<....The events surrounding Epstein’s own death have also raised suspicions. His brother, businessman Mark Epstein, and the former New York medical examiner, Michael Baden, claim that marks on Epstein’s body confirmed his death was a homicide and not suicide, which was the official finding.

Ghislaine told the Department of Justice she believed Epstein was murdered – not in a high-level hit but because of an “internal situation” in the jail.

Whatever the case, after Epstein’s death, Ghislaine made it clear she would keep his and her secrets. It was her ticket to staying alive and to getting clemency.

Her lawyer, David Oscar Markus, told reporters this month that if she were to be offered clemency, she was prepared to speak “fully and honestly” before Congress. In the meantime, she has refused to answer any questions from the Congressional Oversight Committee investigating the Epstein scandal.

I am convinced that we will never see all the dirt Epstein and Ghislaine acquired, especially videotapes of very famous men having sex with girls in Epstein homes. It is probable that a select number of celebrities will be hung out to dry to satisfy the public’s demand for justice, but the major players will be protected.

Intelligence agencies possessing any kompromat will not discard it. Why waste it when they can continue to use it to control them for years to come? Another reason why Ghislaine must remain silent.

When I was co-authoring the book, The Assassination of Robert Maxwell – Israel’s Superspy, requests to the Maxwell family had to go through Ghislaine, who was living in New York with Epstein. My dealings with her and her mother were handled by way of correspondence with her sister, Isabel. Contrary to media reports, Epstein never personally met her father.

Having spent years studying Robert’s career, I believe Ghislaine fashioned Epstein in her father’s likeness. She introduced him to the cream of New York society, using many of her late father’s contacts.

Epstein lacked her world experience; much of it gained through observing her father, whom she idolised. I also believe she taught Epstein how to employ Robert’s transactional strategies, including buying protections and freedoms of movement provided by intelligence agencies in return for supplying them with compromising information and the secrets of people ensnared in their web.

Intelligence is the possession of secrets others do not wish you to have; secrets that give you power over others. Ghislaine knew this from being the closest member of her family to her father. She has played people at the top of the American political system and indulged Epstein’s fantasies as a means of exerting control.

Not only did she perpetrate vile crimes against vulnerable girls on a scale we have yet to fully grasp, I believe her aim was to amass wealth and power like her late father, by working closely with intelligence agencies. In time, we may come to understand that Ghislaine Maxwell, not Epstein, was the power player in this awful saga.>

<The right’s moral charade was always going to be undone by the Trump of it all.

I’m not sure we’re terrified enough about the American right scrapping even its own scant moral boundaries.

Every segment of the Trump-backing rightwing — America First nationalists, Trump loyalists and rank-and-file MAGA activists — has unsubscribed from the idea that there is any such thing as right and wrong, much less that wrongdoing should result in consequences. In effect, there is no behavior Trump’s GOP sees as too wrong to vote for. In late July 2025, almost half of Republicans said they would keep voting for Trump even if he “was officially implicated in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking activities.” Crime is legal, where rightwingers are concerned, however heinous the crime is.

At least, for themselves. The right still has morals for days when it comes to Black folks, immigrants and trans people. Its moral code has always been selective and conditional; rigorously enforced and mercilessly punitive toward “outsiders” and “others,” but generally indifferent to even the worst acts by those on the right side of whiteness and power. Wilhoit’s Law — coined by music composer Frank Wilhoit in a now-famous 2018 comment on a political science blog — neatly captures this truth. “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition — there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Now it’s ditching even its in-group protections.

The right’s reaction to the Epstein files disclosures is the clearest evidence of this. For the better part of a decade, conservatives lurched from one pedophile-focused moral panic to the next, proclaiming themselves the true saviors of children. They didn’t mean all children, of course; these are the same people who gifted a white woman with $750,000 just for calling a 5-year-old autistic Black boy the n-word. Their concern was always reserved for the white children they saw as fully human. They insisted pedophiles were hiding in pizza parlor basements; obsessed over Q drops and waved signs calling us to “#SavetheChildren” and “Stop Child Trafficking”; and pushed anti-LGBT “groomer” hysteria alongside anti-drag bills. Roughly half of Trump voters said they believed elected Democrats were running child sex rings in surveys from 2020 and 2022; a majority of 2020 Trump voters told pollsters that Trump was actively working to take down “an elite child sex trafficking ring involving top Democrats.” White lives mattered to conservatives, especially the youngest white lives. At least in theory.

And at least as long as they thought their political opponents were responsible. But the more we know about Epstein, the less they care. In July 2025, a CBS News survey found nearly half, or 46 percent, of Republicans said the Epstein files mattered at least “a little” to how they assess Trump’s presidency. By November, that figure had dropped to just 36 percent. (That figure is 64 percent for Democrats.) Faced with at least one allegation in the files that Trump sexually assaulted an underage girl and well documented associations between their leader and Epstein — as well as other alleged sexual predators — the right isn’t just overlooking the implications, they’re abandoning the principles. The right has “gradually de-emphasized” the Epstein issue, CNN writes, choosing to “largely move on.” It was all political calculation.

That might also explain why conservatives, in rebutting the need for greater transparency about the file contents, unfailingly bring up the appearance of Bill Clinton’s name in the Epstein files. They assume the left’s response will be to ditch the issue if there’s no partisan benefit, because that’s what they would do. They genuinely don’t understand that a person might hold a principle like, say, opposing pedophilia, regardless of who engages in it. The notion of sincere moral outrage grounded in right and wrong, instead of political advantage, is genuinely lost on them.

The moral charade was always going to be undone by the Trump of it all. His supporters are members of a reactionary movement almost singularly animated by racial grievance. Trump supporters believed the racial contract — and above all, its guarantee that whiteness was the most immutable hurdle to the American presidency — had been broken. “We haven’t felt like ourselves since Barack Obama,” Megyn Kelly said just this past September, a reminder of the imagined injury white racists sustained nearly two decades ago. Trump promised to not just restore the racial contract, but to punish the people his supporters saw as responsible for breaching it. In exchange, they elevated an openly, extravagantly corrupt white man to the presidency....>

<....When your most coherent ideology is “owning the libs” and fighting against racial equality, and you’ve literally elected one of the most demonstrably immoral people in public life to deliver on both, the moral line can never stop moving. That means every newly horrifying revelation requires the right to set a new moral boundary so that Trump can jump over it, before it’s done being drawn. It means accepting the corrupt enrichment of not just the entire Trump family, but pardons and commutations for errrrybody with a bribe or political clout — the January 6 insurrectionists; comically dishonest former Rep. George Santos; ex-Honduran president and cocaine and weapons trafficker Juan Orlando Hernandez. “I think this is the most corrupt presidency in U.S. history, with the money they are raking in, with the NFTs and the memecoins. I mean it’s so blatant, it’s right in front of our eyes,” Ann Coulter admitted, unashamedly, on the Triggernometry podcast in August, adding, “and the funny thing about [it is], I don’t care, as long as we get a wall and mass deportations.”

When pretending to have moral limits becomes inconvenient to white supremacy, moral limits are thrown out. And that includes when those limits are embodied in white children, abused by those in power. Conservatives have shown themselves willing to scuttle even the last shreds of their own self-interested moral code. What remains is a politics that’s somehow even darker and more nihilistic. And while there’s no disqualifying behavior as long as you’re on their side, by the same token, everyone else is the enemy. The right’s reaction to the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti — the relish they seemed to take in blaming them for their own deaths — makes this painfully clear.

Vice President JD Vance declared Good’s death “a tragedy of her own making.” Erick Erickson smirkily labeled Good “an AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal).” “I know I’m supposed to feel sorry for Alex Pretti,” Megyn Kelly said on her podcast, “but I don’t.” And Matt Walsh, who dismissed comparisons between Alex Pretti and Kyle Rittenhouse — who the right lionized after he fatally shot two people at a Black Lives Matter protest with a gun he was neither licensed nor old enough to carry — as “retarded,” wrote that Pretti “got what was coming to him. Simple as that.”

