This afternoon WaPo posted a news story headlined U.S. and Iran close to signing peace deal, officials say, and the text made it sound as if, indeed, there were an actual deal and Iran was on board with it. Apparently there’s a memorandum with this deal spelled out, and several copies of it are floating around. What the bleep, I thought. Then I checked with the New York Times. Their headline said Conflicting Accounts Emerge of Possible Peace Deal. That sounds more like it. And then further down in the NY Times story we can read,

President Trump insisted on Friday that reports circulating about details of the proposed deal were incorrect. In a post on social media, he said the terms “Iran leaked” to the media “have NOTHING to do with the terms that were agreed to, in writing.”

That I can believe.

Reuters reported that Trump bristles over memorandum text that appears to favor Iran.

Versions and accounts of the memorandum were provided to Reuters by Western sources, sources from mediator Pakistan and senior Iranian sources. Similar drafts were also published in Iranian media.

The sources all stressed that the text was not yet final, with a Western source, an Iranian source and a Gulf source saying a key issue yet to be resolved was language on ceasing hostilities in Lebanon. Iran has demanded Israel end a campaign against Iran’s allies, the Hezbollah militia.

While there were minor differences in the accounts, all versions appeared to accept the principal terms proposed by Tehran over months of negotiations, while omitting key U.S. demands.

Reuters goes on to quote a U.S. official saying that a key term left out of Iran’s version of the memorandum is the destruction of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium. Another U.S. official said that release of the unfrozen assets would be contingent om the destruction of the uranium. The Iran version doesn’t mention that. (Note that, strictly speaking, the element uranium cannot be destroyed. However, there are ways to treat the uranium to reduce its isotopic enrichment level and make it less dangerous.)

So that’s what U.S. officials are expecting. However,

Under the terms of the text described by sources to Reuters, the United States would immediately begin providing Iran with billions of dollars in unfrozen assets, and waive sanctions on its oil exports, in return for Iran lifting its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, largely closed since the war began.

Discussion of Iran’s nuclear programme would be set aside for a 60-day period of talks on a final settlement. The only explicit reference to nuclear policy for now would be a restatement of Iran’s commitment not to seek nuclear weapons, already Tehran’s official position dating to its ratification of the U.N. Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1970.

Yesterday Trump announced to the press that Tehran had agreed to not seek nuclear weapons as if this were a huge breakthrough and not Iran’s stated policy going back decades.

Another issue Iran wants dealt with is an agreement for Israel to stop attacking Lebanon, but as much as Trump believes he “calls all the shots,” Netanyahu isn’t about to agree to anything just because Trump tells him to.

Right now there are a ton of headlines about everybody being optimistic that a deal is within reach, But it seems to me there’s a big gap between what Iran expects and what Trump expects. My sense of things is that it’s all up to Trump. He will either scuttle the thing or will cave and sign it. The latter would be best for everybody but Trump, which is why I don’t think he’ll do it. We’ll see.

In other news: A judge denied a last-minute attempt to keep Trump’s name on the Kennedy Center building, and I understand a crowd has gathered to watch the name come off. Plus there are live cams. There is scaffolding up, but so far I can’t see anybody doing anything.

Over the past several hours there have been several alarming stories about Trump’s DoJ and FBI taking steps to investigate and bring charges of election fraud. This needs a post of its own, but here are a couple of links.

FBI raids Ohio voting rights organization

What the DOJ’s investigation into Los Angeles elections is really about

WaPo is reporting that oil and gas executives have warned Trump that oil reserves are dangerously low and that gas prices could surge.

With about 88 percent of the votes counted, Graham Platner has about 72 percent of the votes in the Maine Democratic Senate primary. Gov. Janet Mills, who was still on the ballot, got about 19.5 percent, and most of the rest went to another Dem named David Costello. This suggests to me that Platner is still competitive against Susan Collins in the general election. But I don’t know how much of the Platner vote was from early and mail-in votes that might have been cast before the recent negative news about him. Fingers crossed.

Trump is furious about a New York Times story by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Inside the White House Freakout Over the Epstein Files. This is worth reading. When the Epstein crisis first hit the White House last year, Trump wanted the whole thing buried. Of course, it couldn’t be. J.D. Vance appears to have been the only one to realize that; he lobbied to just release everything and let the chips fall. But others disagreed, and administration officials soon were feuding over what to do about the files. Eventually they adopted a strategy of releasing carefully curated bits while talking about how transparent they were being.

