Now we learn that Trump did not want to bomb Iran because doing so would interfere with his secret negotiations with Iran and other Middle Eastern countries.  Read on.

On the afternoon of June 26, Zachary Cohen, Alayna Treene, Kylie Atwood, and Jennifer Hansler of CNN reported that the Trump administration has been engaged in secret talks to ease sanctions on Iran, free up $6 billion in Iranian funds currently in foreign banks, and help Iran access as much as $30 billion to build a nuclear energy program, all in exchange for Iran freezing its nuclear enrichment program.

Trump ran his 2016 campaign in part by attacking President Barack Obama for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which was a much more stringent deal than the one suggested in the CNN article.

But there is perhaps a different angle to this deal than the Obama administration’s. The idea of building nuclear power plants in the Middle East was central to Trump’s 2016 bid for office. Members of Trump’s inner circle, including Michael Flynn and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, hatched a plan for a joint U.S.-Russian project to build nuclear power plants in Saudi Arabia. In June 2016 they formed a company called IP3 International, short for International Peace, Power and Prosperity.

Of course, the IP3 International plan included provisions for the Trump family to be included in the ownership, thereby ensuring a steady flow of cash into Trump’s pockets from nuclear power plants in the Middle East.

Americans can agree that our president (a) should obey the Constitution and (b) tell the truth to the American people.

Without regard to the merits or success of the attack on Iran, Trump (a) violated the Constitution in circumventing Congress’s authority to declare war, and (b) lied to the American people about the nuclear capabilities (to justify the attack and about the effectiveness of the attack in disabling Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.

The success of the US bombing of Iran’s uranium enrichment facility is contested at best and insignificant at worst. Indeed, the weight of the evidence suggests that a massive attack by the US has set back Iran only by a few months in its efforts to enrich uranium. Worse, the failed attack has created a new incentive for Iran to rush headlong into the development of a nuclear weapon (as opposed to enriching uranium).

Faced with multiple sources suggesting the US raids were largely ineffective, Trump’s press secretary has simply asserted that the US intelligence is “wrong” because it contradicts Trump’s claim that the Iranian facilities were “obliterated.”

The military success or failure of the attack on Iran is an issue separate from the questions of whether Trump violated the Constitution and repeatedly lied to the American people about the justification and results of the attack.

America is a stronger nation, a more reliable ally, and a more effective global power when its leader obeys the Constitution and tells the truth. Trump should not be lionized by anyone—the media, Netanyahu, or the American people—for acting in a lawless, deceitful manner in carrying out the attacks on Iran.

Trump should not only not be viewed as a heroic wartime president but should instead be viewed as a lawless, deceitful president who may have destabilized the Middle East and made all Americans less secure because he cannot be trusted–by anyone.

The mission to limit Iran’s nuclear ambitions could have been (and may yet be) successful, but the mission and its aftermath are built on a house of lies. That fact has made American democracy more fragile—to the detriment of all Americans and its allies.

The relevant details are these:

Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, testified that the US intelligence community concluded that Iran was not moving toward weaponization of its enriched uranium stockpile. See PBS News (6/17/2025), America’s spies say Iran wasn’t building a nuclear weapon. Trump dismisses that assessment.

Multiple sources are now reporting that Trump’s decision to attack Iran may have been precipitated by Fox “News” personalities who were praising the success of Israel’s air attacks on Iran. Per Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo,

[R]eporting by The New York Times and other publications seems to confirm my initial assumption, which was that the entire U.S. involvement in this conflict was driven by Fox News’s reporting of Israel’s onslaught against Iran’s military infrastructure and nuclear program.

Israel was “winning” and Trump wanted in on that winning. And that was really the entirety of it.

Motivated by Fox News to attack Iran, Trump had to reject the testimony of DNI Director Tulsi Gabbard to Congress—which he did. CBS News, Trump says intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard is “wrong” about Iran’s nuclear program.

After the attack, Trump claimed that Iran’s nuclear processing facilities were “obliterated.” That claim is false on multiple levels.

