Tuesday, June 23, 2026. Chump's 'deal' with Iran continues to falter, he continues to resist oversight and attempts to kill every attempt at oversight, Americans are not praising him s the midterms approach, he's trying to take Church land in New Mexico, and much more.
ABC
is once again fighting back against the FCC’s targeting of The View.
This time, the network has issued an urgent call for audiences of the
daytime talk show to weigh in with their thoughts on the agency’s
decision to question whether the show’s political interviews are exempt
from the equal time rule and potentially affect the broadcast licensing
renewal.
Beginning Monday (June
22), the network is running a TV spot that invites viewer comments to
the FCC with the message, “The View has welcomed your favorite guests
for nearly 30 years. Now the FCC wants to control who is allowed to
appear on the show. Tell the FCC to let the viewers decide. You have
until July 6th.”
The ad also features a QR code linking to the FCC’s comments portal,
which reads, “FCC’s Media Bureau Seeks Comment on Petition by Disney’s
ABC Asking the FCC to Declare that The View Qualifies as a Bona Fide
News Interview Program and Thus is Exempt from the Statutory Equal
Opportunities Requirements.”
Make
a point to weigh in. I have and have made it clear that I support THE
VIEW. This FCC is a joke and it attacking ABC. Good for ABC for
fighting back.
As Vice President JD Vance entered the
fifth hour of negotiations with Iranian leaders over the weekend,
President Trump weighed in with an ill-timed threat to start bombing
again.
If the Iranians closed the Strait of Hormuz, Mr. Trump told a Fox News reporter,
the negotiators talking to Mr. Vance would never make it back to their
country — in fact, they would have no country to return to at all.
For
Mr. Vance, this was the latest example of his increasingly tricky role
as the frontman in the U.S. negotiations with Iran, as Mr. Trump
repeatedly creates disruptions in his path.
On
Monday, Mr. Vance said the first round of talks had laid “a successful
foundation” for peace. But now, Mr. Vance will have to find a way to end
a war that he opposed at the start, while navigating his boss’s whims
and an adversary that has proved itself, at least in part, immune to Mr.
Trump’s threats.
This morning, MS NOW notes that an $80 billion supplemental will be requested.
Iran said on Tuesday that it has no plans to open its damaged nuclear sites
to U.N. inspectors, a day after Vice President JD Vance claimed “a
major milestone” in talks on the country’s nuclear program aimed at
securing a lasting peace agreement.
Iran’s
foreign ministry spokesman, Esmail Baghaei, responded “no” when asked
at a news briefing on Tuesday whether Iran intended to grant access to
any of its war-damaged nuclear sites to inspectors from the United
Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency.
“We had no detailed discussions on the nuclear issue,” he later said, according to Iranian state media.
In other news, midterms are months away and Chump has alienated so many Americans. Alex Henderson reports that swing voters are still bothered by Republicans:
Four
years have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade
with its June 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health
Organization — a ruling that, according to conservative GOP consultant
Sarah Longwell, continues to be a political liability for Republicans.
Writing
in the conservative website The Bulwark, Longwell — founder of
Republican Accountability (RA), formerly Republican Voters Against Trump
— explains, "Amid all the talk of inflation, war, and artificial
intelligence, people are underestimating just how important abortion
could still be to this fall's elections. That seems like an insane
sentence to type because, after all, abortion proved decisive in 2022,
when Democrats dramatically overperformed expectations. The consensus
quickly formed that the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade
was the key contributor. But when the Democratic Party put a heavy
emphasis on abortion in the 2024 elections, it didn't pan out. That's
because voters were more motivated by economic issues."
Longwell
adds, "Fights around abortion moved to the states — where Republican-
controlled legislatures were passing sweeping bans — and receded from
the federal level. Today, Dems may have over-learned the lesson of
2024."
Republicans
have signs of trouble ahead of the midterm elections after President
Donald Trump has "failed to deliver on his economic promises," an
analyst argued on Monday.
In a column for The Guardian,
journalist and author Steven Greenhouse pointed out how the GOP will
have to face this growing problem among white, blue-collar voters in the
fall.
