<The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has sent administrative subpoenas to Harvard demanding information about foreign students, the latest move in the legal battle between the Trump administration and the Ivy League college.

Harvard called the subpoenas "unwarranted," but has said it would cooperate.

DHS said its hand was forced on the subpoenas because Harvard had not complied with noncoercive requests related to its Student Visitor and Exchange Program (SVEP) certification.

The first request, made in April, was for information about "criminality and misconduct" of foreign students on campus.

"If Harvard won't defend the interests of its students, then we will," DHS Secretary Kristi Noem posted to her X account.

"We tried to do things the easy way with Harvard. Now, through their refusal to cooperate, we have to do things the hard way. Harvard, like other universities, has allowed foreign students to abuse their visa privileges and advocate for violence and terrorism on campus."

Harvard Responds to DHS

A spokesperson for Harvard said in a statement sent to Newsweek that the college "is committed to following the law, and while the government's subpoenas are unwarranted, the University will continue to cooperate with lawful requests and obligations."

"The administration's ongoing retaliatory actions come as Harvard continues to defend itself and its students, faculty, and staff against harmful government overreach aimed at dictating whom private universities can admit and hire, and what they can teach," they said.

"Harvard remains unwavering in its efforts to protect its community and its core principles against unfounded retribution by the federal government."

Trump Takes on Elite Colleges

The administration is taking on Harvard and other elite colleges that it says are in the grip of a leftist ideology, which has led to antisemitism on campus, anti-meritocratic admissions policies that prioritize race above ability, and abuse of the immigration system.

Colleges have expressed willingness to engage with the Trump Administration on some of the reforms it has demanded of them, but also accused government officials of political meddling that undermines academic and First Amendment freedoms on campus.

Harvard SEVP Certification Under Threat

DHS has sought to terminate Harvard's SEVP certification, which enables it to enroll foreign students who can then secure visas.

It accused Harvard of "permitting anti-American, pro-terrorist agitators to harass and physically assault individuals, including many Jewish students".

In its latest release, DHS said there are "allegations of disciplinary disparity involving nonimmigrant students" and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is demanding documentation and other relevant records dating back to January 1, 2020.

But the college filed a suit against the SEVP revocation in a Massachusetts federal court and secured a preliminary injunction in June.

"This case is about core constitutional rights that must be safeguarded: freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and freedom of speech, each of which is a pillar of a functioning democracy and an essential hedge against authoritarianism," wrote U.S. District Court Judge Allison D. Burroughs in her preliminary injunction on June 23.

The Trump Administration has also suspended billions of dollars in federal grant money and other funding from Harvard after it refused to back down and make the various governance, disciplinary, and admissions changes it wanted.

Harvard has also challenged these moves to withhold funding in court and has a hearing set for July 21.>

<Former cable news commentators who lost their status after radically opposing President Donald Trump for the last decade are at it again. This time they're fearmongering about security issues related to the upcoming 2026 midterms.

Anti-Trump former MSNBC host Joy Reid spoke with Wajahat Ali on "The Left Hook" last week, claiming that people who believe future elections are going to be fair are “insane" for thinking so.

“Whenever Democrats say to me... 'We have to coalesce for 2026,’ I always add to the end of that sentence: ‘Yeah, assuming we actually have free and fair elections,’” she said. “I think it’s insane, honestly, to just assume we’re going to have normal elections next year. I don't assume that."

"The way Trump is behaving, he's not acting like somebody who worries that his party will lose power, or even if somehow we had normal elections and Democrats took control of either the House or the Senate, he's not acting like somebody who's worried about the consequences of that," Reid added.

She also accused Republicans of attempting to implement a "fascist manifesto" in the form of Project 2025, showing opposition to the "13th, 14th and 15th" constitutional amendments aimed at ending slavery, and not wanting "white women to have any rights."

Oh, and she thinks Trump will never leave office. Wow. That's a lot to unpack.

Reid is known for her Trump derangement issues, which contributed to her firing by MSNBC back in February due to poor ratings. During an interview following her firing, she broke down sobbing while insisting that "my show had value."

Apparently, it didn't have enough value. It turns out no one wants to hear progressive rabbit hole theories that have little evidence to back them up, with bitter anger and racial animosity looming over each talking point.

Another mainstream media fossil who's been put out to pasture is former CNN host and White House correspondent Jim Acosta.

Acosta, who is also anti-Trump, quit CNN back in January after receiving a humbling demotion.

He had former Bill Clinton advisor James Carville on his podcast last week and brought up the idea of "vote tampering."

"Do you worry about vote tampering in the midterms?" he asked Carville. "Do you worry about Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and some of these types monkeying around with the midterms?"

