Robert Hubbell is a well-informed and insightful blogger with a large following.

In this post, he sorts through the claims and counterclaims of the past 24 hours.

He writes:

In a famous thought experiment posed by physicist Erwin Schrödinger, the life-or-death fate of a cat in a box is determined by the random radioactive decay of a particle. Schrödinger argued that the rules of quantum mechanics implied that as the cat awaited its fate, it was simultaneously alive and dead (i.e., in superposition) until the moment the random radioactive decay occurred, at which time the cat’s fate became fixed—it was either alive or dead, but not both.

Friday, Trump and Iran operationalized the “Schrödinger’s Cat” thought experiment using the Strait of Hormuz instead of a cat in a box. Early Friday, Trump said that the Strait of Hormuz was open but that the US blockade against Iran would continue, while Iran said the Strait is open but will remain closed so long as the Trump blockade remains in effect. To further complicate matters, Iran said that when the Strait opens, permission to pass through the Strait must be granted by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

If the above paragraph makes your head hurt, then you understand the situation perfectly—because it makes no sense. Indeed, that was the point of Schrödinger’s thought experiment; he was mocking the seemingly nonsensical idea of a cat being simultaneously dead and alive. That is exactly where we are with the Strait of Hormuz: It is both open and closed, blockaded by the US for now, with future transit subject to the whim of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

We are in this state of quantum indeterminacy because Trump is making announcements that do not appear to be connected to reality. In other words, Trump is lying. He has every incentive to pretend that the conflict with Iran is over. Nearly every announcement Trump made on Friday was quickly contradicted or denied by Iran. See, e.g., Jerusalem Post, Iran denies claim that US will retrieve enriched uranium.

As reported in the Jerusalem Post, the Iranian Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf posted a statement on Twitter accusing Trump of making multiple false claims:

“The President of the United States made seven claims in one hour, all seven of which were false,” Ghalibaf wrote. “They did not win the war with these lies, and they will certainly not get anywhere in negotiations either.”

Ghalibaf urged all to “read the real and accurate news of the negotiations in the recent interview of the Foreign Ministry spokesman,” in which a Foreign Ministry spokesman claimed that Iran will not transfer its enriched uranium anywhere, contrary to earlier Trump claims that Iran had agreed to do so.

Iran and the US appear to be negotiating a three-page term sheet that includes the release of $20 billion in frozen Iranian assets. Axios has published a detailed outline of the term sheet, although both Iran and Trump have denied reporting on the purported terms. See Axios, U.S. considers $20 billion Iran cash-for-uranium deal. 

The Axios article provides a good summary of the state of play in a rapidly evolving situation. My recommendation is to wait until the US and Iran make a joint announcement before trying to parse the terms. Until then, much of the reporting is market manipulation disguised as leaks from “administration officials.” See Reuters, Traders place $760 million bet on falling oil ahead of Hormuz announcement.

Per Reuters,

Investors placed a bet worth about $760 million on a falling oil price around 20 minutes before Iran’s foreign minister announced on Friday that the Strait of Hormuz was open, another sizeable wager on the world’s most traded commodity ahead of major announcements in the course of the Middle East war.

But whatever the outcome, it does not appear that Trump will be able to replicate the advantageous terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated by President Obama. And Iran’s Revolutionary Guard will regulate traffic through the Strait of Hormuz—an unimaginable situation before Trump’s ill-advised and unconstitutional decision to start a war against Iran without consulting Congress or the American people.

We should hope that peace negotiations succeed quickly. But we should not forget that the war was a debacle that cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars, alienated US allies, increased prices in the US, and shifted the balance of power in the Middle East toward Iran, which will retain its stockpile of enriched uranium. 

Trump is in the process of surrendering, and no amount of lying can change reality. We must not let Trump and his apologists distort or bury the truth of what happened over the last six weeks. It was an unmitigated disaster, full stop. Trump and all Republicans must be held to account in November…

Hubbell has two other stories in this post that you should know about.

