Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and John Ratcliffe, the Central Intelligence Agency director, have over the past month claimed that senior officials of the Obama administration manufactured politicized intelligence, silenced intelligence professionals and engaged in a broad “treasonous conspiracy” to undermine the presidency of Donald Trump. That is patently false. In making those allegations, they seek to rewrite history. We want to set the record straight and, in doing so, sound a warning.
Let’s recap. The Trump administration’s claims focus on the intelligence community’s findings about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which were published in January 2017. The assessment found that President Vladimir Putin of Russia had ordered an influence campaign to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process and harm the electability and potential presidency of the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton.
The assessment also found that the Russians had developed a “clear preference” for Mr. Trump and aspired to help his election prospects. It further stated that the Russians employed a variety of tactics as part of this campaign, including hacking into the email accounts of Democratic Party organizations and officials and publicly releasing the stolen data through digital allies. Those covert activities were complemented by the overt but disguised efforts of Russian government intelligence agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries and paid social media users. As stated in the assessment, Mr. Putin himself ordered Russian intelligence to conduct the campaign.
While some external critiques have noted that parts of the Russia investigation could have been handled better, multiple, thorough, yearslong reviews of the assessment have validated its findings and the rigor of its analysis. The most noteworthy was the unanimous, bipartisan, five-volume report issued by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, whose Republican members at the time included Marco Rubio, now the secretary of state, and Senator Tom Cotton, now the committee chairman.
Ukraine didn’t warn him. China doesn’t need him. Europe’s done negotiating. And the beavers? They’re just quietly saving the planet while America embarrasses itself.
By Mary Geddry | Jun 2, 2025
Good morning! Donald Trump spent the weekend doing what he does best: golfing, rage-posting, and letting the world pass him by. In Virginia, he posed with pro golfers and speculated, once again, on whether Joe Biden is a robot. In Russia, 41 strategic aircraft exploded in a fiery symphony of Ukrainian drone precision. And in Beijing, the Chinese government all but rolled its eyes as Trump accused them of trade betrayal, issuing a blunt “we don’t have time for your sandbox politics” response.
Let’s begin in Ukraine, where the Security Service carried out a shock-and-awe drone strike deep inside Russian territory, disabling nearly 34% of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet. Code-named Spiderweb, the operation involved 117 drones and over a year of planning. The White House was deliberately kept in the dark, according to Axios and CBS, a stunning sign of just how little Ukraine trusts, or needs, Trump anymore. His reaction? Silence. Not even a grunt between golf swings.
China, meanwhile, is treating Trump’s trade war cosplay with the weariness of someone who’s been through this sitcom before. After last month’s theatrical “Geneva Agreement” briefly cooled the tariff fever, Trump torched it again, revoking student visas and tightening export controls on AI components. Beijing’s response? Shrug. Their strategy is logical: develop domestic industries, minimize U.S. exposure, and stop trying to reason with the malfunctioning soda machine that is Trump’s economic brain.
And Ukraine? Ukraine didn’t just ignore Trump, they upstaged him. In a poetic reversal of Trump’s infamous Oval Office sneer (“You don’t have the cards, Zelensky”), the Ukrainian president played a hand so bold it reshuffled the entire deck. Spiderweb, a 117-drone blitz on four Russian air bases, crippled a third of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet. The drones launched from disguised cargo trucks parked next to FSB headquarters. The kind of op that, if carried out by the U.S., would earn a Hollywood script deal and a dozen Senate hearings. Under Trump, it earned a blank stare and a golf swing.
Zelensky didn’t ask permission. Why would he? This week, a viral meme answered Trump’s old line with Zelensky smirking: “How about now?”
As Ukraine executes one of the most surgically effective strikes in modern warfare history, Trump is busy reposting robot-Biden conspiracies and spreading lies about Harvard teaching middle school math. Meanwhile, the European Union threatens counter-tariffs, Latin America leans into Chinese trade, and even Africa is being courted by Beijing while Trump’s Pentagon pulls out. The multi-polar world Trump claimed he wanted is here, but America is now the pole no one leans on.
Back home, the Harvard math lie has gone from late-night muttering to federal policy fiction. Two agencies have cited it in official memos, canceling contracts and condemning a university whose lowest-level math course is introductory calculus. The story is built around a viral tweet misinterpreting a five-day calculus course that included algebra review, a common experience for pandemic-affected high schoolers. But in Trump’s America, if it goes viral, it becomes law.
A man shouting “Free Palestine” threw incendiary devices into a peaceful vigil for Israeli hostages in Boulder, injuring eight people. The victims ranged in age from 52 to 88. Trump’s administration immediately shifted from public safety to immigration panic, with Stephen Miller claiming, without confirmation, that the attacker had overstayed a visa. DHS has said only that details are forthcoming.
