An Iranian woman at Valiasr Square in Tehran on June 15, 2026. Atta Kenare/AFP

On Monday, Trump announced beginning concepts of a plan to discuss an outline of understanding on how to end to the war in Iran. It was Trump’s 39^th such announcement since he started the war.

Israeli leaders, ostensible partners in Trump’s war, are increasingly convinced that Trump’s MOU with Iran makes Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal look perfect in comparison, after Trump tore that deal up, calling it “a deal at the highest level of incompetence” and “the worst deal ever negotiated.” Obama’s 2015 deal featured highly detailed, multi-decade uranium enrichment caps and verification protocols, while the core mechanisms of Trump’s MOU remain unseen, unfinalized and deferred for 60-days.Although Trump’s MOU may pause the fighting he started, it has not established any permanent, legally binding nuclear dismantlement or the long-term inspection protocols Trump initially demanded, and it includes a plan to hand Iran up to $300 billion in taxpayer money. The biggest achievement will be the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which, of course, is simply a return to the prewar status quo.

Yesterday Fox News, after promoting Trump’s attacks on the 2015 Iran deal, said Trump “deserves credit for bringing this conflict to this point.”

Fox News manipulated Trump into Iran

Fox may be reluctant to criticize an end to a costly war it encouraged. Fox News and its hawkish hosts played an aggressive role in pushing Trump toward greater military force in Iran — a troubling dynamic critics call a “doom loop” between the White House and the network, a self-reinforcing feedback cycle where the administration’s grievances and policies prioritize media spectacle over conventional governance, which in turn shapes presidential policy and messaging.

As early as June 2025, Fox talking heads pushed for war with Iran, encouraging Trump into open conflict. Mark Levin reportedly helped push the June 2025 U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities by convincing Trump over lunch that the country was just days away from getting a nuclear weapon. When a fragile ceasefire was declared in April 2026, rather than celebrating, many Fox voices including senior security analyst Jack Keane and host Brian Kilmeade demanded it be broken. These voices agitated for the Trump administration and Israel to resume aggressive bombing campaigns rather than continue diplomatic negotiations, demanding Trump restart the war and, in their words, “finish the job.” Host Ainsley Earhardt even told Trump that Americans were supportive of escalating aggression in Iran, which was not true.

Sean Hannity, Brian Kilmeade, and Jesse Watters all floated the idea of flooding Iran with small arms to provoke an uprising. Kilmeade, one of the network’s most prominent hawks and co-host of Fox & Friends, proposed relentless U.S. strikes against Iranian targets to “open up the strait,” “grab the uranium,” and “target bad actors,” an apparent embrace of assassination. Other Fox News hosts also pushed Trump to seek regime change in Iran, hosting retired Gen. Keith Kellogg, who called for “putting boots on the ground” and for the U.S. to seize Iranian territory.

This was not commentary or news, it was Fox television personalities directly shaping foreign policy at the highest level.

The doom loop endangers the nation

What makes this dynamic especially fraught is the structural relationship between Fox and the Trump administration. Trump has appointed more than two dozen former Fox News hosts into administration positions, blurring the line between media and government in an unprecedented way. When Trump calls into Fox & Friends, he is not just doing an interview — he is engaging a network with an inherent interest in promoting conflict and spectacle. Fox hosts also reward Trump with hyperbolic praise: when Trump ordered military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, Sean Hannity said the strikes would “go down in history as one of the greatest military victories,” while other hosts claimed Trump deserved “six Nobel Peace Prizes” and a spot on Mount Rushmore. Trump went on to demand—and expect— both honors.

Fox’s lockstep promotion of Trump’s war reflects the network’s calculated plan to keep MAGA enraged and engaged. War framed as a righteous confrontation with a Judeo-Christian undertones is good television. It generates ratings, emotional investment, and brand loyalty. It is what happens when the line between journalism and political advocacy dissolves.

A network that functions as an echo chamber for a sitting president, with hosts who propose military strikes rather than analyze them, and treats war as a network ratings strategy, has abdicated its responsibility to the public and should be held to account. The feedback loop between Fox and the White House helped produce a war that cost American lives, roiled the global economy, and left our allies disgusted. Even if Trump’s MOU miraculously holds, analysts predict the global economy will take months and even years to recover. As the NYT Editorial Board assessed the MOU, “Mr. Trump made a terrible mistake starting this war... The United States is emerging weaker — militarily, diplomatically and economically — and will pay strategic costs for years to come.”

What will Fox News pay? Fox has inflicted lasting damage on our democracy by selling Trump propaganda as news, directly profiting from falsehoods in a classic case of consumer fraud. Fox paid nearly $1 billion for lying about the 2020 election. One wonders what they’ll pay the families of 13 soldiers who died for nothing other than their ratings.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

The Claw by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Today’s South Lawn of the White House features a huge, brightly lit metal cage called “the ​Claw.” It is a stage erected to showcase men beating each other bloody, Caligula style, to entertain a wannabe Roman Emperor on his 80^th birthday.

After musical performers refused to sing at the ​nation’s 250^th birthday party Trump made about himself, the UFC cage match has taken top entertainment billing. The Claw complements golden Trump statues, illegally-minted gold coins bearing Trump’s likeness, commemorative passports featuring Trump’s photo, and huge Nazi chic banners of Trump draped on the edifices of the DOJ, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Agriculture buildings.

A former FBI Director called the banners ‘sickening’ for their authoritarian symbolism.

An arch for one

Monument by revered monument, Trump is painstakingly desecrating the U.S. capital. Last week, Trump said that the 250 foot arch he is demanding as a monument to himself would be, “along with the White House Ballroom, the Greatest Structure in Washington.” His drive to overshadow national monuments to Presidents Washington and Lincoln reflects a level of delusion best described by the DSM: “Grandiosity presents an exaggerated sense of self-importance, entitlement, a constant need for admiration, and a lack of empathy …” It also presents profound disrespect for our nation’s history.

Trump’s ‘Triumphal Arch’ would obstruct the historically significant sightline between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington House at Arlington National Cemetery. Historical preservationists emphasize that the Lincoln Monument was designed so that it would forever gaze at the final resting place of over 400,000 veterans, a somber reflection on the cost of freedom. The sightline also connects Lincoln to the Robert E. Lee Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery to symbolize national unity, the post-Civil War reconciliation between North and South.

The massive scale of the arch, which will be more than double the height of the 99-foot Lincoln Memorial, would block the views along the Memorial Avenue Corridor and across the Arlington Memorial Bridge. When viewed from the Arlington House, the arch would obscure much of Lincoln’s Memorial, like someone walking in front of a movie screen and just... standing there.

To Trump, historical symbolism is noise. According to recent National Park Service documents, Trump is planning year-round, 20-hours-per-day construction on his arch, for projected completion within three years. Several years of construction all day and night, diverted traffic, and marred sightlines is extremely aggressive; one intuits that the completed arch will take less time to tear down.

Branding a nation

Trump’s handiwork on Lincoln’s Memorial Reflecting Pool isn’t much better. Trump posted a video on Truth Social showing workers draining and cleaning it, as Trump’s voice talks about “Biden filth and incompetence.” The Reflecting Pool, built in 1922 and restored in 2012, has nothing to do with Biden, who clearly competes with Trump in the rent-free occupation of Trump’s own head.

The Reflecting Pool was originally designed with a reflective surface intentionally subordinate and solemn, a dignified spatial connection between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.Trump had it repainted in circus blue, again missing the historical significance of solemnity.

The work was also performed by another of Trump’s overpaid no-bid contractors. Trump said he handpicked Atlantic Industrial Coatings because they had done work on his personal swimming pool at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia. Shortly thereafter, perhaps realizing that ‘I hired my pool guy’ was not the best justification, Trump did an about-face and claimed he had never used the firm’s services before. After the contract was awarded, bypassing standard competitive bidding channels, the cost ballooned from initial estimates of under $2 million to $13.1 million.

What will the future say?

Trump lawyers recently argued in federal court that they could bulldoze the Statue of Liberty and the courts couldn’t do anything to stop them. A man who slapped his name on steaks, vodka, a fake university, candles, soaps, NFTs, casinos, and an airline that went bankrupt has now upgraded to more durable media on the public dime: marble, federally funded, and gold, omnipresent. Trump has redecorated the Oval Office with heavy gold filigree, including gold cherubs, gold trim, and gold furniture. His gold overkill aesthetic, reminiscent of Versailles just before the French monarchs were beheaded, proves that Trump’s historical ignorance isn’t confined to American history.

Congress, not the president, controls federal property, but Trump doesn’t want to work with Congress, preferring to rebrand DC in his own personal, bawdy image. The National Trust has sued, arguing that the White House grounds, a designated national park, cannot be updated without congressional approvaland that the park, like Yellowstone, can’t simply be repurposed at one man’s whim. That suit is pending.

Future generations will study this era and learn many things. They will learn about the fragility of democracy, and the extraordinary load-bearing capacity of our capital’s foundation, now bearing the weight of history, the republic and Trump’s self-regard.

E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one. And that one would really like his own monument.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

That’s me yesterday, listening to how the Biltmore’s glass atrium foyer was constructed.

I just toured the opulent Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC. I love beautiful homes as much as anyone, but this tour didn’t land as intended.

To me, America’s largest private residence, one that took 1,000 laborers six years to build, is a testament to inherited wealth and inequality. The lavish indoor swimming pool was built at a time when most homes didn’t have plumbing. As I walked through the gardens and imported Italian tapestries, I couldn’t stop thinking about how the laborers who built the estates of Gilded Age scions lived in squalor themselves, and could barely afford to eat.

The warning was also deafening: Trump and his corporate backers, pushing an economic regression most supporters can’t even recognize, are taking us back to that era. MAGA keeps buying the same robber-baron con job the working-class finally defeated over a century ago, even as they bear the brunt of it.

Fast foward only a hundred years and we are watching the same well-planned, deliberate, and coordinated effort by a handful of tyrants to dismantle the regulatory state, enrich themselves at taxpayers’ expense, and erode the rule of law. The parallels to the late 19th century are disastrous and obvious.

Robber barons then and now

During the first Gilded Age, robber barons like John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Andrew Carnegie operated under laissez-faire capitalism where laborers were expendable and civil rights were non-existent. The man who built the Biltmore, a 175,000 square foot monument to extreme wealth, inherited his massive fortune from Cornelius Vanderbilt, his grandfather, who built railroads on the backs of starvation wages.

The Gilded Age top 1% claimed that their hyper-monopolies were the natural result of a free market, but in truth those monopolies were protected by corruption: oligarchs openly bribed legislators, crushed labor unions with brutal force, and treated the working class as disposable. Trump’s grid of exploitation, anti-regulation, and legal evasion follows the same formula.

Trump’s entire political apparatus models the 19th-century political machine where Trump is the Tammany Hall boss and the presidency is a vehicle for transactional profits lining his family’s pockets. With the help of corporate-aligned Supreme Court justices, US health and environmental protections have been dismantled to favor big oil and corporations, while education, health care, and food assistance have been gutted to finance another massive tax giveaway to the rich.