Everyday rightwingers did their part by donating nearly $800,000 in crowdfunded dollars to Good’s killer. (Oddly, no one set up a GoFundMe for Pretti’s killers — really, I looked — and I’m sure that has nothing to do with the fact that the identified agents are Hispanic.) It just confirms what so many of us have long suspected — that the right’s obsession with “crime” and “law and order” was less about an actual moral code and more about weaponizing it against perceived outsiders. Trump’s name, according to House Rep. Jamie Raskin, appears “more than one million” times in the unredacted Epstein documents. NBC reports that “at least a half-dozen top officials in the current Trump administration have connections to” Epstein. But Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal is, in this moment and without irony, still finding space for op-eds insisting it’s Black America who needs a “moral rejuvenation”— chastising them for “Black-on-Black crime” and suggesting they stop “whining about racism.”

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro made this idea explicit in a recent New Yorker interview when asked whether Trump could do anything he would find “disqualifying, in a moral-political sense.” Shapiro — who at least admitted he would “probably not” want Trump marrying into his family — couldn’t name a single thing.

“I don’t know what disqualifying means,” he said, before adding, “the only way to lose my faith and support and vote forever would be for there to be an alternative that I find superior to him. This is the problem when you’re making voting decisions.”

And there you have it. “Morality” isn’t about principles or lines you refuse to cross, it’s just a cost-benefit analysis between options that maintain power. That’s how authoritarian movements work — they put hierarchy, dominance and power above all else. (“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”) And while some of us were always held as collateral to be damaged by the right, the abandonment of even its most cynically held limits is still more terrifying still. Where nothing is disqualifying, everything is permissible. And a politics with no bottom should frighten us all. >

<Donald Trump on Saturday demanded that Netflix fire a former Obama insider from its board, or face "consequences."

The president took to Truth Social over the weekend to share a comment made by fringe MAGA influencer Laura Loomer, known for her close ties to Trump.

She wrote, "Netflix Board Member Susan Rice says corporations who took a 'knee to Trump' will face an 'accountability agenda' from elected Democrats if they win the midterms in 2026 and the 2028 Presidential election."

"Does Netflix stand by their Board Member threatening half of the country with weaponized government and political retribution for choosing who they wanted to vote for as President?" Loomer asked. "This is as anti-American as it gets, and Netflix is proving everyday they are an anti-American, WOKE company. Rice is basically openly saying that Democrats will go after anyone and everyone who supported President Trump, embracing weaponized lawfare against potentially millions of Americans. Making this more horrifying is the fact that if the Netflix-Warner Bros. merger is approved, positive messaging of the Democrats' upcoming witch hunts against Trump from Barack Hussein Obama and his anti-White racist wife Michelle would likely be blasted across all streaming services as the Obamas' Higher Ground Productions continues to grow within Netflix. The Netflix-Warner Bros. merger would result in a streaming monopoly, which the Obamas will have a significant stake in."

Trump shared that post, adding an additional threat to Ambassador Rice, who reportedly rejoined the Netflix Board of Directors in September 2023.

"Netflix should fire racist, Trump Deranged Susan Rice, IMMEDIATELY, or pay the consequences," he wrote. "She’s got no talent or skills - Purely a political hack! HER POWER IS GONE, AND WILL NEVER BE BACK. How much is she being paid, and for what??? Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DJT">

<Lawyers for Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s imprisoned co-conspirator, are fighting the requested release of 90,000 pages related to their cases, saying a law used to force the public release of millions of documents is unconstitutional.

The lawyers filed papers late Friday in Manhattan federal court to try to block the release of documents from a since-settled civil defamation lawsuit brought a decade ago by the late Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre against Maxwell. The Justice Department recently asked a judge to lift secrecy requirements on the files.

Maxwell’s attorneys said the Justice Department obtained the documents — otherwise subject to secrecy orders — improperly during its criminal investigation of Maxwell. They said the documents include transcripts of more than 30 depositions and private information regarding financial and sexual matters related to Maxwell and others.

Some records from the year-long exchange of evidence in the lawsuit battle were already released publicly in response to a federal appeals court order.

Maxwell’s lawyers say a law Congress passed in December to force the release of millions of Epstein-related documents violates the Constitution’s separation of powers doctrine.

“Congress cannot, by statute, strip this Court of the power or relieve it of the responsibility to protect its files from misuse. To do so violates the separation of powers,” wrote the lawyers, Laura Menninger and Jeffrey Pagliuca, about the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

“Under the Constitution’s separation of powers, neither Congress nor the Executive Branch may intrude on the judicial power. That power includes the power to definitively and finally resolve cases and disputes,” the lawyers added.

The release of Epstein-related documents from criminal inquiries that began weeks ago has resulted in new revelations about Epstein’s decades-long sexual abuse of women and teenage girls. Some victims have complained that their names and personal information were revealed in documents while the names of their abusers were blacked out.

Members of Congress have complained that only about half of existing documents, many with redactions, have been made public even as Justice Department officials have said everything has been released, except for some files that can’t be made public until a judge gives the go-ahead.

Giuffre said Epstein had trafficked her to other men, including Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. She sued Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew, in 2021, claiming that they had sex when she was 17.

Mountbatten-Windsor denied her claims and the two settled the lawsuit in 2022. Days ago, he was arrested and held in custody for nearly 11 hours on suspicion of misconduct in having shared confidential trade information with Epstein. Those charges remain under investigation.

In a memoir published after she killed herself last year, Giuffre wrote that prosecutors told her they didn’t include her in the sex trafficking prosecution of Maxwell because they didn’t want her allegations to distract the jury.

Maxwell, 64, was convicted in December 2021 and sentenced to 20 years in prison for her role over a decade in sexually exploiting and abusing underage girls with Epstein. She was found guilty of conspiracy to entice minors to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, conspiracy to transport minors to participate in illegal sex acts, transporting a minor to participate in illegal sex acts, sex trafficking conspiracy and sex trafficking of a minor.

Epstein took his life in a federal lockup in August 2019 as he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges. He was convicted eight years earlier of solicitation of prostitution involving a minor.

Maxwell was moved from a federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas last summer after she participated in two days of interviews with Deputy Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche. The move was fiercely criticized by Epstein’s victims and their advocates.

Two weeks ago, Maxwell declined to answer questions from House Oversight Committee lawmakers in a deposition conducted in a video call to her federal prison camp, though she indicated through a statement from her lawyer that she was “prepared to speak fully and honestly” if granted clemency by President Trump, which he has declined to rule out.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.>

<President Donald Trump has a familiar rhythm when he feels an opening. When the question lands, there’s a split second where he could let it pass or treat it lightly, but instead he leans forward, convinced there’s something to be gained by pushing harder.

It’s a pattern of spotting what looks like an easy target especially when he sees an opportunity to target a perceived political enemy and doesn’t always register the guardrails in the room.

Aboard Air Force One late last week, that instinct was on full display. Trump appeared to think he had just received an easy layup to stick it to his one-sided archrival, former President Barack Obama.

The exchange began as a routine question during a brief Q&A with reporters when Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked him directly, “Barack Obama said that aliens are real. Have you seen any evidence of nonhuman visitors to Earth?”

Instead of treating it as speculative or unserious, Trump escalated immediately.

“Well, he gave classified information. He’s not supposed to be doing that,” Trump said, as if the gotcha had already been secured.

Doocy didn’t miss a beat. He quickly followed up and narrowed the focus, asking Trump whether he was confirming that aliens are real.

But it was Trump who appeared to edge the conversation further when he repeated that “he took it out of classified information,” as if confirming the government indeed has details on the existence of aliens.

“I don’t know if they’re real or not. I can tell you he gave classified information. He’s not supposed to be doing that. He made a big mistake. He took it out of classified information.”

The irony is that the original podcast comments were delivered in a lighthearted speed round on the “No Lie With Brian Tyler Cohen” show. Obama had joked that aliens “are real,” but clarified they weren’t being kept at Area 51 — adding that there was no underground facility “unless there’s this enormous conspiracy, and they hid it from the president of the United States.”

He later clarified on Instagram that he was speaking about the statistical likelihood of life somewhere in the universe and stated plainly, “I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”

But Trump never misses a chance to go after an enemy. And this time, in his effort to frame Obama as reckless with classified information, critics argue he may have complicated the narrative himself.

Social media went wild, with plenty of people pointing out that it was Trump who actually confirmed the government has known about UFOs and alien life all along.

“So…Trump said it. Not Obama,” sharp-eared X user Cap posted.

Another X user agreed, “He indeed, did not f****ng say that. And trump indeed verified that aliens are real. Props to the reporter. Master baiter.”