• First, Iran apparently removed most of the enriched uranium prior to the attack. JFeed, Did Iran Outsmart the U.S.? Tehran Says Uranium Was Moved Before Strike.
• Second, the attack did not collapse the underground bunker housing Iran’s nuclear processing facilities.
• Third, per a leaked US intelligence report, the attack set back Iran’s nuclear program only by a matter of months, not years. HuffPost, Trump’s Bombing Probably Set Iran’s Nuclear Program Back By Mere Months, Report Says. [But at least one international agency disagrees, saying that the attacks set back Iran’s processing capability by years. See Institute for the Study of War.]
• Fourth, Iran reports that the damage at main processing facility was “limited to surface structures and can be repaired.” MSN/Voice of Ukraine, Iran says nuclear program will continue despite U.S. and Israeli strikes

Trump’s press secretary has responded to the above by repeating that the facilities were “obliterated” and that the US intelligence is “wrong.” Press Secretary Karoline Levitt also said that the leak of the report was the work of a “low-level loser in the intelligence community,” a snarky attack that validated the authenticity of the leaked report. See The List, Karoline Leavitt Thought She Could Pull Off Trump’s Insult Game And It Was Her Biggest Blunder Yet.

In a sign that the Trump administration is scrambling to concoct a story to support Trump’s “obliteration” claim, the administration canceled a briefing for both chambers of Congress set for Tuesday. The hearings have been rescheduled for Friday, allegedly so that Sec. of State Rubio and Sec. of Defense Hegseth can testify.

Neither man has demonstrated the ability (or willingness) to testify truthfully to Congress on prior occasions. There is little reason to believe they will do so on Friday. The likelihood is that Rubio and Hegseth are being imported to replace career military officers who will tell the truth about the limited success of the US bombing mission.

The outcome of the US attack on Iran is far from clear—and may remain so for a long time to come. It is possible that the ultimate outcome could be beneficial to the security of the Middle East—which would be a welcome result. However, from an internal domestic perspective, the manner in which Trump decided to attack and report on the results continued his disregard for the Constitution and the norms of democracy.

That is the story that cannot be lost in the media’s mindless reporting that implies Trump acted with forethought and discipline. He did not. He acted because his fragile ego could not stand the thought of Bibi Netanyahu claiming credit for successful attacks on Iran. Let’s hope that Trump’s rash, lawless decision works its way to a successful outcome—in spite of Trump.

A senior Justice Department official, Emil Bove III, told subordinates he was willing to ignore court orders to fulfill the president’s aggressive deportation campaign, according to a whistle-blower complaint by a department lawyer who has since been fired.

The account by the dismissed lawyer, Erez Reuveni, paints a disturbing portrait of his final three weeks on the front lines of the Trump administration’s legal efforts to ship immigrants overseas, often with little notice or recourse. In Mr. Reuveni’s telling, Mr. Bove discussed disregarding court orders, adding an expletive for emphasis, and other top law enforcement officials showed themselves ready to stonewall judges or lie to them to get their way.

Mr. Reuveni’s account, which was obtained by The New York Times, was filed to lawmakers and the Justice Department inspector general on Tuesday, just one day before Mr. Bove is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a nomination to a federal appeals court.

In March and early April, the filing states, Mr. Reuveni “became aware of the plans of D.O.J. leadership to resist court orders that would impede potentially illegal efforts to deport noncitizens, and further became aware of the details to execute those plans.”

Top officials at the Justice Department and the White House sought to defy federal court orders “through lack of candor, deliberate delay and disinformation,” his account states.

“Discouraging clients from engaging in illegal conduct is an important part of the role of a lawyer,” the account says. “Mr. Reuveni tried to do so and was thwarted, threatened, fired and publicly disparaged for both doing his job and telling the truth to the court.”

A pivotal meeting occurred on March 14, when Mr. Bove, a senior official in the deputy attorney general’s office, spoke bluntly about the administration’s plans. He informed his subordinates that Mr. Trump would soon invoke the Alien Enemies Act to rapidly fly a group of immigrants out of the country that weekend. Two other officials in that office, James McHenry and Paul Perkins, were in attendance, as well as Mr. Reuveni’s supervisors, Drew Ensign and August Flentje, according to the whistle-blower document.

