting the remaining Americans, down to U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin’s little dog, Nit Noy (among the passengers on the final helicopters). Violence and oppression had, in fact, been behind the news business from the start—this was true of city journalism and its regular beat of murders, sexual assaults, break-ins, and crooked politicians, but part of foreign reporting especially. Lawson’s idea for overseas bureaus, for example, first emerged in 1897 as he contemplated the brutal Cuban war for independence from Spain—a conflict of interest for Americans because the United States would soon join it to deny Cubans full independence—and came into its own thanks to Hecht’s 1918–1920 tour in Berlin, where he covered the aftermath of World War I, another conflict decided by late American arrival. World War II was its heyday: Pyle, Shirer, Gellhorn, and Hemingway on the typewriters, with Capa and Miller clapping home the shutters. The foreign bureau and international reporting for American newspapers and magazines thus emerged and reached their height in direct correlation with the emergence and expansion of U.S. imperial power in the twentieth century, two trend lines tracking up on the graph together, before tumbling back down the chart in 1970s Southeast Asia. Tamarkin consequently avoids telling the story in a straightforward way, one that might overly valorize the correspondents and their trade, using her father’s time in Vietnam instead as a frame for an impressionistic and nonlinear consideration of one day and the way it was understood—moving in and out of the main story for extended digressions on small details. Central is the image of the telex. She considers Hans Haacke’s News, a contemporary art exhibit featuring an actual telex machine that began churning out page after page of news in 1970, the paper collecting in piles on the floor of the Jewish Museum in New York. This seemingly endless and transient accumulation of information was not unlike, Tamarkin suggests, the endless waves of information and news from Vietnam—news that had made clear to the government by the mid-’60s, and the American public by the early 1970s, that the war was unwinnable. The press may have raised questions, Tamarkin argues, but these often focused more on the process of the war than on whether or the why. “Historians” she writes, sometimes “suggest the war was a transformative moment of accountability journalism,” where the press began to truly speak truth to government power—a narrative belied by the billowing piles of telex paper, reporting on a failed war effort that nevertheless kept failing for decades. The press may have raised questions, Tamarkin argues, but these often focused more on the process of the war than on whether or the why. “Journalists,” then as now, “rely on officials to share their perspectives and … leak information, so when there finally was dissent in the press,” it was because that view was shared by many in Washington, the State Department, and the intelligence community too. Those officials were often leaking because their bosses, like the American public, also seemed impermeable to the waves and waves of news and information that swept over them. Ambassador Martin refused to begin the official evacuation, even as Communist forces closed in on Saigon in early April, and his CIA officers leaked like sieves in the hope press reports would change his mind. He made no plan for getting Nit Noy out—though he did pack his beloved stuffed ocelot and a suitcase full of top-secret documents (meant to help him justify his inaction before Congress). The dog, the ocelot, and the documents ultimately made it to safety, but thousands of the South Vietnamese who had supported the U.S. war effort did not. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, learning in Washington that the final evacuations were underway, chose not to attend a play at the Kennedy Center as planned—though, according to one photograph of that night, at least, he continued to wear his tux. The remaining Marine guards were the last Americans to leave (nearly left behind, actually, until one last helicopter was sent to their rescue). Among “the last things my father reported seeing in the Saigon embassy lobby,” Tamarkin writes, was one of them: “a young Marine … stuffing a paperback book,” The Fall of Rome, “into his knapsack.” Evidently a copy of a 1971 volume by R.A. Lafferty, the topic seemed well fitted to events from an American perspective. But the view of the PAVN was strikingly different: Official watercolorists depicted in vibrant colors not a “fall” but a glorious rising, a long-delayed but inevitable triumph of the “people” over the machinations of empire.Those machinations, alas, have outlasted the age of newsprint. While today American power seems too to be in decline—withdrawing, not unlike the Post, from old allies in Europe—it retains enough strength to further an orgy of purposeless and horrific violence in the Middle East. At the same time, the last remaining newspapers have not transcended the flaws of their ancestors, relying on a set of well-practiced euphemisms to cover destruction in Gaza. Still, the successors to the PAVN watercolorists are also present today, bravely posting videos of the war crimes committed against them. These scroll across the screens of viewers and—in most American news and living rooms—accumulate like spools of unread telex paper on the floor.
https://newrepublic.com/article/208901/elegy-foreign-correspondent

2026-04-16 09:00:00 UTC

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Donald Trump’s war on Pope Leo is worsening. JD Vance warned that the Pope, who condemned Trump’s war on religious grounds, should “be careful” in his theology. Mike Johnson dismissed the Pope’s criticisms by bizarrely invoking just war doctrine, which Trump and Pete Hegseth are serially violating. All this reveals Trump to be demanding that his leading sycophants (even devoutly religious ones) place him above the Pope—and indeed that they recognize no higher allegiance than to the president. Meanwhile, The New York Times has an epic piece on his mental decline, which reports that many ex-allies are sounding the alarm, from Marjorie Taylor Greene to numerous top first-term advisers. We talked to former national security official Olivia Troye, who just announced a run for Congress. She recounts what she witnessed first-hand about Trump’s unfitness, why his enablers are much worse this time around, and how his madness is now impacting Americans’ everyday lives. Listen to this episode here.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209135/trump-war-pope-takes-darker-turn-mental-decline-alarms-ex-allies

2026-04-15 21:22:56 UTC

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A Black former federal employee is suing the Trump administration, claiming he was fired because of his race. Alvin Brown, a Democrat member of the National Transportation Safety Board nominated by President Biden, was fired from his post in May 2025. In his lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Tuesday, Brown said that political differences couldn’t have been the main reason for his firing from the NTSB. Brown’s lawyers, who work for the Democracy Forward Foundation, also claim that 75 percent of Black officials at independent agencies have been fired under Trump.“Mr. Brown’s removal from the NTSB cannot be explained by the fact that Mr. Brown is a Democrat and President Trump might have wanted to exert Republican control over the Board,” the lawsuit states. “At the time of Mr. Brown’s removal from the NTSB, there were two other Democrats serving on the Board.” Since Brown’s firing was racially motivated, the lawsuit alleges, it “therefore violated Mr. Brown’s constitutional rights under the Fifth Amendment,” the lawsuit states. The lawsuit also points to people of color being dismissed at agencies including the National Labor Relations Board, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Federal Reserve, and Library of Congress.The lawsuit cited Trump’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and the fact that Brown’s replacement, John DeLeeuw, is white. “President Trump has removed Black Senate-confirmed appointees; he has either nominated a non-Black individual for their replacement or has not formally replaced them at all,” the lawsuit states. “This trend fits with President Trump’s consistent messaging criticizing diversity and inclusion and his clear and demonstrable emphasis.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/209131/trump-sued-firing-black-officials-government

2026-04-14 17:14:18 UTC

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The Trump administration won’t face contempt of court charges for deporting immigrants to El Salvador last year in defiance of a court order.In a 2–1 ruling, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a writ of mandamus Tuesday rebuking U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, saying that he overstepped his authority by pursuing the charges against former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and other administration officials. In March 2025, DHS quickly deported over 100 Venezuelans that the administration claimed were gang members, invoking the Alien Enemies Act to justify their removal without due process. The immigrants were put on planes to El Salvador as part of an agreement with the country’s president, Nayib Bukele, to house them in Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, where human rights abuses are alleged to take place. These flights took place in spite of Boasberg ordering them to stop.Boasberg subsequently ruled that “probable cause exists to find the government in criminal contempt” for the government’s defiance of his order, but over the next year, the administration dodged the contempt charges with multiple appeals to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which deliberated on whether Boasberg had the authority to hold the federal government in contempt.The two judges who ruled against Boasberg, Neomi Rao and Justin Walker, were both appointed by Trump, and they claimed the lower court judge abused his power with the contempt probe.“The district court proposes to probe high-level Executive Branch deliberations about matters of national security and diplomacy,” wrote Rao in the majority opinion. “These proceedings are a clear abuse of discretion.”Incensed over Boasberg, Trump called for his impeachment last year, earning a rare and light rebuke from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who warned about attacks on the judicial branch of government. While Boasberg isn’t being penalized with this ruling, the White House will be happy that none of its officials, for now, will face penalties for breaking the law.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209048/trump-judges-block-criminal-contempt-inquiry-officials-court-orders-deportations

