Editors Note: We originally broke this analysis to paid subscribers on June 18th, but the reaction was too overwhelming to keep it behind a paywall. We are making this public right now because Trump’s amateurish, catastrophically weak deal with Iran puts American security in immediate jeopardy. While the corporate media sleeps on this horrific surrender, our mission cannot wait. Read this, share it, and help us fuel the fight before the legacy media moves on to the next story.

No sleep until the truth was out. We couldn’t wrap up last night without ensuring you got the real facts about Trump’s capitulation to Iran. While the mainstream media glossed over the details, our team worked the late shift to break down everything America actually needed to know.

Below, you will find the full text of the newly leaked “Memorandum of Understanding” (MOU), which is essentially a surrender by the Trump administration to the Islamic Republic of Iran to end the war.

This framework is a stunning document that outlines an immediate standstill and de-escalation of the current conflict. To understand its true gravity, we must analyze what it includes, what it dangerously leaves out, and how it measures up against Obama’s 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

What It Includes vs. What It Leaves Out

On paper, this MOU stops active military operations, lifts the U.S. naval blockade, grants immediate sanctions waivers for Iranian oil, and unlocks all frozen Iranian assets. However, what it doesn’t include is any meaningful oversight or monitoring. Unlike the highly restrictive JCPOA—which enforced a strict 3.67% uranium enrichment cap, dismantled two-thirds of Iran’s centrifuges, and established a unilateral “snapback” mechanism for sanctions—this MOU relies on a vague promise to down-blend materials. It completely fails to cap long-term enrichment levels, ban advanced centrifuges, or lay out clear verification measures, kicking those critical issues down the road—all while rewarding Iran in the form of lifted sanctions, the ability to sell oil on the free market, and handing over a $300B reconstruction fund.

A Rushed Timeline

The structural weakness of this agreement is a direct result of how it was made. The original JCPOA took nearly two years of painstaking, highly technical negotiations by international experts to finalize. By contrast, this MOU was thrown together in a few days, imposing an unrealistic 60-day deadline to finalize a definitive treaty.

The Cost of Amateur Diplomacy

All of the terms in this agreement are undeniably great for Iran, but make no mistake: this is Trump’s surrender to Iran to end the war.

Amateurs negotiated this MOU instead of seasoned diplomats and professionals in serious positions who actually know how to negotiate on behalf of American interests. Because of this strategic failure, Americans are left holding the bag—burdened by billions of dollars spent on an unnecessary war, a closed major waterway vital for global trade, soaring gas and food prices, a crumbling economy, crucial American military bases in the Middle East, and the tragic loss of 13 American lives.

Instead of eliminating any threat of building a nuclear program, accomplishing a regime change or ending the threat by Iranian proxy groups, we are handed a framework that gives Iran all of the necessary resources to rebuild and rearm.

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Read the full text below to see exactly how this deal was structured and where it falls short.

Item 1: Termination of Military Operations

Original Text: 1 — The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran and their allies in the current war are signing this MOU to declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. The final deal will confirm the permanent termination of the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon and other provisions of this paragraph.

• What it doesn’t accomplish / Will result in: It establishes an immediate ceasefire but fails to define verification mechanisms or what constitutes a “breach” by proxy forces (e.g., Hezbollah, Houthis). By binding “allies in the current war,” it risks collapsing the moment an autonomous or loosely aligned militia fires a rocket, as there is no clear enforcement structure to referee localized violations.

• JCPOA Comparison: The JCPOA was strictly a non-proliferation agreement; it intentionally avoided regional security dynamics, ceasefires, or proxy warfare. This MOU directly links regional military operations to the diplomatic framework.

Item 2: Respecting Sovereignty & Non-Interference

Original Text: 2 — The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran undertake to respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and to refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs.

• What it doesn’t accomplish / Will result in: This is standard, broad diplomatic prose. It does nothing to stop cyber warfare, covert intelligence operations, or state-sponsored asymmetric influence, which both sides traditionally view as distinct from overt physical “interference.”

• JCPOA Comparison: Identical in spirit to standard international norms, but the JCPOA had zero explicit clauses attempting to police internal affairs or broader regional statecraft.

Item 3: 60-Day Deadline for Final Deal

Original Text: 3 — The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran commit to negotiating and achieving the final deal in maximum 60 days, extendable with mutual consent.

• What it doesn’t accomplish / Will result in: 60 days is a dangerously brief window for complex international diplomacy. Because the timeline is extendable, this will almost certainly result in rolling extensions, leaving the “temporary” concessions granted in this MOU functioning as a semi-permanent status quo.

• JCPOA Comparison: The JCPOA took nearly two years of intense, highly technical negotiations to finalize. Setting a 60-day deadline for a broader deal (nuclear + regional war + $300B fund) is structurally unrealistic.

Item 4: Removal of U.S. Naval Blockade & Force Reduction

Original Text: 4 — Immediately upon the signing of this MOU, the United States of America will begin the removal of its naval blockade and any disturbances or impediments against the Islamic Republic of Iran, and will fully end the naval blockade within 30 days. During this period, the traffic of vessels will be in proportion to the numbers of pre-war traffic being restored by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States of America further undertakes to remove its forces from the proximity of the Islamic Republic of Iran within 30 days after the final deal.

• What it doesn’t accomplish / Will result in: This is a major, immediate, and irreversible U.S. concession. Ending a naval blockade within 30 days—before a final deal is signed—permanently forfeits U.S. military leverage. Re-imposing a blockade later if negotiations fail would be legally and logistically difficult.

• JCPOA Comparison: The JCPOA did not involve lifting military blockades or committing to U.S. troop withdrawals. U.S. military posture in the Persian Gulf remained entirely separate from nuclear compliance.

Item 5: Safe Passage & Strait of Hormuz Administration

Original Text: 5 — Upon the signing of this MOU, the Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge, for 60 days only, from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman and vice versa. The traffic of commercial vessels will immediately start, and considering the need for removing the technical and military obstacles, and demining by the Islamic Republic of Iran will be instated within 30 days. The Islamic Republic of Iran will conduct dialog with the Sultanate of Oman to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz in discussion with other Persian Gulf littoral states in line with the applicable international law and the sovereign rights of coastal states of the Strait of Hormuz.

• What it doesn’t accomplish / Will result in: Iran only guarantees free passage for 60 days. After that, it has the explicit right to alter the rules. Furthermore, inviting Iran and Oman to “define the future administration” of the Strait of Hormuz effectively legitimizes Iran’s claim to police a critical international choke point, bypassing standard international maritime law (UNCLOS).

• JCPOA Comparison: The JCPOA never touched maritime law, freedom of navigation, or the administration of the Strait of Hormuz.

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Item 6: $300 Billion Reconstruction Fund

Original Text: 6 — The United States of America undertakes with regional partners to develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least USD 300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The mechanism for the implementation of this plan will be finalized as part of a final deal within 60 days. All required licenses, waivers and permissions needed for the relevant financial transactions will be granted by the United States of America.

• What it doesn’t accomplish / Will result in: It binds the U.S. to “develop a plan” for a massive financial injection ($300B) without attaching any domestic political feasibility. It does not dictate where the money comes from (U.S. taxpayers vs. international partners) and will likely face insurmountable opposition in the U.S. Congress, threatening the viability of the whole MOU.

• JCPOA Comparison: The JCPOA provided zero reconstruction or development funds to Iran. It simply allowed Iran access to its own money by lifting sanctions.

Item 7: Schedule for Terminating Sanctions

Original Text: 7 — The United States of America undertakes to terminate all types of sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the United Nations Security Council resolutions, IAEA Board of Governors resolutions, and all unilateral US sanctions, primary and secondary, in an agreed upon schedule as part of the final deal. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America acknowledge the critical importance of the sanctions termination issue above mentioned, and expressed their intentions to immediately address these issues in the negotiations in order to achieve mutual agreement on them.