Carville replied, "Yes," adding that he "wouldn't put anything past" the commander-in-chief.

Here we have three has-beens who've almost always attacked Trump, and who were left by the wayside, claiming Republicans are going to sabotage the integrity of the upcoming election.

My, oh my, how the tables have turned. There was a time not so long ago when woke pundits and Democratic lawmakers claimed voter fraud was a "myth" and preached that it was nearly impossible.

Even when the world was on lockdown, and relied on an entirely new -- and vulnerable -- voting system with mass mail-in ballots, it was considered treason to question any aspect of Joe Biden's 81 million votes.

Yet before a single vote has even been cast for the 2026 election, which is over a year away, these pundits are trying to convince the public it's fixed. This strategy has been financially profitable for them in the past, so they will continue their pandering to fringe elements of the far-left.

Ironically, they will likely never realize that this is also the main reason they've found themselves out in the cold.

Due to a lack of self-reflection -- and too much self-importance -- they are destined to sing this same old song until the music stops, or until they come to their senses. The public shouldn't hold its breath on either account.>

<[Event "19th World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1991.07.??"]
[EventDate "1991"]
[Round "7"]
[Result "0-1"]
[White "Tataev, Manach"]
[Black "Zaichik, Gennadi"]
[ECO "A21"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<“The America Party is needed to fight the Republican/Democrat Uniparty,” Elon Musk posted on X, announcing that he’s forming a third party.

Does America need a third party? Possibly, for a reason I’ll get to in a moment.

But America doesn’t need a third party financed by the richest person in the world, who sank a quarter of a billion dollars into making Trump president and was also among the most prolific Republican donors in 2024 (Trump officials are still awaiting $100 million in pledges Musk made this year).

We need a third party dedicated to just the opposite — getting big money out of politics.

Both major parties are far too dependent on big corporations and the ultra-wealthy, although the GOP is far more dependent than are the Democrats.

Just 100 extremely wealthy families invested $2.6 billion in the 2024 election that put Trump back in the White House and Republican majorities in both the House and Senate.

Even if you subtract Musk’s contribution, that’s more than double what billionaire donors contributed just four years ago.

Fully 70 percent of the bounty from the top 100 contributing billionaire families went to Republicans.

Billionaires accounted for almost three-quarters (71 percent) of the total amount used by outside spending groups to attack Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, and over three-fifths (61 percent) of all outside dollars spent praising Trump.

In the three Senate races that gave Republicans control of the Senate, billionaires supplied most Republican outside spending: in Montana, 58.1 percent. Pennsylvania 56.8 percent. Ohio 44.5 percent.

Soon, the billionaires who invested in Trump will get a giant return on their investment, courtesy of Trump’s Big Ugly budget bill.

The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that by 2027, the richest 0.1 percent of taxpayers (of which the country’s estimated roughly 900 billionaires are a subset) will collectively save $60 billion in federal taxes, due to the Big Ugly.

Clearly, Musk’s purpose in creating a third party has nothing whatever to do with ending this deepening corruption.

He says he wants to unseat Republican lawmakers who backed Trump’s Big Ugly because it will add trillions to the national debt.

“What the heck was the point of @DOGE if he’s just going to increase the debt by $5 trillion??” Musk wrote on X, referring to his so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Oh, please.

If Musk is really worried about the federal debt, the easiest way to shrink it would be to raise taxes on the wealthy — including himself.

Near-record levels of income and wealth are now concentrated at the very top, yet the rich don’t pay nearly their fair share in taxes.

Consider this: Musk’s 2024 campaign contributions were four times more than what he paid in annual federal income taxes between 2013 and 2018.

In fact, Musk — the richest person in the world — pays a lower tax rate than average Americans....>

<....A ProPublica analysis showed that between 2014 and 2018, Musk’s wealth increased by $13.9 billion, but he paid a “true tax rate” of only 3.27 percent on that growth.

If Musk gives his 14 children his shares of stock when he dies, his heirs won’t be taxed on any of the increases in their value over Musk’s lifetime because of a loophole in the tax laws called “stepped-up basis at death.”

So Musk’s real purpose in starting a third party can’t be to reduce the federal budget deficit. And it’s obviously not to get big money out of American politics.

What is it?

One hint comes in the people from whom Musk is seeking advice for his third party. The New York Times reported yesterday that Musk recently spoke about the task with the blogger Curtis Yarvin.

Yarvin has no particular expertise in the mechanics of American politics, but he comes as close as anyone to being the intellectual godfather of the anti-democracy movement in America.

Yarvin is at the center of a group of libertarian tech bros that includes Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. JD Vance has cited Yarvin’s writing.

In Yarvin’s view, real political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream press, whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding social order.