And yet, the American public appears to be catching on. A new YouGov poll shows that 57% of respondents believe Trump’s age is impairing his presidency. That’s before factoring in the part where he reposted a theory that Biden was executed and replaced with a robotic clone. Even The New York Times covered that one, on page one. Favorability numbers don’t look any better. Atlas Intel has Obama at +10, AOC at +4, Trump at –1. JD Vance is at –14, which is roughly the political equivalent of shingles.
Trump’s economic message, meanwhile, is now just a series of broken promises and nonbinding hallucinations. The “deal” with the UK? A glorified memo that favored Rolls-Royce and Jaguar over any U.S. automaker. The “deals” with China? Nonexistent. According to his commerce secretary, the new strategy is to simply let Trump set tariff rates unilaterally and call that a deal. No signatures, no talks, just an emperor with no clothes and a Sharpie.
But there is a bright spot. A humble, hopeful one. The return of the Eurasian beaver to Britain marks a bright spot; these animals have repopulated areas where rivers have been poisoned, straightened, and forgotten. Not with a press release, but with mud, sticks, and ecological wisdom. Once hunted to extinction, they are now protected and reintroduced to the wild. Their dams filter pollution, prevent floods, raise water tables, and bring back frogs, fish, birds, bats, even dormice. They do more for climate resilience than most G7 leaders.
They don’t tweet, they don’t hold summits, they just fix things. Quietly, effectively, and persistently.
In a world of unstable tyrants and collapsing legitimacy, the beaver is proving to be a more trustworthy civil engineer than most of the Trump cabinet. While Trump fantasizes about trade wars and robot clones, the beavers are making rivers livable again. And the rest of the world, Zelensky, Xi, Brussels, even Ottawa, is increasingly doing the same.
They’re not playing his game anymore. And neither should we.
Early yesterday morning, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent three U.S. citizens aged 2, 4, and 7 from Louisiana, including one with Stage 4 cancer, to Honduras when they deported their mothers. The three are children of two different mothers who were arrested while checking in with the government as part of their routine process for immigration proceedings. The women and their children were not permitted to speak to family or lawyers before being flown to Honduras. The cancer patient was sent out of the country without medication or consultation with doctors although, according to Charisma Madarang and Lorena O’Neil of Rolling Stone, ICE agents were told of the child’s medical needs.
The government says the mothers opted to take their U.S. citizen children to Honduras with them. But as Emmanuel Felton and Maegan Vazquez of the Washington Post noted, because ICE refused to let the women talk to their lawyers, there is only the agents’ word for how events transpired.
ICE also deported Heidy Sánchez, a Cuban-born mother of a one-year-old who is still breastfeeding, leaving the U.S.-born child in the U.S. with her father, who is a U.S. citizen. Like the women flown to Honduras, Sánchez was detained when she showed up at a scheduled check-in with ICE.
In March, ICE agents sent four U.S. citizens, including a 10-year-old with brain cancer, to Mexico when they deported their undocumented parents.
In May 2023, then–presidential candidate Donald J. Trump released a video promising that on “Day One” of a new presidential term, he would issue an executive order that would end birthright citizenship. He claimed that the understanding that anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen is “based on a historical myth, and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocates.” He promises to make “clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward, the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic US citizenship.”
Reelected in 2024, on his first day in office, Trump signed an Executive Order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” It announced a new U.S. policy, saying that the government would not issue documents recognizing U.S. citizenship to persons whose “mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or…when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States was lawful but temporary, and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.”
The order specified that it would not take effect for 30 days. If it had been in effect when Trump’s rival for the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris, was born, she would have fallen under it.
But an executive order is simply a directive to federal employees. It cannot override the Constitution. Trump’s attack on the idea of birthright citizenship as a “historical myth” is a perversion of our history.
In the nineteenth century, the United States enshrined in its fundamental law the idea that there would not be different levels of rights in this country. Although not honored in practice, that idea, and its place in the law, gave those excluded from it the language and the tools to fight for equality. Over time, Americans have increasingly expanded those included in it.
The Republican Party organized in the 1850s to fight the idea that there should be different classes of Americans based on race. In that era, not only Black Americans, but also Irish, Chinese, Mexican, and Indigenous Americans faced discriminatory state laws. Republicans stated explicitly in their 1860 platform that they were “opposed to any change in our naturalization laws or any state legislation by which the rights of citizens hitherto accorded to immigrants from foreign lands shall be abridged or impaired; and in favor of giving a full and efficient protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized, both at home and abroad.”
After the Civil War, in 1866, as former Confederates denied their Black neighbors basic rights, the Republican Congress passed a civil rights bill establishing “[t]hat all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians, not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States; and such citizens of every race and color…shall have the same right[s] in every State and Territory in the United States.”
