President Donald Trump's administration is conditioning nearly $1 billion in public safety grants on local police cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, a move critics argue is designed to exclude Democratic-led cities. Approximately $700 million flows through the existing COPS grant program. NPR reports this new $300 million Model Cities Initiative will go to just two to four cities, bypassing standard competitive peer-review processes, explained Amy Solomon, senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice and former head of the DOJ's Office of Justice Programs.Any program that impedes or hinders federal immigration enforcement will not receive funding, according to the mandate. This includes failing to honor requests from the Department of Homeland Security. Legal experts warn the approach is highly unusual, with critics predicting only Republican-led jurisdictions will apply, allowing the administration to portray Democrats as soft on crime. Police chiefs have long opposed linking local law enforcement to immigration enforcement, citing erosion of community trust and witness cooperation. Federal data shows over 70 percent of immigrant detainees lack criminal convictions. The DOJ defended the policy, while the first Trump administration's similar tactic was previously challenged in court and reversed under Former President Joe Biden.Watch the video below. Your browser does not support the video tag.
Intelligence Democrats are warning acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Bill Pulte against carrying out sweeping firings or improperly declassifying intelligence as Congress braces for the controversial new intelligence chief’s full first week on the job. Pulte, who also remains the head of a federal housing agency, was tapped by Trump to lead the Office…
Iran appears to have identified and systematically exploited President Donald Trump's rapidly decaying cognitive abilities.That's according to Atlantic staff writer and national security scholar Tom Nichols, who joined MS NOW's Nicolle Wallace on "Deadline: White House" on Monday. Wallace argued that Trump is operating inside an "artificial reality" constructed by aides who feed him selectively curated social media posts to shield him from negative information about the economy and the war. The arrangement, Wallace said, explains moments like Trump's repeated insistence that the country is "hot."I used to think he was lying. Now I think he's deluded," Wallace said, calling it a "threat to global stability."Nichols agreed with the withering verdict. "Delusion is the word I was going to use when you were asking about this, because he is self-deluded," Nichols echoed. "I have said many times on this show that I think his cognitive abilities are decaying rapidly."Aides who once told Trump hard truths have stopped doing so, he said. "He doesn't want to hear it. I mean, now we're just seeing a more extreme version of the problem that Donald Trump has always been uneducable and unbriefable. He doesn't listen. He's a narcissist. You can't tell a narcissist that they're wrong about something when they've decided that they're right," said Nichols.Drawing on the upcoming new book "Regime Change" by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Nichols said the portrait that emerges is of a president who has turned previous positions completely upside down. A regime once called an existential evil is now a negotiating partner, he said, and nuclear material that sparked the Iran war may now remain in the country indefinitely.Nichols argued that Iran had "figured something out" that Trump refuses to accept: that two months of high gas prices would damage him politically far more than depleting U.S. weapons stockpiles. That assessment tracks with earlier reports that Iranian negotiators were recruiting senior psychologists to tailor messages for what they described as Trump's "impaired mental state."Analysts have warned that Trump's split-off-from-reality problem has cascaded from domestic politics onto the global stage, leaving adversaries better positioned.
Following an oval office signing event where President Trump signed two executive orders intended to speed up the implementation of Quantum Computing within the U.S. Government, President Trump took questions from the assembled press pool on current events. The Q&A begins at 16:24 of the video below (prompted): . Posted in media bias, President Trump, […]
The post President Trump Takes Questions from the White House Press Pool appeared first on The Last Refuge.
VP JD Vance defends fragile Iran MOU in Switzerland as reports suggest internal administration split over whether Tehran can be trusted on nuclear deal.
Israel's government is concerned that the U.S. is effectively legitimizing Iran's influence in Lebanon and eroding Israel's freedom of operation there through new understandings reached in Switzerland and the memorandum of understanding signed with Iran last week, two Israeli sources told Axios.Why it matters: Iran has managed to wrap the situation in Lebanon into its negotiations with the U.S. in order to support its proxy, Hezbollah. The Trump administration accepts that it must now contain Israel's actions in Lebanon in order to advance its diplomacy with Iran.Israeli officials worry the new understandings will undermine months of efforts by the U.S. and Israel to weaken Hezbollah and decrease Iran's influence in Lebanon.More immediately, they're also worried about pushback from D.C. each time they want to conduct a strike on Lebanese soil, or pressure from Trump to withdraw from southern Lebanon while the Hezbollah threat still exists.Driving the news: The U.S.-Iran MOU stipulates that both countries and their allies will end all hostilities, including in Lebanon, and ensure the country's territorial integrity and sovereignty — which are undermined by Israel's ongoing occupation in southern Lebanon.There were several rounds of fighting in the days after it was signed, though the latest ceasefire renewal has held since Saturday.Iran threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz and to skip the Switzerland talks if Israel continued its attacks.Once the talks actually began on Sunday, Lebanon was one of the key issues discussed. The parties agreed to create a new "deconfliction cell," together with Lebanon and the Pakistani and Qatari mediators, to ensure the ceasefire holds.Between the lines: Israeli sources claim that new U.S.