"If any demographic group
was key to Donald Trump’s election victories in 2016 and 2024, it was
white, blue-collar voters," Greenhouse wrote. "But in perhaps perilous
news for Republicans, Trump’s support from that group has plummeted – as
many white, working-class voters have grown upset about everything from
increased inflation and gas prices to Trump’s war against Iran. These
glaring cracks in Trump’s blue-collar base point to big trouble for
Republicans in this November’s midterm elections."
The
disappointment among GOP voters is "bad news" for Republicans,
Greenhouse argued. And polls point to that mounting dissatisfaction — a
new CBS poll revealed
that 54 percent of white voters without a college degree disapprove of
Trump's performance as president. Trump won 66 percent of white voters
without a four-year degree in the 2024 presidential election.
Senate Republicans started last week with a plan. Just days after Donald Trump announced his plan to nominate Jay Clayton
to succeed Tulsi Gabbard as the next director of national intelligence,
GOP leaders said the federal prosecutor was so uncontroversial that
they hoped to confirm him by the end of the week, which would have been a
rare example of remarkable congressional efficiency.
He
didn’t go into a lot of detail as to why Pulte’s appointment was such a
priority, though Trump did recently declare that he expects Pulte to
use his new office to perhaps “find out some things about the rigged
elections,” reinforcing obvious concerns about the unqualified housing
official playing the role of a partisan weapon in pursuit of Trump’s
conspiracy theories.
It was against this backdrop that Politico reported
late last week that Pulte had already directed staffers “to pull
together a list of about 300 candidates to be fired from the National
Counterterrorism Center in the coming weeks.” CNN published a related report about Pulte “raising alarm bells among intelligence officials” before his first day even began.
While
the reports have not been independently verified by MS NOW, they did
generate attention on Capitol Hill. Rep. Jim Jimes of Connecticut, the
top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a written
statement, “If the reports of Bill Pulte’s arrival at ODNI [the Office
of the Director of National Intelligence] are true, they demonstrate why
he should never spend a minute as Director of National Intelligence, a
role he is legally not qualified to perform. I am particularly concerned
by reporting that he may undertake a sweeping firing of intelligence
professionals, following on major cuts already undertaken last year.”
Intelligence Democrats are warning acting Director of National
Intelligence (DNI) Bill Pulte against carrying out sweeping firings or
improperly declassifying intelligence as Congress braces for the
controversial new intelligence chief’s full first week on the job.
[. . .]
“Given
your lack of experience within the Intelligence Community, it is
difficult to imagine that in such a short amount of time you have
already developed fully informed views as to how to shrink ODNI without
incurring risks to national security,” Rep. Jim Himes (Conn.), the top
Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and his counterpart in the
Senate, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) wrote to Pulte.
“Making
significant structural changes to ODNI, to include a reduction in
force, is not an appropriate course of action for anyone in an acting
capacity, let alone without consultation with Congress, and you should
refrain from doing so.”
[. . .]
“We
are concerned that your record as Director of the Federal Housing
Finance Agency demonstrates a willingness to misuse your position,
including your access to sensitive information, to pursue President
Trump’s perceived political enemies and further his retributive
political agenda,” they wrote.
“Given the
extremely sensitive nature of intelligence, we expect that you will not
declassify properly classified information that would compromise
intelligence sources and methods, or weaponize the declassification
process for partisan political purposes.”
A
federal judge on Monday blocked the Justice Department from forcing
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and other officials to turn over records in its
probe of Democratic resistance to the Trump administration’s immigration
crackdown, calling the move retaliatory.
In a 30-page ruling,
district Judge Patrick Schiltz found that subpoenas were “part of an
unconstitutional effort to coerce Minnesota officials into assisting the
federal government with enforcing civil immigration laws and to harass
and retaliate against them for failing to do so.”
“The
Department is not conducting a criminal investigation, but is instead
using the grand jury process for other (unlawful) purposes,” wrote
Schiltz, an appointee of former President George W. Bush.
“Initiating
a criminal investigation in order to harass political opponents or to
coerce them into taking official action-particularly official action
that the federal government cannot directly require those political
opponents to take-is a blatantly unlawful and unethical use the
grand-jury process,” the ruling reads.