This isn’t conservatism; it is an oligarchs’ coup, a return to the robber baron past where laws applied only to the poor.

Trump, Musk and Bezos’ deliberate dismantling of institutions that could check them

Trump’s constant attacks on the judiciary and the press are meant to weaken the only institutions capable of checking his lawlessness and the concentration of wealth it affords his family and donors. His anti-regulation, pro-corporate policies even drive US foreign relations, with his latest National Security Strategy pledge to push “Europe… to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.” Escaping regulations and laws altogether, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are building a private resort on Albanian protected land. Don Jr just married Epstein’s banker’s daughter, with a record $620 million Pentagon loan for his start up to boot. Eric is taking an Israeli drone company public for $1.5 billion, directly profiting from Trump’s war in Iran.

Elon Musk is the modern equivalent of a railroad tycoon, contemptuous of the laws of nations where he operates. Musk has utilized his massive wealth, much of it accumulated through taxpayer-funded government subsidies, to build global communication networks only to weaponize them against democratic institutions. Why? To end corporate regulations/ environmental protections, labor laws, and fair taxation. By bankrolling political disinformation campaigns and turning Twitter into a right wing echo chamber, Musk helps distract voters with manufactured culture wars so they won’t notice their economic rights being stripped away. Gilded Age tycoons controlled the printing presses; Musk controls the algorithms.

Jeff Bezos completes the triumvirate. Much like Gilded Age factory owners who locked workers in unsafe facilities for starvation wages, Bezos built an empire that invades the privacy of its employees and tracks their bathroom breaks while spending tens of millions to fight workers’ unionization efforts. He, like the Robber Barons, also pays Amazon warehouse and delivery staff sub-standard wages. While his employees rely on federal assistance programs just to survive, Bezos builds himself mega-yachts and finances space tourism projects for the rich. The Biltmore would have been right up his alley.

If past is prologue, we’re going to be ok

The central tragedy of our moment is how easily millions of Americans were conned into voting against their own self interests, and remain conned, with the help of Fox News. Informed only by propaganda, working-class supporters defend Trump’s policies because they can’t see that they are directly aimed at their clean water, safe workplaces, and economic survival.

As we drove away from the Biltmore grounds, I looked up the Progressive Era on my phone, America’s response to the Gilded Age. The good news is that gross inequality during the robber baron era led to the rise of organized labor, legal reform, political resistance and antitrust enforcement. If things get bad enough under Trump—SNAP and Medicaid will begin to disappear in October— anger and hunger will morph into political will. If that happens, in 2028, we will balance the high court, reverse Citizens United, and pass a real wealth tax so that we can fix our broken systems.

US history has shown what happens when a handful of corrupt tyrants dictate the laws of the land; it has also shown what happens when voters get fed up.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Trump didn’t drop his $1.8 billion slush fund because of political backlash. Worshipped by the nation’s lowest IQ foot soldiers and propped up by tax-and-regulation-averse donors no matter his crimes, Trump doesn’t care about the midterms because he doesn’t have to. If his suppression efforts fail, he’ll switch to intimidation. If masked goons don’t work, he’ll claim the results were ‘rigged.’ He may even succeed in manufacturing grounds for declaring martial law and cancelling the midterms entirely.

Elections don’t vex a man who uses force to erase them, which suggests most analysts got his slush-fund reversal wrong. As I see it, Trump didn’t drop the looting to soften the results in November. He dropped it to avoid having to name his third AG.

Trump and Todd Blanche quickly repackaged Trump’s IRS case without the ‘anti-weaponization fund’ because of an extremely unusual intervention in the case by 35 retired federal judges. Even Trump understands how a finding of ‘fraud upon the courts’ paired with larceny would tar his legacy, especially if his own AG is permanently disbarred over it.

Thirty-five federal judges express shock

On May 27, 2026, thirty five retired federal judges of all political stripes filed a motion to reopen Trump’s IRS case on suspicion of fraud against the court. The significance of what they wrote cannot be overstated.

The motion suggested that the DOJ had “deceived” U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams by announcing a settlement to the public after failing to mention it to the court. It was an “extraordinary” deception, the judges wrote, where (Blanche) “dismissed this case before the Court could complete its inquiry into whether there was an actual case or controversy, and then cited the ‘settlement’ of this case as the legal justification for looting the federal treasury of $1.776 billion dollars and purporting to release all possible federal claims against President Trump, his family, and his businesses.”

The judges aren’t just frothing over the larceny. The fraud, they noted, is bigger and more consequential. Trump/Blanche tried to manipulate and defraud, then circumvent and forever silence a federal court. Blanche tried to orchestrate that court’s imprimatur on an unprecedented theft of taxpayer funds, knowing full well that the court had no jurisdiction and never could because there was no case or controversy. If Trump sits on both sides of the same case, both controlling the outcome and financially benefitting from it, there is no legal controversy. There is no case. There is only theft, and claiming otherwise is fraud.

“Most egregious conduct”

The judges didn’t hold back, suggesting that this case demonstrated “most egregious conduct involving a corruption of the judicial process itself.” The parties “used the proceedings before this Court as a legal pretext,” they wrote, “while trying to deprive this Court of the opportunity to determine whether this was a real case or controversy in the first place. To (allow it) would be, in effect, to reward and immunize such collusion from judicial scrutiny, since the parties to such a scheme will obviously never challenge” fraud that benefits them personally.

As I wrote on May 21 in ‘Todd Blanche should be disbarred for this,’ Blanche moved to dismiss the case two days before his brief outlining the court’s jurisdiction was due. Blanche’s orchestrated ‘settlement’ purported to “bind the United States to a stunningly broad release of potential claims” against Trump for tax evasion, and to pay billions of dollars, without even trying to defend against Trump’s underlying claims.

Blanche failed to assert the most basic defenses to Trump’s IRS claims, defenses Blanche was legally obligated to assert, and which the DOJ has previously asserted in prior claims. There was even a prior IRS case involving the same IRS contractor as the one who released Trump’s tax returns, Charles Littlejohn. The government sought dismissal of that exact same case on grounds that a contractor was “not an officer or employee of the IRS,” yet for Trump it was worth $1.8 billion dollars.

Blanche’s failure to mount any defense at all to Trump’s claims, the judges note, “only emphasizes the fraudulent nature of the ‘settlement’ reached here” and “strengthens the conclusion that the litigation was collusive from the start.” Blanche seemingly “perpetrated a fraud on the judicial machinery itself, by fostering an appearance that the litigation involved adverse parties, when, in fact, it did not.”

Judge Williams ordered the DOJ to respond to the judges’ accusations of fraud upon the court by June 14. Blanche will edit that brief knowing that in New York, where he is licensed, committing a fraud upon the court is considered egregious conduct that supports immediate suspension or permanent disbarment. Removing larceny from the mix won’t save him.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

My neighbors’ mail. Note the date.

Last week my neighbors brought me an envelope with a “MAGA priorities survey” enclosed. A solicitation for money disguised as a survey, it opened with a four-page cover letter from Trump.

The survey drills down on ‘Biden’s sky-high mortgage rates,’ and ‘reckless spending binge’ even though we’re now 1.5 years into Trump 2.0. It blames Biden for ‘today’s affordability squeeze,’ despite Trump’s economically unhinged tariffs and $94 billion war in Iran. Trump, who still thinks exporters pay tariffs, single handedly turbo-charged the price of energy, and tanked consumer confidence at the same time, all while demanding that Americans disbelieve their lyin’ eyes.

Trump’s cover letter begins, “Dear America First Patriot, I put THREE LIVE POSTAGE STAMPS (all caps) on the enclosed Rush Return Envelope because I had to get your immediate attention… And because I need you to respond to me right away!” Four pages later, Trump urges True Patriots to make a True Patriotic donation of $2,026…. Or even just $47, by rushing back the MAGA survey using the enclosed TRIPLE-STAMPED Rush Return Envelope TODAY. (Combining all caps with bold, a triple-dog-dare-you maneuver that conveys urgency.)

The kicker is that the “triple stamped rush envelope” was the pre-marked, pre-paid, “No postage necessary if mailed in the United States” kind. Adding extra postage stamps to a prepaid postage envelope, according to the USPS, means Trump just wasted money (USPS bold, not mine). Trump, in one mailing, spent extra on an agency he accuses of waste, demonstrated his fiscal illiteracy, and declared his donors stupid. Another masterclass in Trump’s trifecta of incompetence.

Demanding respect without cause

While Trump’s ineptitude at home often skews absurd, it’s catastrophic on the world stage. Pitbullcomms director Steven Cheung recently told Mike Pompeo to “shut his stupid mouth” on Iran because Pompeo had “no idea what the f— he’s talking about.” Cheung was telling a Harvard top-of-class West Point alum, a military officer who served with distinction and as Trump’s Secretary of State, that he lacked proper credentials to weigh in on Iran. As Iran pulled out of talks, Trump did a victory dance on Fox News despite creating an objectively more hostile and dangerous adversary who now has us by the short hairs. Cheung told Pompeo with a straight face he “should shut his stupid mouth and leave the real work to the professionals.”

With foreign policy professionals like these, who needs insurgents? Trump managed, unaided, to upgrade Iran’s asymmetric fighting capabilities, strengthen Iran’s financial and geopolitical position, and alienate NATO and other U.S. allies who reminded Trump this was his war—not theirs— and refused to bail him out. Trump’s staggering incompetence has not only strengthened a terrorist state, it looks like Iran will be left in possession of some 10 tons of low-enriched uranium.

Even if Pompeo wanted to leave Trump’s Iranian quagmire to the professionals, there aren’t any. In a childish ‘up yours’ to the world, Trump handpicked the biggest bloviators he could find to serve in his cabinet, an assembly critics call one of the least qualified and most inappropriately vetted in modern U.S. history. The only vetting was for Dear Leader sycophancy, a skill relentlessly paraded during televised meetings by a cabinet of flattering courtiers afraid of telling the truth.

Trump’s incompetence is (relatively) safer at home

Trump wants to be regarded as omni powerful and untouchable. Targeting critics who criticize him, threatening punishment for their “seditious behavior”… “punishable by death,” Trump oozes Godfather because he lives in a delusional reality TV, alternative facts universe. Thankfully, even in our darkest hour, most Americans don’t fear incompetence. They ridicule it, as do our adversaries.

Iran has been trolling the US from the beginning with pop-culture driven critiques of a nation that would elect a moron like Trump. Other adversaries, including China, are watching. In the EU, where accuracy in the news is largely expected, resentment and disbelief have morphed into outright condemnation. But, here at home, where maga-aligned corporate interests rule most media, the gaslighting continues.

House Speaker Mike Johnson declared, “President Trump is the only one who could have gotten Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, to the negotiating table… Under President Trump’s leadership, our nation is stronger, more respected on the global stage, and safer than ever before.” Never mind that Trump’s war was pointless to begin with; never mind the uranium, the poor results, or the global condemnation. If Trump’s buffoonery in Iran isn’t an arsonist demanding praise for calling the fire department, nothing is.

