At the Cannes Film Festival, international attendees mourn the decline of American culture — and democracy
Iran is pushing back on parts of a tentative deal being negotiated by the Trump administration that could put an end to the war between the two countries. President Trump on Saturday evening announced the two sides were moving close to a deal. Iranian officials have acknowledged the talks, and have even said there has…
Donald Trump posted an image Sunday morning on Truth Social depicting former President Barack Obama and several of his top national security officials dressed in orange prison jumpsuits, in what appears to be a direct threat against a former president and his allies.The image, styled as a Brady Bunch-style grid of mugshots, showed Obama — labeled "Barack Hussein Obama" — alongside former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, former UN Ambassador Samantha Power, former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, and former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, who was labeled 'Ben "Hamas" Rhodes.' The graphic was captioned with, "The Shady Bunch.""This is a bad (Sick!) group of people," Trump wrote. "Very destructive to our great Nation. Caused tremendous damage through Weaponization! President DJT"The post comes as Trump's Justice Department has moved aggressively against perceived political enemies. Trump has repeatedly suggested — without evidence — that Obama-era officials engaged in illegal surveillance and other misconduct against his 2016 campaign, a conspiracy theory his supporters refer to as "Obamagate."
A Texas congressional primary race sparks veteran outrage after a PAC-funded ad mocks candidate Carlos De La Cruz's 100% military disability rating.
White House communications director Steven Cheung unleashed a profanity-laced broadside against former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo after Pompeo criticized the Trump administration's emerging deal with Iran — setting off a wave of condemnation from commentators across the political spectrum.Pompeo had posted that the deal "being floated with Iran seems straight out of the Wendy Sherman-Robert Malley-Ben Rhodes playbook," warning it would "pay the IRGC to build a WMD program and terrorize the world." He called it "not remotely America First" and demanded the administration simply "open the damned strait."Cheung, a former UFC communications director, fired back with language rarely seen from an official White House spokesman. "Mike Pompeo has no idea what the f--- he's talking about," Cheung wrote. "He should shut his stupid mouth and leave the real work to the professionals. He's not read into anything that's happening, so how would he know."The statement triggered immediate blowback."I will never get used to this kind of obscenity being used in an official statement by the White House Communication Director," wrote attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick. "The White House no longer aspires to lead from a higher moral vantage point, it seeks to fight in the mud with the pigs."Journalist Brett Meiselas appealed directly to the administration's sense of decorum. "Can you all grow up? You work in the White House. Act like it for once. This shouldn't be a political thing. Just have some decency, man."The spectacle of a Trump aide attacking the man Trump himself chose as his top diplomat drew particular mockery. "Pompeo is so dumb that Cheung's boss made him Secretary of State for nearly 3 years," wrote National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru.The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes was more pointed about the credibility gap on display: "Yeah, take it from a 1980s-born political hatchetman and ex-UFC comms director, Mike Pompeo — top of his class at West Point, Harvard Law grad, House Intel, ex-CIA director, ex-SecState — is clueless about Iran."Independent journalist Aaron Rupar summed up the broader reaction in blunt terms: "Is it a sign that things are going well when your spokesperson is posting like a jilted incel 8th grader?"Mehdi Hasan simply noted the absurdity for the record: "White House comms director to former Trump Secretary of State," he wrote, quoting Cheung's statement without further comment.Tom Nichols of The Atlantic added dryly: "This sounds totally calm."
President Donald Trump keeps clashing with the Supreme Court, even though he repeatedly gives them exactly what they want.“With the court preparing to issue major rulings in the coming weeks that will determine the fate of key aspects of the president’s agenda, Mr. Trump has vacillated between combative and conciliatory in his treatment of the justices,” The New York Times reported on Sunday. “He has seemed ever aware and at times resentful of the critical role the justices play in determining the lawfulness of his policies, with the court representing perhaps the one force in American government truly able to thwart his agenda. At the heart of the tension: a president who appears to believe that justices, especially those he appointed, should be loyalists rather than independent actors in a separate, equal branch of government.”The Times added that Trump is “furious” with America’s most powerful bench because it invalidated the sweeping tariffs he passed without congressional approval earlier in his term. He has also attacked the court preemptively in recent weeks as he prepares for possible losses on issues like his crusade to get rid of birthright citizenship.“It would be a disgrace if the Supreme Court of the United States allows that to happen,” Trump said last week. “It’s all up to a couple of people, and I hope they do what’s right.” He reinforced this desire to seemingly intimidate the justices by becoming the first sitting president to attend a Supreme Court oral argument in person, which he did in April for roughly an hour before abruptly leaving. He subsequently took to social media and complained that the Supreme Court had “not even recognized or acknowledged” that he was in the courtroom.Despite Trump’s complaints, the Supreme Court has ruled in his favor far more often than not, from giving him unprecedented presidential powers in Trump v. United States (2024) to a ruling to make it easier for Republicans to gerrymander in Louisiana v. Callais (2026) while not hearing a case involving the Virginia Supreme Court striking down voter-approved new congressional maps when it would make it easier for Democrats to gerrymander.“The president gave a surprisingly frank assessment of his view of the Supreme Court — and how he expects personal loyalty from the justices that he appoints to it,” The New Republic's Matt Ford wrote earlier this month. “In the lengthy post, Trump criticized two members of the High Court for voting in Trump v. Learning Resources, the case that nixed his purported ability to impose hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs under a Cold War-era emergency-powers law. The Supreme Court held 6-3 that Trump had exceeded the powers laid out in the statute…. It would be hard to find a better example than this of Trump's thinking that the justices that he nominated to the High Court should be personally loyal to him."Ford added Trump believes he is entitled to total obedience from Supreme Court justices "simply because he appointed them,” which raises troubling questions about what he has demanded from appointees for lower court positions."If this is his public thinking about the justices," Ford argued, "it casts doubt on whether any second-term Trump appointee can be trusted to place the national interest or the law ahead of Trump's personal and political goals…. If Trump is willing to demand personal loyalty from Supreme Court justices, what about his lower-court nominees?"He added, "The Supreme Court has given him nearly everything that he has wanted over the last two years — and he still isn't satisfied. This is the same Supreme Court that just boosted his party's midterm chances earlier this month by demolishing what's left of the Voting Rights Act."