Among other things, it was decided FBI interview notes of Epstein survivors could not see the light of day, ever. I noted this because I understand the survivors have been asking for those notes especially, because they want to read what the notes say about their own interviews. I don’t believe any have been released to this day.

In other news, inflation is now at a three-year high, mostly because of gas prices. Way to go, Trump. Trump and his cabinet all appear to be in denial about how hard things are getting even for people who voted for Trump. See, for example, Paul Krugman’s new substack column, Breaking the Heart of the Heartland.

In brief: Trump officials like Kevin Hassett, the administration’s top alleged economist, say that low consumer sentiment numbers are “being driven by Democrats who have Trump derangement syndrome.” And recently Trump went to Wisconsin to hold a “roundtable” with farmers in which he was the only one at the table and apparently did all the talking. Trump is very sure that farmers all love him. And it was largely rural America that put Trump back in the White House. “In 2024 Donald Trump narrowly won the popular vote, with only a 1.5 percentage point margin. But he won rural areas by 30 points,” Krugman writes. He continues,

Trump won rural areas by such a large margin because farmers were wildly optimistic about what he would do for them. The Purdue/CME Ag Economy Barometer, which is basically an index of farmers’ economic sentiment, surged with Trump’s victory. …

…Today, the rural Trump bump is nowhere to be seen. In fact, white rural voters’ views about Trump’s economic policy have turned astonishingly negative. … They are almost as negative on the economy as the population as a whole, with only 32% of rural whites approving of Trump’s handling of the economy, and 68% disapproving. Trump has made the rural economy so bad that reality has overridden Trump voters’ usual tendency to make excuses for him.

Trump is, apparently, utterly oblivious to this. In his mind all the people who voted for him in 2024 still love him as much as ever.

And it’s not about to get better. In the not-war with Iran, war-like activities between Iran and the U.S. and everybody else in the region are escalating. There is no peace deal on the horizon, and I say there won’t be as long as Trump is president.  Oil reserves are running out, and gas prices are likely to climb even higher in the coming months.

Shifting gears a bit — here’s something not about Trump I found genuinely interesting at The Atlantic. See How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi: A case study in self-sabotage by Idrees Kahloon. First, is Britain really as poor as Mississippi? Kahloon writes,

The country’s output per person is now only just above that of Mississippi, America’s poorest state—and that slight lead is only achieved thanks to London. Outside the capital, in places where tourists do not visit, living standards fall well below Mississippi’s. 

In brief — 20 years ago, Britain’s economy was much, much better. Then came the financial sector meltdown of 2008. The government adopted austerity economics — trying to grow out of an economic slump mostly by cutting government spending to reduce the government’s debt.

Rather than increase spending to revive depressed demand, as modern Keynesians would counsel, the government, then led by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, opted to slash budgets as revenue plunged. The theory was that fiscal discipline—cutting spending more sharply than Britain’s peer countries—would inspire confidence and spur growth. At the time, deficits and debt were seen as immoral; unlike profligate Greece, Britain would manage its affairs prudently.

You’ll recognize that this is very similar to Republican economics. The only difference is that the Brits didn’t cut taxes on rich people. But even with higher taxes, revenues are down. And among the government services that have declined is the famous National Health Service.

The National Health Service, the celebrated pillar of the British cradle-to-grave welfare state, has a backlog of 6 million patients—almost a tenth of the population—waiting for treatment. The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.

The NHS had been underfunded for years before the financial crisis. Maggie Thatcher seems to have tried to starve it to death, as I remember. When I was in Wales in 2005 I remember getting an earful from one of my Welsh cousins about how badly the NHS had deteriorated even then. At the time the UK was paying less per capita for health care than just about any other country in the world. They have a system designed to be cost-effective, but it still requires some funding. And now they’ve just about killed it. Note that killing it didn’t make the economy better.

And, one more time — Keynes was right. 

Shifting gears again — for another good read, see Josh Kovensky at TPM, ‘A Crock of Shit’: Amid Misconduct Allegations, Broadview Six Transcripts Offer Rare Window into Grand Jury. 

Now, for sports news. A huge number of World Cup tickets remain unsold. What will FIFA do, if anything, to avoid empty seats?

Trump will blessedly be absent for tonight’s Knicks-Spurs game in Madison Square Garden. The weather could be a bit iffy for outdoor watch parties, though. I hope the rain doesn’t fall and the Knicks win and New Yorkers have a great night.

