Good morning! Martin and Swin here. At Zeteo, we’ve spent time this week at Donald Trump’s so-called Great American State Fair, on the National Mall in DC. We’ll have more to report soon (it’s going as well as you’ve heard, and yes, it does add another layer to the thesis, Trump Literally Can’t Do Anything Right), but until then, we need to talk about the president’s unbridled corruption. Since last year, multiple sources close to Trump have quipped that thanks solely to his second presidency, and his willingness to use it to line his and his family’s pockets, Trump will finally be able to say he’s an actual billionaire as opposed to a “fake” one. 😂 😭 The line might be funny… if it weren’t so immensely sad for a nominally democratic society.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we follow Trump’s chemtrails of corruption west to North Dakota, via his first flight on his new Air Force One, the totally normal, not staggeringly wrong gift from his friends in Qatar. We also take a trip back inside a presidential brain still absolutely furious about bestselling book Regime Change and consider other events from another insane day in DC and further abroad. Let’s dig in.

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‘He’s Pretty Busy as President’

Famously, The Onion’s front page for April 16, 1912, about the sinking of the Titanic, reads: “World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Ice-Berg.” On Wednesday, Donald Trump was taking off rather than sinking, but the gag came to mind nonetheless. The world’s largest metaphor for the most corrupt U.S. president’s second administration – the new Air Force One, a $400 million gift from Qatar, a suitably emiratic symbol of this kakistocratic regime – made its maiden flight from Maryland to Medora, North Dakota, where Trump teed off celebrations of America’s 250th birthday at the Theodore Roosevelt library.

A reporter asked about financial disclosures that showed Trump’s staggering profit from the presidency: at least $2.2 billion in 2025, including about $1.4 billion from family crypto ventures, more than anyone else in the sector. “What message,” the reporter asked, “does this send to average Americans, especially those who may be struggling financially?”

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Trump’s response is worth quoting in full, if only to show how he avoided the question by lying and blathering at length.

“I don’t get involved in my personal… we have funds that run my money. Well I’ve made a lot of money before I became president, and they invest my money, and I don’t talk to them. I never… I don’t even speak to them. So, I have many people. I don’t know what they call it, ‘closed accounts’ or something. You put your money in, and that’s it. I don’t talk to them, they’re big institutions, and they run it. But yeah, I’ve had a great career in business. I’ve had a great career. I don’t know if I’ve had a better career in politics or business, but I had a great career in business. And you know, you saw the cash and you report the different things, and what they do is, we gave it, I think it’s called a blind account, but they basically, they take it, and I purposely, I never speak to any of the people that run the money, but they’re big institutions, and they invest in whatever they invest.”

It was nonsense: horseshit d’oeuvres, if you will, for the speech Trump gave in the Dakotas, surrounded by cosplay Rough Riders. Trump has clearly, undoubtedly, obscenely profited from the presidency second time around. Consider just some of the many, many stories of insider dealing and ruthless profiteering.

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Justin Baragona here, bringing you the latest media dispatches from the right-wing industrial outrage complex and Bari World. In tonight’s edition, does Zohran Mamdani need to take the threat of “Barstool conservatism” seriously ahead of his next mayoral election? Also, Anderson Cooper just can’t seem to get away from Bari Weiss, and NPR really steps in it over a botched Supreme Court story.

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‘El Presidente’ for NYC Mayor?

Amid the current political freakout (from MAGA and establishment Democrats) over Zohran Mamdani’s role as kingmaker as anti-war progressives and democratic socialists rack up primary victories, the New York City mayor suddenly found himself a potential new challenger for 2029.

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That’s what happened according to a new book, Regime Change, by New York Times Journalists Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman.

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Swan joined Mehdi Unfiltered to discuss many of the shocking revelations in his book, giving an inside look at Trump and Netanyahu’s love-hate relationship.

“Are they best pals?” Mehdi asks. “No, the relationship’s very bad right now,” replies Swan.

Swan says in the course of writing, it became clear to him and his co-author that “the second term Trump administration was almost unrecognizable from the first,” particularly in the way Trump is wielding his presidential power. “We were covering a form of regime change in our own country.”

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The two also discuss:

• Who is Natalie Harp and why her ‘love’ letters to Trump put her on Secret Service’s radar

• The crisis control meeting inside the Situation Room about the Epstein files

• Marco Rubio’s lifelong wish to free Cuba

• Stephen Miller as a driving force of domestic policy: “He has his hands in everything”

• The secrecy around President Trump’s health.
  

