By now we all understand that the Supreme Court did something very bad to the Voting Rights Act. I want to explain that bad thing from a lawyer’s standpoint but without much legalese. And I want to tell the part of the story not too many people know. It begins with the Chief Justice, John Roberts, back when he was a staffer in the Reagan Administration. That’s when the long game plan began, culminating with a dismantling of voting rights that had taken 100 years to achieve and another 60 to try to expand and keep.

It would be tempting to wring our hands and agonize over what this decision means for our dream of a multi-racial, pluralistic democracy. But we don’t have time for that. We need to act because the other side is already acting. And there are very specific things we need to do.

I lay some of the most critical ways out in today’s piece. If you’re already a subscriber to The Big Picture, you’ll receive it in your inboxes later today. If you’re not yet subscribed, now is a great time to do so! My column is one of the two weekly free ones, but for our valued paid subscribers we also have great bonus material each week, including our popular weekly round-up and our Sunday “Week in Wins” to keep our collective spirits high.

Yes! Sign Me Up for The Big Picture!

I’ll be back on Thursday with a new piece here at The Status Kuo. Tomorrow is the big move for me and the fam to begin our new life in the small town of Kingston, New York! It’s a personal lesson in the idea that things that once seemed impossible are actually doable, step by methodical step.

Jay

On Friday, a Fifth Circuit panel ruling from Louisiana ordered that mifepristone, a widely used abortion medication, can no longer be prescribed by telehealth or delivered by mail anywhere in the country. That includes states that have moved to protect abortion access since the Dobbs decision came down in 2022. Patients who want mifepristone must now show up in person to receive it, even in areas where abortion is fully legal and telehealth has been the standard of care for years. That is particularly burdensome for patients without easy access to clinics.

The panelists themselves acknowledged that their ruling would have “as a practical matter, a nationwide effect.”

The Supreme Court and the GOP have long insisted that overturning Roe was about returning the question of abortion to the states. Critics have argued that this was just a ploy, and their real target was always a nationwide ban. The Fifth Circuit’s mifepristone ruling takes a big step toward that.

This morning, in a single sentence order signed by Justice Samuel Alito without further context, the Supreme Court paused, at least temporarily, the effect of the ruling until at least May 11 while it considers the arguments of the parties.

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What the panel did

On Friday, the panel issued an order reinstating a requirement that mifepristone be dispensed in person at a clinic by blocking the 2023 FDA rules that had allowed the medication to be prescribed via telehealth and delivered by mail. The telehealth and mail delivery of mifepristone has been in place since 2021.

The impact of the order would be significant. Medication abortion now accounts for roughly two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S. More than one in four abortions nationwide were provided through telehealth in the first half of 2025. That’s up from fewer than one in ten in 2022. While mifepristone itself remains approved, the distribution system has been effectively shut down.

The panel opinion was written by Judge Kyle Duncan, a Trump appointee who was previously general counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, joined by Judge Kurt Engelhardt (Trump) and Judge Leslie Southwick (George W. Bush).

The Dobbs promise and what became of it

Duncan’s opinion is a dangerous one. It opens by quoting Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 decision that eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, for the proposition that the Supreme Court had “returned the regulation of abortion to the states.”

He then spends 18 pages imposing a nationwide rule that overrides the abortion policies of states across the country.

The ruling effectively would impose Louisiana’s position that “every unborn child is a human being from the moment of conception” on the entire country. This is from a court whose jurisdiction covers only Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. California’s laws on the subject are beside the point, as are New York’s and other blue states. The Fifth Circuit has resolved the question for them.

In her Civil Discourse newsletter, former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance challenged the “let the states decide” point directly when Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a federal district judge in Texas, first launched an attack on medication abortion in 2023. “That’s not the legal landscape the Supreme Court said it was creating when it ended 50 years of abortion rights under Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs case,” Vance observed. “When the Court decided Dobbs, it said decisions about whether and under what circumstances abortion should be legal would be left up to each state.”

Friday’s ruling is the clearest illustration yet of the distance between that promise and the current reality.

Meet Kacsmaryk: the judge the right always shops for

The jurist responsible for creating much of the legal infrastructure that led to Friday’s ruling is U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the Northern District of Texas.

Kacsmaryk is a Trump appointee and former lawyer for the conservative First Liberty Institute. He was confirmed in 2019 over Democratic opposition citing his poor record on LGBTQ+ rights and reproductive access. Because of how the Northern District of Texas is set up, litigants who file in the Amarillo division are virtually guaranteed to draw Kacsmaryk as their judge. It’s a feature, as Joyce Vance observed, that anti-abortion legal strategists have deliberately exploited.

In April 2023, Kacsmaryk issued a 67-page ruling purporting to void the FDA’s 23-year-old approval of mifepristone, effective across the entire nation. The opinion drew criticism from legal analysts for its factual errors and ideological framing, including the use of medically inaccurate terminology and a false claim that abortion dramatically increases the risk of suicide.

The Supreme Court stayed Kacsmaryk’s ruling and, in June 2024, unanimously rejected the underlying case. But it did so only on so-called “standing” grounds (more on that later), holding that the plaintiffs—an anti-abortion medical coalition called the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine—had no legal right to bring the suit. The merits of the arguments were never reached.

As Vladeck observed, the Court’s unexplained 2023 stay “left room for the Fifth Circuit to hold that there was standing” in a future case brought by different plaintiffs with a more direct injury claim.

It turns out, Louisiana was already preparing one.

The lawsuit reloaded

With Judge Kacsmaryk’s case kicked aside on standing grounds, the movement filed again, this time with better plaintiffs. As legal journalist Chris Geidner reported, in January 2025 Kacsmaryk allowed conservative states to file an amended complaint that dropped the most legally vulnerable arguments while preserving their core demand requiring in-person dispensing of mifepristone.

Louisiana had also filed its own federal lawsuit against the FDA in October 2025. The state’s theory was that under the Biden administration, the FDA had “attempted to undermine Dobbs by facilitating the mailing of mifepristone into every pro-life state.” The federal government’s decision to ease access to a drug with a 25-year safety record was, in the state’s view, a political act requiring judicial correction.

The district court judge assigned to the Louisiana case, U.S. District Judge David C. Joseph, another Trump appointee, agreed that Louisiana was likely to succeed on the merits. That was alarming, but in the end, he declined to immediately block the FDA rule, citing the agency’s ongoing safety review and the nationwide “reliance interests,” discussed below, that had built up over years of the policy being in effect. Judge Joseph wrote that given “the length of time the 2023 [Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies] has been in effect, reliance interests on that scheme throughout the nation, [and] the sweeping effect any remedy would have across states with differing abortion laws,” he would defer to the agency’s review process.

Louisiana appealed. And on Friday the Fifth Circuit declined to share Judge Joseph’s restraint.

What the Fifth Circuit ignored about nationwide bans

As Geidner noted, the Fifth Circuit opinion quotes Joseph’s own acknowledgment of the ruling’s scope and the impact it would have: “It is true, as the district court noted, that a § 705 stay ‘would, as a practical matter, have a nationwide effect.’” But then it issued an order with no meaningful analysis of what it would mean for the tens of millions of people living in states where the policy had been operating without incident.

The “reliance interests” of patients refer to the fact that millions of people have in good faith believed the law allows the use of telehealth and mail delivery of mifepristone and acted on that understanding. This includes not only patients, but providers, pharmacies, and manufacturers across all 50 states. These reliance interests appeared briefly in the Fifth Circuit’s ruling—and were summarily thrust aside.

The opinion was at pains, however, to address Louisiana’s “sovereign interest in its laws protecting the unborn.” It treated the state’s desire to extend its abortion ban’s reach beyond its own borders as a recognizable constitutional interest. As Vladeck observed, the ruling “pays no attention to the other side of what lawyers call the “equities.” Addressing that side would require the court to consider the harm, not just to the state of Louisiana, but to people in states where abortions are generally legal, from an order that suddenly imposes an in-person dispensation requirement.

The ruling also addressed the Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling in CASA, which had limited the use of nationwide injunctions. But its response raises more questions. Yes, CASA restricted what courts could order on a nationwide basis, but this order was issued under the Administrative Procedure Act, making it a different category of remedy in the panel’s view.

That creates an exception wide enough to drive a garbage truck through. And as Vladeck noted, the distinction “just leaves nationwide relief available; it does nothing to explain why nationwide relief is appropriate in this case.”

Danco goes to the Supreme Court

Within hours of the Friday ruling, mifepristone manufacturer Danco Laboratories filed an emergency motion asking the Fifth Circuit to pause its own order while the company appealed. The Fifth Circuit did not respond. So on Saturday, Danco went directly to the Supreme Court, joined by another mifepristone manufacturer, GenBioPro. This morning, on Monday, the Supreme Court granted a temporary stay of the Fifth Circuit’s ruling while it considers the case.

Danco’s filing argued that the Fifth Circuit’s ruling “is not an application of neutral principles” but rather “an abdication of lower courts’ duty to adhere to decisions of” the Supreme Court itself. It then posed three practical questions about the disruption the ruling had already created: What happens to patients who arrived at pharmacies this weekend with prescriptions written before the ruling? What should a patient do who cannot secure an in-person appointment immediately? What are Danco’s legal obligations as the drug’s sponsor?

“The resulting chaos for patients, providers, pharmacies, and the drug-regulatory system,” the lawyers wrote, “is a quintessential irreparable harm.”

Danco’s lawyers also raised a threshold legal question that could end the case before the merits are ever reached—the very same question that ended the last one. Under the Constitution, a party can only sue in federal court if it can show a concrete, direct injury from the thing it’s challenging. This requirement is called “standing,” and it exists to prevent courts from becoming venues for policy disputes by parties who aren’t actually harmed.

In the first mifepristone case, the Supreme Court noted that the anti-abortion medical groups who brought the challenge consisted of doctors who allegedly objected to the drug on moral grounds. But it unanimously held that these doctors had no actual injury. They were not required to prescribe mifepristone. They were not required to do anything differently because of it. They simply didn’t like it, which the Court found was not enough.

Louisiana’s claimed injury is different, but Danco’s lawyers argue it has the same problem. The Fifth Circuit grounded the state’s standing partly in an “injury” of $92,000 in Medicaid costs it attributed to emergency care for two women who had complications from out-of-state mifepristone in 2025. Louisiana argued that easier access to the drug causes more abortions in the state, which in turn causes more complications, which in turn costs Louisiana money.

Danco’s filing pointed out that the Supreme Court had already rejected this kind of “chain of causation” reasoning when it reviewed Kacsmaryk’s original ruling. The idea that “FDA’s relaxed regulation of mifepristone may cause downstream economic injuries“ does not satisfy the constitutional requirement of a direct, traceable harm. Louisiana, Danco argued, is not required to “prescribe or use mifepristone“ or to “do anything or refrain from doing anything“ as a result of FDA’s actions, just as the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine plaintiffs were not. Whether the Supreme Court agrees will determine whether this case survives at all.

“It bears emphasis how unprecedented the Fifth Circuit’s order is,” Danco noted. “Never before has a federal court purported to immediately enjoin a several years’ old drug approval; restrict a distribution system for that drug that manufacturers, providers, patients, and pharmacies have all been using for years; or reinstate conditions that FDA determined do not meet the mandatory statutory criteria.”

What comes next

The case is now before the Supreme Court, which, as discussed, preserved mifepristone access in 2024, but only by ruling that the challengers in that case lacked standing to sue. At the time, it passed on reviewing the underlying restrictions, meaning the Court never answered the central question of whether the FDA’s actions were legal and authorized.

That question is now back. Can a federal court override the FDA’s scientific judgment about drug safety to enforce one state’s abortion ban across the entire country?

Vladeck offers a specific caution about what the Supreme Court should do differently this time. In 2023, when the Court paused Kacsmaryk’s original ruling, it did so without explanation. It never actually said anything about whether the challenge to mifepristone had any legal merit. That silence, Vladeck argues, left the door open for Louisiana to file a new case with different plaintiffs and run the same play again. “The Court will be impelled to say more than nothing,” he writes, “so that the message doesn’t get lost again.” A ruling that simply dismisses this case on standing grounds, without addressing whether these restrictions are legally valid, risks the same thing happening a third time.

The Trump White House’s posture makes this harder. Throughout this litigation, the regime has declined to affirmatively defend the FDA’s 2023 rule that allowed mifepristone to be mailed, even while simultaneously conducting its own review of the drug’s regulations. That review was widely understood to be laying the groundwork for imposing further restrictions. In this upside-down world, the executive branch responsible for defending the FDA in court has little apparent interest in winning.

This brings us back to Dobbs. The majority in that case held that abortion was a matter for democratic resolution at the state level and insisted that the Court was returning the question to the people and their elected representatives. Three years later, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit has issued a ruling on medication abortion access that governs all 50 states, on the basis of a lawsuit brought by one of them. The justices who wrote Dobbs said the Court was getting out of the business of setting national abortion policy. But now the Fifth Circuit has stepped right back into it.

It will be worth watching whether the justices who decided Dobbs acknowledge how national abortion policy is now being set by federal panels bent on protecting the interests of anti-abortion red states.

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The week started off with, well, a bang. And frankly, folks had questions.

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Many were initially skeptical, even as the right pounced to make this all about violent leftists.

People predicted how Trump would milk the moment.

It turns out, he made it all about his damn ballroom and how security was needed more than ever.

The FBI was on it!

Man, the internet is fast.

The conspiracy theories continued to fly, but not without a sense of humor.

My favorite was this one.

It didn’t help matters that Karoline Leavitt had said THIS earlier in the evening.

The would-be attacker reportedly left a message indicating his reasons for the attack. But he oddly made a point of leaving Kash Patel off his list of targets.

One viral moment from the evening was this unflappable guest, who just kept eating his salad through the mayhem.

Erika Kirk left the event… in tears, of course. Commentary ensued.

Wonder how she’ll monetize the moment.

Trump gave an interview the very next day on 60 Minutes, and Jon Stewart had some thoughts on that incredible moment. Here’s the whole piece on The Daily Show:

After footage from the security cameras showed a, let’s just say, rather lax security perimeter that the assailant was able to run right through after being spotted by a dog and a guard, there were questions about competence and mission.

The third alleged attempt on the President’s life was not the only news this week, of course. There was also a royal visit, which evoked inevitable comparisons.

And the astronauts from the Artemis II mission had to endure another uncomfortable journey.

Trump is putting pressure again on ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel, but Kimmel isn’t backing down.

He also came for former FBI Director James Comey again, this time over a photo of seashells on the beach that Comey posted to Instagram. Let the trolling begin!