So on Sunday Trump asked Netanyahu to not strike Iran and mess up the alleged ongoing peace talks. Netanyahu agreed. Also, too,

Trump told the Financial Times that Netanyahu “won’t have any choice” but to accept any deal the U.S. secures from negotiations with Iran.

“I call the shots. I call all the shots. He doesn’t call the shots,” Trump said of Netanyahu.

Right. And then Israel struck Iran.

Update: I’ve learned a watch party was set up at Bryant Park, which is in midtown near Grand Central and the main Library building, and far enough from Madison Square Garden that it’s not a security issue for Trump. The space is already full, I understand. There are some other watch party venues that should still be open, but anyplace within a few blocks of Madison Square Garden is off limits.

They are still counting votes in California, but at least we know that Democrat Xavier Becerra will advance to the general election. I would think that would make him a huge favorite to be the next governor. The number two spot is still uncertain, but MAGA Steve Hilton is slightly ahead of Dem Tom Steyer.

I need to take a break from complaining about Trump, so I will instead complain about that other scourge of contemporary America, centrist Dems. There’s a great piece by Monica Potts at The New Republic about a recent gathering of a center-left political action committee called Welcome PAC. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of it, but I take it it’s been around for a while. Something that comes across in Potts’s insightful writing is how reactive the centrists are. There’s an emptiness to them. They define themselves entirely by declaring what they are not. It’s as if they have no fixed core of values or goals other than winning elections.

“Centrism, in reality, is almost always defined by where it lies on the spectrum between two extremes: Its politics are almost monomaniacally focused on arguing that those who stand apart have gone too far,” Potts writes. And I’m thinking back to the 1970s and 1980s, when the New Deal coalition was coming apart and the New Left was fading, and Reaganism was on the rise. The response from the Democrats was the New Democrats, led by Bill Clinton, which turned its back on the muscular anti-poverty programs of the New Deal and Great Society and instead looked to market-based solutions to hardship, ways to tweak the economy to maybe make it work a bit better for poor folks (while making more money for rich folks).

Alex Pareene wrote back in 2022 that “Clintonites taught their party how to talk about helping people without actually doing it.”

The crew that would come to take over the Democratic Party organized themselves, in the 1980s, around the idea that the party had become discredited among the public because it was in thrall to its more liberal elements. These “New Democrats” gravitated toward Gary Hart, who unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic Party nomination in 1984, positioned as the candidate of “new ideas” against Walter Mondale, ostensibly the embodiment of stale Great Society liberalism. Hart, along with allies like Representative Tim Wirth, articulated what Geismer calls “larger generational skepticism with large institutions and bureaucracy.” In practice, “large institutions” tended to mean unions and government agencies. The New Democrats were similarly allergic to “transactional politics” and “special interest groups,” which Geismer helpfully defines as “African Americans, women, white farmers, and, especially, organized labor.”

As the Republican Party moved further right through the 1900s and into the 21st century, the Democrats seemed to lose any identity at all. Who are their constituents? They tend to attract people who are better educated, but is that because of what the Democrats offer or because at least they are not Republicans? And meanwhile, in large swaths of working-class America people at least hear Republicans directly addressing their problems, even if what the Republicans say is often nuts if not hateful. If you don’t understand economics it’s easier to believe that minorities are taking your jobs and stealing your money, somehow, than to grasp what’s really going on. Especially when you don’t see the other party going out of its way to help you all that much.

And now it’s 2026. Potts describes a Welcome PAC speaker on health care reform: “On this last point, Mark Cuban spoke at length about his ideas for health care, which rely largely on hoary ideas like HSA spending accounts—like a man who missed the yearslong health care debate leading up to the election of President Barack Obama and the passage of the Affordable Care Act.”

Most of the people in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party today came up through the ranks during the New Democrat era and are pretty much stuck in its thinking. I see the New Democrats as less about an ideology than a strategy. When movement conservatism was on the rise and gaining popularity, Bill Clinton and others positioned themselves just to the left of, but not directly in opposition to, Republican policies. And that worked for a time. It was a useful strategy.

But now the GOP has just plain gone bat guano crazy and so far Right to a place where democracy cannot survive. And the centrists don’t know how to do real opposition. It’s not in their nature. It’s why they’ve been so ineffectual and so slow to stand up to Trump. And just where is the center any more? If you’re defining center as a mid-point between two ends, the center is way to the right of where it used to be. The so-called “far left,” on the other hand, would have been right at home in the New Deal.