Trump has received no Iran war approval whatsoever from Congress, which possesses the sole constitutional authority to declare war. Although Trump keeps bragging that his war in Iran has been shorter than WWII and Vietnam, he fails to grasp that those wars were justified, Congressionally authorized, and at least understood by most Americans. Only an imbecile would equate them with Iran.

Even if we leave Iran tomorrow, the U.S. will face new, heightened terrorism risks from a nuclear-enthused adversary for generations. Trump’s unprovoked and woefully un-planned aggression has now justified Iran’s hatred of us and its commitment to uranium.

As Trump pivots to planning his upcoming Idiocracy-forward, lowest-common-denominator cage fight and IndyCar race at the White House, we should breathe a collective sigh of relief. Trump training his genius on tasteless pageantry at home may rightly inspire ridicule, but it is safer than poking all the bears at once.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Pondering this year’s Memorial Day, it’s hard not to get emotional. I still get a lump in my throat when we stand for the national anthem at Bears home games. I look away or fidget with my shoe so people don’t see my tears and think I’m loopy. But when I hear ‘perilous fight,’ and ‘proof through the night’ I really do well up. I see the yellowed flag: 15 stars and stripes, tattered and frayed, still standing against all odds for a new freedom the world had never heard of.

We were founded on a novel concept never before articulated: an intangible, deeply profound declaration that all men were created equal, endowed with the same right to pursue happiness. Not because those rights were bestowed by a king, but because people were born with them. They were inalienable.

Five hundred days into this administration, sensing the precarity of those rights, seeing the momentum of attempts to erase them, guts me. Not because we’re exceptional, not because we reached our goals.We haven’t, and we’ve recently begun marching so determinedly backward it’s easy to feel helpless, despondent even.

Then suddenly, and unexpectedly, I hear the song sung from a faint and unexpected voice, and there’s that tattered flag again, still standing.

A light through the night

On May 12, 2026, South Carolina State Senator Shane Massey made a singularly impassioned argumentabout why we are, and what we stand for. He is a republican.

Massey took to the floor to reject Trump’s demand that South Carolina gerrymander itself so that, despite being having a statewide population that is 26% black, no black member of Congress will ever get elected again. South Carolina, the main driver of slavery and the first to secede to defend the sin, has sent only one black Democratic representative to Congress since 1897: James Clyburn.

Massey spoke of the evils of permanently silencing Clyburn, the citizens who elected him, and an entire political party just because an ethically compromised Supreme Court, with a wink to their corporate backers, says you can. In a 45-minute address at the state’s capital, Massey rejected Trump’s redraw of SC’s congressional map and instead embraced American pluralism, now all but forgotten as Republicans do an about face on states rights to serve an unschooled master.

A republican sees the peril of uni-party rule

First, Massey reminded his colleagues that our system was designed to divide power not only between three federal branches, but also, crucially, between the federal government and 50 sovereign states.

Massey urged Trump to respect the judicial and legislative branches, and the federal/state division of power as well. “The separation of powers may actually be the most important governmental doctrine that has been created in the history of man,” Massey said, astutely. “It is that important. And what the Congress has done to relinquish their authority to the executive is terrible. And we all see the results of that.” He didn’t say “abuse of power,” “dictator,” or “corruption,” because he didn’t have to.

Instead, Massey stressed the founders’ “brilliant creation of federalism and the sovereignty of the states,” and said he didn’t want to participate in eroding federalism or diminishing the essential role of states. It’s obvious that Trump is destroying the federal government, but no republican before Massey has publicly acknowledged that he’s also trying to erase state boundaries and state authority, the very basis of federalism.

Healthy opponents make us stronger

Massey also recognized a fundamental human dynamic, a principle self-evident in free markets, commerce, education, scientific achievement, sports, and most realms of human performance: competition makes us stronger. He argued that Republicans should not seek to destroy Democrats just because they can, because the Democratic party makes Republicans stronger. In a truth rarely spoken by any politician, Massey declared, “I will tell my Republican friends: Republicans are stronger when the Democrat Party is vibrant and viable. We are. Competition makes you better, y’all.”

It’s a message for all factions. Healthy political parties make each other better. Without an effective opponent, they turn on each other. They infight. They lose incentive to address what they were elected to address, to fix what they should fix, and focus instead on how best to stay in power.

Specifically, Massey said, when facing criticism and accountability from democrats, republicans rise to the challenge because they have to. He boldly suggested that republicans should stop and assess whythey can’t now win a popular election without first rigging it. One-party rule, demanded by a corrupt executive and enabled by a partisan high court serving the same corporate masters, fosters mediocrity and ruin.

The fading flag still waves in the South

Finally, Massey reminded the SC Senate that our nation — the most powerful in the world — cannot be conquered by an external foe, but it surely will destroy itself if it abandons the very principles and values it was founded on. “Maybe we become convinced that the only way to preserve the Republic is to implement policies that are contrary to the founding ideas of the Republic,” he mused. “Maybe we turn on ourselves. Maybe 250 years in,” (he said, triggering the lump in my own throat again), “we will no longer be able to keep our Republic.”

And then, Massey did something extraordinary: He said ‘No.’ “If we’re going to lose this radical idea of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, a nation that in its Constitution guarantees to each state a republican form of government to ensure the debate of ideas — if that’s going to happen, Mr. President, by God, it’s not going to be because I surrendered it.”

“I’m voting no.”

Massey’s words ultimately did not carry the day, but made clear that the principles of the American Revolution set forth in our Declaration of Independence remain. Trump is doing his best to kill them, and he may succeed for a while as an exhausted public looks away. But Massey’s words proved that somewhere, in the night, even in the darkest and deepest south, we will see the real flag again.

Sabrina Haake is an opinion columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche took an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, including domestic. He also took an oath to faithfully discharge the duties of office without mental reservation or purpose of evasion, meaning without trying to find loopholes to serve a different master.

Because Blanche served as Trump’s personal criminal lawyer prior to assuming the AG role, he explicitly swore during his Senate confirmation hearing that he would recuse himself from any case relating to Trump personally, if advised to do so by government ethics lawyers. Blanche was, in fact, advised to recuse by government ethics lawyers, who presented Blanche a PowerPoint presentation on DOJ ethics that explicitly detailed his recusal requirement.

Blanche did not recuse. Instead he fired the lawyer who so advised him, and continued representing the DOJ in Trump’s personal lawsuit seeking a preposterous $10 billion from the IRS. Trump filed the suit in his personal capacity, after a contracted IRS employee embarrassed him by revealing that Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017, and paid zero in federal income taxes for ten years before that.

Instead of following legal advice to recuse from the case, Blanche shot the messenger, “settled” a non-existent case, and orchestrated a $1.8 billion heist.

Blanche helped his client steal from taxpayers

Blanche, who is legally required to represent the public interest on behalf of the federal government, engineered Trump’s $1.8 billion theft of the U.S. treasury before a judge could stop it.

Trump filed his IRS complaint in January 2026. By April, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams had expressed obvious doubts about the merits of the case because Trump was both plaintiff and defendant. If a party sits on both sides of lawsuit, there’s no real case in controversy as required under Article III of the Constitution, and the court lacks jurisdiction to even hear the case.Seeing the obvious flaw, Judge Williams ordered both parties to file legal briefs addressing “whether a case and controversy” even existed by May 20.

Instead of submitting legally vacuous arguments, Blanche sought formal dismissal of the complaint two days before the deadline, which was granted. Blanche then announced the “anti-weaponization fund” to “settle” a case that had already been dismissed on his request. It is important to understand that after a case is formally dismissed, there’s nothing left to settle. The court did not approve the ‘settlement,’ having never acceded to jurisdiction over the claim in the first place.

The $1.776 billion “resolution” was not authorized by any statute either. Blanche claims that 31 U.S.C. § 1304 authorizes it, but the Judgment Fund is statutorily limited to paying legal settlements and judgments against the United States, which this was not, since there was no jurisdiction, the complaint was dismissed with prejudice, there was no judgment, and no “settlement” was approved by any court. The $1.8 billion fund is simply untethered from the law or case, Blanche’s own legal invention to hold open the treasury cookie jar while Trump dug deep.

Blanche mocks ABA ethics rules

The deal Blanche approved in Trump’s IRS lawsuit also granted Trump Audit Immunity through a highly controversial addendum that forever seals and ends any IRS investigation or audit into Trump, his family members, and his businesses. Blanche signed the addendum on behalf of the citizens whose interests he is supposed to represent.

All practicing lawyers, including those employed by the government, are bound by ethics rules, standards, and commitments. Under the American Bar Association’s model Rules, a lawyer cannot assist a client in breaking the law, nor can they advise a client how to commit a crime or fraud with impunity. They can explain legal consequences, including the scope and application of laws, but they cannot help their client get around them.

In pursuing money on behalf of a former client at the expense of a current client, Blanche is not only violating long-standing conflict of interest rules, he is also considering illegal payments to white supremacists and J6 insurrectionists who attacked the US capital. The 14^th Amendment could not be any clearer that the US shall not “assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States…” but Blanche appears to be helping Trump get around it. When asked to confirm that the funds will not be used to reward Trump’s J6 rioters for attacking the US capital, Blanche refused, repeatedly.

The only reason to openly violate the 14^th Amendment by paying J6 insurrectionists up to $1 million each is to reward them and publicly inspire others to do it again at Trump’s behest. Blanche not only helped Trump break the law here, but also seems to be paving the way for Trump’s future criminality.

Every accusation from Trump is a confession

In creating a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate people Trump claims were ‘victims’ of Biden’s DOJ, Trump is again accusing political rivals of criminal offenses he, himself, is committing. But Biden’s DOJ, unlike Trump’s, only prosecuted people who broke federal law.

Trump’s DOJ also attacks Trump’s accusers, and those who pursued prosecutions against him, in order to convince voters that Trump didn’t commit the crimes for which he was convicted. It is an ongoing effort to undermine American’s faith in the rule of law, to further enable Trump’s erosion of it.

Trump, with Blanche’s help, flexes corruption on steroids. Blanche must know how many lawyers assisting Trump’s illegal efforts have already faced disciplinary and disbarment proceedings, including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell.

Blanche surely realizes that ultimately, he will likely join that list.

Sabrina Haake is an opinion columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Whenever a new poll comes out showing Trump’s abysmal ratings, public reactions follow a pattern. Public comments don’t question Trump’s disapproval rating. Rather, millions of people question the flip side: how does 38% of the nation still support such an obvious charlatan? Are supporters delusional? Suicidal?

Specifically, does MAGA not know that 15 million Americans, mostly their own, have now lost health insurance because of him? Can they not read the Walmart price tags they hold in their own hands? Do they not know he’s weakening the NATO alliance their granddads fought for, or that he single-handedly empowered one of the most dangerous regimes in the world?