• What it doesn’t accomplish / Will result in: It kicks the entire schedule to future negotiations (”an agreed upon schedule as part of the final deal”) but notes that all types of sanctions are on the table. It completely fails to establish a “snapback” mechanism if Iran violates the terms later.

• JCPOA Comparison: The JCPOA featured a meticulously detailed, multi-year phase-out schedule (Implementation Day, Transition Day, Termination Day) and included a historic “snapback” mechanism (UNSC Resolution 2231) allowing the U.S. to unilaterally restore UN sanctions if Iran cheated. This MOU lacks that safety net.

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Item 8: Nuclear Procurement & Down-blending

Original Text: 8 — The Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran have agreed to resolve the disposition of stockpiled enriched material pursuant to a mechanism that will be mutually agreed upon in accordance with the schedule mentioned in paragraph seven, with the minimum methodology to be down blended on site under the supervision of the IAEA. The two parties also agreed to discuss the issue of enrichment and other mutually agreed matters related to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear needs, based on a satisfactory framework being agreed upon in the final deal. The final deal will confirm the provisions of this paragraph. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran acknowledge the critical importance of the nuclear issues above mentioned. They express their intention to immediately address these issues in the negotiations in order to achieve mutual agreement on them.

• What it doesn’t accomplish / Will result in: This is the weakest nuclear clause in the text. It uses the vague phrase “minimum methodology to be down blended on site” but fails to cap enrichment levels (e.g., 3.67%), ban advanced centrifuges, or seal underground facilities (like Fordow). It kicks the core framework of Iran’s nuclear limits down the road to be discussed later.

• JCPOA Comparison: The JCPOA was a technical masterpiece of restrictions. It strictly capped enrichment at 3.67%, limited the stockpile to 300kg, slashed centrifuge counts by two-thirds, converted Fordow into a physics center, and mandated a 20-year intensive IAEA inspection regime. This MOU relies mostly on vague promises.

Item 9: Maintaining the Nuclear Status Quo

Original Text: 9 — Pending the final deal, the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran agree to maintain the status quo. The Islamic Republic of Iran will maintain the current status quo of its nuclear program, and the United States of America will not impose any new sanctions and will not deploy additional forces in the region.

• What it doesn’t accomplish / Will result in: “Current status quo” freezes Iran’s program exactly where it is today. If Iran is already holding highly enriched fissile material (e.g., 60% or near-weapons grade), this item legitimizes them keeping that highly advanced baseline during the talks.

• JCPOA Comparison: The JCPOA forced Iran to drastically roll back its existing capabilities, shipping out 98% of its enriched uranium stockpile before receiving a dime of sanctions relief.

Item 10: Immediate U.S. Oil Waivers

Original Text: 10 — The United States of America undertakes that immediately upon the signing of this MOU and until the termination of sanctions, US Department of Treasury will issue waivers for the export of Iranian crude oil, petroleum products and derivatives, and all associated services, including banking transactions, insurances, transportation, etc.

• What it doesn’t accomplish / Will result in: The U.S. agrees to immediately permit the export of Iranian crude oil and provide full banking/insurance services prior to a final deal. This provides Iran with immediate, massive financial relief, vastly reducing their economic incentive to make tough concessions during the 60-day final deal negotiations.

• JCPOA Comparison: Under the JCPOA, oil sanctions were only lifted after the IAEA formally verified that Iran had dismantled its nuclear infrastructure (Implementation Day).

Item 11: Release of Frozen Assets

Original Text: 11 — The United States of America undertakes to make fully available for use the frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran upon the implementation of this MOU. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran will mutually agree on the procedures related to the release of these funds during negotiations. Such funds, whether retained in the original account or transferred, shall be made fully usable for payment to any ultimate beneficiary designated by the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States of America undertakes to issue all necessary licenses and authorizations accordingly.

• What it doesn’t accomplish / Will result in: It makes all restricted Iranian assets fully available immediately. Because the funds are designated “fully usable for payment to any ultimate beneficiary,” the U.S. loses the ability to track or restrict these funds to humanitarian goods (food/medicine), meaning they can be used for state or military expenditures.

• JCPOA Comparison: While the JCPOA unfroze tens of billions in Iranian assets, it did so only after structural nuclear rollbacks were completed, and many transactions remained bound to rigorous banking compliance channels.

Item 12: Executive Monitoring Mechanism

Original Text: 12 — The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran agree that an executive mechanism will be established to monitor the successful implementation of this MOU and the future compliance of the final deal.

• What it doesn’t accomplish / Will result in: It states a mechanism “will be established” but gives no details. Without explicit wording guaranteeing “anytime, anywhere” access for inspectors, this item provides no immediate verification utility.

• JCPOA Comparison: The JCPOA explicitly detailed the Joint Commission framework and granted the IAEA unprecedented access rights, including specific timelines to resolve access disputes within 24 days.

Item 13: Bifurcated Negotiation Strategy

Original Text: 13 — After signing this MOU, and subject to the beginning of the implementation of paragraphs 1, 4, 5, 10 and 11 of this MOU, and the continuing implementation of these measures, the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran will start negotiations regarding the final deal exclusively on the other paragraphs.

• What it doesn’t accomplish / Will result in: This clause isolates items 1, 4, 5, 10, and 11 as immediate prerequisites. Essentially, Iran receives its core objectives first (ceasefire, blockade lifted, oil waivers, frozen funds) just to start negotiating the final terms of the other pieces (like long-term nuclear caps and sanctions schedules). It strips the U.S. of nearly all transactional leverage.

• JCPOA Comparison: The JCPOA operated under the strict diplomatic principle that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.” No single benefit was paid out early.

Item 14: Binding UNSC Resolution

Original Text: 14 — The final deal will be endorsed by a binding UNSC resolution.

• What it doesn’t accomplish / Will result in: While a UNSC resolution makes the final deal part of international law, history (including the U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA in 2018) shows that domestic political shifts can still tank these agreements regardless of UN backing.

• JCPOA Comparison: Identical strategy. The JCPOA was codified under UNSC Resolution 2231 to give it international legal permanence, though it ultimately could not prevent a signatory from walking away.

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Ultimately, Lincoln Square wants our subscribers to understand the full depth of this MOU. We are deeply committed to the facts, and we believe it is our duty to inform disengaged Americans of the harsh truth: this agreement represents an absolute surrender by the President. Financially, this deal will cost us even more than what we already spent on the war, while severely weakening our national security. It positions the United States as weak on the global stage and leaves Iran significantly stronger.

We are incredibly grateful for your support as a paid subscriber and donor—you are the reason we can expose these facts. But democracy is not a one-time event; it requires us to continuously fuel the fight.

That is why we are asking you to consider an extra donation today to help us launch a new set of targeted graphic ads. This campaign is specifically designed to reach disengaged Americans and MAGA supporters in key red and swing states with info-graphics, showing them the true financial cost of the war, this amateur diplomacy, and the reality of this weak surrender.

Every $10 you contribute allows us to reach 1,000 Americans with these facts—bypassing the mainstream corporate media entirely. If you are in a position to help us amplify this message and protect our democracy ahead of November, please consider making another donation today.

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The Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Summit this month featured selfie stations, magenta smoke machines, and free Pilates classes. A hype squad waved signs in the aisles to get the young female crowd pumped before speakers hit the stage. Vendors sold Christian lip tints and bracelet stacks. Between breakout sessions, attendees posed for photos against backdrops designed to make the whole thing look like a Coachella fever dream.

And then a 20-year-old tradwife influencer named Savanna Faith Stone stepped up and told the self-dubbed “cute-servatives” assembled there that they don’t deserve the right to vote.

Yes, Stone believes the 19th Amendment was a mistake and endorses “household voting” where only the husband casts a ballot. If you’re single, gay, widowed, or your husband is incapacitated (or simply wrong about everything), too bad. No votes for you.