This X user chimed in, “Obama didn’t give up anything classified but it appears Trump just did. Dude has no concept of context.”....>

<....Doocy then introduced the pivot that would later loom larger than the initial exchange.

“Well, the president can declassify anything that he wants to, so if you want to make an announcement…”

Trump responded without hesitation: “I may get him out of trouble by declassifying it.”

But only hours after accusing someone else of revealing classified information, Trump leaned into the attention generated by the viral clip and fell right into Doocy’s trap.

On Truth Social, he announced that he had directed federal agencies “to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters.”

“Based on the tremendous interest shown,” Trump wrote, he would move toward releasing the materials.

Trump himself has given various responses over the years when asked about the existence of extraterrestrial life.

Trump has given various responses over the years when asked about the existence of extraterrestrial life.

In 2019 after a briefing on alleged UFO sightings Trump told ABC News, “Do I believe it? Not particularly,” according to Newsweek.

He also told Fox News host at the time Tucker Carlson, “I’m not a believer, but you know, I guess anything is possible.”

The in 2020, according to the Hill, Trump told his older son Don Jr. when asked about what really happened in Roswell, “I won’t talk to you about what I know about it, but it’s very interesting.”

<Consider the analogy.

The Watergate scandal that brought Nixon down began in June 1972, but Nixon didn’t resigned until August 1974. It crossed over his re-election in November 1972, and was barely a factor, just like Epstein was only a footnote to Trump’s election in 2024. For over two years, most Americans thought Watergate was overblown.

Early reporting in the mainstream media largely dismissed the initial furor of Democrats over their headquarters’ offices being broken into as partisan huffing and puffing, because almost nobody thought Nixon himself had anything to do with the crime.

Conservative media at the time ridiculed Democrats’ concerns as political opportunism, calling the event — as Nixon himself said — “A third-rate burglary.” The legal system was largely disinterested, beyond holding the burglars themselves to account for a crime where it wasn’t clear that anything was even taken from the offices.

And the Nixon administration — and his Department of Justice and its leader, Attorney General John Mitchell — ridiculed both politicians and media folks who expressed concern that Watergate represented an actual threat to our constitutional system of government.

What changed when the tapes were finally released (analogous to the release of 3 million documents by the DOJ and Bondi’s evasive testimony) was that Americans finally realized that the president was, in fact, “a crook” and that the institutions of the federal government — particularly the DOJ — had been covering up for him.

We’re damn close to that moment now.

The recent DOJ release included reference to a report that a 13-15-year old girl reported to the FBI that Trump beat her up when she bit his penis as he forced her to perform oral sex.

This week, reporter Roger Sollenberger found that she was interviewed at least four times by the FBI and those more in-depth interviews ­(case number 3501.045) had mysteriously gone entirely missing from the documents released by Patel and Bondi.

The story made a headline on the conservative news site Drudge Report, among others; this mirrors the period immediately before Nixon resigned when rightwing sites and elected Republicans stopped publicly defending him.

Nixon fell when institutional America and the GOP stopped speaking out in his defense. It wasn’t just the break-in or the hush money he paid the burglars that broke the dam; it was when the elite consensus turned on him.

Late in the evening on Aug. 7th, 1974, three Republican leaders — Barry Goldwater, Hugh Scott, and John Rhodes — walked over to the White House and told President Nixon that the evidence against him had accumulated beyond spin, loyalty, and even partisan defense. The center of gravity had shifted, and two days later he was gone....>

<....I’m not suggesting Trump is losing his presidency this week or next; after all, Watergate took over two years and Nixon didn’t have Fox “News” or 1,500 rightwing radio stations or Vladimir Putin and Elon Musk churning social media on his behalf. Trump has a much more powerful firewall than Nixon ever dreamed of. It may sustain him for months or even another year.

And, as president, he has a lot of tools at his disposal to keep changing the subject, which is where these revelations about Trump could become “world changing” if he comes sufficiently desperate.

A war with Iran appears to be his latest gambit. During Watergate, Nixon’s aides developed what they called a “modified limited hangout,” a strategy not of disproving the scandal but of suffocating it in the media by overwhelming the public with competing announcements, threats, events, and crises.

Nonetheless, while Americans will tolerate misconduct, abuse of office to escape accountability is an entirely different animal. And allegations of child rape are a much bigger deal than breaking into the DNC; Nixon didn’t even participate, he just gave the orders and supervised the cover-up. Trump, on the other hand, appears to be right in the middle of Epstein’s operation, perhaps even including his teen modeling agency and Miss Teen USA pageant.

It’s a cliché that “the coverup is worse than the crime,” but they keep doing it.

And now it’s metastasizing beyond Epstein.

Bondi and Patel insist the Epstein investigation is closed. Kristi Noem and Kash Patel refuse to give Minnesota police evidence in the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. ICE defies over 4,400 court orders and refuses members of Congress or the press entrance to its brutal concentration camps. Trump goes after the FBI agents who uncovered Putin’s efforts to make him president in 2016. He and his family make $4 billion off his presidency in less than a year. Trump sucks up to Putin.

Trump’s level of criminality and corruption exceeds Nixon’s by orders of magnitude.

The coverups were why Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell went to prison, as did his Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, his Assistant for Domestic Affairs John Ehrlichman, his Special Counsel Charles Colson, and his White House Counsel John Dean (who’s since been a frequent guest on my radio/TV program).

That has to be waking Pam Bondi and others around Trump up at night. And it should be giving pause to every elected Republican facing the November midterms.

Every Watergate moment looks impossible right up until the hour it becomes inevitable. And when that hour arrives, it never feels sudden to those who carefully read history; only to the people who insisted, until the very end, that it could never happen here.>

<President Donald Trump reposted a message calling Michelle Obama a “racist” and ranted against a former high-ranking official in Barack Obama’s administration as he prepares to face Democrats in Congress at the State of the Union address.

In a Truth Social post on Saturday, the president reposted a message from far-right activist and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer describing the former first lady as an “anti-white racist.” In his own caption, the president took aim at another Black woman in the same administration: former White House adviser Susan Rice.

Threatening Netflix to fire Rice, who serves on the company’s executive board, Trump wrote: “Netflix should fire racist, Trump Deranged Susan Rice, IMMEDIATELY, or pay the consequences.”

Loomer’s post was must more extensive and urged the president to kill an upcoming merger between Warner Bros. and Netflix, which the far-right activist feared would expand the Obamas’ influence within both companies. The former president and his wife own a production company, Higher Ground Productions, which produces a variety of content on Neftlix’s platform.

Of the Obamas, Loomer wrote: “[P]ositive messaging of the Democrats' upcoming witch hunts against Trump from Barack Hussein Obama ... and his anti-White racist wife Michelle ... would likely be blasted across all streaming services as the Obamas' Higher Ground Productions continues to grow within Netflix.”

The two posts came in response to Rice warning that companies seen as guilty of cozying up to the Trump administration would face consequences of their own if Democratic lawmakers retake the House and Senate in midterm elections this fall — along with the White House in 2028.

She made the comments on a podcast hosted by Preet Bharara, a former U.S. attorney fired by Trump during his first term.

“If these corporations think that the Democrats, when they come back in power, are going to, you know, play by the old rules, and, you know, say, ‘Oh, never mind. We’ll forgive you for all the people you fired, all the policies and principles you’ve violated, all, you know, the laws you’ve skirted.’ I think they’ve got another thing coming,” Rice said.

Trump’s apparent support for Loomer’s description of Michelle Obama as “racist” comes as he has continues to refuse to apologize for a scandal that enveloped him this month around the posting of a bizarre AI video from his Truth Social account depicting her and her husband as apes.

The racist depiction of the nation’s first Black president was immediately condemned by politicians on both sides of the aisle, forcing the White House to offer a defense, then walk it back entirely and delete the post.

Republicans on the Hill were clearly uncomfortable with the video and called its posting a mistake. Sen. Tim Scott, the Senate’s only Black Republican, called it racist.

The former president responded on a podcast, stating that “it's important to recognize that the majority of the American people find this behavior deeply troubling.

Trump has blamed the post on a staffer who has access his Truth Social account, Natalie Harp, whom he said did not watch the video fully before posting it to his account.

In a statement to reporters on Air Force One, Trump claimed to have watched part of the video and sent it to his team for review and a possible post on his account. He denied seeing the part of the video where the former president and former first lady appeared.

