President insists ‘I don’t make bad deals!’ as hawks from his own party call proposed agreement a disaster – key US politics stories from Sunday 24 May at a glanceDonald Trump defended himself against criticism from fellow Republicans on Sunday as he appeared on the verge of agreeing a deal with Iran to end the war.As hawks in his party called the proposed agreement a disaster and questioned why the US president had launched the conflict in the first place, Trump claimed on social media that his deal would be “THE EXACT OPPOSITE” of the one agreed by Barack Obama, which Trump pulled out of in 2018. Continue reading...
Welcome to Wednesday’s edition of Washington Secrets. We take a look at the smartest way to ensure a warm phone call with Donald Trump, examine the campaign to discredit Joe Kent as his resignation from the administration threatens to rip the MAGA movement wide open, and we have the latest skirmish in the race for […]
Trump said on Saturday that an agreement would include the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, without giving further details.
Is the United States headed for a second Civil War? According to a survey of likely midterm voters published by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, 57% of Americans believe it is. Sixty-nine percent say democracy is under serious threat; and an equal percentage of non-white voters say they fear rising white supremacy.While President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement deserve the lion’s share of blame for such findings, the Supreme Court has done its part. Under the stewardship of Chief Justice John Roberts, the court has issued a blistering succession of dangerously polarizing rulings, ranging from presidential immunity, union organizing, the death penalty, environmental protection, and gun control to affirmative action and abortion rights. The resulting jurisprudential carnage has accelerated the nation’s rupture into irreconcilable belligerent tribes and prompted speculation that we are headed for another existential conflict.The Roberts Court has taken a particularly malevolent interest in destroying the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965. Last month’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais gutted Section 2 of the landmark legislation, which was amended in 1982 to permit the Justice Department and private citizens to challenge election laws that have the effect of diluting minority voting power.The court’s 6-3 majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito invalidated Louisiana’s 2024 congressional map that created a second majority-Black congressional district to operate alongside the state’s five white-majority districts, roughly reflecting the size of Louisiana’s Black population. The ruling handed a victory to the lead plaintiff in the case, Phillip “Bert” Callais, an election denier and alleged conspiracy theorist who had attended the January 6, 2021 “Stop the Steal” rally on the White House Ellipse that eventually snowballed into the insurrection at the Capitol. Barely concealing their racial animus, Callais and his co-plaintiffs described themselves in court filings as “non-African American voters” who were the victims of reverse discrimination. Louisiana has since moved to redraw its voting maps.With the demise of the “effects test,” future Section 2 plaintiffs will have to meet the nearly impossible burden of proving that redistricting maps were created with overt discriminatory intent rather than for political purposes. And as the court held in a 2019 opinion written by Roberts in Rucho v. Common Cause, political gerrymandering claims cannot be brought in federal courts because, as the Republican majority sees it, they present nonjusticiable “political questions.”Both Callais and Rucho built upon Roberts’ 2013 majority opinion in Shelby County v. Alabama gutting two other sections of the VRA that required state and local jurisdictions with histories of egregious voter discrimination to obtain advance federal approval—known as preclearance—before making changes to their election procedures. Like Alito in Callais, Roberts declared in Shelby that racial discrimination in voting was a thing of the past and thus special protections for minorities were no longer necessary.The combined effects of Shelby and Rucho have led to a proliferation of voting roll purges, onerous photo ID laws, and limitations on mail-in ballots in red states across the country. Now, with Callais, election law experts predict that as many as 19 Democratic congressional seats in Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana could be eliminated, returning the former states of the Confederacy to one-party rule.The court’s handiwork has sparked outrage and alarm. Rep. Bennie Thompson, the only Democrat in Mississippi’s congressional delegation, who will likely lose his seat to gerrymandering, has condemned Callais as “equivalent to a second Civil War.” Other observers have compared the current moment in the US to the 1850s, when debates over the future of slavery eventually led to secession and war.Chief Justice Roberts has also drawn comparisons to Chief Justice Roger Taney, whose 1857 majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford held that Black Americans had “no rights that the white man was bound to respect.” The Dred Scott decision helped precipitate the Civil War, and is widely considered the most infamous in the court’s history.The parallels between Taney and Roberts are beyond hyperbole. Both men began their legal careers as zealous partisan political advocates. Before ascending to the Supreme Court in 1836, Taney was elected to the General Assembly of Maryland, and later served as a loyal foot soldier to President Andrew Jackson, first as secretary of war and then as attorney general, in which capacity he penned an advisory opinion that prefigured his Dred Scott ruling, arguing that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were inapplicable to Black people, even those living in free states.Similarly, the young Roberts established himself as a dependable right-wing operative, clerking for Chief...