The first is explosive investigative reporting about Kash Patel by Sally Kirkpatrick in The Atlantic. She reports that she interviewed many FBI employees and learned that Patel is a heavy drinker. He is, she writes, a security risk. Patel and his law firm announced on Twitter that he was suing her and the magazine.

Another item describes the Trump administration’s efforts to send former CIA Director John Brennan to prison. One prosecutor, unwilling to go along, resigned. Brennan had the bad luck to land in the courtroom of Judge Aileen Cannon in South Florida. Hubbell feels sure that Brennan will be cleared of whatever charges they cobble together against him.

Federal Judge Richard Leon again halted work on Trump’s super-sized ballroom, which can hold as many as 1,000 people and would be twice as large as the White House. It’s a giant golden sore thumb looming over the White House.

Trump said that under the ballroom would be a major security site and that continuing the construction of the ballroom was a matter of national security. A federal appeals lifted Judge Leon’s stay and asked him to clarify what part of the structure he was stopping.

Judge Leon clarified: the ballroom.

Dan Diamond of The Washington Post reported:

A federal judge set new limits on President Donald Trump’s planned White House ballroom, saying construction could proceed only on an underground portion of the project deemed necessary by the military, and not on the 90,000-square-foot aboveground addition that Trump has eyed to entertain VIP guests.

“National security is not a blank check to proceed with otherwise unlawful activity,” U.S. District Judge Richard Leon wrote Thursday. He said the Trump administration could also take steps to secure the construction site to make it safe for people on the White House grounds.

Leon, an appointee of President George W. Bush, last month ordered a halt to Trump’s planned $400 million project, ruling that it could not continue until the president obtains approval from Congress. But Leon permitted further construction to ensure “the safety and security of the White House” after Trump officials said work on an underground emergency bunker was necessary to protect the president, his family and his staff….

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, the organization that sued to block the ballroom construction last year, disputed Trump’s interpretation and asked Leon to explicitly bar any aboveground construction on the ballroom until it received authorization from federal panels and Congress. It also questioned the Trump administration’s claim that pausing the project puts the president at risk.

“No matter how much the Defendants insist otherwise, the lack of a massive ballroom on the White House grounds is not a national-security emergency,” lawyers for the National Trust wrote in a filing Tuesday. They noted that Trump continues to live at the White House and entertain foreign dignitaries, despite the administration’s claim that the current situation poses a security risk.

The National Trust’s lawyers also called attention to the Justice Department’s shifting arguments over the project’s scope. The Trump administration initially maintained that the underground work was separate from the aboveground ballroom, an argument that Leon considered when he declined to pause the project last year and allowed the underground work to continue.

We have learned a few facts about state voucher programs since they have spread to about half the states. They have spread not because of popular demand but because of big money and campaign contributions. Every state referendum on vouchers has failed.

1. Most vouchers are used to subsidize the private school tuition of students who never attended public schools.
2. The students who transfer from public schools to private, mostly religious schools, usually do not have better academic performance; they often have dramatically worse academic performance than their public school peers.
3. More money for vouchers means less money for public schools, where the overwhelming majority of students are enrolled.

In Missouri, a county judge upheld the state voucher program.

Jacob Richey of KOMU 8 reported:

A Cole County judge has thrown out a lawsuit that claimed the state of Missouri unlawfully funded its private school voucher program using taxpayer dollars.

The lawsuit, filed in July 2025 by two members of the Missouri National Education Association against the state of Missouri and several elected officials, alleged that the General Assembly unconstitutionally allocated $51 million to the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts Program fund. One of the elected officials listed was Gov. Mike Kehoe.

The General Assembly created the program, also called MOScholars, in 2021. The program awards tax credits to Missouri taxpayers who donate to organizations that award scholarships to families to help send their students to private schools.