He believes democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful. “There is no such thing as ‘autocracy’ versus ‘democracy,’” Yarvin has written. “All government is arbitrary, unlimited and contingent.…All stable regimes are monarchical or oligarchic in practice.”

Democracies, says Yarvin, should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” — wealthy oligarchs — select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.

Yarvin criticized Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency for not assuming <enough> power.

So it seems we’ve come to Musk’s real purpose in starting a third party. Not to reduce the federal debt (which could be done by raising taxes on the ultra-wealthy like Musk). Certainly not to get big money out of politics (Musk is Exhibit A in how big money subverts democracy).

It’s to finish the job Musk’s money in the 2024 election began and his DOGE continued once Trump was in office: the total annihilation of American democracy.>

<When someone crosses Donald Trump, the retribution tends to come fast and fierce. But when Sen. Susan Collins of Maine voted last week against his One Big Beautiful Bill, a tax- and safety net-cuts behemoth, the President was atypically silent. That may be the biggest indicator of just how much danger Collins is in as she faces re-election in Maine in 2026.

Collins’ opposition was not enough to kill the giant domestic bill that may be the lone legislative lift of the 119th Congress. She was the 50th nay, which forced Vice President J.D. Vance’s to provide a tie breaking 51st vote. Collins is seldom the deciding factor; she did not sink Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court and voted for all but one of Trump’s second-term Cabinet picks, while also voting against Kash Patel’s nomination to lead the FBI. Her protest votes are as strategic as they are symbolic; FiveThirtyEight found she voted with Trump 67% of the time during his first term. Plus, on an early test vote on this bill, she let it proceed as she continued, unsuccessfully, to negotiate for carve-outs for rural hospitals.

Collins is the lone Senator up for re-election next year in a state that Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris carried in 2024. Democrats have yet to settle on a favored candidate to become the nominee although all eyes are on Maine Gov. Janet Mills, the tough-minded former prosecutor who stared down Trump at the White House and refused to comply with his administration’s anti-transgender athlete orders. State Democrats have other options at the ready if the 77-year-old Mills passes and are primed either way to make Collins own the Trump record, especially her votes for his Supreme Court nominees in his first term. While she was re-elected after those votes, the Justices have since overturned a half-century of precedent on abortion rights in Roe.

Republicans in Washington, meanwhile, have seemingly endless patience with Collins and understand her savvy. Her tangles with Trump have been largely performative, not predictive. She is no John McCain, who with a single thumbs-down signal thwarted Trump’s first-term effort to repeal Obamacare. Cynics say that Collins shows independence only when it doesn’t really make a difference; no one on her side of the aisle really unloaded on her after the vote against the latest package. Most had her back, saying they understood her choice.

Collins, a powerful player and chair of the all-important Appropriations panel, is not terribly difficult to understand, politically speaking. She has never won re-election by less than 8 points despite her home state’s fickle politics. The last time the state’s majority vote went for a Republican presidential candidate was in 1988, also the last year a Democrat won a Senate race in the state.

But her net approval rating sank 12 percentage points—more than any other Senator’s numbers—between the first and second quarters of this year, according to Morning Consult. Her disapproval number stood at 51%, up from a 44% average in the January-March window.

And she is definitely viewed less warmly than when she was at a comparable point ahead of her 2020 bid. In 2019, 52% of Mainers had a favorable impression of Collins, according to Morning Consult polling. Today, the number is 42%.

This suggests she’s going to have a trickier time than when she was at the comparable point ahead of her last campaign. In 2019, ahead of her 2020 bid, her net positive numbers were 13 points. Today she’s at a net negative of 9 points, according to the same pollsters. That means roughly 1-in-5 Maine voters have changed their minds about Collins in a state where her last victory was secured by less than 9 points.

Collins’ allies, meanwhile, offer a different read, noting that she enjoyed a net positive of 2 points in September of last year, and that has moved to a net positive of 4 points last month, according to an independent survey from Pan Atlantic Research....>

<....As a practical matter, about 34,000 Mainers stand to lose health coverage as the bill was drafted. Two solar projects in the state were put on hold even before the bill passed. Hospitals were already bracing for shifting services. Collins’ no vote, in a rational world, made sense for her constituents.

But that may not help her. Among voters in Maine, a majority—including a majority of Republicans—says she does not deserve to be re-elected, according to polling from neighboring University of New Hampshire. A striking 71% of all Maine voters say this should be her last term, and 57% of Republicans agree, according to a survey taken in April. That’s a simply brutal number.

Flipping ahead a few pages in the same UNH binder, things get even worse. Their survey finds Collins with a favorability number of just 12%, landing a 58% unfavorable number. Among Republicans, the gap is a 19% positive to a 43% negative.