The answer is ‘No, no, and no.’ Nearly 40% of the country—38%, to be exact— can’t connect the dots on who’s making their lives harder. We don’t need another study to figure out why, because it couldn’t be more obvious: As of May 12, 2026, 38% of the nation still supports Trump because 38% of the nation watches Fox News, purveyors of pure Trump propaganda. And compared to other consumers, Fox News viewers do not diversify their sources.

After the 2020 election, the Pew Research Center did a deep dive to learn what Americans heard, perceived and knew about it. Researchers found, for example, that 63% of Fox News viewers had given Trump an “excellent” rating on Covid. Trump suggested injecting bleach into unspecified orifices while over 1 million Americans died, yet Fox viewers thought he did an excellent job??

More accurately it was a con job, perpetrated by Fox News.

Fox News propaganda

Coming into the present news cycle, the Pope-Trump conflict illustrates the con in real time. Pope Leo XIV criticized Trump’s war with Iran by condemning leaders who manipulate religion for military gain. Trump, manifestly devoid of impulse control, immediately shot back on Truth Social that the Pope was “weak on crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy” as if he were a political adversary. In follow up Fox News Digital interviews, Trump doubled down and refused to apologize as Fox hosts clapped like seals.

While most media outlets questioned Trump’s sanity for attacking the spiritual leader of 1.4 billion people, Fox dissembled with headlines like, “60 Minutes accused of using left-leaning Cardinals to bait Trump into feud with Vatican” and “Pope Leo says remarks about world being ‘ravaged by a ​handful of tyrants’ were not aimed at Trump. When Trump dispatched Marco Rubio to patch things up with the Pope last week, most media reported that it didn’t work, but Fox called it a big success and applauded what a great job Rubio did.

Fox News even tried to accuse other media networks of intentionally ‘baiting’ a response from Trump. They invited Elise Stefanik onto the network to tell Pope Leo XIV to “stay out of politics,” while other guests labelled the Pope’s foreign policy views ‘wrong’ and ‘liberal.’ Sean Hannity questioned whether the Pope fully understood the Iran conflict, and several other Fox commentators questioned whether the Pontiff had “read the Bible” about geocomplexities in Iran. To be clear, not one Fox host questioned whether Trump had “read the map” before he delivered the Strait of Hormuz to the mullahs.

The First Amendment protects political speech but it does not protect fraud

The Pope example alone illustrates how MAGA is being lied to on a daily basis, but it’s just one example. Fox News serves up daily falsehoods about climate change, immigrants, public education, NATO, black crime, ICE, and the war in Iran to craft a pro-Trump narrative, assuming their lies are legally protected by the First Amendment as “political speech.”

Enough damage is now evident to challenge that legal assumption.

In 2010, Supreme Court republicans fast-tracked America’s slide into oligarchy when they ruled in Citizens United that corporate political donations were a form of free speech. Citizens United further clarified that, under the First Amendment, political speech warrants the “highest level of protection against government regulation” following the New York Times Co. v. Sullivan’s restatement, and an earlier ruling that any regulations on political speech must withstand the highest level of strict scrutiny.

But while First Amendment protection for political speech is old news, there’s another long-toothed maxim: The First Amendment does not protect fraud. In 2012, under United States v. Alvarez, the Court confirmed that fraud is a ‘narrowly limited class of speech’ not entitled to First Amendment protection. In Alvarez, the Court struck down the Stolen Valor Act, a law that made lying about military medals a crime, because no one gained a ‘material advantage’ from the lie. Unless someone is profiting from their false speech, the court ruled, there’s no actionable fraud—they’re simply lying. But false speech connected to economic gain on one side and economic harm on the other is fraud, legally unprotected under the First Amendment.

Under this definition, Fox News is engaged in classic consumer fraud. Fox admitted in the Dominion case that they lied to their viewers for profit, and paid out nearly $1 billion in settlement as a result. But their lies didn’t stop after that case, they continue to sell 24/7 Trump propaganda as ‘news.’ They are perpetrating the same fraud, one that hooks viewers, profiting Fox and their corporate backers, while materially harming victims by convincing them to vote against their own economic interests.

Under Supreme Court precedent, Fox News isn’t engaging in protected political speech. It’s engaging in commercial fraud. And the victims aren’t just Fox viewers, even though studies show they are harmed the most: the entire nation is enduring political violence, extreme division and rumblings of civil war because 38% of the country is being lied to.

Albert Einstein once said, “A people that were to honor falsehood…would be unable, indeed, to subsist for very long.” Is mere national survival a sufficient justification to require accuracy in the news again? Is survival legally sufficient to pass strict scrutiny? If it is not, if this high court strikes down a return to the Fairness Doctrine, it will be elevating partisan interests to the point of national suicide.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Mary Louise Wilburs

May 14, 1940- May 20, 2020

My mom died from Covid in 2020, just after Mother’s Day. I couldn’t write about it until I could be honest about who she was, a feat complicated by my then-pending Congressional race, which served my own ass to me on an unceremonious platter.

Every time I tried to write this Mothers’ Day column, my simmering anger at how Trump mismanaged and lied to the country about the coronavirus percolated into a full boil that scalded my best intentions. Instead of honoring my mother’s truth without deflection or self-pity, I kept churning out bitter screeds about how elections have consequences, and our democracy wouldn’t be on the brink if only- if only- everyone actually bothered to vote.

My mother was extraordinary in many ways, including her disdain for a woman’s ‘fate’ to be stuck in the house, raising children, while men got to ‘see the world’ (her words). The man whose ticket out of Southern Indiana she co-opted- my father’s- bought her passage to Oahu, Hawaii, where he served in the Navy, where he also brutalized her, us, and anything that moved, repeatedly, with impunity, and without regard to audience.

Because of my father’s predilection for extreme violence, I became my mother’s caretaker from a very early age. After the final episode, complete with burst capillaries from her near-complete asphyxiation, we went into foster care. When my mom eventually got out of the hospital & rehab (wtf can be done, anyway, to ‘rehab’ someone who was oxygen-deprived long enough for tiny red capillaries to burst all over their face?), we moved back to southern Indiana.

My mother was so afraid my father would return from the Vietnam War and finish the job, she never sought child support- which meant years of dire poverty on top of whatever brain damage she sustained from the burst capillaries incident. Even in her compromised state, my mother knew that when a man promises to finish you off, he will keep his promise if given half the chance.

So we moved to Huntingburg, Indiana, to live with my mom’s equally poor sister- Aunt Maggie. My mom and her sister Margaret were small-town lookers whose beauty and ambition attracted the same kind of husband- one who needs to capture, then own and cage, a beautiful thing. Aunt Maggie was making her way as a newly single mother as well, and for the same reason.

Shortly after we all moved in together, Aunt Maggie’s escape- and her life- ended abruptly. Her story and violent ending would upstage even my mother’s.

Maggie’s death was a continuation of an unending rotation, a locked cycle of poverty and trauma. It was the same story played out across the country in the nightly news, only the names have been changed. In case anyone is unschooled in the ways of poverty, poverty causes trauma causes poverty causes trauma. After some years stuck on this decidedly American treadmill with one tragedy following the next, my mom eventually remarried a wonderful man, my stepfather Bob Hyde, who would stop to help a struggling beetle.

While we were fortunate to have a kind benefactor in our lives, neither of my siblings overcame their early origins. You hear that formative childhood years- one through five- pretty much set the tone, and I guess that’s true enough in our case. I’m pretty sure the only reason I became “successful” (whatever that means, here I mean financially) while my siblings floundered, was because my mom tapped me young to take care of her, which meant early financial responsibility and a non-optional work ethic. I started earning at 11, never stopped, and financially supported my mom and sister all my adult life. My brother Curtis, meanwhile, started his own poverty-trauma treadmill, probably because it was what he knew. He ran on it until, last December, he died of heroin-related dementia at 63.

My mother’s situation left her entirely dependent on me, and over the years, her dependence developed into raging neediness over all things, large and small. I’ll never know whether my mother’s mental health challenges were organic, or caused by extreme domestic violence. On the campaign trail when I spoke about growing up with the effects of untreated substance abuse and domestic violence, I was talking about my father. When I spoke about growing up with untreated mental illness, I was talking about my mother. For sure, all three things in our household were interrelated, as they are in most every tragic, sad headline running in the evening news.

The only Mothers Day gift I can offer up now is full honesty and ownership of a story all too common in America. It’s a reality of extreme domestic violence, substance abuse, and untreated mental illness. It’s the American struggle of single moms so afraid of their abusers they live in poverty instead of seeking child support. It’s an American story that plays across racial lines, geography, and culture, one that state-forced births will only exacerbate, trapping more vulnerable women with their abusers.

My tribute to my mother and all mothers who are trapped in violence is a siren of agency and honesty, so others in the same situation know they are not alone. Stigma, and societal judgment, only make tragedies worse, which is why we should spare no time for them. Instead, we should salute the women and children who survive.

I miss my mother. She was a stone around my neck, but she was my heavy necklace.

It took me a minute to write this because the real tragedy wasn’t in how the country failed her at her death. The real tragedy is how our laws and our system failed to protect her- and hundreds of thousands of women like her- in life.

So I guess my screed survives, after all. Stripped of angst, anger, regret and sorrow, it boils down to one simple word: Vote.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake, is free.

Last month at the Sitra refinery. REUTERS

Trump’s war in Iran has created the biggest energy crisis in modern history. The International Energy Agency describes the current shock as “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.”

The crisis can’t be spun, no matter how hard Trump, Fox News and Chris Wright try. Because the big take away, ultimately far more significant than any regime change or reshuffling of alliances, is that Trump has unintentionally kicked off a global race to renewable energy.

The irony of an uniformed charlatan who relentlessly calls green energy a con job causing it to proliferate is so, so sweet.

The crisis couldn’t have come at a better time, as the costs of solar, wind, and batteries have fallen dramatically. Battery storage costs have fallen 93% since 2010, solar photovoltaic (PV) costs have declined by 90%, and onshore wind by 70% in the same period, making them the cheapest energy sources in history. More than 85 percent of renewable energy sources now cost less than fossil fuel sources.

With Trump’s Iran war now in its third month, countries are scrambling to circumvent the geopolitical tug of war by transitioning more quickly to renewables. Climate change almost seems like an afterthought as calls to speed the transition are now framed as a matter of security and economics, a strategy to avoid the war-driven upheaval of global oil markets. Wind and solar energy, produced entirely within national boundaries, insures against war-driven supply upset. It also insulates allies from future trade sabotage threatened by a psychopath hell-bent on retribution.

The world is leaving Trump’s America behind

In the Trump administration’s unwavering assault on science and fact, climate information has all but disappeared. Trump has taken unprecedented steps to halt climate progress and bolster his fossil fuel donors. More than 1,500 scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency have been laid off, reassigned or pressured to retire. Today, only 124 remain at the EPA, none of whom are assigned to climate science.

It’s no secret that Fox News and the oligarchs pushing Project 2025—think Koch Industries— are financially aligned with big oil. But Trump’s promise to fossil fuel donors that he’d kill environmental regulations if they donated $1 billion to get him re-elected is not aging well, for him or for them. In fact, it is backfiring, dusting the world in optimistic, spring-flower pink schadenfreude.