2026-04-14 13:08:29 UTC

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Vice President JD Vance thinks economic terrorism is OK—as long as President Donald Trump’s the one doing it. Speaking to Fox News Monday night, the vice president made a startling admission about how Donald Trump intended to end the war in Iran. “When it comes to weapons of war, what they have done is engage in this act of economic terrorism against the entire world. They’ve basically threatened any ship that’s moving through the Strait of Hormuz. Well, as the president of the United States showed, two can play at that game,” Vance said. VANCE: What they have done is engage in this act of economic terrorism against the entire world. As the President showed, two can play at that game. pic.twitter.com/pd9HIdamV7— Acyn (@Acyn) April 13, 2026“And if the Iranians are going to try and engage in economic terrorism, we’re going to abide by a simple principle, that no Iranian ships are going to get out either,” Vance said. Still, the vice president insisted that Trump only wanted to see Iranians “thrive and succeed,” as if the president had not threatened to end their entire civilization a little more than a week ago. Trump’s naval blockade on Iranian ports began Monday. A sustained military blockade would be incredibly expensive and require a large number of warships, and U.S. allies have made it very clear they have no intention of helping out. While it may seem like a quick fix, taking Iranian oil off the market will only squeeze the market, causing energy prices to surge higher. Gas prices in the U.S. have surged beyond $4 a gallon, as crude oil has climbed to over $100 per barrel.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209027/jd-vance-donald-trump-economic-terrorism-iran

