This article by Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg tells the story of how he became an “education warrior.”
Pasi is one of the best-known education gurus in the world. He is an articulate advocate of a “whole child, child-centered” view of education. He believes in the power of teachers. He has stood strongly against standardized testing, incentives, punishments, and markets throughout his career.
He is one of my personal heroes.
Today, I read Robert Reich’s commentary on a remarkable event: A bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges asked Federal Judge Kathleen J. Williams to reopen the case that culminated in a deal between President Trump and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who had been Trump’s personal lawyer before the 2024 election.
The “settlement” between Trump and Blanche handed over $1.776 billion to a commission controlled by Trump, and in another part of the “settlement,” Blanche agreed that neither Trump nor his family members would be audited by the Internal Revenue Service.
The retired judges said that Trump and Blanche may have deceived the court and perpetrated a fraud.
Judge Williams agreed to investigate and gave Trump and Blanche until June 12 to respond.
I can’t overstate the importance of Judge Kathleen Williams’s decision on Friday to reopen Trump’s $10 billion case against the I.R.S.
She said she wants to investigate “grievous allegations” that the hasty deal to resolve it was “premised on deception,” and she ordered Trump’s lawyers to tell her by June 12 whether the lawsuit should be formally reopened because “the court was the victim of a fraud.”
The “deception” and “fraud” Judge Williams refers to were allegedly carried out by Trump and his Justice Department.
This is a big deal.
Judge Williams’s decision came in response to court papers filed on Wednesday by a bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges who urged her to revive the case and dig into the details of the agreement to settle it.
The judges’ brief is also a big deal. They call it a motion for relief from judgement or order or, alternatively, “leave to appear as amici curiae by thirty-five former federal judges.”
I don’t recall a similar instance of 35 former federal judges filing such a motion or amicus (friend of the court) brief.
In it, the judges argue that the parties’ — Trump and the Justice Department’s — so-called “settlement” agreement was made to circumvent the court ‘s possible finding that the case presented no actual controversy, since Trump is on both sides of it.
This, they conclude, constituted a fraud on the Court.
I wanted to read the brief by the 35 judges. I did. You should read it too. It is linked in the next paragraph from Reich’s post.
Judge Williams’s decision came in response to court papers filed on Wednesday by a bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges who urged her to revive the case and dig into the details of the agreement to settle it.
Read it yourself. The judge had previously raised the question of whether Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit was genuine, since he seemed to be suing himself. Had the case gone to trial, she might have tossed it, since there were not two genuine adversaries.
The parties decided to withdraw their lawsuit and quickly reached an agreement that was highly beneficial to Trump (the slush fund and freedom from audits).
The former judges smelled a rat and took the unprecedented step of joining together to petition Judge Williams.
Alan Feuer and Andrew Duehren wrote in The New York Times today:
A federal judge in Miami reopened President Trump’s $10 billion case against the I.R.S. in a striking turnabout, saying that she wanted to investigate “grievous allegations” that the hasty deal to resolve it was “premised on deception.”
The ruling by the judge, Kathleen M. Williams, on Friday to revive the case shortly after closing it was a significant blow both to Mr. Trump, who had voluntarily dismissed the suit last week, and to the Justice Department. After the president withdrew the suit, senior department officials released a pair of extraordinary agreements that settled the case by establishing a $1.8 billion fund to compensate people who claimed they were victims of government “weaponization” by Democrats.
The deal also conferred lucrative tax benefits on Mr. Trump, his family and his businesses.
Judge Williams’s decision came in response to court papers filed on Wednesday by a bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges who urged her to bring the case back to life and dig into the details of the agreement to settle it.
The former judges said that Mr. Trump’s settlement agreement raised serious questions about his “candor toward the court and manipulation of the judicial system.”
Before she closed the case, Judge Williams, an Obama appointee, had in fact questioned whether the lawsuit presented an actual conflict that she could adjudicate, given that Mr. Trump was on both sides of the suit, bringing claims against a federal agency that he controlled. When she closed it, she noted there was no “settlement of record,” but shortly after, the Justice Department released its agreement foreclosing the action.
In her brief but stern order on Friday, Judge Williams said that she wanted to investigate the circumstances surrounding Mr. Trump’s efforts to settle the lawsuit in a way that benefited him and his allies. If she succeeds in moving forward with her inquiry, it could ultimately result in questions being asked of the Justice Department leaders who signed the agreements to settle the suit — chief among them, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, and Stanley Woodward Jr., the No. 3 official in the department.
In her order, Judge Williams asserted that she was “empowered to investigate serious misconduct” in any case before her, and ordered Mr. Trump’s lawyers to tell her by June 12 whether the lawsuit should be formally reopened because “the court was the victim of a fraud.”