Of course this was a moment designed to rack up headlines. The audacity is the point. But it also can’t be ignored. Because over the last decade, we’ve watched once-fringe right-wing ideas get mainstreamed by MAGA with frightening velocity.

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Here’s the actual problem the right is trying to solve: the roughly 18-point gender gap in presidential elections.

This genuinely terrifies Republican strategists. But rather than alter their far-right agenda to persuade women at the ballot box, there’s another path more in MAGA are embracing out loud: just eliminate their votes.

And if you’re going to sell that Christian nationalist pitch — if you’re going to tell women to enthusiastically surrender the rights their foremothers fought decades for — you can’t send in a man in a suit to do it. You can’t send in a frumpy fundamentalist in a floor-length denim skirt. You need someone who looks like she belongs on The Real Housewives of Orange County.

The most effective opponents of women’s suffrage in the 19th century were women like Ida Tarbell and Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Married women, mothers, and proper ladies earnestly explained that politics would contaminate women’s natural purity, drag them out of their elevated domestic sphere, and ruin our great nation.

They lost that battle. But decades later, Phyllis Schlafly was a practicing attorney whose life’s work was derailing the Equal Rights Amendment.

The packaging is all that’s changed.

The women headlining the TPUSA Women’s Leadership Summit have freshly Botoxed faces, body-hugging dresses, and pricy hair extensions that are giving aspirational girlboss. The tradwife influencers all over TikTok urging you to lovingly submit to your husband are, ironically, their families’ breadwinners.

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Bill Maher and Stephen A. Smith have become two of the most reliable suppliers of what I have come to call the Conservative Alibi Machine. Whenever Republicans create a disaster, undermine democratic norms, excuse corruption, or wander face-first into yet another self-inflicted scandal, Maher and Smith show up like insurance adjusters determined to explain why Democrats are actually liable for the damage.

It is a remarkable business model. Republicans light the fire. Republicans pour gasoline on the fire. Republicans stand in front of the fire insisting it is actually a freedom bonfire. Then Maher and Smith arrive to explain that Democrats should have done a better job communicating with the flames. And, somehow, they always manage to collect the check.

I have written about both of these men before — Smith across three separate pieces that documented his Asymmetric Neutrality Syndrome, his motivated reasoning, and his role as the Conservative Alibi Machine’s most decorated practitioner, and Maher most recently last week, when he spent a segment mocking Trump’s Freedom 250 concert lineup — the Vanilla Ice, Milli Vanilli, Bret Michaels fever dream of a birthday party — and then turned around days later and scolded the very artists he’d just mocked for having the nerve to drop out once they realized what they’d signed up for. I thought that piece said everything that needed to be said about a man whose entire public persona is built on mistaking confidence for clarity.

Then D.L. Hughley started talking.

On a recent episode of his show Uncertain, Hughley delivered what might be the most efficient roast of both men I have ever heard. And what made it land so hard was not just what he said. It was who was saying it. D.L. attended Bill Maher’s 40th birthday party. They were close friends. He is not some media critic taking potshots from the cheap seats. He is a man who watched someone he actually knew become, in his words, “a decidedly different dude.” That changes the weight of the criticism. When D.L. Hughley calls Bill Maher out, it does not feel like punditry. It feels like someone reading the obituary of a friendship and wondering what happened to the guy he used to know.

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Then Hughley dropped a line so perfect that it practically ended the discussion before it began: “Bill Maher is “the white Stephen A. Smith.”

I am still laughing about it. Not just because it is funny, but because it explains so much.

Real Time has been on the air for more than two decades. Stephen A. Smith has been a national media figure for decades. Somehow these two spent years orbiting the same media universe without becoming attached at the hip. Then somebody finally put them in the same room and, apparently, nobody could stop it. Smith has now appeared on Real Time four times since January 2024.

Four times.

At this point, it feels less like a guest booking strategy and more like the television equivalent of two people matching on a dating app and moving in together three weeks later.

And once you see it, you cannot unsee it. You go back and watch those appearances and suddenly the similarities jump off the screen. The certainty. The self-regard. The conviction that they are the last two honest men left in a civilization overrun by cowards and idiots. Two men who pride themselves on speaking uncomfortable truths right up until someone says something uncomfortable about them.

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I had the honor of running the FBI Cleveland Field Office for four years during my Bureau career.

Last Thursday, agents from that same division executed a search warrant at the office of a group that tries to get more Ohioans registered to vote. According to a board member of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, agents seized computer files and documents from the racial justice and voting rights grassroots entity that’s been around for almost 20 years.

Agents also showed up at the homes of workers and volunteers and reportedly asked questions about voter fraud allegations. I don’t know what probable cause of criminal activity was included in the FBI’s affidavit for this search warrant, signed by a federal judge, but it better be damn good.

Maybe the Ohio allegations have merit; maybe they don’t. If some group is committing voter fraud on behalf of either party, they should be charged. Yet I’m concerned that this incident isn’t a one-off. Rather, it appears part of an increasing and seemingly organized effort to insert the federal government, from DOJ to DHS to the U.S. Postal Service, and even the Department of Defense, into the lead up toward the midterms in myriad ways that can suppress and intimidate voters, destroy trust in elections and outcomes, and tilt close calls toward the party of Trump.

Signs are pointing to plans for even more such efforts in a kind of whole-of-government approach to messing with the midterms. And when I say all government, I’m including developments that could place federal agents or even the military at polling places.

Ohio is in the throes of hotly-contested races for U.S. Senate (Democratic former Sen. Sherrod Brown vs. GOP Sen. Jon Husted) and for governor (Republican businessman Vivek Ramaswamy vs. Democratic Dr. Amy Acton). It’s no coincidence that federal agents, prosecutors and even MAGA sheriffs are also already at work in other states like Georgia, Arizona, and California that could see Democrats clobber the GOP in November.

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Here’s the thing about institutions that fold to authoritarianism: those who stay insist they’re doing so to preserve something of grave societal significance. And then you watch these institutions die anyway.

Scott Pelley was fired from 60 Minutes for saying, out loud, what everyone already knew: Bari Weiss is killing CBS’s journalistic integrity. He confirmed that she’s injecting right-wing politics into the broadcast and censoring solid investigative reporting. He accused Weiss of “murdering” the show during a contentious staff meeting and was fired the next day. That’s it. That was his offense. He told the truth about what was happening to his own show, and Paramount and CBS fired him for it.

I’ve been in journalism for a quarter-century. I’ve watched plenty of ethical failures in corporate, partisan, and nonprofit newsrooms. But there’s a specific kind of failure that happens when someone gets fired for telling the truth, and it’s not really about that person at all. It’s an indictment of the institution. Every time. No exceptions.

Believe me, I know.

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What happened next is the part that should actually worry you.

Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim didn’t walk. They stayed. Pelley’s firing left the show’s remaining correspondents “completely adrift,” according to a source close to the situation. They said they wanted to save the show. But as media critic Jennifer Schulze aptly put it: the show is already dead. It died the moment they decided that staying was worth more than standing up for a colleague who got fired for telling the truth.

I want to be clear about who we’re talking about here, because it matters. These aren’t editorial assistants or interns — twentysomethings at the start of their careers who’d be risking everything and couldn’t make rent if they got the ax.

Stahl, Whitaker, and Wertheim have spent decades as some of the most respected journalists in America. They’re millionaires. They have more power and more security than almost anyone in that building. If there was ever a moment for someone to use that power — to walk out, to make Paramount choose between 60 Minutes and Bari Weiss in full public view — this was it.

They didn’t. And the fact that they didn’t tells you everything about why David Ellison’s Skydance Media felt so confident doing a MAGA takeover of CBS News in the first place. They’d already sized up the resistance. They knew it was weak.

They were right.

This is the bet. This is the bet Donald Trump and MAGA make over and over again, and it keeps paying off. Institutions are weaker than you think. People’s backbones — their morality — are weaker than you think. And so things that used to be unthinkable become merely things that happened.

