This morning, more than 10,000 federal court rulings have gone against Trump’s immigration detention policy, with judges across the country, including his own appointees, comparing his administration to Hercules fighting a hydra and Sisyphus rolling a boulder. The Wall Street Journal has documented the full scope of Trump’s Truth Social addiction, including 54 posts in 74 minutes, nearly 160 posts in a single evening, and a staff member who prints out social media content for his approval. The Justice Department is quietly discussing settling Trump’s $10 billion IRS lawsuit with taxpayer money before a judge can throw the case out. And Bari Weiss is now planning to put the anchor who praised Marco Rubio on the air as a “Florida Man” onto 60 Minutes, while the veteran correspondent she went around to land a Netanyahu interview is reportedly walking out the door. Corporate media is covering what it’s told. The FCC chair has made sure everyone knows the cost of doing otherwise. And the Ellisons keep buying. Let’s get into it.
10,000 Judges Have Ruled Against Trump’s Detention Policy. The DOJ Calls That ‘Great.’
Federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration’s mandatory immigration detention policy more than 10,000 times. They have sided with the administration 1,200 times. More than 425 federal judges across the country have issued rulings against the policy, including a majority of Trump’s own appointees.
The language coming from the bench has been extraordinary. A West Virginia judge wrote in February: “Across the interior of the United States, agents of the federal government, masked, anonymous, armed with military weapons, operating from unmarked vehicles, acting without warrants of any kind, are seizing persons for civil immigration violations and imprisoning them without any semblance of due process. It is an assault on the constitutional order. It is what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent.”
A Trump-appointed New York judge condemned ICE’s tactics, including moving detainees from state to state to prevent them from filing lawsuits, and releasing people hundreds of miles from home without their possessions after courts ordered them freed. “This isn’t how things are supposed to work in America,” he wrote. “Unquestionably, the laws of human decency condemn such villainy.”
One judge who has ruled against the administration 90 times cited Greek mythology, comparing the administration’s continued detention attempts to the Hydra, whose heads regenerated twofold for each one cut off. Another compared the administration to Sisyphus. A third wrote in February: “Despite hundreds of similar rulings in this and other courts resoundingly in favor of the ICE-detainee petitioners, ICE continues to act contrary to law, to spend taxpayer money needlessly, and to waste the scarce resources of the judiciary.”
The Justice Department’s response to being on the losing end of 10,000 court rulings? A spokesperson called it “great,” saying it showed judges putting “personal policy preferences ahead of proper interpretations of the law.” The White House added that it expects the Supreme Court to ultimately side with the administration.
When the Justice Department calls 10,000 losses “great,” folks, they’re telling you the quiet part out loud. The Fourth Amendment was written by men who’d watched British soldiers kick down colonial doors with general warrants, and a government that shrugs off 425 federal judges, including its own appointees, isn’t losing in court. It’s announcing that the constitutional order itself is now optional.
Trump Has Posted 8,800 Times in His Second Term. 44 Nights He Posted at Least a Dozen Times After 8 PM.
A Wall Street Journal analysis of Trump’s Truth Social activity in his second term has documented the full scale of his social media obsession. He has posted at least 8,800 times. He has gone on overnight blitzes of at least a dozen posts between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. on 44 separate occasions. On December 1, 2025, he posted nearly 160 times between 8:17 p.m. and midnight, the single busiest posting day of his term. On Monday night he posted 54 times in 74 minutes, then once more at 1:12 a.m.
The content ranges from AI-generated slop and recycled attacks to posts calling Barack Obama a “traitor” who should be arrested, false claims the 2020 election was stolen, accusations of treason against James Comey and Jack Smith, and reposts from accounts affiliated with the QAnon conspiracy theory. Around one in ten of his own written posts attacks someone as “crooked,” “sleazebag,” “loser,” or “low IQ.” The phrase “fake news” has appeared nearly 140 times. He has published more than 120 posts attacking Somalia or its people, including Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.