For those of you not familiar with the practice of “speaking in tongues,” read this article.

Meanwhile – – –

Last night, exactly a week after his military parade fizzled and more than five million Americans turned out to protest his administration, President Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S. had bombed three Iranian nuclear sites: Fordo, Natanz, and Esfahan. He assured the American people that the strikes “were a spectacular military success” and that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” “Iran,” he said, “must now make peace.”

For the first time in history, the United States dropped its 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs)—twelve of them—on another country.

It was a triumphant moment for the president, but as reporter James Fallows noted, the bombing of Iran would never seem as “successful” as it did when Trump could still say the nuclear sites were obliterated and Iran and its allies had not yet made a move.

Today administration officials began to walk back Trump’s boast. The Wall Street Journal reported that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine said it was “way too early” to assess the amount of damage. International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said that “no one, no one, neither us, nobody else, could be able to tell you how much it has been damaged.”

Tonight David E. Sanger of the New York Times reported that there is evidence to suggest that Iran had moved both uranium and equipment from the Fordo site before the strikes.

In last night’s speech to the nation, Trump appeared to reach out to the evangelical wing of MAGA that wanted the U.S. to intervene on Israel’s side in its fight against Iran. Trump said: “And I want to just thank everybody and in particular, God, I want to just say we love you, God, and we love our great military, protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”

But while the evangelicals in MAGA liked Trump’s bombing of Iran, the isolationist “America First” wing had staunchly opposed it and are adamant that they don’t want to see U.S. involvement in another foreign war. So today, administration officials were on the Sunday talk shows promising that Trump was interested only in stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions, not in regime change. On ABC’s This Week, Vice President J.D. Vance said explicitly: “We don’t want to achieve regime change.” On X, poster after poster, using the same script, tried to bring America Firsters behind the attack on Iran by posting some version of “If you are upset that Trump took out Obama’s nuclear facilities in Iran, you were never MAGA.”

This afternoon, Trump posted: “It’s not politically correct to use the term “Regime Change,” but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”

On ABC’s This Week, Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) said: “It’s way too early to tell what the actual effect on the nuclear program is, and of course, it’s way too early to tell how this plays out, right? I mean, we’ve seen this movie before. Every conflict in the Middle East has its Senator Tom Cottons who promise us mushroom clouds. In the Iraq war it was Condoleezza Rice promising us a mushroom cloud. And initially—and this is true of every one of these wars in Libya, in Iraq, and Afghanistan—initially, things looked pretty good. Saddam Hussein is gone. Muammar Qaddafi is gone. The Afghan Taliban are gone. And then, over time, we start to learn what the cost is. Four thousand, four hundred Americans dead in Iraq. The Taliban back in power. So bottom line, the president has taken a massive, massive gamble here.”

There are already questions about why Trump felt obliged to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites right now. In March, Trump’s director of national intelligence, who oversees all U.S. intelligence, told Congress that the intelligence community assessed that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. The U.S. and Iran have been negotiating over Iran’s nuclear program since April, and when Israel attacked Iran on June 12, a sixth round of negotiations between the U.S. and Iran was scheduled to begin just two days later, in Oman.

After Trump announced the strikes, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted: “I was briefed on the intelligence last week. Iran posed no imminent threat of attack to the United States. Iran was not close to building a deliverable nuclear weapon. The negotiations Israel scuttled with their strikes held the potential for success.” He added: “We know—for certain—there is a diplomatic path to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. The Obama agreement was working. And as late as a week ago, Iran was back at the table again. Which makes this attack—with all its enormous risks—so reckless.”

On Friday a reporter asked Trump, “What intelligence do you have that Iran is building a nuclear weapon? Your intelligence community had said they have no evidence that they are at this point.” Trump answered: “Well then, my intelligence community is wrong.” He added: “Who in the intelligence community said that?” The reporter responded: “Your director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.” Trump answered: “She’s wrong.”