2026-04-14 10:46:45 UTC

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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 14 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.When Donald Trump viciously attacked the Pope and then posted a picture depicting himself as a divine figure, it provoked a massive backlash from many in his own base. That was bad enough, but then Trump offered some rambling spin on it all that was so preposterous in its dishonesty, so insulting, that it quickly made things worse. We think this mess hints at deeper truths about how Trump approaches religious voters, particularly the right-wing evangelicals who are critical to his support. It also helps explain why the Trump coalition and the Trump project are so fragile right now. So we invited on Robert Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of several books about religion and the American right, to make sense of all this for us. Robert, good to have you on.Robert Jones: Thanks. Glad to be here.Sargent: So Trump is angry because Pope Leo has repeatedly criticized the Iran war and especially Trump’s threat to obliterate Iranian civilization. In response, Trump unleashed this crazed rant describing the Pope as “weak on crime,” adding this: “I don’t want a pope who thinks it’s okay for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” Trump also said, “I don’t want a pope who criticizes the president of the United States” because I’m doing what I was elected for. Robert, I just wanted to get your general thoughts on that first.Jones: Well, I guess I’ll start with the last one. “I was doing what I was elected for”—I mean, Trump, of course, thinks that now that he’s been elected, he can be constrained by nothing but his own whim. And so I think that’s really what he’s reacting to here. But, in this case, he’s got the leader of a worldwide church who is also operating out of a 2,000-year-old theological tradition. So Leo is not firing from the hip here. He really is digging pretty deep. And this criticism, again, is not just about the war. It really is weighing these decisions about state violence against Catholic moral teaching. Trump thinks that there should be no criticism of him whatsoever. I mean, this is the authoritarian playbook, right? That you should have no dissenters. And certainly no dissenters with influence or power.Sargent: Exactly. And it doesn’t matter whether they speak for a 2,000-year-old religion or not. So Trump also posted this deranged image that portrayed him as a divine figure in a white robe, healing a sick man by placing his hand on the man’s forehead. This got MAGA figures angry. Marjorie Taylor Greene said, “It’s more than blasphemy. It’s an anti-Christ spirit.” A Daily Wire reporter called it “outrageous blasphemy,” adding “he needs to take this down immediately and ask for forgiveness.” Christian MAGA activist Sean Fucht said: “This should be deleted immediately.” And former Republican spinner Ari Fleischer said “it’s inappropriate and embarrassing—it’s offensive.” There was much more like that. Robert, can you just explain at the core why this image is seen as blasphemous?Jones: Well, Trump is clearly displaying himself as Jesus. So, in the image he’s got on a white robe with a kind of red robe over it. And you could find hundreds of images like that of Jesus, dressed this way—this white robe, this red sash over the top. And he’s got this glowing hand, right, as he’s kind of leaning over this person in their sickbed. So this is also this depiction of supernatural divine healing power that he’s claiming for himself. One other thing I would say is that this is not the first time Trump has done this. You know, it was actually just after Easter last year that Trump actually posted an image of himself as the Pope, dressed up in papal vestments. So, you know, this is not the first time he’s posted things like this, assuming either the chair of the Pope himself or the image of Jesus.Sargent: Well, Trump actually deleted the image of himself as a divine figure. Now let’s listen to how he tried to spin his way out of this.Reporter (voiceover): Mr. President, did you post that picture of yourself depicted as Jesus Christ?Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, it wasn’t a picture. It was me. I did post it and I thought it was me as the doctor and had to do with Red Cross, as a Red Cross worker there, which we support. And only the fake news could come up with that one. So I had—I just heard about it. And I said, how did they come up with that? It’s supposed to be me as a doctor.Sargent: So, Robert, apparently Trump thinks doctors have celestial light pouring forth from their palms and can heal people by touching them. As the picture showed, what did you make of his excuse?Jones: Well, he’s reaching deep for this one, I’ve got to say. I mean, the problem is that the image really didn’t allow much wiggle room. So the best he could say is, yeah, OK, I’m a doctor, I’m at a bedside. But there’s angels in the air behind him. And as we said, these kind of glowing palms. So it’s very clearly—he’s just trying to clearly just obfuscate and kind of trying to back away from it. And again, if he thought this was just an image of him as a doctor and did this innocently, why remove it? Just leave it up if he really believed in it.Sargent: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s obvious and very clear that a big motivator here, a big core of this whole thing, is that for Donald Trump, he doesn’t really understand why something like this would actually bother a lot of people, don’t you think?Jones: I think that’s a really good insight. I mean things that are sacred, things that are holy, things that deserve kind of awe and respect and deference, right? These are all religious emotions that actual people who have some sense of piety take very seriously. And so I think that’s why we’re seeing some of this kind of reaction, even from some of his strongest supporters, is because they also have a religious sensibility. And I think that’s the thing that makes so much of what—whenever Trump engages religion, it comes off very tin ear, because he just has no sense of piety, I think. It becomes very clear, whether it’s his misnaming a book of the Bible, walking across the street, clearing it with kind of some violence and then holding up a Bible awkwardly in front of a church. These are all things that actual religious people wouldn’t do that way. But I think he just has no innate sense of that.Sargent: So Robert, I wonder if part of what we’re seeing here is that in Trump’s genuine understanding of the situation, evangelicals really do matter a lot more within his base than Catholics do. What does the data show on that? It confirms that, right? And how would these different groups perceive this controversy generally?Jones: That’s right. His strongest supporters have always been white evangelical Protestants. They have voted more than eight in 10 for him every time he has been on the ballot. And Catholics are a much more complex story. His support among Catholics has actually been split pretty starkly along racial and ethnic lines. So he’s always had white non-Hispanic Catholics with him, but they vote about six in 10 for him, not 85 percent for him. And the real difference though is that inside the Catholic Church, Hispanic Catholics have actually voted Democratic, typically. So in the last election, it was only about 43 percent of Hispanic Catholics that supported him, compared to 60 percent of white Catholics. So there’s this kind of racial tension inside the Catholic Church, and it’s just not a monolith in the way that it is among white evangelicals.His statement that he could walk down the middle of the street and shoot somebody in the middle of the day and people would still vote for him—I think that’s actually largely true among white evangelicals today. In fact, he made that comment at an evangelical college in the first place. It’s not so true among Catholics.Sargent: Yeah, I want to ask you about that because it seems like there may be a fundamental difference between how devout evangelicals and how devout Catholics perceive Trump. Evangelicals are much more prone to understand Trump as kind of a flawed vessel sent to them by God to carry out his and their plans in the world. Whereas Catholics, I think, aren’t really at that place. Is that distinction correct?Jones: I think that’s fair. I think that Catholics have much more complex reasons for supporting Trump than white evangelicals do. His messianic appearances actually resonate, I think, much stronger with evangelicals than they do among Catholics. You can see that in the favorability numbers too—that Trump’s favorability among white evangelicals, even today, is 70 percent. It just hardly ever wavers, no matter what happens. But his favorability among even white Catholics who voted for him is only about 53 percent. So it’s just barely in majority territory today.Sargent: And what is his favorability rating with Catholics overall right now?Jones: Yeah, with Catholics overall, it’s actually a little bit underwater—just below majority. But that’s because his favorability rating among Hispanic Catholics is 25 percent, right? It’s half as high as among white Catholics.Sargent: So let’s listen to some more of Trump here. He’s asked if he’ll apologize to Pope Leo. Then he says this.Reporter (voiceover): You don’t apologize?Donald Trump (voiceover): No, I don’t, because Pope Leo said things that are wrong. He was very much against what I’m doing with regard to Iran. And you cannot have a nuclear Iran. Pope Leo would not be happy with the end result. You have hundreds of millions of people dead, and it’s not going to happen. So I can’t. I think he’s very weak on crime and other things. So I’m not. I mean, he went public. I’m just responding to Pope Leo. And you know, his brother is a big MAGA person, and he’s a great guy, Luis. And I said, I like Luis better than I like the Pope.Sargent: So, Robert, what do you make of that? I think all this makes it a lot worse, doesn’t it?Jones: Well, look, I mean, the never-apologize mantra, right? Straight from Roger Stone all the way through. I mean, this is his M.O. It’s also—just while we’re talking about religion—it was striking to me when he was running for president the first time around, where he just outright admitted he’s never even asked God for forgiveness. Like he outright said that, I’ve never asked forgiveness for my sins, which for most Christians is a pretty threshold moment, right, to kind of joining the religion or becoming part of the religion. So I think this is really part of his MO. Don’t ask forgiveness even of God. Certainly don’t apologize to any human being. It is just kind of stand by it. But I think you’re right that in this case, it again is so far over the line. I think he’s going to—it may actually do some damage.Sargent: Well, I think another way to put this is that he thinks of himself as answering to a higher authority than the Pope, and that higher authority is Roy Cohn.Jones: Yeah, that’s right. Sargent: He’s basically applying his longtime policy of never backing down—which was taught to him by Roy Cohn—to his relations with the Pope, a spiritual leader of many, many millions who is operating from a 2,000-year-old theology. If you think about it, the Pope is saying some fairly unsurprising things. He’s saying that violent conquest and domination are contrary to the spirit of the Lord, that we have to take care to welcome the stranger. These are things that he probably shouldn’t be surprised by coming from the Pope. But Trump is only capable of understanding this as an affront to him personally. And I really wonder whether that makes things worse in the minds of at least some religious people. Can you talk about that?Jones: Well, being surprised by something depends on having some knowledge of where the benchmark is in order to even know whether you should be surprised by something. I think Trump is so out of his depth here that he doesn’t really even realize what he’s walked into. Catholic just war tradition goes back to St. Augustine, right? It is more than 1,500 years old of serious Catholic theology. And so it’s very developed, and it’s over the very serious question of, if there’s a state that has a monopoly on violence and can wield it at such high levels, what are the moral restraints that should be placed even on a state—or even on a king, in its original formulations? And it turns out there are moral constraints according to Catholic moral tradition. And one of the key ones is that there’s no such thing as a preemptive just war. In other words, preemption is never a moral reason to go to war. War always has to be a last resort, after all modes of diplomacy have failed, and there has to be an imminent threat before—and none of those things has—you could imagine a different world in which Trump knew this tradition and tried to frame a justification for going to war with Iran that might meet some of those criteria, even if it were kind of spun very heavily. But he just hasn’t even attempted to do this. I think he just doesn’t really realize the kind of bandsaw he’s run into here with Catholic moral theology.Sargent: I want to clarify for listeners what you’re saying here, which is that the just war doctrine and the laws of armed conflict are in a sense nourished by Catholic theology going back to St. Augustine.Jones: I think it’s really telling in that clip you’ve played about Trump that he’s simply appealing to ends. So if you kind of think about ends and means in your kind of philosophy classes. he’s just appealing to an end and saying, well, we should want this kind of end with Iran. And if we want that kind of end, then we could just go to war. But that’s not the way moral philosophy works, right? There are principles that one must meet. You can’t just declare an end and then willy-nilly deploy any means to getting there. That’s entirely the whole point of moral theology—to limit what can be done. Particularly when we’re talking about wielding violence. And I think the thing that is so revealing here is that Trump can’t even recognize the functioning of a principle that might limit power. That’s just not even in his lexicon.Sargent: Right. And I think it’s probably worth bringing in here Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who’s been holding these monthly sermons at the Pentagon, which is itself probably a violation of the church-state separation. Pete Hegseth is a Christian Reconstructionist, and that’s really a radical theology. And Pete Hegseth has also, not coincidentally, been essentially saying that maximal force and violence and brutality is a good thing. He’s been kind of saturated with bloodlust and sadism as he’s talked about how our precision weaponry will kill people on a mass scale. And he even recited one prayer which essentially said, in some form or other, that the Iranian enemy doesn’t hear God when he cries to God. By contrast, Pete Hegseth believes he does hear God when he speaks to God—God speaks back to Pete Hegseth, but not to the enemy. And it seems like that itself is something that, if I understand this correctly, Pope Leo is rebutting. Is he not? Can you explain that?Jones: Well, Pope Leo rebutted it directly by saying that God does not hear the prayers of those who pray for violence. So he came straight at those in response to that. And so I think we do have these diametrically opposed things where one is saying we are declaring ourselves the instruments of God’s violent justice in the world and God is on our side. And what Pope Leo is saying is actually something quite different. He’s saying that, no, no, we actually have to go through this process to figure out whether what we’re doing can actually put us on God’s side, which is a very different way of thinking about it.Sargent: So do you think that a lot of religious Catholics out there will understand this kind of dimension of the debate, and will they see Trump essentially—not just blaspheming himself, but also being so diametrically opposed to Catholic doctrine on principle—will that trouble them?Jones: I think it will. I think it may be cumulative thing. I think what will happen is they’ll see the tension between Pope Leo and Trump. They’ll definitely see it because, again, he’s an American Pope, right? So that’ll make it much more resonant than perhaps other popes. So they’ll see that. But I think what will happen is, because of the way that Pope Leo is carving out this very careful moral theological stance, that then trickles down to the bishops and to parish priests. And it creates a kind of space for very different conversations to happen. Because the most powerful thing is what happens at the local community level, right? Not what happens on high. But I think Pope Leo’s leadership here is creating more space for bishops and parish priests to have a different kind of conversation—one where maybe they just have a whole Bible study or a whole kind of theology study on the Catholic just war tradition. And if you do that, I mean, you’re very quickly going to discover there’s no way to shoehorn this Iran War into anything to be approved by that tradition.Sargent: Can I ask, do you think that Pope Leo, by saying this stuff, is actually in some subtle way trying to invite these conversations on the local level?Jones: Well, I think so. I mean, I think that that’s the church’s job, right, is to kind of provide moral teaching, and that’s part of what the hierarchy does. It organizes the worldwide church and can influence certain kinds of conversations and bring them to the fore. I think by spotlighting this as something very important, addressing it on Easter—these are very strong signals, I think, to local parishes that this is actually something important to talk about.Sargent: And I guess what that would ultimately mean is that Pope Leo is, in some sense, subtly undermining Trump with a constituency among whom he’s already vulnerable.Jones: Yeah, I don’t think Pope Leo would think about it directly like that, but I think that may be the end result. I did take a little bit of a look, and what’s important to remember is that Trump’s super support among evangelicals largely occurs among states that are very safe Republican states, right? So even if he dropped 10 points among evangelicals, he’d probably still be okay. But his support among Catholics, particularly white Catholics, is very heavily concentrated in places that are all swing states, like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania—these are places where elections are won or lost. And so, if you’re thinking about very close elections in those states, if he loses—again, 60 percent of white Catholics voted for him, his favorability is now 53 percent among white Catholics, only 46 percent of white Catholics support the war in Iran—if he loses 10 points among white Catholics, it’s game over in those swing states.Sargent: Just to wrap this up, can you explain how that plays out for JD Vance in 2028? He’s, after all, someone who converted to Catholicism and he’s making that a major part of his political identity.Jones: He did, and very early on. And he’s also earned his own direct rebuke from the Vatican when he tried to kind of really bastardize a Catholic teaching about immigrants—he was trying to invoke the Ordo Amoris, right, the Order of Loves. He was trying to say, first we love our family, then we love our friends, then we love our community, and then we love the rest of the world. And he got a straight rebuke from the Vatican saying, no, actually, that’s not the way this theology works. So he may run into the same kind of problems, even though he himself is Catholic. And because he’s Catholic, that may actually create more problems for him than it does for Trump.Sargent: Why? Because he’ll have to explain himself in more detail.Jones: I think so. And you have to explain—like, if you consider yourself to be a Catholic in good standing, how then can you be being rebuked by the head of the Catholic Church at the same time?Sargent: Well, best of luck to JD Vance sorting that one out. Folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Robert Jones’s new book, which will be out soon. It’s called Backslide. It’s about Christian nationalism and democracy. Robert, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much.Jones: Thanks so much.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209024/transcript-trump-rages-pope-harsh-new-rebuke-lands-surprise-blow

