There’s no logical explanation for deliberately fumbling the World Cup, which is supposed to provide a massively lucrative tourism boost for the countries that host it. But to no one’s surprise this year, hotel bookings are badly lagging in the U.S. compared to Mexico and Canada ahead of the tournament, with 80% of hotels in U.S. host cities reporting that the rooms they blocked off in anticipation of the travel boom are remaining empty. The U.S. tourism industry already saw a 5.5% decline last year due to the Trump administration’s cruel immigration “crackdown,” which translated to a loss of about $8 billion in revenue. And now the U.S. is going out of its way to squander the potential financial boom, reputational goodwill and unifying moment this tournament should have brought, apparently deciding that shutting out Iranians and Somalians and even random Scottish fans is more important than allowing anyone to feel joy.

Iran’s World Cup team touched down in Tijuana this week wearing gold pins featuring the number “168” on their jackets in honor of the 168 schoolgirls the U.S. bombed on day two of its senseless war. The gesture is being amplified by the fact that Iran says the U.S. is denying visas to key team staff members just days before the games, putting them at a disadvantage in the tournament out of pure vindictiveness. “By extending your whimsical hostilities against the Iranian nation into the realm of sport, the U.S. government in practice is depriving Iran’s national team of its right to play in the World Cup under normal conditions and without undue pressure and stress,” the Iranian embassy in Turkey wrote on X. (“Whimsical hostilities” is a perfect way to put it.)

The State Department said in reply that it “will not allow the Iranian team to abuse this system to sneak terrorists into the United States under false pretenses,” which frankly should be a disqualifying attitude for a host country to have toward participating teams.

Even more disqualifying is the fact that the Trump administration has now denied entry to the World Cup’s first Somalian referee, crushing his life dream as part of its propaganda campaign against alleged daycare fraud in Minnesota’s Somali community.

“I’m just simply a referee who’s trying to live his dream, the biggest dream of my life, to come to the World Cup,” Omar Artan told the New York Times after the U.S. denied his entry. “I had the right papers and everything. I had the right visa.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection cited vague “vetting concerns” in the petty rejection of Artan, which comes after Trump terminated the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation for Somalia earlier this year and decided only to allow white “refugees” into the country going forward. Trump has been openly, viciously racist against Somalis in his crusade against the community. “Can you believe that? Somalia, they turned out to be higher-IQ than we thought,” Trump said in January, pretending to care about “fraud” while committing it himself on a massive scale. “I always say these are low-IQ people. How do they go into Minnesota and steal all that money?”

Again—that statement alone should have disqualified the United States from hosting a World Cup.

To put this into perspective, most autocratic nations will loosen their restrictions around big tournaments like the World Cup and the Olympics in order to pretend to the rest of the world like everything’s dandy there. Qatar, for instance, relaxed its public drinking laws and dress codes and punishments for minor offenses for the 2022 World Cup (which it also should not have been allowed to host). Even Hitler performatively allowed Black and Jewish people to compete in Germany’s 1936 Summer Olympics, including Jesse Owens, a Black American athlete who took home four gold medals. But Trump, for all his narcissism and image-consciousness and greed, appears hell bent on destroying any remaining goodwill the United States has with the rest of the world by going full North Korea during his turn to host and leaving New York hotels half empty for the games.

I’ll be down here rooting for Brazil and squeezing whatever joy can be squeezed out of a tournament so marred this year by the gutless xenophobia of my home country, but please let this be considered an embarrassing low point for both the United States and the FIFA World Cup in history books going forward. I refuse to accept that this is who we are.

But first: We catch up on the week in news and the best of the internet.

Hunter Biden disarming MAGA with his god-tier posting

Former President Joe Biden’s prodigal son came crashing back into public life this week when he joined X and started posting rather frankly about his former crack addiction (he’s 7 years in recovery) and his laptop scandal in a way that seems to be low-key charming even the worst MAGA trolls.

It’s funny because Hunter Biden is the ultimate symbol of corruption of degeneracy for Republicans, but they really seem kinda caught off guard when he engages with them and owns up to his issues in an honest and endearing way.

The Hunter Biden “scandal,” if you can even call it that—(he earned $11 million over 5 years from jobs he got because of who his dad was, basically)—looks like peanuts compared to the Trump family enriching itself to the tune of billions of dollars from this presidency. And Hunter is really neutering the whole “what about Hunter Biden” retort that MAGA uses every time they’re confronted with Trump’s corruption by throwing into stark relief how utterly incomparable the two situations are. No one can insult Hunter harder than he’s willing to insult himself, but this is not a man making billion-dollar deals with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

Don Jr., by contrast, will never be admitting his own coke addiction, which is equally as obvious.

Trump had to cancel his birthday concert after all the artists dropped out

Martina McBride, Bret Michaels, Millie Vanilli, The Commodores, Young MC, and two other random bands dropped out of Trump’s “Great American State Fair” this summer, meant to celebrate America’s 250th birthday (as well as Trump’s), because they weren’t told when they initially agreed to it that it was going to be all about Donald Trump rather than a nonpartisan event. And the MAGA brand has become career-ruining toxic.

Trump initially responded by canceling the concert in a longwinded rant saying he was going to be the featured performer instead—perhaps not realizing how pathetic it is for a president to position himself a second string backup attraction to replace Milli Vanilli, a 90s band best known for its lip syncing scandal.

But Trump’s tantrum about the humiliation has raged on, and today he announced that he’s hired a tenor to perform “Nessun Dorma,” an opera song popularized by Pavarotti, at the concert in lieu of sole remaining performer Vanilla Ice. Yes, the president has chosen an Italian song that Pavarotti’s family has demanded multiple times he stop using as the entertainment for America’s 250th birthday celebration. Incredible.

Speaking of Trump being a queen—

He posted this on Truth Social, perhaps thinking it would make him look tough and popular, at the beginning of Pride Month ?

Queerbaiting? Oiled up dudes with pompoms? I really don’t know what’s going on here.

Marco Rubio denied that he’s wearing clown shoes to please the president

He’s lying. They’re too big.

A Pennsylvania mayor flipped out about a Love Island contestant, an actual cop who calls himself “Officer Sexy Pants,” leaving his job to join the show

I beg this man to get a grip.

Taylor and Travis getting married at…Madison Square Garden?

Please tell me this isn’t real. I genuinely can’t think of a less romantic venue.

…

In less funny news, Bari Weiss’s newly-tapped boss of “60 Minutes” has fired correspondent Scott Pelley for calling out her bullshit in front of the staff. Pelley then blew the whistle about Weiss in a statement, claiming he’s been instructed “to inject falsehoods and bias” and unverified assertions into his reporting since she took over at CBS News. Fuuuuuuuuuuck.

An update from Brazil…

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Please excuse this brief pause in our regular scheduled politics programming—I’m in the middle of an international move and need to share how I accidentally ended up at the last place that I would ever willingly spend my last night in the United States.

First, it is really fucking stressful trying to get a dog to Brazil. You have to spend over a thousand dollars just to get the necessary health paperwork signed by a pet travel specialist and then endorsed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture within 10 days of your flight. Government departments are notoriously backed up and unreliable, so they still might just not get you the certificate in time. Also, you can only bring a dog on the plane as an in-cabin pet if you’re flying on both a Latin American airline and aircraft—not, say, a Colombian airline that partners with Delta. I have heard too many stories about dogs getting hypothermia or even dying when people put them in cargo on a long flight. I’d rather row a canoe to Brazil myself and risk getting bombed by my own military for being a “drug boat” on the way than put my 20-pound dog under the plane. All of this severely limited my flight options.

So the unhinged travel route I had to book required us to fly to Miami, spend 1.5 nights in a hotel, and then take a 3 am flight to Rio that connects in Bogotá. I decided I was going to use this full layover day in Miami to find the best dog beach in the city and really wear Pedro out in the sun and sand before he has to travel in a bag for 12 hours. The best dog beach I could find in Miami was in Haulover Park, on North Beach, so I aimed to stay near there. But the nice hotels around the beach are really expensive—and especially unaffordable amid the Miami Swim Week festivities, where every reality TV influencer apparently walked the runway this year. Some of the 2-star and 3-star hotels I found in area looked fine to me, but I got spooked by reviews warning of things like rooms smelling like bleach or sewage and the constant sound and view of construction outside the windows. It being my last day in the country, I really wanted to have a relaxing and nice time. So I went on Hotwire.

For the uninitiated, the deal with Hotwire is that you can get big discounts by booking a hotel blind, meaning you don’t know exactly which hotel you’re booking. Hotels put their empty rooms on Hotwire at low prices they don’t want to be associated with by name online, because then they’d have trouble selling their other rooms for the standard price. You can search for particular areas of a city and amenities and numbers of stars, and you can see very general reviews of the place, but you can’t know the name of the hotel until after you book it. Unfortunately, the “area” search tool is quite broad and encompasses multiple neighborhoods, so it’s not that easy to narrow down for yourself exactly where you want to be. But I found a 4.5-star hotel on there that was pet friendly, in the general region of Haulover Beach, had good reviews, and was about $300 off the regular room price. A “hot rate,” they called it. So I booked a “bay view” room and carelessly waived the $30 fee that lets you cancel once you find out the name of the hotel. I didn’t consider that the Trump International Beach Resort was even one of the options, because I’d missed it on the map.

Of course, the big reveal happened and that’s the one I had booked for two nights. It was non-refundable. I arrived at midnight in a thunderstorm. Here’s the tacky marble and bronze lobby.