This is both hilarious and an earworm!

Hear, hear!

Can you be indicted for this? Asking for a friend.

Let’s not let Trump’s shell game distract us from this.

Or from this.

In a terrible blow to voting rights, the Supreme Court handed down its Callais decision, gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Josh Johnson had a few thoughts on that.

We weren’t quite done with Erika Kirk stories, either. She actually went on her podcast looking like this, then proceeded to make this sound:

And she wonders why the internet mocks her. Even the MAGA folks!

Maybe we should just have sympathy for the poor woman.

Speaking of MAGA ladies, this influencer thought she’d found someone like-minded. Nope!

Last week we were treated to 90 excruciating seconds of Russell Brand trying to locate a Bible verse during an interview. Then came the meta commentary.

Neil Stone was on a roll. Or maybe a rolling Stone?

Others had a culinary take.

Okay, back to Neil.

Nudge nudge! Please support your friendly neighborhood Substack writer with an upgrade to a paid account!

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I’ve seen cats do this all the time. Dogs? Not so much!

This was an admittedly incredible moment for this NFL recruit, but my eyes were on the dog! Good boy!

We may have to rename the cone of shame to the cone of pride. Rooster, you are rocking the look!

Do not attempt at home.

To be fair, this is also often my reaction to a bad horn section.

I was rooting for him at the way. And wow, look what he did at the end!

This doggo is Instafamous for a reason. Wow.

This clip stole the internet’s heart this week.

Those eyes! How could anyone keep playing?

If cats could talk, I think we know what she’d be saying.

Reminder of why I don’t want to raise large farm animals.

I didn’t know there was a World Penguin Day, nor did I know penguins make this sound when delighted.

Here’s another animal story involving a stuffed version of mom. Not for a monkey, but for an owl!

They finna get it on.

The chances of being slapped by a turtle in the open sea are very small but non-zero.

When the sushi is a bit too live crew.

My own brain wouldn’t have leapt to this, but that’s why the internet exists.

Speaking of cow posts, this series is one for the ages.

OMG she saw it.

Wait, Google saw it.

There was more to cover, of course, so as not to be utterly ashamed.

Google Earth has caught some sus things before.

This is like those AI nude generators.

In the human world, if you’re wondering where your package went, take a look.

🎶 So why don’t you slide… 🎶

What’s up, brah?

A picture of poise and balance.

My new favorite celebrity chef is this little chap:

I want some Yorkshire pudding now!

We end, as usual, with a ridiculous dad joke. This is a shout-out to my brother Kaiser and his return to the rock scene in China!

Have a great weekend!

Jay

The party now in charge has a habit of losing the very fights it picks. The Iran war, of course, comes to mind, as do key legislative battles here at home. This week, it lost another—over Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding.

Let’s set the stage once more because it underscores how remarkable it is that they keep whiffing.

Democrats control nothing in Washington. They hold no Senate majority, no House majority and certainly no White House. The Supreme Court is stacked with GOP appointees. Democrats cannot pass a bill on their own, confirm a nominee or force a vote on anything. By the conventional logic of American politics, they have no leverage beyond throwing sand in the gears and making the case against continued GOP governance.

Yet Thursday, House Republicans lost again. After 76 days of a DHS shutdown, they caved, passing a bill to partially reopen the Department on the exact terms Democrats had been offering for weeks: funding for DHS except for new money for ICE and the Border Patrol, while putting off the question of reforms until later.

Let me repeat: The party that controls every lever of federal power lost a fight it picked, against an opponent with little power to stop it. Today let’s hold a mini-seminar on politics. Call it Government 101, a course the GOP just failed, by the way. Not a great look, with just over six months until the midterms.

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Minneapolis mettle

The fight began in Minneapolis. We all know what happened there. In January, DHS deployed 2,000 agents under Operation Metro Surge, the largest immigration enforcement operation in U.S. history. On January 7, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renée Good, a 37-year-old American mother of three. Two weeks later, two CBP agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old VA nurse who was filming agents during a protest. Both were U.S. citizens, both posed no threat, and both incidents were captured on film from multiple angles for all the world to see.

The killings galvanized Democratic opposition to ICE funding in a way nothing had before. Senate Democrats announced they would no longer support the DHS bill without reforms to immigration enforcement, including visible agent identification, warrants for private property searches, and use-of-force accountability standards. These were objectively modest demands, but Republicans still refused all of them. To keep half the government from shutting down again, the White House agreed to separate the DHS funding bill from the broader spending package to allow more time for negotiation. The broader measure passed, leaving the parties fighting over just DHS funding.

But negotiations soon collapsed. On February 14, DHS funding lapsed. The shutdown that followed was the longest partial government shutdown in American history.

The GOP fails to align

The mechanics of the standoff are worth understanding, because they reveal just how badly this was mismanaged.

In the Senate, the math was clear. Republicans hold 53 seats, but most legislation, including a bill funding DHS, requires 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. That meant Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) needed at least seven Democratic votes to reopen DHS through the normal appropriations process.

After weeks of failed bipartisan negotiations over ICE reforms, Thune accepted a compromise based on a proposal by Democrats. He agreed to fund all of DHS—including paying TSA agents who were calling out sick and causing chaos at airports—except ICE and Border Patrol. He would do it through “regular order”—meaning still needing 60 votes—then pursue ICE and CBP funding separately. That would happen through what’s called the “reconciliation” process, a party-line maneuver with specific limitations requiring only 51 votes (technically, 50 plus JD Vance).

So far, so good. The Senate passed that bill unanimously by voice vote. It would have reopened TSA, FEMA, the Secret Service, the Coast Guard and CISA. Confident of this temporary fix, the Senate left town.

But House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) was not impressed by his own party’s move. He called it “a joke” and outright refused to put it on the House floor.

This was extraordinary. A Senate majority leader’s bill passing unanimously, with his own party’s full blessing, is among the clearest possible signals that the upper chamber has done its work and is ready to send legislation to the president. Johnson sitting on it for a month marked an embarrassing rupture between the two Republican leaders, with Thune’s allies privately furious and House conservatives openly dismissive of the Senate’s judgment.

The Senate passed the bill again. And again, Johnson refused to move on it. His stated reason, offered weeks later: a “technical issue” with the bill’s language. As MS NOW reported, Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said she was unaware of any legitimate technical problem. House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-OK) acknowledged the obstacle was political, not technical. Thune, pressed on what Johnson’s objection actually was, told reporters, “In the end, it’s the same issue. We’ve got to fund all the agencies. They’ve got a bill over there that does that.”

On April 1, Johnson publicly promised that the House would vote on the Senate bill. The vote never came.

Circular firing squad

Johnson was failing to manage a cascade of Republican preconditions, each one contingent on the last, collectively ensuring that nothing could move. At the most basic level, House Republicans didn’t trust the Senate to follow through on reconciliation after the House approved the partial DHS funding bill.

As Axios reported, hardline GOP members began insisting that reconciliation had to pass before the House would touch anything else, even as DHS workers prepared to miss more paychecks. House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington (R-TX) put it plainly, declaring, “There are very few things that garner the strong support of every member of our conference—that one was roundly rejected.”

Then came the reconciliation rounds. Johnson tried to advance a reconciliation bill to fund ICE and CBP—call it Reconciliation 1.0—and conservatives demanded assurances it would happen. Then Reconciliation 1.0 stalled because a faction wanted a broader Reconciliation 2.0. Then Reconciliation 2.0 stalled because another faction wanted a broader Reconciliation 3.0 that would include the SAVE Act voter ID bill, billions for the Iran war and farm aid. Each new demand served as cover for the previous faction’s inaction.

Wednesday of this week was one of the most tumultuous days in the House in recent memory. Johnson was simultaneously trying to advance a foreign surveillance reauthorization bill, a farm bill and the DHS reconciliation measure. But his members were in open revolt on all three. Hard-liners including Reps. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Tim Burchett (R-TN) and Harriet Hageman (R-WY) blocked a procedural rule vote for hours. If you recall from last season, a rule vote is a procedural formality that is typically a win for the majority party, but this GOP majority keeps losing them because of internal dissent.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) refused to support the final DHS funding bill and offered his assessment of the week. “I think this whole thing is stupid. I think it’s asinine that we’re funding the government this way.”

Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX) was more sweeping. “We can’t really agree on much of anything,” he said. “This is our time to actually pass conservative legislation. The American people gave us the gavel. They gave us the White House. They gave us the Senate. And we have squandered an enormous amount of time away.”

CNN’s verdict was brutal. Johnson no longer has a functional majority. His GOP is struggling to fulfill the chamber’s most basic role on issues from government funding to spy powers that Trump himself has demanded, months before a critical midterm election.

The breaking point

The money Trump had been using to pay TSA agents was running out. So DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin warned in late April that emergency payroll funds, drawn from a slush fund in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, would be exhausted in the first week of May. “My payroll through DHS is just over $1.6 billion every two weeks,” Mullin said, “so the money is going extremely fast and once that happens there is no emergency funds after that.”

TSA agents had previously gone without pay for weeks, causing four-hour security lines at major airports. ICE agents, deployed to assist TSA and untrained for security screening, did nothing but increase the temperature and tensions with already angry travelers. The weekend before the final vote, a gunman attempted to breach the White House Correspondents’ Dinner; the Secret Service agents who stopped him were working without pay.

On Tuesday, Trump’s own Office of Management and Budget sent a memo to Capitol Hill urging House Republicans to accept the Senate’s partial DHS funding bill—even without ICE money. In short, the White House delivered the ultimatum that ended the standoff.

To no one’s surprise, Johnson went along. To avoid having his own members tank the bill on a recorded vote, he quietly slipped it onto the floor under a voice vote procedure, a maneuver used when passage is assumed and no objection is expected. Reporters noted that many GOP members didn’t even know the bill was being called. Roy, one of the shutdown’s loudest opponents, confirmed the tactic with a sigh. “If there was a vote, I would’ve voted no,” he said. “But we weren’t going to win that vote, so we decided to let it pass by voice vote.”

Johnson stepped before cameras to try to sew a purse out of failed pork politics. “Despite unrelenting predictions from many of you today in the press that we would fail this week, we did exactly the opposite.” Johnson added, “Sometimes when you have a small margin as we do, people have different ideas, different priorities about very contentious pieces of legislation, but we got it done because ultimately we just used patience and frankly prayer.”

Never mind that, six weeks earlier, he had called this very same bill “a joke” and sat on it with no action. Perhaps he simply prayed away the pain.

A draw is a win against a more powerful opponent

Credit is due to congressional Democratic leadership that is often harshly critiqued. In this funding fight, Democrats fought the GOP majority to a stalemate. Unlike in battles past, they held the line for 76 days without yielding on the core policy fight, and Republicans blinked first, receiving nothing in return. The New Republic framed it well: Republicans thought Democrats would do what they always do when push comes to shove: back down. But they didn’t.

The stalemate leaves the status quo in place, which admittedly was not a good spot to begin with. ICE is already funded through 2028 under special appropriations contained in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which nearly tripled the agency’s budget. And the reconciliation fight, where Republicans will attempt to add $70 billion more for ICE and CBP without Democratic votes, is still coming.

But the same fractures that broke the shutdown fight could follow Republicans into this one. Reconciliation requires that everything in the bill have a direct budgetary impact. Anything that doesn’t can be stripped by the Senate parliamentarian. That means the SAVE Act voter ID provisions, farm aid and Iran war funding that conservative members want to attach may not survive the process.

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) was already managing expectations. “I think we have to set our sights a little bit lower on this reconciliation bill. It’s got to be targeted to fund ICE for 10 years, I think that’s the number one thing,” he said.

But with reconciliation also comes the “vote-a-rama.” That’s an open-ended series of amendment votes where anything can get proposed, including from Democrats. And that will create political exposure during a midterm year. During this week’s budget resolution vote, for example, Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Dan Sullivan (R-AK), both facing competitive 2026 re-election races, broke with their party on amendments tied to healthcare costs and insurance denials. The final reconciliation bill will run that same gauntlet, but with higher stakes and more amendments.

As an ode to the capitulation of the GOP over the Democratic DHS funding proposal, I’ve rewritten the lyrics to the famous Schoolhouse Rock ditty. Sing along if you know the tune, and happy Friday!

I’m just a bill

Just a stand-alone bill

And I languished there on Capitol Hill

Because although in the Senate

It was un-an-i-mous

When I got to the House

Johnson showed he’s a puss

So I waited over 70 days

Till the anger started to spill

That the funding was still unfulfilled…

Pete Hegseth spent years at Fox comfortable in a world he understood well: friendly hosts, no follow-up questions, and any challenge treated as bad faith rather than a question requiring an answer.

When he became Defense Secretary, he rebuilt that world inside the Pentagon. He took questions only from sympathetic reporters. He fired military leaders who pushed back. He withheld budget data from Congress. And he went nearly a year without testifying before lawmakers at all.

For months, that protected system held. On Wednesday, it didn’t.

Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee for the first time, Hegseth sat in a room with people who weren’t part of his carefully constructed world asking the questions. They were lawmakers armed with receipts, including survivor testimony and his own prior statements. What followed, across nearly six hours of contentious questioning, was less a terrible performance than a demonstration of how fragile Hegseth’s false world actually was.

Wednesday offered six stark examples of what happens when the bubble bursts. Here’s what they revealed.

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If it was obliterated, why are we at war?

For months, Hegseth made public statements about Iran’s nuclear program to audiences who weren’t in a position to cross-examine him. This time was different.

The sharpest exchange of the day came from Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), the ranking member on the committee. Pressed on the White House’s strategy for reducing Iran’s nuclear threat, Hegseth told Smith that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been “obliterated”—a line he has deployed consistently and largely unchallenged for weeks in friendly briefings and sympathetic interviews.

Smith pounced. “We had to start this war, you just said 60 days ago, because the nuclear weapon was an imminent threat,” Smith said. “Now you’re saying it was completely obliterated?”

Hegseth had no clean answer. When Smith pressed further by asking whether “Operation Midnight Hammer” in June 2025 had actually accomplished nothing of substance, Hegseth shifted his framing. He argued that Trump had acted to dismantle Iran’s “conventional shield” for its nuclear program. Smith was unmoved, noting, “Yet they still haven’t given up their nuclear capabilities.”

DNI Tulsi Gabbard had stated in a written submission to Congress in March that Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was “obliterated” and that Iran had made “no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability”—a statement that raises its own questions about the urgency of launching a new war. As Smith noted in his opening statement:

Iran’s nuclear program is exactly what it was before this war started. They have not lost their capacity to inflict pain, they still have a ballistic missile program, they’re still able to blockade the Strait of Hormuz.