The
document goes on: “The only question, then, is whether the challenged
subpoenas were issued for one of these forbidden purposes. The Court has
no doubt that they were.”
The courts have caught on. They know this administration cannot be trusted. When not trying to destroy the justice system, Chump tries to grease the wheels for corruption. Casey Michel (THE NEW REPUBLIC) explains:
It goes without saying that Trump now oversees the most corrupt White House
the U.S. has ever seen. But it would be a mistake to say that he and
his White House are acting alone. Indeed, in the latest assault on
America’s anti-corruption edifice—perhaps the most destructive effort
yet—the White House is taking a back seat, and is instead looking to
Republican allies in Congress to undo the single most important
anti-corruption step the U.S. has taken in years.
First, a bit of history. For decades, until the early 2020s, the United States stood at the center of the world of offshore finance.
While places like Switzerland, Panama, the Cayman Islands, and other
smaller locales got most of the headlines regarding offshore secrecy, in
reality it was the U.S. that dominated the world of laundering illicit
wealth, attracting billions (and potentially more) from
narco-traffickers, arms dealers, kleptocrats, and others looking to wash
their wealth clean.
Many industries
accelerated America’s transformation into an offshore behemoth,
including real estate and private equity, both of which enjoyed
decades-long loopholes in basic anti–money laundering provisions. But
there was one industry in particular that served as the bedrock for all
of these laundering networks: shell companies. Thanks to America’s
fractured corporate formation landscape, the federal government had no
say in how U.S. shell companies were formed—or what kind of information
was needed when setting up a shell company.
As a
result, states like Delaware, Wyoming, Nevada, and others provided all
of the secrecy and legal protections that cartel heads, dictators, human
smugglers, and others needed to hide their financial tracks. In a
matter of minutes, anyone around the world could set up a U.S. shell
company and immediately access their own bespoke U.S. money-laundering
network—all of it perfectly legally. Time and again, investigators both
domestic and foreign could track a dirty money trail, only to watch
their efforts collapse in the face of a Delaware or Nevada shell
company.
It wasn’t simply autocrats and their
oligarchic proxies who benefited from these anonymous shells. Wealthy
Americans, those looking to secretly influence American politics, those
searching for ways to covertly inject finance into U.S. elections—all of
them profited from this rank secrecy.
Efforts
to bring the barest transparency to U.S. shell companies stretch back to
at least 2008. But it wasn’t until the early 2020s that legislators
finally passed something called the Corporate Transparency Act. The bill
was hardly partisan; remarkably, a slate of legislators from both sides
of the aisle passed the bill over President Trump’s veto. Nor was the
bill onerous. Instead of a public registry of corporate owners, as seen
in places like the United Kingdom, America’s new shell company database
would remain private, accessible only to federal authorities and other
officials tracking illicit and looted wealth.
It’s
difficult to overstate just how momentous this new legislation was. For
the first time in decades, the U.S. was no longer the leading font of
anonymous shell companies. The best days of U.S. offshoring appeared
behind us.
How much can change in just a few
short years. Unsurprisingly, the opening salvo against the Corporate
Transparency Act came from the politician who’s benefited from anonymous
shells perhaps more than anyone else: Trump. Barely a month into his
second term, Trump announced
that the Corporate Transparency Act was an “absolute disaster,” an
“economic menace” that would “soon be no more.” He announced that his
administration would no longer be enforcing the law for U.S. shell
companies—and that no one would need to worry about prosecution for
breaking the law. A few months later, Trump’s Treasury Department announced that it was destroying all of the filings the registry had compiled thus far, torching the database entirely.
A
federal appeals court on Friday blocked the Trump administration's
plans to immediately slash the workforce at the U.S. Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau by about two-thirds, delivering a setback to the White
House's protracted efforts to shrink the consumer watchdog.
The
order from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
Circuit came in response to a revised plan the Justice Department
submitted in late March following repeated legal defeats over its plans
to decimate if not eliminate the CFPB.