The University of New Hampshire Survey Center found the bill was deeply unpopular, according to a June poll. A 58% majority did not want to see the bill pass, including 72% of independent voters.

Still, Democrats are realistic about what they face. While Collins has just $3 million in her account, she raised almost $31 million for her 2020 bid and won her 2014 campaign with less than $6 million in spending to notch 67% of the vote. Senate Republicans’ campaign committee is, first and foremost, an incumbent-retention operation and will have her back.

Senate Democrats, meanwhile, are going to be defending tricky seats in Georgia, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Michigan, and Colorado. They would need a net pick-up run of four seats to take a majority, and the path to that would require upsets in Trump-backing states like Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, Iowa, and Texas, plus holding every seat that is currently blue.

So Collins is facing some pretty lousy poll numbers and is going to be dogged by her no vote that had no real upside. The vote against Trump is not going to be the salve that cures her dour numbers. She defied Republicans but is not going to get any love from Democrats. She’s going to be hounded by a bill she did not support. Plus, the headwinds are historic—and that’s before Trump decides whether he will launch his own revenge.>

<Late on Tuesday, we had another missive from the mists of the Supreme Court’s shadow docket—an unsigned opinion that confirmed for the moment the president’s right to clear-cut the entire administrative structure of the executive branch’s agencies and departments. From The Guardian:

Extending a winning streak for the US president, the justices on Tuesday lifted a lower court order that had frozen sweeping federal layoffs known as “reductions in force” while litigation in the case proceeds. The decision could result in hundreds of thousands of job losses at the departments of agriculture, commerce, health and human services, state, treasury, veterans affairs and other agencies.

In February, Trump announced “a critical transformation of the federal bureaucracy” in an executive order directing agencies to prepare for a government overhaul aimed at significantly reducing the workforce and gutting offices. In its brief unsigned order on Tuesday, the supreme court said Trump’s administration was “likely to succeed on its argument that the executive order” and a memorandum implementing his order were lawful. The court said it was not assessing the legality of any specific plans for layoffs at federal agencies.

Of course not. That would mean that the carefully manufactured conservative majority on the Supreme Court was carefully manufactured in order to advance right-wing policy goals and not simply to “call balls and strikes,” as Chief Justice John Roberts once described his job. And as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed out in her solo dissent, the majority’s “We’re not judging the president’s actions, but we do think they’re legitimate” argument was a shuck from start to finish.

Given the fact-based nature of the issue in this case and the many serious harms that result from allowing the President to dramatically reconfigure the Federal Government, it was eminently reasonable for the District Court to maintain the status quo while the courts evaluate the lawfulness of the President’s executive action. At bottom, this case is about whether that action amounts to a structural overhaul that usurps Congress’s policymaking prerogatives—and it is hard to imagine deciding that question in any meaningful way after those changes have happened. Yet, for some reason, this Court sees fit to step in now and release the President’s wrecking ball at the outset of this litigation.

Jackson has made it her brief to push back against the pronouncements of the shadow docket. And she clearly enjoys her work. From ABC News:

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in her first public appearance since the Supreme Court sharply limited the ability of federal judges to check presidential power, said Saturday she believes recent rulings by the court’s conservative majority pose an “existential threat to the rule of law.”

“Sometimes we have cases that have those kinds of implications, and, you know, are there cases in which there are issues that have that kind of significance? Absolutely,” Jackson told ABC News Live Prime anchor Linsey Davis during a wide-ranging conversation at the Global Black Economic Forum.

Brown touched off a hooley on the bench with her dissent in Trump v. CASA, the case that many observers—including Brown and, well, me—see as a prelude for a move against the concept of birthright citizenship. Brown wrote that the decision would result in a situation in which “executive power will become completely uncontainable.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett found this blunt mobilization of obvious truth so unbearably déclassé that she unleashed her inner Karen in response. This, in turn, prompted an interesting piece in The New York Times....>

<....Her opinions, sometimes joined by no other justice, have been the subject of scornful criticism from the right and have raised questions about her relationships with her fellow justices, including the other two members of its liberal wing.

Mercy me, questions are being raised. Can gathering clouds be far behind? However, the piece later is quite plain in calling out the obvious privilege behind Barrett’s suburban outrage.

Justice Jackson added her own dissent, speaking only for herself. She said the majority imperiled the rule of law, creating “a zone of lawlessness within which the executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes.” That prompted an extended response from Justice Barrett, the next most junior justice and the author of the majority opinion. It did not stint on condescension.

Yoicks!

“We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself,” Justice Barrett wrote, in an opinion signed by all five of the other Republican appointees. “The principal dissent focuses on conventional legal terrain,” Justice Barrett went on, referring to Justice Sotomayor’s opinion. “Justice Jackson, however, chooses a startling line of attack that is tethered neither to these sources nor, frankly, to any doctrine whatsoever.”