Hegseth had offered versions of both claims—both “obliterated” and an “imminent threat”—for months, but only yesterday did someone actually place them side by side and force him to reconcile them.

Soldiers sent into harm’s way

The deaths of six American service members early in the Iran war received sustained attention at Wednesday’s hearing. The incident illustrated a specific vulnerability of the world Hegseth had built: It did not account for survivor testimony.

The six soldiers were working out of a makeshift office space in Shuaiba, an industrial port south of Kuwait City, when they were hit by an Iranian drone strike. Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY), a combat veteran who serves on the Armed Services Committee, laid out what he said the intelligence record showed:

“Before the war started, there was clear intelligence Shuaiba was high on Iran’s target list. Internal analysis had said the site was indefensible from aerial attack and should not be used. Yet you sent our soldiers from the 103rd Sustainment Command there anyway. Is that true or false?”

Hegseth dodged. He responded that the military had taken proactive measures to protect American forces and that the soldiers who died are “remembered every day.” Rep. Ryan then turned to people who were actually at Shuaiba. He read from a CBS News report in which one survivor described the base’s drone defenses: “I would put it in the none category from a drone defense capability.”

Hegseth said that “whenever humanly possible, counter-UAS are always made available.” Ryan responded, “I’ll save you the time—they did not.”

This is a dynamic that has played out before. Operation Southern Spear, the regime’s campaign of military strikes on alleged drug vessels off the coast of Venezuela, drew similar scrutiny. The family of Colombian fisherman Alejandro Carranza filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, alleging he was doing nothing more than fishing for marlin and tuna when his boat was struck and he was killed. Surviving family members of two Trinidadian men killed in a separate strike filed a wrongful death lawsuit in U.S. federal court, describing their relatives as fishermen returning home from Venezuela. And a Washington Post report on a September 2 incident involving shipwrecked sailors cited two people with direct knowledge saying a second strike was ordered on the survivors. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) called it “an extrajudicial killing amounting to murder or a war crime.”

In short, the accounts cutting through Hegseth’s assurances came from people who have direct knowledge of the victims or the attacks. His generalized statements don’t hold up against these witnesses.

Perhaps Hegseth could manage that dynamic from the Pentagon briefing room. But he could not manage it on Wednesday.

A $25 billion secret

The world Hegseth built also required controlling what numbers reached the public. And for months, that worked.

Pentagon comptroller Jules Hurst told the committee that the Iran war has cost an estimated $25 billion so far, with the largest share going to munitions. The figure was notable not just for its size, but for the circumstances of its disclosure. Rep. Adam Smith noted it was the first time he had been given a cost figure, despite repeated prior inquiries to the department. The administration had sent no supplemental spending request to Congress to finance the war, and White House budget director Russell Vought had declined to estimate the cost of the war as recently as April 15.

The economic ripple effects have not been contained in the same way. Since the war began, oil prices have spiked globally, with U.S. crude hitting $106 per barrel and the global benchmark Brent rising to $118 per barrel on Wednesday before climbing to $126 per barrel today. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) pressed Hegseth on cascading costs to ordinary Americans in food and transportation prices. These, once again, were questions the Pentagon had never been made to answer in a setting where answering is required. Hegseth had no answer but to retort with what it would cost to allow Iran to build a nuclear weapon.

At least 168 dead, still under investigation

If the cost figures illustrated how Hegseth’s system manages numbers, the U.S. strike on an elementary school in Iran exemplified how it manages accountability by deferring it indefinitely.

The strike on the girls’ school in Minab killed scores of children and teachers and appears to have included an illegal second strike when rescuers were searching for survivors. Preliminary findings of an internal military investigation, reported by the New York Times and Reuters, suggest the Minab strike may have resulted from the U.S.’s use of outdated targeting data. When pressed at Wednesday’s hearing, Hegseth said only that “that unfortunate situation remains under investigation.” He has given the same answer for two months.

There is also an institutional dimension that Wednesday’s hearing brought into sharper focus. Senate Democrats, in a letter sent to Hegseth last week, raised concerns about his cuts to the Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Office and its Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, two offices explicitly tasked with preventing exactly this kind of outcome. The Civilian Protection Center of Excellence was mandated by Congress in the FY2023 National Defense Authorization Act and established in early 2023, and cuts to it were made over the objections of senior military officials.

With the cuts, Hegseth dismantled the very offices designed to flag problems like this before they happened, then declined to answer for the consequences once they had. At Fox News, that’s usually the end of the segment. But before Congress, the testimony goes into the record and can become a big policy issue gone terribly wrong.

Firing generals during wartime

The world Hegseth has been building at the Pentagon has a specific makeup. He has fired or sidelined more than a dozen senior military officials since taking over, including Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, Navy Secretary John Phelan, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. C.Q. Brown, and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti. He has also blocked the promotion of four colonels to brigadier general, two women and two Black officers, in what officials described as unprecedented interference in the promotions process. His stated rationale throughout has been the need to build a “warrior culture” at the Pentagon. In practice, that has meant purging the military’s most decorated senior officers and blocking the advancement of women and minorities.

Wednesday was the first time he had to describe that world out loud, in public, to people with the ability to push back.

Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), a former Air Force officer, pressed Hegseth directly on the firing of Gen. George, widely regarded as one of the most respected officers in the Army. Hegseth’s explanation was that “new leadership” was needed. When Houlahan challenged him, he repeated it, and she was unimpressed. “You have no way of explaining why you fired one of the most decorated and remarkable men,” Houlahan said before Hegseth interrupted her.

The pushback was not limited to Democrats. Rep. Austin Scott (R-GA) told Hegseth directly: “I disagree with the firing of Gen. George” and warned that bipartisan support would be necessary to pass any defense budget. Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), a retired Air Force brigadier general, acknowledged Hegseth’s legal authority to make the changes while saying it “doesn’t make it right or wise.” He noted that Congress had held a “huge bipartisan majority” of confidence in both George and Phelan.

The timing of the firings, as tensions continue to rise, made this critique particularly pointed. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) put it plainly in recent days when asked about George’s firing. “We’re in the middle of a war. We got to know that things are being managed well.”

“New leadership,” offered twice by Hegseth as a rationale for the firings with nothing else behind it, is simply not an adequate answer. This is especially true when, as now, the war threatens to spread and disrupt much of the world’s oil and natural gas supply.

Congress itself as the enemy

When the protective bubble Hegseth has wrapped himself inside can provide no answer to critical questions, he has only one remaining move: declare the people asking the questions to be the problem.

That works on Fox News. The host can turn to the camera and question the critics’ motives instead of their argument. On Wednesday, that was the only tool Hegseth had left, and it showed.

In his opening remarks, Hegseth said the biggest “adversary” the U.S. faces at this point in the war is the “reckless, feckless and defeatist words of congressional Democrats and some Republicans.” When Rep. John Garamendi (D-CA) called the war a “quagmire” and a “political and economic disaster at every level,” Hegseth accused him of “handing propaganda to our enemies” and demanded to know “who are you cheering for here?”

This aggressive posture did not go unchallenged. Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) seized on Hegseth’s “feckless” characterization, asking, “Do you think Congress was smart or feckless when it failed to ask tough questions of the Bush administration and gave them a blank check for Iraq?” Hegseth, who had been openly critical of that war, called it “a false comparison.”

Hegseth was resisting responding to precisely what the law requires. Trump notified Congress of the U.S.-Israeli strikes on March 2, starting the 60-day clock under the 1973 War Powers Resolution that requires either congressional authorization or withdrawal. That deadline falls on Friday, May 1. Republicans control both chambers of Congress and have broadly signaled they will not force a vote, leaving the conflict on uncertain legal footing.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

A war launched without congressional approval, defended by a Defense Secretary who considers the very act of questioning the war disloyalty, is where the bubble begins to burst. Hegseth walked into the hearing room past protesters chanting “arrest Hegseth” and “war criminal,” then delivered an opening statement about rebuilding a military that “instills unrelenting fear in our adversaries.” But the adversaries he seemed least prepared for were the ones already in the room.

Since his confirmation, there has been a question hanging over the Pentagon: What happens when a Fox News personality with no executive experience has to run the United States military during wartime? Wednesday’s hearing was the most complete answer we’ve seen. It turns out, it looks like a man who has never had to answer a hard question suddenly having to answer many of them—and getting quickly backed into a corner.

The Trump bus continues on its revenge tour, and two stories that broke yesterday show us where it is headed.

A federal grand jury in North Carolina indicted former FBI Director James Comey, for the second time. His crime? Sharing a picture of seashells spelling out “86 47.”

Also yesterday, the FCC ordered Disney’s television company ABC to file early license renewals for all eight of its owned-and-operated stations, a move widely understood as retaliation for a Jimmy Kimmel joke about Melania Trump.

Both moves are almost certainly losers in court. Yet both are happening anyway, because the point is to intimidate the regime’s enemies and frighten its critics. Let’s take a closer look at each, then discuss why, with Todd Blanche now acting attorney general, the attacks are coming faster and more furious.

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He shared seashells on the seashore

Last May, James Comey posted a photo to Instagram. It showed seashells on a beach arranged to spell out “86 47.” His caption: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.” He said he spotted the shells during a walk near his North Carolina beach house and assumed they were a political message. He took the post down the same day, writing that he “didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence.”

The Trump regime was an opening. The Secret Service hauled Comey in for an hours-long interview, an uncommon step for a non-specific threat. The cabinet pile-on was nearly immediate. Now former (yay!) Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed that Comey had “just called for the assassination” of the president. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard called for Comey to be imprisoned.

Trump even appeared on Fox to assert that Comey “knew exactly what that meant. A child knows what that meant.”

No immediate charges followed. Instead, last September, Comey was charged in Virginia with lying to Congress and obstruction. His lawyers called it politically motivated revenge.

In November, a federal judge dismissed the case, not on the merits but because the prosecutor who brought it, Lindsey Halligan, a former personal lawyer for Trump, had been unlawfully appointed. Comey posted a video soon afterward:

“I know that Donald Trump will probably come after me again, and my attitude is going to be the same. I’m innocent. I am not afraid, and I believe in an independent federal judiciary — the gift from our founders that protects us from a would-be tyrant.”

This was prescient. On Tuesday, a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of North Carolina indicted Comey, this time directly over the seashells photo. The specific charges have not been made public, and Comey’s attorneys had no immediate comment.

FBI Director Kash Patel went before cameras to assert that this somehow was the culmination of months of investigations. And in the process he appears to have violated grand jury secrecy.

Apart from continuing FBI leadership incompetence, let’s be clear. The legal obstacles to convicting Comey on these facts are formidable. The Supreme Court held in Counterman v. Colorado (2023) that proving a “true threat” requires showing the defendant subjectively understood their words would be perceived as threatening, not merely that a reasonable person would find them so. The facts in that case were stark: Billy Counterman had sent hundreds of threatening Facebook messages to a named victim over several years. Even then, the Court reversed his conviction 7-2 because Colorado had applied only an objective standard.

The contrast with Comey could hardly be sharper. Comey photographed shells he found on a beach, captioned them neutrally, and deleted the post the same day he learned of the violent interpretation, publicly stating it had never occurred to him. Prosecutors would have to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that Comey consciously disregarded the risk that a beach photo would be read as a presidential assassination threat. His contemporaneous disavowal is direct evidence against that theory.

As legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Naveed Rahmani explained to Newsweek, “Intent to harm is necessary and nothing in his post expresses any type of intent. It’s a loser case and a judge would probably toss it.”

There is also the uncomfortable matter of selective enforcement. Legal scholar Jessica Levinson noted that politicians, including Matt Gaetz, have used “86” in political contexts without triggering federal investigations. And with “86 47” now a common protest slogan adopted by millions of Americans during No Kings rallies, the implications of this prosecution and its impact on free speech extend well beyond Comey’s beach walk.

The Trumps are obsessed with Kimmel

On April 23, Jimmy Kimmel taped a mock White House Correspondents’ Dinner segment. In it, he quipped that Melania Trump had “a glow like an expectant widow.” (I laughed when I heard it. It was pretty funny.)

The joke, as later explained by Kimmel, turned on the fact that Trump is nearly 80 and Melania is younger than Kimmel.

Two days later, an armed man charged through a security perimeter at the Washington Hilton Correspondents’ Dinner. The suspect, Cole Allen, has been charged with attempting to assassinate Trump.

Trump moved immediately to link Kimmel’s joke to the shooting, calling it a “despicable call to violence” and demanding Disney and ABC fire Kimmel “immediately.” Melania Trump chimed in, calling Kimmel’s words “corrosive” and “intended to divide our country.” She called on ABC to “take a stand.”

White House Communications Director Steven Cheung called for Kimmel to be “shunned for the rest of his life.”

Disney aired Kimmel’s show Monday night, and he opened with a First Amendment tutorial: “Trump is allowed to say whatever he wants to say, as are you and as am I and as are all of us, because under the First Amendment we have as Americans the right to free speech.”

Then the FCC weighed in. On Tuesday afternoon, the commission, chaired by Trump sycophant Brendan Carr, ordered Disney’s ABC to file license renewals for all eight of its owned-and-operated stations by May 28. Those licenses were not due for renewal until 2028 at the earliest.

The FCC’s official rationale was an ongoing investigation into Disney’s “DEI” practices, and not, it insisted, the Kimmel controversy. Nobody bought it. Seth Stern of the Freedom of the Press Foundation said the FCC “is neither the journalism police nor the humor police. This is nothing but illegal jawboning intended to intimidate ABC into kissing the ring.” Stern noted that Carr had repeatedly said the FCC has no role policing late-night jokes, at least until Trump needed a favor. Anna Gomez, the FCC’s only Democratic commissioner, called the move “unprecedented, unlawful, and going nowhere.”

The legal battle isn’t likely to hobble ABC. Communications attorney Andrew Schwartzman noted that “the legal standard for denying a license renewal is almost insurmountable,” and that a hearing plus judicial review would take years, during which time the broadcaster would continue operating. Even a successful FCC action would not take ABC off the air.

This of course is not the first time this playbook has been run against Kimmel or his employer. Last September, amid an earlier pressure campaign over comments about the killing of Charlie Kirk, ABC suspended Kimmel’s show briefly, then brought it back less than a week later following a wave of public outcry and mass cancellations of Disney subscriptions by angry viewers.

“I love you, sir.”

These two stories—a seashell indictment and a broadcast license shakedown—may look like separate controversies, but they are iterations of the same strategy, playing out simultaneously across two different arms of the federal government.