Paid subscribers can watch the full interview for free, with no paywall. Free subscribers can watch a 3-minute preview. Consider becoming a paid subscriber to Zeteo to watch the full interview and the rest of Zeteo’s content.

Click here to buy a copy of Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman’s book, ‘Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.’ And if you’ve already read it, feel free to share your review of the book in the comments below!

Looking for more book recommendations? Visit the Zeteo book club here for inspiration!

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Remember that open-and-shut federal criminal case where Donald Trump clearly committed serious crimes, but managed to escape justice thanks to the right-wing supermajority he built on the Supreme Court?

No, not the case over Jan. 6 and his efforts to overturn the election he lost – the other federal case, the one about how he stole a bunch of classified government documents and stored some next to his toilet at Mar-a-Lago, and refused to give them back to the U.S. government after he left office the first time. Remember? Well, the president would like to do it again, minus the part where anyone attempts to hold him accountable.

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President Trump is already angling to retain whichever currently classified or top secret government documents he wants after he leaves the White House again, two sources familiar with the matter and another two briefed on it tell Zeteo. In some cases, he’s made comments suggesting he’s already picked out files to keep.

“This one would be good!” he’s joked (or, “joked”) while holding a document up in the Oval Office within the past year, according to one of the sources who was present for it.

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Good morning, friends. Prem here, with two stories for you that together serve to illustrate how the monstrosity of the old world may at last be proving too much to bear. We all have our limits. A new world is no longer struggling to be born. Here it comes. To that end, prepare for elected Republicans to grow even more insane and ‘Reasonable Democrats’ to spiral even more, as socialism spreads from sea to shining sea in the United States!

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we consider another momentous win for the left, this time in Colorado; a determined Democratic effort to hold President Donald Trump to account over his preposterous Board of Peace and its plans for Gaza; and the Supreme Court turns Trump down on birthright citizenship, though not without four justices showing they don’t believe in… the Constitution. Let’s get to it.

Socialism’s Mile High Moment

A democratic socialist born in 1997 has unseated a veteran Democrat who was first elected to Congress in… 1997.

Last night, 29-year-old Melat Kiros beat 30-year incumbent Diana DeGette, 68, in the Democratic primary for Colorado’s first congressional district in Denver.

Kiros’s victory in the Mile High City comes just one week after a Zohran Mamdani-backed trio of democratic socialists – Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander – strung together three primary wins in New York City. In total, three Democratic incumbents have been usurped by challengers from the left in just the past week.

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The Colorado election is another notch in the belt for the democratic socialist movement – showing promise beyond the well-oiled machine that is the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.

New York was not a one-off, says Bhavik Lathia, a Democratic strategist and spokesman for the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “Kiros’s win validates that the same political energy is moving across the country — from Maine to New York to Pennsylvania to Colorado. The common thread is voters looking for outsider candidates who will fight Trump and corporate power with equal clarity,” he tells Zeteo. “The socialist sweep in New York showed that voters are hungry for a Democratic Party willing to change. Kiros’ win shows that hunger is national.”

AIPAC will be feeling super disappointed this morning. Again.

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As voters head to the polls in just a few weeks’ time, progressive doctor and former public health official Abdul El-Sayed will face off in a heated primary against Democratic establishment favorite Congresswoman Haley Stevens and Michigan state Senator Mallory McMorrow.

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“We tend to center the party, we tend to center the politicians in rooms like this, but we miss the opportunity to center the public, and our campaign has been about centering the people of the state of Michigan from the very beginning,” he tells Mehdi.

And while El-Sayed is currently leading in the polls, his job is far from over. “People want a politics that really is about getting money out, putting money in their pockets, and passing Medicare for All,” he explains, outlining his plans to deliver that agenda if he defeats Republican Mike Rogers in the November election.

In this wide-ranging interview, Mehdi also presses him on the following:

• Whether he can actually defeat AIPAC-backed contender Haley Stevens

• Why he’s a threat to the Democratic establishment

• Whether he defines himself as a Democratic Socialist

• Whether he regrets calling himself a physician despite not having a medical license

• Why he hasn’t yet released his financial disclosures

• Whether he disputes both Israel and Egypt’s right to exist

• Who he’ll back as Senate majority leader

• And if he’ll consider a presidential run.

Paid subscribers can watch the full video interview above, while free subscribers can access a two-minute preview. Consider upgrading your subscription to never hit a Zeteo paywall again.

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The Trump administration’s new drug strategy does more than escalate the war on fentanyl. It sketches the architecture for a national surveillance system built from some of Americans’ most personal data: prescriptions, toxicology results, wastewater, electronic health records, license plate scans, and law enforcement intelligence.

