Good morning.
The Treasury Department’s top lawyer resigned yesterday, hours after the Trump administration announced a $1.776 billion slush fund to pay out Jan. 6 rioters and other MAGA loyalists — and the recipients will be kept secret from the public. Trump’s disapproval rating has now hit the highest level of his presidency, surpassing even the days after January 6th, as gas prices top $4.50 a gallon and inflation climbs to its highest point in three years. A former MAGA insider is claiming Elon Musk told her he knew Trump won the 2024 election hours before it was called — because his satellites were tracking real-time election data. And Trump reportedly asked China and Russia to help him kneecap the International Criminal Court, the body that has an active arrest warrant out for his close ally Benjamin Netanyahu.
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Trump’s Treasury Lawyer Just Quit. The Timing Says Everything.
Brian Morrissey, the Treasury Department’s general counsel, resigned yesterday — seven months after his Senate confirmation, on the same day the Trump administration unveiled a $1.776 billion fund to compensate people who claim they were targeted by the Biden Justice Department. The pool of potential recipients includes roughly 1,600 people charged in connection with the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
Morrissey is a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He served in Trump’s first administration. He did not speak publicly about why he left.
The fund was set up to settle Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leaking of his tax returns — a lawsuit a federal judge had just cast doubt on, since it involved a sitting president suing a department he controls. Trump dropped the original lawsuit Monday. What replaced it is, by any honest reading, worse.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — Trump’s former personal lawyer — will hand-pick every member of the five-person commission that controls who gets paid and how much. He can remove any of them, at any time, without cause. The names of recipients and the amounts they receive will be kept hidden from the public.
Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden called it “the most brazen theft and abuse of taxpayer dollars by any president in American history.” Rep. Jamie Raskin called it “pure fraud and highway robbery.” Nearly 100 House Democrats filed a brief seeking to block the settlement.
Trump, asked about it at a White House event Monday, said it had been “very well received.”
Here’s what I want you to sit with. The men who wrote our Constitution had just fought a revolution against a king who treated the public treasury as his personal property, and so they put the power of the purse in Article One, in the hands of Congress, on purpose. They wanted spending to be public, debated, and accountable to the people who earned the money. A secret fund, controlled by the president’s former defense attorney, paying undisclosed sums to people who attacked the Capitol on the president’s behalf, isn’t a loophole in that system. It’s the exact thing the Founders built the system to prevent, and when a lawyer who clerked for a Supreme Court justice walks out the door rather than put his name on it, that tells you everything about what he saw.
Trump Is Now More Unpopular Than at Any Point in His First Term — Including After January 6th
Trump’s disapproval rating has now reached 58.6 percent according to polling averages compiled by Nate Silver, surpassing both his first-term peak and Joe Biden’s peak disapproval after his debate collapse in June 2024. No president has posted a higher disapproval rating since George W. Bush left office.
The numbers across individual polls are just as bad. The latest New York Times/Siena poll showed just 37 percent of Americans approving of Trump’s job performance — his weakest showing across both terms. Pollsters note that no president in the past 17 years has remained below 38 percent approval for more than a brief stretch.
The collapse is hitting groups that delivered his 2024 victory. The Times/Siena poll showed Trump’s lowest approval rating among Hispanic voters in the pollsters’ history, at just 20 percent. CNN polling found he has dipped below 50 percent with non-college-educated white Americans for the first time.
The driving forces are not hard to identify. The national average for regular gas has climbed above $4.50 a gallon, with drivers in seven states now paying more than $5. Inflation hit 3.8 percent in April, the highest in nearly three years. A CBS/YouGov survey found 59 percent of Americans say gas prices have caused them financial hardship, up from 51 percent in April.
The warning signs inside Trump’s own coalition are equally stark. Among Republicans, disapproval of Trump’s handling of inflation has risen 11 points since March, to 37 percent. A CNN poll found 56 percent of non-college white voters believe Trump’s policies have worsened economic conditions, and 67 percent said the Iran war has hurt their personal finances.
One Republican adviser put it plainly to Reuters: “The toughest thing is that we made gas prices the Achilles’ heel for Biden and now it’s our own.”
