New Verasight poll on the prominent issues of the day:
ICE at airports: 53% disapprove of deploying ICE agents to airports; 59% disapprove of Trump rejecting the Senate DHS funding deal.
Airport chaos: 77% say conditions at airports are worse than usual, and 52% blame the Trump administration or Senate Republicans for the current chaos — nearly double the 25% who blame Democrats.
ICE trust: Only 37% trust ICE to act professionally — the lowest of any agency we tested.
Iran: 72% oppose sending ground troops into the conflict. 60% prefer the U.S. pursue a ceasefire and negotiate with Iran, vs 29% who want to continue military operations.
People don’t realize that the Border Patrol is responsible for much of the brutality we’ve seen on our streets. Gregory Bovino was CBP not ICE.
And this …
That’s a killer. Not that he cares. As I’ve said, he’s playing for legacy now. And he’s so megalomaniacal that he figures all he has to do is accuse the Democrats of cheating in 2026 to make it so in the eyes of history. That may not work as well as he thinks it will.
A new Fox News poll released on Wednesday shows President Donald Trump’s disapproval rating is the highest it has been in either of his two terms.
A whopping 59% of respondents said they disapprove of Trump’s performance as president, with 47% saying they strongly disapprove. The 59% disapproval figure is the highest Trump has received in a Fox News poll. Only 41% of Americans said they approve. The survey was conducted between March 20 and March 23 and has a margin of error of three percent.
One key issue that seems to be weighing down the president is the war on Iran and its knock-on effects on the economy. Just 42% of voters back the war, according to the Fox News survey, with independents supporting it at a clip of just 28%.
A Reuters poll released on Tuesday had similarly bad numbers for Trump, as his approval rating in that survey was just 36%.
Twenty-two years ago a famous American became the poster child for insider trading when she was found to have taken a tip from her broker about a falling stock price and saved herself about $45,000 in losses. Martha Stewart, the extremely wealthy entrepreneur and “domestic lifestyle influencer,” spent five months in jail for lying about what she’d done. She paid restitution and fines, and came back just fine afterward. But the punishment struck many people as excessive. It was clear prosecutors sought to make an example of her and send a message that no one is above the law when it comes to insider trading.
Somebody didn’t get the memo. Monday saw what appears to be one of the biggest insider trades ever registered, and there’s nobody minding the store willing to find out who it was. In fact, it may be that the store itself was in on it.
Over the weekend, and seemingly out of the blue, President Trump took to Truth Social to threaten Iran with what, if executed, would amount to war crimes for targeting civilian infrastructure. He wrote, “If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!” This sounded like a serious escalation, but at the same time, Trump has been so all over the place in conducting the war that it’s no longer reasonable to assume he means anything he says.
Iran responded as one would expect. The regime sent out its own statements threatening to “irreversibly destroy” energy plants throughout the Middle East in response. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — who has become an unlikely spokesman for the administration on military strategy, perhaps in an attempt to soothe the chaotic markets — explained on Sunday’s “Meet the Press” that “sometimes you have to escalate to de-escalate,” as if that made any sense at all. Suffice to say that everyone awaited Monday with anxiety and trepidation, wondering if the administration was about to take the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran to the next level.
Trump blinked at 7:05 that morning, declaring he was giving Iran a five-day reprieve due to “good and productive talks” to end the war. The Islamic Republic denied that any such talks were happening, and since everyone involved in this endeavor are inveterate liars, there’s no way of really knowing the truth about any of it.
But someone seems to have known that Trump was going to back down exactly when he did. CNBC reported later that day that at 6:49 a.m., the S&P 500 e-Mini futures trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange — the world’s largest derivatives marketplace for futures and options, — saw a “sharp and isolated jump in volume.” It also happened on the Barito Renewables Energy (BREN) and West Texas Intermediate May futures oil markets, where contracts valued at $580 million were sold. Bloomberg News analyzed trading on those markets during the same period of time over the previous five days; the average trading level was around 700 contracts. In a one-minute period on Monday — between 6:49 and 6:50 — about 6,200 contracts were traded.
The market was very quiet at the time. There was no news, no public chit-chat, nothing that would give rise to such a big move, but there it was. The only explanation that makes any sense is that someone knew that within 15 minutes Donald Trump was going to announce he was backing off his threats against Iran — and that the markets would surge on the news. (A White House spokesman called the implication “baseless.”)
As Axios noted on Wednesday, “Mysterious trading patterns [have followed] Trump into war.” Each time he announces a consequential decision, the report found, an “epidemic of suspicious trading” occurs just before the news would affect the markets.