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Scott Kupor, the Director of the Office of Personnel Management, has explained why nearly every federal employee should sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement:

In much of the private sector, employees handling sensitive business or customer information are routinely required to sign confidentiality agreements, and the federal government should not be held to a lower standard.

Set aside the small problem that Kupor — previously a longtime executive at Andreessen Horowitz — does not work in the private sector anymore, and that the public sector has somewhat different normative expectations about transparency than a venture capital fund. There is another problem with his argument: venture capitalists themselves famously refuse to sign NDAs. They know what NDAs are and are not for. They are not, mostly, for protecting genuinely sensitive information.

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So what are NDAs for? NDAs are a tool of the powerful to protect themselves by threatening the less powerful. The private sector has used them so promiscuously and so abusively that they should be a warning for the public sector, not a model for it.

Many Americans first found out about NDAs when they learned that Harvey Weinstein used them systematically to hide his pattern of sexual abuse. When state governments restricted the use of NDAs, the type of venture capital-backed firms that Kupor supported started hiring about 8% fewer women per year. Without NDAs to cover patterns of gender discrimination or sexual harassment, the tech world decided to become even more of a boys club.

The proposed rule, would require federal employees to sign an agreement promising not to disclose “non-public, confidential, or proprietary information” or “any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material that is not currently publicly available and should not be disclosed under applicable law.” The administration insists the new policy merely codifies “current legal obligations.” If that were true, there would be no reason to write the rule!

As a reminder, all rules are subject to public comment, and the federal government has to read those comments. You can submit a comment on this new rule until June 26. Let them know how you feel! (Guidance on writing a public comment — which is super easy — can be found here).

The reason for the new rule is to substantively close off transparency in government. “Pre-decisional or deliberative material that is not currently publicly available” could describe almost every conversation a career employee has with a political appointee. Or internal memos, draft analyses, and the candid advice we have, until very recently, expected federal employees to give without fear. The vagueness is not a drafting flaw. It is the product. Federal employees won’t know what they can say.

Ray Limon, who previously worked at the Office of Personnel Management proposing the new rule wrote the following:

My former employer, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, frames this as simply documenting obligations that already exist. I don’t buy it…It’s a chilling mechanism. My concern is straightforward: language this sweeping will create confusion about what employees can and cannot lawfully disclose — and confusion is a powerful silencer, even when whistleblower protections technically remain on paper. It is the U.S. Office of Special Counsel - not OPM - that has statutory responsibility for enforcing NDA compliance and informing agencies of their obligations…This is one more measure in a sustained effort to tighten control over the federal workforce.

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Trump’s History of NDAs

We know what Trump’s NDAs are for because he has used them his whole career. The people Trump has compelled to sign NDAs are not the holders of valuable trade secrets. They are his ex-wives. Porn stars he wanted to hush up. The contestants on his television shows. His campaign staff. None of them were sitting on the proprietary formula for Trump Industries.¹

They were sitting on unflattering information about him.

Those Trump NDAs were also staggeringly broad. They placed no defined limit on what could or could not be disclosed; that was for Trump to decide, after the fact. They operated in perpetuity.

When a former female campaign officials accused Trump’s 2016 campaign of sexual harassment and sex discrimination, they were hit with massive counter-lawsuits for violating their NDAs, as well as an accompanying campaign of personal harassment. As one of those targeted put it, NDAs are:

representative of the levers of fear that this campaign and administration wield over people. And if this lever of these NDAs is lifted, it is significant not only for the direct effect it has on people who have signed it, but for a general environment of people who are afraid to speak out.

That is the lever the Trump administration now wants to impose across the federal government.

You Can’t Spell Scandal without NDA

The Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Lauren Harper said:

The proposal by the ‘most transparent administration in history’ that millions of federal employees sign a blanket NDA is not just absurd, it’s unnecessary and dangerously secretive…It comes at a time when agency watchdogs are sidelined, FOIA officials are being fired, and leaks to the press — which are the sole reason the public knows about so much of this administration’s misconduct — are being demonized and prosecuted…Its sole intent would be to protect the administration from the leak of embarrassing, politically damaging, or unlawful information.

Go to any credible news site today. There will be a story about wrongdoing in the Trump administration, most of it extraordinary in terms of its scale and lack of precedence. Many of these stories are about abuses of power, or the looting of the treasury that the Trump administration would prefer there be little coverage of in order to rob opposition of their most tool: the information to demand accountability.

For example, the Trump families that their sudden business success with companies that have contracts with the government reflect favoritism. But reporting shows just how much cronyism is occurring.

Or internal documents show that the administration is quietly punishing specific companies, like universities, by withholding the money for grants that have been awarded. There is no policy announcement, but the policy is happening.

If it were up to the Trump administration you would never read these stories. And the new NDAs are designed to stop these stories from being told. Because their goal is to kill oversight and accountability. They know that principled public servants are not revealing confidential information that creates national security risks, but will expose wrongdoing that is running rampant in this administration. So they want to gag them in an effort to kill one of our few remaining mechanisms of oversight.

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.The At-Will Problem

The Trump White House used NDAs in the first term for senior political appointees. The second term has produced its own examples, including in the Department of Defense and for employees overseeing firings at the Department of Veterans Affairs. None of that was the same as what is being proposed now. This is the first serious attempt to draw a single veil of secrecy across the entire federal workforce.

What is also different now is that federal employees, after the dismantling of civil service protections, are effectively at-will, meaning they can be fired on the whim of Trump appointees. An accusation of violating the NDS provides an easy pretext for firing an employee and then setting government lawyers upon them.

This matters. For example, Trump lost his lawsuit against former White House official Omarosa Manigault Newman (still feels weird saying that) for violating her NDA, and had to pay her $1.3 million in legal fees. If federal lawyers are the ones prosecuting federal employees, he can treat them as a free law firm, knowing there is no risk on his end. All of the risk is on the federal employee.

That changes what the NDA is. It is not a contract between equals. It is a loyalty oath, enforced with the full weight of federal prosecutorial power, demanded of people who already swore a different oath — to the Constitution. That older oath, the one we asked them to take, said they serve us. The new agreement says they serve Trump. It is part of Trump’s pattern of imposing loyalty tests into his personalist regime.

Max Stier, the President of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Partnership for Public Service said in a statement:

Federal employees already know what they can and cannot disclose to the public. Those obligations are written into law, spelled out in regulation and reinforced through mandatory ethics and disclosure trainings…A blanket, governmentwide NDA does little to meet any pressing need. It seems more intended to make ethical employees think twice before coming forward and to chill the lawful disclosures that hold government accountable. When that happens, the public knows even less about how their government works and how their tax dollars are being spent.

Culture of Governmental Secrecy and Coverups

This is, clearly, more bad news for federal employees whose morale is already at basement levels. But you should care about this even if you are not a public servant, or a journalist looking for a scoop, because the accountability of the federal government depends upon the candor this rule is designed to extinguish.

Federal employee confidence that they could report misconduct already dropped from about 72% in 2024 to 22.5% in 2025. Now it will be even lower. The NDAs will protect wrongdoing from exposure.

The survey that collected these numbers featured employees describing a new culture of secrecy that the NDAs will expand. An IRS employee said:

I’ll be honest, [at the] political level, I have minimal confidence that if we reported anything, any misbehavior, that it would be taken care of. In fact, quite honestly, I would fear retribution if we reported an ethical violation of a political level person in the IRS. I would do it anonymously. I’d probably do it through the union. I would not do it through the normal channels.

The administration has already told staff not to write things down, in apparent tension with the Federal Records Act. It has normalized the use of Signal — and not only by Pete Hegseth — to keep government business off the books. At the same time, it is compelling federal workers to install a Trump propaganda app on their phones, a measure that will almost certainly create more security exposure than the NDAs purport to prevent.

