'Ouch': Elena Kagan shocks ex-prosecutor with blistering attack on Trump lawyers

Trump's latest botch exposes his 'comical' but 'ominous' threats

President Donald Trump's administration has become mired in embarrassment over his latest botched remodeling project, but according to a new analysis from MS NOW, the threats he has made in response to the affair reveal him as both "comical" and "ominous."As part of his ongoing campaign to remodel iconic fixtures of Washington, D.C., to his own liking, Trump made a big deal out of his plan to have the Lincoln Memorial's Reflecting Pool painted a color he called "American Flag Blue." Once the project — handed off to a GOP donor through a swift no-bid contract — was completed, it promptly blew up in his face, as the pool became overrun with green algae, which numerous experts have said was actively made worse by the change in color.Despite the administration's efforts, the algae have remained, threatening to stick around as a highly visible embarrassment for Trump during the country's 250th birthday celebrations. In response to this predicament, Trump has tried to save face by claiming that the algae bloom was caused by vandals, with a former Olympian getting arrested and charged by the U.S. Park Police after touching a piece of peeling paint in the Reflecting Pool. Multiple other people near the pool, whom Trump accused of being "vandals," have also been arrested, though there have been no charges leveled against them.Writing for MS NOW on Saturday, political strategist Symone Sanders-Townsend argued that "the ongoing debacle of the Reflecting Pool has been a helpful distillation of [Trump's] approach" to governance: "Make a big promise, use it to reward your allies, blame setbacks on your opponents, criminalize dissent and then attack the press.""The first three steps are fairly common in politics, especially among populists with little experience in government," she explained. "But it’s the last two that turn Trump into something more than just a run-of-the-mill incompetent politician. Authoritarianism often begins with the habit of treating ordinary problems as criminal conspiracies. A court strikes down his policy, and he calls the judge 'crooked' or 'corrupt.' A protest escalates, and he calls the protesters 'paid agitators.'”She added: "If an authoritarian government cannot accept criticism, then it has to label critics enemies. If it cannot admit a mistake, then it has to blame sabotage. And if it cannot accept failure, then it has to find someone to punish."Sanders-Townsend further argued that while it may be "comical" to see Trump deploy this predictable authoritarian playbook over something like the Reflecting Pool debacle, it is also "ominous" and must be taken seriously. This sort of impulse, she explained, is exactly why the nation's founders "built a system designed to restrain power rather than indulge it.""The Reflecting Pool is simply the latest reminder that, in Trump’s Washington, the line between politics and criminality is growing dangerously thin," she continued. "That’s because the common thread is not just inflammatory rhetoric. It is the growing weaponization of government against ordinary political activity and the ordinary people who engage in it. When a president begins treating ordinary politics as criminality, it does not stay rhetorical for long. Eventually, someone gets investigated. Someone gets detained. Someone gets arrested."

Trump Now to Receive Housing Bill, SAVE America Still Mired in Senate

NYT bombshell: Trump sons cash in on $1.6 billion federal mining deal

President Donald Trump’s sons are profiting off of their father’s connections, including in a previously-undisclosed deal over a lucrative metal.“Their sons were soon doing business with partners in a deal that their fathers were negotiating, continuing a pattern of self-enrichment in the second Trump administration that has few precedents in American history,” wrote The New York Times’ Paul Sonne and Eric Lipton on Sunday. The report covered how Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump availed themselves of a meeting between Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in September to grant a little-known American company called Kaz Resources access to their tungsten mines.Prior to that meeting, the Trump administration approved preliminary applications for up to $1.6 billion in federal financing for Kaz Resources to break ground on the project in rural Kazakhstan. Dominari Securities, which is partly owned by the Trump sons, agreed to take a 20 percent stake in the tungsten projects.“Around the same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment company controlled by Mr. Lutnick’s family and overseen by his sons Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, helped one of the lead investors working with Dominari on the Kazakh deal raise $210 million in new capital for a related entity,” Sonne and Lipton wrote. “Such rounds of fund-raising typically net Cantor millions of dollars in fees.”They added, “The Kazakh deal was ultimately signed on Nov. 6, six days after the investment involving the Trump sons and their partners, which was not publicly disclosed at the time. The arrangement is hardly an outlier. One or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals, including the Kazakhstan project, according to federal filings examined by The New York Times.”This is not the only occasion when the Trump family has come under scrutiny for profiting from the White House, as has Trump himself. Earlier this month the American Economic Liberties Project and Groundwork Collaborative released a joint report called “The Price of Corruption: How Trump’s Pay-to-Play Administration is Driving Up Costs for Working Families,” which described how the Trumps’ alleged corruption has literally cost ordinary Americans a lot of money.“When Trump rolled out TrumpRX earlier this year, the administration claimed it was a way for Americans to access more affordable prescription drugs,” the report pointed out. “Instead, the platform fails to disclose information about less expensive generic alternatives and, in some instances, charges consumers more for products that are available for less elsewhere.”It added that TrumpRx “serves as free advertisement for Big Pharma and may be lining the pockets of the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who is on the board of prescription drug platform BlinkRX, which stands to benefit from the administration’s promotion of direct-to-patient medicine sales.”It also observed that Trump’s tariffs have raised the cost of imported goods for consumers while also enriching Trump himself, citing as one example when he reduced Swiss tariffs “just a few days after Swiss business leaders presented him with a personalized gold bar worth more than $130,000 and a Rolex desk clock.” Conversely, when Trump’s fellow right-winger, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, faced legal consequences for plotting a coup to illegally stay in power after losing an election to current President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva, Trump used tariffs to retaliate.“Americans paid the price for Trump’s international allies breaking the law,” the report pointed out, “as coffee imported from Brazil surged to a 40% increase in price.”