Last week, nearly 60 nations representing over one-third of the world’s economic power met in Colombia to accelerate their shift away from oil, gas, and coal in light of Iran. The summit, led by Colombia and the Netherlands, was organized outside normal U.N. channels and processes to avoid the kind of bottlenecking often orchestrated by petrostates. Participants met to draft individualized, national transition roadmaps away from fossil fuels; using more laid back Q and A information sessions, they made unusual progress. The United States was not invited.

That allies grasp the existential imperative to bypass Trump’s destructive impulses is reassuring; it confirms that other nations are not led by idiots.

Green energy dominance is Trump’s worst nightmare

Like a suicidal sadist, Trump is obsessed with increasing reliance on fossil fuels. His attempts to elevate coal are as economically illiterate and embarrassing as his now comical battle against wind energy. The rest of the world, thankfully, has stopped listening. Instead, reeling from oil and gas price aftershocks from Iran, the industrialized world is now running toward renewable energy, to wit:

§ In China, President Xi Jinping has called for a rapid acceleration of a new energy system, emphasizing massive development in wind, solar, and hydropower to safeguard energy security.

§ The EU has drafted new plans to accelerate clean energy deployment, specifically focused on accelerated investment in solar, wind, and heat pumps to reduce dependence on imported fuels, while also reconsidering nuclear power as a ‘strategic stabilizer.’

§ South Korea has committed to a goal of 100 GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030.

§ India is now focusing on rapid expansion in solar and wind to diversify its energy supply to reduce dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

§ Saudi Arabia, despite being a major oil producer, has doubled its target to ensure 50% of its electricity generation comes from renewables by 2030.

§ Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines are accelerating renewable projects with incentives, with private companies in Vietnam abandoning LNG projects in favor of renewables.

§ Egypt is planning to transition its electricity supply, now 10% renewable, to 45% in two years.

§ Chile is now facilitating tax credits and supports for electric vehicle (EV) adoption to reduce foreign-sourced fuel dependence.

These developments should give everyone hope. Even if a ceasefire is announced tomorrow, analysts say damage to the oil industry will last for years. Most delicious of all, Trump put it in motion.

Fatih Birol, Director of the International Energy Agency, told The Guardian that Trump’s war in Iran has permanently damaged the industry. Almost overnight, Birol observed, foreign leaders lost faith in fossil fuels, which will cause “a significant boost to renewables and nuclear power and a further shift towards a more electrified future,” he said, which will “cut into the main markets for oil.”

As an anti-science, anti-information nihilism spreads its ignorant rot across the U.S., it is reassuring to know that other nations aren’t similarly afflicted. Idiocracy, it would seem, is not contagious.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

I just opened an online image so beautiful it stopped my thoughts, cut them off midstream so efficiently I forgot where they were going.

The image, captured in this glorious video from Renee Volpi, shows a bird constructing its home from young leaves she sews together with leaf thread. She suspends her architectural marvel from an attached leaf (almond tree?), a condo perched between branches, shielded from rain and hungry eyes. After she builds the walls, she lines the floor with softness, perfect for cradling her own belly and bellies soon to peck free from speckled eggs. I googled, ‘What yellow bird sews its own nest?’ and learned that it’s most likely a tailorbird, known for weaving natural materials into habitats.

The bird’s soft beauty speaks- grey collar, yellow jacket, hat and pants in matching orange. But it was her purpose, her drive to protect and cradle life, that leapt from the screen and shook me. Her wordless mission said to stop staring at the destructive craziness du jour leaching from the White House and intuit, just for a moment, the intelligence of life.

The bird’s quiet resolve somehow reminded me that the psychopath we’ve loosed on the world is only transitory. Even the concentration camps he’s building with critics’ names on them will eventually crumble. As horrific as this moment in America is, all of it will pass.

A bird builds a nest. A predator tears it down.

I write, too often, about what is wrong in the world. From where I sit, most roads to death and cruelty are built by emotionally stunted men short on intelligence and too long on world-destroying power. On a good day I see them as a blip, a wrinkle, a mistake along our evolutionary continuum. Their self-preserving greed and wanton cruelty are nothing new; those traits have been with man since we first stood erect. Even today, despite the clear hindsight of history, the stupidest among us somehow still believe that naked aggression reflects superiority.

One of the deadliest Cro-Magnon predators to walk the earth has attacked ten different nations in as many years. Starting wars with no purpose other than to satiate an insatiable ego, he demands a prize for spreading peace, as if willing green to become yellow will make it turn. Despite his relentless attacks on science, he has unearthed one unwelcome truth: if he repeats a lie often enough, some not-insignificant cohort of the U.S. population will believe it is true.

The bird, our bird, is blissfully oblivious to a force so ravenous it took a wrecking ball to the White House, a force hellbent on destroying history because he knows history will not spare him. Our bird is indifferent to the dichotomy of co-existing forces on earth: those that protect life, and those that destroy.

Intelligence can be deceptive

My mom tried to raise Catholic children. Her best efforts, thwarted by a hard life, began and ended with sending us to Catholic schools. When I was about nine years old, waiting in line for communion, I studied—really studied—the Stations of the Cross along the wall: violent whips, nails through bloodied hands, thorn crowns. Staring too hard or just hard enough, I suddenly realized I was being manipulated. This wasn’t a message of god, goodness, or the sublime, this religion wanted to control people, using fear.

For about the next thirty years I considered myself an atheist; researching “religious” cruelties through the ages delivered easy confirmation. Yet I still re-learned, whenever I walked in nature, that a vast intelligence lived there. How else to explain an acorn?

I’ve learned since then that trees and plants communicate with each other. Their communication systems are composed of underground fungal networks, electric signals, and chemical signals. They don’t debate, they just work quietly to absorb sunlight and nutrients from the earth around them, making good use of what the stars sent us billions of years ago.

A bird? Or divinity?

One day, walking through the trees, my dearest friend Lois Osborn convinced me that I wasn’t an atheist after all. How can you sense the rightness of the universe and not believe in god? For someone so convinced of their own intelligence, how can you be so blind to deep contradictions? We agreed, finally, that god (“life force,” if you will) exists in the propulsion of life.

Lois, I’ll add, is an old school Christian. She believes there’s an evil force in the world akin to a biblical Lucifer. She believes in judgment—in another place and time, she might wear a MAGA hat. But she harbors an immense dislike for cruelty. She sees that MAGA Christians embrace cruelty as a form of governance that hurts others with no real thought of what Jesus would do. So I channel Lois as I watch the tailorbird video on repeat like it’s a drug.

Yes, an ugly annihilatory force is afoot in America, one that may reshape our world for generations to come. We have no choice but to fight it. But along the way, we have to take breaks and touch grass. And we have to remember that even if this insanity culminates in the worst possible outcome, some tailorbird, somewhere, will survive, peck through the ashes, and rebuild its nest.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Michael Kovac/The Hollywood Reporter via Getty Images and Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Donald Trump, currently arguing on appeal that the 1^st Amendment protected his right to incite the J6 mob, simultaneously claims the 1^st Amendment does not protect a comedian’s right to insult him.

Two days after a man tried to enter the Correspondents Dinner armed with weapons, Trump took to Truth Social to blame Jimmy Kimmel. In his post, Trump relayed a Kimmel joke about Melania glowing “like an expectant widow,” then leapt to causation, claiming, “A day (after Kimmel’s joke aired), a lunatic tried entering (the Dinner) loaded up with a shotgun, handgun, and many knives… so many people are incensed by Kimmel’s despicable call to violence... Jimmy Kimmel should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC...”

The next day, Trump’s FCC ordered ABC to file early license renewals for all eight ABC-owned and operated TV stations. It was an unprecedented move, served under the pretext of ‘investigating diversity programs,’ but no one is fooled. Mimicking Nixon’s threats to TV licenses during Watergate, Trump is threatening broadcast licenses over political speech he doesn’t like, an obvious mob-boss challenge to longstanding First Amendment law.

Pot, meet kettle

In gaslighting lost only on the deliberately obtuse, Trump keeps blaming adversaries for the rise in political violence he has spent years orchestrating. A sore loser who launched a violent coup then teased a “bloodbath” if he lost four years later, a man who joked about a brutal hammer attack, who called for shooting protestors then justified the deed, who equivocates when Democrats are shot or firebombed, who posts snuff videos of murders on the high seas, a felon who has so frequently, so routinely encouraged political violence it’s the subject of online tallies and predictive markets, reflexively blames the victim. America, it seems, has married an abuser.

Since every accusation with Trump is a confession, his attempt to silence critics compels a closer look at the First Amendment butchery he keeps foisting on federal judges, who aren’t having it. Under two federal rulings, Trump now stands financially exposed for damages he caused on J6, despite his claimed First Amendment protection, for incitement. Under long standing Supreme Court precedent, incitement is speech “directed [at] producing imminent lawless action, and likely to do so.” That has been the legal definition, separating incitement from First Amendment protection, for over fifty years.

In a landmark 2022 ruling, the D.C. federal district considered Trump’s January 6 Ellipse speech in its entirety and context, and concluded that his statements were plausibly words of incitement not protected by the First Amendment. Instead, those words were implicitly “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and [were] likely to produce such action.” In the most recent J6 civil ruling, Trump again claimed his words were not incitement, because he didn’t specifically intend what came next. The judge disagreed. (Lee v. Trump, p. 62).

Trump incites political violence then hides from it

Trump claims that the one time he used the word “peaceful” during his fiery speech on the Ellipse outweighed the multiple times he exhorted followers to “fight.” After spending weeks fraudulently convincing supporters that the 2020 election was “stolen” from them, he told the gathered mob on J6, “We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” He uttered these words immediately before telling them to “march to the Capitol,” where 7 people died from the resulting violence.

Trump’s legal team insists that it can’t be proved that Trump “intended” to produce imminent lawlessness on J6, so the incitement exception to the First Amendment isn’t met. Even if that were somehow creditable, what he said during the violence confirmed his approval.

Trump’s first tweet while the capital was under attack was aimed at the Vice President. At 2:24 p.m., Trump tweeted while rioters brandished a noose with Pence’s name on it that, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution…” And that was it. Instead of stopping what he started, Trump spent the next three hours enjoying the melee on TV in the White House dining room, where his silence also spoke volumes. Trump’s last tweet expressed solidarity, telling the rioters, “We love you, you’re very special…I know how you feel...”

Ordering the removal of magnetometers confirms violent intent

This month’s J6 ruling also discussed how Cassidy Hutchinson, then-assistant to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, was with Trump immediately before the Ellipse Speech. In her closed door testimony before Congress, she said she heard Trump complain about the Secret Service’s magnetometers (‘mags’) that blocked people with guns from the rally. Trump said, ‘You know, I don’t F’ing care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the F’ing mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here.” When told the magnetometers could not be removed, Trump said, ‘F-- the Secret Service. I’m the President.”

