The death of Dolly Parton was a blow to millions of people who never met her but loved her for her spirit, her kindness, her humor, and of course, her music.
In a time of meanness, she was steadfastly kind.
She was born into dire poverty, one of 12 children in a one-room house. She was never bitter or angry about her meager beginnings. She marveled at where her talent took her.
Over the course of her long career, she amassed a huge fortune but she did not aspire to be a billionaire. She was a philanthropist. She gave her money away, unlike Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and the Trump family. Is there a hospital or library or public space named for them because of their generosity? None that I know of. People will remember Dolly for her generosity; the others and their ilk will be remembered for their avarice.
She was not political but she spoke up for Black Lives Matter and for LGBT people. When she was interviewed by Johnny Carson in 1977, she spoke up for LGBT people in her straightforward way. She loved drag queens; she knew that they liked to mimic her style, her hair, her dress. She said it was God’s role to judge, not ours. Hers was the voice of love and compassion.
I wrote this four years ago when the twins aged out of her Imagination Library, one of the best things any wealthy person ever did. How cramped and meager some of our leaders look in comparison.
After five great years, the Board of Directors has aged out of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. I have been plugging this program for years (my first post was in 2014, back before the Board of Directors was even a sparkle in our eyes). Parton has engineered putting a book a month into the hands of families all across the country–we’re talking (currently) 184 million books in millions of households meeting no requirement other than they have a child between the ages of born and five. It costs the family nothing.
The quality of the books is great. Over the years we have received classics, newer books, books featuring every sort of family, every sort of kid. They are filled with wonder, kindness, beauty, excitement. This is one of the best examples of thoughtful, useful, not-trying-to-take-over-a-government function philanthropy you’ll find.
The program launched in 1995 in Sevier County, and it grew quickly. By 2006, when the Washington Post wrote about it, the program had spread to 471 communities in 41 states. In 2011 it launched in Scotland, and it can now be found in the UK, Australia, and Canada. The site says that 706,468 US kids are currently signed up. It’s still fairly simple. Some combination of sponsors (some private, some government, depending on the locale) help with the financing (the cost is roughly $27 per child per year) and the Foundation delivers the books, each in its own poly bag with the child’s name on it (consider the power of a child, even a small one, receiving a book that is theirs, addressed to them, by name).
I am not, I’ll confess, a huge fan of Parton’s music, but she is the very best example of what good a person can do with their giant pile of money you can find. Not trying to shape the world to her own requirements, not trying to buy a good name, not trying to make herself the unelected boss of whatever. And the little PR that Imagination Library does is to get itself out into the hands of students, not to raise Parton’s profile. She doesn’t pay people to promote it, and it has spread largely through word of mouth or through the local organizations that co-sponsor it and help make the connections to local families.
Once a month, the boys received a book, addressed to them personally. We love books in this house, and the arrival of the monthly “book from Dolly” was an event. We will miss it.
The last book to arrive is Kindergarten, Here I Come, and the first page inside the front cover is a letter from Parton, that I’ll quote in part:
My, how time flies. It seems only yesterday when your family and friends read you your first story. You were just a baby. Now you’re five years old and about to go to school. How exciting!
This may be your last book from my Imagination Library but you have to promise me you will keep on reading…Every book is a treasure and every time you open one you will meet new friends and take wonderful journeys to magical places.
I hope you have a great time in school. I bet your school will even have a library where you can check out books. You and all your friends are very special. There is no limit to what you can do or how far you can go.
The board of directors examines a position paper
Her signature, a simple Dolly, is at the end. The first time we read the message together I was apparently having a bad allergy day.
None of the rich amateurs who want to change the face of education are doing anything of this value on this scale–both intensely personal and yet broadly across the globe. I mean, imagine if Bill Gates had said, “I want to give every child a book” instead of “I want to give every child a test.”
And if there is a tiny human in your life, and they aren’t signed up, go to the program website and see if it’s operating in your neighborhood, and if so, then sign up that child.
What a fabulous, generous, powerful program. God bless Dolly Parton. We are going to miss here at this house.
Andrew Eggers of The Bulwark writes here about the close connection between Katie Miller, wife of Trump confidant Steven Miller, and Dr. Anthony Fauci. They worked together closely during the pandemic. They were friends. But it is longer wise for Katie to befriend Dr. Fauci. In MAGAland, he is the Devil incarnate.
Eggers writes,
By now you’ve probably read plenty about congressional Republicans’ latest struggle session against Anthony Fauci—the mean-spirited publication of his COVID-era diary, the barrage of ridiculous and misleading questions at his Senate hearing, the crude spectacle of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tweeting a photoshopped image of himself clapping the doctor in handcuffs.