2026-04-13 10:00:00 UTC

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In a small corridor near the governor’s office at the Idaho State Capitol last week, state and local police officers stood in formation, blocking the public from approaching a public restroom. Inside, two state police officers had taken up a position beside two white pedestal sinks, their uniforms a strange contrast to the white marble tiled walls. One announced that those people remaining in the toilet stalls were “trespassing.” Not long after, officers walked each person out of the bathroom and into the corridor, cuffed their wrists behind their backs, and took them away, some still chanting, “Trans rights are human rights.”Two days earlier, Governor Brad Little had signed into law the most punitive anti-trans bathroom bill in the United States, banning “knowingly and willfully” entering a bathroom or changing room “that is designated for use by the opposite biological sex of such person”—with penalties including up to one year in jail for a first offense, “essentially making it a misdemeanor for trans people to use the bathroom that aligns with their identity,” said Scar Rulien, a board member at Trans Affirm, a statewide trans rights group. Subsequent offenses could result in felony charges and up to five years in prison. “The bill doesn’t ban illegal activity in a bathroom,” Rulien told me. “It makes a new crime out of something.” The ban is not yet in effect. The arrests last week were the culmination of a protest against the law—resulting in six charges of misdemeanor trespass and two charges of resisting arrest—but they were a preview of what trans Idahoans may soon face.Laws endangering transgender and nonbinary communities are now so common. Dozens are introduced every legislative session in many states: banning bathroom use, prohibiting gender-affirming care for young people, forcing schools to out trans students, denying changes to government-issued identity documents. The onslaught from anti-trans lawmakers is now so constant that it may be hard to remember that just ten years ago, it was not like this. Human Rights Campaign identified 55 anti-trans laws introduced across the United States, with three passing, in 2015. The next year, when North Carolina passed an anti-trans bathroom ban, there was national resistance from civil rights groups to professional sports organizations and corporations. A narrative began to take hold: Republicans had gone too far, and such bans were costly, extreme, and politically reckless. As North Carolina news outlet The Assembly marked the anniversary of the bathroom ban, it reminded readers that the state’s attorney general called the bill “a national embarrassment” and that Trump, during his 2016 campaign, said North Carolina was “paying a big price” for the law.Now, in 2026, when Idaho’s legislature has passed the country’s most comprehensive and most punitive bathroom ban, the national response feels comparatively muted. There were no calls for boycotts from major organizations, as the NAACP had in North Carolina. Bruce Springsteen did not cancel shows. PayPal—a company co-founded by the gay neoreactionary Peter Thiel—did not threaten to take its business out of state, as the company had done when it withdrew a planned expansion to Charlotte. Bathroom bans have since proliferated, but very few threaten trans people with arrest as Idaho has. While Florida, Kansas, and Utah have bathroom bans with some criminal penalties in some public bathrooms, Idaho has the only ban extending such penalties to any “place of public accommodation.” The bill was opposed by a range of groups and interests, from Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates–Idaho to the Idaho Fraternal Order of Police. It was not even the state’s first bathroom ban; the first was in 2023, targeting students, then was expanded to colleges and universities in 2025, and now has been expanded to all bathrooms, and for the first time criminalizes trans people themselves. Legal challenges to both those bans have already been brought by trans students in Idaho, represented by Lambda Legal. “We are tremendously concerned about the new law that criminalizes transgender people for ordinary restroom use,” said Kell Olson, counsel and strategist at Lambda Legal in a statement this week. “We are talking to people across the state whose daily lives are being affected.” Given all this, it is unnerving to witness something like public acquiescence despite Idahoans’ loud and persistent resistance to the bathroom ban, just one among a host of other anti-trans laws passed this year in the state. As if to make the point for the public, Governor Little signed the bathroom ban into law on Transgender Day of Visibility, as trans Idahoans rallied outside the Capitol. “We were in our own world,” said Rulien of Trans Affirm, who had co-organized the rally. “We were in the moment.”“The law doesn’t go into effect until July 1, but the trans community is already feeling the anxiety,” said Preston Pace, an activist and co-founder of the group Trans Joy Boise. The message had been sent: The state’s government was officially excluding trans people from civic life. “We’re already starting to see the public try to enforce these things, and getting aggressive with people in public restrooms,” Pace told me by phone this week. In hearings on the ban, state Senator Brandon Shippy claimed the bill doesn’t target trans people because trans people are not mentioned in the bill. “There is no oppressed community that we’re dealing with here,” said Shippy. “Because there is only male and female.” He called the trans community a “myth.” When the opposition claims they have none, why would they entertain testimony at all? Shippy said in 2025 that he had voted against that year’s bathroom ban because to do so would affirm that trans people existed.The hearings, such as they were, were rushed affairs, with limited public comment. In one Senate committee, testimony was cut off after only five people spoke (two in support, three against). “We see this tactic happening a lot,” said Rulien. “Push them to the end of the session so that they can justify not giving them an adequate hearing.” Rulien testified against the bill, and as they told me (and told the panel considering the bathroom ban bill), “This is the second time I’ve testified against this exact same thing.” Both Pace and Rulien were clear about what little they can expect from the legislature. “When we go to the hearings, we go into them knowing they are going to pass anyway,” said Pace. When they prepare what they’ll say about a bill, Rulien told me, what advocates are asking themselves is, “how are we going to frame our testimony so that when this goes to court, it can potentially be overturned? Because that’s the only real reality for us to win in these deep red states.”This is not at all uncommon. In 2021, I met a Texas middle schooler who had already testified against three sessions worth of anti-trans bills that targeted her education and her medical care. Any anti-trans strategy that Republicans introduce in one state predictably spreads to another, and another. Idaho has been dealing with this for a long time, too: In 2020, they were the first state to adopt a blanket ban on trans women and girls from participating in women’s sports. With the Republicans’ supermajority in the legislature nearly guaranteeing passage of anti-trans laws, the fight isn’t even really about those lawmakers. It isn’t really about the law at all. “We go to show that there are people that are fighting against this,” Pace explained, “and to also show other people in the trans community that we are fighting for you.”In addition to local organizations such as Trans Affirm and Trans Joy Boise, new media outlets in Idaho are now regularly reporting on anti-trans legislative developments and community resistance at the Capitol. Idaho activist and independent journalist Jaewon Lee livestreamed the bathroom protest on their Boise Blackbirds Instagram. When we spoke this week, Lee told me that he only really got into activism after Trump’s re-election. “I’m noticing kind of a pecking order here,” he told me, “where you have immigrants being targeted, trans people being targeted.” Lee is a naturalized citizen, and at least for now, they told me, being involved in activism feels safer than it might be for immigrants without that status. “I felt an obligation to get out there, and say, I’m somebody who is on that pecking order.” Lee realized they weren’t alone in that, that they were seeing people who said, as he put it, “we’re gonna show up wherever we can and do what whatever we can, not only for the queer community but for immigrant community.” By now, they’ve been seeing “a lot of familiar faces coming together.” Lee is one of the very few people who is keeping that record in real-time.The same week as the bathroom arrests at the Capitol, a group of activists held a sit-in in Governor Little’s office, requesting a meeting and demanding he veto the bathroom ban, along with a bill that would force teachers to out trans students to their parents. Lee noticed that the people there were really active in the community, and were coming from different causes, “we understand there’s a lot of overlap, and the things we are standing up for in Idaho against white Christian nationalism right now.” At the governor’s office sit-in, he saw many of the people involved were faith leaders, who wanted to confront Christian nationalism, as well. Preston Pace was there, too, but wasn’t one of those arrested. “Being in that setting, surrounded mostly by allies, which consisted of a lot of older, cis white church women,” they told me. “Having these people so willing to not only stand up for our rights and protect us, and put themselves between us and danger was incredibly moving.”One of those arrested, Nikson Mathews, spoke at a Trans Day of Visibility rally at the Capitol, telling supporters how important it was to show up, “in front of this building when year after year they continue to bring bills that try to remove us from public space and remove us from our public lives.” When Mathews offered testimony opposing the bathroom ban in the House, like Rulien, it was far from the first time he testified against a bathroom ban in the state. “In the past five years this body has passed 17 laws targeting trans rights,” he said, noting that five were introduced this session. “When is it enough? When do we reach the point when it’s been enough?”Republican lawmakers were not content merely to file and pass as many of these bills as they have. They also tried to keep opposition off the record, voting to suppress a report by Democrats on the likely harms of a the forced outing bill—“a dangerous bill,” the ACLU of Idaho said in a statement, “that would require trusted adults, such as teachers and counselors, to monitor children for signs that they are not conforming to gender stereotypes.” The Democrats’ report attempted to get on the record objections that will be important when the law is enforced or challenged, such as it lacking any “safety exception for children at knowable risk of abuse, homelessness, or parental violence” and creating “compelled speech obligations that conflict with professional ethical and legal duties,” among other concerns. House Republicans “do not want Idahoans to see the serious legal, constitutional, and practical problems this bill creates,” said House Democratic leader Ilana Rubel.In his testimony, Nikson Mathews pressed the lawmakers to think through what the bathroom ban meant for trans people, “what this law forces me to do,” he said. “It forces me to use the women’s bathroom,” where people would see a bearded young man enter, in apparent violation of the law. What if someone took enforcement into their own hands, attacking a “man” in a “woman’s bathroom”?“It’s worth noting that based on existing Idaho code”—Mathews offered a sheaf of printed pages—”if I were assaulted, that person would face a lighter punishment than I would for using the men’s bathroom.” The law becomes an instrument for creating public spaces where violence against trans people is more likely, and where such violence was deemed less worthy of punishment than a trans person’s mere presence. Mathews would thus be left to choose, as he put it: “Do I feel like going to jail today? Or do I feel like being attacked?” Given the experiences of trans people in jails and prisons, the likelihood that someone arrested under this law would also be attacked while in custody is also high, notwithstanding the violence of the arrest itself.Hours before Little signed the bathroom ban on March 31, he signed a petty and mean-spirited law banning Pride flags on government buildings. That day, Trans Affirm and Trans Joy Boise were also recognized with a proclamation by Boise’s Democratic mayor, Lauren McLean. The contrast is too obvious to dwell on for long, but that night Boise City Hall was lit magenta, blue, and violet to mark Trans Day of Visibility, even as its Pride flag had been removed by state decree. Since then, “the mayor has kind of maliciously complied,” Scar Rulien told me, “and they have put a giant rainbow up,” inside and visible in the window. The City Hall flagpoles are also now wrapped in Pride colors.Idaho Republicans are not stopping any time soon, but the session is done for the year, offering some time to regroup and ready for the next one. “I know the reality of how red it is in Idaho, and at times, it is a losing battle,” Pace told me. Pace is headed out of state soon—but not for good, as many trans Idahoans have had to do. Pace is going to attend law school, so they can return “and help continue the fight.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/208968/idaho-trans-bathroom-ban-republican-anti-lgbtq-laws