The place looks and feels like it’s stuck in the 80s. It smells too strongly of a floral perfume. There’s Trump merch everywhere, including Trump hats and Trump wine and Trump-branded water bottles in the room. Walking past this cabinet on the way to find my room was when I started to want to die.

My room had faux alligator-skin walls and a view of a strip mall, a parking lot, and, sure, the bay. Pedro immediately vomited and had diarrhea on the carpet, which I swear I did not intentionally allow to happen (I tried to clean it myself and gonna leave a massive tip for housekeeping!) but was darkly funny.

There’s a creepy sanitary arcade on the second floor that looks like it’s never been used, playing late-80s techno music inside of a room with no people in it. It would almost be cool if it didn’t feel like a horror movie about clowns in there.

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Barely a week after Donald Trump stole $1.8 billion from taxpayers to create a slush fund, called the “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” that will compensate supposed victims of Joe Biden’s Department of Justice, Trump has weaponized his own DOJ against columnist E. Jean Carroll as revenge for her accusing him of rape.

Three years after she beat him in court twice over claims of rape and then defamation, Trump’s DOJ has opened a criminal investigation into whether Carroll committed perjury in 2022. Prosecutors are trying to prove that she lied in a deposition for her civil rape case against Trump when she said that she was receiving no outside funding for her legal fees, when six months later her team disclosed that she was now receiving some legal financial assistance from billionaire Reid Hoffman. Of course, it’s fully possible that Carroll was not receiving the funds when she gave the deposition and only later accepted the help from Hoffman, considering that Trump’s lawyer at the time—now acting Attorney General Todd Blanche (lol)—never brought up this supposed perjury by the plaintiff while the case was underway.

What’s clear is that Trump despises E. Jean Carroll, perhaps more than anyone else on the planet, because she publicly labeled him a rapist and won $88 million in damages. He keeps trying to appeal the damages that he’s supposed to pay her, which the Supreme Court has deferred now 12 times, claiming he couldn’t have raped her because she’s “not my type.” He called her a liar 26 times in unhinged social media rants after a jury had found him liable for rape, which only led to him having to pay her exponentially more money. And when Carroll won her defamation case against him, she called the verdict “a great victory for every woman who stands up when she’s been knocked down, and a huge defeat for every bully who has tried to keep a woman down.” That set her up as the final boss of Trump’s ultimate revenge tour against women.

I wrote a column for The Cut back when Trump was assembling the rape-iest possible cabinet late in 2024 that his second term appeared to be revenge for the whole Me Too movement. Trump pointedly nominated multiple people—Pete Hegseth, Matt Gaetz, RFK Jr., and Linda McMahon among them—who also either faced rape and sexual abuse allegations themselves or were accused of enabling the sexual abuse of kids. Trump has now pushed out four cabinet members, all of them women, to replace them with men—including Pam Bondi, whom he believed wasn’t weaponizing the DOJ effectively enough against his enemies. But Hegseth, Kennedy, and McMahon are still up there running the country, and the lawyer with the biggest personal vendetta against E. Jean Carroll is now running the Justice Department.

We’ve become almost desensitized to the casual misogyny of this administration and its followers, because there are so many battles to fight right now. But the headlines should all be shocking on their own: The Students for Trump cofounder was just arrested for punching a woman in the face; Hegseth is methodically purging women from the military and from military history; Trump yelled “quiet piggy” at a female reporter and is still trying to disenfranchise married women; red state doctors are letting women die from miscarriages because they’ve been told to prioritize the fetus. And now Trump is using the full weight of the DOJ to punish the woman he raped for daring to open her mouth about it.

What the president perhaps doesn’t realize is that all he’s accomplishing with this transparently bogus “criminal probe” is putting E. Jean Carroll back into national headlines a few months before the midterms. He’s reminding voters for absolutely no reason at all, with his poll numbers already circling the drain, that there’s a woman out there who accused him of rape and won. He’s making his “anti-weaponization fund” look even more hypocritical and ridiculous in process. And when this investigation comes up empty, I fear he’s going to implode.

Today I’m introducing a new feature of Nightcap that will drop weekly in addition to my deeper dives (and Brazil dispatches when I have them). When I originally conceived of this newsletter, it was supposed to be more of a round-up of politics news and the best of the internet, and then I just kept finding myself wanting to go long. But who says we can’t do both? The news is so overwhelmingly dark right now that I think it’s important to pluck out moments of humor and levity and maybe a little satisfaction from the wasteland—even if it’s a laugh-while-you-cry situation. So here’s what amused me from the news cycle this week:

Trump skipping his son’s wedding

Trump famously does not give a shit about any of his kids except for Ivanka, whom he thinks is hot. He forgets Tiffany exists; all he knows about Barron is that he’s tall and that Melania takes care of him. And when he was asked yesterday whether he was attending his son Don Jr.’s wedding to socialite Bettina Anderson, Trump said, “The timing is not good for me. I have a thing called Iran and other things.”

Trump officially RSVP’d no to his son’s wedding in a Truth Social post today, citing “circumstances pertaining to the Government” and “my love for the United States of America” as his reasons for skipping. The president's public schedule shows he’ll be at his New Jersey golf club this weekend.

A MAGA House candidate who calls himself a 'proud family man’ ruined his best friend’s life by introducing to swinging

A Trump-endorsed candidate running for Congress in Arizona, former Pinal County sheriff Mark Lamb, is accused of “ruining his best friend’s life by introducing him to the swinger lifestyle” and sending women photos of his penis, which one woman sent to investigators at their church.

Per the Daily Beast:

Lamb is accused of roping his pal Matt Hilsabeck into a years-long affair with his wife without permission from Hilsabeck’s spouse, which not only led to his friend’s divorce, but also a probe by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, an investigation by the Arizona Republic has revealed.

Jillian Stannard, Hilsabeck’s ex-wife, said Lamb “got in her face” when she sent sexual material, including a photo of Lamb’s penis, to church officials as part of their probe. The Republic writes that he then “threatened her, telling her there would be consequences.”

He’ll probably still win.

“toothless misogynist Jack Hughes”

I don’t know what the account Pop Flop is, but I can’t stop laughing at this tweet about an Olympic hockey player:

The Senate abruptly left town without funding ICE or Trump’s ballroom

Republicans are furious with Trump and desperate to avoid having to vote on his toxic billion-dollar ballroom or slush fund for insurrectionists, so they just kinda quiet quit their jobs. Andrew Desiderio of Punchbowl News reports that as many as 25 GOP senators spoke in opposition to Trump’s slush fund in a private meeting with Attorney General Todd Blanche this week; they believe Trump is fucking their party ahead of the midterms by being openly corrupt and attacking some of their own members (John Cornyn, Bill Cassidy, Thomas Massie) in primary elections.

Britney Spears’ DUI statement

Driving under the influence is not funny!!! But Britney Spears did say this to the officers who pulled her over this month: “I could probably drink four bottles of wine and take care of you. I’m an angel.”

She also told the cops, “You can come to my house — I’ll make you food or lasagna or whatever you want. I have a pool.”

Honestly—period. (Hope she gets all the help she needs.)

Kilmar Abrego Garcia beats the Trump administration AGAIN

The Maryland dad whom the Trump administration “mistakenly” sent to a concentration camp in El Salvador has been through absolute hell in the year since being released back home—DHS has been desperately trying to re-deport him to Africa, where he’s never even lived, in retaliation for making them look bad by becoming a symbol of their immigration failures and cruelty. And today, a federal judge finally dismissed the bogus criminal case against Garcia, calling it a “vindictive” effort by the DOJ. A humiliating blow to the Trump administration, which I will count as “funny.”

Trump continues to swoon over young dudes

Did I miss anything? See you next week.

It’s been five years since a mob of MAGA thugs smeared poop on the walls inside the U.S. Capitol and murdered a police officer because Trump told them to overturn his election loss to Joe Biden. Roughly 1,500 of those people were charged with federal crimes under Biden, and Trump pardoned nearly all of them or commuted their sentences when he returned to office last year. Dozens of those rioters went on to commit new crimes, including child sexual abuse, reckless homicide by drunk driving, strangulation, burglary, and possession of child pornography. And now $1.8 billion of our taxpayer money is being funneled into a “slush fund” to pay these people for their (past and future) loyalty to Trump—without Congress having approved a dime of it.

One insurrectionist who was recently convicted of child sexual assault, a Florida handyman named Andrew Paul Johnson, appeared to know this money was coming. According to a police report from February, he tried to bribe one of his young victims into silence with the millions he expected to receive as restitution for his Jan. 6 prosecution. “Andrew also told [child] that since he was pardoned for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and he was being awarded $10,000,000 as a result of being a ‘jan 6’er,’” the report reads. “Andrew did tell [child] that he would be putting him in his ‘will’ to take any money he had left over.”

The police must have assumed that Johnson was lying about the money coming from Trump just to keep the kid quiet. But no—the molester’s prediction has come to pass! Because Trump has now actually reached a “settlement” with his own DOJ and IRS—just a transfer of taxpayer money to himself, really—to create a $1.776 billion slush fund for his allies that he believes were wrongly targeted by Biden’s DOJ. (Note the 1776 number they came up with for the slush fund, referencing the Revolutionary War.) Trump had originally sued the IRS for $10 billion over his leaked tax returns, and this was part of the deal his own agencies came up with for him to drop that lawsuit: essentially, reparations for white people.

When confronted over whether this money could go to literal child molesters at a Senate hearing today, Attorney General Todd Blanche refused to say no or even acknowledge that such men exist. And when Sen. Blumenthal (D-Conn.) introduced an amendment to an unrelated bill that would block this money from going to “convicted child predators,” Republicans killed it.