The cynical mind suggests that it’s really Jackson’s outspoken opposition to the use of the shadow docket that is the real reason why the carefully manufactured conservative majority sent its newest member out to push back. Jackson’s patience with the shadow-docket sleight of hand has run out.

“This fly-by-night approach to the work of the Supreme Court is not only misguided,” she wrote in April, when the court said that Venezuelan men the administration was seeking to deport to El Salvador had sued in the wrong court. “It is also dangerous.” In a dissent from an emergency ruling in June granting Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency access to sensitive Social Security data, Justice Jackson accused the majority of giving Mr. Trump favored treatment. “What would be an extraordinary request for everyone else,” she wrote, “is nothing more than an ordinary day on the docket for this administration.”

Justice Jackson has a chance to be reckoned one day as the justice who rang all the alarm bells. If nobody listened, that’s on them.>

<As monstrous floodwaters surged across central Texas late last week, officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency leapt into action, preparing to deploy critical search and rescue teams and life-saving resources, like they have in countless past disasters.

But almost instantly, FEMA ran into bureaucratic obstacles, four officials inside the agency told CNN.

As CNN has previously reported, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — whose department oversees FEMA — recently enacted a sweeping rule aimed at cutting spending: Every contract and grant over $100,000 now requires her personal sign-off before any funds can be released.

For FEMA, where disaster response costs routinely soar into the billions as the agency contracts with on-the-ground crews, officials say that threshold is essentially “pennies,” requiring sign-off for relatively small expenditures.

In essence, they say the order has stripped the agency of much of its autonomy at the very moment its help is needed most.

“We were operating under a clear set of guidance: lean forward, be prepared, anticipate what the state needs, and be ready to deliver it,” a longtime FEMA official told CNN. “That is not as clear of an intent for us at the moment.”

For example, as central Texas towns were submerged in rising waters, FEMA officials realized they couldn’t pre-position Urban Search and Rescue crews from a network of teams stationed regionally across the country.

In the past, FEMA would have swiftly staged these teams, which are specifically trained for situations including catastrophic floods, closer to a disaster zone in anticipation of urgent requests, multiple agency sources told CNN.

But even as Texas rescue crews raced to save lives, FEMA officials realized they needed Noem’s approval before sending those additional assets. Noem didn’t authorize FEMA’s deployment of Urban Search and Rescue teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding began, multiple sources told CNN.

Homeland Security officials have defended the federal response in Texas and President Donald Trump’s plan to dismantle FEMA and shift more responsibility for disaster response to states.

Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS spokeswoman, told CNN that Noem did not need to authorize additional FEMA resources initially because the department used other DHS search and rescue assets. She added that over time, as a need for FEMA resources arose, those requests received Noem’s approval.

“FEMA is shifting from bloated, DC-centric dead weight to a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers state actors to provide relief for their citizens,” McLaughlin told CNN in a statement. “The old processes are being replaced because they failed Americans in real emergencies for decades.”

Other homeland security components have assisted, including the US Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection.

One Texas state official told CNN that the Texas emergency management division has been interacting with FEMA “in the way we always do for disasters like this.” The official added that Texas has “quite a bit of capabilities” related to disaster management on its own.

But the additional red tape required at FEMA added another hurdle to getting critical federal resources deployed when hours counted.

Texas did request aerial imagery from FEMA to aid search and rescue operations, a source told CNN, but that was delayed as it awaited Noem’s approval for the necessary contract.

FEMA staff have also been answering phones at a disaster call center, where, according to one agency official, callers have faced longer wait times as the agency awaited Noem’s approval for a contract to bring in additional support staff.

The chaos has exposed a deeper uncertainty within FEMA about its ability to respond, its mission, and its authority under the Trump administration — just as hurricane and wildfire seasons have gotten underway. Officials within FEMA warn that if the disaster had spanned a larger area and multiple states, the confusion and delays could have been even more severe.

For months, FEMA officials have been warning that the agency is unprepared amid a mass exodus of experienced emergency managers and the looming threat of the agency being dismantled.

CNN has reached out to FEMA for comment.

Difficult scenes, different model

After the skies over central Texas opened up and caused waters to rise more than 23 feet in under an hour in the early morning hours of Friday, dozens were swept away in the raging flood waters that surged around the Guadalupe River where campers and merrymakers had been looking forward to the Independence Day weekend.

Five days later, the death toll of nearly 120 people continues to climb. More than 160 are still missing....>

<....Trump approved a major disaster declaration for Texas on Sunday, July 6.