2026-04-10 17:04:30 UTC

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Kristi Noem might be fired soon from her latest position within the Trump administration.The former Homeland Security chief has barely put in a lick of work at her new government job, sparking questions about Noem’s ongoing tenure within the Trump administration, State Department officials told the Daily Mail.Noem was ousted from her position atop Homeland Security last month for playing a starring role in several major scandals, including a sprawling $220 million DHS advertising campaign that prominently featured her on horseback and reportedly funneled money into the pockets of her friends and allies. Her reputation—and consequently, Donald Trump’s immigration agenda—were also marred by the actions of ICE agents in Minnesota, where Noem’s subordinates killed two U.S. citizens in January.But despite the drama, Trump was not willing to let Noem exit his administration entirely. Instead, the president demoted her to the position of special envoy to the Shield of the Americas, a multinational security coalition within the folds of the State Department formed two days after she was fired.So far, the bloc has not achieved much under Noem’s stewardship. At least four officials who followed Noem from DHS to the brand-new security coalition have been placed on administrative leave, unnamed sources told the Mail Thursday. The outbound officials include former deputy chief of staff Troup Hemenway, ex-deputy general counsel Giovanna Cinelli, and junior staffers Josh King and Octavian Miller.Noem, meanwhile, took just one meeting last week via teleconference, senior State Department officials told the British gossip tabloid.“This post was intended as a soft landing so it didn’t look like Noem was immediately being fired,” one State Department insider told the Mail. “But no one really thinks she should have this job. The State Department was not happy to have her here and the understanding is that she’s not going to be here for much longer.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/208949/kristi-noem-not-showing-up-new-job

2026-04-10 14:40:40 UTC

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The Trump administration is warning staffers not to bet on world events in futures markets. The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House Management Office sent out a staff-wide email on March 24 telling administration employees not to engage in the practice following President Donald Trump’s announcement the previous day that he was pausing strikes against Iran. The email was likely prompted by the rise in suspicious wagers and investments being made just before Trump announces major policy decisions. Only 15 minutes before Trump announced the pause in bombing Iran, $760 million in oil futures contracts was traded in under two minutes. Three accounts in the prediction market Polymarket correctly bet on the timing of the Iran war ceasefire earlier this week, netting over $600,000. One of those accounts, with a 93 percent accuracy rate, was able to profit by betting on when U.S. and Israeli airstrikes would occur in 2024, 2025, and 2026. The timing of those bets raises the question of whether one of Trump’s staffers or associates is using insider information for profit. Online prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket allow their customers to bet on everything from political events to sports, and suspicious bets have been going on for months. In January, one trader, who had only created their account in December, made $400,000 by betting that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro would be removed from power less than five hours before it actually happened. Israel arrested and charged two people, including a military reservist, in February for allegedly using classified information to make bets on Polymarket.Insider trading in the White House is a disturbing phenomenon, made worse by Trump’s embrace of corruption as president and because it’s an even more perverse form of war profiteering. It extends further than Polymarket or Kalshi, which are problematic in their own right, and could go all the way to the presidential Cabinet, as a broker for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth allegedly tried to invest millions of dollars in defense companies just before the U.S. began bombing Iran. One wonders if Trump himself is also engaged in insider trading, or if his corrupt Department of Justice even takes the issue seriously.
https://newrepublic.com/post/208929/white-house-stop-placing-bets-prediction-markets

2026-04-10 14:32:17 UTC

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Donald Trump just drove a wedge into the MAGA movement.The president reamed out several of his longtime acolytes Thursday, smearing ex-Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, as well as far-right influencers Candace Owens and Alex Jones. The quartet had each issued their own condemnation of Trump’s warmongering rhetoric, slamming the president’s various promises to completely annihilate Iran as vile and unpresidential.And for once, Trump’s base was not willing to back him up in this fight. Instead, droves of MAGA supporters seemed shocked by the president’s sudden turn on his own political disciples, writing their own critiques of the president’s behavior under one of his Truth Social rants.“Trump just going against everyone that fought for him to win, just because of the Epstein files and being at war with Iran for Israel,” wrote a Truth Social user called Deportation News. “You had so much potential, Trump. Voted for you all three times, and I feel so betrayed.”“LOST MY SUPPORT,” responded user Mark Winslow.“As of last week, they’ve done nothing but make excuses for your behavior and you think they’re the enemy??? They are why I am a triple Trumper!” posted Misty. “Whoever is telling you this is very wrong!!!! They have been trying to tell you how a large percentage of Americans see things... I was confident that you knew what you were doing but this is truly SCARY.”The president posted 482 words to his Truth Social account Thursday afternoon, complaining that the four conservative commentators had been “fighting” him “for years” because of their “low IQs.” Trump further claimed that the MAGA-aligned media personalities were “stupid people” and that they “don’t have what it takes.” He also mentioned that he believed Owens was less attractive than the first lady of France, Brigitte Macron, who has sued the far-right podcaster over her repeated claims that Macron is transgender.But the mouthy tirade only seemed to inspire Trump’s voters to lose respect for him. In his Truth Social replies, supporters referred to Trump’s missive as “childish,” “rambling,” and “pathetic.”“What am I am hearing is your ego is so fragile you think anyone who questions any of your decisions is a low IQ person,” wrote Truth Social user shannstine. “Sir, statements like this say far more about you than them.”“You’re the terrorist that kills people for politics,” wrote user RealTedFrancis.“They’re fighting you because you sold us out,” posted another user on the platform, PapaSteve72. “We aren’t getting anything we voted for. No DOGE cuts, no mass deportations, no fraud and abuse getting cut, no arrests of pedofiles and traitors, and a brand new war nobody wanted and in fact voted explicitly against. You are an absolute failure and pathetic loser and I am so sorry I voted for you 3 times. I will never be tricked like this again. I’ve learned my lesson. Fuck you asshole!”
https://newrepublic.com/post/208922/donald-trump-fans-attack-far-right-influencers