Meanwhile, the IRS has also quietly agreed to drop all current and future claims against Trump, his family, and his companies for unpaid taxes, which feels just as newsworthy as anything else about the slush fund. The Trumps are now just eternally shielded from any kind of financial scrutiny, as they profit off of Donald’s second term through brazen corruption, tax evasion, and insider trading. “In a sweeping one-page addendum to Monday’s settlement agreement…Blanche agreed that the U.S. is ‘FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing, any and all claims,’ including ‘monetary relief,’ that ‘have been or could have been’ asserted by the IRS against Trump, his family or his businesses,” per NBC News.

The slush fund and immunity deal are so nakedly corrupt that even Republicans are queasy about it. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he’s “not a fan” of it, and his caucus already appears to be looking for a way out of having to deal with it (along with $1 billion ballroom) ahead of a midterm election they are expected to lose, badly. “I’ve got more questions than I’ve heard answers for, and … I didn’t hear anything that gave me certainty in terms of how this all comes together,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), after attending the hearing with Blanche. “Can the president just say $1.87 billion? … I don’t know enough about it to feel comfortable.”

House Democrats, meanwhile, appear to have located their spines and are planning use a discharge petition to force Republicans to take a vote on whether to re-assert Congress’ power of the purse and block this unhinged slush fund. “We need to put Republicans on the spot as to whether or not they are going to endorse this rank corruption, or whether they are going to stand up for basic constitutional values,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) told The New Republic.

At this point, Trump is just playing in our faces. Reaching a deal with your own government to use it like a piggy bank and move billions of taxpayer dollars to the people who smeared literal shit on the Capitol walls is so absurd that a TV writers’ room would reject it. Make every Republican take a vote on whether they like that this is happening in their names.

I happened to start watching The Testaments on Hulu last night, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, after weeks of avoiding it. I’ve found it harder this time to mentally psych myself up for another show set in Gilead after a long day of the bleakest possible news about our real-life dystopia, but it turned out to be a really excellent and well-acted show. It’s less torture-porny than the original (praise be), and I binged a full four episodes last night before bed.

I only bring this up to say that with the world of Gilead still fresh on my mind today, I had an especially out-of-body experience watching Trump’s extremely bizarre press conference about why (white) women aren’t having more babies. The event was so unserious that it could’ve been an SNL skit, and at the same time it epitomized the whole pathology of this administration—which, to be fair, certainly might be affecting people’s will to reproduce.

‘Father of Fertility’

Trump opened the presser in front of a row of smiling zombie women led by Sen. Katie Britt, the Alabama Republican infamous for delivering that strange State of the Union rebuttal in whispers from her kitchen. Its purpose was to propose a new rule aimed at making it easier for employers to choose to offer some IVF coverage among other health insurance benefits, which falls well short of Trump’s campaign promise to make IVF free for all.

Looking bored and agitated at his desk, Trump declared himself “father of fertility”—a topic he says he learned about in “three to four minutes”—and then told the women behind him to make it quick because he had other things to do. “You’ll speak not too long because I am being waited on by a large group of generals,” he said. “That’s also important. Having to do with the absolutely country of ‘I-run.’ That’s the way they pronounce it.” Britt had to interrupt him to get the presser back on topic, and as she glazed him about his leadership, he winked and raised his eyebrows at onlookers and occasionally appeared to doze off.

‘Under-babied’ women

On Dr. Oz’s turn to speak (he’s somehow in charge of Medicare), he lamented that one in three Americans are “under-babied.”

“What does under-babied mean?” Oz explained. “It means that either you don’t have any children or you have less children than you would normally want to have. And to Katie’s point, we have a crisis that’s causing our fertility rate to drop below 1.5. The replacement rate is 2.1, so we’re way below what we need just to replace the people we have in America.”

The numbers Oz chose to cite here are telling, as June Sternbach noted, because they only refer to the white replacement rate in America. The overall U.S. replacement rate in 2025 was 1.79, and the rate for just white people was 1.5. He’s basically echoing neo-Nazi Elon Musk, who tweets constantly about the “Great Replacement” theory, or the fear that the white race is being replaced by Black and brown immigrants. (FWIW, in the Margaret Atwood novel, low fertility rates are offered as the justification for why Gilead was created in the first place, and Atwood’s Gilead was explicitly white supremacist.)

Oz added that the goal of this fertility initiative is “more Trump babies.”

RFK Jr. on teen boy sperm count

We also learned that Health Secretary Bobby Kennedy is taking a break from slicing off raccoon penises and chugging raw milk to turn his attention to the sperm count of young boys. “In 1970, men had twice the sperm count that our teenage boys have today,” he lamented.

You’ll be surprised to learn that that statistic is kinda bullshit and based on some cherry-picked scientific studies that can’t be applied very broadly. But, to the extent that men’s sperm count and quality are declining in specific geographical areas, we know they are caused by environmental factors that the Trump Administration is actively making worse by destroying the Environmental Protection Agency: air and water pollution, pesticides, microplastics, global warming, BPA. Toxins plus climate harms are likely hurting both men’s and women’s fertility, and the MAHA movement was a hypocritical scam that only enabled Trump to further sacrifice our environment and natural resources to corporate greed.

Other reasons women might be less inclined to have a baby right now:

• Women are quite literally dying of miscarriages under the Trump administration because doctors in states with harsh abortion laws won’t treat them even in the worst health emergencies if their fetus still has a heartbeat.

• Major American companies are cutting paid family leave and reducing support for working parents because the job market is so bad that there’s less competition for employees.

• The cost of groceries and gas right now is insane and getting worse, and we’re facing a global recession on top of that.

• Every day we’re hit with a new terrifying headline about the Atlantic ocean current collapsing within the century, or New Orleans being underwater within decades, or the world running out of fresh water and people having to duke it out for basic resources—and the current administration’s answer to that is to deny that any of it is happening and implement policies that only speed up the damage.

• Instead of listening to women about anything that we actually want, men are inflating their balls with Surgilube and saline injections to try to make themselves more sexually attractive.

• Some women just don’t want them, and that’s fine!

• Republicans are trying to ban sending abortion pills by mail while legalizing sending handguns by mail, despite guns being the leading cause of death of children in the US.

• The women trying to pressure other women to procreate, like Stephen Miller’s wife, literally had to have sex with a white supremacist vampire to do this???

Most women don’t want to be farmed like livestock, and today’s press conference started to make me feel a little bit like a goat. If this administration wants more babies, they should really start by giving a shit whether women live or die, and then maybe work up to understanding what kind of world people might want to bring a child into.

Three people on a cruise out of Southern Argentina last month have died from a deadly hantavirus outbreak onboard, and five more infections and possible infections are being traced throughout more than a dozen countries. A British man is in intensive care in South Africa with the respiratory disease, and three people are reporting symptoms in Europe, according to the World Health Organization (which Trump pulled us out of in January, incidentally). The variant of the virus that jumped onto this cruise, called the Andes variant, can be contracted from rat urine or droppings and spread from human to human. Argentine officials suspect that a Dutch couple, two of the three people who died on the cruise, contracted the virus during a bird-watching excursion at an Argentine landfill and brought it aboard the ship.

People are freaking out about a potential hantavirus pandemic, understandably, because we’re all still traumatized by the Covid pandemic and how it also started as just a few deadly cases very far away. And there were American passengers on the cruise, at least six of whom have returned their to their home states by now. But the hantavirus is very unlikely to become a pandemic, infectious disease experts say, because it’s difficult for it to transmit between people unless you’ve been in close quarters with an infected person for a long period of time. “There’s really no risk to anyone who is not on that ship,” Dr. Bryce Warner, an expert on the virus, told the New York Times.

Still, the hantapanic has yielded something productive, which is a renewed scrutiny on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s (and DOGE’s) reckless mass firings across U.S. federal health agencies—including, specifically, the guys who were hired to inspect cruise ships for health and sanitation and investigate outbreaks. CBS News reports that Kennedy fired all of the full-time employees in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Vessel Sanitation Program as part of its sweeping, indiscriminate layoffs when Trump took office. Notably, these guys’ salaries were paid by the cruise companies, not by taxpayers, so getting rid of them saved the federal government zero dollars while enabling massive ships full of vacationers to be floating petri dishes of infectious disease. Per the story:

The steep cuts to the program’s inspectors baffled CDC officials since the small team’s staff is not paid for by taxpayer dollars. Fees from cruise ships companies pay for the program, which is supposed to inspect large vessels at least twice a year.

The epidemiologist tasked with leading the agency’s outbreak response on cruise ships was included in the layoffs, multiple CDC officials said.

…

At least a dozen outbreaks have been documented so far this year on cruise ships, mostly from norovirus. Some of those outbreaks have made headlines for sickening dozens or even hundreds of people. There were 18 total outbreaks listed for all of last year.

Agency staff were in the middle of responding to two outbreaks when they were let go, an official said.

Keep in mind that if Bari Weiss’ CBS News, which now skews quite friendly toward the Trump Administration, is reporting and publishing a piece this damning, it’s an extremely bad look for Trump and Kennedy. And many of the biggest viral news and left-leaning influencer accounts on X and Instagram, including the former Kamala Harris campaign’s Headquarters, jumped on the story today to make sure everybody is clear about what terrifyingly stupid leadership looks like.