The Journal also identified the mechanism behind some of Trump’s more prolific reposting: a senior White House aide nicknamed the “human printer” who follows the president with a portable printer, prints out social media posts for his approval, then logs onto his account to reshare them. This reportedly included a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, and the AI-generated image of Trump as Jesus Christ.
The Daily Beast previously reported that in April there were only five days on which Trump could have gotten a full night’s sleep based on his posting timestamps. This is also the man who is deciding whether to resume bombing Iran this week.
Madison put the war power in Article I Section 8 because he understood you cannot trust one sleep-deprived man, posting 160 times in an evening with a “human printer” feeding him QAnon reposts, to decide whether American servicemembers go die in another Middle Eastern war. The Framers built this republic to survive bad presidents. The open question is whether it can survive this one.
Trump’s DOJ Is Considering Using Taxpayer Money to Settle Trump’s Own $10 Billion IRS Lawsuit
In January, Trump, his sons Don Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization sued the IRS for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns by a contractor during his first term. A federal judge has now ordered both sides to submit briefs by May 20 explaining why the lawsuit represents a genuine conflict, since Trump controls the IRS and is effectively suing himself.
Rather than let that hearing happen, the DOJ is holding internal discussions about settling the lawsuit before the deadline, according to the New York Times. If even a fraction of the $10 billion were paid out, it could reportedly double Trump’s net worth. The settlement options also reportedly include the IRS dropping all audits of Trump, his family members, and his businesses, a guarantee that could itself be worth millions given that IRS policy requires mandatory annual audits of sitting presidents.
The DOJ is led by Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal criminal defense attorney. Legal experts told the Times that even if a judge found the settlement to be collusive or in bad faith, she likely could not stop the money from changing hands.
When other wealthy Americans whose tax returns were leaked by the same contractor sued the IRS, the DOJ argued successfully that the government couldn’t be held liable for a contractor’s actions. Hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin settled without receiving any damages, just a public apology. Trump is seeking $10 billion and appears likely to get something.
The DOJ has also moved to prevent Trump from paying a jury’s $83.3 million verdict to E. Jean Carroll and secretly advised him he can violate a federal anti-corruption law. The pattern is consistent. The DOJ under Blanche functions as the president’s personal legal defense fund, paid for by taxpayers.
The Founders fled a system where the king’s treasury and the king’s pocket were the same pocket, and that’s exactly why they wrote the Emoluments Clause and built Article II to draw a hard line between public office and private gain. A president suing the government he runs, with his own former defense attorney running the department deciding what to pay him, is the precise corruption Madison and Jefferson spent their lives trying to escape.
Bari Weiss Is Dismantling 60 Minutes in Real Time. The Veteran Who Pushed Back Is Walking Out.
The full picture of what Bari Weiss is doing to 60 Minutes is now visible, and it is the story of a storied institution being taken apart piece by piece.
Weiss is planning to bring CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil, whose tenure has been a gaffe-filled ratings collapse, onto 60 Minutes as part of a broader effort to “open up” the program to the wider news division. Other CBS correspondents are being folded in. The show’s institutional traditions, its correspondent hierarchy, its editorial independence, are being dismantled in the name of integrating it into the corporate whole.
The most revealing episode involves veteran correspondent Lesley Stahl, who spent months pursuing an interview with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. Weiss bypassed her entirely, secured the interview herself, and allowed Netanyahu’s office to choose who would conduct it. His office picked CBS Washington correspondent Major Garrett, a journalist whose primary platform is a little-watched streaming service, because, as one source put it, “Major Garrett was a friendly face and a reliable choice because he would not challenge Netanyahu.” Weiss let the subject of a major news interview pick his own interviewer.
Stahl, 84, is reportedly considering leaving the show altogether when the current season ends. 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, who publicly described Weiss’s intervention in her CECOT prison report as the product of “corporate meddling and editorial fear,” has reportedly had no contract renewal discussions, with her contract expiring at the end of the month.
“This is exactly what Bari has been talking about doing,” one source told the New York Post, “breaking down the silos at 60 Minutes and making clear that the show is no longer an island unto itself.”