The
appeals court had been reviewing the administration's appeal of a March
2025 injunction by a federal district court judge which temporarily
barred the mass terminations.
The Justice
Department, which previously tried to cut up to 90% of employees, had
argued that it should be permitted to carry out its new plan
immediately.
Yes, he
wants to increase corruption and Chump knows that will also require
shrinking the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He is highly allergic to oversight and always has been.
It was just last week that US president Donald Trump’s name was removed
from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts following a court order
to do so, but when it came to taking the 80-year-old Republican’s name
off the building, tarpaulin was erected to cover up the humiliating
moment – tarpaulin which is yet to be taken down.
And with Trump already being branded a “snowflake”
over the move, a group known as The Lincoln Project Advocacy (part of
the wider anti-Trump Lincoln Project) took advantage of the tarpaulin
still being up to beam a projection onto it – one highly critical of the
president.
In one video captured of the projection, the animation shows clips of Trump and the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein; a man climbing up a ladder to rip off letters from the Kennedy Center; Trump scrunching up pages marked ‘Epstein Files’ and eating them; and text which reads “no one bends the knee like the GOP”.
The
Kennedy Center is being accused of “gamesmanship” by fighting a court
order that required the removal of President Donald Trump’s name from
the building’s facade, and of keeping up tarps that block the sign in
“petulant defiance,” according to new court documents filed Monday
afternoon.
Lawyers
representing Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, who sued Trump and the Kennedy
Center in December over Trump’s legally dubious bid to rename the center
after himself, filed an opposition Monday to the Kennedy Center’s
motion to pause the court’s prior order requiring the removal of Trump’s
name.
In the filing,
Beatty’s lawyers accuse the Kennedy Center of running a “posion-pill
gambit” to block the court order through legal maneuvers, including a
last-minute request to pause the court order before the June 12 deadline
to remove Trump’s name, which failed.
The
filing also accused the center of hanging a tarp that obscures the
Kennedy Center’s sign—which has stood for 10 days—in “petulant defiance”
and to “frustrate the restoration of the status quo as it existed prior
to the renaming.”
President
Trump poured out his frustrations with the problems plaguing the
Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, saying that multiple people had been
arrested and it would likely need to be drained for repairs.
The reflecting pool on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., has been plagued by algae and a coating that is sloughing off
after a recently completed $14.7 million renovation that was part of
the president’s project to beautify the nation’s capital. On Saturday,
Trump blamed the problems on vandals, who he said cut and poured
corrosive chemicals into the pool.
[. . .]
It
wasn’t immediately clear what the president meant by this. The new
surface isn’t plastic like a typical pool lining, which is easier to
cut, but is more like a coarse coat of paint. The Interior Department
and the U.S. Park Police, which help oversee the pool, didn’t
immediately return requests to provide additional details.
Trump
said on social media on Sunday that he inspected the pool himself.
“Work will begin immediately on fixing the seriously vandalized
Reflecting Pool,” he said.
The reflecting pool
was resurfaced this spring with an “American flag blue” coating. Within
days of the pool’s reopening this month, algae blooms coated the floor
and colored the surface, drawing spectators and online mockery. Some
have taken pieces of the blue coating that has been floating in the
water.
President
Donald Trump has accused his critics of vandalizing the recently
renovated Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool as online images reveal the
landmark's blue paint peeling and algae accumulating.
The
president turned to Truth Social to express his fury over what he
characterized as a vandalized pool. However, no evidence exists that the
landmark has been deliberately sabotaged.
"Of
the MANY Statues and Fountains that we rebuilt, renovated, cleaned, and
fixed, the only one that was Vandalized was the Reflecting Pool, which
is being taken care of, ASAP! It has been given a 300 foot long gash,
chemicals have been illegally placed in the water, and the beautiful new
grass field has been destroyed with a gigantic 86 47 chemically carved
into it (Probably inspired by Dirty Cop, James Comey! )" Trump stated.
MS NOW's MORNING JOE today addressed the reflecting pool.