“I gave it to the people, generally they’d look at the whole thing but I guess somebody didn’t and they posted it. And then we deleted it,” said Trump.

This isn’t the first time he’s taken content or advice directly from Loomer, either.

The far-right activist found herself with new access to the Oval Office in 2025 as Trump returned to the White House and used it to direct a purge of figures tied to Michael Waltz, then-Trump’s national security adviser, for supposed disloyalty.

Loomer has also supported a loyalty-driven purge of officials across other parts of the government, with one notable victim being the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey. His daughter, Maurene, was fired from the Department of Justice in July.

Through her constant, vitriolic attacks on Democrats, Loomer has faced her own accusations of racism, including in the fall of 2025, when she was widely condemned for hurling a racist slur at Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett, whom she called a “ghetto Black B****.”>

<Beneath the surface of the Supreme Court’s tariff decision, Justice Neil Gorsuch had choice words for his colleagues.

In a solo opinion, Gorsuch called out his fellow justices for their inconsistent application of a controversial legal doctrine in decisions invalidating former President Obama’s environmental regulation to former President Biden’s student debt relief and now, President Trump’s tariffs.

The liberal justices think Gorsuch invented the doctrine out of thin air. Three of Gorsuch’s fellow conservatives wanted to carve out exceptions. And another says Gorsuch’s stance makes a mountain of a molehill.

As far as Gorsuch is concerned, only he and Chief Justice John Roberts have stayed the course.

“It is an interesting turn of events,” Gorsuch wrote. “Each camp warrants a visit.”

At issue is the “major questions doctrine.” It states the president must point to clear authorization when claiming that Congress made an extraordinary delegation of power to the executive branch.

“The opinion of the court, what it says about the major questions doctrine, everyone has had their eyes on,” New Civil Liberties Alliance senior counsel Andrew Morris, who represents businesses challenging Trump’s tariffs, told reporters.

Gorsuch and his colleagues invoked the doctrine to reject Trump’s sweeping assertion of his tariff authority under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a massive blow to the president’s economic agenda.

“Whatever else might be said about Congress’s work in IEEPA, it did not clearly surrender to the President the sweeping tariff power he seeks to wield,” Gorsuch wrote. “Not everyone sees it this way.”

Trump took aim at several justices following the decision on Friday and over the weekend on social media, where he announced he would be using lowercase letters when writing Supreme Court “based on a complete lack of respect.”

Trump will come face-to-face with the justices Tuesday, setting up for a potentially awkward moment with some of his nominees, including Gorsuch, who was his first to the high court in his first term.

William & Mary law professor Jonathan Adler in a blog post described Gorsuch’s camp-by-camp takedown as “something of a Godfather-esque settling of family business.”

Gorsuch’s opinion stretched 46 pages in all, more than twice as long as the main opinion. Many court watchers believe it explains why the tariffs decision didn’t land earlier.

“What took so long? The Chief probably wrote his majority opinion before breakfast. … I think the reason for the delay has to be Justice Gorsuch,” wrote Josh Blackman, a conservative law professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston, in a blog post.

Gorsuch began with the liberal justices, who don’t acknowledge the major questions doctrine is real. Justice Elena Kagan has long accused her conservative colleagues of “magically” inventing it. On Friday, she again referred to it as a “so-called” doctrine.

As Gorsuch spilled pages of examples dating back to English rule to make his point, he said Kagan had effectively endorsed the doctrine by striking down Trump’s tariffs. She disagreed.

“Given how strong his apparent desire for converts,” she wrote, “I almost regret to inform him that I am not one. But that is the fact of the matter.”

For years, the liberal justices have voiced opposition as the doctrine became most prominently used to strike down Democratic administration actions.

In 2021, the court ruled the Biden administration did not have authority to issue a nationwide eviction moratorium during the COVID-19 pandemic. The next year, the court ruled the Clean Air Act did not authorize Obama’s broad actions aimed at curbing carbon emissions. And the following year, the court referenced the doctrine again as it struck Biden’s effort to unilaterally cancel roughly $430 billion in student debt.

It led many Democrats to spurn the doctrine as a back door for judges to invalidate policies they don’t like.

“There is enormous upheaval from that novel doctrine imported by the billionaire-selected justices of the Supreme Court into American law,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said on the Senate floor in 2024.

With the shoe now on the other foot, Gorsuch found himself at a different divide with his fellow conservatives....>

<....To Justice Amy Coney Barrett, it was friendly fire. Gorsuch said she was seeking to “soften the blow” of the doctrine by suggesting it is merely a commonsense principle. Barrett, who has always sided with Gorsuch on major questions cases, refuted ever taking that position.

“He takes down a straw man,” Barrett said of Gorsuch.

Gorsuch said in a footnote that, if Barrett means to put her past remarks on common sense to bed, the doctrine would be “better for it.”

Of the dissenters — Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — Gorsuch noted their acceptance of the doctrine but criticized them for their readiness to carve out exceptions.

Kavanaugh and Alito said the doctrine shouldn’t apply to foreign affairs, where the president has more authority. Thomas opined it should only protect deprivations of life, liberty or property.

Gorsuch skewered Thomas separately for that solo dissent, where he suggested Congress may “hand over” most of its powers, including the tariff power, to Trump without limit.

“Suppose for argument’s sake that Congress can delegate its tariff powers to the President as completely as Justice Thomas suggests,” Gorsuch wrote. “Even then, the question remains whether Congress has given the President the tariff authority he claims in this case — or whether the President is seeking to exploit questionable statutory language to aggrandize his own power.”

In giving his fellow justices a dressing-down, Gorsuch also sought to invigorate Congress, the opinion doubling as a rallying cry for legislators whom he suggested have handed too much power to the executive branch.

Gorsuch described the legislative process as a “bulwark of liberty,” saying its deliberative nature is the “whole point” of its design and meant to temper impulse and disagreement.

Trump made clear he disagrees. Asked by reporters whether he would work with Congress on a tariff plan moving forward, the president said, “I don’t have to.” He added that he has — and has always had — the “right” to enact tariffs without Congress’s help.

“It’s unfortunate that the president said what he said,” said Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the Cato Institute. “I’m hoping that cooler heads prevail in the coming days, and the administration does make this as easy as possible, because if they don’t, it will disproportionately burden small businesses that can’t afford the lawyers and all the paperwork and the rest.”

The businesses challenging Trump’s tariffs agreed.

“These duties were not like past tariffs set by Congress, which we could plan around,” said Victor Schwartz, owner of the wine importer VOS Selections that led the challenge. “Instead, these tariffs were arbitrary and simply put, just bad business. They forced us to gamble with our livelihoods by trying to predict the unpredictable.”>

<Recent policy changes and economic shifts have slashed 12 years off the projected life span of the trust fund that pays for Medicare Part A, according to a newly updated report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The Hospital Insurance (HI) Trust Fund is now slated to be entirely exhausted by 2040, even though the balance generally increases through 2031, as spending will begin to outstrip income in the following year.

This rapid deterioration of Medicare’s financial solvency represents a stark drop from the CBO’s previous estimate, which was published just last year, in March 2025. The dramatically shortened timeline means future retirees could face significant cuts to vital health care services far sooner than previously anticipated. As required by the Deficit Control Act, CBO Director Phillip Swagel noted the projections reflect the assumption benefits would be paid as scheduled even after the HI trust fund was exhausted.

The primary culprit for this accelerated depletion is a sharp reduction in the fund’s projected income, heavily driven by legislation passed over the last year. Specifically, the 2025 reconciliation act (Public Law 119-21, more commonly known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act) significantly reduced the revenues the trust fund normally receives from taxing Social Security benefits. This legislation lowered tax rates and established a temporary deduction for taxpayers age 65 or older. Consequently, this major policy shift enacted during the Trump administration has directly contributed to starving the Medicare safety net of critical future funding.

What is the HI trust fund?

The HI trust fund is the financial backbone for Medicare Part A, which covers essential services including inpatient hospital care, stays in skilled nursing facilities, home health care, and hospice care. Over the next 30 years, the fund is expected to rely on the Medicare payroll tax for about three-quarters of its annual income, with another roughly one-eighth derived from income taxes on Social Security benefits.

However, the recent tax cuts are not the only factor draining the fund. The CBO also cited decreased projections for payroll tax revenues, warning it had to adjust their models to account for lower expected worker earnings. Furthermore, because the trust fund will have smaller balances going forward, it will generate less interest income, creating a compounding negative effect on its overall finances.