By Monday night, only 86 FEMA staffers had been deployed, according to internal FEMA data seen by CNN — a fraction of the typical response for a disaster of this scale.

By Tuesday night, the federal response expanded to 311 staffers deployed, the data showed.

Multiple FEMA officials told CNN that they were taken aback by the agency’s relatively limited response in the immediate aftermath of the disaster.

The tragedy in Texas has made one thing clear: The buck now stops with Noem.

Her office has delegated little authority to acting FEMA Administrator David Richardson, who, as of Wednesday morning, has yet to visit Texas since the flooding began, multiple FEMA officials told CNN.

“DHS and its components have taken an all-hands-on-desk approach to respond to recovery efforts in Kerrville. FEMA has deployed extensive staff to support Texas response and recovery operations based on staff skills and requirements,” McLaughlin told CNN.

The agency has activated its regional response center in Austin and sent a liaison officer to Kerrville, she said.

“DHS is rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and is reprioritizing appropriated dollars. Secretary Noem is delivering accountability to the U.S. taxpayer, which Washington bureaucrats have ignored for decades at the expense of American citizens.”

Texas, which has one of the most robust emergency management systems in the country, has managed this disaster largely on its own and leaned on its state and local search and rescue teams in the early hours of the disaster. More than 2,100 people have been deployed across 20 state agencies, Gov. Greg Abbott’s office has said.

To bolster the response at the outset, officials in Texas turned to the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC), a mutual aid agreement between states to share resources during disasters.

At least one state requested a guarantee that FEMA would cover the steep costs and potential damage to equipment, a promise the federal agency couldn’t make on the spot, though the issue was quickly resolved, two sources with knowledge of the matter told CNN.

All of this raises questions over the vision of emergency management Trump has laid out several times during this administration, in which states bear the brunt of the responsibility for disaster relief and FEMA is eventually “phased out.”

On Wednesday, Noem, his DHS secretary, called for the agency to be eliminated and remade after telling reporters the previous day: “We, as a federal government, don’t manage these disasters. The state does.”

“We come in and support them, and that’s exactly what we did in this situation,” she said.

Trump said: “You had people there as fast as anybody’s ever seen.”>

<Fox News hosts Charles Hurt and Rachel Campos-Duffy said Sunday President Donald Trump and his team should publicly address lingering questions about the Epstein investigation, arguing that only a full explanation — like detailing witnesses and interviews — can calm the unrest stirred by the president’s own Truth Social post.

In a post on his Truth Social platform Saturday evening, Trump wrote: “What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?’ They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening. We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and ‘selfish people’ are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.”

Trump went on to say that his critics — from former President Barack Obama, “Crooked Hillary,” Comey, Brennan, and the Biden team — were behind the documents related to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

“They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so‑called ‘friends’ are playing right into their hands," Trump added.

He continued: “Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files? If there was ANYTHING in there that could have hurt the MAGA Movement, why didn’t they use it? They haven’t even given up on the John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr. Files.”

Reacting to Trump’s comments, Hurt argued during Fox News's "Fox & Friends" that Trump and his team must do more to reassure the public.

“If there’s anybody who could walk in and say, ‘OK, we’ve resolved all of the questions and there is nothing here,’ it would be President Trump and his crew,” Hurt said, adding, “The problem is, you can’t really do it without giving some explanation. And there has to be some explanation. And I think that’s why you have a lot of people still pretty with a lot a very valid questions.”

Campos-Duffy echoed this sentiment, saying: “You can defuse this ticking time bomb if you simply get out there. You can’t tell me that a thousand people were hurt and that there are no people out there that we can arrest."

She added: "You can tell me that, ‘Sorry. We don’t have a list.’ Fine, don’t have a list. Tell me who the perpetrators were. Let’s depose every single person who might have had a chance to get on that list, and might have been out there at that island and let’s talk to them. Let’s find out what happened.”

A wave of disillusionment swept through the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement after the Department of Justice and FBI recently declared there was no Epstein “client list” and reaffirmed that Epstein’s death was a suicide.

Right‑wing figures such as Laura Loomer, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FLa), and Robby Starbuck publicly criticized Bondi for allegedly misleading the base, with several calling for her resignation over what they view as a betrayal.>

<Former FBI agent Michael Fienberg has gone public, pointing out that the agency, under the leadership of Dan Bongino and Kash Patel, is purging itself of people who are not members of the Trump cult (my phrase, not his).

Similar cult-like behavior is on vivid display with the White House press secretary, the head of DHS, and the head of the Department of Justice — among numerous other administration officials and elected Republicans — regularly spouting lies and half-truths that target women, immigrants, and Democrats.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is implying that the children who died in the Texas floods were the victims of a nefarious plot — presumably by Democrats or Jews who operate space lasers — to modify the weather, completely ignoring the fact that Republican-aligned fossil fuel billionaires have been engaged in a half-century-long scheme to sabotage our atmosphere with their carbon dioxide emissions in exchange for trillions of dollars in profits. Some of which, no doubt, have been shared with Greene or her campaign.