She also wanted Mr. Trump’s lawyers to respond to the question of whether he had colluded with his own government to settle the case “to avoid judicial scrutiny.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
Judge Williams pointed to reporting by The New York Times that described how the I.R.S. had prepared a 25-page memorandumoutlining defenses against the suit that the Justice Department did not take up in court.
Lawyers for the former judges hailed Judge Williams’s decision.
“The judges and their counsel greatly appreciate the seriousness with which the court is addressing these grievous allegations,” said Norman Eisen, who represented the former judges for the nonprofit group, Democracy Defenders Fund. “We stand ready to work with the court as it investigates this matter.”
Mr. Eisen was joined by the law firms Platkin and Susman Godfrey.
In their filing this week, the former judges claimed that Mr. Trump had improperly used his suit against the I.R.S. as a way to obtain “unlawful private benefits” for himself and his family, and to create a fund that would dole out taxpayer money “without constitutional or congressional authority.”
They also argued that the president had tried to shield the deal from judicial oversight by rushing a settlement and “short-circuiting” Judge Williams’s ability to examine its terms.
The $1.8 billion fund has faced separate legal headwinds. A federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia temporarily blocked the Trump administration from taking any further steps to set it up or disburse money from it. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill, including many Republicans, have also been critical of the fund, which upended G.O.P. plans to pass a party-line bill funding immigration enforcement efforts last week.
Mr. Trump, along with two of his sons and the Trump family business, first sued the I.R.S. in January, claiming they were owed at least $10 billion because a former contractor at the agency had leaked their tax returns (and hundreds of others) during the president’s first term in the White House. The Trumps claimed that the I.R.S. should have done more to prevent the contractor, Charles Littlejohn, from disclosing tax information to The New York Times and ProPublica.
Mr. Trump’s suit, as I.R.S. officials laid out in their memo and other lawyers have noted, had clear legal flaws. Potential defenses against it include that it was filed after the statute of limitations, and that it incorrectly faulted the I.R.S. for the actions of Mr. Littlejohn, previously a contractor employed by Booz Allen Hamilton. But the Justice Department never made an attempt to contest Mr. Trump’s suit. No government lawyer entered an appearance in the case.
That has fueled criticism that the deal the Justice Department struck with Mr. Trump was not a genuine attempt to avoid a loss on the merits to the president in court, but instead a scheme to provide him and his political allies with public benefits.
In a footnote, Judge Williams questioned the provision granting Mr. Trump, his family and their businesses immunity from I.R.S. scrutiny of tax returns they had already filed. She wrote that the audit protection may run afoul of Justice Department rules requiring legal settlements to directly relate to the issues in the suit.
She also noted that only Mr. Blanche signed the audit provision. The separate, nine-page agreement laying out the $1.8 billion fund was signed by Mr. Woodward and Frank Bisignano, who is serving as the chief executive officer of the I.R.S., a newly created role that is not subject to Senate confirmation.
Here is NPR’s summary.
The U.S. Supreme Court was designed to be a separate branch of government, the one that monitored the adherence to the Constitution by the other two branches. The Court disappoints sometimes, but it has never been as nakedly partisan as it is under Chief Justice John Roberts. The far-right wing of the Republican Party has a reliable friend at the Court.
It’s hard to say which of their decisions is the worst.
Some might say it was their recent decision to overturn the Voting Rights Act, which will sharply reduce the number of Black members of Congress.
Some might say it was their decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, despite promises by most of them not to do so.
Some would say it is their decisions that tear down the wall of separation between church and state.
I say it was their decision in Trump v. United States, in which the majority decided that the president was above the law and could not be charged for anything he did while in office as part of his official duties. We can be certain that the same court would claim that whatever he did was part of his official duties, including tearing down the East Wing of the White House without seeking anyone’s approval.
Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee has had enough. He introduced six articles of impeachment of Chief Justice John Roberts. Good for him!
Scott Dworkin reported on his blog:
Rep. Steve Cohen has represented Memphis, Tennessee, for 19 years. Republicans cut his district into pieces, and he decided to retire—but not without a fight.
Cohen told The Dworkin Report in 2019: “[Trump’s] life has been one crime after another. One misdeed after another. One lie after another.” Now he’s applied that same standard to the man who put Trump above the law.
On May 21, Cohen introduced six articles of impeachment against Chief Justice John Roberts. Charges include allowing the Court to become a partisan weapon, placing the president above the law, endorsing a corrupt campaign finance system, and failing to recuse himself while his wife collected millions recruiting attorneys for law firms with cases before the Court.
Cohen was direct: “Under Chief Justice Roberts’ stewardship, [The Supreme Court] is now understood as biased: with decisions designed to benefit Republicans at the expense of representative government.”