Meanwhile, the administration itself leaks promiscuously when leaks serve its narrative. The objective is not less disclosure. It is asymmetric disclosure, privileging Trump’s handpicked leakers, punishing everyone else. The double standards don’t end there. The Trump administration has also encouraged a culture of snitching. Right wing social media posters can get federal employees they dislike fired, and federal employees are told to report any use of DEI or anti-Christian bias. It’s secrecy for me, snitching for thee.

The existing rules already restrict federal employees from disclosing classified information and information with national security implications. Those rules have teeth. While the order says it exempts legally whistleblower complaints about waste, fraud, or abuse, it is worth noting the administration is already weakening whistleblower protections and the NDA policy will further chill such speech. To choose to be a whistleblower means your career in government is over and you will be the subject of Trump-driven harassment, creating too high a price for most employees. Even employees who exit but want to draw attention to wrongdoing with some sort of public statement must now worry that they will face a lawsuit.

There is always a debate about what are the appropriate limits of government employees communicating non-public information to the public. For every President, the interest is in withholding information, but in many cases there is a public interest in disclosing it. That public interest becomes a lot stronger in an environment of depleted accountability and mass wrongdoing. That is the environment we have right now. The Trump administration routinely lies about its actions, and has neutered traditional accountability figures like Inspector Generals and General Counsels. It appears to be breaking laws and engaging in massive corruption, but Congress is not investigating.

In this context, silencing public employee voice removes one of the last remaining accountability mechanisms we have.

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Moynihan (the Other One) Was Right

One of the top two Moynihans of all time — Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan — wrote about exactly this drift towards the end of his career. In Secrecy: The American Experience, he argued that the American state’s tendency toward classification was a sign not of strength but of fear, a bad sign for our democracy.

Open governments win arguments and self-correct. Closed governments make bad decisions and then cover them up. Does that sound like any administration you might know?

“Secrecy,” he wrote, “is for losers.”

A federal NDA covering “any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material that is not currently publicly available” is a confession. It says: we do not believe what we are doing can survive being seen. It says: we are afraid of our own employees. It says: the employee’s loyalty must be to the King, not the constitution.

¹ Don’t tell anyone, but here is the proprietary formula for Trump’s success: Carnival barking self-promotion + spray tan + corruption.

NOTE: We originally shared this message with a small circle of supporters on Sunday, June 14th. The responses were so overwhelming that we knew it couldn’t stay behind closed doors. We are republishing it today because the mission to restore the American mind cannot wait, and the time to reach more of you is right now.

First and foremost, thank you. Because you are a subscriber or a donor to Lincoln Square, we are on the front lines of the war for the American mind. Your paid subscription is the reason we can bypass the mainstream media filters, call out authoritarian overreach, and deliver unvarnished truths directly to those who need to hear it most.

But as we look around our communities this Flag Day, it is profoundly sobering to witness the sacred symbols of our republic reduced to cheap props for personal grievances and corporate counter-culture. We find ourselves at a crossroads that our ancestors would have recognized with a collective shudder. The American flag hasn’t just been commercialized; it has been hijacked by a movement that views checks and balances as inconveniences and our institutions as obstacles to a singular, corrupt will.

The Stars and Stripes were never meant to be a brand logo for an autocrat or a shield for white supremacy. It is a sacred trust. Historically, that flag represented our collective greatness—it was the beacon that welcomed generations of immigrants passing the Statue of Liberty, the standard carried into battle to defeat fascism, and the emblem of freedom that accompanied humanity to the surface of the moon. It belongs to the civil rights marchers who carried it across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to demand the basic promises of democracy.

Today, that grand history is under siege by a MAGA movement that has twisted the flag into a symbol of exclusion, grievance, and fear.

We watch with disgust as our national symbol is cheapened by the likes of Kid Rock wearing it like a costume while frolicking with RFK Jr., or draped over the shoulders of racist rioters and extremists who stand against everything the flag actually represents. Even turning the White House into a backdrop for a raucous UFC fight night is a profound disgrace to the flag and the dignity it demands, reducing the citadel of our democracy into a cheap octagon for toxic spectacle. They treat patriotism like a country club membership meant only for those who look like them, talk like them, and swear fealty to a singular, corrupt political figure.

But waving a flag doesn’t make you a patriot.

True patriotism is not blind obedience to a leader; it is an unyielding commitment to our democratic principles. True patriots do not demand conformity; they defend the right to dissent. They protect free speech, uphold the rule of law, and believe in the vision of an America that is open to the oppressed and persecuted of all nations.

We in the pro-democracy movement are the real patriots. And because of your support, we are the ones fighting to prove it.

Why We Are Asking Our Dedicated Core to Do a Little More

Because you already invest in our mission, you know that admiration for the truth isn’t the same as defending it. You have been running with us on the front lines. But as we head toward the crucial 2026 midterms, we are at a strategic tipping point.

We don’t need to change your mind—you already see the crisis clearly. We need to scale our reach to the millions of disengaged voters who have tuned out of the political process entirely because they are exhausted by the noise. To do that, we are expanding our Rapid Response Graphics & Media Staff to fight a modern war of information with modern tools.

We aren’t trying to fight their billions of dollars of dark money with old-guard, multi-paragraph lectures. Through highly targeted visual media—short-form graphics and high-impact, viral memes—our expanded rapid-response team will inject the unvarnished truth directly into the feeds of independent and disengaged voters in the exact battleground states where this election will be decided.

As a current stakeholder in Lincoln Square, we are asking you to make an extra, one-time or recurring investment today to help us fund this staff expansion. The math behind our visual counter-offensive is simple, transparent, and devastatingly effective:

• An extra $10 gift reaches 1,000 disengaged voters with hard-hitting, pro-democracy facts and visual hooks.

• An extra $50 gift puts the real meaning of the flag in front of 5,000 Americans who are currently trapped in media echo chambers.

• An extra $100 investment delivers a massive counter-punch to far-right propaganda, educating 10,000 citizens before they head to the ballot box.

Scale Pro-Democracy Messaging: Help Fund the Rapid Response Team Today

The MAGA movement wants the world to believe that the flag belongs to them. We are here to remind everyone that the flag belongs to the Constitution, and the Constitution belongs to “We the People.”

The cavalry isn’t coming from the cable networks or the old-guard papers. They treat an assault on our institutions like just another ‘both sides’ horse race. They won’t give people the raw facts required to demand better, and they certainly won’t empower citizens to rise up against the rot. That is our job. And we can only hire the talented creators, designers, and editors needed to scale this fight if our strongest believers stand with us to fund them.

Thank you for your unmatched loyalty, your ongoing support, and for being the true patriots this country needs.

Please consider doing just a little bit more today.

Donate to Directly Defend Democracy

Our July Campaign: Reclaiming the 250th Anniversary of America

To show you exactly how your additional fundraising dollars will be deployed, here is the strategic visual messaging calendar our expanding graphics team has mapped out for July 2026 as the nation builds toward the 250th anniversary of America’s founding.

We will be flooding social platforms with sharp, scannable graphics built around three distinct phases to actively rescue the concept of patriotism from authoritarianism:

Phase 1 (July 1–July 4): Reclaiming the Semiquincentennial

• The Visual Theme: High-contrast splits showing historical patriots (the civil rights marchers, the suffragettes, WWII veterans) holding the Stars and Stripes on one side, contrasted against modern partisan spectacles on the other.

• The Core Meme: “Patriotism is loyalty to the ideals of 1776, not loyalty to a politician in 2026.”

• Target Audience: Moderate and disengaged voters who feel alienated by aggressive partisan flag-waving.

Phase 2 (July 5–July 15): The Free Speech & Dissent Campaign

• The Visual Theme: Bold, text-forward graphics featuring quotes on the necessity of structural dissent.

• The Core Meme: “A true patriot defends your right to speak, write, and vote—even if they disagree with you. Authoritarians demand silence; Patriots demand free speech.”

• Target Audience: Younger, platform-native independent voters who prioritize civil liberties but feel politically homeless.