At the end of May, Courtney Kube, Carol E. Lee, Gordon Lubold, Dan De Luce, and Elyse Perlmutter-Gumbiner of NBC News reported that Gabbard was considering turning the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) into a video that looked like a broadcast from the Fox News Channel to try to capture Trump’s attention. At the time, he had taken only 14 PDBs, or fewer than one a week (in the same number of days, President Joe Biden took 90). One person with direct knowledge of the discussions said: “The problem with Trump is that he doesn’t read.”

On June 17, Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen of CNN noted that while U.S. intelligence says Iran was years away from developing a nuclear weapon, Israel has insisted Iran was on the brink of one. A week ago, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Fox News Channel: “The intel we got and we shared with the United States was absolutely clear, was absolutely clear that they were working, in a secret plan to weaponize the uranium. They were marching very quickly.”

What will happen next is anyone’s guess. Iran’s parliament says it will close the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil travels, sending oil prices upward, but that decision can be overruled by the country’s Supreme National Security Council. Iran’s foreign minister announced today he was on his way to Moscow for urgent talks with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev wrote this afternoon that “A number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads.”

The Department of Homeland Security has warned that “[t]he ongoing Iran conflict is causing a heightened threat environment in the United States.” It linked those threats to the antisemitism the Trump administration has used as justification for cracking down on civil liberties in the United States.

One pattern is clear from yesterday’s events: Trump’s determination to act without check by the Constitution.

Democrats as well as some Republicans are concerned about Trump’s unilateral decision to insert the United States into a war. The Constitution gives to Congress alone the power to declare war, but Congress has not actually done so since 1942, permitting significant power to flow to the president. In the 1973 War Powers Resolution, Congress limited the president’s power as commander in chief to times when Congress has declared war, Congress has passed a law giving the president that power, or there is “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.”

That same resolution also says: “The President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances.” If an emergency appears to require military action without congressional input, the president must brief the Gang of Eight—both party leaders in each chamber of Congress, and both party leaders of each chambers’ intelligence committee—within 48 hours.

Democrats and some Republicans maintain that while no one wants Iran to have nuclear capabilities, the strikes on Iran were not an emergency and the president had no right to involve the U.S. in a war unilaterally. Administration officials’ insistence that the attack was a one-shot deal is designed to undercut the idea that the U.S. is at war; Trump’s call for regime change undermined their efforts.

Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said in a statement: “Trump said he would end wars; now he has dragged America into one. His actions are a clear violation of our Constitution—ignoring the requirement that only the Congress has the authority to declare war. While we all agree that Iran must not have a nuclear weapon, Trump abandoned diplomatic efforts to achieve that goal and instead chose to unnecessarily endanger American lives, further threaten our armed forces in the region, and risk pulling America into another long conflict in the Middle East. The U.S. intelligence community has repeatedly assessed that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon. There was more time for diplomacy to work.

“The war in Iraq was also started under false pretenses. It’s clear that President Trump has been outmaneuvered by Prime Minister Netanyahu, who opposed the JCPOA negotiated by President Obama and has long favored drawing America into a war against Iran. The United States has rightly supported Israel’s defense, but it should not have joined Netanyahu in waging this war of choice. Instead of living up to his claim that he’d bring all wars to an end, Trump is yet again betraying Americans by embroiling the United States directly in this conflict.”

Representative Sean Casten (D-IL) posted on social media: “​​This is not about the merits of Iran’s nuclear program. No president has the authority to bomb another country that does not pose an imminent threat to the US without the approval of Congress. This is an unambiguous impeachable offense. I’m not saying we have the votes to impeach,” he added. “I’m saying that you DO NOT do this without Congressional approval and if [Speaker Mike] Johnson [R-LA] doesn’t grow a spine and learn to be a real boy tomorrow we have a BFing problem that puts our very Republic at risk.”