People appear to have been profiteering on the prediction-market website Polymarket as well, beginning with Trump’s military operation in Venezuela. According to the BBC, one trader made $436,000 on a $32,000 bet on the timing of the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. CNN reported that another trader has made nearly $1 million since 2024 from “dozens of well-timed bets that correctly predicted U.S. and Israeli military actions against Iran,” profits almost certainly derived from insider information. According to the report, “the bettor won a staggering 93% of their five-figure wagers about Iran, even though the events they predicted were unannounced military operations.”
This threat is acute enough that observers are warning that the ability to anonymously make such large bets on current events could motivate the people involved to alter outcomes for their own financial benefit. This is bad when it comes to sports, but it’s downright terrifying when it comes to wars.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., labeled the alleged profiteering an example of “mind-blowing corruption” and has proposed legislation to prohibit these markets from allowing bets on government action. “They are rife with insider trading,” he said, “and they offer incredibly perverse incentives, especially inside government, for government actors to push official decision making towards their financial interests.”
It would be nice to believe that our political leaders would never do such a thing, which would amount to making money off the lives of our troops. But considering the history of an administration led by a man convicted of 34 felony counts of business fraud, that would be unforgivably naive. According to a comprehensive New Yorker investigation, the Trump family has made $4 billion since the president returned to office in January 2025, and it’s important to note that Donald Trump Jr. is an investor in and adviser to Polymarket, and a paid strategic adviser to Kalshi, its rival firm.
But members of Congress are no better. Many of them have been raking in profits like it’s their religion ever since Donald Trump came back into office. After Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched the war against Iran on Feb. 28, Rep. Dave Taylor, R-Ohio, sold stock among two oil companies.
Polymarket and Kalshi announced on Monday they were issuing new guidance to guard against such behaviors going forward, but no one knows exactly how they will be able to control it. There are various bills pending in Congress to rein in some of the excesses, but it’s hard to imagine Trump signing them.
As for the blatant market manipulation that’s taking place, such as those incredibly lucrative, serendipitously-timed Monday morning trades, I wouldn’t expect too much. After just six months on the job, Margaret Ryan, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s top enforcement official, resigned last week. She reportedly clashed with Trump’s hand-picked SEC chair Paul Atkins and other GOP political appointees over her decision to pursue cases with ties to Trump.
Maybe they can find another high-profile woman like Martha Stewart to send a different message. This one will say, “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”
You’re driving down the highway and the driver ahead meanders back and forth between the left and right lanes. “For god’s sake, pick a lane,” you say aloud.
You may say the same to federal judges mentioned in Mattathias Schwartz’s reflections on their recent comments regarding the fate of the republic. Some are speaking out in Trump-era opinions usually much more reserved. Others see that as risky.
Schwartz writes in The New York Times (gift link):
In many instances, the writerly flourishes and flashy citations appear to be symptoms of a growing sense among district-court judges that President Trump’s second term is an all-hands-on-deck constitutional emergency. That feeling of alarm runs all the way up to the Supreme Court, where Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that one decision from the conservative majority was “an existential threat to the rule of law.”
Oh, but wait, warn others.
The public could perceive rulings as motivated by political animus, instead of the basic application of law to the facts of a case. District court judges who take an unnecessarily adversarial stance could provoke appellate courts to overturn their rulings. And if strident writing becomes the new normal, some judges expressed worry that a more restrained, technical style could be misinterpreted as a sign that they do not have broader concerns.
Some judges who spoke anonymously worried their colleagues just might be taking Trump’s bait. Pick a lane.
“The risk is being the boy who cried wolf,” said Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School and the author of a book on Franklin Roosevelt’s Supreme Court nominees. “If you say that the republic is collapsing in every single case, will anyone listen when the republic really is collapsing, and the Supreme Court says so?”
Noah needs to get out more. Maybe to Minneapolis.
Jaw-dropping DOJ admissions to court
DOJ admits repeatedly made "material mistaken" representations to judge. ICE never had authority (under 2025 Guidance) to conduct arrests at immigration courthouses!
“Antiseptic judicial rhetoric cannot do justice to what is happening,” Judge Joseph R. Goodwin of the Southern District of West Virginia wrote last month. The tactics being deployed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he wrote, are “an assault on the constitutional order” and “beyond the reach of ordinary legal description.”
We are seeing blatant constitutional violations of civil rights promoted by this White House. “No court has yet been required to state the obvious,” Goodwin wrote. “This court is now required to say it.”