On the other side of the ledger, Medicare spending is rising faster than anticipated. The CBO noted per-enrollee spending in Medicare Part A’s fee-for-service program in 2025, along with 2026 bids by Medicare Advantage plan providers, both came in higher than expected.

The consequences of the fund’s exhaustion in 2040 would be severe for both seniors and health care providers. By law, if the trust fund runs dry and spending continues to exceed income, Medicare would be legally restricted to paying out only what it takes in. To make up the shortfall, total benefits would need to be slashed. The CBO estimates these benefit reductions would start at 8% in 2040 and steadily climb to a 10% cut by 2056. It currently remains unclear exactly how the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services would manage the program under such dire financial constraints.

Addressing this looming crisis will require significant legislative action. The fund currently faces a 25-year actuarial deficit of 0.30% of taxable payroll—a figure representing the total amount of earnings subject to the payroll tax. This deficit is 0.17 percentage points worse than last year’s projection. To eliminate this deficit and restore the 12 years of solvency lost over the last 11 months, lawmakers will be forced to increase taxes, reduce health care payments, transfer money into the trust fund, or implement a combination of these politically fraught approaches.

Notably, these already grim baseline projections remain highly uncertain and do not yet account for the potential economic or budgetary fallout from the recent Supreme Court ruling on tariffs (Learning Res., Inc. v. Trump, issued on February 20, 2026).>

<With just days until Texas’ primary, Republicans in Washington are growing more alarmed that their increasingly vicious intraparty contest could cost them a must-win Senate seat.

Sen. John Cornyn appears to be headed to an expensive and nasty 10-week runoff against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, with a strong chance that Paxton wins the nomination even after national Republicans spent months airing his dirty laundry all over the Texas airwaves in an effort to boost Cornyn.

“Honestly, if you look at the polling in a general election setting, I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility that the seat [flips], depending on who the Democrats nominate,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune, when asked about the possibility that Republicans could lose the race if Cornyn, who he endorsed, is not the party’s nominee.

If Cornyn loses the primary, Senate Republicans worry they could be forced to spend hundreds of millions of dollars that could otherwise go toward key battleground races in expensive states like North Carolina, Georgia or Michigan, complicating their path toward holding Senate control.

Republicans have already spent nearly $100 million on TV advertising in the primary, which also includes Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-Texas), according to data from AdImpact. And Cornyn launched new ads this week, with support from the National Republican Senatorial Committee, that hammer Paxton in ways that could hurt him in the general election too: highlighting his messy ongoing divorce and accusations of corruption and calling Paxton a “wife-cheater and fraud.”

But those attacks haven’t stopped Paxton, a MAGA hero more aligned with the party base who has been bolstered by positive polling and a wave of grassroots enthusiasm.

“All signs indicate that Paxton probably finishes first,” a Washington GOP operative close to Cornyn who was granted anonymity to candidly discuss the race told POLITICO. “We’re just hoping the gap is close enough the narrative isn’t ‘Paxton kicked the crap out of Cornyn.’”

Paxton attended the president’s State of the Union address Tuesday night as a guest of Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas), who called warnings of an expensive general election a “scare tactic.”

“What you’re doing now is you’re telling Texas you can’t elect Ken Paxton, not because you do a better job than me, but it’ll cost too much to win it,” said Nehls. “What a desperate attempt to convince voters to not vote for Ken Paxton because it could cost too much money in November. That’s ridiculous.”

Paxton is predicting a massive victory. Speaking with reporters after a campaign rally in the Houston suburbs last Friday, he suggested he may win the race outright and avoid a runoff.

Both Paxton and Cornyn allies have been running ads attacking Hunt in recent days, a sign either that they see a chance that Hunt could edge Cornyn for a spot in the runoff — or that Paxton could win outright.

If the race does extend until the end of May, Paxton said he doesn’t intend to change his strategy.

“It’ll be grassroots, just like it always has been, and we’ll be out trying to compete,” Paxton said. “Obviously, [Cornyn] has got a lot of money, D.C. money. I don’t have that money. We’ll have our money from Texas.”

A spokesperson for Hunt said the congressman told NRSC chair Sen. Tim Scott last year before he got into the race that Cornyn was going to lose, but “Washington ignored it.” They also warned that Paxton could be vulnerable in the general election.

“If Senate Republicans lose the majority, it will be because the NRSC failed to plan for the future and chose to spend a record-breaking sum meddling in a Republican primary in Texas, of all places, where the GOP nominee is almost always favored to win,” the spokesperson said. “That’s malpractice.”

Republican Party officials and Senate GOP leaders think Cornyn has a far better chance than Paxton of staving off a Democratic challenger in the general election. When asked for comment on the race, the NRSC pointed to a memo it circulated to donors earlier this month that said that “John Cornyn is the only Republican candidate who reliably wins a general election matchup,” and warned “Paxton puts this seat at risk.”

“We have to be prepared to spend there, and that’s a very different scenario if Cornyn’s the nominee,” Thune said. “He is by far, I think, the best candidate on the ballot in a general election, not only for the Senate, but also for down-ballot races in the House that could be impacted by the Senate race too.”....>

<....The polls bear that out. The NRSC released polling toplines showing Cornyn leading state Rep. James Talarico by 3 points and Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) by 7 points in general-election matchups. Paxton would trail Talarico by 3 points and lead Crockett by just 1 point. Nonpartisan public polls have found similar numbers.

A Democrat has not won a U.S. Senate election in Texas since 1988.

Rep. Monica De La Cruz (R-Texas), who hasn’t made an endorsement in the race, said she hopes the Republican primary avoids a runoff. “We’ve got to keep Texas red,” she said. “That is not a choice, and so the faster we can get someone in place, the better it is for all Texans.”

During a Fox News appearance Monday, Cornyn said he anticipates he will face Paxton in a runoff and warned that a Paxton victory would give Democrats a boost in November.

“Unfortunately, the attorney general has got so much baggage and corruption in his wake that he will jeopardize our chances of keeping this seat red in November,” Cornyn said. “I believe that I can help President Trump in [the] end of his second term by not only winning this race, but bringing along some of these congressmen who are running in these five new congressional seats. Ken Paxton jeopardizes all of that.”

Paxton has led or been in a statistical tie with Cornyn in nearly every primary poll since launching his bid in April of last year, despite campaigning minimally and spending a small fraction compared with Cornyn’s war chest. It’s a testament to Paxton’s status as an aggressive MAGA figure in Texas, a reputation he has forged while serving as Texas’ top lawyer for a decade. Paxton used the power of his office to stoke the culture wars in court, like suing to overturn the 2020 election and defending the state’s strict abortion ban.

Dave Carney, an adviser to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, predicted that Cornyn and Paxton will face off in a runoff, where he suggested Paxton would have the edge. The most conservative candidate tends to win because they often have the most driven supporters in low-turnout primary runoff elections.

“They have to run real campaigns, both of them, they got to model their voters and turn them out,” said Carney.

To date, Trump has resisted making an endorsement in the primary. “I’m friendly with all of them,” he said earlier this month. “I like all of them, all three.”

Thune and other Senate Republicans for months privately lobbied to get Trump to endorse Cornyn, believing he would be the most formidable candidate in the general election. Thune has been careful not to predict what Trump will do in the future. Some top Trump political aides are working on Cornyn’s campaign — but the president has a longstanding relationship with Paxton. There is lingering skepticism in and outside of the Capitol that Trump would endorse Cornyn if the senator comes in second heading into the runoff.

Trump is scheduled to make an appearance in Corpus Christi on Friday to deliver a speech on the economy. A White House aide, granted anonymity to speak freely, said the president will not endorse at the event. The White House hasn’t announced if any of the GOP Senate candidates will join Trump on the trip.

Top GOP donors, too, worry that the party is burning money — and that Paxton still has the upper hand in spite of the huge spending against him, with some concerned about an outright Paxton win.

“Nobody truly knows what is going to happen based on the polling,” said one GOP donor. “There is a scenario [where] Cornyn doesn’t make it into a runoff. But even if he does, a runoff with Paxton will be very tough because of [the] low number of voters who turn out — most of whom are very conservative and viewed as Paxton voters.”

The person added that there is “frustration from everyone that Trump lets this happen by not endorsing.”