GOP governor urges Trump to reconsider Haiti TPS after Supreme Court decision

Ohio Gov. Mike Dewine (R) on Sunday called on the Trump administration to reconsider pushing for the elimination of temporary protected status (TPS) for Haitian migrants following the Supreme Court’s recent decision on the program. The high court ruled 6-3 that the Trump administration can remove thousands of Haitians and Syrians who currently have TPS,…

Trump Says He Is Nominating Former Oklahoma State Trooper Lance Schroyer As ICE Director

President Donald Trump says he is nominating Lance Schroyer as the next director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Trump’s Next ICE Pick: A Trooper Poised to Turn Local Cops Into Deportation Agents

On Saturday, President Trump nominated Lance Schroyer, a former Oklahoma State Trooper, to serve as the Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. If confirmed, he would become the agency’s first permanent director since 2017. The pick signals a broader push to integrate local and federal law enforcement. Schroyer has 29 years of state law enforcement […]

Supreme Court's blockbuster week will put Trump's power to the test

The Supreme Court's final week of the term is shaping up to be a blockbuster, with several remaining cases carrying major implications regarding the scope of President Trump's power. The big picture: Three of the eight cases awaiting ruling hinge on what Trump — and future presidents — can or can't do in office, including determining who gets to be an American and what checks there are for a president's ability to fire federal officials. Trump is no stranger to pushing the limits as commander in chief, and told "The Axios Show" last week that there are "no limits" to his power in office since going to war with Iran. But federal courts have demarcated the limits to what a president can do, often to Trump's ire. Driving the news: Perhaps the biggest decision remaining before the court is Trump's attempt to end birthright citizenship.Immigration advocacy groups and constitutional scholars tell Axios that the Constitution's 14th Amendment and subsequent legal precedent clearly protect the right to citizenship for children born in the U.S.But if the court were to gut those protections, there would be "mass chaos at every hospital in the United States," warns Todd Schulte, the president of immigration and criminal justice advocacy group FWD.us."A patchwork level of citizenship loss and stateless children being born across the United States would fundamentally alter the day-to-day lives of tens of millions of Americans," he adds.At oral arguments earlier this year, key justices appeared skeptical of the government's case, but no one knows how they will ultimately rule.Meanwhile, the court is also weighing whether the central bank and independent agency commissioners are insulated from the president's political whims to say, "You're Fired!""Trump has attempted to exercise an extremely aggressive and expansive view of presidential authority, under which he can ignore or rewrite laws that Congress has passed and even rewrite the Constitution itself," says Thomas Wolf, the director of democracy initiatives at the Brennan Center.The court appeared skeptical of Trump's ability to boot Cook, whose attorneys argued siding with the president would undermine the Fed's independence.But the court seemed more open to Trump firing FTC members, which would be a blow to a 90-year-old precedent guarding independent agency commissioners from political firings.The stakes of the Supreme Court's other upcoming decisions are also immensely high. Here's what else is on the justices' plate:Election lawThe Supreme Court must weigh in on a dispute over a Mississippi law allowing election officials to count mail-in ballots received up to five days after Election Day.Striking down Mississippi's law could have implications for other states that have similar grace periods.Also outstanding is a decision on a Republican challenge to limits on how much money political parties can spend in coordination with candidates.The Supreme Court upheld coordinated party expenditure limits in 2001.Trans athletesThe court has outstanding cases over transgender athlete bans in Idaho and West Virginia, and the conservative justices seemed poised to uphold the bans.The court's decision could enshrine that Title IX does not mean transgender athletes can compete in sports aligning with their gender identity.Geofencing and the Fourth AmendmentThe justices were also posed with a question over whether a geofence warrant that led to a robbery conviction violated the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unreasonable searches or seizures.Per Brookings, the court does not seem poised to categorically reject or uphold the constitutionality of such warrants.Go deeper: Supreme Court backs Trump on stricter asylum rules

'Stupid' Trump mocked by conservatives for revealing his ignorance on US passport basics

President Donald Trump's unveiling of a redesigned U.S. passport — complete with a "welcome" message and an image of himself — drew ridicule this week, with critics arguing the greeting makes no sense on a document meant for Americans traveling abroad.Trump had posted an image of what he called the new commemorative passport, marking the country's 250th anniversary, writing: "The U.S.A.'s New Passport, which says, 'Welcome, but be good!' President DJT." The design featured a photo of the president alongside patriotic imagery.The anti-Trump conservative outlet The Bulwark seized on the "welcome" framing in a segment by host Tim Miller, who questioned whether the president grasped the basic purpose of the document.In the video, Miller noted that Trump had updated the passport with the message "Welcome, but be good," then raised the obvious problem."This raises the question, does Donald Trump know what a passport is for? Welcome to who? The US passport is for Americans. We use it to go other places," Miller said.He framed the confusion as cause for concern about the president's faculties, in a line The Bulwark highlighted: "It's pretty concerning that the President of the United States either is so stupid that he doesn't know what a passport is or that his mentals are declining at such a rate that he's forgotten."Miller went on to mock the image of the president on the document, describing "a glowering president reminding Americans welcome in your own house, in your own country" — before working in a reference to Trump's legal history with the aside, "I've been indicted several times."He closed with a note of resignation: "This is it, I guess. This is real life."Conservative commentator and Bulwark contributor Bill Kristol also amplified the segment, calling Miller's take "very good" and adding his own variation on the critique."Trump clearly doesn't understand that a passport is for Americans, since the message he's delivering is suitable for a visa for foreigners," Kristol wrote.