Multiple administration officials, elected Republicans, and rightwing media cult leaders on platforms like Fox “News” have been amplifying the racist, antisemitic “Great Replacement Theory,” that wealthy Jews are paying to “replace” white people in America with Blacks, Mexicans, and other people of color. This has led to ICE becoming the largest police force in America, with a budget larger than that of the entire Russian military, soon to be sweeping a neighborhood near you in their never-ending hunt for brown-skinned people.

Donald Trump didn’t need to lure his followers into a remote jungle, like Jim Jones did in Guyana. He didn’t need to physically isolate them from the rest of the world. Instead, Trump built his Jonestown right here at home, within the boundaries of our republic, brick by brick. He did it using over 30,000 documented lies, fear, rage, and the intoxicating promise of belonging.

Today, tens of millions of Americans are trapped inside Trump’s reality-warping cult. And just as Jones’ followers drank poisoned Kool-Aid believing it was salvation, Trump’s followers have swallowed his Big Lies and are now willing to sacrifice our Constitution, our democracy, and our future on the altar of one man’s insatiable ego.

This is an old story in new packaging.

Jim Jones wasn’t always a madman. In the beginning, he offered something people desperately wanted: community, belonging, equality. He drew in the lonely, the marginalized, the disillusioned. He offered them meaning, dignity, and the hope of a better world. But slowly, he twisted that hope into a tool of control, weaponizing his followers’ trust for his own wealth, power, and self-aggrandizement.

Donald Trump followed a similar cult leader’s path.

He didn’t invent the grievances he exploited. For decades, America’s middle class was gutted by Reaganomics and neoliberal trade policies. Jobs were shipped overseas. Unions were crushed. Wages stagnated while billionaires like Trump amassed obscene wealth.

Trump didn’t cause that pain, but he channeled it. He told working-class Americans that he alone could restore their lost greatness. At the 2016 Republican National Convention, he bellowed: “I alone can fix it.”

That wasn’t a campaign promise. It was a cult leader’s declaration. Like Jones, Trump positioned himself not as a servant of the people, but as their savior, the one indispensable man without whom all hope would be lost.

All cults, whether religious or political, thrive on division and a sense of victimhood. Jim Jones taught his followers that outsiders were out to destroy them, that they were surrounded by enemies, traitors, and saboteurs. He warned that the CIA, the media, and shadowy conspirators would annihilate Jonestown unless his people followed him without question.

Trump operates from the same playbook.

His enemies list is long: immigrants, Black voters, Muslims, women, Democrats, journalists, scientists, the “deep state,” election officials, even members of his own party who dare to tell the truth. He has spent years feeding his followers a steady diet of paranoia, victimhood, and grievance, convincing them that the only thing standing between them and ruin is him.

And just as Jones’ followers were taught to see dissent as treason, Trump’s followers are conditioned to see any criticism of him as an attack on themselves. They’ve surrendered their own personal identities to him and his cult. When he tells them that an election they lost was stolen, they believe it; not because the evidence says so, but because Trump says so. And in a cult, the cult leader’s word is truth....>

<....Jones kept his followers in a physical jungle, cut off from the outside world. Trump does the same psychologically with the help of billionaire-backed media. His repeated attacks on the press as “the enemy of the people” are no accident: they are a deliberate strategy to isolate his followers in an information silo, where only his voice matters.

Fox “News,” Truth Social, MAGA podcasts, and a network of social media influencers form the walls of this new Jonestown. Alternative facts replace real ones. And when reality intrudes — when courts reject Trump’s lawsuits, when audits confirm his losses — his followers simply double down. “That’s just what the enemy wants us to believe.”

It’s classic cult behavior. And it’s why millions remain convinced that Trump won in 2020, that the COVID vaccine was a hoax or a plot, that January 6th was “legitimate political discourse.” Like Jones, Trump has taught his followers to see the world not as it is, but as he tells them it is.

When Jones’ utopia began to crumble — when defections and investigations threatened his power and a congressional delegation arrived to expose his lies and manipulations — he led his followers into mass suicide. Over 900 men, women, and children perished, drinking poisoned Kool-Aid to prove their loyalty.

Trump, faced with the reality of defeat in 2020, incited his followers to violence rather than admit loss. January 6th was America’s political Jonestown: a desperate, delusional last stand to keep their messiah in power. Trump didn’t just sit back as the Capitol was attacked. He watched with satisfaction, refusing to act for hours, while the very heart of our democracy was desecrated in his name.