Another GOP donor said there’s “not a lot of cautious optimism” among donors that Cornyn will even make it to a runoff. “It’s going down to the wire,” the donor lamented.>

<Democratic leadership’s choice to have Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger deliver the State of the Union rebuttal was a strategic move to keep the party’s focus on affordability. But she was just one Democrat jockeying to pave the way forward for the party.

Various Democratic factions hosting numerous competing events Tuesday night diverged on the best way to challenge President Donald Trump. Throughout the speeches, universal calls to bring down costs and crack down on Immigration and Customs Enforcement mixed in with more forceful and sometimes vulgar rebukes of his administration — laying bare the ideological and stylistic divides that are driving the party’s identity crisis.

Spanberger — a one-time battleground House Democrat who joined Congress during the party’s last wave election — was the headliner, calling from Williamsburg, Virgina, for Trump to focus on the needs of American families while also condemning the president for doing “what he always does: He lied, he scapegoated, and he distracted.”

But she was far from alone, with a group of Democratic-aligned organizations holding their own State of the Union events in an effort to harness rising furor against Trump.

Dozens of lawmakers spoke across several counterprogramming events, including a rally hosted by MoveOn and the left-leaning media outlet MeidasTouch on the National Mall, or at another in downtown Washington hosted by the anti-Trump activist networks Defiance and the Portland Frog Brigade along with the Courier Newsroom.

On the Mall, Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) called to impeach Attorney General Pam Bondi over the Epstein files, and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) accused Trump of “rigging” the midterms by pushing voting restrictions to “save his authoritarian control and turn the presidency into a kingship.” Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) called herself a “bareknuckled brawler with a heart” and declared “that’s what we need right now.”

The dueling rallies, both timed to overlap with Trump’s speech, were accompanied by a Working Families Party rebuttal also delivered by Lee.

Some party strategists said the events — which also hosted high-profile Democrats like Robert De Niro, Joy Reid and New York congressional candidate George Conway — splintered the party’s response in a high-profile moment.

“A uniform response is much better than a cacophony of responses,” said Matt Bennett, an executive with the center-left think tank Third Way. “One narrative is better than many, and Spanberger is very talented at articulating a message that resonates broadly.”

Dueling State of the Union responses are not a new phenomenon. While the party out of power typically green-lights an English- and Spanish-language rebuttal — Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) gave Democrats’ response in Spanish this year, vowing his party would lower costs, make voting more accessible and rein in ICE — different wings have long looked to get in on the action, from Tea Party Republicans during Barack Obama’s presidency to the progressive groups on Tuesday night.

But the lack of a unified response Tuesday comes as the Democratic Party still searches — and fights over — the best way to beat Trump, even as party members agree overall that centering the Trump administration’s struggles to boost the economy gives them the best chance in November.

Democrats were already divided in their approach to Trump’s address to Congress. Dozens of members across both chambers skipped the speech to protest the president while others said they were attending out of constitutional duty — a schism that stretched all the way up through party leadership.

Despite calls from Democratic leadership to refrain from protests inside the House chamber, Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) was escorted out of the room minutes into Trump’s speech after brandishing a sign reading “Black people aren’t apes,” a likely reference to a racist video Trump reposted earlier in the month.

Progressive Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) also heckled Trump at multiple points during Trump’s speech, including in response to Trump touting his aggressive immigration enforcement.

At multiple moments during his speech, Trump appeared to relish opportunities to draw Democrats in attendance into heated exchanges.

“You people are crazy,” he said at one point, prompting some Democrats in the room to heckle him in return.

Spanberger’s aides were cognizant of the volume of competing Democratic rebuttals and built a “war room” team to boost the governor’s response on social media. And while her team insisted that she isn’t competing with other counter-programming events, her aides believed heading into Tuesday evening that Spanberger’s successful affordability-focused campaign last year gave her credibility on how to best respond to Trump....>

<....Spanberger, whose campaign last year is viewed by some party strategists as a blueprint for Democrats to score victories in November, focused on her proposals to lower costs for Virginians, while also criticizing the president for aggressive immigration policies and blaming rising costs on Trump’s tariffs.

“Americans deserve to know that their leaders are focused on addressing the problems that keep them up at night, problems that dictate where you live, whether you can afford to start a business, or whether you have to skip a prescription in order to buy groceries,” she said in her live rebuttal. “Is the president working to make life more affordable for you and your family? We all know the answer is no.”

Several of the lawmakers who spoke at competing events echoed that affordability template, including some Democrats with possible presidential ambitions, like Sens. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.).

Gallego, who warned in his speech that Trump was making Americans “sicker and poorer,” told POLITICO beforehand that “it’s fine that we have different people talking, provided the message is all the same: [that Democrats] are here to fight for everyday Americans.”

Some of those behind Democrats’ various response events Tuesday said they aimed to better capture the degree of frustration voters feel towards Trump.

“These are not the times for an institutionalist to say, ‘Well, let’s just give him his moment, and if you want to protest, protest by sitting there silently.’ That’s bull****,” said Miles Taylor, a co-founder of Defiance and former Trump administration official-turned-Trump critic. “And I think that Hakeem Jeffries knows that his caucus feels like that doesn’t meet the moment, which is why so many of them are literally just not showing up.”

Taylor added that the plethora of Democratic responses also reflected the current political media environment, where both voters and candidates can easily find forums that align with their preferences.

Lee, who railed against Trump’s “authoritarianism” and cast his speech as an “obituary for the country working people built” in her Working Families Party rebuttal, said Democrats are at a “crossroads” and won’t win control of Congress “by electing more of the same” — which she cast as those who “speak boldly but deliver cautiously or sometimes even vote with MAGA.”

In an interview on Monday, Lee said it was critical for Democrats to promote a bigger tent after progressives scored major wins of their own in recent elections, from Zohran Mamdani being elected mayor of New York City to Analilia Mejia’s victory this month in the Democratic primary to replace moderate now-Gov. Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey.

Progressives “are always accepting of moderate places being represented well,” Lee said. But “it feels like there’s a wing of this party fighting back more against us trying to represent our own communities just as hard as somebody who is trying to represent their community in a swing district.”>

<THE LEFT IS ABSOLUTELY @#$%ED. Trump didn’t even have to tweet once.

He just sat back like the alpha he is while his MAGA titan ally Larry Ellison that Oracle warlord who bankrolls real power...dropped $110 BILLION to have Paramount Skydance devour Warner Bros. Discovery whole.

CNN? Ours.

HBO? Ours.

CBS? Ours.

MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Showtime, TNT, TBS, Adult Swim, Paramount+, Warner Bros. studios, DC universe, Harry Potter rights...the entire propaganda hydra just got choked out and rebranded under Ellison control.

Netflix tried to play savior.

They folded like the limp-dick cowards they are.

Psychological autopsy time, bitches:

For decades you leftist cultists treated the media like your personal prefrontal cortex...pumping 24/7 psyops, manufacturing consent for open borders, groomer @#$%, endless wars, and every flavor of degeneracy that keeps your dopamine-starved base seething and voting blue. >

'People are guilty until proven innocent--I mean--goddamit, you know what I mean'.

<Two federal judges are raising concerns about Attorney General Pam Bondi’s use of social media to publicize a string of arrests tied to the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota.

In a recent order, U.S. Magistrate Judge Dulce Foster said Bondi’s posts on X – which included names and, in many cases, photographs of defendants shortly after their arrests – “violated a court order” sealing the cases, Politico reported Friday. The criticism came in connection with the prosecution of Nitzana Flores, who is accused of attacking two Border Patrol agents during a scuffle.

Foster said the government “failed to respect Ms. Flores’s dignity and privacy, exposed her to a risk of doxxing, and generally thumbed its nose at the notion that defendants are innocent until proven guilty.”

“The post also directly violated a court order sealing the case,” the judge wrote. “Notwithstanding, the government now seeks an accommodation from the Court that it blatantly failed to give Ms. Flores and her codefendants.

She added that the government’s request for court-order discretion was “eyebrow-raising, to say the least.”

In a separate Minneapolis case, Magistrate Judge Shannon Elkins directed prosecutors to address whether Bondi’s public posting of arrest photos violated another sealing order, according to the Politico report. The government initially missed a response deadline before receiving an extension that pushed the deadline until Monday, the report said.