Phase 3 (July 16–July 31): Restoring the Honor of the Flag

• The Visual Theme: Infographics breaking down the true metric of American greatness: immigration, innovation, equality, and systemic justice, using the flag as a unifying background rather than an exclusionary weapon.

• The Core Meme: “The flag didn’t build a wall; it welcomed the world. Reclaim the flag.”

Help us build the team. Scale your support to reach thousands more voters today.

This is our moment to draw a line in the sand. When we look back at the 250th anniversary of this great experiment, let it be said that we didn’t sit quietly while our national inheritance was bartered away for cheap applause and autocracy. Let it be said that the true patriots of this country stood up, reclaimed our symbols, and used the unyielding power of the truth to wake up a nation. The flag doesn’t belong to the loudest bullies in the room—it belongs to everyone who fights for a more just, free, and perfect union.

Thank you for standing in the breach with us, for funding the front lines of this information war, and for proving that when democracy is under siege, “We the People” will always show up to defend it.

Let’s win this fight, together. Please donate today.

The Lincoln Square Team

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During the wee hours of the morning on Saturday, in compliance with court orders and having run out their capacity for delay, the government removed the illegal graffiti of Donald Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center.

Unlike their cruel ICE invasions in our cities, they performed this removal in secret, having built a set of screens to save the man himself the public humiliation of seeing his name come down like a Saddam statue.

So what do we do with the pile of letters:

Mr Odd Jut Plan

Darn Dump Jolt

Darn Dolt Jump

PM Don Jut Lard

Told Rand Jump

I’m pretty good with anagrams, but I cannot find a really useful repurposing of these letters. When they spell Donald J. Trump, they aren’t good either. So I believe we should throw them away.

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Now the stooges that Trump installed on the Kennedy Center Board changed the institution’s bylaws to say that the board must strip all funding from the Kennedy Center unless Trump’s name stays on the building. That sure sounds like trustee malfeasance. What’s next? A directive that any money donated to that institution go instead to a new Trump grift masquerading as an arts organization?

That is, after all, what happened with the money Congress appropriated to celebrate our 250^th birthday. They set up an organization called American 250. It was bipartisan and meant to bring us together. Forget that. Trump set up Freedom 250 and transferred the money. The result?

He built his claw on the White House lawn for his MMA match. Tickets are being sold at exorbitant prices to ass-kissers and oligarchs. The event is not open to the American public. It will be streamed on Paramount Plus — the network owned by his media allies, the Ellisons, and it requires a paid subscription.

So, there you have it. Donald Trump’s idea of a celebration of our great anniversary is an event not open to the public, where funds are diverted to his friends and allies, and to companies where he is a shareholder. They will be shown in images linked to our national monuments, as if they are the real America.

What do we get? We get to see gold-painted horses outside the Lincoln Memorial.

All of his spectacle and all of his gold paint cannot hide the truth.

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Start with Iran, where a deal, now, is finally taking shape. That deal reflects the reality that Donald Trump lost his war. Iran will be far better off than before it began. The entire world will be worse off because of it. And America has not only lost the trust of its allies and friends; it has also lost the credibility to check its adversaries.

Next up is Europe where Donald Trump switched sides in the Ukraine war, promising to impose a Russian peace on day one, but forgetting that Ukraine has a say in its own future. Shouting, “you don’t have the cards,” Trump tried to bully Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to fall in line. He didn’t. Now, with help from Europe Ukraine is pushing back against Russia and winning.

Setting aside, for a moment, that Trump chose a cruel dictatorship over an inchoate democracy, that he chose a military aggressor over a country trying to preserve its borders, that he chose to abandon the idea of an international rules based order, Trump’s decisions mean the free world has moved on without us. It means America is, at this moment, irrelevant to the progress of freedom.

But as he also proved in Iran, we are not irrelevant when it comes to wanton destruction, and the empowerment of bad actors around the world.

One reason he got all of this so catastrophically wrong is that our entire national security apparatus has turned inward as he deploys it against Americans who stand against him. Remember that last September he directed his government to “investigate, prosecute, and disrupt” a wide range of organizations he accused of being Antifa. The first fruits of that directive include the corrupt indictments of James Comey and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

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Last week, instead of protecting us from real threats, Kash Patel’s agents raided the offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, they chased down its board members, they confiscated phones and laptops. The organization encourages people to register to vote, but in Trump’s America that’s a crime.

And then there’s Elon Musk. I actually read the prospectus for the IPO of Space X. I recommend it to anyone heading the beach. It is a great science fiction read. The company aims “to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multi-planetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.”

Its value is based on three pillars. Space, connectivity, and AI. The company’s AI platform is Grok. About that, they say, “Grok’s deep integration with X enables freshness, relevance, and contextual awareness that we believe is a competitive differentiator. This direct, real-time access to the information and human discourse on X enhances Grok’s truth-seeking capabilities by grounding outputs in up-to-date knowledge and diverse viewpoints.”

Have you been on X lately? The world’s moneymen have just bet trillions on an AI system trained on billions of hate-filled and pornographic posts. This is their idea of truth. This is the consciousness they want to take to the stars.

Meanwhile back on planet earth, where prices continue to climb, where the world no longer benefits from steadying influence of our great democracy, where a madman celebrates our great birthday in a publicly-funded, private party that desecrates our national monuments, it’s at least a nice first step to see his name in the trash pile.

Missed a show this week? The news is moving fast, but we’ve got you covered. Here are five essential Lincoln Square clips featuring the week's sharpest analysis and clearest warnings. Check out our weekly watchlist to get the highlights, cut through the chaos, and stay active in the fight for democracy.

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1. This Isn't a Blue Wave. It's Something Bigger | Strategy Session with Rick Wilson and Joe Trippi

Joe Trippi argues that 2026 isn't shaping up to be a traditional Democratic wave election. Instead, he sees a broader "change wave" fueled by economic frustration, collapsing Republican turnout, and voters demanding new leadership.

Rick Wilson and Joe break down what they're seeing in Iowa, Texas, Florida, and beyond—and why they believe Washington insiders are underestimating what's happening on the ground.

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2. Can Trump Be Removed before 2029? | Six Questions with Steven Beschloss & George Conway

George Conway tells Steven Beschloss that Trump’s removal before 2029 is possible, but Democrats must stop treating the crisis like ordinary politics. Conway, who’s running for Congress in New York, argues that Trump’s corruption, lawlessness, and damage to affordability are all connected — and that Democrats need to fight harder.

3. Congressman Jim Himes Has a Fix for FISA 702 | The Frank FIgliuzzi Show

Congressman Jim Himes joins Frank Figliuzzi to explain what happens if FISA 702 expires, why the intelligence program matters, and how a new court safeguard could protect Americans while preserving critical national security tools.

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4. Ukraine Is Winning and Putin Knows It | Stuart Stevens and Simon Rosenberg

Stuart Stevens and Simon Rosenberg have one of the most personal and powerful conversations we've heard on Ukraine. Drawing on his firsthand experience in the region over the last few weeks, Stuart explains why Ukraine continues to resist Putin, why the country is inspiring a generation, and why history may judge America's response harshly.

5. Trump’s Intelligence Takeover Is a Five Alarm Fire | Anchor Watch

Stephen Cash of tells retired Navy Commander Bobby Jones why Trump’s acting DNI appointment is a “15 out of 10” concern. From bypassing congressional oversight to turning America’s intelligence tools inward, Cash warns that Trump’s intelligence takeover is already a five alarm fire.

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That’s this week’s ICYMI Watchlist. Watch, share, and send these clips to someone who needs to understand what’s really happening right now. And before you go, make sure you’re subscribed to Lincoln Square on YouTube so you don’t miss the next round of conversations, warnings, and hard truths.

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As Joe Trippi’s first guest, Gilberto Ocañas, can attest, there’s a lot going on in the Lone Star State in the midterms.

Ocañas is a veteran of four presidential campaigns and one of the first Latinos to run statewide campaigns in Texas. He’s built a trusted network spanning political and business leaders. Including our own Joe Trippi.