The playbook is consistent: Find a pretextual legal or regulatory hook (“DEI” violations, a “true threat” statute), deploy it immediately after a political provocation, and count on the process itself to inflict pain even when the underlying case collapses.

Comey faces costly litigation over a beach photo. Disney faces a possible years-long regulatory proceeding because of a late-night monologue. Neither requires the regime to prevail in court to send a message; the investigation itself is the punishment. The chilling effect on every journalist, comedian, and executive watching is the point.

The administration has been running this playbook for months. It forced cancellation of regime critic Stephen Colbert’s show by leveraging its regulatory say over the Paramount/Skydance merger. The DOJ is prosecuting journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort under the FACE Act, a statute intended to protect abortion clinics. Their “crime”? Covering a church protest.

Trump sought $15 billion from the New York Times and $10 billion from the Wall Street Journal over unfavorable coverage (and that pesky birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein). He keeps losing in court, but that hasn’t prevented the next suit. A federal judge struck down Trump’s executive order defunding NPR and PBS, calling it “unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.” While courts keep saying no dice, the administration keeps finding new ways to apply pressure.

The main difference now is Todd Blanche, who seems as intent on doing Trump’s bidding at the DOJ as Brendan Carr has been at the FCC.

Blanche is a man on a mission. On April 2, Trump fired Pam Bondi as attorney general. The reported reason was his frustration that, under her leadership, the Justice Department had failed to deliver successful prosecutions of his political enemies. The indictments of Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James were both thrown out in November after U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie ruled that the prosecutor who brought them, Lindsey Halligan, had been unlawfully appointed. The DOJ tried and failed to reindict James in Norfolk—and then tried again in Alexandria. The grand jury refused again.

In February, another grand jury rejected criminal charges against six Democratic lawmakers who had posted a video urging service members to defy illegal orders. Bondi’s Weaponization Working Group, tasked with building cases against Trump’s adversaries, had not produced a single report by the time she left office.

Blanche has now stepped in as acting AG. A former federal prosecutor, he later became Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney and sat beside Trump at his hush-money trial in New York. At his first press conference, when asked whether he wanted the job permanently, Blanche said: “I love working for President Trump. It’s the greatest honor of a lifetime.” Then he added, “If he chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I will say, ‘Thank you very much. I love you, sir.’”

I’m sorry, but blech.

CNN reported that Trump told Blanche to treat the acting period as an audition. The job is “his to lose.”

And so Blanche has moved fast. Within his first weeks, he intensified the investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan, hiring Trump ally Joe diGenova to lead it. He opened investigations into former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson. He filed charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center. He oversaw an effort to vacate the convictions of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers involved in the January 6 attack. And on Tuesday, he indicted James Comey again, this time over a seashell photo.

The timing—three days after the WHCD shooting, with Kimmel simultaneously under FCC fire—is not accidental. The administration is pressing on every front at once.

Whether Blanche will succeed where Bondi failed is another question. As Bondi’s former chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, put it: “Part of the reason the weaponization work has been difficult is that you need people who are MAGA and who are really competent. Many career prosecutors are not interested in this kind of work. It’s a very small group of people.”

Pam Bondi failed to prosecute Trump’s foes successfully and lost her job as a result. Todd Blanche may soon also discover the high cost of failure.

I’m writing for The Big Picture today about a group we haven’t heard much from in a while.

Every time we see RFK Jr. in our feeds, we are reminded how wacky and dangerous he is. What we hear less about is the status of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement he brought to the table to help elect Trump. And things aren’t looking so great.

On Monday, MAHA protesters rallied outside the Supreme Court. This time, they were there protesting the very administration they helped elect. MAHA was supposed to be the crown jewel of the Trump coalition: suburban moms, wellness voters, and people who believed RFK Jr. would take on Big Pharma and clean up the food supply.

Fifteen months in, he’s done the opposite. He endorsed a Trump order expanding glyphosate production, the same pesticide he once sued Monsanto over. He praised a pro-vaccine CDC director that his base despised. And he shouted at senators that Medicaid cuts affecting millions of working families weren’t actually happening.

The MAHA-MAGA marriage is falling apart.

What could this mean for November’s all-important midterms? Find out more in my piece, out later this afternoon. It will arrive in your inboxes if you’re a subscriber to The Big Picture, a companion substack to this one that I write for once a week. If you’re not yet a subscriber, it’s a great time to sign up. It’s free to read my column there, but we appreciate our voluntary paid supporters who make our work possible!

Yes! Sign Me Up for The Big Picture!

I’ll be back here tomorrow with my regular installment of The Status Kuo.

Jay

If you’re like many people, the moment you heard Saturday night about yet another failed lone gunman attempt on the president, you thought, “Oh, here we go again.”

Three attempts in two years start to feel like a stretch even to hardened skeptics. And with Trump of the miraculous healing ear starting to sound like the man-boy who cried “Lone Wolf,” our collective credulity is now strained to the breaking point.

On the other hand, no one wants to sound like a conspiracy theorist. A faked assassination attempt to gain public sympathy sounds like tinfoil hat territory. Or at least it did until evidence emerged recently that Trump’s pal in Hungary, Viktor Orbán, had been considering a faked assassination play in a plan proposed by Russian intelligence under the code name “Gamechanger.”

As Gary Kasparov has remarked, “I do believe in coincidences. I also believe in KGB.”

And come on, our brains insist. With this third attempt on Trump’s life, some things just aren’t adding up. Someone somewhere is manipulating the truth.

To be clear, that is what’s happening. Just not necessarily the way we think.

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The truth is way out there

Immediately following the shooting, as the New York Times reported, online accounts fishing for engagement and revenue leapt to assert conspiracy theories about the whole incident being faked. These were often based on cherry-picked facts and footage.

There was Karoline Leavitt’s admittedly horrifically-phrased remark before the event: “There will be shots fired tonight.”

There was the weird Fox reporter phone call, which cut off just as she seemed poised to reveal a guest’s possible foreknowledge of danger. As Media Matters reported, Leavitt’s husband told the reporter, “You need to be very safe and he was very serious when he said that to me. Looked around the room and he said…” Then the phone cut off.

There was also buzz around an account that had posted just one tweet three years ago containing only the name of the would-be killer: Cole Allen. (It gets even more X Files-like if you rabbit hole down this particular conspiracy, but I’d recommend against it.)

It’s almost designed to make our heads explode, which is probably the point. People make a lot of money peddling false claims on social media.

Trump adds fuel to the conspiracy fires

Of course, Trump didn’t help matters by treating the whole incident so cavalierly. After posting security footage of the shooter running through the lobby, he held a press conference, despite an active investigation. There, he pivoted rather bizarrely to claims that he needs his ballroom to be fully safe. This claim makes no sense because the Correspondents Dinner is a private affair and not a White House event. A ballroom isn’t going to change anything, because it’s not like the event will be held inside the White House in the future.

Big MAGA accounts nevertheless amplified Trump’s ballroom messaging, which only fueled the perception that the episode was staged as propaganda. According to MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair, these MAGA accounts are all on group chats where they receive their marching orders directly from Republican leadership or the White House.

Trump then went on 60 Minutes Sunday night and made bald-faced lies about not falling down when the Secret Service tried to whisk him away to safety. He insisted instead that they had demanded that he get down. But footage shows Trump falling and agents immediately trying to get him to stand up and move.

Trump also labeled the would-be shooter as “anti-Christian”—a smear that appears to be false, based on interviews with friends and colleagues who described him as studious, devout and pious and “pretty prominent at the Caltech Christian Fellowship.”

When Trump acts in this manner, he is gaslighting us all. And no surprise, we start to feel crazy and question reality itself. That’s the hallmark of a successful gaslighting campaign. As Ana Navarro remarked,

“I think people jump to the conclusion that it’s staged because Trump lies. He lies constantly, daily, and pathologically. People do not trust and do not believe anything Trump says. His lips are moving, the likelihood is he is lying.”

A different, more troubling theory

Hard as it is to remain disciplined, an extraordinary claim such as “This was all faked!” still requires extraordinary evidence before it should be advanced. We need to stick to that rule, even when our brains want to abandon it because of all the lies, weird coincidences and amplified conspiracy theories.

What we have seen so far, including the would-be killer’s apparent manifesto, points away from a fabricated incident and more toward Secret Service incompetence. We’ll know more in the coming days, but the suspect is alive and unharmed, and we will learn more about him soon. Most of what we know already suggests he was a quiet science nerd who got a terrible, violent idea in his head.

I should say at this point that I am also sometimes guilty of donning my own tinfoil hat, but in a Kasparovian way. Because the Russians have been dabbling in and pushing false flags, I would be remiss if I didn’t include one other possibility that I haven’t seen discussed much. In my own moments of “Oh, come on!” there is often this thought: there is a non-zero chance someone in the White House or FBI is aware of lone wolf actors and is actively keeping close tabs on them. They might even be allowing them to believe they can get close or even that they can strike, when in fact, they have long been neutralized as a real threat. These kinds of actors make for convenient rubes. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have any evidence to back this theory up. But if I were a bad actor in U.S. intelligence or the White House looking to score the biggest political points from a doomed assassination attempt, this is how I would let things play out.

But here’s the thing: We don’t need strained theories to make sense of this. The conditions already exist.

As one commentator noted on Twitter, we have a president so vile that there is empirical data to support the claim that he would fake the whole thing. At the same time, we have a president so vile that, statistically speaking, a few citizens might be pushed past the brink and try to off him.

That’s a horrifying thought, but it wouldn’t be unique in our history. Indeed, the very first U.S. president assassinated by a gunman was Abraham Lincoln. John Wilkes Booth believed, in his own warped way, that he was doing the right thing for the country. In a letter left behind for his brother to read and later publish, Booth framed his act as patriotic sacrifice. He saw Lincoln as a tyrant who had destroyed the Constitution and enslaved the South under despotism. Booth saw himself, however wrongly, as a defender of the Republic and the South.

We’ve now experienced three recent, troubling versions of this from those violently opposed to right-wing hatemongers and oligarchs: Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer Tyler Robinson; Luigi Mangione, who is charged with killing the UnitedHealthcare CEO; and now this latest would-be shooter, Cole Allen, whose reported manifesto evinced a desire to strike back: “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” wrote Allen in a message allegedly sent minutes before the shootings to his family members.

Trump, the GOP and even some members of the media suggest that the rise in politically-driven violence is due to the left’s sharp critiques of Trump and his cabal. Here’s CNN’s Dana Bash suggesting that “heated rhetoric” against Trump is to blame.

What this misses is that, statistically speaking, there will always be a handful of citizens who become violently radicalized. But it won’t be because of the left’s pointed criticisms. It will happen in their own minds, fueled by the hate, moral rot and horrifying crimes of Trump and the far right.

That is a worrisome state of affairs. Political violence is never a solution and only breeds more chaos, tension and strife. Justice must arrive not from the barrel of a vigilante’s gun but from the judgment of the courts, juries and voters.

While the right tells us the answer is for the left to “tone down the rhetoric”—meaning, stop criticizing them and labeling them as the fascists they are—there is perhaps another, more direct solution: GOP political leaders, officials and the goons on the right who serve them could stop waging war, murdering citizens, raping women, molesting children, denying life-saving health care, disappearing immigrants and demonizing and scapegoating whole communities.

That, I’d imagine, would “turn down the heat” considerably.

Again, deep breath! And more on that insanity tomorrow. (Seriously, it can wait.) I first want apologize to the reader here who caught me right after the show to tell me she enjoys my work! I was so caught up in the Correspondents Dinner news blowing up my phone that I didn’t even realize you were talking directly to me! If you’re reading this now, thank you for being a loyal reader, and sorry for spacing out like that…

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Today I’m back home and jumping right back into Baba-hood with these two. If you missed my pics and vids on social media, here are a few recent ones!

Their hair may be unruly, but they are not! Hooray for super well-behaved kids. (Thank you, universe, at least so far lol.)

Here’s Ronan’s characteristic morning bed head:

And Riley with her trusted watch doggo, Windsor!

Ronan has learned how to say “Baba” and is just weeks away from walking on his own!

And Riley loves the trampoline at the kiddie gym!

In personal news, we’re just 10 days away from our big move! On May 6, we’re piling into a car and heading with the moving van up to Kingston on the west side of the Hudson River, about 90 minutes outside of NYC. We’ll be moving in with my brother John and his son Hartley, who will both be able to help out with the kids! My children will get to grow up with extended family in small town America, just like their Ba did. Yay!

It’s admittedly a bit of a stressful time, both in our politics and in our lives. But once the move is done and we’re settled into our new place, I expect the clouds of anxiety over relocating our lives will lift, and I can get back to focusing on the absurdity that is our national government.

Have a great Sunday!

Jay

Trump announced it was open, then Iran said “No, closed!” and markets did their little dance while someone got rich off inside info.

Have we been here before?

Looney Tunes seemed particularly apt…

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Borowitz had no shortage of material this week.

Late night hosts came to skewer. Here’s Jimmy Fallon.

And Fallon again:

Oh heck, let’s just do a Fallon/Borowitz volley.

Trump’s biblical turn needed some live commentary from the MAGA faithful, so Jordan Klepper hit the ground to interview them.

And more on the Iran war…

Fallon had quite the week. Here is his take on Trump’s Bible verse readings.

Not even the oceans are safe nowadays.

Some heroes just post signs.

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is tonight, but for the first time, there will be no comedian and no roast because Snowflake Don and his sycophants can’t take it. But what if Jimmy Kimmel hosted one anyway…

Trump sent JD Vance to Pakistan to negotiate further with Iran, but they didn’t show up.

Lower in the ranks, Trumplings were also having quite a week. There was the swirl of drunken mess allegations about Kash Patel. Here’s The Daily Show on that.

A drunk? In an important top position in government?

It was time to remind the people what this was.

Again, Borowitz, the LeBron James of political comedy.

Patel, of course, denies the allegations and sued The Atlantic for $250 million. How are those denials going?

What could take the heat off Kash? Oh, wow. Here we go…

Pete Hegseth, Christ’s very own alpha warrior in the Pentagon, hasn’t lacked for controversy lately after quoting Pulp Fiction as if it were scripture.

TMZ has been following Congress members around, and now its reporters are in the Pentagon and I’m actually good with that.

Hegseth fired the Secretary of the Navy, who was himself a Trump donor crony. The Daily Show’s coverage:

But don’t worry, Phelan’s replacement is this guy!

RFK Jr. testified before Congress and lied nonstop, but there was also this notable audio feed which I’m just going to leave here.

