One of the three nuclear enrichment sites in Iran struck by the United States last month was mostly destroyed, setting work there back significantly. But the two others were not as badly damaged and may have been degraded only to a point where nuclear enrichment could resume in the next several months if Iran wants it to, according to a recent U.S. assessment of the destruction caused by the military operation, five current and former U.S. officials familiar with the assessment told NBC News.
The assessment, part of the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to determine the status of Iran’s nuclear program since the facilities were struck, was briefed to some U.S. lawmakers, Defense Department officials and allied countries in recent days, four of those people said.
NBC News has also learned that U.S. Central Command had developed a much more comprehensive plan to strike Iran that would have involved hitting three additional sites in an operation that would have stretched for several weeks instead of a single night, according to a current U.S. official and two former U.S. officials.
President Donald Trump was briefed on that plan, but it was rejected because it was at odds with his foreign policy instincts to extract the United States from conflicts abroad, not dig deeper into them, as well as the possibility of a high number of casualties on both sides, one of the current officials and one of the former officials said. “We were willing to go all the way in our options, but the president did not want to,” one of the sources with knowledge of the plan said.
This explains why he lied so blatantly about the sites being obliterated. It was his decision to take the action least likely to result in success. All risk, little reward. So he immediately spun it as a major victory in the hopes that everyone would accept that regardless of the facts when they emerged.
Trying to keep MAGA happy is getting really complicated for Dear Leader, isn’t it?
President Trump and his administration want to move on from Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and sexual offender, who once associated with some of the world’s richest and most powerful people. Some of Mr. Trump’s most loyal supporters insist there is more to uncover.But it’s not just the MAGA faithful who are refusing to let it go.
Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the powerful Senate Finance Committee, has been digging into Mr. Epstein’s financial network for the past three years. Some members of his staff have viewed confidential files that shed light on the immense sums of money that, they say, Mr. Epstein moved through the banking system to fuel his vast sex-trafficking network.
In particular, filings by four big banks flagged more than $1.5 billion in transactions — including thousands of wire transfers for the purchase and sale of artwork for rich friends, fees paid to Mr. Epstein by wealthy individuals, and payments to numerous women, the senator’s office found. The filings came after Mr. Epstein was arrested in 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges.
Large money transfers to individuals, foreign countries or obscure companies are the kind of things banks are supposed to be examining as potentially suspicious. Some of the Epstein money transfers disclosed in a report from JPMorgan Chase involved accounts at two Russian banks before those institutions were subject to U.S. sanctions. A few transactions red-flagged were for as
Mr. Wyden said his investigation into Mr. Epstein’s finances had taken on new urgency now that the Trump administration was balking at releasing any of the information seized by the F.B.I. from Mr. Epstein’s homes or information collected from the nation’s banks. Like many Republicans on the far right, Mr. Wyden and a growing number of Democrats believe there are more details about Mr. Epstein that the federal government needs to reveal.
“We felt from the beginning this was a follow-the-money case,” Mr. Wyden said in an interview. “This horrific sex-trafficking operation cost Epstein a lot of money, and he had to get that money from somewhere.”
I don’t know if Trump is hiding something or if he’s just being a stubborn old man. But no one can say that it would be surprising if he wasn’t involved in the sex stuff — there’s plenty of evidence that he was fully aware of Epstein’s appetites and shared them. (Just look at that footage and tell me that he didn’t see Epstein as a peer.)
But the money thing is also possible. We know that Trump was desperate for money back in the late 90s and early 2000s when he was heavily involved with Epstein and swimming in the same toxic pool. There’s just as much chance that he’s exposed on this as the sex stuff. Probably both.
Kristi Noem says that every detention is the result of a thorough investigation into each specific, targeted individual undocumented immigrant.
Uh huh:
US Citizen detained by ICE: Clearly it didn't matter that I was a citizen, or a veteran, or that I identified who I was. They ignored everything I said, and they just they broke my window and they dragged me out. I let them know that I was a veteran and I wasn't doing anything… pic.twitter.com/9UVJzzEyMB
US Citizen detained by ICE: Clearly it didn’t matter that I was a citizen, or a veteran, or that I identified who I was. They ignored everything I said, and they just they broke my window and they dragged me out. I let them know that I was a veteran and I wasn’t doing anything wrong, that I’m just trying to get to work
They are just rousting anyone they feel like rousting. That is usually people with brown skin or who look Asian or anyone who gets in their way.