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In a year when Texas Democrats are seeing openings, while Republicans see divisions with the polarizing presence of Ken Paxton at the top of the ticket, Carlos Sanchez emerges as a uniquely positioned voice from the heart of the Lone Star State.

As the former public affairs director for Hidalgo County, Sanchez has seen firsthand the complexities facing Democrats in a region where Biden won by 17 points in 2020 after Clinton’s commanding 40-point margin in 2016.

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Harvey Kronberg, who publishes Quorum Report, one of the definitive publications about Texas politics, has been covering the Lone Star state for years.

With the primaries now in the rearview, Kronberg spoke with Joe Trippi for another edition of On The Ground about the latest polling and why the GOP’s vice grip on Texas may be over.

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In the final episode of On the Ground from the Lone Star State, Joe Trippi welcomed Jasper Scherer from the Texas Tribune. Scherer discussed the optimism stirring in Texas Dems and if James Talarico is for real.

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Whenever I can, I escape to America’s national parks and national forests. I’ve hiked more than 10,000 solo miles across four continents, summited more than 100 mountains, and backpacked legs of the Appalachian, Pacific Crest, and Continental Divide trails. I’ve slept under redwoods, woken to deer licking my laundry, and stumbled across waterfalls that no one else seemed to know existed.

I’ve always agreed with Ken Burns that our national parks are America’s greatest idea.

Which is exactly why I’m asking you not to go today.

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The National Park Service will waive entrance fees today, June 14 — Donald Trump’s 80th birthday. The administration is marketing this as a gift to the American people. It’s not. It is the latest installment in a systematic effort to literally remake this country in one man’s image.

Think about what Trump has done to deface the symbols and institutions that belong to all of us. His face is now on the National Parks Pass — gallingly placed alongside the father of our country, George Washington. Trump’s signature is going on our currency. His face may soon follow. He’s tearing up the White House lawn to build a ballroom and a UFC fighting cage for his birthday celebration. He’s proposed a military-style arch to be built in his honor.

He has desecrated our nation and now he wants to put his name on everything that’s left standing.

And let’s not forget that the administration removed Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth from the free admission calendar. Both of those days — among the most significant civil rights observances in America — were on the list last year. They’re gone now. In their place is Dear Leader’s birthday, which the Interior Department has rebranded as one of its new “patriotic fee-free days.”

“The raw & rank racism here stinks to high heaven,” wrote Cornell William Brooks, a former NAACP president and Harvard Kennedy School professor. He’s right.

Even though times are tough and a free trip to our public lands may sound appealing — don’t. Don’t participate in this. Don’t let your presence be used as evidence that Americans are celebrating his birthday at the public lands his administration is actively trying to destroy.

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The weekend’s UFC fight in honor of the Emperor Donald’s birthday is about more than his obsessive love for big, powerful men, men with tears in their eyes saying, “Mr. President, sir, would you like to touch my rock-solid abs?”

It’s about the fall of Rome, and that of America.

The decline of Rome didn’t begin when the Goths crossed the frontier or rival nations nibbled the edges of the Empire. It began when the Republic died, and Emperors with boundless self-regard and poor impulse control adopted theatrical personas and were told they were gods, not men.

The great crisis of Rome wasn’t merely military weakness, economic collapse, or political corruption. Those were symptoms of a deeper and more pernicious disease. The ruling class lost faith in the institutions that had built the Republic and discovered something far more intoxicating: spectacle and corruption.

When governing a far-flung empire became difficult, performance became easier. When problems became unsolvable, distractions became the irresistible tool to settle the restive plebs. If everyone was corrupt, from the Emperor on down, money set the terms of power.

And when citizens grew anxious about the future, emperors offered them the now-cliched narcotic known throughout in political history: bread and circuses.

This week, America gets its own glimpse of the Colosseum, with less blood but with the requisite mad emperor, his gravid belly straining this corset, slathered in makeup, struggling with his arousal at the edge of the arena, leering at oily, well-hewn men engaged in a pantomime he conflates with manhood and virility.

As headlines pile up with stories of wretched corruption, deep incompetence, economic malpractice, and a foreign policy that swings between delusion and destruction, the White House embraced a spectacle better suited to ancient Rome than a modern constitutional republic.

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I have written before that MAGA is not simply a political movement but a cultish one, complete with loyalty tests, identity fusion, and the systematic punishment of independent thought. I have written about the moments when members begin waking up from the spell. I have written about Harvard lawyers and Yale graduates standing at podiums to defend a man who has never demonstrated the intellectual curiosity of a curious ninth-grader.

And whenever I make that argument, the responses from the right come with a particular brand of indignation that I have come to recognize immediately. How dare you. These people are educated. They have degrees. They went to good schools. Some of them graduated at the top of their class. Who are you to question their judgment? They are entitled to change their minds, and frankly, your arrogance in suggesting otherwise says more about you than it does about them. And honestly, I understand the instinct. Most of us like to believe that education provides at least some protection against manipulation, that a diploma functions as a kind of psychological vaccine against blind devotion. It is a comforting theory. The problem is that history keeps ruining it.

So today, I am going to be very fair. I am going to take the ‘but they’re educated’ defense and treat it with the full seriousness it deserves. And by the time we’re done, the people making that argument are going to wish I had just kept being unfair.

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Because before we ever get to Lindsey Graham or Marco Rubio or Mike Johnson or Megyn Kelly, we need to talk about what history has already told us—loudly, repeatedly, and with devastating specificity—about the relationship between advanced degrees and cult membership. Spoiler: the diploma doesn’t make you immune. If it did, the world’s cult leaders would have spent the last century recruiting exclusively from community theater groups and Facebook comment sections. Instead, they have spent an awful lot of time collecting doctors, lawyers, scientists, professors, and engineers. In some cases, the credential doesn’t protect you from the cult. It makes you more useful to it.

Let’s start with something everybody understands, because this piece is built on a foundation that lives outside of politics entirely. We have all known someone brilliant — genuinely, certifiably smart — who stayed in a relationship that was destroying them. Someone with a graduate degree, a sharp mind, a successful career, who kept going back to a partner who lied to them, manipulated them, humiliated them, and isolated them from the people who loved them. And when we tried to intervene, they had an explanation for everything. They had rationalized every red flag into something manageable. Because that is what intelligent people do — they are exceptionally good at constructing arguments for the conclusions they have already reached emotionally.

The abusive relationship and the cult operate on identical infrastructure. Manufactured dependency. Isolation from outside voices. The gradual erosion of independent judgment until the relationship becomes the primary source of identity and validation. And the thing that pulls a smart person into both is not stupidity. It is need. An abusive partner, like a cult leader, is almost always fulfilling something — relevance, belonging, protection, status, purpose — that is not being fulfilled anywhere else. The intelligence of the person being drawn in does not protect them from that need. It just means they can build a more elaborate internal architecture to justify staying.

Keep that in your pocket. We’re going to need it.

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I want to talk to the Hillary Clinton voters. The Kamala Harris voters. The wine moms. The women who flooded into politics after 2016, knocking on doors, making calls, showing up and doing the work because they believed the Democratic Party was actually different.

We were right about everything.

We said it mattered that two dozen women accused Donald Trum…

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I want to tell you about the week I finally accepted something I had been refusing to say out loud. It was not a single moment. It was a collision of moments, arriving one after another like the universe was trying to make sure I got the point.

It started with the California primaries. I live in this state. I teach in this state. And I had been genuinely looking forward to the general election debates that a competitive California cycle could produce—a substantive fight over the governor’s race between two people with real competing visions for how to address the housing crisis, water infrastructure, wildfire response, and the long-term economic pressures reshaping this state. I wanted to watch a Los Angeles mayoral debate where two serious candidates argued about what this city actually needs from its next mayor—about homelessness policy grounded in evidence, about how you rebuild trust with a Fire Department after a disaster that exposed the city’s institutional failures in real time, about what a functional Los Angeles looks like in 2030. That is the debate I wanted. Those are the stakes I wanted argued.