This is hilarious if you’re in the know. If you’re not, I dare you to Google it and plunge down the rabbit hole.

So, The Onion, fresh off its acquisition of Info Wars, really went there with this.

Erika Kirk will never live this down.

Virginia’s voters approved a 10D-1R map in response to the GOP’s national gerrymandering push, and we have VA Senate president pro tempore L. Louise Lucas largely to thank for that.

In the history of awkward 90-second moments, this one from accused rapist and recent Christian convert Russell Brand is in the top five.

Congrats to Chelsea for completing the marathon! This comment had me chuckling though.

For when they’re ready to walk out the compound gates…

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Plenty of puppy content this week! I support exercising for this reason:

In the realm of doorstop boingy things vs. doggos, this was an epic battle.

I am highly doubtful my corgi would patiently learn this. Impressive.

What a start to your vacation!

You can actually watch him register genuine surprise.

This took me wayyyyyy longer than it should have. There’s no trick, just great camouflage. (I’ll put a hint below the pic if you give up and need it.)

(Okay, big hint if you need it: the cat is the same color as the wood and is top-center.)

Good to know the Japanese grow impatient with such nonsense, too.

I wasn’t convinced this was a hen at first.

Giving Lady and the Tramp spaghetti love vibes.

Funnily, this llama reminded me of my boy Ronan in the morning.

Nope. I’m out!

A job whale done, orcas.

They must not fear humans, like, at all.

For my baby boy, it’s pressing my face against the playpen mesh. For this little guy…

A phrase for the ages was born in this moment, particularly apt for our own fraught times.

Just when you think you’ve seen everything there is to see in our national pastime…

I had to look a few times to figure out what was going on here!

Something from the archives that was making the rounds again.

Honestly, their moves seem a bit stilted.

So silly, but I enjoyed this far more than I should have.

Careful the things you do, children will listen.

This is a warning for our politics. Never think you have it in the bag!

I met my first serious boyfriend in a roller-rink, but even I didn’t have moves like this.

So, not so good in the sack?

Don’t let any sketchy slots in Vegas follow you around.

It’s dad joke time!

This will be my kids. I’m putting it out there now.

Have a great weekend!

Jay

And drum roll, please! My readership has raised $36,592 from 818 contributions so far to JoAnna’s campaign! Woohoo!

I hope that in the next two hours, a few more of you will put us over my personal goal of $40K. This is a priority red-to-blue key race, identified as such by HRC, Latino Victory and the DCCC. Winning in AZ-6 will help flip the House, and you can be a part of making it happen!

I want to get us to a lucky 888 contributors by 12:30 pm today! So if you want to help take back our democracy, hit the button below and give a little today!

I’m in for JoAnna! Flip the House!

JoAnna’s opponent is a Trumper and NRA darling. So we’d not only be gaining an amazing leader and a Marine veteran, we’d be kicking out a MAGA sycophant. As I’ve said here before, our donation dollars have to work smarter, and that means focusing on the narrow band of House races that will actually flip control to the Dems. If you’re tired of seeing our country fall apart, as prices for everything rise and we wage yet another war, send a message TODAY. Read more about JoAnna at the donation link:

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It’s not enough just to envision a better future. Hope is not a strategy. We have to take affirmative steps to help realize that future. Make yours a smart and strategic donation, right now, to win one of the swingiest districts in the country!

And thank you to EVERYONE who has given so far! Together we can make a real difference, starting with the midterms in November and the election of JoAnna Mendoza!

Okay—off to a full day of strategy, action and results! Back tomorrow morning with my Skeets and Giggles column to kick off your Saturday.

Jay

It didn’t use to be this way. Everything changed in 2016 when the Court first got the Clean Power Plan case challenging the Obama administration’s signature climate change initiative. Thanks to reporting by the New York Times, we now know what happened in those five fateful days, and how everything changed after Chief Justice John Roberts opened the gates to a new fresh hell.

This is an important piece that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. I finally decided to pen my thoughts on it, following the Times’s blockbuster reveal of documents, ones we thought we’d never see! I’ve tried to keep most of the legalese out so that anyone can understand the monster Roberts created, one that is still smashing its way through our legal system today.

If you’re already subscribed to The Big Picture substack, you’ll receive it in your inbox later this afternoon. If you’re not already subscribed, you can do so below. All my content there is offered for free and without a paywall, but we always appreciate our paid subscribers who also gain access to our popular news summaries and Week in Wins features!

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I’ll be off tomorrow leading parts of the Human Rights Campaign Equality in Action conference and emceeing our big fundraiser for JoAnna Mendoza, but I’ll share a brief update on how much we’ve raised so far!

Jay

Virginia voters approved a ballot referendum on Tuesday that could hand Democrats four additional congressional seats in November. It’s the latest move in a nationwide redistricting war that Donald Trump ignited less than a year ago and that has now, by most measures, backfired bigly.

The result was closer than advocates had hoped, but Virginia is still a more purple state than, say, California. And when all the votes are counted it will still be a comfortable win—around 3 to 4 points—driven by lopsided “yes” margins in the Northern Virginia suburbs, where many recently fired federal workers do not like Trump one bit.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) deserves credit for beating back the White House’s gerrymandering push. And he had this to say following the election results:

Last July, Donald Trump demanded that Texas draw five new Republican seats in the middle of a decade, igniting a chain reaction of corrupt MAGA state legislators attempting to rig the midterm elections. While many expected Democrats to roll over and play dead, we did the opposite.

Democrats did not step back. We fought back. When they go low, we hit back hard.

We won Prop 50 in California, reclaimed a seat in Utah, pushed back extremists in Ohio and halted toxic GOP efforts in Indiana, New Hampshire, Nebraska and Kansas.

With this victory, it’s a good time to step back and review how we got here and what challenges lie ahead, even as we take a much-deserved victory lap! Go Virginia!

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Brushfire in Texas

In the summer of 2025, Trump summoned Texas Republicans to redraw the state’s congressional map mid-decade. His express goal was to lock in a Republican House majority long before the 2026 midterms could punish his party. It was a calculated act of political arson, but because the universe has a good sense of humor, that same fire is now threatening his own party’s House majority.

This redistricting push did not emerge organically. Planning began among Trump’s advisers before his inauguration, spearheaded by the National Republican Redistricting Trust. The pitch was simple: Republicans hold a razor-thin House majority, just a couple seats above the 218 threshold to govern. The midterms historically punish the party in power. The only way to survive the 2026 cycle was to gerrymander key maps before any votes were cast.

Texas was the first state to oblige. The Lone Star State’s scheme to steal the election led to a dramatic walkout by state House Democrats who fled the state to deny quorum during the first special session and to draw national attention to the crisis. When the realities of staying away so long forced their return, a second legislative session produced a map targeting five Democratic-held seats, redrawn to favor Republicans by margins of R+10 to R+17 based on 2024 presidential results (keep that in mind for our later discussion).

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed the maps into law on Aug. 29, and Missouri and North Carolina followed within weeks.

California knows how to contain infernos

The Texas Dems’ walkout had its desired effect: It lit the warning fires and put all Dems on notice of the danger. The Democratic response was swift and unambiguous. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who had spent years championing the state’s independent redistricting commission, pulled a 180. He pushed hard for a ballot measure, Prop 50, to be decided in November 2025. If passed, it would enact a Democratic gerrymander designed to flip five or so Republican seats—all in response to the Texas steal.

The California GOP and Trump’s Justice Department sued, but a federal panel rejected the claim, finding the map was partisan gerrymandering permissible under current Supreme Court precedent. What’s good for the goose, as they say.

Prop 50 passed by a wide margin, and on Feb. 4, SCOTUS declined to hear an appeal, without comment or dissent. California’s temporary map was locked in for the 2026 midterms, effectively canceling out Texas’s map.

The Old Dominion raises the stakes

The 2025 Virginia elections changed what was possible in that state. Democrats swept all three statewide offices and retained their majorities in the House of Delegates and state Senate, delivering a clean trifecta. Democratic legislators then moved in October 2025 to propose a constitutional amendment allowing the legislature to take back redistricting power from the state’s own bipartisan commission. It was the same commission that Virginia voters had approved by nearly a 2-to-1 margin just five years earlier.

This was a bold and controversial move, driven in large measure by a political force of nature: L. Louise Lucas, the president pro tempore of the Virginia state Senate. After Trump announced his Texas plan, Lucas announced she would pursue a map producing a 10-1 House delegation, eliminating four Republican seats.

They passed that map last night.

Republicans labeled the move a blatant gerrymander, and in fairness, it was. But Democrats offered an important distinction. Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who had once supported the bipartisan commission the map was now circumventing, said the national context had forced the issue: “What has changed is what we’re seeing in states across the country — and a president who says he is ‘entitled’ to more Republican seats before this year’s midterm elections.”

Both California and Virginia submitted their maps to voters via ballot measure. By contrast, Republicans in Texas, Missouri and North Carolina passed their maps through captured legislatures, behind closed doors, with no public ratification.

Moreover, the Democratic changes are temporary. Virginia’s amendment explicitly returns redistricting to the bipartisan commission after the 2030 census. California’s ballot measure carries a similar sunset provision. Republicans built their gerrymanders to last a decade, while Democrats built theirs to expire.

Trump, for his part, called the Virginia amendment “a blatant partisan power grab” during a tele-rally the night before the vote, warning that a “yes” result would leave Virginia Republicans “wiped out in terms of representation in Washington.” It was the best messaging he could have given voters who actually want to see that happen. Of course, Trump neglected to mention that he had personally launched the redistricting wars by pressuring Texas to engineer exactly that outcome for Democrats there.

The Scoreboard

Let’s pull back from Virginia for a moment and look at the full battlefield.

On the Republican side: Texas drew a map targeting five Democratic seats, currently in effect after a Supreme Court order blocked a lower-court ruling that found it an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. North Carolina passed a map aimed at flipping the state’s one remaining swing seat now held by Rep. Don Davis (D-NC), whose district has had continuous Black congressional representation for over 30 years. Missouri passed a gerrymander targeting one seat, despite a citizen petition drive to force a public vote, only to have the Republican secretary of state and a partisan judge run out the clock. Ohio’s bipartisan commission produced a map favoring Republicans by one to two additional seats. GOP gross seat potential: roughly eight to nine seats.

On the Democratic side: California’s map is set, potentially gaining five or even six seats. A court-ordered map in Utah adds one to two more. Virginia, if tonight’s result survives the courts, adds four. Democratic gross potential: ten to twelve seats.

That means that before Virginia’s vote, the running count had Republicans up by a couple seats on the redistricting battlefield. Virginia flipped that margin.

Republican dummymanders are a real thing now

When a party gerrymanders so aggressively that it backfires, political scientists somewhat derisively call this a “dummymander.” It has happened in Texas before: In 2018, backlash against Trump’s first term flipped two Texas seats that Republicans had considered safe. The 2025 GOP map may be running the same dumb play.

To create five new Republican-leaning seats, Texas mapmakers had to crack Democratic-heavy urban districts and push displaced Democratic voters into neighboring Republican-held districts, making those districts “softer” targets.

Moreover, the new GOP-leaning seats were drawn using 2024 presidential election data, when Trump was at the peak of his strength with Latino voters in South Texas. That assumption is now wobbling badly. A University of Houston/Texas Southern University poll last September found only 41 percent of Latinos who voted for Trump in 2024 would do so again, down from 53 percent. That number is likely far lower today. A recent Democratic win in a Tarrant County special election underscores this. The Democratic candidate won by 14 points in a district Trump had carried by 17. That’s a stunning swing.

The Brookings Institution has concluded the new Texas map will most likely net Republicans two seats, not five, and that in a genuine wave, Republicans could actually lose seats they believed were safe.

Florida could be walking into the same trap this week. Gov. Ron DeSantis called a special session to redraw the state’s congressional map. But Aubrey Jewett, a University of Central Florida political scientist, warned of the risk: “It’s possible you end up with, instead of a gerrymander, what we might call a dummymander. You’ve tried to help yourself but ended up hurting your own party and you lose seats.” That warning came right after Democrats flipped a Florida state House seat in Palm Beach—the county that includes Mar-a-Lago.

As Jeffries warned in his statement last night,

If Florida Republicans proceed with this illegal scheme, they will only create more prime pick-up opportunities for Democrats, just as they did with Trump’s dummymander in Texas. We will aggressively target for defeat Mario Díaz-Balart, Maria Elvira Salazar, Carlos Giménez, Kat Cammack, Anna Paulina Luna, Laurel Lee, Cory Mills and Brian Mast. We are prepared to take them all on, and we are prepared to win.

Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.

Now, that is the fighting spirit Dems need to retake the House.

Court challenges

We’re not out of the woods yet. Republicans have repeatedly sought to stop the Virginia plan in the courts. A Tazewell County circuit judge, who had run for the Virginia House of Delegates in 1999 as a Republican, twice ruled the amendment was unlawful, once in January and again in February, each time on different grounds. But the Virginia Supreme Court overruled both injunctions and allowed the election to proceed, setting oral arguments for April 27, six days after the election.

No one can predict how that court will rule, but it would certainly be unusual for a traditional conservative-minded court to overturn the will of both the legislature and the people on the kinds of technicalities that the Republicans raise. We’ll know more in a week.

The larger wild card is at the federal level. The Supreme Court is set to issue its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, a case that could gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. A broad ruling could allow Republican-controlled states to redraw majority-minority districts in states like Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas. This would reopen the redistricting board in ways that could dwarf anything Democrats gained in California or Virginia.

Election watchers are paying close attention to the opinion’s timing. If it arrives in June, that may not be enough time for red states to change their maps ahead of November’s midterms.

Trump’s hubris and his nemesis

The ancient Greeks had a precise word for what Donald Trump did in the summer of 2025. It wasn’t pride exactly. It was hubris.

To the Greeks, hubris referred to a specific kind of public overreach: the act of a powerful man who, flush with victory, reaches for more than the gods have allotted. The offense isn’t ambition. It is the assumption that the cosmic rules governing lesser beings no longer apply.

What followed in their telling was nemesis, named after the goddess of retribution. It describes how overreach generates its own undoing. With hubris and nemesis, a powerful man does not fall because someone defeats him. He falls because his own act of reaching throws the cosmos out of balance and sets forces in motion he cannot control.

Trump won the presidency, the Senate and the House—the latter by a thread. But he decided that wasn’t enough. He reached for the map itself, pressuring states to redraw district lines before voters could render a verdict on his administration. It was not enough to have power. He wanted power insulated from accountability.