President Trump’s abrupt decision to pull an executive order on AI testing has exposed a deeper divide in the White House over how to oversee the technology’s development without stopping its growth. After ushering tech leaders to the White House for a signing ceremony Thursday, Trump’s eleventh-hour decision to scrap the order displayed his administration’s…
Putting an end to Iran's apocalyptic nuclear ambitions is a job that must not be left half-finished, which explains the panic that greeted reports of President Trump's initial peace deal.
With the midterm elections fast approaching in November, outgoing Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) issued a bleak prediction for his party’s chances at the ballot box, and laid most of the blame on the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers he argued were overly loyal to the president.Appearing on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” Massie was asked by Kristen Welker whether his defiance to President Donald Trump on pushing for the release of Jeffrey Epstein-related files, deficit-increasing tax cuts and the U.S. war against Iran was “worth it” given his recent election loss.“It was absolutely worth it for me – now, I don’t think it’s going to be worth it for the party,” Massie said.“They've disenfranchised a large portion of that constituency that Trump assembled to get us in the White House. They’ve alienated [the Make America Healthy Again movement] by kowtowing to the pesticide manufacturers and the pharmaceutical manufacturers, they’ve alienated the fiscal hawks by running DOGE out of town, they’ve alienated the people who don’t want to fight another war for other countries.”And, with the midterm elections just over five months away as of Sunday, Massie predicted a bleak outcome for his own party.“And so I’m worried that in November, this is gonna cost the party a lot,” he said. “But for me, it was completely worth it, and I’ve got seven more months to keep going against the grain.”When the swamp and Epstein class couldn’t buy my vote, they bought the most expensive congressional seat ever.I joined @MeetThePress this morning to talk about putting people & principles over parties.I’m optimistic because the younger generation understands what’s going on. pic.twitter.com/kSg2PRjosN— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) May 24, 2026
On Saturday, President Donald Trump announced via social media that a negotiated settlement with Iran to end the war had “been largely negotiated," but on Sunday, a foreign policy expert raised doubts about whether the president himself authored the post, and what that may reveal about the ongoing negotiations.“First of all, there's no misspellings, there [are] no grammatical errors, there are no attempts at humiliating any side. He's got the titles and the names of each of these different world leaders correct,” said Trita Parsi, an Iranian-Swedish writer, political analyst and co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, during an appearance on “Breaking Points.”“I'm mentioning this because before, we have seen Truth Social posts by the president in which he says 'we're really close [to a deal with Iran],' and it's not a serious post – it is timed to manipulate the markets, it doesn't have any indication that anyone else has reviewed the post in any way shape or form.”He added, “This clearly was not written by him alone, although it does have his flavor to it as well towards the end.”As to why Trump may allow someone other than himself to author a social media post on his personal Truth Social account, Parsi suggested it to be a form of protection from domestic right-wing figures that have urged him to walk away from negotiations and resume the war against Iran.“It gives him a certain degree of protection here in Washington,” Parsi said. “We saw the massive meltdown of warmongers last night when this was first announced, and even before it was announced when they were getting notice that this was coming. They were just in a public panic.”In his announcement, Trump named nearly a dozen world leaders that had helped in negotiations between Washington and Tehran. Their inclusion, Parsi claimed, may have been a pro-active attempt to get ahead of right-wing critics of a deal to end the war.“For him to be able to say 'look, I'm doing it because all of these regional leaders are asking me to do this' is very important,” Parsi said. “Not just to be able to show the regional anchoring of this, but also to be able to deflect the criticism that invariably will come, which is 'you abandoned Israel.' Well, perhaps Israel had abandoned the United States by manipulating the United States into this war in the first place.”
The outlines of a 60-day framework agreement suggest U.S. concessions before a nuclear deal is signed.