Yesterday, though, my attention was captured by a far smaller, sadder side plot in the Fauci affair spotlighted by NOTUS—one involving Katie Miller.
During Trump’s first term, Miller was a senior aide to Vice President Mike Pence, and therefore a close colleague of Fauci’s on the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force, which Pence chaired.
From his journal entries, it’s clear that Fauci quickly took a liking to Miller, whom he viewed as a bright young colleague and for whom he developed an almost grandfatherly affection. “Katie Miller is great (tough, smart, but great),” he wrote in March 2020. “Katie Miller and I laugh at each other in the Sit Room,” he wrote two months later.
The work of grappling with a brand new, barely understood pandemic was stressful, both professionally and personally—after all, the task force could get the virus too. At several points, Miller leaned on Fauci for medical advice. “I am calling Katie frequently to check on her couple times per day,” Fauci wrote after Miller tested positive for COVID in May 2020. “She is very anxious about getting very ill since she is 10 weeks pregnant. Tonight she had an anxiety reaction. I calmed her over the phone.”
This was still awfully early days in the pandemic, when little was yet known about the relative risks COVID presented to various groups. Think of how genuinely terror-stricken Miller must have been. Think of how reassuring it must have been to have America’s top infectious-disease expert on hand not just to advise her, but to show personal concern for her physical and mental health. Miller, NOTUS reports, went back to Fauci repeatedly for medical advice throughout the pandemic: later that year when her husband tested positive for COVID, and again when their newborn experienced an unrelated medical episode. In the latter instance, Fauci records, he called the baby’s doctors directly to ensure she was getting good care.
Miller purports to feel differently now. “Dr. Fauci was neither my friend nor my doctor, but a work colleague who weaponized my pregnancy and child for his gain to aggrandize himself,” she wrote on X yesterday. “As they say, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. I can say with certainty after witnessing his con close up this man should be in prison. Justice for the American People.”
Miller’s claim here—that she was only relying on Fauci’s pro bono medical advice to “keep her enemies closer”—beggars belief. Nor does her explanation of his behavior make a bit of sense: Apparently, he “weaponized [her] pregnancy and child” to “aggrandize himself” by . . . showing concern for her well-being and going out of his way to help her out from time to time. And he kept it all private even as the Millers and the rest of the Trump movement turned him into a bogeyman. Sinister!
Share this story with someone who opposes MAGA, or just likes a good character drama.
Still, it’s easy to see why Miller is twisting herself in these sorts of knots. Fauci has become one of the MAGAsphere’s chief villains, while she’s become one of its influencers, with hundreds of thousands of followers and an odd soft-focus podcast aimed at MAGA moms. The ecosystem she’s chosen to live in is one dominated by political paranoia and intramural accusations of secret disloyalty. Fauci’s diary drop must have been a nasty shock. What if some clout-chasing rabble-rouser used it to try to expose her as some sort of Deep State plant? Better to get ahead of the accusations by cooking up some ridiculous “cover story” for associating with Fauci—and to call for his jailing too, just to be on the safe side.
Now, of course, Miller does a lot of things that I personally find a little difficult to wrap my head around. This, after all, is a woman who has tried to get the FBI to criminally investigate her neighbors. This is a woman who once lost her cool in a TV debate and started threatening her interlocutor with deportation. This is a woman who married Stephen Miller.
Still, it’s interesting to see a human side of Miller emerge in Fauci’s diary entries—and incredibly depressing to see her treat that human side as a four-alarm PR fire. What a bummer way to make a living, swimming in this revolting internet ecosystem. Hard to imagine she’s having a lot of fun.
Steve Schmidt is a political strategist who worked for the campaigns of Republicans such as George W. Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and John McCain.
Disgusted by Trump, he was one of the founders of the Lincoln project, an organization of anti-Trump Republicans. He left the Republican Party in 2018. In December 2020, he switched his party registration to Democratic. He writes one of the most popular blogs on Substack.
Lindsey Graham was a lonely and unprincipled man who betrayed his country for power and his decency for attention.
Let it be known for all time that he knew exactly what Donald Trump was from the very beginning, and chose him over his country:
“If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.”
“I believe Donald Trump would be an absolute, utter disaster for the Republican Party, destroy conservatism as we know it.”
“We would get wiped out and it would take generations to overcome a Trump candidacy.”
“Donald Trump is not going to be the nominee of the Republican party. If he is, that’s the end of the Republican Party.”
“Trump is an interloper and a demagogue of the greatest proportion.”