They gerrymandered Cohen’s district to silence him. John Roberts now has six articles of impeachment to his name—an award no other Chief Justice has ever received in US history.
Judge Colleen McMahon of the Southern Districy of New York issued a ruling restoring $100 million in grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities that were canceled by Elon Musk’s DOGE team. The judge said the cancellations violated the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment, and furthermore that DOGE lacked the statutory authority to act. Judge McMahon ordered the reinstatement of every grant to writers, scholars, and researchers. The DOGE censors did not actually review the grants but used ChatGPT to identify words that the Trump administration had banned, especially those associated with DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion).
Perhaps the most gratifying aspect of the decision was the judge’s ruling that DOGE had no authority to cancel these grants. In fact, DOGE had no authority to fire thousands of civil servants or to terminate entire agencies, like USAID.
She wrote:
On the central ultra vires question, Judge McMahon was unequivocal: “It is not that DOGE misconstrued a statutory provision conferring authority on it; it is that Congress conferred no authority on DOGE at all with respect to the awarding, continuation, or termination of NEH grants.”
The Authors Guild, one of the plaintiffs, reported on the decision;
May 7, 2026—A New York federal court in a 143-page decision today held for the Authors Guild plaintiffs on every count in its case on behalf of individual writers and scholars against DOGE and the NEH for DOGE’s April 2025 mass cancellation at the National Endowment for the Humanities. It ordered the reinstatement of every grant terminated, delivering a complete victory to the Authors Guild and more than 1,400 writers, scholars, and researchers whose awards were abruptly eliminated.
Judge Colleen McMahon of the Southern District of New York granted summary judgment to the plaintiffs on all three of their claims, finding the terminations violated the First Amendment and the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment and were carried out by DOGE without any statutory authority to act.
The court issued a permanent injunction enjoining the administration from giving effect to the mass terminations and requiring the government to rescind every termination notice and restore all affected grants and certified the Authors Guild’s lawsuit as a class action covering all approximately 1,400 affected grantees.
“Today’s ruling makes clear that no administration—regardless of its priorities—is free to defy the statutory purposes of federal agencies and that or to cancel grants based on viewpoint discrimination,” said Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild. “Not only did DOGE have no authority to cancel the grants, it used an AI chatbot to invent pretextual reasons to do it anyway. Writers and scholars had structured their lives around these awards—taking leaves of absence, giving up other income, making commitments—because the government had entered into a legally binding obligation. That obligation must be honored. We are gratified that justice was done, grateful to our amazing legal team at Fairmark Partners, and we will be watching closely to make sure every one of these grants is restored.”
In early April 2025, DOGE officials terminated more than 1,400 NEH grants awarded to scholars, writers, research institutions, and other humanities organizations totaling over $100 million in congressionally appropriated funds—the largest mass cancellation of previously awarded grants in the agency’s nearly 60-year history—with no individualized review, no notice, and no opportunity to appeal.
Discovery revealed that a DOGE official had used ChatGPT to generate “DEI rationales” for termination, submitting thousands of grant descriptions to the AI tool with a single standardized prompt, without defining the term or understanding how the tool interpreted it. They didn’t take any steps to ensure that the system wouldn’t discriminate on the basis of race, sex, or other protected categories. DOGE also searched for grants containing keywords like “gay,” “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, People of Color), “indigenous,” “tribal,” “melting pot,” “equality,” and similar terms. It did not search for analogous terms like “white,” “heterosexual,” or “Caucasian.”
The results were, in the court’s account, irrational: Studies of ancient Jewish texts, the persecution of Uyghurs in China, the plastics industry, and American women in Paris in the early 1900s were all flagged as DEI. The NEH’s own acting chair told DOGE many of the rationales “mischaracterized” the grants but was overruled. His own email to DOGE acknowledged: “Either way, as you’ve made clear, it’s your decision on whether to discontinue funding any of the projects.”
The result of this landmark ruling was actually two separate lawsuits that were quickly consolidated into one. On May 1, 2025, the Modern Language Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Historical Association filed the initial suit, ACLS v. McDonald, challenging DOGE’s mass terminations. Eleven days later, the Authors Guild filed its own suit, The Authors Guild v. NEH, in the Southern District of New York — structured as a class action on behalf of all approximately 1,400 affected grantees. On May 14, Judge Colleen McMahon consolidated the two cases, noting they were “substantially identical,” and the litigation proceeded jointly from there.
Because the Authors Guild’s suit was structured as a class action, Judge McMahon’s order applies not just to named plaintiffs but to all 1,400-plus writers, scholars, and researchers whose awards were canceled, making yesterday’s ruling a victory for everyone DOGE targeted.