Instead, he handed his opponents both a playbook and a rallying cry. California was the first to answer, Utah’s courts followed, and Virginia joined the fight last night. The forces Trump set in motion—i.e., mid-decade redistricting as a legitimate tool of political warfare—will outlast his administration and remain available to any Democratic majority that chooses to use them. (Hello, New York…) Trump has handed his opponents the very weapons he could least afford them to use.

The redistricting wars have shown that democratic institutions don’t preserve themselves through the virtue of one party alone. To end gerrymandering, in many key states Democrats had created non-partisan redistricting commissions, but the GOP took advantage of their good faith efforts. So Democrats adapted, moved quickly and came out fighting. They learned that preserving democracy sometimes requires battling on the terrain your opponents have chosen, with the very tools they normalized.

Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned Monday as Trump’s Secretary of Labor, the third Cabinet member to exit in his second term. You can be forgiven for not knowing her name, as she was hardly ever doing her job and seemed more interested in the, shall we say, “perks” of the job.

On this, she and Kristi Noem appear to be kindred spirits.

The White House said Chavez-DeRemer was leaving her post to “take a position in the private sector.” That’s the same euphemism used for both Noem and Pam Bondi when they were canned. Her attorney issued the obligatory statement that the departure “is not the result of legal wrongdoings. It is a personal decision.”

But there were plenty of alleged wrongdoings, as I’ll summarize below. It’s just that none of them actually got her fired. What ultimately did appears tied to the timing of her departure: A congressional hearing was scheduled for this Wednesday, and Democrats were openly preparing to humiliate the regime yet again by focusing on her alleged misconduct.

Chavez-DeRemer resigned Monday, two days before that could happen.

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Living it up on the public’s dime

Trump’s Labor Secretary’s tenure is a case study in how an official can treat an entire federal agency as her personal fiefdom, turning its staff into personal assistants for her and her family. The list of improprieties reads as eerily similar to Noem’s personal excesses and family drama.

A formal complaint filed with the Labor Department’s inspector general accused Chavez-DeRemer of an “inappropriate relationship” with a member of her security detail, specifically her bodyguard. The staffer was placed on leave in January. (At least there was no love nest on a private jet.)

Her alleged paramour was among four officials ultimately forced out as the IG’s investigation expanded, including her chief of staff and his deputy, who were given 24 hours to resign in early March. That probe found that the two had been manufacturing official reasons for Chavez-DeRemer’s travel by setting up professional events as cover for personal trips. Chavez-DeRemer had launched a “50-state ‘America at Work’ listening tour” early in her term, whatever that means. Staff described her as disconnected from the actual work of the department and as frequently out of Washington.

More like Miranda Beastly

Chavez-DeRemer was accused of blurring professional and personal boundaries through a pattern of bizarre, demanding requests. The New York Times obtained messages showing that she, her top aides and her family members routinely sent personal messages and requests to young, lower-level female staffers. In one exchange, she asked an employee to bring rosé to her hotel room. Her aides also directed young staffers to perform personal chores, including clearing out one of Chavez-DeRemer’s clothing closets.

If that sounds odd, it was the least of it. She also allegedly required employees to attend personally to her male family members—a highly unusual, inappropriate demand for federal staff. Specifically, she and her former deputy chief of staff instructed young female staffers to “pay attention” to her husband, Dr. Shawn DeRemer, and her 81-year-old father, Richard Chavez. In one message, Richard Chavez wrote to a young female staffer:

Hearing u/r in town. Wishing you would let me know. I could have made some excuses to get out and show u around. Please keep this private.

Her husband also messaged the same staffer, responding “You better” when she apologized for not being in touch.

Shawn DeRemer was eventually barred from the Labor Department’s Washington headquarters after two female staffers accused him of sexual assault. One staffer filed a police report with the Metropolitan Police Department in January. The D.C. police and federal prosecutors ultimately closed the investigation without charges, but the ban remained. (DeRemer’s lawyers have denied all allegations, but at least one instance was captured on camera.)

And in a nod to Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth and Jeanine Pirro, the probe also included complaints that Chavez-DeRemer drank during the workday and maintained a liquor stash in her office.

The federal government paid nearly $1 million to settle an employment discrimination claim arising from her office. And three formal EEO complaints were filed against Chavez-DeRemer alleging she fostered a hostile workplace and retaliated against women who reported her husband. The complaints described staff fearing punishment for speaking out or refusing directives they considered inappropriate. One complainant was the secretary’s own director of advance, who was fired a day after completing a four-hour interview under oath with the IG’s office.

The IG investigation was nearly complete, with Chavez-DeRemer’s own interview under oath scheduled for this week. She resigned before she had to sit for it.

Ethics shmethics. Just don’t make me look bad!

The Trump White House tolerates extraordinary levels of dysfunction, personal misconduct and institutional damage… so long as it all stays out of his spotlight. The threshold that triggers a firing isn’t some ethical or moral line; it’s purely political.

Take Kristi Noem. She had been politically radioactive for most of her tenure at Homeland Security. The open infidelity. Her disgraceful labeling of two U.S. citizens killed in Minneapolis as “domestic terrorists.” A $220 million ad campaign featuring her riding a horse in front of Mount Rushmore. Bipartisan fury over slow-walked disaster relief grants.

But it was Noem’s most recent disastrous appearance before Congress that finally broke the dam. After she claimed Trump had personally approved that nine-figure ad campaign, Trump’s allies pounced, describing the president as “livid” and claiming he hadn’t approved it. (In my view, he likely did, given how she’s made this same claim before with no pushback). Noem committed the mortal sin of making her problem Trump’s, under oath, on camera, and in public. And that got her fired two days later.

Or take Pam Bondi. Trump had been frustrated with his Attorney General for months over her failure to successfully prosecute his political enemies, including failed indictments of James Comey and Letitia James. But the Epstein files had become a public relations catastrophe. Bondi had gone on Fox to claim the Epstein client list was “sitting on my desk right now.” Congress passed a near unanimous bill, via discharge petition, forcing the release of large portions of the Epstein files. The disclosures were damning and kept Epstein/Trump in the news. House Oversight then subpoenaed Bondi’s testimony—and she was fired while that deposition was still looming.

The pattern is now both recognizable and consistent. Imminent, unspinnable public exposure, whether a congressional hearing, a deposition or an inspector general interview under oath, can trigger a quick departure to head off further scrutiny. It’s at that point that cabinet officials stop being assets for Trump and start becoming PR liabilities.

Chavez-DeRemer’s case follows this logic. The IG investigation had been grinding for months. Her rather public affair, the travel fraud, the family’s sexual misconduct, the toxic workplace complaints—Trump tolerated all of it so long as it remained contained. But the Wednesday public hearing, along with the IG interview scheduled for this week, shifted the calculus. The White House needed her out before she could pull focus and embarrass everyone.

A galling double standard

Bad PR, consistently negative headlines, and embarrassing the White House can get you canned by Trump, but it’s no surprise that women have been the first to go. They live and work, after all, under a glaring double standard that tolerates misconduct and incompetence in men but penalizes women for far less.

As a result, women in Trump’s cabinet enjoy a much shorter political runway when the ketchup hits the wall. Men with comparable or worse conduct records—Pete Hegseth at Defense, Kash Patel at the FBI, RFK Jr. at HHS—have remained in place.

Take the question of boozing on the job. Chavez-DeRemer’s IG probe included allegations of alcohol consumption during the workday. That’s admittedly a secondary allegation in a pile of more serious ones, but it is documented and now part of the public record. But rosé requests in the middle of the day seem tame compared to what we heard during Hegseth’s confirmation process. That surfaced sworn affidavit testimony that he had passed out drunk at family gatherings, had to be carried out of a Minneapolis strip club while in uniform during a National Guard drill weekend, and that his second wife had an escape plan involving a safe word. Hegseth promised senators he would not drink while serving as secretary, a pledge his chief of staff later reportedly undercut by spreading an unverified story about a disguised post-confirmation bender.

Then there’s Kash Patel. As I wrote about yesterday, The Atlantic published a report Friday citing more than two dozen current and former officials alleging that the FBI Director’s “conspicuous inebriation and unexplained absences” had alarmed colleagues. Briefings reportedly had to be rescheduled because of alcohol-fueled nights. Patel was allegedly often unreachable on time-sensitive decisions. And at one point Patel had a “freak-out” that he’d been fired and locked out of systems, when it was in fact just an IT glitch. Patel has now filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic, denying the allegations, but the outlet stands by its reporting.

Just imagine if any female cabinet members had been accused of the kind of behavior and incompetence Patel and Hegseth have exhibited.

For reasons having a lot to do with testosterone, Hegseth and Patel have so far stayed below the “embarrassment” threshold in Trump’s eyes. This remains true despite Hegseth publicly embarrassing himself with lapses in classified communication protocol in SignalGate and his near cartoonish behavior as a “Christian warrior” at the Pentagon, complete with reciting misquoted scripture that actually came from Pulp Fiction. Patel has remained in his job through multiple botched investigations with premature announcements of suspect captures, his personal use of an FBI jet to attend concerts with his girlfriend, and his perjurious statements under oath that Trump’s name did not appear in the Epstein files more than 100 times.

Trump values their loyalty, their ideological alignment, and their willingness to execute his agenda without friction. But the same calculus that took out Noem, Bondi, and Chavez-DeRemer could eventually apply to them, too. It just takes more to get there because, well, boys will be boys.

On Friday evening, just hours after The Atlantic published one of the most devastating investigative portraits of a sitting law enforcement official in recent memory, FBI Director Kashyap “Kash” Patel did what his boss always does: He went on X and threatened to sue everybody in sight. “See you and your entire entourage of false reporting in court… actual malice standard is now what some would call a legal lay up.”

It’s not an easy lay up, but this threat echoed his earlier response when the magazine contacted him for comment. “Print it, all false, I’ll see you in court — bring your checkbook,” he told the magazine in his official pre-publication comment.

This morning, Patel followed through on that threat, suing The Atlantic and reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick for defamation and demanding $250 million in damages.

Today, let’s walk through exactly why this is a case study in how not to respond to a damaging story.

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From blackout to freak-out

Sarah Fitzpatrick is an award-winning staff writer for The Atlantic. The piece, titled “The FBI Director Is MIA,” drew on interviews with more than two dozen current and former FBI officials, congressional staff, hospitality workers, political operatives and lobbyists. The portrait they collectively painted of Patel is damning.

The Atlantic reported that Patel has a pattern of “conspicuous inebriation” and that “he is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication,” which it said often took place at Ned’s, a private club in Washington, D.C., “in the presence of White House and other administration staff” as well as at the Poodle Room in Las Vegas.

Early in Patel’s tenure, meetings and briefings reportedly had to be rescheduled for later in the day because of his alcohol-fueled nights, per six current and former officials. On multiple occasions, according to information provided to Justice Department and White House officials, his own security detail had difficulty waking him because he appeared intoxicated.

In one particularly striking incident, a request for “breaching equipment” — the kind used by SWAT teams — was allegedly made because Patel was unreachable behind locked doors.

Then came the reported “freak-out.” On April 10, just over a week ago, Patel allegedly tried to log into an FBI computer. But sources told Fitzpatrick that Patel couldn’t get in due to a routine technical glitch. He immediately concluded, and even began alerting aides, that Trump had fired him. No less than nine sources were familiar with the incident, and two called it a “freak-out.”

Some described Patel’s tenure as “a management failure” and his personal behavior as “a national-security vulnerability.”

One official said, “That’s what keeps me up at night”—specifically, how Patel would handle a domestic terrorist attack. Senior administration officials, Fitzpatrick reported, are already discussing his potential successors. “We’re all just waiting for the word,” an FBI official told Fitzpatrick this week.

So say we all.

Everybody already knows, Kash

Patel’s core legal argument, as his attorney Jesse Binnall laid out in a pre-publication letter, is that the drinking allegations are not just false but fabricated. Binnall contends they rely on anonymous sources who “could not possibly possess firsthand knowledge” of events that, according to Binnall, simply never happened. Patel’s communications adviser, Erica Knight, was blunter: the alleged intoxication incidents occurred “exactly ZERO times.”

So, this kind of thing never happens?

As an initial matter, Patel would have to persuade a judge or jury that The Atlantic’s 26-plus sources—current agents, former officials, DOJ staff, White House staff, and hospitality workers who served him drinks at a private club—independently fabricated the same story. That’s pretty hard to imagine.

Moreover, Patel’s blanket denial runs counter to his public image, where conspicuous, exuberant drinking is part of his brand. Only two months ago, after the U.S. men’s hockey team won its first Olympic gold medal in 46 years, viral footage showed the FBI director chugging beer from a bottle, jumping up and down, spraying it across the locker room, and singing along to Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue.” A player then draped a gold medal around his neck.

In fairness, this wasn’t part of The Atlantic’s reporting. But it does make “exactly ZERO times” a hard phrase to say with a straight face.

It also raises real questions about his priorities. The Olympics beer celebration happened while the FBI was tracking an outbreak of cartel violence in Mexico, the Secret Service had just shot an armed man at Mar-a-Lago, and agents were searching for Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of Today co-anchor Savannah Guthrie, who had been abducted from her home three weeks earlier.

Eight former DOJ and FBI officials were so alarmed by the footage that they sent it directly to reporters. The FBI then spent days insisting—through spokesman Ben Williamson, the same man now calling The Atlantic’s reporting “completely false”—that Patel was in Milan strictly for law enforcement meetings and that it was “unfair” to link the trip as having anything to do with hockey.

Patel’s public response to the backlash was telling: “For the very concerned media—yes, I love America and was extremely humbled when my friends, the newly minted Gold Medal winners on Team USA, invited me into the locker room to celebrate this historic moment with the boys.”

(Yes, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation took a government jet—reportedly costing more than $100,000—to go hang with “the boys.”)

Nor was the Olympics episode a one-off. Lawmakers had previously investigated Patel for using the FBI’s Gulfstream for a “date night” to see his country singer girlfriend perform and for assigning an FBI SWAT team for her personal security. The pattern is consistent: Patel treats the instruments of federal law enforcement as personal amenities, has his spokesman deny it, then tweets a defiant statement. Now, like the man he most admires, he is suing.

The answer Donned on him

Patel did not invent this playbook; he is followign it. Donald Trump has spent decades using defamation threats and lawsuits as weapons of political warfare, not necessarily to win in court, but to punish, deter and force adversaries to spend time and money defending themselves.

The most recent instructive example: Trump sued the Wall Street Journal for $10 billion over its reporting that he had sent a sexually suggestive birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein. The suit named not just the Journal but Rupert Murdoch, the paper’s parent company News Corp, its CEO, and the two reporters who wrote the story. A Florida federal judge dismissed it last Monday, writing that the complaint came “nowhere close” to the actual malice standard — “Quite the opposite,” in the judge’s words. Trump has until April 27 to refile.