Referring
to the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, Minnesota governor Tim
Walz commented on X: “Found an imaginary problem, said only they could
fix it, didn’t listen to experts, hired buddies who grifted millions,
failed miserably, bragged how great it went. The entire Trump presidency
in a nutshell.” (Walz could have added: “blamed others for his failure,
conjured up a conspiracy, then prosecuted them.”)
Last night, Rachel Maddow noted the reflecting pool and other failed 'improvements' Chump has made.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has tattoos
all over his body — including a Jerusalem cross and the phrase Deus
Vult (“God wills it”). Tattoos tell us a story about a person’s life and
beliefs.
“God wills it” was a battle cry of
Christian crusaders during the Middle Ages. Today it is used by violent
right-wing extremist groups and other hate organizations – including
those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Hegseth
has defended his tattoos as expressions of his deeply held Christian
faith. He claimed that he was persecuted for his religion and outspoken
“conservative” beliefs. Yet, under current regulations, such tattoos
could disqualify recruits and subject active-duty personnel to
discipline.
Hegseth now oversees the United
States military — one of the largest and most diverse organizations in
the country, if not the world. He has made it his personal crusade to restore “warrior culture” by stomping out “woke” values, “diversity,” “DEI,” and “political correctness” in the military.
What
Hegseth is really eradicating is the principle that the military should
reflect and serve all Americans. His “warrior culture” is a mask for a
21st-century Jim Crow — one that uses colorblind language like “merit”
and “fairness” to do the work of racism and other forms of prejudice,
bigotry and intolerance.
And it
mirrors the Trump administration’s larger authoritarian project: a
version of American history, national greatness and daily life where
white men are the only agents who really matter.
Black
and brown people, women, LGBTQ people, and other marginalized
communities are pushed aside — cast as supporting players, villains or
erased entirely.
Military service is about much
more than a uniform. It is a claim on citizenship, national belonging,
and who counts as a “real American” and a patriot.
As
Frederick Douglass observed during the Civil War, “Once let the black
man get upon his person the brass letters U.S., let him get an eagle on
his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket,
there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to
citizenship.”
Trump, Hegseth, Stephen Miller
and the other architects of the MAGA movement know this is true, which
is why they’re pushing back so hard.
A
Catholic diocese in New Mexico is waging a legal holy war against the
Trump administration's plan to use 14 acres of church land for a new
border wall — saying the plan would desecrate a 25-foot-tall,
mountaintop statue of Jesus nearby.
In court
papers filed Friday, lawyers for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Las
Cruces said the church would fight the administration in court before it
“surrenders even a square inch of its sacred land.”
“The
law, including cases cited by the Government, is clear that the Diocese
is allowed to present its defenses before the Government possesses and
irreparably desecrates the holy site at Mount Cristo Rey,” they wrote.
“This Court should not bless this affront to religious liberty.”
The
court filing also called President Donald Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border
wall a “physical manifestation of this Government’s attitude toward
migrants,” adding that “nothing could be less Catholic.”
Chump's Homeland Security is attempting to seize the land via eminent domain.
Let's wind down with this from Senator Adam Schiff's office:
Seattle, WA – In case you missed it, U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), joined CNN’s One Thing podcast with
host David Rind at the 2026 Cascade PBS Ideas Festival to
discuss the brazen and rampant corruption schemes of President Trump and
his administration, and how the cost of that corruption is coming at
the expense of the American people.
During the conversation, Senator Schiff also discussed
the opportunities and challenges posed by AI, emphasizing that we must
make sure Americans have access to and are able to live with dignity
amid the technological transformation our society is undergoing.
Schiff also spoke about the Democratic Party’s agenda heading into
midterm elections, including lowering costs, building back an economy
that works for everyone, and making the American dream feasible again.