Trump was asked Tuesday whether Americans’ economic struggles were influencing his push for a deal with Iran. His answer: “Not even a little bit.”
There’s an old truth in this country that the founders understood and that every demagogue eventually relearns the hard way. You can run on grievance and spectacle, but people vote with their gas tank and their grocery bill, and no amount of distraction survives contact with an empty wallet. When a president tells voters their financial pain doesn’t move him “even a little bit,” he’s not projecting strength, he’s confirming the one thing they already suspected, which is that the people in power simply don’t feel what the rest of us feel. That’s the gap that’s swallowing this administration, and it’s the same gap that has ended every leader who mistook loyalty for consent.
Trump Asked China and Russia to Help Him Destroy the Court That Wants to Arrest Netanyahu
Sources familiar with last week’s U.S.-China summit tell the Financial Times that Trump proposed to Xi Jinping that the United States, China, and Russia coordinate against the International Criminal Court — the only international body with authority to prosecute individuals for genocide and crimes against humanity.
The ICC issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in November 2024, related to Israel’s siege of Gaza. The charges include using starvation as a method of warfare. As of this week, Israel has killed at least 72,769 Gazans, the majority of them women, children, and the elderly, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Independent researchers believe the true toll is significantly higher, in part because Israel continues to bar international journalists from entering Gaza.
Netanyahu is one of Trump’s closest political allies. The proposal, if accurate, suggests Trump is now asking two of the world’s other major powers to help shield his ally from international accountability — by dismantling the institution designed to provide it.
Critics noted that the United States, China, and Russia together represent a fair portion of the world’s outstanding human rights concerns. The coalition Trump is apparently proposing would be, in effect, the world’s most powerful governments agreeing to make sure none of them ever face consequences.
The entire idea of holding the powerful accountable for atrocities came out of the rubble of the Second World War, when American prosecutors stood up at Nuremberg and established that “I was following orders” and “I was the head of state” are not defenses against crimes against humanity. We built that architecture. We insisted on it. And now an American president is reportedly going to two of the planet’s most notorious human rights abusers to ask them to help tear it down so a friend doesn’t have to answer for starving children. A world where the three strongest governments quietly agree that none of them can ever be judged isn’t order. It’s the law of the jungle with nuclear weapons, and history is brutally clear about where that road leads.
A Musk Insider Claims He Knew Trump Won Hours Before Anyone Else — Because His Satellites Were Watching
Ashley St. Clair was a rising MAGA figure until she became the mother of one of Elon Musk’s 14 known children and subsequently fell out with him. She has since renounced much of her past politics. She is now making a claim that, if true, raises serious questions about what Musk’s satellite network was doing on election night.
St. Clair says that on the night of November 5th, 2024, while she was at Mar-a-Lago, Musk texted her: “I knew hours ago that Trump won, my team has the best real-time data.” The Associated Press did not call the race until 5:34 a.m. the following morning.
She also claims Musk had previously sent her internal data from America PAC, the political action committee he built ahead of the 2024 election, and described it as something drawn from “space technology.” When she asked how he had access to that kind of data, she says he told her it was “not a piece they’ll see on the chess board” — and when she said she didn’t want to be deposed, he reportedly replied: “Very wise.”
St. Clair says she has the communications backed up and has given explicit instructions to others about what to do with them if anything happens to her.
Whether or not the underlying claim is true, the picture it describes — a private citizen using a satellite network to track real-time election results ahead of official tallies, then bankrolling the winning candidate’s political operation — is one the country has not fully reckoned with. Musk has not responded to the allegations.
The founders were obsessed with one danger above almost all others, which is that a single individual with enough money and reach could buy himself a private hold over the machinery of self-government. That’s why they wrote so much about faction and corruption in the Federalist Papers, and why elections were supposed to be the one place where the richest man and the poorest citizen each get exactly one vote. The story here isn’t really about a text message. It’s about whether the most powerful private infrastructure ever built, satellites, data, and a few hundred million dollars, has quietly positioned one unelected man closer to the levers of an American election than the public ever agreed to, and a republic that can’t answer that question honestly isn’t fully a republic anymore.
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