On the central ultra vires question, Judge McMahon was unequivocal: “It is not that DOGE misconstrued a statutory provision conferring authority on it; it is that Congress conferred no authority on DOGE at all with respect to the awarding, continuation, or termination of NEH grants.”
On the ChatGPT-driven process, she wrote that it “would hardly be surprising if ChatGPT inferred, from DOGE’s repeated requests, that Fox and Cavanaugh were looking for reasons why grants could be characterized as DEI—and therefore terminable—and supplied ‘rationales’ simply in order to satisfy the user’s perceived demand. The utter lack of reasoning behind so many of its ‘rationales’ certainly suggests as much.”
“We are extremely pleased with Judge McMahon’s ruling reinstating the more than $100 million in NEH grants that were cancelled by DOGE last April.,” said Jamie Crooks, Managing Partner of Fairmark Partners, LLP “While we are still evaluating her detailed, 143-page opinion, the bottom line is clear: Judge McMahon agreed with the Authors Guild and the other plaintiffs that these ‘DEI’-based cancellations violated the First Amendment and Equal Protection, and that DOGE did not have the authority to order these grants terminated. The Court’s order that the grants be reinstated will allow our clients and the hundreds of other scholars and institutions in the class to continue performing their important scholarly work, and it’s also a vindication for the rule of law and basic principles of constitutional law.”
NEH award recipient Bill Goldstein said, “I am—and all of the plaintiffs will be— forever grateful for your brilliant, tireless, and effective work on our behalf. And on behalf of the First Amendment and what remains and must endure of the rule of law. The stakes are that high, and you made our rights and that right clear. Congratulations on your victory, and thank you for ours.”
Given that the administration has ignored other judicial orders, including the preliminary injunction in this case, we cannot say whether NEH will in fact reinstate the grants and pay out the money owed under those grants. The court emphasized that its decision addresses only “the legality of the Government’s decision to terminate” the grants and that it is requiring the government to “rescind the termination notices,” but clarified that it does not “require[] the immediate payment of grant funds” or “adjudicate[] any contractual entitlement to money.” The reason for that it that claims seeking payment of money owed by the federal government must be brought in a separate court—the Court of Federal Claims. Here, Judge McMahon noted that securing payment of the grant funds “might well require a separate suit in the Court of Federal Claims”—though she did not outline a specific process. For now, we are reviewing the decision with our attorneys to determine next steps, including any possible action in the Court of Federal Claims. As always, our goal is to ensure that grantees receive the payments they are owed as promptly as possible.
In Trump’s ongoing effort to stamp his atrocious taste on the nation’s Capitol, he is pushing full-steam-ahead to gain required approvals for his disgustingly gaudy Triumphal Arch. To make sure that he would gain the support of two review panels, he fired all their members and replaced them with Trump flunkies. Hundreds of letters poured in, overwhelmingly opposing the Arch. No matter. The “Commission on the Arts,” wholly owned by Trump gave their approval without dissent to what will be the largest such arch in the world and the gaudiest.
Luke Broadwater of The Washington Post wrote:
The Commission of Fine Arts on Thursday approved President Trump’s plan to build a 250-foot triumphal arch in Washington, even after the president rejected the panel’s suggestion to remove the large statues of golden eagles and a winged angel atop the structure.
“Washington is not a static city,” the panel’s chairman, Rodney Mims Cook Jr., said before making a motion to fast-track approval of the project. “It must grow to allow the next 250 years of Americans to celebrate their accomplishments.”
He added that the arch was “beautiful.”
Mr. Trump did agree to accommodate some of the panel’s suggested changes, including removing the statues of gold lions that were positioned lower on the arch.
The arts panel, which is filled with Mr. Trump’s appointees, has an advisory role on the design of the project, but no enforcement power. The same panel also fast-tracked approval of Mr. Trump’s $400 million ballroom, bypassing the normal review process on a project that would transform the profile of the White House.
The president has sought to overhaul any entities that might normally stand in the way of his plans to remake Washington, including firing the entire Commission of Fine Arts board and replacing its members with his appointees.
Thomas Luebke, the panel’s secretary, said to the board members before the motion that a project such as the arch would normally undergo an additional review.
“There is a final design that would normally come after this with more documentation of the issues of details, structure, everything else about it,” Mr. Luebke said. But, he added, the panel could also “choose, just like you did with the ballroom, to say ‘We’re done.’”
The future of the arch is still uncertain, however. The plans are scheduled to go next month before the National Capital Planning Commission, which is also controlled by allies of Mr. Trump. The project also faces a legal challenge.
A group of Vietnam War veterans has sued to stop construction of the arch, citing a lack of congressional authority and arguing that the arch would obstruct the view between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. Many critics of the plan have contended that the grandeur of the arch detracts from the solemnity that should be observed at the cemetery nearby.