RFK Jr. knows he shouldn’t have fired those people. He had said a year ago after DOGE randomly took a chainsaw to the CDC that "20% of those thousands of firings had likely been “mistakes” and that he was going to try and hire some of them back. "Personnel that should not have been cut, were cut. We're reinstating them. And that was always the plan. Part of the — at DOGE, we talked about this from the beginning, is we're going to do 80% cuts, but 20% of those are going to have to be reinstated, because we'll make mistakes," Kennedy told reporters in April 2025. He then rescinded hundreds of CDC termination notices, which made him look incompetent in the first place, and also apparently missed quite a few important ones.

With that said, RFK Jr. has also made it clear that he is a eugenicist who wants people dead. He has replaced experienced doctors and health officials with anti-vax quacks, leading to a massive surge in child measles cases across the U.S. (including a new case in Manhattan). Babies are bleeding to death from vitamin K deficiency because MAHA moms are rejecting the vitamin shot their infants are supposed to get at birth. The FDA blocked the publication of new research confirming that the Covid and shingles vaccines are safe and flipped the food pyramid upside down, because truth and facts and science tend to upset Trump’s base. Meanwhile, Kennedy himself is out here slicing off raccoon penises, decapitating whales, and “rescuing” a bird at the airport that looks like it’s about to find itself still alive inside the secretary’s mouth, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence during multinational outbreaks.

If there’s three things to know about MAGA voters, one is that they lack basic empathy and relish in seeing bad things happen to people who disagree with them. The second is that they are driven by fear—of immigrants, trans people, cities, women, public transportation, the unknown. And the third is that they fucking love cruises. Republicans love to get on a big eyesore of a boat and then just be on that boat, passing by other countries from a distance with a piña colada in hand and never having to get out and interact with anyone in those countries. It’s baked into the party platform. So Trump voters can’t love seeing the news that his administration fired all the guys who were supposed to keep them from dying of rat-borne disease outbreaks on vacation.

I was 8 years old in 1991 when my mom explained to me that Louisiana’s race for governor that year was between “a crook and a Klansman.” David Duke, the Republican candidate, had been a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan before running for president and then governor of our state. Democrat Edwin Edwards, who was later convicted on federal racketeering, extortion, and fraud charges related to rigging riverboat casino licenses, ultimately won the election thanks to 80% of Black voters turning out and voting unanimously for the guy who wasn’t in the KKK. But a clear majority of low-income white people in the state had cast their vote for the Klansman. Per the archived NYT story:

Mr. Duke’s strongest support came from low- and middle-income whites. He got 56 percent of the vote of whites with family incomes under $15,000, 63 percent of those making from $15,000 to $29,999, and 60 percent of those making from $30,000 to 49,999.

But 51 percent of whites with family incomes from $50,000 to $74,999 voted for Mr. Edwards, and 66 percent of those with incomes $75,000 and over supported him.

To reiterate, this was 1991.

Twenty-five years later, six unelected, lifetime-appointed Klansmen on the Supreme Court have gutted the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act that protected minority voting representation in the South, declaring that it’s not necessary anymore because racism is over. Things “have changed dramatically’” in the South “in the decades since the passage of the Voting Rights Act,” Justice Alito wrote in his majority opinion. When the VRA was passed, “the Nation had faced nearly a century of ‘entrenched racial discrimination in voting,’” but “Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate.” (The example he uses is the 2008 election, when Obama was on the ballot, which was of course an anomaly.) In fact, Alito writes, allowing for the existence of any majority-Black districts in a state like Louisiana—where a third of the population is Black—actually discriminates against Republicans, because Black voters generally vote for Dems.

In other words, you can draw up districts in the shape of bearded dragons to squeeze out extra seats for Republicans, but you can’t draw the districts in such a way that ensures racial minorities have any representative voting power in their state—even though Congress passed a law mandating exactly that after Black people were literally murdered for trying to vote.

What this decision means, in effect, is that Deep South states including Louisiana, where the case originated, are free to carve up majority-Black areas like New Orleans in a way that fully dilutes their voting power and hands representation of the state entirely over to white Republicans. And right on cue, Gov. Jeff Landry (R) suspended Louisiana’s primary elections—in which people had already begun casting votes—to redraw the state’s congressional maps to eliminate both majority-Black districts.

This comes two days after Ron DeSantis redrew Florida’s map to look like this:

Now if we’re going to talk purely about numbers ahead of the midterms, blue states can play this game too. California and Virginia have redrawn their maps in response to Texas starting all of this (with the caveat that California and Virginia put the redistricting referendum to statewide vote, rather than just having the governor cram the new maps down people’s throats). So before Louisiana’s latest move, the nationwide redistricting games were set to net roughly seven House seats for Republicans:

Even with Louisiana’s new gerrymander, Democrats are still quite likely to take the House in the midterms. The road is a bit bumpier, and it’s more imperative than ever this year that people get off their asses and vote, but Democrats very much can still take the House and even the Senate in 2026. The Senate polling right now in Texas gives a sense of how dark the situation is for Republicans, even in the reddest of red states, where Democrat James Talarico is showing a comfortable lead over both Republicans:

The important thing for Democrats to start thinking about is what they can do with the small window of power the people give them this year, if they manage to win it. Without radical change, democracy is lost—and Black and brown people disenfranchised—for a generation. They need to expand the Supreme Court to dilute the power of Trump and Bush’s appointees, who are ruling the country by shadow docket and casually rewriting federal laws. They need do something about gerrymandering, be it forcing all states to redraw fair districts via independent commissions or some better idea above my pay grade. They need to pass that stronger, more ironclad update to the Voting Rights Act that former Joe Manchin somehow had the power to tank by himself in 2022. They need to write their own version of Project 2025, which bulldozes through red tape to protect the country from future Donald Trumps and Stephen Millers and actually improve people’s lives, should they win the presidency in 2028. Have a plan. Be a party worth voting for. Otherwise, we’re barreling toward a system of all-red states vs. all-blue states that will feel very much like the Union vs. the Confederacy, and it probably will lead to a second Civil War.

I will never be one of those people saying “blue states should just secede” or “the South should just secede,” because I love Louisiana and a whole lot of the people there there despite its insidious leadership, and I believe Louisiana belongs in this country and deserves better than freefalling back into the Jim Crow era. With that said: Everybody down there better be screaming about this shit from the rooftops from now until November.

Before I judge anyone who attended this year’s White House Correspondents’ dinner, I want to say that that I used to be one of them. During the Obama years, my HuffPost colleagues and I always looked forward to that weekend in April when we got to put on formalwear and rub elbows with celebs at all the Vanity Fair before and after parties, because it was the one weekend a year that politics reporters got to feel like we were in LA instead of DC, maybe writing about the Oscars instead of infrastructure week. We savored that annual crumb of glamour, however embarrassing it is to say now, more than anyone really worried about the implications or optics of political journalists throwing back champagne and sliders next to the administration we we were supposed to be covering.

I stopped attending any WHCD festivities after 2016, in part because I moved to New York and in part because it became clear how gross and unbearable the event looked once we had a president who was openly attacking the free press. I’m a little surprised that ten years later, amid a full-on constitutional crisis, many people who consider themselves serious journalists are still showing up to this banquet that sane-washes a POTUS who yelled “Quiet piggy” at a female reporter on his plane recently and brags about the ideological capture of CBS News. Ironically, hundreds of those journalists ended up having front-row seats at what appeared to be the third assassination attempt on Trump, which the White House is now using to further erode the First Amendment, get Jimmy Kimmel fired for a joke and pull the broadcasting licenses of eight local ABC News stations.

The “shooting” itself has unfolded so strangely—and the White House capitalized on it so quickly to twist it in Trump’s political favor—that half the country appears to believe he staged it himself. A 31-year-old California man named Cole Tomas Allen was able to rush past security at the Washington Hilton on Saturday night armed with guns and knives—toward a room filled with Trump and his Vice President and nearly every member of his cabinet—before being tackled and arrested. A gunshot was heard, which we’ve been led to believe was fired by Allen, though the Department of Justice has yet to find the bullet or confirm that Allen used any weapon. The only person hurt was a Secret Service agent, who may have been accidentally shot by a fellow Secret Service agent in friendly fire rather than by the suspect.

In that scenario, Trump’s security team not only let a man with guns and knives blow through the checkpoint towards the president—you can see from the security footage Trump posted that night that Allen got quite far into the hotel before being tackled—but the agents managed to shoot each other in the process. The Washington Post reported that the Trump Administration had provided an unusually low level of security for an event featuring this many important people, which could suggest either that this administration is incompetent or that they weren’t trying very hard to deter an incident like this. “Hypothetically, If I had hidden an explosive in my shoe or my jacket, I would have had no problem getting into one of those ballrooms,” one Fox News reporter posted on X about the notable lack of security at the event.

Allen never got anywhere near the president, but because that room was full of journalists with cell phones, we’ve been treated to unlimited content from the aftermath of the gunshot ringing out. Stephen Miller grabbed his pregnant wife’s boob and used her as a human shield as Trump watched them evacuate from behind the curtain. (Trump later said in interviews that he delayed his own evacuation by the Secret Service on purpose, because he felt calm about the incident and preferred to watch everything unfold.) RFK Jr. ditched his wife entirely to flee the room. Kash Patel’s girlfriend was found holding hands with another man. One guy continued to eat his salad amid the chaos; a Free Press writer recorded a video of herself taking deep breaths and posted it to the grid.

And it seemed like almost immediately, the incident was being spun to push an agenda. Before Trump had even released a statement and before any of the facts had come out, a swarm of paid MAGA influencers all posted some version of the same coordinated message on X: This means we have to give Trump his ballroom!

