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• Trump flexed his strength in primary elections, continuing the process of eliminating political enemies within the GOP. At the same time, his low ratings and the war have raised red flags among base voters who supported his “America First” agenda. The biggest win for the White House is defeating Rep. Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican who opposed Trump on key issues, including on the “big, beautiful bill” and on pushing for the release of files related to Epstein. Massie lost to Ed Gallrein, who got 54%.

• Senate Majority Leader John Thune — and most of the GOP conference — is reeling from Trump’s snap endorsement of Ken Paxton over John Cornyn in the Texas GOP Senate runoff on May 26th.

• Trump sounds increasingly unhinged: “I thought the market would go down 25 percent, and I was OK with that to get rid of a nuclear potential holocaust. Would have been a nuclear holocaust. So, going down 25 percent’s OK when you get rid of a nuclear holocaust, so, uh, most people agree with me…Everyone tells me [the war] is unpopular, but I think it’s very popular. When they hear that it’s having to do with nuclear weapons, weapons that could take out Los Angeles, could take out major cities, very quick, when they hear that—I tell you what, when we explain it to people, I don’t really have enough time to explain to people. I’m too busy getting it done,” Trump said. “I think it’s frankly very popular, but whether it’s popular or not popular, I have to do it, because I’m not going to let the world be blown up on my watch. Not gonna happen.”

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The American worker is under incredible stress from rapacious employers, a horrific job market, avaricious vendors, societal stressors, and an oppressive government. It would take a little more energy to change it all—but that may be asking too much for now.

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• Two teenage attackers fatally shot three men at a mosque in San Diego, California, in a suspected hate crime, before taking their own lives. Police were already on the hunt for the two when the attack at the Islamic Center of San Diego began, and they found three victims with gunshot wounds outside the front of the building. Officers found the suspects – aged 17 and 18 – dead of self-inflicted wounds in a vehicle blocks away from the mosque.

• Iran has made a new proposal for a deal to end the war, with Donald Trump claiming he had postponed new military strikes so talks could continue. But there has been no sign of a breakthrough in the stalled negotiations.

•  Brian Morrissey, the top lawyer at the Treasury Department, quit in the wake of the creation of a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” that could soon make payments to Trump’s political allies.

•  Chinese leader Xi Jinping is set to host his “old friend” Vladimir Putin less than a week after Donald Trump’s ​high-profile visit, as Beijing seeks to project itself as a stable and predictable power in a world shaken by trade tensions, wars and an energy crisis.

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Have a question for Ted and/or co-host Jamarl Thomas? Join the hosts of “DeProgram” for a full hour of nothing but LIVE Q&A! Any topic, any question, goes—it’s up to you.

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• A crowd of thousands transformed a block of the National Mall into an evangelical-style worship service Sunday at an event backed by Trump and funded with millions of taxpayer dollars. In an eight-hour lineup, speakers including top government officials framed America as a country founded to be explicitly Christian — and in danger if its population turns from their version of that religious faith. Sitting, standing, dancing and praising with hands raised toward a blazing sun, attendees appeared riveted as speakers took the stage during “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving.” Many said they were thrilled to see an event that tied the nation and its government so overtly to Christianity.

• The Trump administration is considering the establishment of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate the president’s allies and others investigated by the Justice Department under Biden. The unusual plan, which Democrats and former government officials criticized as a vast political slush fund financed by taxpayers, is being fast-tracked. The fund would also address Trump’s separate pair of administrative claims against the Justice Department for its investigations into him. Trump has asked for $230 million for those claims.

•  Iran is threatening to impose fees on undersea Internet cables beneath the Strait of Hormuz, CNN reports, raising concerns that Iran could target a critical “digital corridor” for global finance, cloud services and communications as talks with Washington remain stalled.

•  The Long Island Railroad commuter rail system is on strike. The main sticking point is a pay raise.

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Remember those car ads where they drove a gas-guzzling vehicle up to the top of a mesa in Arizona to capture the romance of the open road? Now that gas prices are soaring, it looks more like a death wish.