In ordering the release of an Ecuadorian asylum seeker and his 5-year-old son, Judge Fred Biery of the Western District of Texas condemned the Trump administration’s “perfidious lust for unbridled power” was “bereft of human decency.” Furthermore, “the imposition of cruelty in its quest [knows] no bounds and [is] bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.”
MAGA praises Trump for telling it like it is. Suck it up, cupcakes.
Mr. Trump has “forced judges to be in a position that they’ve never been in before,” said Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge and lecturer at Harvard Law School. “The distance between what he’s trying to do and what is lawful is so great, and the language of these opinions reflects that. So it’s not that there are rogue judges. There is a rogue president.”
But for Edward Whelan, a conservative legal commentator and former Justice Department official, judges who go further than “dispassionately deciding the specific case in front of them” are overstepping their role. “Once you get into other questions — should the judge be sending a signal or warning of the apocalypse — that’s not judging. That’s something different,” he said.
Like pulling the fire alarm instead of whispering amidst smoke and flame?
Mr. Trump escalated his attacks on Wednesday night, calling on Republican lawmakers to pass a crime bill that “cracks down on rogue judges.” He said at a National Republican Congressional Committee event in Washington that these judges “are criminals.”
First Trump came for the Muslims. Then he came for the election process. Then he came for the immigrants … and their civil rights. Then he came for civil servants. Then he came for voting rights. Then he came for political opponents. Then he single-handedly started a war, all along accepting bribes and lining his pockets.
The Justice Department has reached an agreement with President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn to pay him roughly $1.2 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the former general claiming he was politically targeted for prosecution during Trump’s first administration, sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News.
The settlement is well below the $50 million in damages Flynn initially sought when he first filed the lawsuit in 2023, but will still likely fuel questions as to whether Flynn received a favorable outcome due to his continued vocal support for President Trump.
A federal judge had previously thrown out Flynn’s lawsuit in 2024 following a motion to dismiss the suit filed by the Justice Department during the Biden administration, after ruling that Flynn had failed to meet essential elements showing he was a victim of malicious prosecution. But Flynn’s attorneys sought to revive their case after President Trump returned to office, and the department disclosed in a filing last year that it had been engaged in settlement talks with his legal team.
A Justice Department spokesperson, in a statement regarding the settlement, said, “ly do it but I have to wonder why. Of course he can. He can do anything and he sees this sort of thing Those who instigated the Russia Collusion Hoax and Crossfire Hurricane abused their power to mislead the American people and tarnish the reputations of President Trump and his supporters. Today’s settlement, secured by this Justice Department, is an important step in redressing that historic injustice.”
I’m sure Trump is next to be given “reparations” for his trouble. I know people think he can’t possibly get away with ordering the DOJ to pay him for the Russia investigation (which was totally on the up and up) but I don’t know why not. He has no limits. He’ll take the money and give it to some wingnut cause, like that makes it ok. I’m sure Flynn won’t be his only henchman to get paid either. This is just another MAGA grift with the taxpayers on the hook.
Remember, all these people were in bed with every Russian they met at the time. Either they were total dupes or playing footsie with one of America’s most powerful adversaries. Either way they should have all been drummed out of politics forever.
Instead:
The Trump Justice Department under former Attorney General William Barr then moved to drop the case in 2020, in a filing that sharply criticized the FBI’s conduct in investigating Flynn and argued that the case against him should never have been brought.
The move faced some pushback from a Washington, D.C., federal judge who had questioned the department’s motives in dropping the prosecution, and President Trump later issued a full pardon for Flynn in the wake of his 2020 election loss.
Barr had a serious case of Fox news brain rot who only belatedly realized that Trump was out of his mind. He will carry the historical burden of what he did.
William Saletan at the Bulwark runs down all the grotesque statements Trump has made when one of his perceived enemies dies and it’s a doozy. There are some I’d forgotten about like this:
In 2020, Congressman John Lewis, a hero of the civil rights movement, died of cancer at 80. Trump groused that Lewis had slighted him (“He didn’t come to my inauguration. He didn’t come to my State of the Union speeches”), and he refused to say whether Lewis’s life had been impressive (“I can’t say one way or the other. I find a lot of people impressive. I find many people not impressive”). Instead, Trump boasted, “Nobody has done more for black Americans than I have.”