That dismissal extends a long pattern. A judge threw out Trump’s defamation suit against CNN in 2023. His suit against the New York Times over a Pulitzer Prize-winning financial investigation also got tossed. His most recent Times suit was dismissed for being unnecessarily long and overladen with political rhetoric.

But the two men do not stand in the same Florsheim shoes. Trump is a real estate mogul turned president who files suits backed by an army of lawyers and the capacity to absorb big losses. Patel is a former podcaster turned sitting FBI director suing a magazine over how he performs his official duties. The political theater is the same; the resources and institutional considerations are not.

There is also a pointed irony in Patel borrowing the Trump playbook here. The president’s own WSJ lawsuit was dismissed in part because the complaint itself showed that the Journal had first asked Trump for comment and attempted to investigate. That very effort at fairness, the judge found, negated any finding of actual malice.

Here, too, The Atlantic gave Patel’s team advance notice and a chance to respond before publication. Patel responded, “Print it, all false, I’ll see you in court.” That back-and-forth documents The Atlantic’s good-faith effort. It does not demonstrate its malice.

Don’t climb every legal mountain

Defamation suits brought against the press by public officials are notoriously hard to win. In the 1964 case of New York Times v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court established the “actual malice” standard for public figures suing the press. To prevail, an official must prove the publication knew the statements were false, or acted with reckless disregard for their truth or falsity. Under Sullivan, it’s not enough for Patel to show the story was wrong. The Atlantic must have published statements it knew were false or acted with reckless disregard for their truth.

That’s a tough burden, and Patel’s conduct since publication has only made things harder for him. He went on Fox to call The Atlantic “fake news mafia.” He tweeted combative screeds. His spokesman declared the reporting “completely false at a nearly 100 percent clip.” None of that is the careful, disciplined posture of a plaintiff building a viable “actual malice” case. It’s all political posturing and manufactured outrage. A plaintiff who announces his lawsuit on Sunday morning cable and files it the next day is playing to his base and to his boss, not building a legal record.

Patel’s attorney Binnall argues that the anonymous sourcing itself proves recklessness and that sources are inherently unreliable if they “could not possibly possess firsthand knowledge” of events that Patel claims never happened. But under Sullivan and its progeny, a publisher’s good-faith reliance on multiple credible sources, combined with a documented effort to seek the subject’s comment before publication, cuts strongly against a finding of recklessness.

A categorical denial from the subject does not, by itself, create a duty to kill the story. The Atlantic’s 26-plus sources, named venues and months of corroborating reporting from CBS News, CNN, the New York Times and the New York Sun create a record that makes a recklessness finding difficult to sustain.

He’s sued before, so he should know better

This is not Patel’s first encounter with the actual malice standard. He once sued CNN over coverage connecting him to Trump’s Ukraine pressure campaign. The courts dismissed it on the ground that he failed to adequately plead actual malice by specific individuals at CNN. Generalized institutional ill will toward Patel, the court found, was insufficient.

Of course, every defamation case turns on its own facts. The CNN dismissal shows, however, that Patel has already litigated this standard against a major media outlet and lost. He knows what he’s up against but is proceeding anyway.

Patel’s choice of attorney is curious. Binnall, who sent the pre-publication letter to The Atlantic and is leading the lawsuit, was also the lawyer hired by former North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson for his defamation suit against CNN. In that case, the network reported that Robinson had posted messages on a pornography website calling himself a “black Nazi,” expressing support for slavery, and describing Martin Luther King Jr. as “worse than a maggot.” Robinson denied the allegations and initially sought $50 million in damages. But he dropped the suit entirely in January 2025 and announced his withdrawal from politics. Binnall’s most prominent prior defamation case against a major news organization ended not with a verdict but a whimper.

Perhaps Patel’s eagerness to sue derives from when he once “prevailed” in a defamation case. There, he sued a blogger named Jim Stewartson who called Patel a “Kremlin asset” and claimed he had planned January 6. But that case resulted in a default judgment against a defendant who may never have been properly served. The judge awarded $250,000 but pointedly noted that there was “almost no concrete evidence of harm or damages suffered” and that, after all those alleged defamatory statements, Patel was still confirmed by the United States Senate as FBI director.

That “successful” case is hardly a template for this one. But it may be why Patel thinks he can roll the defamation dice.

But as I’ll explain below, it’s a very bad idea.

Discovery: the trap within the trap

Defamation lawsuits are two-way streets. The most favorable outcome for Patel would be an early dismissal on the pleadings, which sophisticated media defendants routinely seek. That would at least spare him the discovery process, even if it results in public confirmation that his complaint has no merit. Early dismissal is what happened to Trump’s WSJ suit. It’s what happened to Patel’s CNN suit. It’s not a win, just a faster loss.

Woe be to Patel should the case somehow survive a motion to dismiss and proceeds to discovery, where his exposure would compound. At that point, The Atlantic’s lawyers can subpoena Patel’s schedules, security detail logs, travel records and internal FBI communications. Patel himself would have to testify under oath. Reporters’ privilege protections are real, and The Atlantic’s anonymous sources would not be automatically unmasked. But documents reflecting his whereabouts, his availability during the incidents described, and his overall sobriety would be fair game. The news cycle would stretch for months.

His own lawyer made things worse

I have to point out one thing as an aside. In an unusual move, Patel’s attorney Binnall published his pre-publication letter to The Atlantic on Twitter, apparently to show that the magazine had been “on notice” that the claims were false before the piece was published. As discussed above, that’s largely irrelevant legally,

What is rather funny is that the pre-publication denial letter goes point by point through the allegations, labeling them defamatory—including allegations that The Atlantic had not yet published. Those included claims that sources described Patel as a “threat to public safety,” and that he had his security detail shut down the FBI Agents Store so he could shop alone. By denying allegations the public didn’t even know about, Binnall put them into circulation himself.

Whoops.

Fitzpatrick and The Atlantic respond

Reporter Fitzpatrick has not flinched. Appearing on MS NOW with Jen Psaki, she defended every word of the piece and explained why the sourcing, though anonymous, was credible at the highest level:

“These are not the types of people who are willing to speak out outside of the FBI, especially right now, because Kash Patel is going after people with polygraphs in a way that has never happened at the Bureau. So for it to be this level of alarm, this is people genuinely concerned that America is in danger as a result of this conduct.”

She also noted something significant: Neither the White House nor the Justice Department disputed anything when given the chance to respond prior to publication. Karoline Leavitt’s statement that Patel “remains a critical player” is institutional boilerplate, not a factual denial. Todd Blanche’s dismissal of “anonymously sourced hit pieces” as not constituting real journalism is his opinion, not a factual rebuttal.

Editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who knows something about hostile official pressure after the Signal chat scandal that exposed the Houthi strike plan, was brief and unequivocal: “We stand by our reporting on Kash Patel.”

Patel to the metal

Even before The Atlantic piece, Patel’s tenure had accumulated a damning history. In late February, just days before Trump launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran, Patel fired a dozen agents and staff from CI-12, the FBI’s Washington Field Office counterintelligence unit specializing in Iranian threats. He didn’t fire the agents for poor performance but in spiteful retaliation. The agents, it turns out, had previously worked on the investigation into Trump’s retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and had subpoenaed Patel’s own phone records as part of that probe.

One source called the firings “devastating to the FBI’s Iran program,” adding: “You can’t replicate that with new agents. These sources will go away.” House Democrats wrote to Patel demanding answers: “So while there is never a good time to undermine the FBI’s efforts to protect against foreign spy operations, the timing of your firing of counterespionage agents could not have been worse.”

Patel claims he’s going to court for vindication. Maybe he feels he has to go down swinging. But the question isn’t whether he can win a defamation suit. He cannot. The question is why he is dumb enough to try.

Perhaps a bit more liquid courage is all he needs.

We have raised $26,490 so far! That is a FANTASTIC start, with less than a week to go.

The math to the House Majority is simple. The GOP has 220 seats and we have 215. The magic number is 218. That means if we want the gavel, along with all the committee chairs and the power to subpoena witnesses and impeach Trump regime officials, we need to flip three seats net. That’s why I’m calling on my readers to concentrate our efforts on a handful of winnable toss-up House races.

Sure, we could win far more than that, but the key number is still three. I want us to do all we can to get over that finish line. Everything above is welcome padding!

So if you want your donation dollars to do the maximum good, join us in supporting JoAnna Mendoza for AZ-6. You can read more about JoAnna at the link below. I’d love to see us pass $30,000 tonight! Are you in?

Yes! Let’s Take Back the House!

Thank you in advance for any support you can give. Our democracy needs all of us.

Jay

Note: Xcancel links mirror Twitter without sending traffic. Some GIFs may load; just swipe them down. Issues? Click the gear on the Xcancel page’s upper right, select “proxy video streaming through the server,” then “save preferences” at the bottom. For sanity, don’t read the comments; they’re all bots and trolls. Won’t load? Paste the link into your browser and remove “cancel” after the X in the URL.

SNL’s cold open kicked the week off with Trump impersonator James Austin Johnson.

Weekend Update was a doozy, given the news cycle.

For a time it seemed like the U.S. was getting the short stick up a narrow Strait.

But the week’s news wasn’t all bad! Here’s Jon Stewart on the consequential and historic election in Hungary.

Meanwhile, Trump picked a very politically fraught fight with a fellow American. More on that from Stephen Colbert.

As the war of words grew, Andy Borowitz predicted Trump’s next move:

Trump didn’t waste much time before escalating. If Pope Leo is the boss of the Church, then Trump had to make himself… the boss of Leo, right?

Borowitz again, on that infamous meme:

Way to tie together the news cycle!

Colbert couldn’t resist.

Trump denied he intended to portray himself as our Lord and Savior. The internet went to work.

I feel like I’ve used this meme every week since last year when it first happened.

The man Trump was “healing” bore a certain resemblance to you know who, so folks ran with it.

Jon Stewart saw something else entirely unsettling.

Trump’s first excuse was that he thought he was a doctor healing the sick.

And we’re off to the races.

Remember this incident?

Surgeons need steady hands, right?

Someone made this observation, and now I’m wondering if the last part explains everything.

The internet is so darn fast, thanks to our artificial masters.

There was this moment in the middle of all this.

Many noted the irony of amplifying a Door Dash grandma who has to keep working to pay for her husband’s cancer treatments.

Even the religious right found the “Trump as Jesus” moment a blown-up bridge too far.

But we all know it won’t last.

Fox tried hard to get Trump back on message. It didn’t go well. Stephen Colbert, once again, with quite the impression.

A “glasses half full” moment?

FEMA may be shut down, but not that teleportation story.

Trump dispatched JD Vance and two real estate guys to Pakistan to broker a ceasefire and reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

JD brought his typical charm and diplomacy to the moment.

Just as Vance did with the Pope, now that he is a devout Catholic. Ronny Chieng on that story.

Let’s reflect on JD’s past record a moment.

And we can’t forget the First Lady, who gave a surprise press conference that put Epstein right back into the headlines.

Things suck here, but in Central Europe, there was cause for great celebration.

This could be us in November, folks!

Let’s wrap up the politics with this chilling observation.

If you’ve been enjoying this newsletter for a few months or more and would like to give a little back, please become a paid subscriber today. You support my work, and by extension, you support having an informed electorate with a dose of much needed optimism! I’m looking for just three readers today to upgrade from free to paid! All for about the cost of buying me a cup of coffee a month. How about it?

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This reunion moment between Christina Koch and her dog Sadie melted me.

Watching them on the beach together made my day.

I do believe my dog understands my every word. Here’s proof others do with their hoomans, too.

I’m sneaking a bit of politics in with this because it’s so dead on.

He may be smol, but he has them little claws for a reason!

I was not expecting this sound. Like, at all.

If not friend why butt head like friend?

Cats have a diverse vocabulary… across many cats.

I laughed a bit too hard at this. Sound up.

This was filmed on a rhino preserve. I actually had no idea what a baby rhino looked like. Those feet!

Looks like the one on the left fears the penalty for clipping.

They apparently have a whole YouTube channel. Wait, here’s the screenshot.

Okay, we need a calming moment. So let’s leave it to…

Back in human, or dare I say, superhuman affairs, I love how jokey the crew is with each other.

I missed this video when the protests were in full swing, so here it is again if you didn’t see it either!

Things only people of a certain age will appreciate. 10/10, no notes.

I was trying the “Jessica” trick that’s popular online, where you call out for “Jessica,” and your kid gets confused and stops mid-tantrum. It worked on mine!

But kids are getting wise. Now look what’s happening.

This is not only a dad joke, it is pegged to a very specific meme and time.

Have a great weekend! (And remember, in a few weeks, it’s gonna be May!)

Jay

Things have moved from the mendacious to the surreal in Trump World. In the course of a single day, we witnessed:

• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth quoting a Quentin Tarantino film as scripture during a Pentagon prayer service;

• President Trump absurdly claiming that the Pope supports Iran having nuclear weapons;

• Erika Kirk fabricating security threats to cover for an embarrassingly empty Turning Point USA rally; and

• RFK Jr. testifying before Congress and denying his own recorded statements about “reparenting” Black children.

Our politics are growing increasingly untethered from reality, which is both absurd and dangerous.

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Pulp Fiction

During a Pentagon worship service on Wednesday (let’s sit a moment with the fact that we now have official Pentagon worship services) and in reference to the rescue mission of a downed pilot in Iran this month, the very devout and God-fearing Pete Hegseth led what he called a military prayer titled “CSAR 25:17.” He claimed it was “meant to reflect Ezekiel 25:17” and asked everyone to “pray with me” as he recited what he presented as scripture.

Except it wasn’t. It was almost word-for-word the very fake Bible verse that Samuel L. Jackson’s hitman character recites in Pulp Fiction before executing his targets in cold blood.

Hegseth’s Pentagon Prayer version: “The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men... And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother.”

Jackson’s Hitman Kill version: “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men... And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers.”

The actual Ezekiel 25:17 is just one line: “And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.”

Side-by-side video comparison shows just how closely Hegseth’s “prayer” tracks Tarantino’s screenplay, down to the cadence and structure. See for yourself:

Fun fact: Tarantino lifted his own fake verse from a 1973 Japanese martial arts film, substituting “the Lord” for “Chiba the Bodyguard.”