2026-04-10 09:00:00 UTC

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Donald Trump has been raging at Marjorie Taylor Greene a lot lately. Why? Because improbably, Greene has emerged as a very effective critic of the president. In a striking CNN interview, Greene unloaded, declaring bluntly that Trump is mentally unfit for the presidency, that the people around Trump should rein him in, and that he’s catastrophically failing. This is a watershed moment: Trump’s disastrous Iran war, and his threat to obliterate Iranian civilization, are pushing some in MAGA to look past him. We talked to Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, author of a good piece arguing that the Iran debacle is a new kind of problem for Trump. We discuss why JD Vance won’t be able to escape its taint, why Trump’s threat of genocide is a breaking point for so many Americans, and why Greene’s criticism of Trump breaks surprising new ground. (After we recorded, Trump exploded in fury yet again at Greene and other critics.) Listen to this episode here.
https://newrepublic.com/article/208910/trump-rages-marjorie-taylor-greene-wrecks-cnn-direct-hit

2026-04-09 19:17:51 UTC

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First lady Melania Trump on Thursday called on Congress to hold a public hearing for all the women victimized by sex predator Jeffrey Epstein—a surprising development given her husband’s proximity to Epstein and the allegations against him within the files.“I call on Congress to provide the women who have been victimized by Epstein with a public hearing specifically centered around the survivors, give these victims their opportunity to testify under oath in front of Congress with the power of sworn testimony,” she said. “Each and every woman should have her day to tell her story in public, if she wishes, and then her testimony should be permanently entered into the congressional record.”Melania Trump: Now is the time for congress to act. Epstein was not alone. Several prominent executives resigned from their powerful positions after this matter became widely politicized. Of course this does not amount to guilt, but we still must work openly and transparently to… pic.twitter.com/2CEtxQp2uL— Acyn (@Acyn) April 9, 2026The first lady made the statement during a televised White House announcement on Thursday, most of which she used to reject any rumors or assertions that she had any relationship with Epstein or his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.“I have never been friends with Epstein. Donald and I were invited to the same parties as Epstein from time to time, since overlapping in social circles is common in New York City and Palm Beach,” she said. “To be clear, I never had a relationship with Epstein or his accomplice, Maxwell.”Melania Trump: I've never been friends with Epstein. Donald and I were invited to the same parties as Epstein from time to time… pic.twitter.com/OO3RtPRMsU— Acyn (@Acyn) April 9, 2026
https://newrepublic.com/post/208904/melania-trump-epstein-survivors-testify-congress

2026-04-09 16:41:29 UTC

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The bombs began raining down in Iran on February 28. Israel had successfully convinced Donald Trump to launch a joint attack on the Gulf nation. There was just one thing that the White House had forgotten about: half a dozen U.S. cadets who were working just off the coast, sitting ducks in the Persian Gulf.Five privately owned ships flying the U.S. flag were nearby carrying students from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, the U.S. Merchant Marine, and the transportation industry when the U.S. military started the war in Iran, NOTUS reported Thursday.Unlike previous conflicts, there was no advance word or warning to the ships to evacuate, effectively trapping them as the violence began.“Nobody told them. They were caught unawares,” one source close to the situation told NOTUS. “It was very strange that [officials] weren’t even given a whiff, weren’t even given an indication.”The military had no plan to transport the vessels out of the Strait of Hormuz. Instead, the students were forced to find safe refuge in harbors around the Gulf, living on their ships. They were evacuated a month later, three sources told NOTUS, though it is not known whether all the students have made it back to American soil.“If they’d had even just a day’s notice, they could have gotten them out,” another person familiar with the situation told NOTUS.But the cadets weren’t the only Americans in the region that the White House forgot.The Trump administration also failed to properly notify regional embassy staff of the impending bloodshed that week. In an email delivered February 27, Ambassador Mike Huckabee gave nonemergency workers at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem less than 24 hours to exit Israel, informing them that anyone planning to leave the country “should do so TODAY.”The order and its timeline were highly unusual: Embassy staff are typically provided several days’ notice in order to comply with state-mandated evacuations, with some warnings given as much as a month in advance of the anticipated departure date. By comparison, Huckabee’s 24-hour deadline was shockingly short.
https://newrepublic.com/post/208883/donald-trump-stranded-cadets-gulf-iran

2026-04-09 15:06:21 UTC

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Donald Trump, despite his praise for the U.S. steel industry, will be using foreign steel for his ballroom project. The New York Times reports that Luxembourg-based company ArcelorMittal will be providing millions of dollars in steel for the project, all produced in Europe. Trump said in October that he was offered $37 million worth of donated steel for the ballroom, but didn’t say where it was from. He told ballroom donors at the time that a “great steel company” had come forward with a gift. “He said, ‘Sir, I’d like to donate the steel for your ballroom,’” Trump recounted to the donors. “I said: ‘Whoa, that’s nice.’ And I found out — ‘How much is the steel?’ I called the contractor. ‘Sir, it’s down for $37 million.’ I said, ‘This is a nice donation, right?’”He called the steel “great steel as opposed to garbage steel, because they dump a lot of garbage around. You know, steel is like everything else, including human beings. Steel could be high quality, and it can be low quality. He wants to make sure it’s high quality.”Days after Trump made that announcement last year, he halved tariffs that applied to automotive steel exports that ArcelorMittal happens to produce in Canada. An unnamed White House official told the Times that despite ArcelorMittal being a foreign company, it was benefiting the U.S. through a joint venture with Japan’s Nippon Steel in Alabama and an iron mine in Minnesota, and denied that the company received anything in return for its donation. Last year, the Trump administration allowed Japan-based Nippon Steel to take over U.S. Steel in exchange for a “golden share” in the company, which allows the government to block major decisions such as offshoring or layoffs. Why would Trump get steel from ArcelorMittal when the government already has a close (and controversial) stake in U.S. Steel? On top of that, going with a foreign steel company also contradicts Trump’s stated “America First” ethos, which critics seized upon Wednesday. “While the White House imports foreign steel to build Trump’s ugly Epstein Ballroom, California is opening its first new steel plant in 50 years,” California Governor Gavin Newsom’s press office posted on X. “Thanks, Gavin Newsom!” “Make America Luxembourg Again?” Newsom also posted on his personal account.“Foreign steel in the White House? Are you kidding? We’ve got Iron Range mines shut down & 100’s @steelworkers laid off. Instead, they’re outsourcing one of the most iconic American buildings overseas! American steel built this country, it should build the White House too,” said Minnesota state Senator Grant Hauschild, a Democrat, on X.
https://newrepublic.com/post/208848/america-first-trump-foreign-steel-white-house-ballroom

2026-04-09 13:01:04 UTC

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President Trump plans to automatically sign up military draft-eligible men for a potential draft, an ominous decision to make in the midst of a war on Iran. While registration into Selective Service—the massive database that tells the U.S. how many men they can force into war in the event of a national emergency—has historically been required for every U.S. male upon turning 18, the sign-up process was manual. “On December 18, 2025, the President signed the FY 2026 [National Defense Authorization Act] into law, mandating automatic Selective Service registration. The Agency engaged with Congress throughout the NDAA process regarding the automated legislative proposal,” the Selective Service System said in a public statement. “This statutory change transfers responsibility for registration from individual men to SSS through integration with federal data sources. SSS will implement the change by December 2026, resulting in a streamlined registration process and corresponding workforce realignment.”Multiple Democrats were quick to call out the administration’s misplaced priorities. “If they can automatically register you for WAR, they can automatically register you to VOTE,” Democratic House of Representatives candidate Sarah McGee wrote on X. Others posted old tweets from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller about how young men should vote for Trump lest they be “drafted to fight in Kamala’s and Cheney’s 3rd World War.” The last time the U.S. had a draft was in 1973 for the Vietnam War, which caused institutional and ideological damage that this country is still dealing with today. A draft in this era would be even more catastrophic.
https://newrepublic.com/post/208839/automatic-registration-us-military-draft