This is only going to get worse. They have unlimited money with no accountability for anything they do.
MAGA expert Will Sommer has a great piece today on the Epstein freak-out. He looks at the cult’s various reactions and determined that it just isn’t going away any time soon. The more Trump calls them stupid and orders them to cease and desist, the more upset they get.
SO WHY IS IT THAT EPSTEIN—and not the attack on Iran or Medicaid cuts—has caused such a severe rupture within MAGA? I think it’s because Trump, through the right-wing media, has been engaged in a decade-long game of playing pretend with his base. In the first term, they pretended Mexico would build the wall, and that Trump could bring all the manufacturing jobs back. Now they’re pretending that mass deportations will make everything from food to housing affordable, and even eliminate traffic jams.
Then, with the Epstein memo, Trump abruptly stopped pretending. Instead, he offered a reaction akin to Whoa, you people are a bunch of dumb freaks, I don’t want to play this game anymore! And his fans—and, by extension, the people in right-wing media who built their careers playing this game—are mad about it.
What should scare Trump is that this could all get much worse. And weirder. Jessica Reed Kraus, the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. devotee with more than 1.3 million followers on Instagram, has launched a campaign amid the chaos to win Ghislaine Maxwell a pardon. But despite her efforts, Kraus couldn’t stomach Trump’s thrashing about.
“He’s only making this disaster worse by the day,” Kraus groaned on an Instagram story.
He is not the same man he was in the first term, obviously. His age is catching up with him and he’s obviously much more brittle and impatient — and he’s bought into his own hype. I think he now literally believes he has been ordained by God and it’s intensely frustrating to him that some of his loyal followers are rejecting that premise.
It’s a bigger deal than he realizes. Cults can fall apart.
Donald Trump’s huge spending boost for the Pentagon will produce an additional 26 megatons (Mt) of planet-heating gases – on a par with the annual carbon equivalent (CO2e) emissions generated by 68 gas power plants or the entire country of Croatia, new research reveals.
The Pentagon’s 2026 budget – and climate footprint – is set to surge to $1tnthanks to the president’s One Big Beautiful Act, a 17% rise on last year.
The budget bonanza will push the Pentagon’s total greenhouse emissions to a staggering 178 Mt of CO2e, resulting in an estimated $47bn in economic damages globally, according to new analysis by the Climate and Community Institute (CCI), a US-based research thinktank, shared exclusively with the Guardian.
The huge increase in military spending comes amid worsening climate breakdown, and as Americans – many of them Trump voters – are being hit by destructive extreme weather events such as wildfires, extreme heat and the recent floods in Texas, as well as sea-level rise and other slow-onset climate effects.
Ya think?
Of course, they now believe that these weather events are caused by the deep state so none of this is real.
To keep this in perspective:
Trump’s 2026 budget legislation slashes federal funding for science, education, Medicaid, food stamps, emergency management, the National Weather Service and humanitarian aid – in order to pay for the military expansion, tax cuts for the wealthy, and Trump’s violent immigration crackdown.
Just don’t call it an authoritarian oligarchy. That would be wrong.
“The Nazis did not persecute or murder people solely based on hair or eye-color,” states the Holocaust Encyclopedia. That said, “The Nazis believed that they had to protect Germans from inferior races. To stay strong, they thought they had to remain racially pure.”
The United States of Trump is not there yet. But if the GOP gets its way, political purity will be the order of the day first. We’re not talking about the kinds of faddish purity tests and language policing that arise and disappear regularly on college campuses and draw hair-on-fire commentary from Fox News. We’re talking about the kinds of purity (and loyalty) tests that secure one a job in the Trump 2.0 administration.
The GOP has rejected democracy. The Republican minority has leveraged what power it has to acquire more for itself (permanently); overstepped the traditional checks and balances in our system; fired government watchdogs; set about putting large chunks of government into receivership; engineered a Supreme Court “bound and determined to undermine the American constitutional order“; eliminated the very notion of political corruption; and pardoned men convicted of an attempt to overthrow the government.