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Instead, I was looking at who was emerging from the primary field and realizing that Karen Bass—a former congresswoman, a former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, a sitting mayor who inherited a city on fire and stayed on the job—was on the verge of sharing debate stage with Spencer Pratt. Yes, that Spencer Pratt. The dork from The Hills. The one whose entire theory of governance is equal parts crystal energy and ambient grievance. This nightmare was averted by Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman overtaking Pratt in the vote count.

Now I wasn’t opposed to watching Karen Bass dismantle a reality television personality on a debate stage—that would be its own form of civic entertainment—but I actually want to see a serious general election debate about what Los Angeles needs from its next mayor. I want the fight over homelessness policy, wildfire recovery, and what a functional city looks like in 2030. That is the debate this moment deserves. Spencer Pratt debating Karen Bass would have been the debate this moment gets instead, which is a sentence that tells you everything you need to know about where we are. And in the governor’s race, the serious candidates would eventually have to contend with Steve Hilton, a man whose policy depth rivals a Substack comment section on a bad day. The substantive general election debates I wanted were not cancelled. They were contaminated upstream, before they could happen, by a primary process that has no mechanism for filtering out people who are running for office the same way they would launch a podcast—because the attention is the point and the governance is incidental. I stared at this and felt something shift. Not surprise. Something worse than surprise. Recognition.

Then the next day I watched a clip of Laura Ingraham interviewing Niger Innis of CORE—the Congress of Racial Equality—on Fox News. Ingraham had Innis on to deliver the good news: Black Americans are thriving under Donald Trump’s second non-consecutive term, and the data proves it. Innis obliged enthusiastically, citing statistics from what he called “The Joint Center for Economic and Policy Research.” Ingraham smiled the smile of a woman who had finally located the one witness she needed for a trial she had already decided the outcome of. There was only one problem. The organization is called The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. Political first. Economic second. Not Research at the end. He got the name of the institution he was weaponizing wrong. On national television. While attempting to lecture the country about economic data. It is generally helpful to know the name of the organization before citing it as proof that you are right. Ingraham, meanwhile, appeared completely unbothered by this development, grinning like a woman who had just found the receipt, even though the receipt was misspelled and written in crayon.

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Eighty-two years ago, Allied troops charged into the surf at Normandy. Thousands died, but their legacy, however tenuous, lives on — of stopping fascism, of saving democracy, of preserving the idea that free nations could endure.

This past Saturday, in a small parish in Battle Creek, Michigan, we buried Joe Schwarz. During one of our first interviews, he told me one of his formative memories was hearing the bells ring out for D-Day when he was just six years old. As the son of veterans, he was taught early on: You are here to serve.

And he did.

But you probably don’t know his name. That’s part of the point.

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Joe Schwarz served one term in the United States Congress, representing a mid-Michigan district from 2005 to 2007. He was a surgeon, Vietnam veteran, and former CIA operative who did missions in North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to locate and liberate American prisoners of war. He was the mayor of Battle Creek. He was a state senator. He was a proud, outspoken moderate Republican who voted his conscience and lost his seat because of it.

He touched the lives of thousands of patients he treated and politicians he served with from both parties. His eulogies were delivered by former Republican Governor John Engler — a dear friend and colleague who sparred with him more than once — and current Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, one of the many public servants he mentored during his long career.

That’s not something you often see these days.

The Last One Standing

When Joe Schwarz entered Congress in 2004, he was already something of a relic. (He would often wryly refer to himself as a Wooly Mammoth). The physician was pro-choice in a party that had spent a generation purging those who failed purity tests from its ranks. He believed in governance, in expertise, in the kind of sober, unglamorous public service that doesn’t trend on social media because it was never designed to.

In 2006, Republicans who controlled the U.S. House put up a vote on a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, engineered as a political weapon for the midterms. Everyone told Schwarz that voting yes could help him keep his seat in a tough GOP primary.

He voted no.

He lost to Tim Walberg, a far-right preacher who has since served in Congress for nearly 20 years and become one of Trump’s most reliable foot soldiers. The contrast doesn’t need elaboration (although I’ve done so many times).

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MACKINAC ISLAND — U.S. Sen. Gary Peters (D-Michigan) has spent almost two decades in Congress, passing legislation across party lines and keeping his head down when politics got ugly. Now, in the final months of his Senate career, he’s in a different mode.

The Iran war. A wide-open Senate primary to replace him. A Republican Party he says has abandoned a…

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There is a particular kind of absurdist theater that happens when a man who has spent his life surrounded by people paid to nod and agree with him suddenly collides with journalism.

Under a metal roof booming from a summer storm on a Wisconsin farm, Kristen Welker conducted that experiment in real time.

The results were not a triumph of journalism so much as a clinical observation of a figure in steep decline as a President, as a leader of a party, and as a man. The tantrum was pathetic, juvenile, and politically poisonous.

By the end, the leader of the free world stormed off the set, spitting mad and ranting like an escaped mental patient trying to convince the EMTs that aliens had implanted computer chips in his rectum.

Trump screeched like a cut hog, calling Welker crooked, stupid, and finally…“darling,” and fled into the rain like a man who’d just remembered he left the stove on.

Let’s begin with the lies, because there were so many they formed a kind of weather system of their own.

Start with the one he loves most, the one he returns to like a dog to a familiar patch of political vomit: the 2020 election. Welker, doing the thing journalists are supposed to do, asked for evidence. What she got was a man insisting “there’s more evidence than ever presented,” which is a sentence that eats itself.

You, dear readers, know this a titanic mountain of Trumpian lies.

There is no evidence. There has never been evidence. Sixty-odd courts, dozens of them staffed by his own appointees, looked for it and found nothing.

But watch how he pivots, because this is the tell: cornered on 2020, he leaps immediately to California, where Republicans are “dropping fast” in a slow count because that is, factually, how California counts votes.

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As President Trump intends to surge an additional 1,500 national guard troops into the nation’s Capitol this summer, a new comprehensive study reveals his strategy didn’t have the impact on crime that he claims.

Trump’s summer of soldiers will result in a total army of 5,000 troops patrolling Washington, D.C., with minimal proof that the cost, methodology, and troubling precedent is worth the effort. To the contrary, the data and related analysis by the nonpartisan Niskanen Center think tank shows the ongoing deployments have barely made a dent in violent crime.

Trump’s on-going troop deployment did seem to reduce petty property crimes by less than a quarter, but crime in Washington, including robberies, had already hit a 30-year low, and was already on a downward trend before Trump even came back into office. This raises serious doubts about how much the petty crime decline could be attributed to the deployment. Importantly, the study concluded there was virtually no impact on violence, and certainly not the kind of cost-benefit analysis that merits doubling down on the number of men and women in camouflage on the streets of our capital city.

The feds say they will use the additional troops to help battle criminal activity, violence, and trafficking of illegal drugs and guns, yet evidence to date shows no connection between guard patrols and those systemic challenges. Authorities also assert the troops will help deal with the growing challenge of large, disorderly teen gatherings or “take-overs”; a scenario that could produce regrettable, even ominous, news clips of armed uniformed warfighters chasing unruly kids around parking lots.

Trump first deployed the National Guard to D.C. last August, as part of his Safe and Beautiful Task Force, which he’s replicated in New Orleans and Memphis and wants to expand to other cities. The president did this by declaring a a public safety emergency via executive order, temporarily taking control of D.C. law enforcement, and becoming the first president to invoke the D.C. Home Rule Act – declaring his decision, “liberation day.” Now, according to DOJ officials, this summer surge is only the beginning of Guard deployments.

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America is in as deep a partisan divide as at any point in our history. In 2017, I said on ABC News that our country was as divided and polarized as at any time since the Civil War. Many people criticized this statement, and I was accused of hyperbole. Hmmm …

At points like this, when the political environment exposes a “house divided” as Lincoln would s…

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