Justice Department officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.>

<In tournament poker, one of the biggest leaks isn’t technical—it’s behavioral: as the hours add up and you get closer to the money, it’s easy to get cautious, “protect” your stack, and stop applying pressure.

You've invested so many hours. It would feel awful to bust now, right?

The problem is that tournaments often reward the opposite approach: when the bubble is approaching, that’s when the incentives push the field into fear-based mistakes, and that’s exactly when you want to lean into pressure.

A really effective way to train this (without risking a lot of money) is to deliberately play small buy-in tournaments—think $1, $2, $5, and $10—and use them as “pressure reps.” The goal isn’t to min-cash. The goal is to repeatedly get to the bubble or near-bubble phase and practice being the player who applies maximum pressure.

Here’s the structure for the drill:

Enter small buy-in tournaments and tell yourself the only objective is to get to a deep stage and apply pressure.

As you approach the bubble, start pushing your advantage: 3-bet more, check-raise more, double barrel more, and use overbets or shoves in the right spots. The point is to put opponents to difficult decisions when they’re most likely to fold too much.

Right before the bubble bursts is a prime “fear window.” Many players tighten up dramatically because they’re trying to lock up a cash. That’s where pressure has the highest return.

Right after the bubble bursts, the dynamic usually flips: players start jamming a lot more.

Your adjustment is to be more selective with calling off stacks—stay aggressive, but recognize that post-bubble all-ins happen frequently, so you should mostly be raising when you’re prepared to continue versus a shove rather than drifting into passive calls.

Two key reminders that make this work:

“Shove light, call tight.” You want to be the one applying pressure, not the one passively calling down or calling off big chunks of your stack.

This drill is about repetition and comfort, not perfection. It may not work 10 times in a row. It may fail 30 times. But the point is to train the muscle of applying pressure correctly when it matters, so that when it does work—and it will—you give yourself a real shot to win the tournament instead of sliding into a cautious min-cash strategy.

If you run this drill consistently, you’ll notice two things:

You stop dwindling away late in tournaments because you’ve built confidence in the exact spots where most players freeze.

<Several high-ranking federal election officials attended a summit last week at which prominent figures who worked to overturn Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election pressed the president to declare a national emergency to take over this year’s midterms.

According to videos, photos and social media posts reviewed by ProPublica, the meeting’s participants included Kurt Olsen, a White House lawyer charged with reinvestigating the 2020 election, and Heather Honey, the Department of Homeland Security official in charge of election integrity. The event was convened by Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, and attended by Cleta Mitchell, who directs the Election Integrity Network, a group that has spread false claims about election fraud and noncitizen voting.

Election experts say that the meeting reflects an intensifying push to persuade Trump to take unprecedented actions to affect the vote in November. Courts have largely blocked his efforts to reshape elections through an executive order, and legislation has stalled in Congress that would mandate strict voter ID requirements across the country.

The Washington Post reported Thursday that activists associated with those at the summit have been circulating a draft of an executive order that would ban mail-in ballots and get rid of voting machines as part of a federal takeover. Peter Ticktin, a lawyer who worked on the executive order and had a client at the summit, told ProPublica these actions were “all part of the same effort.”

The summit followed other meetings and discussions between administration officials and activists — many not previously reported — stretching back to at least last fall, according to emails and recordings obtained by ProPublica. The coordination between those inside and outside the government represents a breakdown of crucial guardrails, experts on U.S. elections said.

“The meeting shows that the same people who tried to overturn the 2020 election have only grown better organized and are now embedded in the machinery of government,” said Brendan Fischer, a director at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan pro-democracy organization. “This creates substantial risk that the administration is laying the groundwork to improperly reshape elections ahead of the midterms or even go against the will of the voters.”

Five of six federal officials who attended the summit didn’t answer questions about the event from ProPublica.

A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said federal officials’ attendance at the gathering shouldn’t be construed as support for a national emergency declaration and that it was “common practice” for staffers to communicate with outside advocates who want to share policy ideas. The official pointed to comments Trump made to PBS News denying he was considering a national emergency or had read the draft executive order. “Any speculation about policies the administration may or may not undertake is just that — speculation,” the official said.

In the past, Trump has expressed an openness to a federal takeover as a way to stem projected Republican losses in November. This month, he said in an interview with conservative podcaster Dan Bongino that Republicans need “to take over” elections and “to nationalize the voting.”

Mitchell did not respond to questions from ProPublica about the summit. A spokesperson for Flynn responded to detailed questions from ProPublica by disparaging experts who expressed concerns, texting, “LOL ‘EXPERTS.’”

The 30-person roundtable discussion on Feb. 19, at an office building in downtown Washington, D.C., was sponsored by the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a conservative think tank. Afterward, activists and government officials dined together, photos reviewed by ProPublica showed.

Flynn, the institute’s chair, told a social media personality why he’d arranged the event.

“I wanted to bring this group together physically, because most of us have met online” while “fighting battles” in swing states from Arizona to Georgia, Flynn said to Tommy Robinson on the gathering’s sidelines. Robinson posted videos of these interactions online. “The overall theme of this event was to make sure that all of us aren’t operating in our own little bubbles.”

Flynn has repeatedly advocated for Trump to declare a national emergency and posted on social media after the event addressing Trump, “We The People want fair elections and we know there is only one office in the land that can make that happen given the current political environment in the United States.”

In addition to Olsen and Honey, four other federal officials from agencies that will shape the upcoming elections attended the event. At least four of the six attended the dinner....>

<....One is Clay Parikh, a special government employee at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence who’s helping Olsen with the 2020 inquiry. A spokesperson at ODNI said Parikh had attended the summit “in his personal capacity.”

Another, Mac Warner, handled election litigation at the Justice Department. A department spokesperson said that Warner had resigned the day after the event and had not received the required approval from agency ethics officials to participate.

The department “remains committed to upholding the integrity of our electoral system and will continue to prioritize efforts to ensure all elections remain free, fair, and transparent,” the spokesperson said in an email.

A third administration official who attended the summit, Marci McCarthy, directs communications for the nation’s cyber defense agency, which oversees the security of elections infrastructure like voting machines.

Kari Lake, whom Trump appointed as senior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, was a featured speaker. Lake worked with Olsen and Parikh in her unsuccessful bid to overturn her loss in the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election.

Lake said in an email that she “showed up to the event, spoke for about 20 minutes about the overall importance of election integrity, a non-partisan issue that matters to all citizens — both in the United States and abroad. I left without listening to any other speeches.”

“Elections should be free from fraud or any other malfeasance that subverts the will of the people,” she added.

At the meeting, activists presented on ways to transform American elections that would help conservatives, according to social media posts and interviews they gave on conservative media, such as LindellTV, a streaming platform created by the pillow mogul Mike Lindell. They said the group broke down into two camps: those who wanted to pursue a more incremental legal and legislative strategy and those who wanted Trump to declare a national emergency.

Multiple activists left the meeting convinced Trump should do the latter, a step they believe would allow the president to get around the Constitution’s directive that elections should be run by states.

Former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, a prominent funder of efforts to overturn the 2020 election, told LindellTV that Trump has “played nice” so far in not seizing control of American elections. “But at some point,” Byrne said, “he’s got to do something, the muscular thing: declare a national emergency.”

Byrne responded to questions from ProPublica by sending a screenshot of a poll that he said suggested “2/3 of Americans correctly do not trust” voting machines, which the proposed national emergency declaration aims to do away with.

Will Huff, who has advocated for doing away with voting machines, told a conservative vlogger that Olsen, the White House lawyer, and other administration representatives would take the “consensus” from the gathering back to Trump. “It’s got to be a national emergency,” said Huff, the campaign manager for a Republican candidate for Arkansas secretary of state.

In response to questions from ProPublica, Huff said in an email that Olsen and Trump would use their judgment to decide whether to declare a national emergency.

“The President has been briefed on findings of shortcomings in election infrastructure,” Huff wrote. “I believe there are steady hands around the President wanting to ensure that any action taken is, first, constitutional and legal, but also backed by evidence.”....>

<....McCarthy, the cybersecurity official, expressed more general solidarity with fellow attendees in a post on social media about the summit. “Grateful for friendships forged through years of standing shoulder-to-shoulder, united by purpose and conviction,” she wrote. “The mission continues… and so does the fellowship.”