Last year, the new state budget put over $50 million in taxpayer dollars toward the program in addition to the volunteer donations, which the plaintiffs in the lawsuit argued was an unconstitutional allocation of funding.

However, Cole County Judge Brian Stumpe disagreed, writing in his 57-page ruling that the court would have to find statutory prohibitions not written in state laws themselves in order to side with the plaintiffs.

“As both sides agree, nothing in the statutes governing the Missouri Scholars Program expressly proscribes appropriations made by the General Assembly,” Stumpe wrote in the ruling. “Plaintiffs thus assert that the statute’s structure does not permit appropriations by the legislature to fund scholarships — making the appropriation an improper amendment to the governing statutes. But for Plaintiffs to prevail, this Court would have to find statutory prohibitions not articulated in the statute’s text. This Court cannot do that.”

Stumpe ruled that the allocations made did not directly contradict the statutes that govern MOScholars, meaning the appropriations were constitutional.

Stumpe threw out all allegations made in the lawsuit and denied the plaintiffs request for an injunction. Stumpe dismissed the plaintiffs’ petition with prejudice, meaning the plaintiffs cannot refile the lawsuit.

Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway called the decision a “complete win” in a post on social media.

“This is a victory for parents and students across Missouri,” Hanaway wrote in the post. “MOScholars gives students the full freedom to attend a school that helps them achieve success.”

Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat wrote about a convening of education “reformers” who agreed that it’s time to revive the “bipartisan” education coalition, exemplified by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

Barnum writes:

These days there’s a new energy around an old idea: bipartisan school reform. 

Reviving this was the quaint but ascendant goal of a recent Washington D.C. event that I attended last month. The Bipartisan Policy Center convened a group of influential education leaders from both parties to sketch out a new agenda for school reform.  

“The moment is now,” said former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings during the opening panel. “We have not recovered from COVID fully. We really need to light the fire of urgency.” 

This was the sort of thinking that used to dominate Washington D.C. Presidents from both parties once insisted on a muscular federal role to hold schools and teachers accountable for raising test scores. These advocates have been on the outs politically for over a decade, but some see an opportunity to revive the old coalition. A flurry of reports, compacts, commissions, events, and essays have made the case that politicians of both parties need to come together to address the striking declines in student learning and center education as a national priority.  

Whatever you think about this mini-resurgence, it’s worth paying attention to. Bipartisan school reform upended schools once before (with a much debated legacy). Could it happen again? Maybe. In many ways the ground is ripe, but it’s not clear advocates have a clear constituency or reform agenda. 

Drawing from recent history, here are three reasons this particular brand of reform could return and three obstacles this effort faces. 

Why bipartisan reform could be revived: There really is a learning crisis.

Modern bipartisan school reform has its roots in a 1983 report “A Nation at Risk,” which claimed (with disputed evidence) that the country’s schools were in dire shape. These days the data is clear: Test scores have been on an alarming trajectory for a decade. This has again led to widespread concerns among policymakers, academics, and journalists.  

The aspiring reformers are driving the mainstream media narrative about education.

Centrist education advocates and politicians, like former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, have offered a clear theory to explain these recent learning declines. Emanuel argues that Democrats deserve blame for backing COVID-era school building closures, focusing on culture war issues, and downplaying the importance of test scores. He says Democrats should look to Republican-led states in the South, like Mississippi. 

A remarkable slew of articles have endorsed versions of this narrative. That includes several pieces in the New York Times. Not many other prominent Democrats are echoing Emanuel, but we can be sure they are reading the Times. Crucially, those Democrats more sympathetic to teachers unions and public education have not articulated a clear alternative theory to explain recent learning declines. 

Both parties may have political incentives for moving to the center on education.

The prior iteration of bipartisan reform came at a moment where both parties used education as a strategy to appeal to centrist independent voters. Bill Clinton promised to be a different type of liberal who would take a tough-minded approach to schools, while George W. Bush pitched himself as a “compassionate conservative” who would champion the education of disadvantaged children. 