When Donald Trump attacked America, and tried to burn down the republic built by Washington, saved by Lincoln and redeemed by King, he was aided by Lindsey Graham who supported the lies, dismissed the insanity and sought personal gain from it all.
Lindsey Graham was a pathetic man, a true cynic and a faithless servant of the Constitution.
He was a simple man to understand and a tragic one. He lacked a moral core and any sense of right and wrong. The great empty spaces of his life were filled with an insatiable need for “relevance.” He found it as a cast member in the most malignant reality show ever made.
Let there be no confusion about what Lindsey Graham was. There was no complexity to the man, nor much in the way to plumb and analyze about his journey to the bottom of the Trump sewer.
Lindsey Graham lived his life as a pilot fish, a parasitic sucker fish hovering about larger predators. He was a sidekick and the hollowest of hollow men. Here is what I once shared with Rolling Stone:
“People try to analyze Lindsey through the prism of the manifest inconsistencies that exist between things that he used to believe and what he’s doing now. The way to understand him is to look at what’s consistent. And essentially what he is in American politics is what, in the aquatic world, would be a pilot fish: a smaller fish that hovers about a larger predator, like a shark, living off of its detritus. That’s Lindsey. And when he swam around the McCain shark, broadly viewed as a virtuous and good shark, Lindsey took on the patina of virtue. But wherever the apex shark is, you find the Lindsey fish hovering about, and Trump’s the newest shark in the sea. Lindsey has a real draw to power — but he’s found it unattainable on his own merits.”
Let there never be any confusion over the choice Lindsey Graham made.
He chose Trump over his friend.
He chose Trump over his country.
He chose Trump over his duty.
He chose Trump over his oath.
Now he’s dead, and Trump is his rotten legacy — and in that, he won’t be alone.
In the end he made an adjudicated rapist laugh and played a lot of golf with him.
He was a warmonger and the architect of a lost war against Iran.
Lindsey Graham helped Trump divide America and break our alliances, ideals and traditions.
He was no patriot.
Lindsey Graham made his choice.
The high court of history will pass a brutal judgement about a man who knew better, but chose worse.
I won’t mourn Lindsey Graham’s death, but rather the country he helped break.
Andy Borowitz is one of the nation’s most notable humorists. For years, he wrote for The New Yorker. Now, he writes on Substack, where this commentary was posted.
I remember when Senator Graham was Senator John McCain’s best friend. John McCain was a true war hero. He was shot down over Hanoi, and he spent five years as a prisoner of war. He was offered the chance to get an early release, but he said he wouldn’t leave until the other POWs were freed. Graham adored him until he was dead, then attached himself to Trump. Trump mocked McCain, and said McCain was not a hero because he got captured. This from a man who dodged the draft because of “bone spurs.” And Graham forgot his friend.
Like many Americans, I mourn the sudden passing of Lindsey Graham. I had hoped he would live long enough to be tried for treason.
Let me define my terms. A true traitor collaborates with the enemy despite knowing better. For that reason, someone like Sen. Tommy Tuberville could never be considered a traitor, because he knows nothing.
And then there’s Lindsey.
For the better part of a decade, the senior senator from South Carolina was enmeshed in an on-again, off-again—but mainly on-again—bromance with Donald J. Trump.
It began when both men were running for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. At the time, Graham had some pretty harsh words for his GOP rival.
“There’s only one way to make America great again,” he said. “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”
Snap! But Lindsey was just warming up. He’d go on to call Trump “crazy,” “a jackass,” and “a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot” who “shouldn’t be commander-in-chief.”
“If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed,” he said, “and we will deserve it.” Why was he so sure that Trump would lose? “Donald Trump is the most unelectable Republican I’ve seen in my lifetime,” he said.
As for Trump’s mental health, Lindsey offered this succinct diagnosis: “I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy.”
Just one year later, when the crazy xenophobic jackass was chain-slurping Diet Cokes in the Oval Office, Graham decided to revise that assessment somewhat.
“What concerns me about the American press is this endless, endless attempt to label the guy as some kind of kook not fit to be president,” he told CNN.
This sort of flip-flop worked so much better before the invention of Google. But Lindsey seemed to hope that by piling praise on the man he once wished would go to hell, we’d forget about all that mean stuff he’d said before. By 2018, Graham was bizarrely claiming that Trump “deserves the Nobel Peace Prize and then some.”
In his quest to suck up to Trump as strenuously as possible, Graham hurled himself into self-abasement as if it were an extreme sport. When Trump relentlessly insulted the memory of John McCain—purportedly Graham’s best friend when they were Senate colleagues—Lindsey responded with astonishing nonchalance.
“I don’t like what he says about John McCain,” Graham told Bloomberg. “But when we play golf, it’s fun.”