On the rampant corruption in President Trump’s Justice Department:
[…] It is so transformed and ruinous right now. And in my old
office, I think about a third of the officers quit. We see mass
defections throughout the country. And for me, the canary in the coal
mine happened very early in this iteration of the Trump administration,
when something absolutely unthinkable happened to anyone that had ever
served in the Justice Department. It was beyond comprehension, and that
is the Justice Department sought to dismiss a corruption case against a
major public official, the Mayor of New York, in order to secure his
help in something completely unrelated, and that was enforcement of the
immigration policies of the president. That
was unimaginable prior to this administration, and as much as there are
dark and bleak things to see every day with the kind of corruption of
this administration, we can’t ignore and shouldn’t look away from the
heroes that are also being revealed. And one of my favorites was
one of the attorneys on that case, who had been, I think he was a Scalia
clerk, very conservative, Federalist Society type, wrote to the Justice
Department and said that ‘I’m sure you can find some coward or some
fool to dismiss this case, but it was never going to be me.’
On the cost of the president’s corruption to the American people:
[…] You’ve got the billion-dollar ballroom, you’ve got the triumphal
arch, which violates the law, by the way,
because there’s no Congressional approval. You’ve got all of the no-bid
contracts around the fountains and the pools, they’re spending $5
million to gild, literally gild horses on a statue. You’ve got the
president buying Boeing stock before going to China and announcing a 200
aircraft deal with China, and you’ve got the president
buying Oracle before the TikTok deal, you’ve got the president buying
Nvidia before deciding that Nvidia can export its some of its advanced
chips. This is just stuff we
learned in May, and I do think it’s important to not allow ourselves to
be numb to this, this pillaging. But at the same time, the primary
focus has to be on the fact that while the president is enriching
himself and his family, he is doing nothing to address the
problems of the American people.
[…] And the cost of
corruption is, the president could care less about bringing down the
cost of your food or your housing or your gas, he’s too busy focused on
improving his own economy. His personal economy is doing great. He’s made
more money in the first year of his administration than the rest of his
life put together 10 times, and he can’t be bothered to worry about
your cost of living, and he tells you so. I mean, look how he’s spending
his time. He was out there again on the grounds of the construction of
the ballroom, talking about the ballroom. If
he spent half as much time on trying to help people afford the cost of
living and bring prices down as he spends on that stupid ballroom. I
mean, imagine this: we’re in the midst of an economy that’s simply not
working for millions of Americans, and the president of the United
States is building a golden ballroom. It’s really incomprehensible.
On the opportunities and challenges that AI will bring:
There’s certainly profound
challenges, both with the data centers, and I’ve introduced a bill to
ensure that these large data centers bring their own energy, that they
don’t socialize the costs of improvements that need to be made to the
grid or regional infrastructure or transformers or other technologies. That
they build in an excess capacity, so they can actually put power into
the grid during surge times. This is obviously just one facet of the
problem, you mentioned another, that is the environmental impacts.
[…] There are some new technologies that are mitigating the need for
water, which is, I think, encouraging, but the broader concerns are
still dominating. And in addition to the data center issue, you have the
fact that these models are so advanced now they have far outpaced our
cyber defenses. And you have the additional growing impact on the nature
of work. I’m most particularly concerned about that impact.
[…] I think that AI and the
transformation it will bring, presents both a danger and an
opportunity, and the opportunity is to think anew about how our society
works and how we make sure that people who are working and trying
are able to enjoy a good quality of life. And that there is good and
dignified work for people.
On Democrats’ midterm agenda:
[…] And it is a failure of both parties that housing is unaffordable,
that college is unaffordable, that young people need to get a mortgage
on their education to go to school, that’s on both parties. So, I
totally understand the frustration, and I think there are people in our
party who are speaking to that and speaking eloquently to that, but we
need to do more than speak eloquently to it. We need to attack it
with big ideas, with bold ideas, with non-incremental ideas. I think the
reason we lost the last presidential election was because the
Democratic Party became seen as the party of a deeply, deeply
unsatisfactory status quo.
And we damn well better, when we take the majority, and even more so
when we take the White House, be ready to move dramatically to move this
country in a different direction, of making it possible for people to
work hard and enjoy a good life and provide for themselves and their
family. In a world that is now global, it is automated and is
increasingly driven by AI, and we have absolutely got to meet that
moment. And if we don’t, there
is nothing we can do that will put our democracy on solid ground. If
the democracy isn’t working for people, if people see the quality of
life their parents had as better than what they have. Then all too many
are going to entertain any demagogue who comes along promising they
alone can fix it.