Add in the contruction of concentration camps, efforts to void birthright citizenship and denaturalize naturalized citizens, to deny the vote to “never residents,” and to deport immigrants without due process to third countries like Eswatini, and the Trump gang is headed toward creating an entire class of stateless persons, either officially or functionally. Ridding the nation of undesirables is all part of slow-motion political purification. The GOP is on track to define American citizenship down to a political analog of “Aryan.”
In the attempts to prevent “never residents” from local voting in state and local elections we’ve seen in North Carolina and now Arizona, the GOP talking point is that never-residents “don’t have skin in the game.” Read that as you will.
First they came for the civil servants, then they came for the immigrants, then they came for the never-residents, then for etc. One can see what’s at the bottom of the slippery slope MAGA Republicans are constructing.
White, male, Christian property owners only, baby! MAGA!!!
It has finally dawned on some Democrats, The Bulwark’s Lauren Egan notes, that “the real currency in politics is not message discipline but message dominance.” They are appearing on podcasts and carrying pocket-sized microphones for recording TikTok videos and Instagram reels on the fly. California Sen. Alex Padilla and New York City comptroller Brad Lander made bold headlines in confrontations stemming from DHS’s secret police tactics. Democrats are even working the cut over Donald Trump’s eye from his and Pam Bondi’s Jeffrey Epstein coverup.
But as Egan notes, aversion to change persists. Democrats’ “instinctive caution” about stepping outside their comfy boxes remains a hinderance:
“It was a classic ‘We’re above this, we can’t be for this,’” said Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist and former Sanders adviser. “We have to stop being the party of overeducated pearl-graspers and start getting a little tougher.”
I traded notes recently with a political consultant about registration trends in North Carolina, and about how Democrats win in the environment on display in the chart below (I’m still updating for 2024). One of these curves is not like the others.
Your state similar:
Fully half of NC’s registered voters are 45 and younger. And 47% of voters 45 and younger are registered UNAffiliated. Furthermore, the current NC voter registration is: UNAffiliated 38%, Democrat 31%, and Republican 30%. I suggested that Democrats need to turn out more young UNAffiliated voters. (Duh!) We can’t win without them and that’s where we have the most potential for boosting turnout.
But younger voters are irregular voters, the consultant answered, displaying that instinctive caution. We need to focus on turning out older, more reliable Democratic voters. I thought, So we are supposed to ignore 28-yr-olds until they are 45? Genius!
The attention economy works both ways. Democrats need to capture more attention, yes. But they also need to pay more attention to younger voters who feel undervalued and cut out of the political process.
A retired marketing professional told me last week that no retailer would ignore such a large swath of its potential customer base. They custom-tailor their pitches to different market segments. Showing up on podcasts is one way for Democrats to get attention. But paying attention to a large segment of disaffected voters who don’t vote is another way to increase “sales.” Who doesn’t want to do that?
Good Trouble Lives On protests honoring the legacy of Rep. John Lewis happen today from coast to coast. It’s a weekday. Local “show” times vary from late afternoon to evening:
Civil rights activist and Georgia Congressman John Lewis was known for saying he got into “good trouble” by using peaceful, non-violent action to challenge injustice. Now, in 1,600 cities and towns across the country, protesters are planning to make similar “good trouble” on July 17, the fifth anniversary of Lewis’ death.
“What we want the nation to know is that his legacy lives on, that the good trouble that he got into and that he fought for is not over,” said Barbara Arnwine, co-leader of the Transformative Justice Coalition. “We are absolutely focused on making sure that our voices throughout the country are raised.”
Protesters are expected to turn out for a variety of reasons, including their opposition to the recently passed budget bill, attacks on womens rights and diversity, and immigration enforcement, such as President Donald Trump‘s decision to call out the California National Guard to quell pro-immigrant protests in Los Angeles.
Here in North Carolina, voting rights are a focus. In Arizona too, I’d wager, where Republicans are looking to strip voting rights from Americans living abroad:
The Republican Party is challenging the voting eligibility of some U.S. citizens who have always lived abroad, in what they’re calling a broader strategy ahead of next year’s midterms to clean up voter rolls and improve voter confidence.
But Democrats see the effort as a blatant attempt to disenfranchise eligible Democrats in key swing states.
