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American households will see $3,000 increase in the cost of goods due to Trump’s tarrifs

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

July 10, 2025

Just a week ago, Republicans in the House of Representatives passed the nearly 1,000-page budget reconciliation bill President Donald Trump demanded, and at the signing ceremony for the bill the next day, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced Republicans were “laying a key cornerstone of America’s new golden age.”

But the past week has shown a nation—and an administration—in turmoil.

On July 4, the day Trump signed the bill, flash floods devastated central Texas, leaving more than 100 people dead and about 160 still missing. Local officials immediately blamed cuts to the National Weather Service (NWS) for the disaster, but reviews showed that NWS meteorologists had predicted the storm accurately and had sent out three increasingly urgent warnings at 1:14 a.m., 4:03 a.m., and 6:06 a.m.

But four hours passed before the police department in the City of Kerrville issued a warning. It wasn’t until 7:32 that the city urged people along the Guadalupe River to move to higher ground immediately. The missing link between the NWS and public safety personnel appears to have been the weather service employee in charge of coordinating between them. He took an unplanned early retirement under pressure from the “Department of Government Efficiency” and has not been replaced.

Then, as Gabe Cohen and Michael Williams of CNN reported, search and rescue teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) could not respond to the disaster because Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose department is in charge of FEMA, had recently tried to cut spending by requiring her personal sign-off on any expenditure over $100,000. That order meant FEMA couldn’t put crews in place ahead of the storm, or respond immediately. Noem didn’t sign off on the deployment of FEMA teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding started.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, told Cohen and Williams that Noem did not authorize FEMA deployment because DHS used other search and rescue teams. “FEMA is shifting from bloated, DC-centric dead weight to a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers state actors to provide relief for their citizens,” McLaughlin told CNN in a statement. “The old processes are being replaced because they failed Americans in real emergencies for decades.”

“DHS is rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and is reprioritizing appropriated dollars. Secretary Noem is delivering accountability to the U.S. taxpayer, which Washington bureaucrats have ignored for decades at the expense of American citizens,” McLaughlin said. Noem has called for the elimination of FEMA.

Meanwhile, FEMA’s acting director, David Richardson, has been nowhere to be found, making no public appearances, statements, or postings on social media since the disaster, and not visiting the site. Former FEMA officials told Thomas Frank of Politico that Richardson’s absence suggests Noem is controlling the FEMA response. Trump appointed Richardson after his team fired his first appointee, Cameron Hamilton, for telling Congress he did not think FEMA should be scrapped.

The day after he took office in May, Richardson, who has no experience with emergency management, told staff: “Don’t get in my way…because I will run right over you. I will achieve the president’s intent…. I, and I alone in FEMA, speak for FEMA,” he said.

Even as rescuers were still at work today in Texas, DHS cancelled a $3 million grant that had been awarded in New York to make sure the NWS can communicate effectively with local officials.

Tariffs are back in the news as Trump’s postponement for his high tariff has ended. They are as chaotic and as problematic as ever.

On April 2, Trump announced tariffs on countries around the world. He said that, beginning on April 9, he would impose a baseline tariff of 10%—a significant increase from the 2.5% rate then in effect—and additional tariffs of up to 50% on countries using a bizarre formula apparently cooked up by his trade advisor, Peter Navarro.

Immediately the stock market lost more than $5 trillion. So rather than let the tariffs go into effect on April 9, Trump pushed the start of the tariffs off until Wednesday, July 9 (yesterday), vowing to negotiate trade deals with individual countries rapidly: 90 deals in 90 days, Navarro said. But only two deals have been forthcoming—one with the United Kingdom and one with Vietnam—meaning that on July 9 the high tariffs of April 2 would take effect.

Then, on Tuesday, Trump announced on social media the real date for the start of the tariffs would be August 1. Somewhat bizarrely, he told reporters he had not changed the date the tariffs would go into effect, although on Monday he signed an executive order changing the date of the start of the levies from July 9 to August 1.

Throughout the week, Trump has been sending letters to world leaders informing them that he intended to impose high tariffs on their countries unless they negotiated with him. At a press opportunity at a cabinet meeting, as Danielle Kurtzleben of NPR noted, he tried to rebrand his letters as deals. “A letter means a deal,” he told reporters. “We can’t meet with 200 countries. We have a few trusted people that know what they’re doing, that are doing a good job, but you can’t do it. You have to do it in a more general way. But it’s a very good way. It’s a better way. It’s a more powerful way.”