There’s no chance that Republican influencers suddenly felt inspired to post about Trump’s ballroom, considering that it has absolutely nothing to do with the Correspondents’ Dinner. The dinner would never be hosted at the White House because it’s thrown for and by the journalists and to raise money for the WHCA; the entire point is for it to appear independent of the White House, even if the president invited to it to be roasted by a comedian every year.

But Trump has become obsessed with this ballroom, which will include a massive underground bunker for himself to ride out the next insurrection in, likely because the public absolutely hates the project and a judge recently halted it. So it’s worth noting how swiftly the White House was able to capitalize on this incident with a coordinated campaign to make the ballroom sound indispensable. Like clockwork, MAGA influencers posted in unison about it; Trump himself then came out and said this is why we need the ballroom; and then elected Republicans (even “libertarian” Rand Paul) fell in line the next day behind a bill appropriating $400 million in taxpayer money for this narcissistic monstrosity that Trump claimed was going to be fully funded by outside donors. “The sooner we get the ballroom built, the better it is for the country,” Sen. Lindsey Graham said yesterday.

The White House also wasted no time using the alleged assassination attempt to crack down on free speech, much like they did in the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting. Melania posted a self-serious tweet demanding that Disney/ABC fire Jimmy Kimmel over a joke about her being an “expectant widow” (which was about their age difference, not assassination); Trump’s FCC is threatening to pull eight of ABC News’ local broadcasting licenses in retaliation for the same joke; and Trump’s DOJ has absurdly re-indicted James Comey over an old tweet featuring a picture of seashells that were in the shape of 8645 (meaning get rid of the 45th president). So what did journalists get for inviting Trump to their First Amendment party again? Escalating attacks on the First Amendment.

Meanwhile, as Trump was using the actions of a random guy who busted through his weak security setup to make the case for a gawdy ballroom and accelerate his revenge tour, legacy media outlets are covering the situation like this:

“Trump calls for unity and bipartisan healing,” wrote PBS. CNN’s Dana Bash had Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.) on her show and asked him if the Democratic' party’s “heated rhetoric” is the problem.

In fact, every single American president has had assassination plots against him. There were at least 11 against Obama. The reason nobody remembers the attempts on Obama’s life is that his Secret Service and intelligence teams caught and stopped them before a man was able to get a clear shot at his head or bum rush his banquet, whereas Trump’s security team straight-up let a sniper climb onto the roof of a nearby building during an open-air rally. What FBI Director Kash Patel calls a “tragedy” about Saturday night is actually a security failure of such stunning proportions that half the country thinks Trump staged the attempt on himself to revive his sinking poll numbers.

Trump is going to milk this incident for all it’s worth, but we don’t actually have to play along with any of it. We don’t need to talk about the “inflammatory rhetoric” on the left. I don’t need to read Allen’s manifesto about rapists and pedos to try and understand his motivations. Trump doesn’t need a $400 million ballroom for security now any more than he did last week. We don’t need to hand-wring about jokes on late night cable. The only thing anyone needs to talk about in the wake of Cole Tomas Allen casually jogging past Secret Service packed with weapons is why an administration that guts social programs to spend trillions of dollars on the Department of Defense doesn’t seem the least bit interested in defending the president’s head in public, ever.

Scandal-ridden Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned from Trump’s cabinet today amid an investigation into allegations that she drinks heavily on the job, slept with a subordinate, and that both her husband and her father have been sexually harassing and inappropriately texting young staff at the Labor Department. Her husband, an anesthesiologist, was actually barred from entering the department headquarters in February after two female staffers accused him of sexually assaulting them, which was caught on camera. But Chavez-DeRemer’s attorney insists that her resignation “is not the result of legal wrongdoings” but rather a “personal decision” to leave the administration for a job in the private sector. (Sure, Jan.)

Chavez-DeRemer is the third cabinet secretary to “resign” or be fired during Trump’s second term, and notably, all three have been women. Trump fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in March due to “a culmination of her many unfortunate leadership failures including the fallout in Minnesota, the ad campaign, the allegations of infidelity, the mismanagement of her staff, and her constant feuding with the heads of other agencies, including CBP and ICE,” an administration official told NBC News. A month later, Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi—despite her reportedly begging him not to—because he was frustrated with her mishandling of the Epstein files and failure to prosecute his political enemies.

In reality, while these women were objectively terrible cabinet secretaries, they weren’t any worse than some of the men in the Trump’s cabinet who still have jobs—Trump just found them to be useful scapegoats on which to pin all of the failures of his administration. The drinking allegation against Ms. Chavez-DeRemer is particularly funny to consider in this regard:

The original complaint to the inspector general accused Ms. Chavez-DeRemer and her aides of drinking on the job and keeping a stash of liquor at the office, according to The New York Post, which first reported the complaint in January.

In one text message, Ms. Chavez-DeRemer asked a staff member to bring rosé to her hotel room.

“Do they sell by the bottle,” she asked. The staff member responded that they did, but were out of rosé. Ms. Chavez-DeRemer responded with another selection: “How about the josh sauvi B.”

I’ll admit that it’s a little amusing to read about this woman’s request for josh sauvi B1 amid the list of scandals forcing her departure, considering that some of Trump’s male appointees are so notoriously hammered at all times that social media has taken to nicknaming his cabinet the “Liquor Cabinet.” Pete Hegseth is such a wreckless alcoholic that he had to promise the Senate he would stop drinking if they gave him the Department of Defense. (He’s also been credibly accused of rape and was confirmed to Trump’s cabinet despite that and the drinking problem.) FBI Director Kash Patel announced today that he’s suing The Atlantic over a deeply reported story about his excessive drinking that claims his staff has trouble waking him up sometimes when he’s passed out.

It does feel a little bit like firing the women first would play better with MAGA, who are unclear on whether they believe women should even have the right to vote, much less help Trump to run the country. Republicans like to sprinkle a few women into positions of power for optics, because how can you call Trump a sexist pig if he’s got women like Pam Bondi in his cabinet, openly worshipping and defending him around the big table at those meetings? The Pam Bondis of the cabinet also tend to be the most disposable and the easiest to point a finger at when your poll numbers start circling the drain. Anyone who votes for Trump will be quick to believe him when he blames his problems on a woman. Of course she was a failure; probably a snake who betrayed him, too. Time to get serious and replace her with a man.

Of course, none of this is to defend Chavez-DeRemer—she and her entire family sound like creeps. She took staffers to strip clubs and allegedly pressured the young women to give sexual attention to her husband and dad. During her tenure as labor secretary, the department has broadcast white nationalist propaganda on social media and forced thousands of civil servants out of jobs. She deserves to be fired or exiled whatever exactly happened. But until I see one single man in Trump’s cabinet lose his job for being equally ill-behaved and dysfunctional as the women being thrown under the bus left and right, then this is just more rank misogyny dressed up as an administration having standards.

Hi readers,

After nine beautiful years in Brooklyn, I am shrinking my life into two suitcases and moving to Rio de Janeiro in June.

To be sure, this feels like something one might do in their twenties rather than in the middle of their career. I’m 42 now; I have unexplained lower back pain. My hangovers last three days. I have a small dog who requires an ungodly amount of paperwork to migrate to South America. Moving to a beach city in Brazil with only my clothes and 6-year-old Maltipoo was not on my Bingo card for this decade.

I won’t be writing a Lena Dunham-style “Why I’m Leaving New York” essay about why, because my reasons are pretty simple: My partner and I were an immigrant and a journalist in a country that is increasingly hostile to both. He moved back to his hometown, Rio de Janeiro, in December, and I’m joining him there in June. It’s a romantic decision, in part, but also one that’s best for me right now as it becomes impossible to support myself in New York as a freelancer. I love Rio; its vibrance and sweatiness and soul remind me of New Orleans, except it’s nestled between the sea and mountains1 and is genuinely, shockingly beautiful. And the U.S. dollar, at least for now, stretches a lot further in Brazil than it does in the U.S., so I can afford a much better quality of life there than I can in Brooklyn.

This move also tracks for me in terms of the past few decades of my life: I spent ten years in D.C. and then left when Trump was elected the first time; I spent nearly ten years in New York and am now exiting after Trump’s second election. Brazil has successfully imprisoned its own right-wing aspiring autocrat and is moving in the right direction lately, but should a Bolsonaro scion take power again there in ten years, perhaps I’ll flee again to somewhere even further. The South Pole? A life fleeing fascist regimes by the decade would at least make for great semi-autobiographical novel material.

As for Nightcap, I have great news: It’s not only continuing apace but expanding! I’m writing this post today rather than closer to the actual move on June 1 because we’re coming up on the two-year anniversary of Nightcap this week—my newsletter is a toddler!!!—and I have a couple announcements about it. One, I’ve lowered the monthly and annual subscription price a bit for you guys to accommodate everyone’s subscription fatigue and to acknowledge the rising prices of everything else in this country under Trumponomics, in hopes that folks who regularly enjoy reading this newsletter and find it informative and stirring might be moved to support it. I will keep writing Nightcap for as long as I have enough paid subscribers to make it worth the time and effort, and as always, I am deeply grateful to each and every one of Nightcap’s patrons.

Secondly, in addition to my regular writings, I’ll be adding a new section at the bottom just for paid subscribers that will be more of a personal account of moving to Brazil. I’ll write about attempting to learn Portuguese and to culturally assimilate, post photos and stories of adventures in and around Rio, share the challenges and triumphs of starting over in a strange place with no friends (yet), and just generally enjoy having a freestyle, non-politics section of the newsletter. I hope you’ll come along for the ride!

xx,

Laura

ps. If you know someone in Rio whom you think I should know, please consider introducing us!