Yes, Lindsey apparently lost his moral compass somewhere in the sand trap of the Trump National Golf Club. That’s why it was so striking when he seemed to express genuine outrage on the floor of the Senate after Trump incited the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.
“Trump and I… we’ve had a hell of a journey,” he said. “I hate it to end this way. Oh my god, I hate it… but today, all I can say is ‘Count me out. Enough is enough.’”
Alas, Lindsey’s appearance on the right side of history turned out to be a head-fake, as his hell of a journey with the insurrectionist-in-chief was far from over. Like his fellow quisling, Mitch McConnell, Graham voted to acquit Trump in his second impeachment trial. And once it became clear that launching a coup against the US government wasn’t a deal-breaker for 99 percent of the GOP, Lindsey was hitting the links with the wannabe junta leader once more.
“I’m trying to keep a relationship with him after the riot,” he told Axios two months after January 6. “I still consider him a friend. What happened was a dark day in American history. And we’re going to move forward.”
Lindsey just couldn’t quit him.
All of the events I’ve recounted thus far are sufficient to qualify Graham as a traitor. His defenders, though, might raise a mitigating factor: his hawkish stance against the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin.
In this regard, Graham was always on the same page as his Senate pal McCain. Responding to George W. Bush’s gullible assessment of the murderous Russian (”I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.”), McCain quipped, “I looked in Mr. Putin’s eyes and I saw three letters—a K, a G and B.”
But Graham might have topped McCain in his detestation of Putin. Calling him a “war criminal” and “not a legitimate leader,” in 2022 he proposed assassination as the swiftest way to end the war in Ukraine: “I just want him to go…I wish somebody had taken Hitler out in the ‘30s.”
When the International Criminal Court, in a somewhat less draconian measure, issued an arrest warrant for Putin in 2023, Lindsey hailed the decision: “To forgive and forget Putin’s war crimes—that are occurring on an industrial scale—would irrevocably damage the Rule of Law-based world order established at the end World War II.”
That “Rule of Law-based world order” was shredded in the Oval Office last year when Trump and JD Vance disgracefully ganged up on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for having the audacity to suggest that Putin might not be a trustworthy fellow. Aware of Graham’s longstanding hatred of the man he called a war criminal, I eagerly awaited his rousing statement of support for Zelenskyy.
Instead, Lindsey told reporters, “What I saw in the Oval Office was disrespectful, and I don’t know if we could ever do business with Zelensky again… I have never been more proud of the president. I was very proud of JD Vance standing up for our country.”
That kind of statement made many people wish Lindsey would go to hell. Done.
Trump pardoned the convicted criminals who were sentenced because of their actions on January 6, 2021. Those who committed the most serious crimes were accused of seditious conspiracy and did not receive a pardon. They are leaders of the Proud Boys, a group of right wing extremists. They were later pardoned by Todd Blanche.
(CNN) — A federal judge on Friday dismissed the seditious conspiracy case against several Proud Boys members — granting a request from Trump’s Justice Department and undoing one of the Biden administration’s most celebrated victories against those who it said inspired the January 6, 2021, attack on American democracy.
US District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, begrudgingly agreed to drop the case against the four members, saying he “lacks the authority to compel the Executive to pursue a prosecution, full stop.”
“President Trump’s views about the prosecution of those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6—whether those views are based on fact or fiction—are well known, as is his intention to extend clemency to them through the Executive Order,” Judge Kelly said, referring to Trump on his first day back in office signing an order commuting their sentences.
Trump’s order granted pardons to over 1,000 people convicted in the attack but left in place the convictions of the four Proud Boys members — Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola.
In April, the Justice Department under Todd Blanche moved to vacate their convictions.
Dismissing the case against the Proud Boys associates erases some of the most serious convictions from the sprawling investigation of the US Capitol riot, one of the largest federal investigations in US history. Nordean, Biggs and Rehl were found guilty in 2023 of seditious conspiracy and a range of other charges. Pezzola was found not guilty of seditious conspiracy but convicted on other charges related to January 6.
The US district judge who sits in Washington, DC, said in his order that the Trump administration sought to “treat this case essentially the same way it has all January 6 cases, without regard for the seriousness of the conduct at issue or even whether the case was initiated after President Biden took office or, like this one, while President Trump was still in power.”
“The decisions to issue the Executive Order and to abandon this prosecution—even after the Government secured convictions for serious crimes relating to the attack on the Capitol on January 6—are solely the Executive’s,” Kelly continued. “No one should mistake the Court’s granting of the Government’s motion for its agreement with those decisions.”