On Tuesday, Trump also announced a 50% tariff on copper. Copper is vital to the defense industry, batteries, electric wires, plumbing, and so on, and the U.S. imports more than half of what it uses. Trump claims to want to see the U.S. produce the copper it needs, but getting the industry to that point will take years. He also announced a 35% tariff on goods from Canada.

Paul Wiseman of the Associated Press notes that the 10% tariffs are apparently here to stay because the administration needs that money to cover some of the hole the new tax cuts from the budget reconciliation bill will blast in the deficit.

While Trump continues to insist—incorrectly—that foreign countries pay tariffs, his former vice president Mike Pence reiterated the truth today. On Bloomberg “Surveillance,” he said of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s boast that tariffs will bring in $300 billion this year: “Well, tariffs are a tax, and American importers and businesses and, ultimately, consumers pay almost all of that. And so literally a week after we managed to extend the Trump-Pence tax cuts and prevent a $2,000 tax increase on working families, the administration is right now boasting of the fact that the average American household is going to see about $3,000 increase in the cost of goods.”

Last month, Trump nominated Department of Justice prosecutor Emil Bove to be a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, covering Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and the Virgin Islands. Bove is a Trump loyalist who defended Trump in his criminal indictments and participated in firing officials who investigated Trump and the January 6 rioters. He was also a central player in the dropping of corruption charges against New York mayor Eric Adams and the rendition of Venezuelan migrants to the CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador.

On June 24, Erez Reuveni, a former Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyer, filed an official whistleblower complaint about abuses in the department. Reuveni was fired after telling a court that the administration had made an error when it rendered Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia to CECOT despite a court order not to do so. In the whistleblower complaint, Reuveni alleged that the leaders at the Department of Justice and the White House had deliberately defied court orders and “engaged in unlawful activity, abused their authority, created substantial and specific threat to health and safety.”

Reuveni alleged that Bove insisted the planes carrying the men to El Salvador must take off and that he said DOJ “would need to consider telling the courts ‘f*ck you’ and ignore any such court order.” Reuveni then laid out the events of the March days in which the men were deported, along with the determination of the Department of Justice to violate the orders of the court.

Bove told the Senate Judiciary Committee last month he had “no recollection” of saying “f*ck you” to the court and said he had never advised the Department of Justice to violate a court order. Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on social media that Reuveni was a “leaker asserting false claims.”

Today, Senate Democrats released a trove of documents Reuveni had provided the committee, backing up his complaint. Texts and emails confirm that Department of Justice lawyers misled Judge James Boasberg, one telling him that he did not know when the Trump administration intended to deport the men when, as one of Reuveni’s colleagues said, “I can’t believe he said he doesn’t know. He knows there are plans for AEA removals within the next 24 hours.”

Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement Thursday that Bove “belongs nowhere near the federal bench.” “This is about more than a random f-bomb,” he said. “This is a declaration of defiance of our courts at the highest level of our government by a man who now seeks a lifetime appointment to one of the highest courts in our land.”

Today a federal judge appointed by Republican George W. Bush granted class action status to a lawsuit challenging Trump’s executive order attacking birthright citizenship. With that status in place, U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante barred the administration from denying citizenship to U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. Judge Laplante paused his ruling for a week to give the administration time to appeal.

Trump himself lost his appeal of a New York jury’s verdict that he must pay writer E. Jean Carroll $5 million for sexually abusing and defaming her. Trump now has 90 days to appeal to the Supreme Court to take the case.

Tonight the White House posted on X an image of “SUPERMAN TRUMP”—a much younger Trump dressed as the famous superhero, fists clenched, against a gauzy background—with the caption “TRUTH. JUSTICE. THE AMERICAN WAY.”

Texas is the most visible illustration of the MAGA attempt to destroy the modern U.S. government

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

July 7, 2025

At least 80 people are dead and more than 40 are still missing in Central Texas after almost a foot (30 centimeters) of rain caused flash floods overnight on Friday. Most of the deaths were in Kerr County, where the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet (8 meters) in 45 minutes, engulfing a Christian girls’ camp.

Even as rescuers search for survivors, the disaster has highlighted the dangers of MAGA governance. The steps that left people in the path of the floods on Friday are unclear, but observers are already pointing to the administration’s cuts to government as well as the lack of systems that could have provided earlier warnings to those in the path of the floods.