My stomach lurched yesterday as I watched the videos of Iranians forming human chains around their bridges and power plants as the seconds ticked away toward the arbitrary 8 p.m. deadline Trump had set for when their “whole civilization will die.” Some interpreted his post as a nuclear bomb threat; I was equally worried about the slow, painful deaths the population might face if he used regular bombs to destroy their power and water and food supplies and commit ecological terrorism on a population of 92 million people.

Imagine having to wait around to see what kind of bombs a genocidal madman across the world is going to use to kill you and your children and whether or not he was being serious, after he tweeted about your murder with the casualness of promoting a new TV show. Imagine having to hold hands with your neighbor around the local power plant to block a bomb from plunging your city into darkness, knowing that Pete Hegseth is probably the kind of man who would be more inclined to nuke the place if he saw you standing next to it.

To most of the world’s relief, Trump was bluffing this time when he threatened genocide. And Iran had called his bluff, refusing to negotiate with him at all despite his increasingly unhinged threats. As the deadline approached, it appears that Trump got nervous and sought a quick escape hatch from his own bluff. He asked Pakistan, as a “mediator,” to throw together a quick two-week deal that basically gave Iran everything it wanted: a ceasefire for Iran and its allies, explicit control over the Strait of Hormuz including a $2 million-per-ship toll paid to Iran (as reparations for our attacks), and acceptance of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, among other perks.

All of this leaves the United States worse off than where we were before we started this nonsensical $45 billion war, which has killed 13 Americans and 3,500 Iranians (including 240 school children) and replaced the Supreme Leader with his younger, more hardline son. We have a worse deal in place now than Obama’s Iran deal, which he had secured diplomatically without any bloodshed or war crimes, and we’ve destroyed our own reputation as a sane, stable country while wrecking the global economy and spiking the price of oil. In other words, we have lost this war by every possible metric: strategically, economically, legally, morally, ethically. Iran stood up to Trump, and he folded like the paper tiger he is.

Of course, this isn’t to suggest that the war is over or the deal buttoned up or the ceasefire even happening. Israel immediately violated the ceasefire last night, as they tend to do, and started bombing the hell out of Lebanon again. Israel is reportedly angry that Trump left them out of ceasefire negotiations in his haste to get a deal done before 8 p.m., considering that Netanyahu needs to be in a forever war in order to cling to power. In light of Israel’s attacks, Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz within 24 hours of agreeing to open it, and now Trump looks even more like a fool with his pants down for getting nothing out of this agreement and leaving the world economy in freefall.

AND STILL, I would much prefer this national humiliation as an outcome to one of the darkest days in American history than waking up to the news of armageddon. Yesterday really felt like it could go either way—a 50-50 probability for me. There are no guardrails on Trump because Congress has apparently rolled over and died. The president is a known bluffer, to be sure, but he’s also extremely vulnerable to manipulation and surrounded by unhinged warmongers who see Muslim kids as animals. Pete Hegseth, who’s really talking like a radical religious extremist lately, has spent the last few weeks firing all the top brass in the military because they’re the kinds of men who would refuse illegal orders and push back on his war crimes. The idea that one of these overgrown boys who treats war like a videogame would get a little too hopped up on steroids or whatever and push the mass murder button is not actually that far-fetched to me.

I would love to have a country to feel patriotic about. I would love for Congress to step up, relocate their spines, and impeach and remove both Trump and Hegseth before we all have to sit through another day waiting to see whether our senile president is going to follow-up on the casual evening genocide he threatened. But the United States has put me in a position where I want us to lose this war we started, because that’s preferable to the horrors of the alternative. The moral and ethical response to the Iranian regime killing protesters is not to kill hundreds of thousands more of them ourselves. We are the bad guys now.

Hi readers, and happy Trans Day of Visibility to all who celebrate. I don’t know how to gently transition to the subject of today’s newsletter so I’m just going to dive right in: Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s husband has a “busty bimbo” alter ego who loves to cross-dress in massive fake boobs and leggings and pay thousands of dollars to interact online with adult fetish models. And we know this because an immigrant sex worker, who is likely undocumented, leaked screenshots to the press to get back at Noem for overseeing DHS’s brutal ICE raids and inhuman concentration camps.

The story, which was published today by the Daily Mail along with a trove of explicit texts and photos of Bryon wearing wonky double Fs, wasn’t met with the denials you would expect. Kristi Noem was reportedly “blindsided” and “devastated” by the story and asked for “privacy and prayers at this time” for herself and her family. And Donald Trump had the most hilarious possible response: “They confirmed it?” he told the Daily Mail reporter. “Wow, well, I feel badly for the family if that’s the case, that’s too bad.”

After the story published, Axios reporter Marc Caputo just went ahead and tweeted that he nearly had the same scoop—and it came from an immigrant sex worker seeking revenge against Kristi.

Now, here’s why we’re allowed to laugh at and even be enraged by this situation. It’s not because anyone on the left gives a shit about a man with a cross-dressing kink. Lord knows we don’t care what folks do in their private lives if it isn’t hurting other people, and I frankly don’t see that much difference between Bryon Noem putting on a breast plate and Kristi doing this weird cosplay in full kit:

Rather, the problem here is that in addition to this kind of salacious, gender-bending scandal leaving one of Trump’s cabinet members wide open to blackmail by a foreign government, Kristi Noem has been prominently serving in an administration that is actively trying to torture queer and trans people and eliminate them from public life under the banner of some kind of moral and religious superiority.

Just this morning, Trump’s hand-picked Supreme Court sided with a Christian “therapist” in Colorado who challenged the state’s ban on conversion therapy for gay and trans kids. The plaintiff in Chiles v. Salazar had argued that rather than trying to “convert” her clients, she was just trying to help them “with their stated desires and objectives in counseling, which sometimes includes clients seeking to reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions, change sexual behaviors, or grow in the experience of harmony with one’s physical body.” We know that conversion therapy is akin to child abuse and torture and can lead to lasting psychological problems. But in his opinion, Justice Gorsuch of course agreed with the plaintiff that Colorado’s ban “censors speech based on viewpoint”—essentially ruling that talk therapy is a kind of free speech, rather than medical care subject to state regulation.

JD Vance is currently promoting a book about his faith called Communion while railing against “radical gender ideology.” Pete Hegseth has been going on insane rants about Christianity and divine assistance in his Holy Crusade against Iran while purging the military of gay and trans people and bombing Iranian elementary schools. And Kristi Noem is asking for prayers about her husband’s huge boob fetish while children are dying in American detention centers because their food is full of worms.

So yes, we are allowed to delight in Noem’s humiliation right now and marvel at the exposure of her and her party’s hypocrisy, once again. She shot her puppy, slept with her campaign manager on taxpayer-funded private jets, enriched herself and her boyfriend through illegal government contracts, turned the mass suffering and incarceration of innocent brown people into social media content about herself, and deserves to be tarred and feathered and bullied for the rest of her life.

I flew into Laguardia last night about 30 minutes before the runway crash between an Air Canada plane and a fire truck that killed two pilots, injured dozens of people and shut down the airport. The collision was apparently caused by a miscommunication from an exhausted air traffic controller who was distracted by a different emergency at the time, while his tower was understaffed at night. This is the second fatal plane accident in the U.S. since Trump took office, as his administration has been firing air traffic control employees "without cause nor based on performance or conduct” in order to “save money.”1 And last night’s incident was just a blip on the radar compared to the massive air travel crisis that Trump has not only created but is now deliberately making worse in his own country as his dictatorship slips out of his hands.

The mess started a month ago when the Iran war created a global jet fuel shortage by choking off oil shipments at the Strait of Hormuz. Airlines across the world have already been raising the price of plane tickets dramatically and preparing to cancel some longer flight routes altogether in anticipation of their fuel reserves running low. Iran has also attacked several airports and hotels in the Middle East in retaliation, which is causing a ripple effect of flight cancelations throughout Europe and Africa. The oil crisis and resulting international travel fuckery have become so egregious that it appears the “goal” of this war we started is now just to reopen the strait that closed because the war. It’s that circular Vietnam war logic all over again, driving us further into this pointless quagmire of violence.

On top of climbing ticket prices and international flight cancellations, we’ve now got a domestic travel crisis due to the partial government shutdown. TSA agents are entering their second full week without pay, and they’ve responded by quitting their jobs and calling out sick by the thousands, which is causing hours-long security lines and missed flights across all major U.S. airports. Trump is desperate to blame Democrats for the chaos, but it’s actually Republicans in Congress who’ve blocked TSA funding nine times because it doesn’t also include more money for ICE. The Democrats are holding off for certain ICE reforms, like banning face masks and requiring them to have judicial warrants to break into people’s homes, but have been eager to fund TSA and the rest of the agencies at Homeland Security with clean, standalone bills in the meantime. Republicans wouldn’t come to the table.

Amid the standoff, Trump has decided to pour ICE onto the problem. He originally framed this plan as sending ICE agents in to offset the TSA shortage and help ease the security lines, despite their lack of training for that very specific job. But now he’s fully admitting that ICE is just heading into airports to harass and arrest people and piss off his political opponents by sowing additional chaos and fear. “That’s why the Democrats are going crazy,” he told a reporter this morning. “ICE loves it because they’re able to now arrest illegals as they come into the country. It’s very fertile territory.”

ICE has already made one horrifying arrest of a mother in front of her child at San Francisco’s airport today, which serves as a preview of what’s to come. We should expect some violence, which seems to happen everywhere Trump sends groups of armed men to crack down on peaceful people minding their own business.