The plans are laid out in the 2026 National Drug Control Strategy, a 195-page blueprint released in early May. Drug Czar Sara Carter announced it on Sean Hannity’s Fox show, calling it “a battle cry.” The document promises to “fully resource and empower” Homeland Security Task Forces, “leverage advanced technology and Artificial Intelligence,” and “modernize and integrate public safety and public health data collection,” applying “advanced data science methods” to “toxicology results, wastewater analysis, electronic health records, and law enforcement seizures.”

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The strategy describes a surveillance architecture but never addresses how it may or may not be used. Nowhere does the strategy mention HIPAA. Nowhere does it say how patient privacy would be protected. Nowhere does it explain what limits would prevent a system built for fentanyl from being used to monitor abortion, pregnancy, gender transition, methadone treatment, protest activity, or any other behavior a future administration decides to target.

To law enforcement veterans, the appeal of a system that fuses health data, law enforcement intelligence, and modern analytics into a single system is obvious. Derek Maltz, a former acting DEA administrator who spent a decade running the agency’s Special Operations Division, has spent years arguing that cartels, Chinese chemical brokers, money laundering networks, and synthetic drug suppliers have outpaced a fragmented federal response.

“If you wanna connect the dots, you have to collect the dots,” Maltz told me.

Maltz talks about families whose children died from fentanyl, the collages of dead kids he takes to public events, and the parents who told him they never got the warning that might have saved their child. He describes his work as “not a red or a blue issue,” but “red, white, and blue.” The threat is real: Chinese chemical networks linked to Mexican cartels feed a synthetic-drug supply that kills tens of thousands of Americans a year. Maltz argues that agencies need integrated data and modern tools to keep pace with networks that already operate across borders, banks, chemicals, and encrypted platforms.

Even so, he conceded the limits of enforcement. “We are not going to seize our way out of this problem,” he said. “We are not going to arrest our way out of this problem.”

That is what makes the strategy’s surveillance ambitions so consequential. Fentanyl is deadly, and law enforcement does need better tools. The harder question is what happens when public health infrastructure becomes law enforcement infrastructure, and the government builds a machine with no clear oversight.

Much of the machinery already exists. Every state runs a prescription drug database. Police use national license plate reader networks. Wastewater surveillance expanded during COVID. Risk scores sit atop prescription records, and health data is already used in criminal cases.

The 2026 strategy doesn’t invent these systems from scratch. It connects them, which is the more consequential move.

A Prescription Database With No Privacy Law

Every time a doctor prescribes a controlled substance – painkillers, stimulants, anti-anxiety medication, certain hormones – that prescription goes into a state-run database called a Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP). Every state has one. These databases are not protected by HIPAA. Federal drug agents can access any state’s database by filing a subpoena that requires no judicial review.

“This is a wild, wild west,” said Jennifer Oliva, a law professor at Indiana University who has spent a decade studying prescription drug databases.

The federal government helped build these systems through grants from the Department of Justice. The DEA could not collect prescriber-level data on its own, so it funded states to build the databases. The opioid crisis made that politically easy. But the databases were never limited to opioids.

“There’s no reason to think that the same mechanisms in place to track and respond to potential opioid misuse can’t be turned to other drugs,” said Corey Davis, a senior attorney at the Network for Public Health Law. And there is “decent evidence that PDMPs do move people from prescription opioid misuse to misuse of street opioids, which is a net negative.” The system that was supposed to solve the opioid crisis made it worse. The same architecture is now being expanded.

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States can also expand prescription-monitoring databases beyond opioids through controlled-substance scheduling, “drugs of concern” categories, or similar reporting rules. Others formally reschedule drugs under state law. Louisiana went further in 2024, becoming the first state to classify mifepristone and misoprostol as Schedule IV controlled dangerous substances, placing abortion medications inside the state’s controlled-substances monitoring regimen. Texas and Indiana lawmakers have introduced similar reclassification proposals, and Idaho has reportedly been considering similar tracking measures.

Testosterone is already federally controlled as a Schedule III anabolic steroid and has been tracked through controlled-substance reporting since anabolic steroids were added to the Controlled Substances Act in 1990. You cannot tell, from a database entry, whether testosterone is prescribed for low hormone levels or for gender transition. You cannot tell whether mifepristone is prescribed for an abortion or a miscarriage.

Craig Konnoth, a law professor at the University of Virginia, called this “a clear example of targeting a vulnerable minority.” Asked whether there is legal recourse, he said: “Unfortunately, in my opinion, no.”