Once again Democratic reformers say the party faces a similar political imperative. Emanuel and many others have claimed the party has lost its edge on education with voters. This isn’t true, according to the vast majority of recent surveys, but the talking point has nevertheless proven deeply influential at a moment when Democrats have been casting about for answers following Trump’s election in 2024.  

Republicans are not at this soul-searching stage — they’ve leaned into school choice and parents’ rights. But Trump is quite unpopularat the moment, and so is his effort to close the Education Department. Depending on the midterm results, it’s possible that the GOP will make efforts to tack away from Trump’s combative approach to education. 

Why bipartisan reform might not happen: Reformers don’t have a clear bumper sticker.

Although the centrist reformers are aligned on what’s gone wrong, their solutions are a bit less clear. This was apparent during a Bipartisan Policy Center panel on education, which I moderated. The group released a number of recommendations about improving schools. These ranged from broad goals (“reimagine the high school years”) to very specific policies (“require transparent, consistent annual reporting” on teacher pension plans). But there wasn’t an overarching idea or takeaway, as best I could tell. 

So I asked each participant on the panel what their bumper-sticker pitch for school reform would be. 

“Responsive systems and better information,” responded Andy Rotherham, the co-founder of Bellwether, an education consulting firm, and a former Clinton White House staffer. 

“Locals lead; feds fund, measure, and evaluate,” said Tom Kane, a Harvard education professor. 

“Education is the way out of your parents’ basement,” said Katie Jenner, the Indiana education secretary. 

This range of responses is in contrast with the relatively clear bumper stickers from the political right and the left. (“More choice, less wokeness, no U.S. Department of Education,” on the right. “More money,” on the left.) 

Without a snappy message for what bipartisan reformers want to do, I suspect advocates will struggle to coalesce policy elites or regular people around their ideas. 

There is little clear grassroots demand for this sort of reform. 

Indeed, the push to address learning declines has seemingly not broken through to voters. While Americans have an increasingly negative view of the quality of K-12 schools, very few rate education as a top issue. This is quite different than in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Remarkably, in the 2000 presidential campaign, voters sometimes ranked education as the top issue facing the country.  

And despite years of headlines about bad test scores, most parents still give their child’s school relatively high marks. 

Bipartisan reform may require presidential leadership

Starting with George H. W. Bush and continuing through Barack Obama there were four straight presidents who championed an overlapping agenda of school accountability and school choice. Each made education a central national issue. In a number of cases, these presidents brought along reluctant members of their own parties. The bipartisan coalition crucially depended on this presidential leadership. In turn, bipartisan school reform has collapsed under Trump and Biden since neither bought into this agenda.  

To succeed, the bipartisan reformers may need a like-minded president. That could, of course, be tough to get. Right now, Rahm Emanuel is polling at 0%-1%. The question for these aspiring reformers is whether they can find other presidential candidates to carry their mantle. 

My response: The bipartisan education reform coalition of Bush and Obama faded away because it s “reforms” failed. It treated test scores as the goal of education, and it turned schools into testing factories. Its philosophy of test and punish failed. Its demand for evaluating teachers by student test scores demoralized teachers and caused teachers to avoid low-performing schools. Merit pay failed, as it has for a century. Common Core was a disaster, ignoring the value of context and background knowledge. It welcomed charter schools, promising that they would be more innovative, get higher scores, and be more innovative than public schools. But charter schools opened and closed with regularity, some were for-profit scams, and some were founded by grifters.

Even Mike Petrilli of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute referred to the years from 2010-2020 as “the lost decade” for education.

Defenders of public schools have more to say than “more money.” They could also make bumper stickers about public schools that protect democracy, public schools that serve communities, not hedge fund managers; public schools designed to introduce children to friends from different backgrounds; public schools that teach critical thinking, not the indoctrination characteristic of religious schools.

Parents like their public schools because they know the teachers and appreciate the links between students, parents and schools. The bipartisan coalition of education reformers failed because they constantly derided public schools; their efforts to replace public schools with standardization failed.