At the New York Times Jamelle Bouie has a new column following up the one I wrote about a couple of days ago (which I could tell from your comments most of you didn’t read, btw), The new column is about what must be done after Trump. When Trump is finally gone, Bouie writes, what will be needed is not a restoration but a reconstruction. And for inspiration he looked to the Congress that saw the end of the Civil War and brought us the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. This was the Congress of the “Radical Republicans.” They were not shy about using every scrap of power the Constitution gave them while keeping a conservative Supreme Court and a useless President Andrew Johnson in their places.  Yes, eventually much of their work would be undone and Reconstruction would be unfinished. But It was an amazing thing for a while. Bouie:

As I wrote, should Democrats have control of the White House and both branches of Congress in 2029, they will be faced with a project of reconstruction, not restoration. You could do worse in those circumstances than to ask: What would Charles Sumner do? What would Thaddeus Stevens do? What would John Bingham do?

They wouldn’t stand by and allow their project to be destroyed by the hostile forces arrayed against them. They would look to the Constitution which, for all of its flaws, gives Congress the power and authority to make its vision reality.

But that’s going to require leaders who have vision and some core convictions that are not just a reaction to what the other side is up to. I don’t think the current leadership of the Democratic Party is up to it.

I suppose I have to address the new Graham Platner scandal. Platner is our great hope for defeating Susan Collins in Maine, and until recently he appeared to be cruising to victory. I was so upset when the story broke last night I had to turn off my livestream television feed (as I don’t actually own a tv; I watch on a Kindle).  Chris Hayes devoted most of his one-hour program on MS NOW to an interview of Platner, but I couldn’t bring myself to watch it.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that Platner is not accused of rape. Mostly he seems to be a jerk with issues. I agree with Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money, that people should be encouraged to “vote for the scumbag,” anyway. Control of the Senate is too important. It may be that he can overcome this — especially considering he’s running against the party of Donald Trump and Ken Paxton — but let’s hope another shoe doesn’t drop.

I’m sorry to write a short post. I’m having some health issues — nothing serious — that are wearing me out. I’ll try better tomorrow.

As I was writing this, the House actually passed a war powers resolution. This is from NBC News:

The House offered a rare rebuke to President Donald Trump on Wednesday, passing a Democratic-led measure to end his war with Iran over objections from Republican leadership.

It was one of two Democratic-led measures opposed by the White House that advanced in the GOP-led House. Lawmakers also passed a motion that would unlock a vote on sending aid to Ukraine.

The Iran war powers resolution, offered by Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, had been heading for a vote before the House left for its Memorial Day recess May 21. But it was abruptly pulled from the floor when it appeared too many Republicans were absent to defeat it.

On Wednesday, it passed 215-208, with four Republicans joining all Democrats in voting yes: Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Tom Barrett of Michigan and Warren Davidson of Ohio.

The resolution directs Trump to remove U.S. armed forces from hostilities with Iran, unless Congress votes to declare war or authorizes using military force against it. It would not force him to end the conflict, however; it is a symbolic expression of disapproval of the war with Iran.

I don’t understand why this would be only symbolic if Congress has the power to declare war and Trump does not. But that takes us into my next topic —

Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times is one of the best political commenters anywhere. His current column is America Broke Something When It Gave Trump a Second Chance. It’s worth reading, and not just because of what it says about Trump

Much of the disruption and destruction of the past year and change is downstream of the revolutionary orientation of Roberts, Vought and the other alumni of Project 2025 who have taken up places in and around the Trump administration. To observe the aggrandizement of power in the executive, the decimation of the federal bureaucracy, the destruction of much of the nation’s medical, scientific and public health infrastructure and the broad attack on racial and gender equality is to see the many faces of a furious effort to restructure the existing nation to match the one envisioned by these far-right ideologues.
If this is all true, and it is, then any plausible response to Project 2025 must include a larger vision for the future of the American Republic. A Project 2029 cannot be a collection of Democratic Party agenda items. It must articulate a broad new conception of the nation’s political order — one that will guide the way a future Democratic-led government might wield power. Above all, Democrats must have a plan for reconstruction — for building something new on the wreckage of what President Trump, MAGA and the Republican Party have wrought — not for restoration of what was.

But can the current Democratic Party do that? Can they move beyond proposals for better supporting child care and breaking up utility monopolies?