Meanwhile, Democrats and Republicans finally reached a deal to fund TSA and give the airports some relief. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R) caved and agreed that Republicans would vote yes on funding all of the DHS agencies except ICE—including TSA, FEMA and the Coast Guard—and deal with ICE funding separately in reconciliation. But when he finally took that bipartisan deal to Trump yesterday, the president threw a tantrum and killed it, demanding instead that Republicans refuse to fund TSA unless its tied to passing the SAVE America Act. (That voter suppression bill, as I wrote last week, does not have the votes to pass without blowing up the filibuster, and Thune has said repeatedly that Republicans don’t have the votes to blow up the filibuster either.)

So, given the option of just letting Congress fund TSA and avoiding weeks or months more of travel hell facing Americans, Trump is leaving the mess in place on purpose and sending in untrained, masked white supremacists with guns to harass travelers on top of it. This is the policy equivalent of approaching a starving person with a bag full of food, punching that person in the face instead of giving them the food, and saying you’ll beat them harder if they choose to remain hungry. Trump is governing by spite, and there don’t appear to be any checks or balances on his decisions by the Republicans who control the House and Senate.

Congress should go ahead and pass their TSA funding deal without Trump’s blessing and force him to veto it. Let him personally own the reason someone couldn’t make it home to their sister’s wedding or their mother’s funeral this weekend. The president is actively making our lives more miserable and restricting our ability to move around the country and the world. It’s bad policy and bad politics—and I suspect American voters will be so filled with rage come November that no voter suppression bill could possibly be strong enough to stop the backlash that’s coming.

On Sunday, International Women’s Day, President Donald Trump declared that he won’t sign any new legislation into law until Congress passes the SAVE America Act, a voter suppression bill that he believes would lock in election wins for Republicans “for 50 years” by disenfranchising millions of people—mainly married women, low-income people, and people of color.

“Great Job by hard working Scott Pressler on Fox & Friends talking about using the Filibuster, or Talking Filibuster, in order to pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT, an 88% issue with ALL VOTERS. It supersedes everything else,” he wrote on Truth Social. “MUST GO TO THE FRONT OF THE LINE. I, as President, will not sign other Bills until this is passed, AND NOT THE WATERED DOWN VERSION - GO FOR THE GOLD.”

For months, Republicans have been appearing on Fox News and CNN trying to spin the SAVE America Act, which the House has already passed, as a very moderate and basic voter ID bill that just requires you to show a driver’s license to vote just as you would to get on a plane or buy a drink. This is blatantly untrue, and these lawmakers should be asking themselves why it would be necessary to lie about what a bill like this actually does in order to get the public behind it.

What the bill actually does is ban mail-in voting with narrow exceptions for the military and disabled people, require proof of citizenship to vote (not just an ID, but an original birth certificate or passport, which half the country does not have), and force states to hand over their voter rolls to the Trump administration. Married women who have changed their names would be forced to re-register to vote with a birth certificate in hand and sign an affidavit confirming their marital status, which is designed to be a big enough burden to make many women stay home. Queer and trans folks who have changed their names would face similar burdens under the new law, as well as those who can’t afford passports.

Trump believes that passing this bill is the only way he’ll win the midterm elections with tanking approval ratings and that it would make the United States a one-party country for the next half a century. In other words, it would fix the elections for Republicans by suppressing kinds of voters who already don’t like them. (Married women broke for Trump in 2024, ironically, while single women broke for Harris, so I’m not convinced that this bill would be the slam dunk for himself that he thinks it would. But voter suppression is unequivocally bad.)

I’ve been watching this bill closely for months, as the pressure ramps up for Republicans to pass it. Senate Republicans would need 60 votes to pass it outright, which they don’t have, even with John Fetterman (D-Pa.) switching sides1. So Trump and paid MAGA influencers have been trying to convince Senate Majority Leader John Thune to deploy the talking filibuster to pass it, meaning senators can only filibuster the bill for as long as they’re willing to stand up and talk old-school style on the Senate floor, which would allow the bill to pass by a basic majority. Unfortunately, Republicans really have to have their shit together in order to pull off that gimmick, because it places the burden on the majority party to maintain quorum, whereas Democrats would be able to introduce as many amendments as they want for weeks and months to wear down the GOP. Per NBC:

A talking filibuster under current rules would require 51 GOP senators in or near the chamber at all times, while Democrats would need just one member to hold the floor to sustain the filibuster, and would have the luxury of rotating among themselves. If the number of Republicans dips below a majority, or a “quorum,” a single Democrat could move to adjourn.

Thune basically said today that Republicans do not have the votes or the discipline to make this work, so the bill will go to a regular doomed vote in the Senate. “We don’t have the votes, either to proceed [to] a talking filibuster nor to sustain one if we got on one,” Thune said at a leadership press conference Tuesday. “That’s just a function of math. There isn’t anything I can do about that.”

That means Trump and Republicans will be unable to fix the November midterms harder than they are already trying to fix them via gerrymandering, ICE intimidation, and other kinds of election fuckery. (See Texas last week.) They’ll have to face their deep unpopularity head on.

MAGA influencers on X, naturally, are having a meltdown.

Trump has not weighed in yet on Thune’s press conference, but I imagine he won’t react very well to being told no. That his fate is written. And I guess I’m really excited about all the legislation he won’t be signing.

What happened in Texas yesterday, despite two very obvious instances of election fuckery, should be genuinely terrifying to Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

Let’s start with the voter suppression: In Dallas County, which is of course heavily Democratic and Hispanic, Republicans decided at the 11th hour to abandon the use of countywide vote centers, which allow voters to show up at any polling place, and return to a system of assigned precinct-based polling places due to lingering conspiracy theories about voting machines. This meant that hundreds of voters who hadn’t been alerted to the change were turned away, demoralizing them and delaying the whole voting process. Texas Democratic Party Executive Director Terri Burke said that "around one-third of the voters are having problems.” One woman named Veronica Anderson, who had walked 2.5 miles to the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center to vote, told a reporter for the Dallas Free Press, “I walked up here because I want to vote so, so bad.” She said when they turned her away, it felt like “your self-esteem and everything is torn down.” (This damn near made me cry.)

It gets worse: Because of the polling place confusion, which was exacerbated by Texas’ recent redistricting, a judge in Dallas County agreed to extend voting hours to 9 p.m. to give voters a little extra time to find their correct spot. But Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is challenging Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican primary, successfully petitioned the state Supreme Court to block that decision. Election officials were then ordered to set aside all ballots that hadn’t been cast by 7 p.m.—again, at the request of a candidate who was actively on one of the ballots. Paxton’s race went to a run-off, incidentally, and the confusion around the voting hours and setting aside of certain ballots will almost certainly be the subject of a legal challenge.

Considering how egregious the election fuckery was in Texas yesterday—and the fact that Republicans spent well more than double what Democrats spent on these races—it should be even more terrifying to Trump and the GOP that Democrats actually set voter turnout records in the state. Roughly 2.3 million Dems voted in the primary compared to 2.1 million Republicans, which is the first time since 2002 that they’ve outvoted the GOP in a midterm primary in Texas. In heavily Hispanic Zapata County, turnout was 143% the total number of votes Harris won in the 2024 general election.

Democrats even outvoted Republicans in the four districts that Republicans just gerrymandered to gain Trump seats:

James Talarico, the progressive seminarian challenging Rep. Jasmine Crockett, won his primary despite Bari Weiss’ CBS News censoring his Stephen Colbert interview. Talarico had been lagging in the polls behind Crockett, mostly due to his lack of name recognition, but the Colbert incident backfired and propelled him into broader fame (Streisand Effect!). This should also alarm Republicans, because Talarico actually does have a shot at defeating Paxton or Cornyn for a U.S. Senate seat come November and “turning Texas blue.” He very much looks like a young, clean-cut, Bible-quoting Republican white guy, and he uses that fact to challenge right-wing hypocrisy pretty deftly from the left.

Adding to the GOP’s pain, three Trump-backed candidates lost their primaries: Sid Miller, Cecil Bell Jr. and Stan Kitzman. And the Cornyn/Paxton primary going to a run-off is a nightmare for the party, because it means that two prominent Texas Republicans have to spend money attacking and exposing each other for weeks instead of attacking Talarico. (We know there’s a lot to expose about Paxton, in particular, because he’s already been impeached and investigated for fraud and corruption.)

Meanwhile, Crockett respectfully accepted her primary loss and endorsed Talarico, offering a unifying message of support for the party’s best shot to flip the Senate in November.

I don’t know if this is the year that Texas turns blue. Their politics are still plagued by bigotry and corruption and controlled by the oil companies. But I think if Democrats ever had a chance to claw back power in the Lone Star State and cause a real political earthquake, that chance is sitting in front of them right now.

Trump declared war on Iran—rather, that he’s joining Israel’s war on Iran—from his country club in Florida in the middle of the night on Saturday, once again without getting the permission of Congress. In a video posted to social media, he offered various justifications for these sudden attacks that don’t really add up, including that Iran was developing nuclear weapons1 and the recent shootings of Iranian protesters. “When we are finished, take over your government,” Trump said, addressing Iranians. “It will be yours to take.” As for how they should go about doing that, Trump wrote that police and revolutionary guard forces should “peacefully merge with the Iranian Patriots, and work together as a unit to bring back the Country to the Greatness it deserves,” as if it’s not delusional to suggest that the protesters will just hold hands and form a new peaceful government with the same guards who have been massacring them by the thousands.