[W]e flew on a trip to Australia, to meet with our “five eyes” intelligence community partners, and while we were there, in the middle of the night, I get a phone call from the White House. DHS just had the flag lowered around the country in honor of the late senator John McCain, which was right and appropriate, and no one thought anything of it. I was awoken in the night by the White House and our military aide frantically trying to get in touch with me and with the secretary to say the president is furious that the flags are lowered for John McCain and he wants you guys to order them raised back up.
They finally talked him out of it but it took hours.
So, so typical. I can’t even imagine what he’ll do if Clinton or Biden die while he’s in office.
As Saletan says:
THIS IS NOT THE BEHAVIOR of a normal human being. And Republicans, in accepting this behavior, have ceased to be a normal party.
He provides a lot of evidence but this one really gets me:
This past Sunday on Meet the Press, Kristen Welker pressed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent about Trump’s gloating over Mueller’s corpse. “Do you think it’s appropriate,” she asked, “for the president of the United States to celebrate the death of an American citizen, someone who’s a Bronze Star, Purple Heart recipient and who served in Vietnam?”
Bessent defended Trump:
I was with the president in the green room at Davos, and there was a video playing of what may have been an illegal raid on his home at Mar-a-Lago. They are going through his wife’s wardrobe. And I watched the look in his eye. And I think that neither one of us can understand what has been done to the president and to his family.
Bessent was lying. The FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago was authorized by a court, and it uncovered evidence that Trump had grossly violated laws on retaining classified documents. Furthermore, as Welker reminded Bessent, “Robert Mueller didn’t order that raid.” The search took place in 2022, three years after Mueller’s time as special counsel had ended.
“Is it appropriate for the president to celebrate the death of any American citizen?” Welker then asked. Bessent repeated that Trump was the victim. “Given what has been done to President Trump and his family, it is impossible for either of us to understand what he has been through,” he insisted. “I think that we should all have a little empathy for what has been done to him and his family.”
The whining from all of them is deafening. Poor, poor Donald Trump. He constantly breaks the law, acts like an animal and treats over half the country and most of the world like they are his vassals and then when he’s taken to task for being the grotesque monster he is, he and his minions have a good old fashioned cry.
To borrow a MAGA phrase: fuck their feelings. They’ve inlflicted this chaotic catastrophe on us for over a decade now and it’s enough.
“In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything,” Abraham Lincoln declared. “With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed.”
Faced with negative public reaction to his latest attack on Iran, Donald Trump said, “I don’t care about polling. I have to do the right thing.”
Mr. Trump’s position sounds nobler. But America’s greatest president was making a deeper point: In a country whose government derives its legitimacy from the people, public support is necessary for success.
Lincoln didn’t mean that leaders must always consult the people before acting. As president, he didn’t when he suspended the writ of habeas corpus early in the Civil War. (He did submit his decision to the judgment of the people’s representatives once Congress convened in July 1861.)
Nor did he mean that the public must support the president’s decision at the moment it is made. Rather, he said, leaders in a republic must seek to “mold” public sentiment—to convince an often skeptical populace that a controversial course of action is justified. Persuasion, he rightly believed, isn’t an ornament but the heart of republican leadership.
Trump only cares about his base and I think he’s caring about them less and less. He’s playing for history now — it’s all about being remembered as the greatest president who ever lived. I suspect in the end he almost prefers it that most people hate him because he thinks he’ll be proven right in the long run and everyone in the future will hail him for his courage and genius for “doing the right thing.”
He will go to his grave believing that and since there seems to be no accountability for him in this life, he’ll die a happy man.
I know that’s dark but look at it this way. If that’s true it means we’ll have survived this.
I guess it isn't a shock the guy who called Trump "Daddy" drank the Dear Leader kool-aid.
Even as Trump belittles NATO troops who served in Afghanistan & bows to Putin, Rutte wants NATO to join Trump's & Netanyahu's war. A sure way to undermine support for NATO in member states. https://t.co/8d7qcPCTxi
— Senator Chris Van Hollen (@ChrisVanHollen) March 25, 2026
I have always wondered if the NATO “Trump whisperer” Mark Rutte was actually just playing him as everyone assumed or if he was a true believer. He certainly seemed sincere in all of his public appearances with Trump and was extremely enthusiastic in his support. The affect and the body language certainly suggested “MAGA cultists” in a way that you rarely see among Europeans (other than the Orban and Nigel Farage types.)
It looks like that might be the case after all:
Mark Rutte, the secretary general of NATO, is often called a “Trump whisperer,” able to mix public flattery with private advice to an unpredictable and moody American president whose support is crucial to the alliance and to Ukraine’s war against Russia.