But Representative Ronny Jackson (R-TX) told Maria Bartiromo of the Fox News Channel that Trump did not have to notify Congress because “[w]e do not have trustworthy people in Congress especially on the left side of the aisle.” If you give information to Democrats and those Republicans who oppose the president, he said, “you might as well put the [ayatollah] on the phone as well.” There is no basis for this statement.

In a quirk of timing, the satirical media outlet The Onion took out a full-page ad in the New York Times today that looks like a newspaper with the headline: “Congress, now more than ever, our nation needs your cowardice.” Journalist Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket got an exclusive look at the insert and reproduced its front page. It read in part: “Our republic is a birthright, an exceedingly rare treasure passed down from generation to generation of Americans. It was gained through hard years of bloody resistance and can too easily be lost. Our Founding Fathers in their abundant wisdom, understood that all it would take was men and women of little courage sitting in the corridors of power and taking zero actions as this precious inheritance was stripped away—and that is where we have finally arrived.”

Congress members will have a copy of the ad in their mailboxes tomorrow when they get back to work on the Republicans’ enormously unpopular budget reconciliation bill.

Masked men in U.S. Border Patrol vests take Santa Ana father after repeatedly hitting him

Source: KTLA-TV

LOCAL NEWS
Masked men in U.S. Border Patrol vests take Santa Ana father after repeatedly hitting him

by: Lily Dallow
Posted: Jun 22, 2025 / 03:31 PM PDT
Updated: Jun 22, 2025 / 04:23 PM PDT

In a graphic video that has since gone viral on social media, about seven or more masked men wearing U.S. Border Patrol vests are seen violently detaining a father in Santa Ana before forcing him into the back of an unmarked car on Saturday.

The violent incident sparked protests in the following hours, and an online fundraiser was started through GoFundMe, where family members identified the victim as Tustin resident Narciso Barranco, a father to three sons who are all U.S. Marines.

One of his sons, 25-year-old Alejandro Barranco, told KTLA that his father was pepper-sprayed in addition to repeatedly being punched in the face during his detention. According to Alejandro, Narciso was picked up by alleged federal immigration officers while he was working as a landscaper at the IHOP on Edinger Avenue and Ritchey Street.

The video shared by the Instagram account @SantaAnaProblems shows a group of men wearing hats and face coverings and police vests converge on Narciso, holding him down while one man repeatedly hits him on the head. Some men are standing guard around the scene before the group again seizes Narciso, with one man holding a baton at the back of Narciso’s neck to push him into the backseat of a silver SUV.

{snip}

Read more: https://ktla.com/news/local-news/masked-men-in-u-s-border-patrol-vests-brutally-beat-take-santa-ana-father/

---

Reposted by Completely and Totally Obliterated Hat
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>>>>>>
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“family members identified the victim as Narciso Barranco, a father to three sons who are all U.S. Marines”

https://ktla.com/news/local-news/masked-men-in-u-s-border-patrol-vests-brutally-beat-take-santa-ana-father/

 

 

MAGAt:  Rhymes with “maggot” — no offense intended to maggots, who serve a useful purpose.

President Volodymyr Zelensky is set to attend a NATO summit in The Hague next week, the European Council confirmed on June 20, while TACO may not show up.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte are set to meet Zelensky on June 24.

Zelensky was reportedly reconsidering attending the NATO summit, as questions remain over U.S. President Donald Trump’s participation, the Guardian reported on June 17, citing unnamed Ukrainian officials.

A schedule released by the European Council on June 20 confirms Zelensky’s planned participation at the event.

A Ukrainian official told the Guardian that Kyiv is in a “permanent hazard” of becoming a victim of “Trump’s short attention span,” adding that Russia has exploited this uncertainty with fresh aerial attacks.

There were “all sorts of promises for this summit,” including U.S. arms, the source said.

Zelensky was scheduled to meet U.S. President Donald Trump at the Group of Seven (G7) Summit, held June 15-17.

Trump left that multilateral event early claiming he needed to deal with the renewed conflict between Israel and Iran.  IN FACT Trump was getting his ass kicked by every other member of the G7 so, in true Trump fashion, he CHICKENED OUT – TACO – “TRUMP ALWAYS CHICKENS OUT.”