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• Crisis in Cuba: Cuba’s oil reserves have run dry, which will plunge the country into even more frequent, bigger and longer nationwide blackouts. Venezuelan fuel stopped flowing in January, after the US kidnapped Venezuela’s president and stole Venezuela’s oil industry. Later, Trump imposed a blockade barring oil from reaching Cuba, which had also received shipments from Mexico.

• The US is moving to indict former Cuban president Raúl Castro. The charges are related to the Cuban government shooting down two planes operated by a right-wing group in 1996.

•  CIA Director John Ratcliffe leads a delegation to Havana to deliver a message from Trump to Cuban officials and Raúl “Raulito” Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, the elder Castro’s grandson. Last week, the U.S. State Department ⁠said it had privately offered the $100 million in aid to Cuba, in addition to “free ​and fast satellite internet” on the condition that it agree to “meaningful reforms.”

•  The Justice Department accuses Yale School of Medicine of discriminating based on race, by favoring Black and Hispanic applicants over White and Asian ones. The DOJ looked at median grade-point averages and standardized test scores broken down by race, and concluded that “Yale’s use of race resulted in a Black applicant being as much as 29 times higher odds of getting an interview for admission than an equally strong Asian applicant with similar academic credentials.” The investigation did not address other factors, such as essays, transcripts, letters of recommendation and interviews. The median entrance exam score for admitted Black students last year was 518 and for 517 for Hispanic students. The median score was 524 for both White and Asian students. The highest possible score is 528. The median grade point average for Black students was 3.88 and 3.91 for Hispanic students. For White students, it was 3.97 and for Asians 3.98.

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Despite repeated disasters, the Democratic National Committee continues its strategy of sidelining leftists and progressives in favor of corporate moderates who are unpopular with voters.

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Trump’s three presidential campaigns were contests between establishment and insurgent, steadfastness versus change, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” against “burn it all down.”

Trump did not offer new ideas. Rather, the vagueness of MAGA and America First promised an idea-generation machine powered by a pair of nationalist principles. The implicit pledge that anything would be possible was reinforced in his second term by out-of-the-box personnel picks like Gabbard and Kennedy.

Intellectually exhausted, in permanent defense mode, and paralyzed by the internal contradiction between their New Deal history and their Clintonite present, Democrats tacitly conceded the framing to the opposition. 2016, 2020, and 2024 were referenda about Trump.

Liberals took comfort in Biden’s win, failing to recognize that COVID was a black swan moment, that Trump’s weird disavowal of Operation Warp Speed was political suicide, and that “nothing will fundamentally change” is not an appealing campaign message under normal circumstances.

Yet here we are, ten years into this current political drama, and Democrats are entering the midterms with one repeatedly failed message—we’re not Trump—and one predicated on faulty assumptions: Black and Latino voters will be so angry about GOP efforts to disenfranchise them via gerrymandering that they will turn out in record numbers for Democrats.

About those assumptions: Latinos are no longer a majority Democratic voting bloc and probably never were. Blacks were, but are far less likely to support Democrats nearly unanimously as they have done historically. These days, it turns out, minority voters (and everyone else) often stay home unless something exciting—Obama, Black Lives Matter—compels them to head out to their local school gymnasium or firehouse to cast votes that, individually, as everyone knows, cannot make a difference.

Stupidity by people who seem smart enough to know better—when that stupidity is unmistakable, avoidable, yet repeated, and then repeated again!—fascinates me. How can it be that the Democrats are once again arriving at the field of battle without having prepared a set of policy prescriptions tailored to this moment, as well as a poll-tested messaging campaign to promote it?

The fact that they keep doing this—or, more accurately, not doing what they should be doing—suggests that they have not suffered enough from previous iterations of this misjudgment for the lesson to stick. What happens to individual Democrats who lose elections in a two-party system, after all, is less than awful. They while away their wilderness years in academia and the media until, inevitably, they return or someone close to them returns and hooks them up with some sinecure. Meanwhile, the party apparatus fundraises as an opposition unaccountable for either the outrages of the incumbents or those of its own past, cuz ahistoricity.