Rehl, one of the Proud Boys members, celebrated the dismissal in a post on X, saying, “Finally, it’s all over! January 6th can now be a thing of the past for me!”
Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the group who had also been pardoned by Trump, was also quick to boast on X Friday night: “Justice is served! Proud Boys don’t lose. We win. This is our victory.”
Trump has long lambasted the January 6 prosecutions as an injustice against his supporters, even referring to those in jail as “hostages.”
The president has repeatedly called January 6, 2021, “a day of love and peace” and claimed his supporters posed “zero threat.” His comments are contradicted by hundreds of video clips of Trump supporters beating police with flagpoles, batons, wooden clubs and baseball bats; deploying stun guns and chemical sprays; and engaging in hand-to-hand combat with police officers.
The judge, calling the insurrection “a perilous event,” said it was “an attack on people, including police officers, many of whom were injured. It was an attack on a coordinate branch of government—Congress—that the Founders saw fit to give a place of primacy in Article I of the Constitution. And it was an attack on the Constitution’s mechanism to facilitate the peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next, what President Reagan called ‘nothing less than a miracle.’”
Closing his order with a somber warning, Kelly said, “Moving forward, if this Nation’s experiment in self-government is to last another 250 years, the American people—no matter their partisan preferences—will have to act together to preserve, protect and defend that miracle through our constitutional framework.”
Trump boasted about the U.S. Supreme Court decision Trump v. Slaughter gave him more power than any other President. That decision removes protection from members of independent commissions. With the exception of the Federal Reserve Board (which regulates the banking system and whose stability is crucial to the economy), Trump now has the power to fire any member of any independent commission without cause. He can stack those commissions with his cronies, with people who have no expertise but will do whatever he wants.
What’s the point of having “independent” commissions if they are not independent of political influence?
Thom Hartmann wrote that the Court majority just rolled back the Pendleton Act of 1883, which created the Civil Service:
The six unscrupulous Republicans on the Supreme Court — over the loud objections of the three true constitutionalists on the Court — are aggressively dragging America back not just to the 1950s but, as of yesterday, to the 1830s.
Arguably the most depraved president in American history, Andrew Jackson (aka “The Indian Killer” a title he gave himself), Trump’s favorite, whose picture he hung in the Oval Office, invented what came to be called the “Spoils System.”
If you wanted a job in the federal government, or a favorable ruling from one of the then-few federal agencies, all you had to do was give a big enough gift to President Jackson, or pledge your loyalty to him instead of the Constitution and the people, and your wish would be granted…
The Federal Reserve protects the nations’ banking system and thus ensures stability and prosperity for America’s billionaires and the companies that made them that way. By blowing up Trump’s attempt to remove the Fed’s one Black governor (presumably as part of his and Hegseth’s Make America White Again campaign), the Republicans on the Court defended America’s oligarchs.
The other federal agencies, like the FTC, mostly protect you and me. They oversee our environment, consumer product safety, the purity of our food and drugs, and so on. If anything, America’s oligarchs consider them a pain in the ass.
If Democrats win the Presidency and control of both houses of Congress in 2028, they can write new laws reviving limits on Presidential power, protecting merit-based appointments, and strengthening the federal civil service.
Until that happens, Trump can fire any member of the Federal Trade Commission,
Trump is the master of using the courts to win his battles, but lately he’s been on a losing streak.
The U.S. Supreme Court denied his request to excuse him from paying E. Jean Carroll $5 million, which was awarded by a jury in New York. With the interest it has accrued, Trump now owes her $5.8 million.
An appeals court on Wednesday denied President Trump’s bid to pause the removal of his name from the Kennedy Center while he challenges a lower court ruling.
A three-judge panel determined the administration’s lawyers did not prove the president or the performing arts center would suffer irreparable harm if his name was removed from the venue as ordered.
“First, they argue that removal of President Trump’s name will inflict irreparable harm in terms of expense and time ‘squander[ed][.]’ Since that removal has already occurred, stay would not avert those harms (even assuming they would qualify as irreparable),” the judges wrote in their order.
“Second, Appellants allege financial harm to the Kennedy Center if they are not permitted to reinstate President Trump’s name. They argue that removal of President Trump’s name ‘threatens to impede the Center’s fundraising efforts and [will] contribute to the financial decline of the Center.’ Appellants, however, have failed to support this assertion with any specific facts or evidence,” they added.
Judge Gregory Katsas, a Trump appointee, and Judges Patricia Millett and Robert Wilkins, both Obama appointees, denied the Trump administration’s motion for a stay pending appeal.