The reformers look back to their glory days with nostalgia. Parents and students don’t.

Adam Kinzinger is a war veteran and a former Congressman from Illinois who resigned after serving on the January 6 Commission, which other Republicans (except Liz Cheney) shunned.

In his blog, he explained how the Trump administration turned off America’s voice in the world, leaving the space for Iranian satire. You can’t beat humor, he says, with press briefings.

The question we should all be asking is why the Trump administration pulled the plug on America’s communications to the world. Who benefits when America goes silent?

He writes:

For years, people inside the national security community warned that America’s information infrastructure was one of its most under appreciated strategic assets. Not the bombs, not the bases, not the carrier groups — though those matter enormously — but the quieter architecture of influence: the broadcasters, the counter-disinformation centers, the public diplomacy programs. The “I” in the DIME model — Diplomatic, Informational, Military, Economic — is not decorative. It is load-bearing. Strip it out, and the structure becomes unstable.

We are now watching that instability play out in real time.

Over the past year and a half, the Trump administration has methodically dismantled virtually every institutional instrument the United States had for competing in the global information space. Voice of America, which had been broadcasting in nearly 50 languages to an estimated 354 million people weekly, went silent for the first time in 83 years. The administration also terminated funding for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. The Global Engagement Center — which I helped establish — lost its congressional authorization in December 2024 and was then formally shuttered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in April 2025, with its successor office eliminated as well. In February, the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force — the unit dedicated to investigating foreign disinformation and election interference — was dissolved by Attorney General Pam Bondi. The Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment was disbanded, the Woodrow Wilson Center was effectively shut down, and the US Institute of Peace was ordered dismantled — DOGE physically forced its way into the headquarters and removed board members. USAID, which administered approximately 60 percent of US foreign assistance, was gutted, with over 80 percent of its portfolio canceled. The Fulbright program took severe cuts. Language training programs at universities lost Defense Department funding.

The right-wing argument for all of this rests on a fundamental and willful confusion. The theory goes that these agencies were really instruments of domestic censorship — government apparatuses designed to suppress conservative American voices at home. Marco Rubio announced the GEC’s closure by declaring that it had been used to “actively silence and censor the voices of Americans.” For that claim, officials at the Global Engagement Center have offered denials, and there is no evidence to support it. A federal appeals court, in examining lawsuits targeting the GEC, found no evidence that its officials had coerced or influenced social media platforms to moderate content. The narrative that these agencies were turned against the American people was politically useful and factually hollow.

I say this not as an abstract critic but as someone who was involved in creating the Global Engagement Center. The mission was specific and outward-facing: recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation aimed at undermining American interests and those of our allies. The GEC was tracking Russian narratives around Ukraine, Chinese influence campaigns in Africa and Southeast Asia, and Iranian disinformation targeting American audiences. It was not reading your tweets. It was watching what the Kremlin, the IRGC, and the Chinese Communist Party were doing to shape perceptions overseas and at home — because those are not separate theaters anymore.

The people who tore this infrastructure down either do not understand the modern information environment or, more troublingly, are comfortable with the vacuum their decisions created. Chinese state media openly celebrated the closure of Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. Former Global Times editor-in-chief Hu Xijin called it “truly gratifying.” When your adversaries are that publicly pleased by a policy decision, it is worth pausing to ask who it actually serves.

Those of us who worked in this space assumed we would have some lag time — that the consequences of these closures would take years to fully materialize. Institutions take time to wind down, adversaries take time to scale up, and global audiences don’t shift overnight. We were wrong about the timeline. The effects have arrived with startling speed, and we are seeing them most vividly in the current conflict with Iran.