-Iran agreements on Lebanon erode previous understandings reached between the Netanyahu government and the Biden administration in 2024, which were blessed by the incoming Trump administration.Under the Nov. 2024 Lebanon ceasefire agreement, brokered by the Biden administration, Israel retained the right to act against both imminent threats and emerging threats posed by Hezbollah. Under the current conditions, Israel's freedom of action appears to be limited to imminent threats only.And while the previous ceasefire-monitoring mechanism involved Israel, Lebanon, the U.S., and France, this time Israel is not a direct participant, while Iran is.Furthermore, the Biden-era monitoring mechanism was focused on coordination to dismantle Hezbollah's military infrastructure in southern Lebanon, while this one will focus on de-confliction between the Israeli military and Hezbollah.Behind the scenes: An Israeli source said that while the nuclear elements of the U.S.-Iran deal concerned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he is currently much more worried about the Lebanon part.One reason is that Israel's actions against Hezbollah have enormous domestic political salience ahead of October's election."Bibi is hysterical about it," the source said, referring to Netanyahu by his nickname.In recent days, Netanyahu asked his close confidant Ron Dermer, who left government several months ago, to urgently use his relationships within Trump's team to try to influence the U.S.-Iran talks on Lebanon, according to the same Israeli source.The source claimed Dermer's involvement helped lead to a Truth Social post in which Trump threatened to strike Iran if it didn't restrain Hezbollah.A U.S. official confirmed Dermer's participation and said U.S. negotiators in Switzerland spoke to him several times on Sunday to brief him on the Iran talks and get his input. "We were transparent with them," the official said.The other side: Lebanese President Joseph Aoun is willing to accept the new mechanism as long as it is led by the U.S., according to a Lebanese official.Vice President Vance and Trump's envoy Jared Kushner briefed Aoun on the deconfliction mechanism in a call on Monday morning.What they're saying: A senior U.S. official contended that Iran has been deeply involved in Lebanon for decades and claimed Israel doesn't have to be concerned about the new mechanism for Lebanon. "Israel is not out of the mechanism, because the U.S. is in the mechanism. We are so close and coordinated that a direct channel between the U.S. and Iran over Lebanon will only benefit Israel," the U.S. official said.Friction point: "The deconfliction mechanism in Lebanon envisioned by the Trump administration doesn't include Israel and in my view is a major misstep," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), one of Netanyahu's closest allies in Congress, told Axios.On Monday, Netanyahu issued an unusual joint statement with his Defense Minister Israel Katz and Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Gen.
President Donald Trump's executive order signing ceremony on Monday left some observers wide-eyed. Trump signed a pair of executive orders to boost America's quantum computing industry during a ceremony in the Oval Office. However, Trump stumbled over a section of one of the orders while reading it to the press, leaving some onlookers genuinely baffled. "The second order I am signing directs federal agencies to make the transition to what is called 'quantum crypto-graphy,'" Trump said, seeming confused. "Does anybody know what that is? You're going to hear very soon."The Oval Office may have fallen quiet after Trump made his comments, but political observers were active online reacting to clips of the ceremony. Journalist Aaron Rupar posted on Bluesky that "[Trump] clearly has no clue" about the executive orders he was signing. "President Good Brains calls it 'crypto-graffey' twice," Brandon Friedman, a former Obama administration staffer, posted on Bluesky. "Perhaps another reason we should think of elections as selecting teams and political networks (albeit with notional leaders) into office," Sarang Shah, a fellow at Columbia University's Center for Law and the Economy, posted on Bluesky. "Hang this up in the Unitary Executive Theory Hall of Fame," James Goodwin, policy director at the Center for Progressive Reform, posted on Bluesky. Trump on an executive order he's about to sign that he clearly has no clue about: "Quantum ... cryptography. Does anybody know what that is?"[image or embed]— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) June 22, 2026 at 1:58 PM
President Donald Trump humiliated his Energy secretary in front of the full cabinet, cutting him off mid-sentence with "nobody cares."Energy Secretary Chris Wright had barely launched into a story about Albert Einstein when Donald Trump interrupted him. The remarks came as Donald Trump signed executive orders directing federal agencies to accelerate the shift to post-quantum cryptography and boost domestic computing investment."A hundred twenty — 141 years ago, Albert Einstein — 121 years ago, Albert Einstein published a paper —" Wright began."Nobody cares," Donald Trump said, cutting him off.The Trump line prompted the other secretaries to laugh at the snub."Good point. Good point," Wright said."And usually, won't catch you, but then go ahead," the president told him.Wright pressed on, using the Einstein story to praise Donald Trump's own family, noting that the scientist had laid the groundwork for modern quantum science. Forty years later, he said, the president's uncle built on those principles."Donald Trump's uncle, John Trump, was a pioneer in applying light radiation and the reflections of it to develop radar at the MIT radiation lab, critical in D-Day, critical in the end in winning World War II," Wright continued.John G. Trump was a pioneering MIT electrical engineer who helped develop microwave radar during World War II and served as director of the Radiation Laboratory's British Branch.Donald Trump, meanwhile, acknowledged he didn't know much about the orders he was signing."Does anybody know what that is?" he asked of quantum cryptography. "You'll hear very soon, so you're going to find it interesting."The executive orders direct federal agencies to accelerate the shift to post-quantum encryption and funnel new investment into the domestic quantum computing industry.