And to this day, he defends that insurrection, calling those convicted of violent crimes “hostages,” giving pardons, and encouraging more violence if he’s indicted or loses again. Jones destroyed his followers; Trump is willing to destroy our nation.

I wrote about this back in the summer of 2023 in an article titled, “Will America Face “Narcissistic Collapse” as Trump Descends into Legal Hell?” Narcissistic collapse is what happens when psychopathic narcissists face defeat and humiliation and strike out against the world around them.

Think Hitler in his bunker when my old friend Armin Lehmann, then a 16-year-old Hitler Youth, handed him the news that the war was lost. Armin wrote a book about his experience, In Hitler’s Bunker: A Boy Soldier’s Eyewitness Account of the Fuhrer’s Last Days, which we discussed extensively when he was writing it and during the three years we traveled the world together, lecturing mostly across Europe and the Far East.

Hitler, in those final weeks — Armin told me and the historical record verifies — actually welcomed the destruction of Germany by American and Soviet bombs and tanks.

He hadn’t failed: his narcissism and the cult he had created and surrounded himself with wouldn’t let him confront that.

Instead, in his mind, the German people had failed, his generals had failed, his soldiers had failed. They had failed Germany, but, more importantly they had failed him and his cult — and he wanted them punished for failing him.

When he was finally pushed into full-blown narcissistic collapse — those final days that Armin spent with him — he succumbed to the fate of many severe narcissists who experience a failure so undeniable that it provokes full-blown narcissistic collapse: he killed his wife and then turned the gun on himself.

In the final stages of narcissistic collapse, long before suicide becomes an option, first comes the blaming and the attempts to punish others.

We see this now with Trump blaming the media, the courts, and the Democrats he now openly brags that he “hates” and encourages his cult followers to hate as well.

Historians and political scientists have long warned us about men like Trump. In Strongmen and on her Lucid Substack newsletter, Ruth Ben-Ghiat traces the path of authoritarians like Mussolini, Putin, and Trump: they all consistently cultivate a cult of personality, demonize opponents, destroy the press, capture the courts, collaborate with oligarchs, and use violence as a political tool.

Trump has followed that playbook to the letter....>

<....Jason Stanley, in How Fascism Works and on his Forward Substack, identifies Trump’s tactics: appeals to a mythic past, relentless lying, glorification of violence, and the creation of a “victim” identity for the dominant group. Steven Hassan, one of America’s foremost experts on cults, calls Trumpism a “destructive political cult” in his book The Cult of Trump and on his Substack newsletter Freedom of Mind.

These aren’t wild theories. They’re the sober assessments of professional scholars and historians who’ve studied how democracies fall and how cults rise.

It’s easy to see Jones’ Kool-Aid as the symbol of his evil, but let’s not forget: Trump’s lies have already cost real lives.

His downplaying of COVID, his undermining of vaccines and masks, his promotion of quack cures like hydroxychloroquine and bleach weren’t just irresponsible: they were deadly. Hundreds of thousands of Americans would be alive today if Trump hadn’t turned public health into a culture war battlefield.

And now, his Big Lies about the election and the “deep state” are poisoning faith in our democracy itself. In poll after poll, a majority of Republicans say they believe Trump won in 2020. They believe it so deeply that they’re passing laws to suppress votes, installing loyalists to oversee elections, and preparing to reject any future result that doesn’t favor their Dear Leader. The poison is spreading and fast.

So what comes next?

Jim Jones didn’t start out plotting mass suicide. He got there one lie, one power grab, one act of cruelty at a time. Trump’s path is no different. His first term tested the boundaries. His second is breaking them.

Already, Trump openly promised dictatorship “on day one.” He’s already pursuing “retribution,” purging the government, and rounding up immigrants into camps. He’s gutted the civil service, weaponized the justice department, and is today using the military for domestic crackdowns.

This isn’t hyperbole. It’s all on the record. And it’s what happens when a cult leader gains the reins of state power, as the world has seen repeatedly throughout history.

We don’t have to follow Trump into the abyss. We can refuse the poison. We can choose the hard work of repairing our democracy, telling the truth, and holding this would-be strongman accountable.

But time is short. The cult is deep, and its leader is relentless.

History tells us where this path ends. Jonestown. Berlin 1933. Rome in 1922. Moscow in 2020. The question is whether we have the courage to change course before it’s too late.

Trump may not have led us into a jungle, but he has led millions into a psychological wilderness, where lies are truth, enemies are everywhere, and only he can lead the way out. Jim Jones led his people to destruction, all in the name of salvation. Trump is leading America down the same road.

We must say no. We must tell the truth. And we must do it now.>