Immediately after the catastrophe became apparent, Texas officials began to blame cuts to the National Weather Service (NWS)—part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—for causing inaccurate forecasts. The “Department of Government Efficiency” cut about 600 staffers from the NWS. After the cuts, the understaffed agency warned that “severe shortages” of meteorologists would hurt weather forecasting.

All five living former directors of the NWS warned in May that the cuts “[leave] the nation’s official weather forecasting entity at a significant deficit…just as we head into the busiest time for severe storm predictions like tornadoes and hurricanes…. Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.”

But former NWS officials maintain the forecasts were as accurate as possible and noted the storm escalated abruptly. They told Christopher Flavelle of the New York Times that the problem appeared to be that NWS had lost the staffers who would typically communicate with local authorities to spread the word of dangerous conditions. Molly Taft at Wired confirmed that NWS published flash flood warnings but safety officials didn’t send out public warnings until hours later.

Meanwhile, Kerr County’s most senior elected official, Judge Rob Kelly, focused on local officials, telling Flavelle that the county did not have a warning system because such systems are expensive and “[t]axpayers won’t pay for it.”

Officials will continue to examine the crisis in Texas but, coming as it did after so many deep cuts to government, it has opened up questions about the public cost of those cuts.cut about 600 staffers from the NWS. After the cuts, the understaffed agency warned that “severe shortages” of meteorologists would hurt weather forecasting.

CNN’s Andrew Freedman, Emma Tucker, and Mary Gilbert note that several NWS offices across the country are so understaffed they can no longer operate around the clock, and many are no longer able to launch the weather balloons that provide critical data. The journalists also note that the Trump administration’s 2026 budget calls for eliminating “all of NOAA’s weather and climate research labs along with institutes jointly run with universities around the country.”

Brad Plummer of the New York Times noted that the budget reconciliation bill passed by Republicans last week and signed into law on Friday boosts fossil fuels and destroys government efforts to address climate change, even as scientists warn of the acute dangers we face from extreme heat, wildfires, storms, and floods like those in Texas. Scott Dance of the Washington Post added yesterday that the administration has slashed grants for studying climate change and has limited or even ended access to information about climate science, taking down websites and burying reports.

When a reporter asked Trump, “Are you investigating whether some of the cuts to the federal government left key vacancies at the national weather service or the emergency coordination?” he responded: “They didn’t. I’ll tell you, if you look at that water situation that all is and that was really the Biden setup. That was not our setup. But I wouldn’t blame Biden for it either. I would just say this is a 100-year catastrophe and it’s just so horrible to watch.”

The tragedy in Texas is the most visible illustration of the MAGA attempt to destroy the modern U.S. government, but it is not the only one.

On July 2, Gabe Cohen of CNN reported that state and local officials are meeting a “wall of silence” from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Cohen reported that FEMA leaders have ordered FEMA personnel to stop communicating with the Office of Management and Budget, the National Security Council, members of Congress, and state and local partners, leaving those communications up to the political appointees running the agency. FEMA is housed in the Department of Homeland Security, whose secretary, Kristi Noem, is tightening her control over the agency and recently called for the firing of employees who “who don’t like us.”

On June 30, the medical journal The Lancet published an analysis of the impact of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and consequences of its dismantling. The study concluded that from 2001 through 2021, programs funded by USAID prevented nearly 92 million deaths in 133 countries. It estimates that the cuts the Trump administration has made to USAID will result in more than 14 million deaths in the next five years. About 4.5 million will be children under 5.

On June 30, Dr. Steven H. Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University warned in the New York Times that a health catastrophe is brewing in the U.S. as well, as “[t]he administration has upended the operation of almost every agency that deals with our health and medical care, leaving behind fewer staff members and programs to address critical needs, and changing policies in ways that could endanger us all.” Woolf lists cuts of 39% to the institute that researches heart disease, chronic lower respiratory diseases, and diabetes; 37% to the institute that researches cancer; 40% to the institute that researches stroke, 40% to the institute that researches Alzheimer’s; 38% to the institute that researches drug overdoses and suicide; and 36% to the institute that researches covid, flu, and pneumonia.

Those cuts, along with the deregulation of industries that pollute our environment and the destruction of programs and agencies that address mental illness, suicide, chronic diseases, poisoning, car accidents, and drowning, Woolf writes, are putting Americans at risk. In May, Laura Ungar and Michelle R. Smith of the Associated Press noted the elimination of 20,000 jobs at national health agencies as well as cuts of $11 billion in covid-era funding to state and local health departments that inspect restaurants, monitor wastewater, and so on.