Last week’s gathering was the latest in a string of private interactions between conservative election activists and administration officials, according to emails, documents and recordings obtained by ProPublica. Many have involved Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. Before taking her government post, Honey was a leader in the Election Integrity Network, ProPublica has reported, as was McCarthy.

Previously unreported emails obtained by ProPublica show that just weeks after Honey started at the Department of Homeland Security, she briefed election activists, a Republican secretary of state and another federal official on a conference call arranged by her former boss, Mitchell.

“We are excited to welcome her on our call this morning to hear about her work for election integrity inside DHS,” Mitchell wrote in an email introducing presenters on the call.

Honey didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica about the call. Experts said Honey’s briefing gave her former employer access that likely would have violated ethics rules in place under previous administrations, including the first Trump administration — though not this one.

The prior “ethics guardrails would have prevented some of the revolving door issues we’re seeing between the election denial movement and the government officials,” said Fischer, the Campaign Legal Center director. Those prior rules “were supposed to prevent former employers and clients from receiving privileged access.”>

<Donald Trump didn’t merely criticize his political opponents this week, both at the State of the Union and from his office the following morning. He went on a racist rant that would have embarrassed a talk radio shock jock (if it didn’t get them fired), much less a head of state.

After Representatives Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) shouted “shame” and “liar” during his State of the Union and walked out in protest, Trump took to social media to sneer that they had “the bulging, bloodshot eyes of crazy people” and were “LUNATICS, mentally deranged and sick” who “look like they should be institutionalized.”

He labeled them “Low IQ” — his favorite slur for women, Black, and Hispanic people — and suggested they be sent back “from where they came.” He lumped in Robert De Niro as “Trump Deranged,” “demented,” and possibly “criminal” for criticizing him.

This is the president of the United States talking.

This may have been normal politics in the old Confederacy — which Trump is trying to revive with his base namings and statues and purging Black history from museums and monuments — but it shouldn’t be normal today.

This is an elderly man — whose father was busted in a Klan rally and who himself was busted in the 1970s for refusing to rent to Black people — now occupying the Oval Office and responding to dissent with language that sounds like it was scraped from the darkest, most disgusting corners of the internet.

When Trump tells elected racial-minority members of Congress to “go back where they came from” — US citizens who’ve sworn an oath to defend the Constitution — and trash-talks well-known and respected public figures like De Niro this way, he’s using the oldest dictator’s trick in the book: he’s trying to dehumanize them.

And when he says they should be sent overseas “as fast as possible,” he’s invoking one of the ugliest refrains in American history, the taunt racists have hurled at people of color for generations to tell them they don’t really belong in our nation.

Ilhan Omar came to this country as a refugee and went through the arduous and lengthy process to become a US citizen. Rashida Tlaib was born in Detroit. Yet Trump’s first racist instinct when confronted by two outspoken women of color is to question their right to be here at all.

That’s not an accident; it’s an ancient political strategy rooted in dividing people and turning them against each other. He wants his followers to hate them, and then to act on that hate, making them fearful and putting their lives at risk.

He knows his followers tried to kill Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and actually killed a state legislator in Minnesota and her husband, a federal judge’s son, and others. He knows that by painting Tlaib, Omar, and De Niro as alien, unhinged, and dangerous, he can activate that part of his base that regularly acts on grievance and fear with violence.

This is Blackshirt and Brownshirt politics for the 21st century. It’s pure, unadulterated hate, and should be beneath any elected official. But, of course, this is Donald Trump, for whom there’s no floor beneath which he and his Republican lickspittles can’t sink.

He called his long, boring, rambling, lie-filled State of the Union speech an “important and beautiful event” and accused them of ruining it with their protests. But democracy isn’t a pageant like his old Miss Teen USA contests (that are accused of feeding the Epstein machine). It’s not a royal court where subjects must sit quietly while the monarch speaks (or walks into their dressing rooms while they’re naked).

Members of Congress are not props: they’re co-equal representatives of We the People. If they believe a president or anybody else is lying or has harmed their constituents (and Trump’s ICE goons murdered two of Omar’s constituents in cold blood), they have every right to say so, to do it loudly, and to suffer the consequences like removal or censure if they come.

The Founders and Framers of the Constitution didn’t design a system to protect a president’s feelings. They designed one to protect liberty.

Trump’s attack on De Niro follows the same playbook. De Niro criticized his fascist-like behavior and Trump responded by calling him “sick and demented” with an “extremely Low IQ,” hinting that some of what he said was “seriously CRIMINAL.”

“Criminal.” For speech. In America! That word should chill to the bone anyone who cares about the First Amendment and our most basic freedoms. When Trump toys with the idea that criticism of him could be prosecuted, he’s not joking any more than Putin did in the months before he started arresting protestors. He’s testing the boundaries of what his followers in Congress and what’s left of our system of justice will accept....>

<....And then, almost as an afterthought, Trump boasted that “America is now Bigger, Better, Richer, and Stronger than ever before.”

“Richer” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Yes, the top sliver of this country is now, as a result of 45 years of Republican tax cuts, staggeringly wealthy. Billionaires saw their fortunes explode with the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts. Corporate profits have soared because of Republican deregulation and the destruction of our union movement.

But for working families staring down sky-high rents, unaffordable health care, crushing student loans, stagnant wages, and grocery bills that don’t match their paychecks, Republicans bragging about unprecedented riches among their Epstein-billionaire donor class rings hollow.

We’re living through an affordability crisis caused by Republican policies. More than half of Americans are one emergency away from financial ruin. Young people wonder if they’ll ever own a home. Parents juggle two or three jobs and still fall behind. If this is what Trump’s “richer than ever” looks like, it’s a prosperity reserved for a gilded few while the rest of us tread water.

Any president with a moral compass would acknowledge that reality. He’d understand that leadership requires more than chest thumping and name calling. The office carries a responsibility to elevate the national conversation, not drag it into the gutter. It requires the maturity to accept that in a diverse republic, people will disagree, sometimes loudly, sometimes angrily, and that’s a sign of a healthy democracy.

That diversity is not a flaw in the American experiment: it’s its genius. A democracy that includes Somali refugees turned lawmakers, Palestinian American women from Detroit, Hollywood actors, rural conservatives, urban progressives, people of every color and creed, is a democracy that reflects the real America. And, apparently, the America that Republicans once embraced but today the GOP now hates.

A clash of perspectives and approaches is how we fine-tune our ideas and correct mistakes. It’s how we prevent a concentration of power from calcifying into naked tyranny.

When Trump calls dissenters “lunatics” and tells them to “go back where they came from,” he’s attacking that very foundational American principle. He’s signaling that only certain voices — specifically those of wealthy white Christian men — are legitimate. That they’re only “real” Americans who count.

History teaches us where that road leads, and it doesn’t end in strength. It ends in repression, decay, and the ultimate destruction of the republic itself, which is most likely why Putin probably encourages Trump in this sort of thing during their regular phone conversations.

The bigger picture here is about more than one bizarre, racist, hateful rant among many. It’s about the playbook that authoritarians across the world have used for generations to fracture democracies from within.

When people are anxious about their jobs, their bills, and their futures, an aspiring strongman doesn’t calm those fears with honest solutions; he redirects them. He points at the “other” and says, “There’s your problem!” The immigrant. The Muslim woman in Congress. The Black lawmaker. The outspoken actor.

He tells us to be afraid of each other so we won’t question how Reagan Revolution Republican policies of the past 45 years are crushing working people.

Trump’s words matter because they’re not just insults. They’re signals. When a president calls political opponents “lunatics,” suggests they should be “institutionalized,” or tells American citizens to “go back where they came from,” he’s normalizing hate and exclusion, the “othering” of his opponents.

That poison seeps into public life and erodes the traditional American shared understanding that no matter how fierce our disagreements, we’re all equal citizens under the law. Democracy can’t survive if we start treating dissent as treason and diversity as a threat, which is exactly why Trump is doing this. Like his mentor Vladimir Putin, whose picture he just hung in the White House along with Washington and Jackson, he hates democracy, and has said as much over and over again.

America is strongest when it refuses that dictator’s trap, when it expands the circle of American belonging instead of narrowing it.

The real danger to our country isn’t Omar’s loud protest or De Niro’s sharp criticism. It’s America being stuck with a leader who lives and breathes hate, fear, and division, who wants us to see our neighbors as our enemies, and a party that’s so terrified of him that they back everything he does and says, no matter how grotesque.