Hours after a deadly shooting incident outside the White House, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social just after midnight to thank the Secret Service and, in the same post, push for the construction of his controversial White House ballroom.In a post published shortly after 12 a.m. Eastern, Trump opened with praise for the agents who killed the gunman near the White House gates earlier in the evening. He described the suspect as a man with "a violent history and possible obsession with our Country's most cherished structure.""Thank you to our great Secret Service and Law Enforcement for the swift and professional action taken this evening against a gunman near the White House," Trump wrote.The president then pivoted to his ballroom project. Trump argued that the shooting, combined with what he called the "White House Correspondent'Dinner shooting" from a month earlier, demonstrated the need for what he has been describing as a massive new venue on the White House grounds."This event is one month removed from the White House Correspondent'Dinner shooting, and goes to show how important it is, for all future Presidents, to get, what will be, the most safe and secure space of its kind ever built in Washington, D.C.," Trump wrote, along with the prominent typo.He closed with a familiar appeal."The National Security of our Country demands it!" Trump added.The ballroom, which Trump has touted as one of his second-term priorities, has drawn criticism from lawmakers and watchdogs who view it as a vanity project and claim that the security justification is stretched well beyond its merits. Trump's overnight post Sunday morning is the latest in a pattern of using public safety incidents and high-profile news events as occasions to argue for the ballroom's necessity.
Under the heading of Fiddling While Rome Burns, a new potential viral plague is gaining steam in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda – a strain that has no targeted vaccine to prevent it nor treatment to cure it, making it a nightmare to try to contain.But you know our president is too focused on his ballroom to give it much thought.The reality is this: as of Tuesday, an Ebola virus outbreak in the above-named African nations had more than 500 suspected cases and some 130 deaths. According to the World Health Organization, It involves the much rarer Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, as opposed to the significantly more common Zaire form for which a vaccine and treatments exist.How is the United States responding? Well, the State Department is “strongly urging” Americans not to travel to the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan or Uganda, and to reconsider travel to Rwanda. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued an order barring foreigners from entering the U.S. if they were in any of the above-named countries in the previous 21 days. It assessed the risk to the general American public as “low.”This is all well and good. The problem is that under President Trump, we have pulled out of the WHO and gutted the CDC, greatly restricting our capacity to monitor and respond to an international public health emergency like the Ebola one. We are now less able to detect, coordinate around and contain an Ebola threat early.The weakening of our virus containment apparatus should concern everyone, disturbingly restricting many of the systems that matter most in the first days of an outbreak (i.e. right now). By leaving, the U.S. voluntarily ended formal participation in WHO technical committees and real-time surveillance groups and withdrew staff embedded in WHO operations. That means fewer U.S. personnel plugged into international outbreak intelligence.The radical cuts to the CDC mean fewer epidemiologists and, therefore, less surge capacity and ability to respond quickly. In short, it points to a hampered ability to respond to Ebola before it arrives here and reduced resilience once it does.Why did Trump withdraw us from the WHO? Because he blamed the organization for what he perceived as a delayed response to COVID when in fact it was merely scapegoated for the president’s own deplorable lack of urgency.Public health experts widely regard America’s reaction to the COVID threat as massively slow and flawed. It could have been nipped in the bud, but Trump, early on, treated the virus less like a deadly health emergency than a temporary PR problem. If strong mitigation measures (mask guidance, distancing, limits on gatherings, testing expansion) had begun even two weeks earlier, it’s likely tens of thousands of deaths could have been prevented.Let’s take a look back at a partial timeline of Trump’s COVID response quotes:February 2, 2020: “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”February 10, 2020: “Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”February 24: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. The stock market is starting to look very good to me!”February 26: “The 15 cases (in the U.S.) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”March 6: “You have to be calm. It’ll go away.”March 15: “It’s something we have tremendous control over.”By April 2020, U.S. deaths from COVID would surpass 20,000. By the end of 2020, there would be more than 385,000 confirmed COVID-related fatalities in the United States, making it the third-leading cause of death that year behind heart disease and cancer. Ebola is a different beast altogether, of course. For the uninitiated, it’s an illness caused by a group of related viruses first discovered in 1976 in the nations now known as South Sudan and Congo in a region near the Ebola River. Fruit bats are thought to carry the viruses without being sickened by them.People stricken with Ebola may first experience so-called “dry symptoms” such as fever, aches, pains and fatigue before progressing to “wet symptoms” that include diarrhea, vomiting and bleeding. It’s contracted through contact with the bodily fluids of an infected, sick or dead person and contaminated objects like clothing, bedding, needles or medical equipment.Ebola is, more often than not, fatal. There have been several outbreaks since 2000, and in more than 70 percent of cases the victim died. It is clearly an extremely virulent virus that spreads easily through direct contact.Are we vulnerable in America to an Ebola plague? Not in the traditional sense. Since it spreads only by direct contact and not through easy airborne transmission like COVID or the measles, a large uncontrolled U.S.
One of Democrats’ best pick-up opportunities in the Senate this November is an unexpected one. Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee in the race against Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), has been scandal-prone, complete with a Nazi symbol tattoo, but is polling ahead of the five-term incumbent from Maine. Last week alone Platner, 41, faced a […]