William Kristol had a storied career as a conservative and neoconservative. His father Irving Kristol (a friend of mine) was considered “the father of neoconservativism,” that is, disillusioned liberals. Bill Kristol was chief of staff to Vice-President Dan Quayle. He founded The Weekly Standard, a magazine of cutting-edge neoconservative commentary.
But he couldn’t tolerate Trump. When Trump was elected in 2020, Bill changed his party registration from Republican to Independent. In 2026, he registered as a Democrat. He is now an editor and writer at The Bulwark. What a transformation! As you will read in this article, his change of mind is more than skin-deep.
He wrote, in the same post that carried Jim Swift’s piece, the following about the indifference and arrogance of the elites:
America today has lots of hard-working immigrants, and plenty of native-born citizens who accept and respect them. But there are also plenty of Americans these days who were born on third base and think they hit a triple.
I hasten to say there’s no fault in being born on third base. Indeed, all of us, whether rich or poor, who were born in today’s America might be said, in the grand historical scheme of things, to have been born on third base. A healthy American patriotism begins with acknowledgment of our good fortune, and with gratitude for what our forebears—most of whom were not born on third base—did to make our privileged lives today possible.
Of course there’s nothing wrong with also taking pride in what we and our contemporaries have accomplished. And if we sometimes overestimate our own achievements and underrate those of our predecessors—and therefore underrate our simple good fortune in being born here—well, that’s human nature, and it’s probably not worth getting all worked up about.
But what is worth getting worked up about is those who have no sympathy for others who didn’t happen to enjoy good fortune. What’s worth getting worked up about is those who have contempt for and who revel in cruelty toward the less fortunate.
There are lots of those people in America today. They include our president. They include many in his administration. They include many in the world of MAGA.
And they include Megyn Kelly, who was so proud of what she said on her show yesterday after the Supreme Court’s TPS decision that she then posted the clip on X:
Megyn sends a message to the Haitians who lost their TPS today:
“Go home! Get out! We know our country is better than yours. That’s because we filled it with our work ethic, culture, and values. You being here only dilutes it for us . . . GO BACK TO FUCKING HAITI!”
Kelly thinks that “we” made America great with “our work ethic, culture, and values.” But most Americans of Kelly’s generation—and, to be clear, of mine—have had to do little in the way of heavy lifting to make America great. And is it clear that today’s culture and values are so exceptionally wonderful?
It was our forebears who made America great. Many of them were immigrants and refugees, whom earlier generations of nativists treated with hostility, bigotry, and cruelty.
The rhetoric of yesterday’s Court ruling is not itself bigoted or cruel. But the policies it permits are bigoted and cruel. They are the policies of people who found themselves, mostly by good fortune, standing on third base. Many of them aren’t particularly good hitters or fast runners. But they’ve decided to protect their status by making sure no one else—especially no one else of a different skin color or background—will have a chance to get up to bat.
Are there no laws against conflict of interest? Nepotism?
And to think that Republicans were outraged by Hunter Biden! Whatever he did (a seat on the Burisma board; name-dropping his father in business meetings?) is chump change compared to the money-grubbing Trump boys.
Where is the outrage?
Mary Trump writes:
Donald has always insisted that his children run their businesses independently. We have been told repeatedly that there is a bright line separating the presidency from the Trump family’s financial interests. We have also been told to ignore the remarkable coincidence that, every time Donald returns to power, his family somehow discovers lucrative new industries that depend almost entirely on decisions made by the federal government.
Those coincidences are becoming increasingly difficult to believe.
Since Donald returned to the White House, his two oldest and arguably most useless sons have dramatically expanded their investments into industries that rely almost entirely on Pentagon spending and federal policy. These are not businesses they spent years building. They are not industries in which either Don Jr. or Eric has any meaningful experience. They simply happen to be some of the fastest growing sectors benefiting from the Trump regime’s priorities.
Coincidentally, of course.
Don Jr.’s venture capital firm acquired a stake in Vulcan Elements shortly before the company received a $620 million Pentagon loan. According to reporting by ProPublica, that loan was accelerated after intervention from the White House.
Eric, meanwhile, serves as Chief Strategy Advisor for a robotics company despite possessing no discernible qualifications for such a role. That same company later received a $24 million Pentagon contract.
Neither Don Jr. nor Eric serves in government.
Neither is required to comply with federal ethics rules.
Neither files public financial disclosures.
Yet both continue to profit from industries whose fortunes increasingly depend on decisions being made by the administration run by their father.
Late in 2025, the Pentagon established the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, appropriately abbreviated DAWG, to rapidly expand the military’s use of drones, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Initially funded at roughly $226 million for fiscal year 2026, the Pentagon is now requesting an astonishing $54.6 billion for fiscal year 2027.