The GOP terms the voters they are targeting as “never residents” because they are U.S. citizens but haven’t lived in the United States. Most frequently, they are children of U.S. citizens who have been in the military, or lived overseas for other reasons. Three-quarters of states have laws on the books allowing such citizens to vote by absentee or mail ballot in the same state where their parents or other relatives last lived or are registered.
Here in NC, Republicans want to, well, check out this modification they want to make to election law highlighted by the signup page for today’s Raleigh protest:
🚨 STOP HB 958 🚨 “No person while serving on the State or County Boards of Elections shall make written or oral statements intended for general distribution or dissemination to the public at large encouraging or promoting voter turnout in any election.”
Let that sink in.
North Carolina Republicans are trying to make it illegal for elections officials to encourage people to vote.
That means: — No voter education from elections offices — No public outreach to boost participation — No PSAs reminding people to cast a ballot
This bill strikes at the heart of free and fair elections. It replaces trusted, experienced professionals with partisan operatives hand-picked to control how our elections are run.
The message is simple: They don’t want you to vote.
You might want to get Republicans’ attention today and every day. Don’t just request their attention. Dominate it.
— Piyush Mittal 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇬🇪🇨🇦🟧🌊🌈 (@piyushmittal) July 15, 2025
In fairness, Bill O’Reilly isn’t the only Trumper who just can’t seem to get his stories straight.
Rep. Mike Collins: "Fast-forward to the Biden administration. They put this on steroids. Example? Summer of love, where rioters were out there burning police stations, assaulting officers."
This happens all the time. For some reason, these people cannot seem to remember that Joe Biden was not president in 2019 and 2020. They blame Biden for all the shit that happened in the pandemic, the George Floyd protests, this Epstein suicide. Now Trump is saying that Obama, Biden, James Comey and John Brennan wrote the Epstein files, which are all fake. Well, except there isn’t anything in them.
A senior National Institutes of Health leader was fired Monday amid an investigation into a contract on autism and other topics that could have benefited his spouse, according to three officials familiar with the incident who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
A $3.3 million NIH contract to a Louisiana company, Argo Chasing, named Trish DuffySchnabel, the wife of the NIH’s chief operating officer on its list of staff, according to the officials. The award, made in early July, supports workon several matters including autism, a topicthat is a priority of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
[…]
Eric Schnabel joined NIH as chief operating officer in April after 25 years in the Army. In the email announcing his arrival, NIH director Jay Bhattacharya said Schnabel had held “pivotal security and operations roles within the Army, the Department of Defense and corporate America” and emphasized that he would play a key role at NIH in “detecting, deterring and responding to threats.
He had no had no scientific or biomedical background. But who needs that at the NIH, amirite?
I’m honestly not sure what the problem is here. Hardly anyone in the Trump administration is qualified for their jobs. And the Trump administration is so rife with corruption (the president is selling everything from perfume to memecoins right out of the oval office) that this seems like very small potatoes. Since when do Trumpers care about nepotism? Surely, making a buck can’t be wrong! Everybody’s doing it!
I’m thinking there must be more to this. Stay tuned,
Who needs ’em, right? Aside from all the contributions they make with their labor, talent and culture, there’s this:
Undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022. Most of that amount, $59.4 billion, was paid to the federal government while the remaining $37.3 billion was paid to state and local governments.
Undocumented immigrants paid federal, state, and local taxes of $8,889 per person in 2022. In other words, for every 1 million undocumented immigrants who reside in the country, public services receive $8.9 billion in additional tax revenue.
More than a third of the tax dollars paid by undocumented immigrants go toward payroll taxes dedicated to funding programs that these workers are barred from accessing. Undocumented immigrants paid $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes, $6.4 billion in Medicare taxes, and $1.8 billion in unemployment insurance taxes in 2022.
Yet these people are being hunted like animals by violent masked men and thrown into concentration camps.
![approved the bare minimum](http://<img src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/xO31QVw_2Fs/hq720.jpg?sqp=-oaymwEhCK4FEIIDSFryq4qpAxMIARUAAAAAGAElAADIQj0AgKJD&rs=AOn4CLDUu-zzxuTE9Gr83nIOHQVxt-X9Fg" alt="Donald Trump threatens further attacks following strikes on Iranian nuclear sites"/>){kind=link}