When giving Trump his get-out-of-jail free card in Trump v. United States, John Roberts implied that it was hysterical to think that a president might take the rationale for this decision as a free pass to commit crimes:
They were most concerned that a future president would use his position to prosecute his predecessor. Suffering from a bad case of Fox News Brain Rot they apparently believed that’s what Biden was doing despite the clear evidence that Trump had committed crimes and they were being investigated by sober, dispassionate members of the Justice Department.
Look where that’s gotten us. Trump knows he has a license to commit any crimes he wants, is selling pardons and doling them out to anyone willing to commit crimes on his behalf and is persecuting his political enemies. Excellent job.
The roughly minute-long video focused on false election fraud claims about the 2020 presidential election, but at the end it suddenly flashed to a clip of the Obamas’ faces superimposed on the heads of cartoon apes as the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by The Tokens played in the background.
The imagery, which evokes long-standing racist tropes against Black people, comes during Black History Month, which honors the accomplishments and contributions of Black Americans. Barack Obama made U.S. history as the first Black president.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to NBC News’ request for comment Friday morning with a statement: “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from ‘The Lion King.’ Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
They now say that it was a staffer who put up the video which is almost certainly a lie. Trump is the biggest racist in his administration and has been his entire life. If it was a staffer who did it, he certainly had no reason to believe that Trump wouldn’t have liked it.
Even some Republicans peeked their head up and said a little something:
South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the upper chamber, sharply denounced the president on X, writing, “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it.”
Sen. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., wrote, “Even if this was a ‘Lion King’ meme, a reasonable person sees the racist context to this. The White House should do what anyone does when they make a mistake: remove this and apologize.
Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., who faces a competitive re-election race, also criticized Trump. “The President’s post is wrong and incredibly offensive — whether intentional or a mistake — and should be deleted immediately with an apology offered,” he wrote on X.
Mike Johnson says the NFL choosing Bad Bunny to perform at the Super Bowl was a bad idea because “he’s not someone who appeals to a broader audience” like Lee Greenwood. https://t.co/0F0CHZvUJE
Bad Bunny is the number one Global Top Artist on Spotify for the 4th year, has more than 7 million records sold, four diamond plaques and 11 platinums. He even has a WrestleMania storyline.
Lee Greenwood is an 83 year old one hit wonder whose career is 100% dependent on appearances at Republican Party events.
I don’t think Mike Johnson or the rest of the pathetic MAGA weirdos know what mainstream is.
In case you’re wondering why the highly partisan Supreme Court decided to uphold the California redistricting plan when it doesn’t benefit Donald Trump, Ian Millhiser explains that removing all barriers to partisan gerrymander is one of their highest priorities. They believe, correctly, that this will benefit the Republicans which is in keeping with their larger agenda.
The Supreme Court used to permit federal courts to hear lawsuits alleging that a legislative map drawn to benefit one party or the other violates the Constitution. But the Court’s Republican majority shut these lawsuits down in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019). Five years later, in Alexander v. South Carolina NAACP (2024), the Republican justices went a step further, declaring that “as the Federal Constitution is concerned, a legislature may pursue partisan ends when it engages in redistricting.”
Having abolished federal lawsuits challenging partisan gerrymanders, the Court’s Republicans then started to dismantle longstanding legal rules prohibiting racial gerrymanders — that is, legislative maps that are drawn to minimize the voting power of voters of a particular race. Indeed, the Court’s recent decision in LULAC, the Texas gerrymandering case, was a major milestone in this broader project to shut down anti-gerrymandering lawsuits. Among other things, LULAC held that “ambiguous” evidence must always be construed against a plaintiff alleging that a map was drawn for impermissible racial reasons.
It probably goes too far to say that this Court would allow literally any racial gerrymander to survive judicial scrutiny. If a state passed a law called the “White Supremacist We Want to Bring Back Jim Crow, So These Maps Were Drawn by the Ku Klux Klan Act of 2026,” it is likely that at least two of the Court’s Republicans would vote to strike it down. But LULAC and other recent Supreme Court decisions impose such high barriers on anti-gerrymandering plaintiffs that a state legislature’s racist intent would need to be extraordinarily explicit before this Court would step in.