In short, Trump’s intent to incite political violence on J6 was corroborated by a first-hand account of his state of mind, moments before addressing the crowd. It may not amount to a criminal confession, but it proves that Trump’s J6 speech was incitement deserving of no First Amendment shield.

Escalating with ABC, Trump and Carr have armed their assault on free speech. They may be able to gaslight a public stupefied by Fox News, but the rest of us, including Kimmel’s six million fans, aren’t fooled. Now that federal courts have twice taught Trump what the First Amendment isn’t, maybe Kimmel will soon teach him what it is.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

(AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)

With all the ruin emanating from the Oval Office on a daily basis, it’s easy to fall into quiet despair. Following the news feels like monitoring a malignant tumor as it spreads outward from the epicenter of the free world, jumping oceans, URLs, and psyches, threatening the globe on macro and micro levels simultaneously. Only this sickness, this decidedly opportunistic cancer, has never been seen before. Certainly this level of rot has not been diagnosed in our young 250 year history.

Trump’s singularly corrupt and destructive appetite, both fed and insulated by the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, is hard to stomach. After SCOTUS handed criminal immunity to a psychopath, despondency set in as the world sorrowfully assumed that Trump would get away with his crimes against humanity forever.

Then, just there, on the unlit edge of the blackest cloud to have darkened the world in a very long time, a glimmering trace of silver peaked out. In a development that should have streaked across the headlines like a meteor but barely got a mention, a federal judge issued what looks to be an irreversible ruling that Trump will stand to pay for at least one of his heinous crimes: J6.

Trump will likely lose his ill-got gains

Measuring the amount of corruption lining Trump’s pocket is like shoveling on a snowy day. As of late January, Trump had pocketed upwards of $4 billion from untraceable crypto currency ventures, suspicious market manipulations, and outright bribery from foreign and domestic sources during his first year back in office.

He’d better be thinking on how to hide it, because U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta has ruled that Trump. Is. Civilly. Liable for the damages he caused on January 6, 2021.

Judge Mehta’s cautious 79 page ruling (found here) denied Trump civil immunity through a careful analysis largely devoted to distinguishing between Trump’s criminal actions as an office-holder (official-acts immunity), and his actions in seeking office, which were not official acts and therefore are not immune. The decision carefully followed the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, and will allow claims against him from members of Congress and capital police officers to proceed to trial.

Incitement is not a matter of free speech

After a prior ruling that Trump’s speech on the Ellipse plausibly amounted to incitement, which is not protected under the First Amendment, Trump’s legal team sought to substitute the United States as the defendant under the Westfall Act, arguing that Trump’s acts fell within the scope of his employment as President. That motion was denied. The critical contextual question, following the 2023 decision in Blassingame v. Trump, was whether Trump was speaking or engaging in conduct “in an official capacity as office-holder or instead in an unofficial capacity as office-seeker.”

Applying the immunity ruling, the court observed that “many uses of the presidential bully pulpit fall comfortably within the outer perimeter of [the President’s] official responsibility” and are therefore immune. “The Court’s approach recognizes that presidential speech on matters of public concern will very often be official—and thus immunized.”

But the immunity decision itself recognized that there may “be contexts in which the President, notwithstanding the prominence of his position, speaks in an unofficial capacity—perhaps as a candidate for office or party leader.” Trump, 603 U.S. at 629. Acting or campaigning to attain the Office of the President, is not an official function of the office.

Proving damages will be easy

The cause-damages link is obvious. On December 19, 2020, Trump sent out a tweet targeting extremist groups, urging them to come to the U.S. Capitol to make their anger known about a “stolen” presidential election. In follow up communications, he teased a “wild” rally, and convinced 74 millionsupporters that their votes weren’t counted, which, predictably, angered them.

On Jan. 6, 2021, on the White House Ellipse where his summoned supporters gathered, Trump gave a fiery speech telling those in attendance, “We fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” He then urged them to “walk down Pennsylvania Avenue” to “take back our country.”

Following Trump’s instructions, the summoned mob then marched to the Capitol Building, which they breached with unprecedented political violence seen around the world. Although many people pleaded with Trump to stop the violence, he safely enjoyed it on TV for over three hours before he told rioters to stop. At least seven people died from the attack.

Trump will bring this same trademark contempt to the J6 courtroom where jurors will see it. Betting markets can expect him to falsely bray, repeatedly, that he won in 2020..

Juries can’t stand him when they see him up close, and Americans who aren’t glued to Fox News don’t like him from a distance. He has assaulted women, stolen from our nation, and put our fragile democracy on life support.

No verdict will be too high, and Americans will here for it with popcorn.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom

The Society for the Rule of Law (SRL) self describes as a group of conservative and libertarian lawyers. SRL presents center-right opposition to Trump’s authoritarian power grabs using traditionally conservative constitutional arguments.

This week, the SRL filed an amicus brief against Trump’s Executive Order 14399, “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.” Trump’s ostensible goal in EO 14399 is to prohibit non-citizens from voting, a problem repeatedly debunked as non-existent. The real goals are to disenfranchise non-MAGA voters, intimidate election officials, and cast doubt on Republicans’ widely predicted trouncing in the midterms, lest results be construed as a rejection of Trump.

Read plainly, Trump’s EO repurposes the United States Postal Service into a partisan regulatory tool controlling federal elections, directing USPS to screen and deliver mail-in and absentee ballots only to addressees included on Trump-approved voter lists. It requires the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Social Security Administration (SSA) to prepare and send a list of U.S. citizens eligible to vote in federal elections to state elections officials. Under the EO, all outbound ballots must use Intelligent Mail barcodes for tracking; envelopes must be marked with the “Official Election Mail” logo, and USPS is instructed to maintain an approved Mail-In and Absentee Participation List to cross-reference Trump’s list of ‘eligible voters’ with transmitted ballots.

To be clear, Trump has no statutory or constitutional authority to regulate elections; that power belongs primarily to the States. USPS, in particular, has no statutory authority to have any role in administering voter lists. EO 14399, only one piece of Trump’s election-rigging agenda, complements his push to nationalize elections, his insistence that red states gerrymander their congressional maps, and his SAVE Act, which would disenfranchise up to 83% of eligible voters.

An autocrat’s solution in search of a non-existent problem

Anyone kicking the tires on Trump’s nonstop rejoinder blaming immigrants for his election lossesknows it’s absurd. Federal law already prohibits noncitizens from voting, and has done so for over 100 years. As of 1924, all states had banned noncitizens from voting in federal elections, and by 1996, Congress had added criminal penalties. Facing up to five years in federal prison and immediate deportation for even registering to vote, no immigrant in his right mind would try.

To become U.S. citizens and thus be eligible to vote in federal elections, immigrants must first receive legal permanent residence (aka getting a green card) and typically spend five years in that status before becoming eligible to naturalize. In the case of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, they face a complicated path of a decade or longer to U.S. citizenship and may never find a pathway.

Statistics reflect the hurdles. A Brennan Center for Justice study of the 2016 election found just .0001% suspected noncitizen voting out of 23.5 million votes cast, while forty of 42 surveyed jurisdictions reported no known incidents of noncitizen voting whatsoever. Even the Heritage Foundation, committed to an illiberal interpretation of the U.S. Constitution (and the architects behind Project 2025), scoured the nation for immigrant voting fraud and found only 24 cases of noncitizens voting between 2003 and 2023. Other analyses found similarly low numbers depending on the date range, identifying 77 confirmed cases from 1999–2023, and only 68 total cases dating back to the 1980s.

The law as it exists, not as Trump wants it to

The Society for the Rule of Law argues that using the USPS to manage voter lists and regulate ballot delivery both exceeds Trump’s executive authority and violates constitutionally mandated separation of powers. These are largely the same legal impediments identified in over 700 pending cases challengingTrump’s other power grabs, almost all of which invoke wild presidential powers that do not exist, and disregard Congress as the executive branch’s co-equal.

The federal laws relevant to Trump’s EO 14399 charge state agencies—not federal agencies—with the administration of voter registration for elections for federal office. The only two federal laws dealing with voter lists, the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), are statutorily limited in scope and do not provide Trump with the authority he claims.

Under the NVRA, federal authority to issue election regulations is limited to two subjects – a mail voter “registration application form,” and reports required to Congress every two years assessing the impact of the NVRA and recommending improvements that Congress—not the president— might enact.

HAVA, the other law that would be modified under EO 14399, was passed in 2002 by the United States Congress to make sweeping improvements to voting systems and voter access. HAVA as enactedemphasizes that voter lists are to be “defined, maintained, and administered at the State level.” It also mandates that the “specific choices of methods of complying with the requirements of HAVA” shall be left “to the discretion of the State.”

It’s good to see conservative pushback

Federal law as it currently exists does not authorize any federal agency to compile, provide, or administer voter lists. Trump’s grubby fingers notwithstanding, under existing federal law, voter lists are compiled and maintained by the states where voters live, not the federal government.

Trump has demonstrated that he will do anything to stay in power, including mass violence, including breaking the law. (See: J6.) As one Secretary of State recently put it, “I don’t think we can put anything past this administration.”

It’s increasingly obvious that Trump is headed for a belated reckoning with American voters. What has not been so obvious is that dedicated conservatives are also fighting back. As Republican lawmakers demonstrate obeisance, compliance, and intimidated alignment with Trump’s plan to trample the Constitution, it is comforting to welcome conservative lawyers like SRL to the resistance.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom

The Society for the Rule of Law (SRL) self describes as a group of conservative and libertarian lawyers. SRL presents center-right opposition to Trump’s authoritarian power grabs using traditionally conservative constitutional arguments.

This week, the SRL filed an amicus brief against Trump’s Executive Order 14399, “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.” Trump’s ostensible goal in EO 14399 is to prohibit non-citizens from voting, a problem repeatedly debunked as non-existent. The real goals are to disenfranchise non-MAGA voters, intimidate election officials, and cast doubt on Republicans’ widely predicted trouncing in the midterms, lest results be construed as a rejection of Trump.

Read plainly, Trump’s EO repurposes the United States Postal Service into a partisan regulatory tool controlling federal elections, directing USPS to screen and deliver mail-in and absentee ballots only to addressees included on Trump-approved voter lists. It requires the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Social Security Administration (SSA) to prepare and send a list of U.S. citizens eligible to vote in federal elections to state elections officials. Under the EO, all outbound ballots must use Intelligent Mail barcodes for tracking; envelopes must be marked with the “Official Election Mail” logo, and USPS is instructed to maintain an approved Mail-In and Absentee Participation List to cross-reference Trump’s list of ‘eligible voters’ with transmitted ballots.

To be clear, Trump has no statutory or constitutional authority to regulate elections; that power belongs primarily to the States. USPS, in particular, has no statutory authority to have any role in administering voter lists. EO 14399, only one piece of Trump’s election-rigging agenda, complements his push to nationalize elections, his insistence that red states gerrymander their congressional maps, and his SAVE Act, which would disenfranchise up to 83% of eligible voters.