In a New York Times op-ed on July 4, Dr. Perri Klass added that changes to the childhood vaccine schedule under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. threaten to bring back diseases that routine immunizations had all but eliminated in the U.S.

Yesterday, Deidre McPhillips of CNN reported that measles cases in the U.S. have surged to a record high since the country declared the disease eradicated twenty-five years ago. There have been at least 1,277 confirmed cases of measles in the U.S. this year, passing the previous record of 1,274 set in 2019 and likely a “severe undercount.”

On July 2, Nahal Toosi of Politico reported that cuts to the National Security Council (NSC) have created a “dysfunctional” policymaking process. The NSC is supposed to coordinate policymaking across the different parts of the government. But Toosi reported that when the Pentagon recently announced it was reviewing whether the AUKUS security pact between the U.S., Australia, and the United Kingdom advances Trump’s “America First” agenda, the announcement came from Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby without input from other key U.S. officials, who were blindsided by the move.

The acting national security advisor, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has downsized the NSC and held so few meetings that career staffers are kept in the dark and others are jockeying for power. One person told Toosi, “It’s Game of Thrones politics over there.” Under Trump, the NSC has gone from being a body that can give the president advice to one designed simply to advance the president’s agenda.

And that is the point of the dismantling of modern government systems under Trump: to give him and his loyalists the power to control the country. On July 3, Charlie Savage of the New York Times reported on letters Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote to companies like Google and Apple, claiming Trump has the constitutional power not just to ignore laws himself, but to authorize others to ignore them too.

Last year, Congress passed a law banning TikTok in the U.S. unless its China-based parent company, ByteDance, sold its stake in the platform to a non-Chinese company within nine months, or twelve if a sale was in progress. The Supreme Court upheld the law unanimously, and TikTok disappeared from U.S. app stores.

But when he took office, Trump told the Department of Justice not to enforce the law for 75 days while his administration reviewed it. He also told Bondi to tell companies they can continue to carry the TikTok app “without incurring any legal liability,” no matter what the law says.

The letters she wrote, newly available through Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, suggest Trump can ignore the law because of his “unique constitutional responsibility for the national security of the United States, the conduct of foreign policy, and other vital executive functions.” The law banning TikTok— that Congress passed, President Joe Biden signed, and the Supreme Court upheld 9–0— had to give way, she wrote, to Trump’s “core presidential national security and foreign affairs powers.”

Republican bill is “the most deeply immoral piece of legislation I have ever voted on”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

June 30, 2025

“This is the most deeply immoral piece of legislation I have ever voted on in my entire time in Congress,” said Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT).

“[W]e’re debating a bill that’s going to cut healthcare for 16 million people. It’s going to give a tax break to…massively wealthy people who don’t need any more money. There are going to be kids who go hungry because of this bill. This is the biggest reduction in…nutrition benefits for kids in the history of the country.” Murphy continued: “We’re obviously gonna continue to offer these amendments to try to make it better. So far not a single one of our amendments…has passed, but we’ll be here all day, probably all night, giving Republicans the chance over and over and over again to slim down the tax cuts for the corporations or to make life a little bit…less miserable for hungry kids or maybe don’t throw as many people off of healthcare. Maybe don’t close so many rural hospitals. It’s gonna be a long day and a long night.”

“This bill is a farce,” said Senator Angus King (I-ME). “Imagine a bunch of guys sitting around a table, saying, ‘I’ve got a great idea. Let’s give $32,000 worth of tax breaks to a millionaire and we’ll pay for it by taking health insurance away from lower-income and middle-income people. And to top it off, how about we cut food stamps, we cut SNAP, we cut food aid to people?’… I’ve been in this business of public policy now for 20 years, eight years as governor, 12 years in the United States Senate. I have never seen a bill this bad. I have never seen a bill that is this irresponsible, regressive, and downright cruel.”

“When I worked here in the ‘70s,” King said, “I had insurance as a…junior staff member in this body 50 years ago. Because I had that insurance that covered a free checkup, I went in and had my first physical in eight years…and the doctors found a little mole on my back. And they took it out. And I didn’t think much of it. And I went in a week later and the doctor said, ‘You better sit down, Angus. That was malignant melanoma. You’re going to have to have serious surgery.’… And I had the surgery and here I am. If I hadn’t had insurance, I wouldn’t be here. And it’s always haunted me that some young man in America that same year had malignant melanoma, he didn’t have insurance, he didn’t get that checkup, and he died. That’s wrong. It’s immoral.”