To that end, Mr. Rutte, who took the job in October 2024, has been willing to accept a degree of humiliation for his efforts to keep Mr. Trump sweet and onside, especially on intelligence support for Ukraine. He even called Mr. Trump the alliance’s “Daddy” before last year’s crucial NATO summit meeting.
But Mr. Rutte’s open support for Mr. Trump’s decision to go to war alongside Israel against Iran has brought new, sharper criticism.
The issue is not that he is flattering Mr. Trump. It is that Mr. Rutte is supporting a war of choice that most of the other 31 NATO allies regard as unnecessary and illegal under international law, as President Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany called it on Tuesday.
By supporting the war, which does not involve NATO or collective defense, the critics say, Mr. Rutte has gone beyond his remit as secretary general of the whole alliance to become a cheerleader for an unpopular president and an unpopular war.
It really surprised me to hear him say that and apparently it surprised the Europeans as well as most other experts on NATO:
Mr. Rutte’s main task is to keep the 32-nation alliance together and Mr. Trump engaged, supportive and involved. As someone who does not need to face voters, Mr. Rutte appears prepared to swallow some pride in order to please the White House and maintain its willingness to provide crucial intelligence, and to sell vital arms, to Ukraine.
But Ivo Daalder, a former American ambassador to NATO, said that on Iran, “it makes no sense for the NATO secretary-general to support an argument and a war that 31 other countries think is stupid, illegal, unnecessary and deeply destructive of the main goal, to weaken Russia.”
“The number one goal for him,” Mr. Daalder added, “is to keep NATO secure, and right now the biggest threat to NATO is Trump.”
Fabian Zuleeg, chief executive of the European Policy Center, a Brussels research organization, said working to keep the United States involved in NATO was crucial. “But as a European leader with responsibility to other European NATO members, Rutte is over the top, leaning too much in one direction,” he said.
NATO’s Rutte on him calling Trump “daddy”: Here is my insufficient command of the English language – I said ‘yeah, daddy sometimes has to be tough.’ And… of course later realizing that the word ‘daddy’ has a lot of connotations. Then, what he did, and this is to his credit because he is a fun guy and he has a lot of humor, the American side then put this on T-shirts, there was a video when he came back from the Hague summit where he said ‘daddy is home.’ So there it was born. And it was never intentioned, but okay, I am now carrying it, living with it, it’s a fact of life.
BREAM: Trump called NATO 'a paper tiger' and 'cowards.' So how does that square with what you're saying about their willingness to show up?
RUTTE: The good news is that 22 countries are following the president's lead on making sure we free up the Strait of Hormuz pic.twitter.com/XENJzNnO9B
MARK RUTTE: I know the president and his team — Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, Marco Rubio — they are constantly working to put maximum pressure on the Russians to come to a deal
And the Republicans are busy brainwashing their cult, who have no idea how much the rest of the country loathes their Dear Leader, to believe that the only way Democrats can possibly win is by cheating:
If we don’t pass SAVE America, Democrats win in November
It certainly can’t be because of this husk of a man:
Look at the state of him. Swaying. Drooping. Hands the color of old furniture. Standing in a room full of people paid to clap, looking like a man who has just discovered that Iran didn’t get his victory memo. He declared this war won fourteen times. Iran is still firing. The… pic.twitter.com/kkyvDMQxXb
Heather Cox Richardson noted this in her newsletter last night:
Trump’s vision of the U.S. is one tied to fossil fuels, leading the administration to declare war on renewable energy. On Monday it announced it will pay $928 million in taxpayer money to the large French energy company TotalEnergies to buy back leases it acquired under the Biden administration to build two wind farms, one off New York and the other off North Carolina. TotalEnergies will then invest that money in U.S. oil and gas projects, including one in Texas that will export liquefied natural gas.
“The era of taxpayers subsidizing unreliable, unaffordable and unsecure energy is officially over, and the era of affordable, reliable and secure energy is here to stay,” said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. North Carolina governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, told Maxine Joselow and Brad Plumer of the New York Times: “Our state has the offshore wind potential to power millions of homes with renewable American-made energy. It’s ludicrous and wasteful that the Trump Administration is spending $1 billion in taxpayer money to pay off a company to stop it from investing private dollars to create the clean energy we need.”
We are currently enmeshed in yet another war for oil and the whole world economy hangs in the balance. And this monster is doing absolutely instant things like this. It’s so min-boggling that sometimes I think I must be dreaming. It simply cannot be true that the United States is led by such a person. How could any country be so self-destructive?
