Trump’s national intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard resigns
Gabbard is the fourth cabinet member to leave under Trump's second term

Donald Trump calls climate change a “hoax,” a “scam,” and a “con job.” He has (twice) withdrawn the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement, and he has pulled the plug, or tried to, on “the Green New Scam,” which is what he calls President Joe Biden’s extensive subsidies to alternative energy in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. (The Green New Deal, as Trump well knows, is a separate and never-enacted set of decarbonization policies advocated by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey.) Trump’s energy motto is “Drill, Baby, Drill”; he’s showered the petroleum industry with $80 billion in subsidies, and his Iran War is delivering sky-high windfall profits to the oil industry.Nevertheless, through a combination of stubbornness, incompetence, and senility, Trump is inadvertently boosting the fortunes of alternative energy to a degree not seen since Biden was president. If he keeps this up, the Natural Resources Defense Council may have to erect a statue in his honor.As I write, the international benchmark price of Brent crude is trading around $108.50 per barrel, and gasoline is priced, nationally, at an average $4.56 per gallon. In Washington, D.C., where I live, and where members of Congress in vulnerable districts have been known to gas up, the price is an even higher $4.67 per gallon. By attacking Iran, Trump prompted that nation’s ruling regime (very predictably) to close the Strait of Hormuz. Trump has made it unaffordable for Americans to fill their gas tanks. That’s bad. But the silver lining is that sky-high gas prices are a blessing to the environment. “Renewable Energy Is Booming Again,” says Barron’s. “Trump May Not Be a Fan of Clean Energy, But Iran War Is Accelerating Global Shift From Oil and Gas,” says The Guardian. “The Iran War Is Driving a Clean Energy Wake-Up Call,” says the climate-focused Canary Media. You can call it “The Only Good News From Iran” (David Wallace-Wells, New York Times), or you can call it “Donald Trump’s Green New Deal” (Tej Parikh, Financial Times). Parikh’s headline irritated me because that’s the one I pitched to my editor. It was already taken because the characterization is true. Regrettably, this clean-energy boom is happening mostly outside the United States, and especially in China, which was already cleaning our clock on renewable energy. Still, Planet Earth doesn’t care where carbon reductions originate, so long as they originate from someplace.In Barron’s, Avi Salzman reported that China doubled its exports of solar energy equipment in March. Its solar exports dipped a little in April, but still were 60 percent higher than a year earlier. Also in April, China’s exports of alternative-fuel vehicles more than doubled over the previous year, reaching a record high. Domestically, Nicholas Kusnetz and Georgina Gustin reported in Inside Climate News, China’s investment in green technologies is softening the blow of higher oil prices. For example, more than half of all new cars sold last year in China were electric. Outside China, solar generation was up 15 percent over the previous year during the war’s first month. Wind power was up 8 percent, and hydropower was up 2 percent. Jigar Shah, who was an Energy Department official in the Biden administration, predicted to Matthew Zeitlin of Heatmap News that clean energy spending will double globally to $400 billion per month by the end of this year, all thanks to Trump’s Iran War. In Europe, electric-car sales rose 51 percent over the previous year in March and 34 percent over the previous year in April. Alternative-fuel vehicle sales more than doubled in March in Japan, Korea, and New Zealand over the previous year, and rose more than 50 percent in India and Australia.In spite of Trump’s efforts to kill it, some of this alternative-energy boom is tiptoeing into the United States. The energy storage industry, which includes solar, hydropower, and batteries, reported record growth in January, February, and March. The proliferation of data centers was the primary driver, but “disruptions to global gas and gas turbine supplies” also helped, Reuters reported. This expansion occurred even as Trump cancelled $7 billion in solar subsidies. During that same period, investment in electric vehicles increased by $1.1 billion (even as employment fell nearly by six thousand jobs due to Trump’s policies discouraging EV production). “The US renewables rollout has been more resilient to Trump’s anti-green policies than many first thought,” concluded Parikh in Financial Times, noting that in March the United States, for the first time in history, generated more electricity from renewable energy than from gas.
Gabbard is the fourth cabinet member to leave under Trump's second term
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard resigned Friday, citing her husband’s battle with a rare form of bone cancer. “My husband, Abraham, has recently been diagnosed with an extremely rare form of bone cancer. He faces major challenges in the coming weeks and months. At this time, I must step away from public service to…
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, whose anti-war views spurred tension with the White House, said she was resigning from the post to help her husband confront a bone-cancer diagnosis.
Critics were left dumbstruck on Friday after President Donald Trump characterized a taxpayer-funded settlement he reached as an act of selflessness, a remark that some noted had also severely undercut his own past remarks.On his social media platform Truth Social, Trump complained Friday morning that he “gave up a lot of money” after agreeing to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service in exchange for a nearly $1.8 billion settlement, with the funds earmarked for payouts to those who allege to have been unfairly targeted by the Biden administration’s Justice Department.Trump said that in lieu of a personal payout that could have been an “absolute fortune,” he instead opted to “help others” who were “badly abused by an evil, corrupt and weaponized Biden administration.” His remarks also come after he previously claimed to not be “involved” in the creation of the fund.Trump’s framing of securing a nearly $1.8 billion payout from taxpayers to potentially secure payments for the president’s donors or violent Jan. 6 Capitol rioters, critics argued, was stunning.“Not content to just rip us all off, he expects praise for it,” noted author Jennifer Erin Valent in a social media post on X.Others, like podcast host “Hal for NY,” whose videos on YouTube have amassed more than 71 million views, pointed to what appeared to be a glaring contradiction Trump made in his remarks.“Funny, because he told us he had nothing to do with it. Now he wants a thank you?” they wrote in a social media post on X to their nearly 18,000 followers.And Joanne Carducci, a prominent Democratic political commentator, wrote to her more than 1 million followers on X: “I thought he said he had nothing to do with the slush fund?”I thought he said he had nothing to do with the slush fund? 🧐— Jo (@JoJoFromJerz) May 22, 2026
'Abraham has been my rock throughout our eleven years of marriage — standing steadfast'
Tulsi Gabbard notified President Trump she is resigning as DNI, citing her husband Abraham's diagnosis with an extremely rare form of bone cancer.
President Donald Trump urged Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh on Friday to ignore public musings about fiscal policy — even from the commander in chief himself — and operate “independently.” “Honestly, I really mean this. This is not said in any other way. I want Kevin to be totally independent,” he told the East Room […]
President Donald Trump says no one in the US is better prepared to lead the Federal Reserve than Kevin Warsh as he swears Warsh in at the White House as the 17th chair of the Fed. (Source: Bloomberg)