2026-04-08 19:36:48 UTC

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Hours before the announcement of a two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran, The New York Times published a story titled, “How Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran.” The piece, written by longtime Trump chroniclers Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, described in unusually precise detail the private meetings between Trump, Israeli leaders, and his own advisers in the run-up to the war. According to the piece, almost all of the president’s top advisers, including Vice President JD Vance, privately had misgivings about the war. I call bullshit. The war has failed to achieve most of its goals, from installing a new regime in Iran to permanently ensuring that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapons program. Trump was left basically begging Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. And polls suggest the conflict is the latest anchor on Trump’s already plunging poll numbers. So of course his aides want to distance themselves from the war in America’s most influential news outlet. But they want to do so anonymously to preserve deniability and avoid annoying the president or his base. But we can’t let Vance, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and other senior Trump administration officials off so easily. They have at every turn aided, abetted, and enabled a dictatorial president who constantly ignores national and international laws and casually decides to (try to) overthrow the leaders of other countries. They want the spoils of serving in the Trump administration, from prestigious posts now to potentially even bigger and more lucrative jobs in the future, including the presidency in the cases of Rubio and Vance. So they also need to own and accept the costs of serving with Trump. And right now, that includes being the architects of a stupid, unnecessary war. The Times article is long, in part because it is trying to explain a very important and complicated decision. But it’s also long because it takes a lot of words to list all the misgivings about the war that Trump’s advisers supposedly had. Ratcliffe reportedly said in a White House meeting that included the president that Israel’s hopes of a less anti-Israel regime taking power in Iran are “farcical.” In that same session, Rubio said that Israel’s hopes of regime change were “bullshit.” Vance expressed similar doubts. The article depicts Wiles as worrying that the war could cause a big hike in gas prices, hurting Trump and Republicans in the midterm elections. Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, reportedly said in a meeting of Trump and senior aides that attacking Iran would violate the president’s campaign trail rhetoric about keeping the United States out of new wars abroad. The article includes several paragraphs about the private misgivings of three officials, in particular: Vance, Rubio, and Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Vance was reportedly concerned about irritating the MAGA base and Iran taking control of the Strait of Hormuz. Caine outright predicted Iran would block the strait. Rubio is portrayed as having been broadly skeptical about the war and thinking that sanctions and other pressure tactics against Iran may be more effective. Haberman and Swan are solid reporters, so I trust that some of Trump’s advisers had these doubts about the war and at times expressed them to one another and the president. But people should read this kind of piece with skepticism. From my years in journalism, including as a reporter at The Washington Post, I can tell you that these kinds of behind-the-scenes political stories usually don’t just emerge from reporters’ digging. Often, presidential advisers and those advisers’ various aides and underlings want to tell their side of the story, particularly if they aren’t quoted directly, meaning they can later claim the reporter got some detail wrong. Almost none of the Trump advisers in this piece did on-the-record interviews with the Times. So I read this story as both a historical account and an attempt at spinning. We are now more than a month into the war. Trump’s advisers can see exactly what went wrong, such as the Strait of Hormuz being blocked. So these advisers (and their aides) can tell reporters, “I anticipated this problem,” and seem wise and prescient. Somehow, these advisers predicted exactly how the war could go wrong, but the president ignored them!What we can’t tell is how emphatically they expressed those concerns, and how often. Or what concerns they expressed that didn’t turn out to be big problems. Broadly, since the war is going poorly, these advisers have a strong incentive to leak their prewar misgivings and downplay any pro-war comments they expressed privately. If a more America-friendly regime were now in power in Iran, this article would likely have been written differently (or would not have been published at all), because Trump’s advisers would have been less eager to distance themselves from the policy. This piece is titled, “How Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran,” but in truth it’s essentially, “How Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran Over the Objections of His Top Advisers.” Wittingly or unwittingly, Swan, Haberman, and the Times have provided a massive platform for Rubio, Vance, and others to point the finger solely at Trump for a misguided war. This piece reads like the first draft of Caine’s memoirs, or how Vance will sound on the campaign trail if he is running in 2028 and trying to distance himself from this war. But Trump advisers shouldn’t get to pass the buck so easily. Even if they expressed some private doubts about this war, they presented intelligence and military plans that moved it forward. None of them expressed public opposition. Even in a piece allowing them to spin their own narratives, only Vance told Trump directly in private that he opposed the war. And Vance of course has the most freedom to disagree—he is the one person in the administration Trump can’t fire. The piece reads like a lot of the accounts of President Biden’s decisions to initially run for a second term and allow Israel to kill Palestinians on a mass scale after the October 7, 2023 attacks. A president can’t run for reelection or involve the U.S. deeply in a war without some of his advisers going along. But some of the books written about the Biden administration feature his advisers expressing doubts about his decisions that the president supposedly single-handedly overrode. In all these cases, what these aides want to do is associate themselves with the successes of a president and pin all the problems on the commander in chief himself. But journalists and members of the public shouldn’t go along with that. No one is required to serve in a presidential administration. If they strongly disagree with a decision, they should quit. They can also express their doubts publicly and live with the consequences: a likely dismissal. What they shouldn’t do is join an administration, willingly implement its policies, and then privately bash the president to reporters when something goes wrong. That’s not governing, it’s reputation laundering. It’s weak and gutless. Usually, aides wait until after the president’s term or after they have left their posts to distance themselves from key decisions. It’s possible that Haberman and Swan are such excellent reporters that they simply unearthed these objections earlier than usual. But my guess is that Trump’s aides already know this war is a debacle and want to essentially announce, “It wasn’t me” as loudly and quickly as possible. But JD, Susie, and Marco—it was you. This is the Trump administration. You own all of his decisions, good, bad, and, in the case of this Iran war, catastrophic. Take responsibility for your actions.
https://newrepublic.com/article/208784/vance-rubio-wiles-iran-war-trump

2026-04-08 16:45:54 UTC

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Up north, Wisconsin Democrats increased their state Supreme Court majority to 5–2 and won a mayoral race in the typically Republican city of Waukesha. Down south, a Georgia Democrat narrowly lost a house district Donald Trump carried by 34 points in 2024.In all, Tuesday was an election night that bodes well for Democrats come midterm season.In Wisconsin—a swing state that Trump won by less than a percentage point in 2024—liberal judge Chris Taylor crushed her GOP-backed opponent, Maria Lazar, by 20 points. It was about double the margin of victory that Susan Crawford, another liberal judge, had attained in a Wisconsin Supreme Court election last year.Lest one think the Wisconsin Supreme Court is a nothingburger of a political entity, that 2025 race became the most expensive state Supreme Court race in U.S. history after Elon Musk funnelled millions into backing the GOP candidate, Brad Schimel, in an attempt to flip what was at the time a 4–3 liberal lean. After Musk’s candidate lost, he quietly moved on to his other passions, such as being racist on social media and tax evasion.Without a majority on the line this year, it was a less extravagant affair: $6.5 million was spent on advertising, compared to $85 million in 2025. (It should also be noted that Taylor greatly outspent Lazar.) Nonetheless, the margin of victory was surprisingly one-sided. Taylor even won the reliably Republican Ozaukee County.In Waukesha, after a Republican mayor who declared himself an independent in 2024 decided not to run for reelection, Democrat Alicia Halvensleben bested Republican Scott Allen in a race decided by 2.4 percentage points. Trump had won the city by six points in 2024.In Georgia, Shawn Harris was not as lucky as those up north; the Democrat lost by 12 points to Republican Clay Fuller for the House seat vacated by Marjorie Taylor Greene. But in some ways, Harris’s performance was the most impressive of all. Trump won rural Chattooga County by 37 points in 2024, meaning Harris shifted the district a stunning 25 points to the left.“The takeaway is this: If Democrats, independents, and Republicans can do this in a ruby-red district, the Democrats can win anywhere,” he said in his concession speech. “Nobody ever thought that we would ever be this close.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/208780/democrats-elections-swing-state