Pro-Iran groups, almost certainly linked to the government in Tehran, have deployed AI to produce English-language propaganda targeting American audiences — slick, culturally fluent memes and videos racking up millions of views across social platforms. They have portrayed President Trump as old, out of step, and internationally isolated. They have weaponized the Epstein files, Hegseth’s confirmation hearing, and infighting within the MAGA coalition. One series of AI-generated videos presents Trump and Netanyahu as Lego minifigures. In one, an Iranian military commander raps over imagery of Trump falling into a target. After a ceasefire was announced, the account posted simply: “Iran won! Trump surrendered.”

The videos are, admittedly, sometimes funny. They are also deeply ironic. The regime producing them has imposed a near-total internet blackout on its own citizens. X and most major social platforms have been blocked inside Iran for years, accessible only via VPN — and most ordinary Iranians have barely had access to the internet at all since the outbreak of the conflict in February. The culture these videos depict Iranians defending — the references to American pop culture, the fluency in meme language, the appeal to human rights — is precisely the culture the Islamic Republic murders people for embracing inside its own borders. Women are killed for not wearing the hijab properly. Protesters are tortured and executed. This is the regime now winning the meme war.

Analysts say the sophistication of these videos — the bandwidth, the production quality, the cultural knowledge of the American internet — indicates these creators are officially or unofficially cooperating with the regime. It is state propaganda dressed in the aesthetic of organic content. And it is working in part because the US and Israel do not appear to be engaging in anything comparable for external audiences — the White House’s memes are aimed domestically, at Americans who already support the administration. Nobody is reaching the swing audiences in the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and Africa who are forming their views about this conflict in real time.

Ridicule and satire are especially potent in this environment because they are captivating and very difficult to counter. A factual rebuttal to a Lego animation almost inevitably looks plodding, humorless, and tonally mismatched. You can’t win a meme war by holding a press conference. You need infrastructure, institutional knowledge, cultural fluency, and the operational capacity to produce and distribute counter-narrative content at scale. We had that. We threw it away.

“This is how we lose big wars,” one former counter-disinformation researcher said after the GEC’s closure. That quote wasn’t hyperbole. In the DIME framework, information is not a supplementary element. It is a co-equal instrument of national power. You cannot substitute military and economic pressure for informational presence — especially when the adversary has studied your culture for decades and knows exactly how to reach your own population. Iran’s propaganda operation is the fruit of a decades-long government program to learn American politics and pop culture — the meme war didn’t emerge overnight. It was prepared. We were not.

There is a tendency in American political life to dismiss information operations as somehow soft, as less serious than real tools of statecraft. The same impulse that sees diplomacy as weakness and foreign assistance as waste. These are the instincts of people who have never had to fight for narrative control in a conflict, who have never watched a carefully crafted lie spread faster than the truth in a language we didn’t think to monitor. The DIME model exists because generations of national security professionals learned, often through painful experience, that you need all four instruments working together. Pull one out and the others become less effective, not equally effective.

We dismantled our informational infrastructure not because it was failing — VOA alone reached hundreds of millions of people in closed societies who had no other access to independent news — but because some people convinced themselves and others that it was a domestic censorship threat. The result is that the US has been all but crippled in its ability to compete in the global information arena, while Russia and China have moved to fill every gap.

The Lego videos are funny. The situation is not. A theocracy that blocks its own people’s access to the internet is currently running circles around the United States in the information space of an active conflict. That does not happen by accident. It happens because one side prepared and the other side burned down its own capacity and called it a victory for free speech.

We will be paying the cost of that decision for a very long time.

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Remember when The Wall Street Journal published a story about Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th Birthday Book? Remember that it included an entry from Donald Trump? It was a poem inside the shape of a woman’s torso. Trump was outraged and he threatened to sue the WSJ $10 billion for defamation. He did. A federal judge threw out the case yesterday.

Steve Benen of MS NOW writes:

Last summer, after The Wall Street Journal reported on Donald Trump’s alleged 2003 birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein, the president responded with unsubtle threats. “President Trump will be suing The Wall Street Journal, NewsCorp, and Mr. Murdoch, shortly,” he wrote online, referring to himself in the third person for reasons unknown.