An autocrat’s solution in search of a non-existent problem

Anyone kicking the tires on Trump’s nonstop rejoinder blaming immigrants for his election lossesknows it’s absurd. Federal law already prohibits noncitizens from voting, and has done so for over 100 years. As of 1924, all states had banned noncitizens from voting in federal elections, and by 1996, Congress had added criminal penalties. Facing up to five years in federal prison and immediate deportation for even registering to vote, no immigrant in his right mind would try.

To become U.S. citizens and thus be eligible to vote in federal elections, immigrants must first receive legal permanent residence (aka getting a green card) and typically spend five years in that status before becoming eligible to naturalize. In the case of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, they face a complicated path of a decade or longer to U.S. citizenship and may never find a pathway.

Statistics reflect the hurdles. A Brennan Center for Justice study of the 2016 election found just .0001% suspected noncitizen voting out of 23.5 million votes cast, while forty of 42 surveyed jurisdictions reported no known incidents of noncitizen voting whatsoever. Even the Heritage Foundation, committed to an illiberal interpretation of the U.S. Constitution (and the architects behind Project 2025), scoured the nation for immigrant voting fraud and found only 24 cases of noncitizens voting between 2003 and 2023. Other analyses found similarly low numbers depending on the date range, identifying 77 confirmed cases from 1999–2023, and only 68 total cases dating back to the 1980s.

The law as it exists, not as Trump wants it to

The Society for the Rule of Law argues that using the USPS to manage voter lists and regulate ballot delivery both exceeds Trump’s executive authority and violates constitutionally mandated separation of powers. These are largely the same legal impediments identified in over 700 pending cases challengingTrump’s other power grabs, almost all of which invoke wild presidential powers that do not exist, and disregard Congress as the executive branch’s co-equal.

The federal laws relevant to Trump’s EO 14399 charge state agencies—not federal agencies—with the administration of voter registration for elections for federal office. The only two federal laws dealing with voter lists, the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), are statutorily limited in scope and do not provide Trump with the authority he claims.

Under the NVRA, federal authority to issue election regulations is limited to two subjects – a mail voter “registration application form,” and reports required to Congress every two years assessing the impact of the NVRA and recommending improvements that Congress—not the president— might enact.

HAVA, the other law that would be modified under EO 14399, was passed in 2002 by the United States Congress to make sweeping improvements to voting systems and voter access. HAVA as enactedemphasizes that voter lists are to be “defined, maintained, and administered at the State level.” It also mandates that the “specific choices of methods of complying with the requirements of HAVA” shall be left “to the discretion of the State.”

It’s good to see conservative pushback

Federal law as it currently exists does not authorize any federal agency to compile, provide, or administer voter lists. Trump’s grubby fingers notwithstanding, under existing federal law, voter lists are compiled and maintained by the states where voters live, not the federal government.

Trump has demonstrated that he will do anything to stay in power, including mass violence, including breaking the law. (See: J6.) As one Secretary of State recently put it, “I don’t think we can put anything past this administration.”

It’s increasingly obvious that Trump is headed for a belated reckoning with American voters. What has not been so obvious is that dedicated conservatives are also fighting back. As Republican lawmakers demonstrate obeisance, compliance, and intimidated alignment with Trump’s plan to trample the Constitution, it is comforting to welcome conservative lawyers like SRL to the resistance.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

AP for BBC News

Trump’s domestic agenda is so dystopian it’s hard to believe. Unleashing masked goons onto U.S. streets, building concentration camps, punishing the media, threatening judges, and labeling critics ‘enemies of the state’ all vie for his most Hitlerian maneuvers.

Trump has systematically destroyed institutions, privatizing agencies wherever possible to award billions to his cronies, while his family has earned over $4 billion in untraceable cryptocurrency ventures, to say nothing of suspiciously-timed stock transactions. After gutting food assistance, healthcare, and education to provide tax cuts to his wealthy donors, Trump recently announced “it’s not possible” to provide such services. He plans to spend the money instead on “military protection” while he does his best to provoke a military attack.

As bad as it is at home, Trump’s foreign policy blunders are even worse, setting up long term security consequences no one is even talking about. In every bizarre late night social media post, Trump keeps modeling multi-faceted incompetence to explain his dastardly deeds. From threatening Greenland,to kidnapping Venezuela’s president and stealing their oil, to attacking the Pope, to exploding boats on the high seas then publishing snuff videos to brag about it, Trump has committed one hubristic, sophomoric, and dangerous act of aggression after another.

At 50 days into his “easy” and illegal war in Iran, he remains surprised that our NATO allies won’t join in. He still fails to comprehend that NATO is a defensive pact, not an offensive one.

Iran: A showcase of Trump’s incompetence

In Iran, Trump keeps mocking the old adage: when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Instead, he brandishes shinier shovels.

Frustrated by Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz, closed again, which has strangled 20% of the world’s oil transport, Trump nonsensically decided to impose his own blockade on Iran’s blockade. Blockading their blockade will only worsen the problem he’s trying to solve.

Trying to educate an economically illiterate administration, the WSJ explained, “The U.S. blockade on ships entering or exiting Iranian ports is set to drain more oil from a tight market, prolong the squeeze on other key commodities flowing through the Strait of Hormuz and inject significant uncertainty into the global economy.” They assessed, “Trump’s naval blockade of Iran risks further upending a global economy already battered by weeks of (Trump’s) war, escalating a regional clash into a worldwide financial shock that could prove more devastating than the fighting itself.”

Trump’s war in Iran will end up costing American taxpayers over $1 trillion, without factoring in energy prices, lack of healthcare, inflation, or the long-term costs of global economic contraction. And for what? Middle East policy experts say the war has made Iran’s cabal of religious fanatics even more dangerous.

How stupid does he think Americans are?

Trump blames the media for widespread public opposition to his war, but seems incapable of considering why Americans are opposed. He needs to look no further than his own words and deeds.

After Trump bombed Iran last June, he claimed to have “completely obliterated” Iran’s enriched uranium supply. Strutting on the world stage with great bombast, he declared that Iran’s nuclear capacityhad been annihilated. Eight months later, he’s using Iran’s nuclear capacity to justify a war, without explaining what changed. Even his most diehard supporter wonders: was he was lying then or is he lying now?

It’s bizarre that Trump thinks Americans won’t or can’t track such a major incongruity, demonstrating either his deep contempt for them, or his own mental infirmity.

Signaling more incompetence during negotiations

Trump, who proudly rules by his “gut” instead of intelligence reports, doesn’t recognize that he’s swimming in geopolitical complexities above his head. It’s no surprise that the first round of negotiations to end the war he started failed.

To resolve the highly complex quagmire he created, Trump needs negotiators steeped in Iran’s history, geography, culture, and technological capacities. But he’s relying on loyalists: VP Vance, real estate developer Steve Witkoff, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, all of whom lack the expertise and diplomatic experience needed to achieve an agreement. Two diplomats from the failed negotiationsimmediately identified Trump’s problem: choosing negotiators for personal loyalty instead of subject-matter expertise.

The results reflect the obvious, and it’s nothing new. Kushner and Witkoff failed in negotiationsbetween Russia and Ukraine, and failed in talks between Israel and Hamas while Israel continued bombing Gaza. Vance, for his part, seems to have failed at everything.

The Pope’s moral clarity should shame Republicans

After Trump insulted Pope Leo XIV as if he were a rival politician instead of the religious leader of 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide, JD Vance said the Pope needed ‘to be careful’ when discussing war.

Three days later, clearly discussing war, the Pope warned that the world is “being ravaged by a handful of tyrants.” He reiterated Catholic teachings of peace— “Blessed are the peacemakers. But woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.” (Looking at you, Trump and Hegseth.)

Every member of Congress swore an oath to uphold the Constitution. Every one of them, save maybe Lindsey Graham, knows that what Trump is doing is illegal, dangerous, and unconstitutional, but they have chosen power over honor and duty.

Jamie Raskin’s 25^th Amendment bill has no chance given Republicans’ immoral short term choices, long term consequences to America be damned. Seeing the Pope hold steadfast in Chistian messaging, spreading moral clarity about wars of aggression, and his forceful opposition to evil forces manifesting in Trump, is a welcome balm to Republicans’ shameful depravity.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Mark Wilson Getty Images Trump and Orban, May 2019.

Hungary’s outgoing Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was hailed by the U.S. right as a Trump-like authoritarian. Orbán, an anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-feminist macho man who self-described as “illiberal,” was the Heritage Foundation’s darling. As foundation president Kevin Roberts described Orbán’s ‘soft dictatorship,’ Hungary was “not just a model . . . but the model,” presumably for turning the U.S. toward full-fledged fascism following Project 2025’s blueprint.

As Steve Bannon put it, Orbán was “Trump before Trump.” In power for 16 years, Orbán was called a “21st-century dictator,” a populist strongman, and an authoritarian capitalist. Deliberately pulling Hungary’s “illiberal state” model away from Western European dogmas Orbán considered too egalitarian and liberal, he drew inspiration instead from the oppressive dictatorships of Turkey, Russia and China.

Trump, Vance and the architects of Project 2025, in turn, drew inspiration from Orbán.

Similarities between Orbán and Trump are no accident

Orbán deliberately eroded free markets and the rule of law, goals Trump has adopted with uneven success. Orbán damaged the Hungarian economy through crony capitalism and corruption. He, like Trump, concentrated economic power by empowering and enriching loyalists while weakening the judiciary. Like Trump’s latest moves to ‘own’ equity stakes in corporations seeking regulatory approval, Orbán also created a high-corruption environment that concentrated power among loyalists, widening the gap between Hungary’s haves and have-nots.

Orbán also used the weight of a fascist state, including financial and regulatory measures, to silence critics and kill Hungary’s independent media. Trump flexes similar strongman tactics in the U.S. on a near-daily basis. From direct funding cuts, to FCC/ regulatory ‘investigations,’ to physical restrictions on journalist access, Trump has shown unprecedented aggression in seeking media control.

Critics also describe how Orbán routinely created “imaginary enemies” to distract voters, another Hitlerian maneuver perfected by Trump. From falsely depicting immigrants as violent criminals, to accusing DEI programs of ‘white bashing,’ Trump constantly stokes social division by creating then perpetuating imaginary enemies. Even during his infamous DoorDash delivery this week, Trump clumsily interjected “men playing women’s sports” into a staged conversation about taxes on tips. The forced non sequitur was awkward for its obviousness.

Let the repairs… begin!

Orbán’s delicious comeuppance—a real landslide, unlike Trump’s claimed landslide—will help restore Hungary’s ties to Europe, after years of Orbán efforts to sever them. It will also help Ukraine survivePutin’s illegal invasion.

Newly elected Prime Minister Peter Magyar has already said that Hungary will stop being Putin’s puppet, and will no longer block EU aid to Ukraine or sanctions on Russia. For his part, Zelenskyy hailed Magyar’s win as ‘the victory of light over darkness.’

The website Direkt26, a rare independent outlet still functioning in Hungary, documented how Orbán colluded with Putin over the years, with Orbán describing himself as a ‘mouse’ to Putin’s ‘lion.’ Just before the election, at a Budapest concert, thousands of concertgoers chanted “Russians, go home!”—a public acknowledgement of the problem and the same chant their grandparents used when Russia invaded Hungary in 1956.