Trump then spent the rest of the night offering clues as to what was really on his mind as he pretended to care about the freedom of the Iranian people, posting on Truth Social at 4 am that Iran had helped Biden beat him in 2020. “Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with United States,” he wrote with a link to a far-right media site. (He made this same debunked claim about Venezuela after capturing Maduro in January.) A few minutes later—still in the wee hours of the morning and shortly after declaring war—he posted another article unrelated to Iran with the headline, “As Georgia prosecutor pursued Trump, Biden DOJ ‘invited’ her to get lucrative grant, memos show.”

It’s unsurprising that Trump had elections on his mind as he lobbed bombs into yet another country—we already know that he considers attacking Iran to be one obvious tool in a flailing president’s toolbox that they can use to cling to power, because he predicted for years that Obama would do the same.

By the time most of the country had woken up to the news that we are in a new endless Middle East war, the US-Israel missile campaign had already obliterated an elementary school for girls in Iran, killing an estimated 165 people, mostly children, and injuring 96 more. By today, three US troops had been killed in Iran’s retaliatory attacks, and Trump posted a new video announcement declaring that “there will be more before it ends.” And while Iranians are obviously celebrating the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, Trump’s own intelligence has warned him that Khamenei is likely to be replaced by hardliners from the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Needless to say, it’s critical right now that we have clear-eyed, well-funded, independent reporting on this war that only 21% of Americans support, as well on the motivations of the man who started it. The timing of these attacks strongly suggests that Trump is using war not only as a pretext to declare a national emergency that could help him seize control of the midterms, but also to change the conversation away from the Epstein files and the recent revelation that the Justice Department withheld documents related to the testimony of a minor who accused him of sexual assault. Trump sees attacking Iran as an escape hatch from his domestic problems, and the media shouldn’t accept his framing on any of this.

Unfortunately, the right-wing capture of legacy news outlets continues at an alarming pace. Yesterday Bari Weiss, who was recently appointed editor-in-chief of CBS News after Trump ally Larry Ellison bought it, tweeted a fire emoji in support of the US-Israel attacks on Iran—or specifically, in support of an Iranian activist’s clapback against Zohran Mamdani’s criticism of the war, which amounts to the same thing.

The outlet Weiss ran before she took over CBS, the Free Press, is openly, aggressively anti-Mamdani and pro-Israel, so we can expect CBS now to have the same tilt. Anderson Cooper recently quit his job at 60 Minutes because Weiss was stalling a piece he’d been working on about the “white genocide” Trump claims is happening in South Africa. (CBS obviously axed Stephen Colbert’s show straight away.)

Meanwhile, Bezos’ Washington Post has conveniently gutted its foreign desk and laid off its entire Middle East bureau just weeks before we started a new war there. And Paramount Skydance, the same company that bought and ruined CBS, is about to gobble up Warner Bros. in a nightmare media merger that would include CNN and HBO. That means Trump ally David Ellison would have the power to destroy CNN’s newsrooms and put Bari Weiss in charge of that whole enterprise too, or someone equally fascism-friendly. The last remaining non-state cable news would be MSNOW. And regardless of whether you personally watch CNN or find yourself ideologically aligned with its anchors, they are one of the last well-funded newsrooms willing to pay for on-the-ground war correspondents, and trust that we would desperately miss the stories that they break.

The one thing standing in the way of this merger from hell is California’s attorney general Rob Bonta, who has promised to challenge it and, if he can’t block it entirely, at least put sand in its gears so it takes as long as possible for the deal to go through. Perhaps he can drag it out til the fall, so that Trump and his allies don’t control nearly all forms of media, entertainment, and communications in this country for too long ahead of an election that will decide whether we have still a representative democracy or not going forward.

In the meantime, everybody needs to be subscribing to independent media and emotionally preparing for our breakups with HBO Max.

Folks: We’ve been told that nobody cares about women’s sports more than Donald Trump does. "Under the Trump administration, we will defend the proud tradition of female athletes, and we will not allow men to beat up, injure and cheat our women and our girls," he said one year ago after signing an executive order banning trans women from participating in women’s athletics. It was one of the very first things he did as president.

So I could forgive some people for being confused by the very differing responses the Trump administration has had to the USA men’s and women’s hockey teams both going into overtime to beat Canada for the gold. Over on the men’s side, FBI director Kash Patel spent $75K in taxpayer dollars to fly on a private jet to watch the final game and party with the team in the locker room after, where he jumped around and chugged beers like a coked up frat boy (while Savannah Guthrie’s mother remains kidnapped).

Then Trump called the men’s team to congratulate them and offered to fly them to his State of the Union Address tomorrow. Desperate for their approval, he bragged about how his government planes can take off through any kind of weather, and then he tucked in a joke about how he was obligated to invite the dumb little women’s team too. “I must tell you, we're going to have to bring the women's team, you do know that,” he can be heard saying on speakerphone, as the players laugh. “I do believe I probably would be impeached."

Kash Patel was not seen partying with the women’s team, which was surely a relief to them, nor did Trump personally call to congratulate them and name-check their goalie. And shortly after Trump’s phone call to the men was made public today, the women’s team announced that they unfortunately can’t make it to the White House tomorrow due to scheduling conflicts.

“We are sincerely grateful for the invitation extended to our gold medal–winning U.S. Women’s Hockey Team and deeply appreciate the recognition of their extraordinary achievement,” a USA Hockey spokesperson said. “Due to the timing and previously scheduled academic and professional commitments following the Games, the athletes are unable to participate.”

Obviously, the men shouldn’t show up either. But the way they were lapping up Trump’s attention like dogs in that video, I suspect most of them don’t mind when the president joke like a 12-year-old boy about women’s sports being trivial after the literal Olympic games, much less do they have the depth to grasp the more pressing reasons for protest. Groups of men peacocking for each other’s approval by throwing women under the bus is a tale as old as time.

In other news…

Here’s an absolutely unhinged story: A group of Republican congresswomen, Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), and Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), are calling on Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) to resign after text messages surfaced showing that he pressured one his staffers to send him explicit photos and engage in an affair before she died by self-immolation.

"'Send me a sexy pic,' Rep. Tony Gonzales texted Regina Ann Santos-Aviles, then director of his regional district office in Uvalde.

Santos-Aviles replied that she’d had a rough week and 'you don't really want a hot picture of me.'

'Yes I do,' Gonzales texted, adding, 'Hurry.'"

At one point the congressman asked his staffer about her sexual preferences, to which she replies, “This is going too far boss.”

Santos-Aviles, a mother, died by suicide in September after the alleged affair. She lit herself on fire at home.

The women calling on Gonzales to resign are the same women who broke with the GOP on the Epstein files.

Lauren Boebert, whose problems I’ve written about extensively, is even standing up to those in her own party who are pointing out that losing Gonzales could cost Republicans their razor-thin majority in the House.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), supposedly an Evangelical Christian, refused to pull his endorsement of Gonzales in light of the texts. "You have to allow investigations to play out and all the facts to come out,” he said today.

So once again, Mike Johnson finds himself on the wrong side of Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace, two of the most unhinged members of Congress (one got a hand job during a local theater performance of Beetlejuice and the other faked a wrist injury after shaking hands with a trans rights advocate), in defense of sexual misconduct. And the GOP’s House majority is now threatened by a man who literally drove a woman to set herself on fire.

Every single survivor raised their hand. Some of them glared directly at the back of Bondi’s head as she continued to ignore them, as captured in this now-viral photo by NBC News.

Bondi wore a cross around in her neck. At the table in front of her was a “burn book” full of insults she had prepared with tabs for each Democratic lawmaker who addressed her. She ranted and raved at the questioners, deflecting and pointing fingers and generally sounding like Parker Posey on booze and Lorazepam. “You don’t tell me anything, you washed-up loser lawyer,” she snapped at Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) at one point. “You’re not even a lawyer.”

But it was Jerry Nadler’s (D-N.Y.) line of questioning that caused the crash-out of the day. “How many of Epstein’s co-conspirators have you indicted?” Nadler asked Bondi. “How many perpetrators are you even investigating?”

The answer is zero. But Bondi dodged the question, instead complaining about Nadler’s “theatrics” and launching into an unhinged rant about the stock market. "The DOW is over 50,000 dollars!” she said. “I don't know why you're laughing. You're a great stock trader as I hear, Raskin. The Dow is over 50,000 right now. The S&P at almost 7,000, and the Nasdaq smashing records. That's what we should be talking about."

Yes, the Attorney General of the United States really told members of Congress today that instead of talking about the mass coverup of a network of rich and powerful child rapists—implicated in a shocking trove of documents that mention our sitting president more than a million times— they should shut up and be grateful that their stocks are up. Because that’s how it’s always worked, right? If you’re doing well by the shareholders, we’ll ignore your crimes. Everything that doesn’t affect the bottom line is just noise. Property over people; wealth trumps all.

Indeed, this DOJ has zero interest in prosecuting anyone involved in Epstein files. The’ve met with zero of his victims, though they have “mistakenly” doxxed many of them by redacting the perpetrators’ names instead of the girls that were abused. The only person DOJ officials have seemed interested in talking to is convicted child trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, who was moved to a luxury prison with puppy visitations and custom meals in exchange for making a nice statement about Trump. (She’s still offering to clear his name in exchange for a full release.) And Karoline Leavitt has been responding to all Epstein questions this week with a simple, “We’re moving on from that.”

Perhaps the administration would like to move on from it, and I can see why. But there’s a growing majority of people who would vote for any Democrat at this point who campaigns on a promise to circle back and prosecute the fuck of all of these people for their crimes and their cover-ups. And Bondi’s demeanor today suggested that she knows she wouldn’t be spared.