The Republican added soon after, “The Wall Street Journal printed a FAKE letter, supposedly to Epstein. These are not my words, not the way I talk. Also, I don’t draw pictures. I told Rupert Murdoch it was a Scam, that he shouldn’t print this Fake Story. But he did, and now I’m going to sue his ass off, and that of his third rate newspaper.”

In mid-July, the president did, in fact, file the defamation suit, seeking a jury trial and a judgment of at least $10 billion. At least for now, it now appears he will get neither. The Journal reported:

A federal judge on Monday dismissed President Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles, based in Miami, Fla., ruled Trump hadn’t made a valid legal claim that he was defamed by an article about a letter to financier Jeffrey Epstein bearing Trump’s name.

“Because President Trump has not plausibly alleged that defendants published the article with actual malice, both Counts must be dismissed,” the jurist wrote.

We’ll learn soon enough whether the president’s lawyers appeal and/or file an amended lawsuit, but as things stand, his highly dubious and historically unusual civil case is no more.

If it seems as if Trump has faced related failures before, it’s not your imagination. Indeed, one of the most striking things about his latest legal setback is the familiarity of the circumstances.

The Trump campaign’s 2020 case against CNN failed. Trump’s 2021 case against The New York Times failed. Trump’s 2023 case against Bob Woodward failed. The Trump campaign’s case against The Washington Post failed. Trump’s so-called class action lawsuit against social media giants also failed. (Last week, Trump filed a $15 billion civil suit against the New York Times, which was thrown out four days later, not because it lacked merit, but because a federal judge found that the president’s lawyers’ court filing was simply too ridiculous.)

Americans have never before had a president who sued independent news organizations or individual journalists for publishing reports the White House disapproved of, but we’ve also never before had a president lose so many civil cases while in office.

Let’s not miss the related larger lesson related to the importance of pushback. When the Republican filed a dubious case against ABC News, the network and its corporate parent agreed to a $16 million settlement. When he filed an even weaker case against CBS News, Paramount also struck a $16 million deal.

In the weeks and months that followed, Trump repeatedly pointed to these controversial settlement agreements as evidence of his targets’ guilt, even as those networks denied any wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, news organizations that stood up for themselves and pushed back against the ridiculous attempts at intimidation have prevailed.

Let this be a lesson to the larger political world: The only way to lose in a fight against Trump is to pursue a course rooted in appeasement. It’s true when it comes to law firms; it’s true when it comes to higher education; and it’s true in his court fights against news organizations.

The New York Times reported on an ICE detention in Texas that involved an outstanding doctor who entered the U.S. legally.

The Times reported:

A Venezuelan-born family physician who had been caring for Americans with chronic illnesses in an area facing a doctor shortage was detained by Border Patrol agents in Texas late Monday.

The doctor, Ezequiel Veliz, was featured in a New York Times article last weekend that detailed how a Trump administration policy had frozen visa extensions, work permits and green cards for citizens of 39 countries, forcing some foreign-born physicians out of U.S. hospitals.

Dr. Veliz treated people with diabetes, hypertension and other ailments, and was named resident of the year in 2025 at UT Health, Rio Grande Valley. He had entered the United States legally and was forced to withdraw from his position after losing his work permit because his immigration status ended. He had been trying to transition to a new visa, according to documents he submitted to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that The Times reviewed.

UT Health did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Dr. Veliz’s husband, Joseph Williams, an American citizen, said the pair were driving from the Rio Grande Valley to Houston on Highway 77 when they were flagged by Border Patrol agents at a checkpoint in Sarita.

Dr. Veliz told the agents that his husband was an American citizen and that he was a foreign physician in the process of obtaining a new visa. The officers did not seem to grasp that, Mr. Williams said, and ordered Dr. Veliz to get out of the vehicle.

https://deanblundell.substack.com/p/breaking-melanias-i-barely-knew-epstein