Senator King continued: “I don’t understand the obsession and I never have…with taking health insurance away from people. I don’t get it. Trying to take away the Affordable Care Act in 2017 or 2018 and now this. What’s driving this? What’s the cruelty to do this, to take health insurance away from people knowing that it’s going to cost them…up to and including…their lives.”

In fact, the drive to slash health insurance is part of the Republicans’ determination to destroy the modern government.

Grover Norquist, a lawyer for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and one of the key architects of the Republican argument that the solution to societal ills is tax cuts, in 2010 described to Rebecca Elliott of the Harvard Crimson how he sees the role of government. “Government should enforce [the] rule of law,” he said. “It should enforce contracts, it should protect people bodily from being attacked by criminals. And when the government does those things, it is facilitating liberty. When it goes beyond those things, it becomes destructive to both human happiness and human liberty.”

Norquist vehemently opposed taxation, saying that “it’s not any of the government’s business who earns what, as long as they earn it legitimately,” and proposed cutting government spending down to 8% of gross domestic product, or GDP, the value of the final goods and services produced in the United States.

The last time the level of government spending was at that 8% of GDP was 1933, before the New Deal. In that year, after years of extraordinary corporate profits, the banking system had collapsed, the unemployment rate was nearly 25%, prices and productivity were plummeting, wages were cratering, factories had shut down, farmers were losing their land to foreclosure. Children worked in the fields and factories, elderly and disabled people ate from garbage cans, unregulated banks gambled away people’s money, and business owners treated their workers as they wished. Within a year the Great Plains would be blowing away as extensive deep plowing had damaged the land, making it vulnerable to drought. Republican leaders insisted the primary solution to the crisis was individual enterprise and private charity.

When he accepted the Democratic nomination for president in July 1932, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt vowed to steer between the radical extremes of fascism and communism to deliver a “New Deal” to the American people.

The so-called alphabet soup of the New Deal gave us the regulation of banks and businesses, protections for workers, an end to child labor in factories, repair of the damage to the Great Plains, new municipal buildings and roads and airports, rural electrification, investment in artists and writers, and Social Security for workers who were injured or unemployed. Government outlays as a percentage of GDP began to rise. World War II shot them off the charts, to more than 40% of GDP, as the United States helped the world fight fascism.

That number dropped again after the war, and in 1975, federal expenditures settled in at about 20% of GDP. Except for short-term spikes after financial crises (spending shot up to 24% after the 2008 crash, for example, and to 31% during the 2020 pandemic), the spending-to-GDP ratio has remained at about that set point.

The national debt is growing because tax revenues have plummeted. Tax cuts under the George W. Bush and Trump administrations are responsible for 57% of the increase in the ratio of the debt to the economy, 90% if you exclude the emergency expenditures of the pandemic, and have left the United States with a tax burden nowhere close to the average of the 38 other nations in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), all of which are market-oriented democracies. And those cuts have gone primarily to the wealthy and corporations.

Republicans who backed those tax cuts now want more. They are trying to force through a measure that will dramatically cut the nation’s social safety net while at the same time increasing the national debt by $3.3 trillion over the next ten years.

“There are two ways of viewing the government’s duty in matters affecting economic and social life,” FDR said in his speech accepting the 1932 Democratic nomination for president. “The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small business man.” The other “is based upon the simple moral principle: the welfare and the soundness of a Nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need; and second, whether or not they are getting it.”

The Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill takes wealth from the American people to give it to the very wealthy and corporations, and Democrats are calling their colleagues out.

“This place feels to me, today, like a crime scene,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said on the floor of the Senate. “Get some of that yellow tape and put it around this chamber. This piece of legislation is corrupt. This piece of legislation is crooked. This piece of legislation is a rotten racket. This bill cooked up in back rooms, dropped at midnight, cloaked in fake numbers with huge handouts to big Republican donors. It loots our country for some of the least deserving people you could imagine. When I first got here, this chamber filled me with awe and wonderment. Today, I feel disgust.”