That represents an increase of more than 24,000 percent.
It is also larger than the entire proposed budget for the United States Marine Corps.
Think about that for a moment.
The Pentagon is proposing to spend more money on autonomous warfare than on the Marine Corps itself.
And it just so happens that Donald’s two oldest sons have recently become enthusiastic investors in autonomous defense technologies.
This is what MSNBC reported:
This is a major business move and another in a series of examples of the president’s family’s dealings seeming to intersect with his administration. In this case, the Pentagon, as the war with Iran rages on. Just yesterday, drone maker PowerUS announced it will merge with a golf course holding company backed by Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr., with plans to create a new publicly traded company. That new company calls the Trumps notable investors and says it aims to support American drone industry dominance. The company is expected to compete for lucrative military contracts, trying to fill a void created after the Trump administration banned new foreign made drones on national security grounds. An investment firm joined by Donald Trump Jr. shortly after his father’s reelection has also taken a significant stake in another defense contractor supplying AI powered military technology to the Pentagon. The Trumps maintain their father is not involved in their business dealings, and the White House says President Trump acts only in the best interests of the American people.
The phrase “notable investor” deserves closer examination.
It does not mean Don Jr. or Eric possess unique knowledge about robotics, drones, artificial intelligence, or national defense.
It certainly does not suggest either of them suddenly became experts in autonomous weapons systems. It means they are the sons of the President of the United States. That relationship is their greatest asset. It is the reason companies want them associated with their businesses. It is the reason investors pay attention. And it is almost certainly the reason government contracts suddenly become easier to obtain.
No private citizen should be allowed to leverage proximity to presidential power in this way.
Yet that appears to be exactly what is happening.
Members of Congress are beginning to ask difficult questions.
Following ProPublica’s investigation into Vulcan Elements, Democratic lawmakers demanded explanations after learning that the company’s $620 million Pentagon loan was reportedly handled very differently from virtually every other application under consideration.
According to the report, Don Jr.’s investment firm, 1789 Capital, purchased a stake in Vulcan during 2025. Only months later, the Pentagon approved the largest loan ever issued through its Office of Strategic Capital.
Internal documents reportedly revealed that Vulcan’s application moved through the approval process with unusual speed after direct involvement from senior White House adviser Peter Navarro.
One anonymous Pentagon official summarized the situation bluntly.
The call came from the White House. We have to get this done.
The Pentagon insists political considerations played no role in the decision. Don Jr. likewise denies participating in securing the loan. Those denials become increasingly difficult to accept when viewed alongside the broader pattern.
One contract might be coincidence.
One investment might be luck.
One White House intervention might be explainable.
But eventually coincidences stop looking like coincidences.
They begin looking like a business model.
The deeper problem is that none of this violates the disclosure rules that govern executive branch officials because Don Jr. and Eric are not executive branch officials.
That loophole allows enormous sums of money to flow toward businesses connected to the First Family while shielding the public from understanding the true extent of their financial interests.
Transparency disappears. Accountability disappears. And public trust disappears right alongside them.
Unfortunately, this pattern does not stop with rare earth minerals or autonomous weapons.
It extends into robotics as well.
Apparently, Eric Trump has now become an expert on robotics too, a development that would be more amusing if it were not attached to Pentagon spending, military applications, and the rapidly expanding market for autonomous weapons systems.
This is what Eric Trump said in a FOX state TV Interview:
We have to win robotics in the United States of America. You had a great segment two days ago, Maria, about the robot in Beijing that was literally running marathons and beating the fastest marathoners by seven, eight minutes for a full marathon. These are in the very early days. We better be winning this race in the United States of America. We are the greatest economy in the world, and that is exactly what this company is doing. I am telling you, he is doing a phenomenal job. When you go up and interact with these robots and they fist bump you, they high five you, they follow your commands. You bring in the AI economy. It is going to change industry, it is going to change military application, it is going to change hospitality. The uses are unlimited and I think it is a very beautiful thing, but we must win this race.
What race, exactly?
The marathon the robot is running?
In what universe does the world become a better place because we have fast-running robots that can fist bump people? Although, to be fair, I would be more than happy to have robots replace Eric and Donnie.
Eric is listed as Chief Strategy Advisor, which, after listening to him speak, makes perfect sense if the strategy is to say a lot of words without demonstrating any understanding of the subject matter. In April 2026, the Pentagon awarded Foundation Future Industries a $24 million contract to test its Phantom robotic systems for military applications. That contract immediately drew attention from lawmakers concerned about potential conflicts of interest.
This is what Senator Elizabeth Warren said:
Is the Pentagon just a cash machine for Trump’s kids now? This looks like corruption in plain sight.