 

Face-hidden goons in plain clothes claiming to be “federal officers” terrorizing American cities and towns — reminiscent of the KKK

Individuals in plain clothes with their faces covered and without badges or name tags are snatching people off the streets and taking them away. Todd Lyons, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is housed within the Department of Homeland Security, claimed that such measures for anonymity are imperative because “ICE officers have seen a staggering 413 percent increase in assaults against them.”

Philip Bump of the Washington Post looked into that claim and noted that by using a percentage, ICE avoids the question of just how many assaults there have actually been. He points out that year-to-date assaults against Customs and Border Protection are currently 20% lower than they were in 2024 and that at least one ICE news release blurred the distinction between “threatening to assault” and “assaulting.” ICE would not provide evidence for their claims.

Bump concludes: “[W]e should not and cannot take ICE’s representations about the need for its officers to obscure their identities at face value.” After Bump’s article appeared yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security posted on social media: “New data reveals that ICE law enforcement is now facing a 500% increase in assaults while carrying out enforcement operations.”

Bump noted that ICE “has been eager to level dubious charges against Democratic legislators,” and the message from Homeland Security bears that claim out. After claiming a 500% increase in assaults, it continued: “Make no mistake, sanctuary politicians are contributing to the surge in assaults of our ICE officers through their repeated vilification and demonization of ICE. This violence against ICE must end.”

The Department of Homeland Security appears to be trying to convince Americans that their agents must cover their faces because their opponents, especially Democrats, are dangerous.

On Tuesday, masked, plainclothes ICE agents assaulted and arrested New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander, the city’s chief financial officer. Lander was accompanying an immigrant to a scheduled court hearing to try to protect him from arrest in one of ICE’s sweeps of those showing up for their court hearings. Lander asked the agents to produce an arrest warrant for the man they were arresting, and was himself arrested.

Homeland Security said it would charge him with impeding a federal officer and “assaulting law enforcement.” As Bump notes, a video of the incident shows that Lander “assaulted the officers in the sense that a bully might accuse you of having gotten in the way of his fist.” Lander was later released, and New York governor Kathy Hochul said the charges against him had been dropped.

The same pattern occurred last month, when federal prosecutors charged Newark, New Jersey, mayor Ras Baraka with trespassing and interim U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, Alina Habba, broke the Department of Justice rule that it would not comment on ongoing investigations by posting that Baraka had “committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey this afternoon. He has willingly chosen to disregard the law. That will not stand in this state. He has been taken into custody. NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.”

Ten days later, Habba quietly dropped the case and announced another one, this time against U.S. Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), charging her with “assaulting, impeding and interfering with law enforcement” during Baraka’s arrest.

U.S. Magistrate Judge André Espinosa, a federal judge, rebuked the officials who had charged Baraka, warning them that their rush to charge the mayor suggests “a failure to adequately investigate, to carefully gather facts, and to thoughtfully consider the implications of your actions before wielding your immense power.”

The point is to spread the Big Lie

But the point of these arrests is almost certainly not an attempt to see justice done. They continue the longstanding Republican policy of seeding the media with a false narrative of bad behavior by their opponents—voter fraud, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails, and so on—in order to convince voters that their opponents are dangerous to America.

President Donald J. Trump relied on this political technique so thoroughly that in 2019 he tried to discredit his primary challenger for the 2020 presidential election, then former vice president Joe Biden, by getting Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into the Ukrainian company for which Biden’s son Hunter had worked.

Trump didn’t want an actual investigation; he wanted an announcement that an investigation was being launched. He could trust that media reports would carry the story and its suggestion of corruption from there, even in the absence of evidence, leaving behind his own administration’s deep involvement with Russia. Similarly, during Biden’s presidency, Republicans launched a sprawling investigation of what they insisted on calling the “Biden Crime Family” although there was never a Biden family business, their star witness went to prison after confessing to lying to the FBI, and they never produced any evidence that the president had taken foreign bribes. Now, though, with the Trump Organization—a family business—openly making deals with foreign governments, Republicans are silent.