As it happens, several Democratic groups are drafting the equivalent of a Project 2029. And so far, unfortunately, it is not the reconstruction agenda the country needs. It is, instead, just another Democratic Party policy document: a grab bag of ideas stitched together with the usual slogans and gestures toward economic populism.

This reminds me of one of my biggest complaints about Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign against Trump — there was no vision. She went on and on about how qualified she was. To do what? She said she would “fight for us.” To do what? If you went to her website she did indeed have lots of proposals, most of which would have improved existing programs. If there was anything genuinely innovative or groundbreaking I’m not remembering it. Trump, on the other hand, made lots of grandiose promises he didn’t keep. Notice who won.

This is not to say voters are all idiots, necessarily. Hillary Clinton promised a well-managed status quo, and Trump promised change. People were in the mood for change. But Trump didn’t know how to deliver on what he promised. He had establishment people around him, keeping him in check, and he wasn’t able to do anything too stupid and screw up Obama’s economy (for which Trump took credit). And if it weren’t for Covid, voters might not have noticed how incompetent Trump truly was. Too bad they forgot.

Too much of the Dem establishment has spent entire long careers trying to not stick out too much and becoming a target of the Right.  Now we need them to stand and be bold and directly address all the weaknesses in the system that Trump exploited. As Jamelle Bouie wrote,

Item one: Trump has appointed an acting director of national intelligence. Bill Pulte has been as the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and the chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac since 2025. I understand he is still going to hold those positions while serving as director of national intelligence. Sure he will. Pulte has absolutely no background in intelligence, national or otherwise. His background appears to be in home construction and private equity.

Obviously Pulte was put in the DNI position because Trump trusts  him to be loyal. David Frum at The Atlantic:

In every other respect, the appointment is baffling. Pulte has no intelligence background; no national-security expertise. He’s an ultra-partisan with a highly quarrelsome personality and great inherited wealth. Beyond that, there’s not much to say about his record of public or personal achievement.

Yet Pulte does have a disgraceful record of putting the prosecutorial powers of government at President Trump’s vindictive service. In his role as director of the Federal Housing Financing Agency, Pulte referred Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook and New York Attorney General Letitia James for criminal prosecution for mistakes on mortgage documents so commonplace that they were also committed by Trump Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent.

Bessent and Pulte are said to not get along well, BTW. There’s a story that Bessent threatened to punch Pulte out at some fancy dinner.

I’m hearing the bobbleheads on television say that Pulte will be in a position to do a lot of mischief in upcoming elections. He and Kash Patel can fabricate all kinds of accusations that will allow them to interfere with honest voting. “In Bill Pulte, [Trump] has the perfect tool for any improper goal,” writes David Frum.

Watch this space.

Item two: You may have heard the slush fund is dead. Guess again. See David Kurtz, TPM, Fool Me a Thousand Times … All that reporting that Trump had to have decided to stop the slush fund and the stipulations attached to it appears to have been a feint. It’s not dead yet.

A confusing mishmash of reporting Monday afternoon inadvertently revealed that Donald Trump can still play Congress and the press like fools.

The flurry of reporting, mostly from Capitol Hill, was about whether the political heat around the corrupt “Anti-Weaponization Fund” had become too much to stomach, especially for GOP senators. The vague news, largely attributed to unnamed White House sources, was that Trump was signaling he “plans to drop,” “pause,” “retreat,” “backtrack,” and “back off” from the slush fund.

Adding an absurdist twist to the afternoon, the Trump DOJ put out a meaningless statement that it would abide by a court order blocking the slush fund.

Note that all the uproar yesterday only dealt with the slush fund — and only with the political furor over the slush fund. That represents only part of the corrupt scheme to settle Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS, which has three main elements:

The three elements are the taxpayers’ money claimed by Trump for his own purposes; the stipulation that Trump and his offspring be spared audits by the IRS; and the appearance that this whole thing is an attempt to defraud the courts. And the feint is intended to stop Republicans in Congress from doing anything about it. Trump intends to go through with this when the coast is clear. There are other obstacles, of course, and Kurtz provides more details. Note that Bloomberg is running a headline that says Trump to Get Audit Immunity as $1.8 Billion Fund in Doubt, but the story is behind a paywall.

Item Three: Today there are primaries in California, Iowa, Montana, New Jersey, South Dakota and New Mexico. Fingers crossed that a Democrat moves on to the California general.