Trump, Vance lose their poster boy

As positive as Orbán’s defeat is for Hungary, Ukraine, and the EU, the sweetest reverberations are yet to come— in the U.S.

In the last weeks of Orbán’s campaign, Trump, Vance, Putin, and other authoritarians formally endorsed him. Vance, who broke with longstanding US diplomatic precedent by campaigning for him in person, spoke at a rally in Budapest and declared, “We have got to get Viktor Orbán reelected!”

Double blind to irony, Vance urged Hungarians to act “with no outside forces pressuring you,” despite his own outside pressure on them. Vance seems to assume Orbán voters are as intellectually impaired as Trump’s supporters.

Best of all, Vance’s appearance helped the opposition. Magyar was able to use Vance’s 11^th hourappearance as evidence of Orbán’s open embrace of foreign interference, contrary to Orbán’s constant harping against the foreign influence of Brussels, or the EU. Magyar, decidedly not blind to irony, used Vance to flip Orbán’s rhetoric against “Brussels bureaucrats” back onto him, using it to highlight Orbán’s own reliance on Trump/Vance/ Putin’s political backing.

Democracy: 1, MAGA: 0

The Conservative Political Action Conference (C-PAC), an amalgam of populist and far right activists undecided on women’s suffrage, converged on Budapest for four consecutive years to foster ties between America’s far right politicians and those in other countries. Perhaps, with Orbán gone, C-PAC will meet instead in Moscow. Good riddance.

Trump’s domestic agenda so obviously follows Orbán’s that someday, if Fox News ever decides to report the truth, voters in MAGA will eventually catch on. Orbán used consolidated cronyism and corruption to stay in power for 16 years. The parallels with Trump are obvious.

Come November, the parallels in their political fates will also emerge. As Ian Bassin of Protect Democracy put it, the most important lesson from Orbán’s landslide loss, despite Orbán controlling Hungary’s media and judiciary, is that “(E)ven a guy who rigs the system can be defeated when the people unite and turn out against him.”

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Trump’s Armageddon insanity in Iran reminds me of an old funny-not-funny joke:

‘When it’s my time to die, I want to go peacefully and in my sleep, like my uncle. Not screaming in terror like his passengers.’

The world is careening as an indulged manchild sets it on fire, while Republicans in Congress violate their oaths and refuse to stop him. From burning hellscapes in the Middle East to the earth’s rising temperatures, Trump is the quintessential arsonist with a hose: Douse the flames with gas, brandish a spigot, then demand adulation for putting out the fire.

On Monday Trump threatened the globe with deranged ramblings about the stone age, on Tuesday he served tacos, and by Wednesday bombs were falling again and the Strait of Hormuz was decidedly not open. Turns out Trump can’t control Netanyahu, who, continuing the bombing campaign, is as concerned as Trump about staying in power, but isn’t as concerned about the price of gas. Maybe Trump should have considered Bibi’s motivations before he let him drag us into Israel’s forever war.

Nah. Just kidding. Consequences are beyond Trump’s capacity. But even as we inch closer to 12 on the Atomic clock, signs of intelligent life, i.e. resistance, are stirring.

Military brass understands the assignment

Last November, after Trump and Hegseth released one snuff video after another bragging about murdering people on the high seas, Senator Mark Kelly and five other veteran lawmakers released a video reminding U.S. service members that they must refuse illegal orders, citing canned, non-controversial military code. Even though they were announcing the law as it is plainly written, the video got under Trump and Hegseth’s skin, so they “investigated” to try to silence Kelly, a retired Navy captain.

To Hegseth, Kelly citing the military code of conduct—which Hegseth considers “woke”—was ‘conduct unbecoming an officer.’ Setting aside the absurdity of a Secretary of Defense openly rejecting military law, it seems Kelly’s public service announcement may have hit its mark.

Because on Tuesday, MSNBC aired an interview suggesting that military officers were already rejecting Hegseth’s civilian targets.

When a dry(?) drunk tells you to bomb civilians, JUST SAY NO

Fox News may have sold Trump’s gamesmanship in Iran as victory, but not everyone was fooled. Because while our Commander in Chief was busy tanking 80 years of post-WWII security, military brass was pushing back. On Tuesday, April 7, Retired Army Major General Randy Manner appeared on MS NOW, where he told Nicolle Wallace that military officials were saying “no” to Pentagon leadership. General Manner said in part:

The idea of attacking bridges that are clearly, overwhelmingly for civilian use would be a war crime, and the planners in CENTCOM would not permit that. I have indications that many targets recommended by the Secretary of Defense were rejected by CENTCOM (because) they were civilian targets… It’s secondhand knowledge, but I believe people are already saying no to the hierarchy.”

Since Trump and Hegseth fired JAGs as the first order of business, and excluded military lawyers from strike planning, mapping out the combat missions in Iran falls to CENTCOM, U.S. Central Command. Officers at CENTCOM are now the last line of defense against Trump’s unlawful orders.

It is reassuring, to put it mildly, that while Republicans are letting a lunatic destroy the global order, military leaders are not. By rejecting Trump’s blatantly unlawful orders and honoring their oaths of office, and the law, they are standing up where Congress has fallen.

Even Tucker Carlson gets it

Trump’s f-bomb laden Easter tantrum revealed his frustration at being sold a quick and easy war in Iran, which has turned out to be anything but. Threatening war crimes, he posted that, “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran…JUST WATCH!” He ended his petition for involuntary civil commitment with a mocking, ‘Praise be to Allah!’

There’s no real debate about whether threatening to obliterate 92 million people is a war crime. Nor is there real debate, outside Fox News propaganda, about how insane, provocative, and dangerous he’s become.

Even Tucker Carlson was triggered. Carlson urged members of the administration and military to resign if given orders to slaughter civilians. Taking severe umbrage at the mocking “praise Allah” part of Trump’s message, Carlson asked, “Who do you think you are?...(Y)ou are not God. And only if you think you are, do you talk this way.” Then, in an astonishing endorsement of the Constitution from the far right, he wrote, (We are) not a theocracy. We don’t go to war with other theocracies to find out which theocracy is more effective…”

Color me shocked. A broken clock strikes at just the right moment during America’s darkest hour. It jolted me with hope when I least expected it for my beloved and beleaguered country, reminding me of another favorite saying:

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”

---Albert Camus

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Photograph: (X)

From his first days back in power, Trump has set about remaking the nation’s capital in his own gilded image.

He paved over the 1903 Rose Garden, then matched the new patio to his Mar-a-Lago hotel, demolished the entire East Wing, and spray painted Oval Office fixtures in a Let-them-eat-cake gold frenzy. The Kennedy Center, left alone until one artist after another refused to perform there following Trump’s rebrand, is now facing an unplanned two year “closure” for “comprehensive renovations.” Still in the works are Trump’s massive ‘arch de Trump’ between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial, the conversion of three historic municipal golf courses into private, luxury courses, and a 90,000 square foot ballroom styled after his Palm Beach bordello that will dwarf the White House.

The Commission of Fine Arts is an independent federal agency established by Congress to advise the President and Congress on aesthetics and design in order to preserve the quiet dignity of the nation’s capital. After Trump packed its governing board with allies, the Commission voted to approve his gold-appointed ballroom, no notes. However, on March 31, 2026, in a delicious smackdown that got out-noised by Trump’s WWIII insanity, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon put a pin in it.

Addressing the planned ballroom, Judge Leon wrote that the President of the United States “is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families,” however, he is not the owner.

What gives Trump the right to redraw the nation’s capital?

Facing down Trump’s claims of foolproof authority to control what happens to the White House, Judge Leon belabored the historical context in which Congress—not the president— has always controlled construction at the White House. His opinion can be found here.

Leon started by noting that the original White House construction was directed and funded by Congress. The initial build was quickly followed by repairs necessitated by the War of 1812. From there Leon detailed how Congress appropriated funds for construction of the South Portico in 1823, the North Portico in 1829, and the East and West Wings in 1902. In the late 1940s, Leon noted, after the discovery of major structural issues, Congress appropriated funds for “the renovation, repair, and modernization” of the White House but prohibited any change of the “architectural appearance of the exterior of the mansion or the interior of its main floor.”

Despite the clarity of historical precedent, easily found on the White House’s own Historical Association website, the White House announced in August 2025 that, “President Trump, and other patriot donors, have generously committed to donating the funds to build” a 90,000 square foot ballroom, at “zero cost to the American Taxpayer!” (Cancer! Lobotomies! at zero cost!)

Less than two months later, photos circulating online confirmed that the East Wing had been entirely demolished to make way for Trump’s ballroom eyesore.

National monuments don’t belong to Trump’s oligarchs

Trump has claimed repeatedly that he, not Congress, possesses vast powers to control the nation’s purse strings. To construct his ballroom, he claimed the right to supplant Congressional funding with money donated by his wealthy donor class, as if centuries of American tradition could be restyled in Trump’s taste by simply paying for it. Trump’s ballroom donors wouldn’t have $400 million laying around to begin with if not for Trump’s $117 billion in tax cuts lining their pockets.

Issuing a preliminary injunction against the ballroom’s construction last week, Judge Leon ordered it to “stop until Congress authorizes its completion.” Under 40 USC. § 8106, in effect since 1912, “[a] building or structure shall not be erected on any reservation, park, or public grounds of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia without express authority of Congress.” The statute further instructs the Secretary of the Interior to protect the District of Colombia’s scenery, natural and historic objects “in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

Trump’s legal team tried numerous spins around these statutory hurdles, but Judge Leon rejected them in turn, ruling that “no statute comes close to giving (Trump) the authority he claims to have” to bypass Congress for such major alterations, regardless of who’s paying for them.

Ultra vires: ‘beyond the powers of,’ ‘unauthorized’

Letting Trump and his oligarchs pay to control the landscape of our nation’s 235 year capital is blatantly corrupt. Donor entities such as Amazon, Apple, Meta, Google, and Microsoft, defense contractors, and cryptocurrency firms paying for the ballroom expect paybacks in the form of regulatory breaks, merger approvals, more tax breaks, and lucrative federal contracts. That’s why the Antideficiency Act restricts government agencies from accepting private funds without explicit authorization from Congress- to prevent people and corporations from donating to the government in order to buy influence.

Trump, above that law thanks to SCOTUS, is now freely and openly selling influence and accepting bribes. Aside from the obvious corruption of pay to play, by revising national monuments with private funds, Trump is also trying to transfer the power of Congress, a co-equal branch of government, to his own corporate donors. That Congressional Republicans are letting him do it suggests severe pathologies, and hints at flaws in our founding document.

Fittingly, as to Trump’s lamentations that the work had already begun on the ballroom, with the destruction of the East Wing now leaving an unsightly mess, Judge Leon called it “a hole of the President’s own making.”

If that’s not a metaphor for this disastrous presidency, nothing is.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.