And so the Republican justices voted to uphold a Democratic gerrymander in Tangipa. They did not do so because they are particularly worried about Democratic voting rights or Democratic chances in the midterms. They did so because that decision is consistent with their broader project to eliminate nearly all lawsuits challenging gerrymanders.
John Roberts has been on a crusade to end minority voting protections his entire career so this is perfectly in line with that. It doesn’t bode well for the case Louisiana v. Callais that could finally gut the Voting Right’s Act, restoring the ability of white conservatives to draw maps that will essentially disenfranchising Black Americans across a wide swathe of the country. That’s been on the agenda for all the decades since the act was originally passed.
I certainly hope they don’t go that way but I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t which means we will have a very big problem winning a majority in the House going forward.
President Trump last month offered to drop his hold on billions of dollars for a major infrastructure project in New York, but only if Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer agreed to rename New York’s Penn Station and Washington’s Dulles International Airport after Trump.
Schumer (D-N.Y.) rejected the offer, a source familiar with the talks told Axios, prolonging the standoff over funding for the Gateway Tunnel Project connecting New York to New Jersey.
Trump, whose allies renamed the Kennedy Center and the U.S. Institute of Peace after him, is continuing his efforts to reshape American institutions in his image.
The offer did not come up in an Oval Office meeting between Trump and Schumer last month, the source said. Instead, the offer was made to Schumer in subsequent conversations with the administration about the Gateway project.
The $16 billion project is set to shut down indefinitely on Friday, without the funding from the federal government.
The offer from Trump was first reported by Punchbowl News.
ICE and CBP agents in Minneapolis face off against residents after Renee Good shooting on January 7, 2026. Photo by Chad Davis (CC BY 4.0).
Democrats in Congress have issued a list of demands for more restrictions on federal agents in exchange for funding the Department of Homeland Security (Washington Post):
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) laid out their demands late Wednesday in a letter to Republicans, including barring immigration agents from wearing face masks and entering private property without a warrant from a judge.
Republicans immediately criticized Democrats’ proposals as excessive. Sen. Katie Boyd Britt (R-Alabama), who is representing Senate Republicans in negotiations with Democrats, described it as “a ridiculous Christmas list of demands.”
The details are irrelevant despite multiplepolls showing they have public support.
First, because cosmetic changes won’t address the cultural rot at the heart of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Ask people if they support requiring judicial warrants to enter homes and oppose having masked secret police on their streets, and what else will majorities of Americans say? But if you want to know how Americans really feel, don’t ask, listen:
Second, the changes Democrats demand don’t address the problem of CBP/ICE thugs violating people’s civil rights with impunity. They know they can’t be touched if they bust your head. It’s what they’ve been hired to do, egged on by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, President Donald Trump, and Shadow President Stephen Miller. Republicans are all about personal responsibility and accountability … for their enemies. Disincentivizing random brutality by agents of the state — their agents of the state — is not on the fascist agenda.
“Scores of claims are expected to arise out of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration. Experts say suing the government will be tough,” The Washington Post begins. The Federal Tort Claims Act stacks the legal deck against the Trump administration’s victims. The process is long and arduous (another Washington Post article):
“It’s absolutely bonkers,” said Brian Orozco, a Chicago attorney for Ricardo Aguayo Rodriguez, the bike-riding immigrant who was hospitalized and is now detained, awaiting deportation to Mexico. “If a Chicago police officer abuses my civil rights, I can file a claim immediately. I don’t have to wait six months [to file a lawsuit]. I have a right to a jury trial. I don’t have that when I’m up against the federal government. It’s scary to me how protected these federal agents are.”
After the Civil War, Congress passed a law that established the right to sue local and state officials for the violation of constitutional rights. Federal officials weren’t included in the law, though a 1971 Supreme Court ruling established precedence for such lawsuits. But legal experts said that the court’s decisions within the past decade have narrowed that path and made it nearly impossible to successfully sue federal agents for civil rights violations.