As I predicted a couple of days ago, Trump decided the most recently announced peace deal wasn’t good enough. He has sent it back to Tehran with edits. It’s still not clear to me whether the unedited deal was a deal Tehran had approved. It appears Trump is just cranking out performative peace deals and then shooting them down without input from Tehran, just so there can be headlines about peace deals.

At The Atlantic, Karim Sadjadpour explains why there will be no deal, at least with the current negotiators.

America under Trump is the attention-deficit superpower, pinballing from isolationism to interventionism in Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba, having hollowed out the State Department. The Islamic Republic is an obsessive-compulsive revolutionary state—a regime with a half-century fixation on resisting America, rather than advancing the welfare of its own people. Fighting America is not the regime’s policy; it’s the regime’s identity.

The deadlock is both ideological and structural. To justify the immense costs of conflict to American taxpayers, Trump must demand far more from Tehran in any deal than he would have before the war began. Conversely, having lost hundreds of billions of dollars and its top leadership, Iran’s theocracy must demand far more—and concede far less—than it ever would have previously. Neither side can afford a deal that the other might accept. And in a zero-sum negotiation, Iran’s monomaniacal focus is a greater currency than American military power.

And a bit later it says,

U.S.-Iran negotiations yield zero trust and zero closure. A win-win scenario does not exist. Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, threats to close the Strait of Hormuz, regional proxies, and missile programs will menace the Middle East so long as the Islamic Republic is in power.

This is worth reading all the way though. But it seems to me Trump is not going to concede anything as long as the stock market continues to soar every time he announces that another (probably fake) deal is on the table. Why the stock market jumps on command for Trump makes no sense to me, but it does. I seriously doubt there will be an end to anything until Congress steps in and stops it. Maybe next year.

I was intrigued by this headline– Does Trump Want to Lose the Midterms? This is to an Ezra Klein podcast; here is the transcript. The short answer is that he’d probably prefer to win the midterms, but what really worries him is losing control of the Republicans. I suspect he thinks that as long as he controls them, especially Republicans in Congress, he’s safe from facing consequences.

But then the question is, if the GOP is slaughtered in the midterms, will Trump still control it? or will Republicans finally start to break away?  Already there’s a lot of focus on the YOLO caucus — Republicans who will not be returning to Congress in January, either because they lost primaries or were already planning to retire. And this crew is already turning into a thorn in Trump’s side. Senators Mitch McConnell and Thom Tillis both spoke out strongly against the infamous slush fund to reward Trump thugs, for example.

So it’s all a matter of how long Trump can keep screws turned on his own party to keep them in line. I honestly don’t understand why Republicans in purple districts haven’t broken away already. But my congressman Mike Lawler recently held a rally with Trump himself, attended by about 4,000 people, which given the population density around here isn’t that impressive. He’s vulnerable, so he’s going more MAGA in a district that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024? That makes no sense. Maybe it’ll get him more campaign money for television ads, somehow. Otherwise I am not seeing the point.

Trump is allegedly meeting with aides right now to decide whether to agree to the latest cease fire deal with Iran. The catch is that it’s not clear to me if Iran has agreed to it. Al Jazeera reported earlier today that Iran hadn’t agreed to anything. Want to take bets that Trump will decide the “deal” isn’t good enough yet?

Also as I was typing, a judge temporarily halted the closing of the Kennedy Center and ordered that Trump’s name must be removed from the building. The judge said “the board’s decision to add President Donald Trump’s name to the center was unlawful and ordered that it be removed from the building and its website.”

This morning a judge temporarily blocked the creation of the $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” that Trump plans to use to reward his minions.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia paused any action on the fund while the case proceeds on an expedited briefing schedule that she issued simultaneously. She set a June 12 hearing for arguments on issuing an injunction in the case brought by a group that includes a former Jan. 6 prosecutor, Common Cause, and the National Abortion Federation.

In pressing pause, Brinkema delineated in her order exactly what she doesn’t want happening between now and next month’s hearing. She barred the administration “from taking any further action pursuant to the creation or operation of the Anti Weaponization Fund, which includes the transferring of money to the Fund; the consideration of any claims submitted to the Fund; and the disbursing of any funds from the Fund.”

I think it’s likely the court will kill this beast. But then it will go to the Supreme Court.

I haven’t written nearly enough about all the grift and self-dealing going on in the Maladministration. But Jen Psaki gave a good update on what’s going on last night, so here’s a video.