Punishment this fall, such as it will be, will probably see Republicans overperforming but losing the House—i.e., beating the spread. Because they won, Democrats will say, and privately believe, that the results reflect voter approval and thus validate running against Trump. This will be a repeat of the error of 2020. Winning a majority while throwing away a chance at a supermajority is political malpractice.

Given their vast experience, donor base, and media alliances, corporate Democrats have no excuse for their lack of imagination. That’s just as true of Trump’s MAGA movement; with nothing to lose, their pariah status ought to have freed them from establishment encumbrances. They had the chance to make good on their vision of a Republican Party opposed to foreign wars, dedicated to adding American jobs by leveraging our consumer base, and repealing and replacing Obamacare. They have instead succumbed to the siren calls of militarism, Zionism, and transnationalism, betraying their base and the country at large.

So 2026 has become a contest no longer between a party bereft of ideas and one offering the possibility of future ideas, but between a party bereft of ideas and one with no credible argument to make concerning future ideas.

Happy 250th.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)

The post MAGA’s Idea Factory Has Closed appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

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• Backed by $5.6 million in outside money, Corporatist Denise Powell has narrowly defeated progressive State Sen. John Cavanaugh to win the Democratic primary in the race for Nebraska’s second congressional district. Powell will go on to face Brinker Harding who is endorsed by Trump. The race for the state’s second congressional district could help decide which party controls the narrowly divided U.S. House after this year’s midterm elections. The district, which includes Omaha, is known as the “blue dot” because it was the lone Nebraska district to vote for Kamala in 2024 and Biden in 2020. It is currently represented by Republican Don Bacon, who is retiring.

• The South Carolina Supreme Court has unanimously ruled to overturn the 2023 double murder conviction of disgraced attorney Alex Murdaugh, saying the jury tampering actions of former Colleton County Court Clerk Rebecca “Becky” Hill denied “Murdaugh his right to a fair trial by an impartial jury.” Murdaugh’s case will now return to circuit court. He is accused of killing his wife, Maggie, and younger son Paul at the Murdaugh rural estate in Colleton County on the evening of June 7, 2021.

•  JPMorgan warns that oil prices may hit $150 per barrel by June 15th, the time available to reach a diplomatic resolution is narrowing, and the economic consequences of delay are compounding in ways that are not yet fully visible in either securities markets or inflation data. Global supply disruptions reached 13.7 million barrels per day in April 2026, roughly 14% of total world demand. Spare capacity from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates is effectively offline due to the Strait of Hormuz closure. 75 percent of Americans say the war has had a negative effect on their finances.

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• Trump says that he is not weighing the economic burden of the Iran war on everyday Americans. Asked to what extent “Americans’ financial situations” were motivating him to make a deal with Iran, he replied: “Not even a little bit,” Trump said. “The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran — they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing — we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.”

• Secret new assessments say Iran has operational access to 30 of its 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz, suggesting that its military remains far stronger than President Trump has asserted. Iran still fields about 70 percent of its mobile launchers across the country and has retained roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile.

•  Dozens of Gulf citizens have been accused of belonging to Iran-linked terrorism cells as the war accelerates a shift toward deeper authoritarianism in the region. Shiite religious leaders in Pakistan also estimate that as many as thousands of Shiite Pakistanis have been deported from the Emirates since mid-April.

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition may collapse next week, after one of his key ultra-Orthodox coalition partners called for the parliament to be dissolved. The political crisis comes after Netanyahu told ultra-Orthodox political leaders that he would not advance legislation to exempt ultra-Orthodox Jewish Israelis from military service.

•  More than 10,000 times, judges have said ICE detentions, typically carried out with no opportunity for detainees to plead their case, are illegal. That’s roughly 90 percent of all cases — a staggering rejection of a core piece of Trump’s immigration agenda. Presidents’ signature initiatives often end up in court. But this flood of adverse rulings is unique — a never-before-seen reaction to a never-before-seen policy.