“It is arguably harder today in 2026 than at any other time in American history to sue federal officials for money damages if they violate your constitutional rights,” said Harrison Stark, senior counsel at the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
As we mentioned on Monday, Democrats in the 119th Congress have filed over a dozen bills touching on removing qualified immunity from federal officials who violate people’s civil rights under color of law. The bills establish a right to for Americans to sue federal officials who violate their civil rights. But they’ve gained little traction with Republicans holding a trifecta in Washington, D.C. And don’t expect Schumer or Jeffries to break a sweat fighting for them.
“It’s a somewhat complicated area of law across different jurisdictions,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) said of the challenges in garnering support for the bill, which he sponsored. “But I didn’t see any huge partisan issues.”
[…]
Last fall, Whitehouse and Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Georgia) reintroduced the measure. Legal experts told The Post they think it is unlikely to pass, citing anticipated concerns about exposing federal law enforcement officers to personal liability.
Personal liability, say, like Chicago policemen face? Or the New York Police Department? In the United States of America, some law enforcement officers are more equal than others. Republicans marching in step down the road to fascism mean to keep it that way.
We covered on Monday how a variety of states have passed or introduced measures to level the playing field for victims. Until then, under existing law victims may encounter difficulty in finding lawyers to take their cases. The government thumb on the scales of justice makes the cases tough to win.
Anya Bidwell, senior attorney for the nonprofit Institute for Justice in the D.C. area tells the Post, “even getting to trial is extremely difficult.” Plus the length of the existing process makes bringing cases cost-prohibitive for many victims.
Trump at the National Prayer Breakfast: "They rigged the second election. I had to win it. I had to win it. I needed it for my own ego. I would've had a bad ego for the rest of my life. Now I really have a big ego. Beating these lunatics was incredible … the first time they… pic.twitter.com/KpExEgj3fg
“They rigged the second election. I had to win it. I had to win it. I needed it for my own ego. I would’ve had a bad ego for the rest of my life. Now I really have a big ego. Beating these lunatics was incredible … the first time they said I didn’t win the popular vote. I did.”
Now I understand Trump’s DEI strategy. He ordered the government to get rid of all mentions of Black American contributions and achievements so that he could then lie and claim it was actually done by Democrats. He’ll then say, “nobody cared about these great Americans until I came along and honored them as they should be honored. You think I’m kidding?
The National Garden of American Heroes, which Trump originally announced during his first term, will include multiple Black heroes, he announced in a proclamation on Tuesday.
The park will “honor our greatest Americans, including black icons like Booker T. Washington, Jackie Robinson, Aretha Franklin, Coretta Scott King, Muhammad Ali, and many others,” the action reads.
The president also recognized Prince Estabrook, who served in the Revolutionary War while enslaved, and Lemuel Haynes, who is widely recognizedas the first Black man in America to be ordained by a Protestant church.
Trump called them “black patriots” and said “as President, I am fighting to restore the Nation that these titans helped build.”
What?
Trump also used the occasion to slam “the progressive movement and far-left politicians,” as has become a tradition in his White Housecommemorations.
They “needlessly divide our citizens on the basis of race, painting a toxic and distorted and disfigured vision of our history, heritage, and heroes,” he said.
See? It’s the left that’s made everything worse for Black America. Trump is their greatest champion.
I assume most people won’t believe this crap but you never know. A reminder:
Trump expressed support in his proclamation for Black History Month celebrations, which his administration has targeted in the past year. In response to his executive order last year banning DEI initiatives, the Pentagon’s intelligence agency paused special event programs and related events, including ones for Black History Month.
I’m sure they’ll just pretend that never happened even though they blackmailed countless institutions into abandoning their efforts to recruit qualified Black people, proclaiming such measures to be discrimination against white people. The assault on DEI has been comprehensive throughout the government and more broadly throughout society. Trump proclaiming himself a hero for restoring their place in history is enough to give you a blinding headache.
Leonard Leo constructed the court that gave Trump immunity for all his crimes and enabled him to destroy the nation, That little tantrum, a reprise of an earlier on last spring, is because Trump is worried that the Supreme Court is going to rule against his daft tariff scheme and he needs to blame someone and claim it was rigged because he never really loses.