Sixty years of institutional journalism, reduced to a platform where the subject picks the interviewer and the anchor calls a Cabinet secretary a “Florida Man” on air. That is what media capture looks like from the inside.
Jefferson said he’d rather have newspapers without a government than a government without newspapers because he understood that a republic cannot survive without an adversarial press willing to challenge power. When the subject of an interview gets to pick his own interviewer, what’s being killed isn’t a TV show. It’s the basic premise that journalism exists to hold the powerful accountable, and the billionaires writing these checks know exactly what they’re buying.
This Is Why Raw America Exists — and Why We Need You
Judges across the country are calling Trump’s immigration enforcement an assault on the constitutional order. His DOJ is preparing to hand him a billion-dollar taxpayer payout. The networks that used to hold power accountable are letting Netanyahu pick his own interviewer and planning to seat the anchor who praised Rubio on 60 Minutes.
Raw America was built to be the thing that doesn’t get bought.
Because of your support, we have had reporters on the ground at the most important hearings of this political era. We have broken exclusives the corporate press buried. We are joining the D.C. press pool and going after the interviews that hold power accountable, bringing them directly to you unfiltered and unbought.
If you’ve been meaning to subscribe, today is the day.
This is Thom Hartmann for Raw America. The fight is here. Thank you for being in it.
STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Tom Steyer Calls Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger a “Right-Wing Takeover.” Billionaire investor Tom Steyer — who is running in California’s Democratic gubernatorial primary — recently heaped criticism on the pending merger of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery, calling it a “right-wing takeover” of media. He also expressed support for California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s lawsuit seeking to stop Paramount Skydance chairman David Ellison (the son of billionaire Republican donor Larry Ellison) from owning CNN’s parent company.
Australian Trump Tower Cancelled After Developer Labels His Brand ‘Toxic.’ A planned 91-story Trump Tower skyscraper on the Gold Coast of Queensland, Australia has been cancelled just three months after it was announced. Developer David Young, who is the CEO of Altus Property Group, told CNN that after the Iran War, the Trump brand had become “increasingly unpopular un Australia.” The building would have combined a 285-room luxury hotel with high-end retail stores, restaurants and residential apartments.
FBI Has ‘Payback Squad’ of Agents to Hound Trump’s Political Enemies. A unit within Kash Patel’s FBI has been dubbed the “Payback Squad,” and is reportedly tasked with looking into President Donald Trump’s political enemies. Internal FBI sources anonymously confided to NOTUS that the agents are officially designated the “Director’s Advisory Team,” and that they’re working on a series of indictments against officials in former presidential administrations to uncover what is to be described as a “grand conspiracy” against Trump. Former CIA Director John Brennan — who served in the Barack Obama administration — is expected to be indicted in the Southern District of Florida, where Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon is expected to preside over the case.
RFK Jr. Has Opinions About Teenage Boys’ Sperm. During an event at the White House to announce the rollout of a maternal healthcare initiative, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. opined about teenage boys supposedly having a lower sperm count than that of their age cohort in 1976. He also lamented that young women were being exposed to a “toxic soup” of environmental factors impacting female reproductive health, though he didn’t elaborate on that point. There are no studies comparing the sperm counts of adolescent boys across generations, so it’s unclear where Kennedy got his information.
Republican Congresswoman Attacks Fourth Grader Who Wrote Her a Letter. After a 10 year-old boy named Christian wrote a letter to Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) as part of a school project, Foxx wrote a response attacking both Christian and his teachers. Christian’s mother wrote on social media that her son’s assignment was to write an essay making an argument and back it up with facts from respected sources, and that his essay was focused on providing Americans with a $5,000 tax credit to buy an electric vehicle. Foxx wrote in her response that Christian had been influenced by “propaganda,” and that his teachers were indoctrinating him. Christian’s mother called Foxx’s response “reprehensible.” Foxx, who is 82, is running for reelection with an endorsement from Trump.