Yes. It does.
The Pentagon has defended the contracting process and has not alleged wrongdoing by Eric or the company. Of course it has not. This is Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon. Expecting it to objectively assess whether Donald Trump’s son is benefiting from conflicts of interest is like asking Donald to fact-check his own net worth.
We need a slightly more objective entity to decide whether there is wrongdoing here.
In May 2026, Ranking Member Robert Garcia wrote a letter to the Department of Defense laying out the concerns with unusual clarity.
Eric and Donnie’s purchases, consultancies, and advisory roles create unprecedented intertwining of Donald’s personal financial interests with U.S. policy and national security. Each new venture opens new opportunities to direct DOD funds to the first family’s pockets, and the Trump administration appears to be taking advantage of those opportunities. Such actions raise concerns that DOD is rewarding companies with contracts for recruiting a Trump family member into their ownership group or directly onto their payroll. Such companies have amassed over $725 million in loans, grants, and awards since Donald took office.
No kidding.
The coincidences are mind-boggling.
The Pentagon maintains that its decisions are based on merit, which is a difficult claim to take seriously when Pete Hegseth is the Secretary of Defense. His appointment alone is evidence that merit is not exactly the organizing principle of this administration.
Because neither Eric nor Donnie is subject to federal disclosure requirements, the public has very limited visibility into the scale of their financial exposure. That is precisely how this kind of corruption is allowed to happen. The President’s children can invest in, advise, or promote companies that stand to benefit from federal contracts, while the American people are left guessing how much money they are making and how directly their father’s administration may be helping them make it.
This is the Trump family business model in its purest form. Find an industry dependent on government action. Attach the Trump name to a company operating in that space. Let the machinery of government create the opening. Then insist there is nothing to see when the money begins flowing.
The problem is not merely that Eric and Donnie are unqualified. That has always been the least surprising part of the story. The problem is that their lack of qualifications does not matter. In fact, it may be part of the point. Companies do not need them for their expertise. They need them for their access.
This is the same pattern that has defined Donald’s entire life. He has never understood the difference between public power and private profit because nobody ever forced him to learn it. Fred Trump built the empire. Donald inherited it, hollowed it out, sold off pieces of it, and survived only because other people kept rescuing him. Now his sons are applying the same principle to national security.
The stakes, however, are much higher this time.
We are not talking about failed casinos, licensing deals, branded steaks, or golf course scams. We are talking about drones, rare earth minerals, autonomous warfare, artificial intelligence, robotics, and Pentagon contracts. We are talking about the future of American military policy and billions of dollars in public money being routed through a system in which the president’s family appears to have direct financial interests.
There needs to be an investigation.
Someday, when we finally get through this mess, Eric and Donnie need to be held accountable, stripped of their ill-gotten gains, and, if warranted by the evidence, prosecuted. The American people should not be treated as a revenue stream for the Trump family. The Pentagon should not function as another Trump family ATM. National security should not be turned into a business opportunity for two men whose only qualification is their last name.
Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut gave a stunning speech about the normalcy of corruption in the Trump White House. Senator Murphy spoke about “500 Days of Corruption,” in which he detailed numerous deals that enriched the Trump sons, Don Jr. and Eric. Typically, they invested in a company and with days or weeks, that company received a government contract.
Set aside 30 minutes and watch this speech. It is startling, infuriating, outrageous.
Just yesterday (June 29), the media reported that President Trump made $2.2 billion in 2025. $2.2 billion!
President Trump reaped a stunning windfall in his first year back in the White House, including about $1.4 billion from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses, a new filing shows.
All told, the president pulled in at least $2.2 billion, a figure that includes other parts of his vast holdings, such as his real estate assets. That compares to a minimum of $622 million his enterprises pulled in for all of 2024, before he returned to the presidency.
One of his biggest hauls in 2025 came when an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates bought nearly half of the Trump family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial, a transaction that blurred the line between foreign policy and private enterprise.
Mr. Trump also collected hundreds of millions of dollars from sales of his $TRUMP memecoin and World Liberty’s sale of its own digital tokens.
Remember how the Republicans in Congress excoriated Hunter Biden because he was paid to serve as a board member for a company called Burisma in Ukraine? How many times did Trump and his allies speak with derision about “the Biden crime family”?
Penny-ante when compared to the shameless profiteering of the Trump family.
The President should have no problem paying his $5 million debt to E. Jean Carroll, which the U.S. Supreme Court refused to overturn or even the $83 million judgment that Carroll won in state court but Trump is litigating to avoid paying.
Diane Ravitch's blog 