Pope Fiction

Not to be outdone, Trump spent his time fabricating statements about Pope Leo XIV. In repeated press appearances, No. 47 insisted: “The Pope made a statement saying Iran can have [a] nuclear weapon” and “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon.”

Multiple fact-checkers gave Trump’s claim their most false rating. The Pope has consistently opposed nuclear weapons everywhere, including Iran. In March, Leo explicitly prayed: “May the nuclear threat never again dictate the future of humanity.” The Vatican signed the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in 2017.

When pressed for evidence of his claim, Trump’s spokesperson referred reporters back to his original Truth Social post. That’s it. No source, no recording, no statement because none exists. Just the President’s word that the Pope said something he demonstrably never said.

The Pope’s actual response, delivered from Africa: “I have no fear of the Trump administration, or speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel. That’s what I believe I am called to do.”

Kirk to (Criminal) Enterprise

Then there’s “Baby you’re a firework” Erika Kirk, who pulled out of an appearance at a Turning Point USA rally with Vice President JD Vance, claiming “very serious threats in her direction.” The rally’s spokesperson announced that Kirk had received threats serious enough that organizers briefly considered canceling the event altogether.

But the Secret Service told CBS News there were no credible threats to the event, the venue or to Vance, whom they was there protecting. While Kirk may have received hostile social media messages, they “were not part of any identified or actionable threat stream monitored by federal authorities.”

Apparently the “threats” were not serious enough to keep the Vice President of United States from appearing. Vance, after all, is accustomed to being sent into places where he’s bound to get a weak reception. And to be fair to Kirk, given Vance’s visibly shrinking influence, she understandably views herself as more important than him lately.

An alternative explanation for her no-show? Right-wing conspiracy peddler Candace Owens, who is no one’s favorite person either, accused Kirk of lying to cover up poor ticket sales, tweeting, “Stop. This is exhausting. You pulled out because of bad ticket sales. For the same reason TPFaith had to ‘reschedule’ the Pastor’s Summit and various other events quietly.”

Oh, come on, Candace. Be nice. The place was filled to the rafters for JD:

Black to Reality

The day’s most brazen denial came from Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr., who during a congressional hearing flat-out refused to acknowledge his own recorded statements about “reparenting” Black children on ADHD medication.

Rep. Terri Sewell (D-AL) began by quoting the Secretary’s own words back to him:

“Every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence, and those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get re-parented”

“I don’t even know what that phrase means, and I doubt that I said it,” Kennedy shot back. “I’m not going to answer something that I didn’t say.”

The House Ways and Means Democrats then posted the actual video from the 19Keys podcast, titling the clip “Video Receipts.” And there was Kennedy saying verbatim what Sewell had quoted.

As Sewell noted, suggesting the federal government should separate Black children from their families carries painful echoes of slavery and Jim Crow. Kennedy’s response was to deny he had ever uttered those words, a denial he has repeated numerous times despite recorded evidence to the contrary.

Maybe the brain worm made him do it?

In a coda to this absurdity, TMZ, which has recently begun hounding members of Congress as part of its regular pop culture reporting, chased down Kennedy after the hearing to ask about a different story entirely: his recently revealed 2001 diary entry describing how he cut the penis off a dead raccoon while his kids waited in the car.

TMZ? More like TMI. Here’s the passage in question:

“I was standing in front of my parked car on I-684 cutting the penis out of a road-killed raccoon, thinking about how weird some of my family members have turned out to be.”

Wait. How weird must the other Kennedy family members be for RFK Jr. to be thinking about how weird they are?

His security team quickly hustled him away from TMZ, and the universe breathed a sigh of relief that it didn’t actually get further details about the raccoon penis.

And here are the results of last week’s poll!

We’re all starved for it, actually, after just 15 months of this incompetent, dangerous fool and his cronies back in power. To get past their blundering, we need to understand its origins, its risks and what history suggests comes next. The news, it turns out, is good… if we can get through the current crisis.

I write about that hunger for competence, and some glimmers of hope that it’s just around the corner, in The Big Picture today. You should receive it in your inboxes if you’re a subscriber. It’s separate from the writing I do here at The Status Kuo, but it’s a great complement to it. If you’re not yet signed up, you can do so for free or as a voluntary paid supporter here:

I’m in! ‘Cuz I’m Hungry For Competence!

I’ll see you back here at The Status Kuo tomorrow.

Jay

There’s a question I haven’t seen answered yet.

We all know by now that Trump attacked Pope Leo XIV on Easter Sunday, posted an AI image of himself as Jesus, and spent the week watching Catholic bishops, cardinals, and lay leaders—including conservatives who voted for him—express their dismay in the some of the bluntest terms to date.

But what will this cost Trump and his party at the ballot box? Will Catholics choose religious principles over MAGA politics? And if we do see Catholic support for Trump erode, where specifically could this affect the electoral math?

How worried should Republicans be about losing the Catholics heading into the November midterms?

It turns out that the answers are not only more concrete but more damaging than the GOP would like to admit publicly.

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The drift was already underway

By January of this year, weeks before Operation Epic Fury, and months before Trump’s Easter meltdown, Catholic support for Trump was already eroding. Pew Research data showed his approval among white Catholics had slipped seven points from the start of his second term. Among Hispanic Catholics, the drop was even steeper, falling eight points.

Two months can change a great deal. A Fox poll conducted in late March pushed his overall Catholic approval below 50 percent for the first time, with a lopsided 40 percent saying they strongly disapprove, a critical signal of how deeply dissatisfaction now runs.

John White, professor emeritus of politics at The Catholic University of America, put it bluntly: Trump’s 2024 coalition is “now in tatters, and Catholics are no exception.”

Pew’s senior researcher Gregory A. Smith told OSV News, a Catholic news and information service, that the change had taken place “over the course of the year, rather than recently or rapidly.” In other words, this was not a reaction to a single bad week. Immigration enforcement, tariffs, cost of living, the steady drumbeat of norm-breaking—all of it had been steadily building.

But unhappiness over the Iran war, with its consequences at the pump, now appears to have further accelerated the trend. And Trump’s Easter Sunday attacks on the Pope may have broken something that was already badly cracked.

To be clear, Catholic erosion is part of a broader pattern. Pew’s January 2026 survey found approval down across virtually every religious group — evangelicals, mainline Protestants, and Catholics alike.

But unlike evangelicals, Catholics are a genuine swing bloc—still Republican-leaning but with real room to move, unlike groups firmly in the Democratic column. And they are concentrated in precisely the suburban battleground districts and states where even a three- to five-point shift could prove decisive.

We can now add a specific and ongoing institutional pressure that no other group faces: a public spat between a warmongering president and an American pope with sky-high approval ratings among Catholic Republicans.

Pope Leo ain’t no Pope Francis

To be clear, Trump has attacked popes before, which may explain his willingness to take on Pope Leo. He and Pope Francis clashed for years. But Trump’s attacks on Leo carry far more political risk.

To understand why, we need to rewind to Francis’s papacy. Conservative American Catholics had their own grievances with the Vatican during this time. Francis was Argentine, identified as theologically liberal, and had tangled with Republican bishops over climate, LGBTQ+ inclusion and immigration for more than a decade. By the end of his papacy, Gallup found only 42 percent of American conservatives viewed Pope Francis favorably. For Trump, that meant attacking Francis came with limited political cost because much of the MAGA Catholic base had already cooled on him.

Pope Leo is a different proposition. Last September, Pew Research surveyed American Catholics and found 84 percent held a favorable view of the new pope. Among Catholic Republicans specifically, that number was also 84 percent, far higher than the 69 percent who still viewed Pope Francis favorably in his final months. Leo enters this fight with Trump with a reserve of goodwill among conservative Catholics that Francis simply did not have.

When Leo was elected last May, a significant segment of Catholic Republicans hoped he would take the Church in a different direction than Francis had led it. Pew found that 18 percent of Catholic Republicans believed Leo would be different from Francis and saw that as a good thing. That may sound small, but it’s still more than double the share of Catholic Democrats who felt the same way.

But that wasn’t to be. Leo has been just as outspoken as Francis on immigration and war, and in some ways more direct. He is simply harder to dismiss, because he is one of their own, and Trump 2.0 on immigration and war is significantly to the right of Trump 1.0.

Professor White captures what makes this psychologically distinct from the Francis years. Pope Leo’s “strong and blunt statements about the war,” White told EWTN News, formerly the Catholic News Agency, create “a higher level of cognitive dissonance among Catholics who support Trump but are hearing the words of the pope.” For some, he said, that dissonance will shift opinions. Maybe not for all, but for a good number.

David Gibson, director of Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture, framed the stakes even more starkly. While many Catholics have been standing by Trump and criticizing their own bishops for speaking out, eventually they will be faced with “choosing a Catholic-baiting president over their own pope.” That could sit uneasily for many, particularly those already unhappy with the job Trump is doing and the way he is actively insulting Pope Leo.

Gibson observed, “American presidents and American Catholics have disagreed with popes in the past. But this is disrespect. Disrespect is way different than disagreement, and that’s the danger for Trump here.”

Where the Catholic vote really counts

Catholics make up roughly one in five voters nationally. But that national figure obscures their true electoral weight. Catholics are a true swing voting group and are heavily concentrated in the battlegrounds that will decide 2026.

New York and New Jersey, two states where nearly a third of all residents are Catholic, account for six competitive House seats between them. In New York, Cook Political Report rates Rep. Mike Lawler’s Hudson Valley seat (NY-17) a true toss-up, having moved from “lean Republican” in November 2025. Meanwhile, three Democratic incumbents (Reps. Laura Gillen (NY-4), Tom Suozzi (NY-3) and Josh Riley (NY-19)) hold seats rated “lean Democratic,” leading both parties to play offense in the state.

In New Jersey, Cook Political rates Rep. Tom Kean Jr.’s NJ-7 race a toss-up (also having moved from “lean Republican” in November 2025) and is a top Democratic target. Meanwhile, NJ-9, held by freshman Democrat Rep. Nellie Pou, remains a top Republican target and is both on the DCCC’s initial Frontline list and the NRCC’s initial target list for the 2026 cycle.

That’s six seats in play, in just two blue states, where Catholic voters make up an outsized share of the electorate and where even a modest shift in that bloc could hand Democrats the House majority.

Zoom out and the picture grows even clearer. A Newsweek analysis mapped Catholic population data against competitive race ratings across the full 2026 battlefield and found the overlap striking. Pennsylvania (21.8 percent Catholic) has three vulnerable Republican-held seats and Wisconsin (21 percent Catholic) has one of the most competitive districts in the country. In the Senate, Michigan, Maine, Ohio, Georgia, and North Carolina all have tight races where the Catholic vote could prove decisive.

Among the demographic fault lines within Catholic voting, none may matter more in suburban swing districts than gender. An EWTN/RealClear poll conducted last November, when Trump still held majority Catholic support, already showed 62 percent of male Catholic voters viewing him favorably compared with only 45 percent of female Catholic voters. Catholic women are more likely to live in the suburban districts that flip House seats, more likely to cite the Church’s social teaching on care for the vulnerable as a political priority, and, as the same poll showed, less likely than men to rank deportations as a top priority.

No subsequent poll has broken down Catholic approval of Trump by gender, but the overall Catholic approval numbers have dropped sharply since that November 2025 poll, and broader polling consistently shows women moving away from Trump faster than men. The Catholic gender gap—already baked in before Iran and the pope fight—has likely widened.

There is also the Hispanic Catholic dimension. PRRI data from February showed Hispanic Catholic favorability toward Trump at just 25 percent, down from a high of 37 percent in September 2024. That collapse—driven by immigration enforcement, economic anxiety, and now an ugly war the Church has explicitly condemned—has direct implications for competitive districts in Texas, New Jersey and New York, where Latino Catholics comprise a significant share of the electorate.

Deeper than one bad weekend

There is growing friction between Trump’s governing agenda and basic Catholic social teaching. And it cuts across nearly every major policy area, not just the Iran war.

On April 12, three of the most senior Catholic cardinals in the United States — Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, and Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark—sat down together on 60 Minutes to address the war and immigration enforcement, in a rare joint interview. Their joint appearance was itself a statement; the last time the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a special unified message criticizing a sitting president’s policy was more than a decade ago.

Cardinal McElroy framed the Church’s “just war” argument in terms that left little room for interpretation. “The Catholic faith teaches us there are certain prerequisites for a just war,” he said. “You can’t go for a variety of different aims. You have to have a focused aim, which is to restore justice and restore peace. That’s it.” He acknowledged Iran’s government as “an abominable regime” that “should be removed” — and then said plainly that “this is a war of choice that we went into.” In a separate homily, McElroy said each of the administration’s policy failures in Iran “is equally a moral failure which under Catholic ‘just war’ principles renders both the initiation of this war and any continuation of it morally illegitimate.”

Cardinal Cupich took aim at something more specific: the White House’s social media presentation of the war, which has included videos splicing together clips from Top Gun, Braveheart, and video games like Grand Theft Auto with actual combat footage. “We’re dehumanizing the victims of war,” Cupich told 60 Minutes, “by turning the suffering of people and the killing of children and our own soldiers into entertainment.” He called it “sickening.” The congregation at his Washington peace Mass responded with several minutes of applause.

On immigration, the tensions are just as stark. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a rare unified rebuke last November denouncing the administration’s “indiscriminate mass deportation of people.” That statement was approved by more than 95 percent of voting bishops. Pope Leo then urged Americans to heed the bishops’ message. Cardinal Tobin of Newark, also on 60 Minutes, called ICE a “lawless organization” when agents “have to hide their identities to terrify people” and violate constitutional guarantees.

Then there is the economic disconnect. When EWTN and RealClear polled Catholic voters last November and asked which Trump campaign promise mattered most, 40 percent said reducing inflation, by far outpacing every other issue. Only 15 percent named deportations. Catholics voted for economic relief, but it’s not at all what they got. As affordability grows ever more out of reach, driven in part by the war of choice the Church has now condemned, these economic voters may angrily vote their pocketbooks in 2026, just as many did in 2024.

Pope over president?

Kathleen Sprows Cummings, a professor of American Studies and History at Notre Dame, offered the long view on Trump’s fight with the pontiff: “Emperors, monarchs, and despots have long threatened popes in an effort to force them to bend to their will,” she said. “In an American context, however, Trump’s invective does represent a historic reversal.”

And David Gibson’s question raised earlier—will Catholics choose the pope or the president?—now looms large, especially going into the fall campaign. In 2024, Trump won Catholic voters by 12 points. That margin is now underwater in national polling, and the dioceses that matter most to the midterm map are in the states where the Senate and House majorities will be decided.

The November answer remains uncertain. But the question has never been more open.