Today, after a week of embarrassing news, Trump continued this pattern by announcing that he is calling for a special prosecutor to investigate claims that the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election. There has never been any evidence of this Big Lie, and courts dismissed the many cases brought over it. But raising it now, when MAGA is deeply divided over U.S. involvement in the Israel-Iran conflict, could create a distraction and reinforce his loyalists’ support.

There was, of course, a special counsel appointed to look into Trump’s attempt to stay in power despite losing the 2020 presidential election. His name was Jack Smith, and after his investigation, in 2023 a grand jury, made up of American citizens, indicted Trump for engaging in “dishonesty, fraud and conceit” to obstruct American democracy by stopping the counting of votes by which citizens choose their government officials. “Despite having lost,” the indictment reads, Trump “was determined to remain in power.”

Trump — who barely won the 2024 election — sees his popularity disappearing

Now he is back in office, but he remains unpopular. A new Fox News poll released yesterday shows that only 38% of registered voters like the Republicans’ budget reconciliation omnibus bill, while 59% oppose it, a difference of 21 points. The poll also showed that 55% of registered voters are worried about the economy, 84% are worried about inflation, and 57% think tariffs hurt the economy. Only 46% of respondents approve of Trump’s job performance, while 54% disapprove.

This week’s Economist/YouGov poll shows that 52% of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling deportations, while only 42% approve, and that Trump’s job approval rating among those from 18 to 29 years old has dropped 44 points since he took office. Many of Trump’s supporters believed he would be deporting only undocumented immigrants who had committed violent crimes, but an investigation by CNN reporters published on Monday showed that fewer than 10% of those taken into custody since October have been convicted of violent crimes.

So members of his administration are centering power in the White House while obscuring who, exactly, is giving orders that either are or might be violating the law. Administration lawyers are still hiding who was actually the head of the Department of Government Efficiency in its first months and who gave the order to send Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia to prison in El Salvador. Making lawbreaking opaque makes it harder to prosecute those doing the breaking. It is possible at least some of the drive to hide agents’ faces comes from that impulse, just as members of the Ku Klux Klan hid their faces in the 1860s and 1870s.

There is another important parallel to the Klan in the administration’s defense of masked agents who are terrorizing Americans even as they insist they are the ones under attack by dangerous Democrats. The Klan set out to “reform” governments elected by a majority of voters and take control themselves, permanently. In Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, about two thousand armed white Democrats overthrew a government of black Republicans and white Populists. The Democrats agreed that the town officials had been elected fairly, but they rejected the outcome of the election nonetheless, insisting that such people were “socialists” and had no idea how to run a government.

On June 12, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in Los Angeles, “We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

When California senator Alex Padilla, the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on immigration, citizenship and border safety, tried to ask Noem a question, he was assaulted and handcuffed by agents from the Department of Homeland Security. Yesterday, he noted in a New York Times op-ed that “public safety is not the point; the spectacle is.” Trump “is testing the boundaries of his power,” Padilla wrote, “[a]nd he’s using the theatrics around his immigration policies to do it.”

“If federal troops can deploy to Los Angeles against the wishes of the governor, the mayor and even local law enforcement, they can do the same tomorrow in your hometown,” he wrote. “This is a fundamental threat to the rule of law nationwide.”

But Padilla noted that the attempt to force minority rule on the U.S. through violence shows that the administration is weak. “If the Trump administration was this afraid of one senator with a question,” he wrote, “imagine what the voices of tens of millions of Americans organizing will do.”

Today, at a news conference in Los Angeles, a reporter asked Vice President J.D. Vance if Trump’s administration is “cracking down on Democrats.” Vance, who served with Alex Padilla in the Senate, called his former colleague by the wrong name. Once again seeding the idea that a Democratic lawmaker must be a criminal, Vance called the California senator “José Padilla,” using the name of a man convicted in 2007 of conspiring to commit murder and fund terrorism.

The vice president’s press secretary said the vice president “must have mixed up two people who have broken the law.”