This dialog between Dahlia Lithwick at Slate and Lisa Graves, legal expert and the author of Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights speaks to the reality we are dealing with:
Lithwick: Since Trump has taken office, that same Federalist Society–constructed majority is giving cover, sometimes even fighting lower court judges (including Federalist Society judges) to protect Trump’s prerogatives. The Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention made news last month when Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche did a little fireside chat where he more or less said that he and the Justice Department were at war against federal district courts and asked young members of the Federalist Society to join in that battle. The video of that chat now seems to have been taken down. So there is this public-facing “We’re just a debate society” FedSoc, but at the same time, what’s happening in the inside of that ballroom is someone is openly trying to foment a rebellion against Article 3 judges. How do you square that particular circle?
Graves: The president’s job is to faithfully execute the law. I was just finishing writing my book on Inauguration Day and John Roberts swore Trump in, and the president swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, to faithfully execute it. I wondered at that time, and I wonder even more so now, what that oath even means. It seems to have been rendered meaningless by John Roberts and his cohorts in the immunity decision, and in the series of unprecedented rulings this year that have allowed Trump to move forward with extreme actions that on their face look like they’re in violation of the Constitution, or statutes, or regulations, or rules, or contracts.
President Trump tapped out a few posts on Truth Social recently, “To Leonard Leo, Koch, and all of the countries and slimeballs that have ripped off the United States of America for years through the use of their own tariffs. We don’t have a court system that’s going to let you destroy our country any longer.” I think parsing Trump tweets—well, that way madness lies, but I do want to ask whether that signals to you a meaningful break between Trump and the conservative legal movement?
It’s clear that he has this notion of 100 percent loyalty and anything less is not OK. Charles Koch has gotten a huge amount of what he wanted from Donald Trump. The tax breaks from Trump’s first term were crafted by the Koch machine, pushed through in part with the help of Koch, and then they were made permanent. These are generational changes to our tax structure in ways that benefit billionaires like Koch, and Trump was more than happy to do it. The only time he’s not happy is if the Koch operation dares to issue a brief on the other side, as it has done in the tariff case.
The tariff case is an extraordinary circumstance where Trump has, yet again, claimed a power that is expressly committed to Congress. His lawyer has tried to expand a statute in order to basically shoehorn him into the ability to issue arbitrary and capricious and irrational tariffs. Some in the business community, like Koch, are objecting. Some groups that have lawyers who’ve been tied to Leonard Leo are objecting too—on that one issue. And it’s the one issue where the Roberts court, that’s so beholden to this right-wing agenda and also to Trump, may defect. It looks like they may say that this is the one bridge too far, along with perhaps Trump’s attempt to control the Fed, because it cuts against business interests. But on every other issue where our rights are at stake, where our future is at stake, where programs that Congress has funded to support our kids in schools, our health, cancer research, parks, the environment, on and on, this court has been putting its thumb on the scale of justice in a way that favors Trump and favors this right-wing movement. For an authoritarian, any daylight between someone and the regime is too much, but that doesn’t mean that there’s a meaningful, deep and wide difference between where Leonard Leo wants the court to head—unitary executive theory, consolidating the other gains on anti-regulation, moving forward when they think it’s politically expedient on assailing marriage equality, continuing to drive forward on limiting abortion access—these things are aligned, and Charles Koch, despite his libertarian roots, has been funding the groups that are all on board for that same agenda. Groups associated with Koch have announced that they will be spending big again in this midterm election like they did in the presidential, like they did in the midterm before that, to try to ensure that Donald Trump has a majority in both houses of Congress, regardless of the destruction that is unfolding for the rest of us.
They’re all getting what they paid for. Trump, as usual, thinks he deserves more than anyone else.
The tariff case was heard on a semi-expedited basis (at least in terms of these Trump cases) but they;re taking their sweet time with a decision. I would not be surprised if it goes Trump’s way. Why would they delay the decision for so long unless they wanted to pull one of those, “well, we might not agree with this but it’s too late now to reverse anything so maybe just don’t do it next time opinions?”
Who knows? But the idea that Leonard Leo has suddenly come to Jesus is ridiculous. He may be pretending that he isn’t a full-blown Trump lackey but for all intents and purposes he might as well be.