Trump: “It was the United States of America that saved Israel, and now it is going to be the United States of America that saves Bibi Netanyahu”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

June 25, 2025

At The Hague, a city in the Netherlands, today for a summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Trump showed that he cannot let go of the intelligence assessment that his military strikes against Iran had set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions only by a few months. He appears determined to convince Americans that he has solved the problem of Iran’s nuclear ambitions overnight.

“It’s gone for years, years,” he said. And then, turning to the news outlets that reported the early conclusions of Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the intelligence arm of the Pentagon, that the hits delayed production of a nuclear weapon by only a few months, he said: “CNN is scum. MSDNC is scum. The New York Times is scum. They’re bad people. They’re sick. And what they’ve done is they’ve tried to make this unbelievable victory into something less.” Trump insisted that the U.S. hits caused “total obliteration.” He claimed he did not want the recognition of the effectiveness of the hits for himself, but rather for “the military.”

Trump equated the strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities with the U.S. bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters at the NATO summit that the FBI had launched a criminal investigation into who had leaked the DIA report, complaining that “CNN and others are trying to spin it to make the president look bad, when this was an overwhelming success.” Later in the morning, Trump’s social media account posted that CNN should fire Natasha Bertrand, one of the CNN journalists who broke the story that the attacks had done less damage than Trump claimed.

Marc Caputo of Axios reported this afternoon that the Trump administration will limit the classified information it shares with Congress after the leak of the DIA assessment, even though there is currently no evidence tying that leak to Congress. A senior White House official said: “We are declaring a war on leakers.”

Stephan Neukam and Andrew Solender of Axios reported that congressional Democrats, already angry that the administration delayed briefing Congress about the strikes on Iran past the legal deadline for such a briefing, see the announcement that the White House will limit the information it provides to Congress as an attempt to hide reality in order to bolster Trump’s narrative. “A senior House Democrat told the Axios reporters: “[T]his from a group of people who used Signal about actual war plans?”

On the Senate floor, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said: “The administration has no right to stonewall Congress on matters of national security. Senators deserve information, and the administration has a legal obligation to inform Congress precisely about what is happening right now abroad.”

Representative Jim Himes (D-CT), the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said: “The law requires the congressional intelligence committees to be kept fully and currently informed, and I expect the Intelligence Community to comply with the law.”

Tomorrow the White House will brief senators on the strikes. Notably, it is not sending Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who testified in March that the Intelligence Community did not think Iran was developing a nuclear weapon. Instead, it is sending Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine. Ratcliffe, not Gabbard, will represent the Intelligence Community.

Today, Ratcliffe appeared to walk back Trump’s claims that the strikes had “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, saying instead they had “severely damaged” the program.

On his social media platform tonight, Trump continued his attacks on CNN and announced that tomorrow morning, Hegseth and “Military Representatives” will hold a “Major News Conference” to “fight for the Dignity of our Great American Pilots.” He claimed those “Patriots” were “very upset!” when they “started reading Fake News by CNN and The Failing New York Times. They felt terribly!… The News Conference will prove both interesting and irrefutable. Enjoy!”

There is no evidence that anyone sees the correction of Trump’s extreme claims as an attack on the pilots who flew the mission, or that the pilots see that correction in that way.

Laura Rozen of Diplomatic notes that the strikes might have convinced Iran to abandon negotiations and commit to building a nuclear weapon. Rozen quotes former top European Union Iran nuclear negotiator Enrique Mora, who wrote: “This unprecedented strike has shown, for the second time, the Islamic regime that nuclear diplomacy is reversible, fragile and vulnerable to changes in leadership in Washington. There will not be a third time.” Mora continued: “If Iran now decides to move towards a bomb, it will do so following a clear strategic logic. No one bombs the capital of a nuclear-armed country. June 21, 2025 may go down in history not as the day the Iranian nuclear program was destroyed, but as the day a nuclear Iran was irreversibly born.”

Tonight, on his social media site, Trump’s account called for Israel to abandon its trial of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, calling it a “ridiculous Witch Hunt.” Trump claimed that Netanyahu was a partner in “something that nobody thought was possible, a complete elimination of potentially one of the biggest and most powerful Nuclear Weapons anywhere in the world, and it was going to happen, SOON!” Trump called for the trial to be “CANCELLED, IMMEDIATELY, or a Pardon given to a Great Hero.” He continued: “It was the United States of America that saved Israel, and now it is going to be the United States of America that saves Bibi Netanyahu.”