The architect designing the monument, Nicolas Leo Charbonneau, said Mr. Trump had rejected the suggestion to remove the large statues atop the structure because the arch is a monument for the living, not the dead.
“The intent of the arch is a celebration in America of 250 years of greatness, freedom, and posterity, for which we can only thank the wisdom of our founders and God’s providence,” he said. “While it may celebrate the victories of America in various theories of war and the sacrifice of our fallen heroes, it is not primarily monument dedicated to the dead, but to the living.”
The structure will allow 80 visitors per hour to go inside the arch, Mr. Charbonneau said.
Before the vote, Mr. Luebke informed members that they had received about 600 new messages about the project. Only one letter writer was in favor of the project without major changes, he said.
Mr. Luebke said about half of those writing letters raised concerns about the arch’s closeness to Arlington Cemetery, “that this in fact disrespects the cemetery and military sacrifice,” he said. “The other ones have to do with misuse of public funds, that it’s a gaudy or synthetically incompatible design, that is authoritarian,” among other concerns.
Elizabeth Merritt, deputy general counsel for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, testified that her organization “remains extremely concerned about the location, the height, the scale, and the design of the proposed arch.”
“Arlington National Cemetery is a living memorial that hosts hundreds of funeral services every month,” she said. “The arch, as proposed, would dominate the national cemetery.”
In the lawsuit seeking to block construction of the arch, Vietnam War veterans maintain that Mr. Trump cannot build it without the authorization of Congress. They cite the Commemorative Works Act of 1986, which details a multistep process for authorizing and designing commemorative works in the District of Columbia and says any such work must be “specifically authorized” by Congress.
But in legal documents, the Trump administration has argued that congressional actions in the 1920s connected to the design of the Arlington Memorial Bridge already give it the legal right to build the arch.
Congress at the time authorized “construction of two tall columns surmounted by statues on Columbia Island,” the administration wrote. “Although those columns have not yet been built, the statutory authority to build them remains.”
The Federal Aviation Administration is also reviewing whether the arch could pose an aerial hazard, an evaluation that it requires for all structures more than 200 feet tall. The arch would sit about a mile from a Pentagon heliport and about two miles from Reagan National Airport, one of the country’s busiest flight hubs.
Rick Wilson is a never-Trumper, a former Republican operative who was a founder of The Lincoln Project. He write a popular blog, “Against All Enemies,” where he follows the actions of Trump 47.
Let’s start with a number, because the number is the whole story and the rest is just decoration.
3,700.
Between January and March of this year, three months, ninety-odd days, one fiscal quarter of a man who is supposed to be running the country, Donald Trump’s required ethics filings disclosed 3,700 stock trades worth somewhere between $220 million and three-quarters of a billiondollars.
Microsoft. Meta. Oracle. Broadcom. Bank of America. Goldman Sachs. Nvidia. Apple. An S&P 500 index fund, because even a degenerate gambler likes a hedge. Municipal bonds, for flavor.
That’s not a portfolio. That’s a casino floor. And the President of the United States is standing in the middle of it, counting cards at the table while the pit boss looks the other way, and the cameras, conveniently, are off.
You are supposed to find this normal now. You are supposed to scroll past it. That’s the entire design.
So let’s not.
.
Here is the part where I am legally and intellectually obligated to be precise, so pay attention. Precision is the enemy of this whole operation, and they are counting on you being too tired for it.
Insider trading is not “rich guy buys stock.”
Insider trading, as a federal crime, has elements: actual, legally defined moving parts a prosecutor has to bolt together. You need material, non-public information. You need a trade made on the basis of it. You need a breach of a duty of trust. And you need the thing lawyers call scienter, which is a fancy Latin way of saying the person knew exactly what they were doing. (Insider trading rabbit holes are shockingly amusing. I’ve been in one for two days.)
The rabbit hole led me to the Supreme Court last night, because of course it did. SCOTUS, over time, blessed two flavors of this in United States v. O’Hagan, the “classical” theory and the “misappropriation” theory, and federal prosecutors get to reach for the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, Rule 10b-5, and the heavy artillery of 18 U.S.C. § 1348, the criminal securities-fraud statute that carries up to twenty-five years in a federal prison. I don’t understand it all, either, but it strikes me that Trump’s legal team will need to be up on these, quite soon.
Now hold that definition in your hand like a ruler, and lay it next to the reporting.
According to the Washington Post‘s reading of these filings, Trump bought Nvidia on February 10. Days later, Nvidia announced a major deal with Meta, and the stock jumped roughly 2.5 percent. He sold Microsoft and Amazon in February, then bought millions more in March, shortly before the Pentagon announced it would put its technology into classified computer networks.
Let me say the quiet part at conversational volume: I am not telling you that is a proven crime. I am telling you that if you fed those two paragraphs to a hundred securities lawyers with no name attached, every one of them would say the same two words before their coffee got cold: “Lawyer up.”