But President Andrew Johnson vetoed the 1866 Civil Rights Bill. He objected that the proposed law “comprehends the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called Gipsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks,” as citizens, and noted that if “all persons who are native-born already are, by virtue of the Constitution, citizens of the United States, the passage of the pending bill cannot be necessary to make them such.” And if they weren’t already citizens, he wrote, Congress should not pass a law “to make our entire colored population and all other excepted classes citizens of the United States” when 11 southern states were not represented in Congress.
When Congress wrote the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, it took Johnson’s admonition to heart. It did not confer citizenship on the groups Johnson outlined; it simply acknowledged the Constitution had already established their citizenship. The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
In the short term, Americans recognized that the Fourteenth Amendment overturned the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that people of African descent “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.” The Fourteenth Amendment established that Black men were citizens.
But the question of whether the amendment really did recognize the citizenship of the U.S.-born children of immigrants quickly became an issue in the American West, where prejudice against Chinese immigrants ran hot. In 1882, during a period of racist hysteria, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act declaring that Chinese immigrants could not become citizens. But what about their children who were born in the United States?
Wong Kim Ark was born around 1873, the child of Chinese parents who were merchants in San Francisco. In 1889 he traveled with his parents when they repatriated to China, where he married. He then returned to the U.S., leaving his wife behind, and was readmitted. After another trip to China in 1894, though, customs officials denied him reentry to the U.S. in 1895, claiming he was a Chinese subject because his parents were Chinese.
Wong sued, and his lawsuit was the first to climb all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, thanks to the government’s recognition that with the U.S. in the middle of an immigration boom, the question of birthright citizenship must be addressed. In the 1898 U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark decision, the court held by a vote of 6–2 that Wong was a citizen because he was born in the United States.
That decision has stood ever since, as a majority of Americans have recognized the principle behind the citizenship clause as the one central to the United States: “that all men are created equal” and that a nation based on that idea draws strength from all of its people.
On the last day of his presidency, in his last speech, President Ronald Reagan recalled what someone had once written to him: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”
He continued: “We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
Former British prime minister posts apparent criticism of US president over his plans for peace deal with Russia
By Jessica Elgot
Boris Johnson has issued stern criticism of Donald Trump’s Ukraine peace proposals in one of his first apparent censures of the US president, saying under his terms the Ukrainians would “get nothing”.
The former British prime minister, a strong supporter of Ukraine who remains close to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has previously said there is “method in the madness” of Trump’s approach and that he believed the US president could bring peace.
But in a post on X, Johnson criticised the apparent terms of a deal that Trump is pushing Kyiv to accept.
On Wednesday, Trump accused Zelenskyy of jeopardising what he claimed was an imminent peace deal to end the war in Ukraine as he gave the clearest hint yet that the US would be willing to formally recognise Russia’s seizure of Crimea as part of any agreement.
Russia then carried out one of the most devastating air attacks against the capital for months, with Kharkiv and other cities also targeted.
“Putin indiscriminately butchers more Ukrainian civilians, killing and injuring 100 in Kyiv including children,” Johnson posted. “And what is his reward under the latest peace proposals?
“1. The right to keep sovereign Ukrainian territory he has taken by violence and in breach of international law. 2. The right to control Ukraine’s destiny by forbidding Nato membership. 3. The lifting of sanctions against Russia. 4. An economic partnership with America. 5. The chance to rebuild his armed forces for the next attack in a few short years’ time.”
He added: “As for Ukraine – what do they get after three years of heroic resistance against a brutal and unprovoked invasion? What is their reward for the appalling sacrifices they have made – for the sake, as they have endlessly been told, of freedom and democracy around the world?
“Apart from the right to share their natural resources with the United States they get nothing. What is there in this deal that can realistically stop a third Russian invasion? Nothing. If we are to prevent more atrocities by Putin then we must have a long-term, credible and above all properly funded security guarantee for Ukraine – a guarantee issued by the UK, the US and all western allies.”
Keir Starmer condemned Moscow’s Wednesday night’s strikes on Kyiv, saying it was “a real reminder that Russia is the aggressor here and that is being felt by the Ukrainians, as it has been felt for three long years now. That’s why it’s important to get Russia to an unconditional ceasefire.”
He added: “We’re making progress towards the ceasefire. It’s got to be a lasting ceasefire. But these attacks – these awful attacks – are a real, human reminder of who is the aggressor here and the cost to the Ukrainian people.”
Trump also criticised the strikes in a post on his Truth Social network. He said: “I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV. Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, STOP! 5000 soldiers a week are dying. Lets get the Peace Deal DONE!”
Johnson has previously criticised some of Trump’s language about Zelenskyy, including during their White House fallout, saying it was “ghastly to hear some of the language that’s been coming from Washington about who started the war and Zelenskyy being a dictator”.
But in the aftermath of the row, Johnson defended Trump again in a column for the Mail, saying the war of words “was not meant to happen” and that the US president did have a viable plan for peace.