2026-04-08 10:00:00 UTC

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There’s a new way to teach American history. It’s not woke. But it’s not patriotic, either. It’s not the 1619 Project or the 1776 project.It’s the Iranian History of the United States, as seen in “One Vengeance for All,” the most cosmological of the recent pieces of pro-Iran Lego-style agitprop. This is the series you’ve probably caught a glimpse of—the obscene, masterful, and viral AI videos that have hammered the internet since the start of Donald Trump’s ruinous war in Iran. The series, which has been labeled “slopaganda,” is sometimes called “Operation Epstein Fury.”The strongest entries in the series are produced by an anonymous student activist group called Explosive News (Akhbar Enfejari). Shorter videos in the same style, which look less polished, are reportedly fan-made. All of the videos treat the war with max cartoonery and max ideological torque. Russian and Iranian government accounts regularly boost them. (China has also made its own anti-American propaganda pegged to the war.) Scare up the extremely violent videos at your own risk, but here’s a plot summary. In an early one, Trump, panicked about his culpability in the Epstein affair, smashes a red button to strike Iran as a distraction. After Iran strikes back and slams shut the Strait of Hormuz, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu run scared from Iran’s strategic genius and godlike military might. In the next few videos, the U.S. Army loses personnel, planes, helicopters, and popular support; capital markets spiral. Coffins draped in American flags pile up. “One Vengeance for All” stands out from the rest because it contains more American history than breaking news. And what a way to see our once-promising nation. The Iranian History of the United States features no pilgrims, Revolutionary War, Civil War, or wars in Europe. Also absent: slavery, civil rights, feminism, and unions. Instead, you get 53 seconds of 600 years of American jingoism and genocide. The video opens on an AI caricature of an Indigenous man in a headdress looking to the heavens from the Western plains. Cut to a little boy carrying a dead infant amid smoldering rubble in Hiroshima. These are ghosts.From there to Vietnam. A middle-aged woman carries a scythe, in a rice field, and again looks skyward. Then come slain Iranian leaders: Qassem Soleimani in 2020, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in February. All ghosts. Now there’s a girl at a refugee camp in Gaza. We’re given to understand from her hopeful expression that help is coming, and that the help is the Iranian army, though it has no intention of “liberating” or “saving” the ghosts. Instead, with centuries of pent-up resentment in its arsenal, Iran will avenge their suffering with fire and fury.About two-thirds of the way in, the narrative rounds on the American people, and finds Trump’s victims among us. A blond girl in a pink dress, no older than 6, is pictured in a tropical landscape. It’s Epstein Island. The island’s enigmatic blue-striped building, which some speculate is a reference to the Israeli flag, stands behind her. This girl is also a victim of American imperialism, courtesy of the Trump-Epstein class that merged capital and executive power; private-sector monopolies with political world domination. This girl’s Iranian counterpart appears in the next image, a young schoolgirl in a blue coat and white hijab, and she seals the connection. She’s abandoned in the deserted courtyard of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, Hormozgan Province. This is the schoolyard where around 170 people were murdered, elementary school students, when the school was bombed by U.S. forces back in February on the war’s first day. At once, a sisterhood of ghosts coalesces. From Epstein Island to southern Iran, schoolgirls pair with schoolgirls, the specters of abused children whose lives or spirits have been extinguished by sadistic American tyrants.Trump is globally known for sex crimes and, like Hegseth, charges of sex crimes—and the Iranian videos depict the two men explicitly as rapists. In one video, the Lego Trump has doll-like girl figures on his bed and lap, and Hegseth is shown in military garb, repeatedly committing rape. Assaults on girls are the modus vivendi of these videos’ versions of Trump and Hegseth.These sequences are not idle trolling. Rape is, of course, a crime against humanity. But rape is implicated more immediately in the brief for this war, which centers not on strategic goals but on the relentless use of violence against innocents to humiliate an entire people. As Jamelle Bouie put it recently, “Forcing others to submit through the indiscriminate use of force does not really sound like war. That does sound like something else. It sounds like rape.” He concluded that the ideology of Trump and Hegseth is “the ideology of the rapist.” After 9/11, President Bush used to tell Americans that our enemies resented “our way of life.” In his memorable “Why Do They Hate Us?” speech of September 20, 2001, Bush answered his own question, “They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” This may or may not have been true of the terrorists a quarter century ago. But it’s not at all true now of Iran, which the U.S. attacked without permission from the people or provocation from Iran. Iran hates the American government for its cruelty toward hundreds of millions of people across six centuries. It’s hard not to see the logic in it. In Trump, the ideology of the rapist was unmistakable a decade ago, when he crowed about the joy he takes in humiliating human beings by mauling their crotches. With this war, he’s trying, as usual, for highly aestheticized spectacles of humiliation, and he’s getting them—but not for Iran. For himself, and for the United States.
https://newrepublic.com/article/208732/trump-hegseth-pro-iran-propaganda-videos

2026-04-07 21:11:47 UTC

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The leader of the Catholic Church has denounced Donald Trump’s warmongering rhetoric.Pope Leo XIV described the U.S. president’s recent threats to obliterate Iranian civilization as “truly unacceptable.”“Today as we all know there was this threat against all the people of Iran. This is truly unacceptable,” Leo said Tuesday. “Here there are certainly questions of international law, but even more than this a question of morality for the good of people.” Trump earlier Tuesday had pledged that Iran’s “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” unless the country’s leadership agreed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a vital tradeway in the region that only closed because of Trump’s intervention. He similarly promised to “blow up the whole country.”Trump has repeatedly escalated his threats against Iran since Sunday, demanding that the country’s leadership either reopen the waterway or face total annihilation, highlighting various possible strike targets such as Iran’s power plants and bridges. The president said this despite the fact that carrying out this threat would constitute a war crime.Leo referred to the conflict as an “unjust war” and said that the war is “continuing to escalate” with no clear resolution. It “is only provoking more hatred throughout the world,” he said, according to the Associated Press’s English translation of the pope’s comments, which were made in Italian.But such a severe attack on Iran wouldn’t just be immoral—it would also violate the laws of war. Targeting noncombatants such as civilians and civilian infrastructure is a blatant violation of International Humanitarian Law. Exterminating a “whole civilization” would break several components of the Geneva Conventions, which the U.S. played a foundational role in creating nearly a century ago.The pope urged people of goodwill to contact their local lawmakers to create pressure against the White House–led war effort. Leo emphasized that attacks on civilian infrastructure are “against international law” as well as a “sign of the hatred, the division, the destruction human beings are capable of.”“We all want to work for peace,” the pope said.Trump wrote on social media that Iran had the opportunity to act until Tuesday 8 p.m. Iran has so far rejected potential peace deals.
https://newrepublic.com/post/208755/pope-leo-donald-trump-threat-destroy-iran

2026-04-07 20:57:21 UTC

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Annie Ramos, the 22-year-old wife of Army soldier Matthew Blank, was released from ICE custody on Tuesday. Ramos had been detained for five days after being arrested on the Fort Polk, Louisiana, military base where her husband is stationed.“I am deeply grateful to my husband, Matthew, who never stopped fighting for me, and to our families and community who surrounded us with love, prayers, and support. Because of them, I am home,” Ramos said in a statement. “All I have ever wanted is to live with dignity in the country I have called home since I was a baby. I want to finish my degree, continue my education, and serve my community—just as my husband serves our country with honor.”Just a few weeks after the couple were married, Ramos was arrested by ICE agents. The two were checking in at Fort Polk to begin the process that would allow them to live together at the base and earn military benefits. Ramos was then handcuffed, led away from Blank and her new parents-in-law, and taken to a building that Blank said “looked like an interrogation room.”She had no criminal record. Ramos was born in Honduras and is undocumented. She was issued a deportation order when she was 22 months old. But regardless of such orders, U.S. law allows undocumented immigrants who marry U.S. citizens to become eligible for permanent residency. After getting permanent residency, they can apply for citizenship.The couple had even hired an immigration lawyer to assist them as they navigated the complicated citizenship process, before running into Donald Trump’s lawless goons.“I knew she didn’t have status,” Blank said after Ramos was detained. “We were doing everything the right way.”When they’re not milling around airports doing nothing, some ICE agents have been deployed to military bases around the U.S., mostly targeting relatives of military recruits when they show up on visiting days. Ramos’s case was the first reported instance of a military spouse being detained.Thankfully, the couple is now reunited. The Trump administration has presumably realized it is a terrible look to be splitting up military families at a time when the U.S. is literally at war. Sadly, thousands of other families continue to be forced apart under Trump’s immigration policies.
https://newrepublic.com/post/208754/ice-releases-soldier-wife-military-base

2026-04-07 18:34:12 UTC

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The United Nations is warning Donald Trump against further escalation in the Iran war after he threatened Tuesday that “[a] whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” “Even wars have rules,” the U.N.’s official X account posted along with a link to its human rights office. “The Geneva Conventions protect civilians in conflict and help ensure assistance reaches those in need, without discrimination.”The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, issued a statement against “incendiary rhetoric” and warned that anyone who commits war crimes should face legal justice, strongly hinting at Trump without mentioning him by name. “I deplore the tirade of incendiary rhetoric being used in the Middle East war over the last couple of weeks by all parties, including the latest threats to annihilate a whole civilisation and to target civilian infrastructure. This is sickening. Carrying through on such threats amounts to the most serious international crimes,” Türk said. “Under international law, deliberately attacking civilians and civilian infrastructure is a war crime. Anyone responsible for international crimes must be held to account by a competent court.”Will any of this get through to Trump or his inner circle? Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has already made clear his disdain for any restraint and his love for violence, calling for “no quarter” and “no mercy for our enemies.” Trump doesn’t have a problem with this, as evidenced by his outrageous threat, and the fact that he seems to get his war news from a staff-prepared daily highlight reel of bombings in Iran.If Trump sticks to his 8 p.m. EST deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and decides to follow through on his threat to bomb the country’s power plants, bridges, and other civilian infrastructure, the results could be catastrophic. That would no doubt be a war crime resulting in a humanitarian nightmare, not just in the eyes of the U.N., but many in the U.S. and around the world. The question is whether the White House or Republicans in Washington actually care.
https://newrepublic.com/post/208728/un-warns-trump-iran-threat-wars-have-rules