The President of the United States sits atop the single largest pile of non-public material intelligence and information on planet Earth. He knows what the Pentagon is buying before the Pentagon’s vendors do. He knows the tariff rate before the market does, because he is the source of the tariff. Markets are always defined by information asymmetry. For him, the asymmetry isn’t a loophole. It’s the strategy. It’s the job.
A normal person who traded a defense contractor’s stock the week before a classified Pentagon contract would be explaining himself to men in windbreakers with “FBI” on the back. Trump gets a $200 fine. Twice. We’ll come back to the two hundred dollars, because the two hundred dollars is the funniest and darkest detail in the entire file.
Here is the thing that turns this from a scandal into a regime: there is functionally no one on the beat.
The Securities and Exchange Commission, the agency whose entire reason to exist is to walk this exact crime scene, has been hollowed out with the precision of me working a Thanksgiving turkey. Since the administration took over, the SEC has shed the order of 18% of its workforce, dropping from roughly 5,000 employees to around 4,200, the bulk of them walking out the door clutching $50,000 buyout checks dangled by the same government they were supposed to police.
The Enforcement Division and the Office of the General Counsel, the cops and the lawyers, in other words, took the deepest cuts. DOGE set up shop inside the SEC headquarters, occupying actual rooms; nothing good was ever going to come of that. The Philadelphia and Los Angeles field offices were slated to go dark. Enforcement actions against public companies are down roughly thirty percent. The new chairman publicly mused that it’s “good every once in a while to have a house cleaning.” Uh huh.
You do not need a decoder ring. When the man at the top is running a quarter-billion-dollar trading book off privileged information, and the watchdog has been defunded, depopulated, and told to think of mass attrition as spring cleaning, that is not two unrelated news stories. That is one strategy with two press releases.
This is the part that should raise the hair on your neck, regardless of your party. The genius of the grift is not that it’s hidden. It’s that it’s legal-adjacent by demolition. You don’t have to break the law if you can fire the people who enforce it and starve out the ones who remain. The cop didn’t miss the robbery. The cop took the buyout, and the robber signed the check.
Fine. You want to know how this plays as an actual case. Put on the prosecutor’s jacket for a second, because the honest answer is more damning than the cartoon.
It would be hard.
Not because the conduct smells clean. It reeks.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump made thousands of stock transactions in the first quarter of 2026. In many instances, actions he took as president directly affected the price of the shares he bought or sold.
Previous Presidents put their assets into a blind trust or invested only in bonds.
Before he entered the White House, President Trump was a real-estate developer and speculator. Lately, his fortune has been wagered on some Big Tech stocks.
Money managers for the president made more than 3,700 trades in the first quarter, including million-dollar purchases of Nvidia, Dell and other Big Tech stocks. Trump’s managers pared his holdings in Microsoft and Amazon with sizable sales in the quarter.
Canny investors should read Trump’s account on his social media site “Truth Social.” If he praises a company, it’s likely that he just bought the stock and is encouraging others to join him.
Bloomberg reported that experienced traders were stunned by the sheer number of trades on behalf of Trump.
President Donald Trump’s latest financial disclosures show that he or his investment advisers made more than 3,700 trades in the first quarter, a flurry totaling tens of millions of dollars and involving major companies that have dealings with his administration.
The transactions, spelled out in more than 100 pages of documents filed Thursday with the US Office of Government Ethics, list purchases and sales in broad ranges, making it hard to calculate an exact value. But the volume of trading — more than 40 per day over a three-month period — stands out as much as the potential dollar value.
“This is an insane amount of trades,” said Matthew Tuttle, chief executive officer of Tuttle Capital Management, in an interview, adding that it looks more like something done by “a hedge fund with massive algo trades” that buys and shorts securities than a personal account…
The disclosure reignites conflict-of-interest concerns that have shadowed Trump’s terms in the White House. Critics have regularly accused him of mixing his official duties with his business interests. Unlike his predecessors, Trump didn’t divest or move his assets into a blind trust with an independent overseer. His sprawling business empire is managed by two of his sons and operates in several areas that intersect with presidential policy.
At the same time, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner helps manage billions in investments for Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates while simultaneously serving as a “volunteer” envoy for the president on issues affecting the war in Iran and the Middle East in general…
The president’s disclosures spurred questions from some on Wall Street who expressed surprise at the trading volume.
“I’m baffled,” said Eric Diton, president and managing director at The Wealth Alliance. “In the 40-plus years of my time on Wall Street, this is an unusual amount of trading by any standards.”
The billionaire president’s stock trades were no doubt made to protect the best interests of the American people.