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Theoretically, representative democracy is a process by which candidates for elected office accurately assess people’s biggest concerns and develop popular plans to fix the problems. However, politicians from both parties, especially Republicans, seem to prefer radical and novel redistricting schemes so that they don’t have to convince anyone and can still win.

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• Since Virginia’s Supreme Court struck down state Democrats’ new congressional map and SCOTUS narrowed the Voting Rights Act, Democrats are arguing that Republicans’ aggressive moves to dismantle Black- and Hispanic-majority districts in the South will outrage voters of color and spur them to the polls in record numbers.

•  The former mayor of Arcadia was expected to plead guilty after being charged with acting as an illegal agent of China. Eileen Wang, who was elected to the Arcadia City Council in 2022, as well as Yaoning “Mike” Sun of Chino Hills, allegedly worked at the direction of China and operated “U.S. News Center,” a news source for the local Chinese American community between late 2020 and through 2022.

• Israeli legislators have approved a bill to establish a special tribunal with the power to impose the death penalty on Palestinians accused of involvement in the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023. The bill explicitly permits mass trials that deviate from standard rules of evidence, including broad judicial discretion to admit evidence obtained under torture.

•  Kuwait accused Iran of sending an armed paramilitary Revolutionary Guard team to launch a failed attack earlier this month on an island in the Middle East nation home to a China-funded port project. The accusation came as the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, said that Israel sent Iron Dome anti-missile batteries and personnel to operate them to the UAE.

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• Writing in The New York Times, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) argues that the Left is picking on Israel but gets a free pass: “The Democratic condemnation piled on Israel’s government is overwhelming in comparison to other allies. It’s also louder than Democrats’ condemnation of Iran’s regime for the slaughter of thousands of Iranians in December and January. Israel has been decried by some leading Democrats as an ‘apartheid’ state. But I haven’t heard any of them claim apartheid when it comes to how women and LGBTQ people are treated across the Middle East.”

•  A report, from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based advocacy group, concludes that Israel employs “systematic sexual violence” in jails and prisons that is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy.”

• Netanyahu says he wants Israel to wean itself off the $3.8 billion it gets from the US each year over the next decade.

• Six people are found dead inside a cargo train boxcar in Laredo, home to one of Texas’ largest hubs for trade with Mexico, accounting for roughly 62% of the state’s land port trade, or $340 billion.

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When an American missile blew up an elementary school in Iran, killing nearly 200 boys, girls, and teachers, few Americans seemed highly concerned about it. Nevertheless, the war is highly unpopular—mainly because rising fuel prices are pinching our wallets.

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• Trump’s announcement that the U.S. military would escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz under Operation Freedom angered Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who denied U.S. access to Saudi airspace and American bases in the country because he wants to end the war and saw the idea as a provocation. Prince Mohammed’s action stunned U.S. officials and forced Trump to abandon his plan. Trump’s unpredictable and whipsawing approach to Iran has strained ties with one of his closest allies.

• Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s governing Labour Party suffers big losses and the hard-right party Reform U.K. made major gains in partial results from local elections that are widely seen as an unofficial referendum on Starmer. Reform UK, led by nationalist politician Nigel Farage, won hundreds of local council seats in working-class areas in England’s north such as Hartlepool that once were solid Labour turf, and also made gains from the Conservatives in areas like Havering on the eastern edge of London.

• A crowd at a military Mother’s Day event laughed lightly when Melania Trump referred to her husband’s empathy. “Most know my husband as the strong commander-in-chief, but his empathy transcends the role,” she said as laughter bubbled up among military moms.

• The Washington Post editorial board argues: “Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) doesn’t just think there should be no billionaires. She believes accumulating that much wealth is inherently immoral, probably criminal and definitely illegitimate. How does she grapple with the 3,400 or so people who have that much? ‘You can break rules,’ she explained. ‘You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they’re worth. But you can’t earn that.’ To say that it’s impossible to legitimately earn a billion dollars is to put an arbitrary limit on human potential. And presuming that anyone who becomes too successful must be cheating shows a lack of imagination as to what humans are capable of accomplishing in a free society.”

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These days, everything seems so fake that it’s impossible to discern what may or may not be real in order to determine whether you should care.

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