Harrison Ford delivered a stunning commencement speech to the graduates of Arizona State University. Today is the first day of the rest of their lives. He urged them to make a difference.
In an inspiring speech to the class of 2026, actor Harrison Ford admitted to the mistakes of his generation, before calling on young people to change the world.
If you want to hear his speeech in full, here it is on YouTube (17 minutes).
Here is the report of his speech by KTLA:
He kicked off his commencement address Monday at Arizona State University by admitting he didn’t always make the best choices when he was young. “I was squandering my life in riotous living,” the 83-year-old said of his college years. He found himself in a drama class looking for an easy A grade, but fell in love with acting.
“Hiding in character, costume and makeup, I had a freedom, a bravery I had never felt before – and I got an A!” he joked. “I was, I realized, present for possibly the very first time in my life. My passion had led me to community.”
Ford pursued acting, he told the students, while working carpentry jobs to pay the bills and support his family. Even after the success “Star Wars,” when things got easier, something still wasn’t quite right.
“The load lightened. I had freedom, opportunity, but something was still missing.” He had found passion for acting, but not purpose in life.
That changed in the 1980s, Ford said, when he discovered the nonprofit Conservation International. As he continued starring in episodes of “Star Wars,” the “Indiana Jones” series, “Blade Runner” and more, he found his true purpose in activism on behalf of the environment.
“Humanity is a part of nature, not above it,” he continued, making a plea for environmental justice, social justice and protecting indigenous communities. “These communities have long understood that the trees, the mountain, water, soil are not commodities, they are relatives to be cherished.
“We can all play a role by embracing that wisdom in our day-to-day lives, by loving the planet, by honoring nature’s authority, her generosity, the bounty she affords us, the justice of her example,” he said. “Because the world you’re stepping into, the world my generation left you is a real mess.”
“Find a place for yourself,” he continued. “Whatever talent or ambition you have, find some way to put it to work. Build something that didn’t exist yesterday. Stand up for someone who can’t stand up for themselves. Bring people together that weren’t talking before. That’s leadership. That’s what moves the needle.
“Your generation has far more power than you may realize. And if you harness that power, if you find your leadership, your issues, your voice, the world will not be able to ignore you.”
He ended with a few more inspiring final words: “This is your time. Own it. Enjoy every second of it. Because what could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing that you haven’t fully lived it. Congratulations. Go change the world.”
The student body cheered as Ford exited the stage. Arizona State said more than 14,000 undergraduates graduated this year.
The New York Times explained why Trump wanted immunity from audits by the IRS. Before his first presidency, Trump appears to have had a tax liability of nearly $80 million. The IRS claimed that he used the same business failure twice to decrease his tax debt.
The new exemption from audits that he gave himself saves him what he owed, which would now be nearly $100 million. It’s not clear whether he will ever again be audited by the IRS.
The Times reported:
A tax audit that President Trump has been fighting since his peak earning days as a television celebrity was most likely wiped away in this week’s settlement with the Justice and Treasury Departments.
The agreement, part of a resolution to an unusual lawsuit that Mr. Trump and his sons filed against the Internal Revenue Service, frees the president from a potential adverse ruling that could have cost him more than $100 million, according to an analysis of his tax returns in 2020 by The New York Times.
Two years ago, Mr. Trump’s middle son, Eric Trump, acknowledged to The Times that the audit remained active. During his father’s first term in office, the matter was put on hold, records obtained by The Times showed.
It is unclear whether the matter was placed on hold again during the president’s current term or was resolved. If it was still pending until this week, the increased interest and penalties would have grown significantly.
Mr. Trump has always argued that he did nothing wrong in the way he filed his tax returns.
The audit dated back to a $72.9 million tax refund that Mr. Trump claimed, and received, starting in about 2010. The total reflected all the federal income tax he had paid, plus interest, for 2005 through 2008, his greatest earning years as the star of his reality show, “The Apprentice.”
Mr. Trump justified the refund claim by declaring huge business losses — a total of $1.4 billion from his core businesses for 2008 and 2009 — that tax laws had prevented him from using in prior years, The Times previously reported.
Records obtained by The Times did not itemize the business losses. But two of the largest-scale projects of Mr. Trump’s career — his long-failing casinos and his money-losing tower in Chicago — appeared to be behind the biggest numbers. In both cases, Mr. Trump made the argument that his interest in those projects met the tax code definition of worthlessness.
In 2008, with sales on his new Chicago condo-hotel tower lagging far behind projections, Mr. Trump claimed that he had so much debt on the project that he would never see a profit. That move resulted in Mr. Trump reporting losses as high as $651 million for the year, The Times and ProPublica found.
The I.R.S. has argued that he, in effect, tried to write off the same losses on the Chicago tower twice.
During his first campaign, Trump contended that it was “smart” to avoid taxes. He may be the first billionaire to skip them altogether.
Jamelle Bouie, columnist for The New York Times, wrote several columns (see here) about the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act in its Callais decision. This one is titled “The Law They Hate Was a High Point of Our History.” The high court majority, six hard-right Republicans, decided that partisan redistricting is just fine, but redistricting that takes account of race is not. Thus, a state legislature dominated by one party can justly produce a voting map that gives every seat to its own party, but it may not permit districts created to encourage representation of racial minorities.
In the wake of the Callais decision, some states of the Confederacy quickly carved up districts to eliminate seats held by Democrats and by Blacks. Some of these states will have only white Republicans in Congress.
Bouie wrote:
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 wasn’t the top-down dictate of a rogue, liberal Supreme Court — if such a thing has ever existed.
It wasn’t the brainchild of out-of-touch bureaucrats in Washington, nor was it some kind of martial settlement imposed on the states of the former Confederacy.
It was, instead, an achievement of the most effective social movement of the postwar United States. The Voting Rights Act revitalized American democracy and stands as one of its great achievements.
This, somehow, has been lost in the discourse around the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais. The court’s clear hostility to the law, as well as the glee with which conservative Republicans have dismantled the South’s majority-minority congressional districts in its wake, makes it seem as if the V.R.A. was a handcuff placed on American politics by some outside force.
The truth is that the Voting Rights Act was conceived, crafted and passed in order to further realize American democracy. And it was, itself, the product of an explosion of democratic energy.
The V.R.A. was forced onto the national agenda by the tireless work of the grass roots activists in the Civil Rights Movement, who struggled, bled and put their lives on the line in a fierce fight to secure their fundamental rights as Americans. It was signed into law by a president who had won election in one of the largest landslides in American history. It was subsequently reauthorized by Congress, after Congress, after Congress, after Congress.
The most recent reauthorization in 2006 was nearly unanimous, and there was broad support from the public — so much that to justify the Supreme Court’s attack on the law in Shelby County v. Holder, Chief Justice John Roberts had to fabricate a constitutional doctrine about the “equal sovereignty” of states, and Justice Antonin Scalia had to characterize the reauthorization as an unfair “racial entitlement” that politicians would never remove for fear of backlash.
If there is any single law that you could plausibly say represents the general will of the American people, it might be one that was reaffirmed nearly every decade for 40 years by the people’s representatives.
This isn’t just a historical point or a piece of idle trivia. It is essential. And it gets to what is so egregious about the court’s campaign against the law.
The Voting Rights Act was an attempt by the people of the United States, affirmed across two generations of voters and lawmakers, to make good the 15th Amendment to the Constitution — itself the hard fought product of war and reconstruction. It was an attempt to wield the authority of the federal government to secure the fundamental right to vote as well as the fundamental right to representation. It stood for substantive equal protection — the chance to make democracy real.
The V.R.A. was not, contra John Roberts and the rest, an expression of colorblindness, indifferent to the social realities of the United States. It did not pretend to treat supposed neutrality as truly neutral, nor did it place racial inequality outside the remit of the Constitution. And it was not, as this court would have it, the bland expression of a bloodless commitment to anti-discrimination. In fact, it was the most significant attempt in this country’s history to realize the promise of political equality.
The Voting Rights Act has more — much more — democratic legitimacy than this Supreme Court has ever enjoyed. After all, most of this court’s conservative majority was appointed by presidents who entered office as winners of the Electoral College but not the popular vote.
It is that relative difference in democratic legitimacy that makes this court’s voting rights jurisprudence so offensive.
Those voting rights rulings, from Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 to Callais in 2026, come from a court that has placed itself above the people at large. It is a court that will, according to its whims, ignore the clear commands, directions and intent of Congress. It is a court that treats voters and legislators as errant children to be corralled and disciplined by wise jurists. It is a court that doesn’t answer hard constitutional questions as they arise as much as it imposes constitutional meaning based on its narrow interests and ideological preoccupations.
It is a court that is trying to shape the political system to its liking, despite the claims of the chief justice, with no limits other than its partisan preferences. It is a court, in other words, that is wielding a cramped and parochial vision of the Constitution against American democracy, rather than treating the Constitution as a tool for realizing our democratic aspirations.
There have been many frustrating decisions from this Supreme Court. Louisiana v. Callais may not even be its worst decision — that prize might still go to Trump v. United States, where the chief justice conjured, out of thin air, an anti-constitutional doctrine of criminal immunity for the president.
Callais, however, might be the most emblematic of this court’s decisions: a flashing warning that our democracy is being crushed underneath the imperial authority of an arrogant and reactionary juristocracy. We can either discipline that court — and put it in its place — or accept our fate as its subjects.
Diane Ravitch's blog 