AI on Medical Records

A company called Bamboo Health runs a platform called NarxCare on top of these prescription databases. It assigns patients risk scores based on factors such as how they pay, whether they have insurance, and how far they travel to the pharmacy. No state requires doctors to tell patients the system exists. Patients cannot see their scores.

The 2026 drug strategy proposes going further: “applying predictive analytics to electronic health records to identify patients at high risk of overdose.”

That may sound clinical. But Charlotte Tschider, a health AI scholar at Loyola Chicago, said the “current regulatory framework does not distinguish between the use of AI for helping patients and enforcement.” Nothing in the law stops a system built to identify overdose risk from being repurposed to flag who is getting an abortion pill or hormone therapy.

The records that AI would analyze are not the clean clinical documents most people imagine. They are billing tools. Dr. Mishka Terplan, an OB/GYN and addiction medicine specialist, gave an example: a patient has one positive drug test at her first prenatal visit and nothing after. The billing code “drug abuse complicating pregnancy” gets attached to her record anyway. “Complicating” just means it happened at the same time, not that drugs caused a problem.

But in court, judges may read it as proof.

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“The chart says drug abuse complicating pregnancy in the third trimester, therefore you must be lying,” Terplan said. “And the judge agrees.”

The strategy proposes AI analytics applied to these records.

Terplan said his patients are “legitimately reluctant to disclose and may sometimes, not always, forego care or delay care.” What he tells them now: “I can’t ensure protection of that information any longer.”

The danger is not hypothetical. Medical information already moves from healthcare into the criminal legal system. According to Pregnancy Justice, more than 64% of pregnancy criminalization cases involve information flowing from healthcare settings into the legal system.

In late December 2025, Alexia Moore went to a Georgia emergency room after a medical crisis. She had obtained abortion pills from an online provider. Hospital staff contacted the police. In March, she was charged with murder, based entirely on medical records, toxicology results, and statements taken at her bedside. No surveillance technology was involved.

Karen Thompson, Pregnancy Justice’s legal director, said: “The point of this is to terrify people. The point of this has no scientific function.”

Now add to that existing pipeline more data, more automation, more scoring, and more law enforcement integration.

From COVID to Drug Intelligence

During the COVID pandemic, public health agencies built the National Wastewater Surveillance System to test sewage for the virus. That funding is now drying up. The drug strategy proposes to fill the gap with law enforcement money, to “implement wastewater testing for the first time at a national scale.” On ‘Hannity,’ Carter confirmed: “We’re doing wastewater testing right now across the nation.”

Mariana Matus, CEO of Biobot Analytics, the largest commercial wastewater testing company, confirmed that “Biobot uses the same wastewater collection infrastructure for both pathogen and drug trend surveillance.”

The technology can detect HIV prevention drugs, testosterone, psychiatric medications, and abortion pills. Matus confirmed her company received inquiries about testing for abortion-related drugs from “local government agents.” She would not say which ones. “We have no plans to develop abortifacient testing,” she said.

But when asked about connections between Biobot’s lead venture funder – Valor Equity Partners, run by Antonio Gracias, a major Trump donor and former DOGE official – and Biobot’s January 2026 Office of National Drug Control Policy wastewater intelligence contract, she did not answer. Instead, she volunteered that she “would welcome the opportunity to educate” law enforcement on integrating wastewater intelligence.

Rolf Halden, a scientist at Arizona State University who built the first U.S. citywide wastewater drug monitoring program, independently confirmed that “almost any medication or its metabolites can be monitored in wastewater.” His lab also received inquiries about testing for abortion drugs.

What protects individuals from identification, he said, “are not regulatory barriers but the high cost at this point in time.”

The CDC’s National Wastewater Surveillance System, built during the pandemic, runs on Palantir’s Foundry platform under a $443 million contract. The CDC has said it will have no funding to sustain the program beyond September 30, 2026. Meanwhile, there are bills in several states that propose requiring wastewater testing for abortion-related drugs.

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Natalie Ram and Jessica Roberts, law professors at the University of Maryland and Emory, warned that wastewater monitoring for mifepristone, “if successful, would create a roadmap for surveilling, suppressing, and sanctioning other politically contested medical care.”

Prescription databases show what people are prescribed. Electronic health records show what clinicians document and bill. Wastewater can show what communities consume or excrete. License plate readers show where people go.

The strategy also encompasses six overlapping federal license plate reader networks that Congress never authorized. What stops them from tracking someone driving to an abortion clinic or a methadone program?

“Under the current way that law enforcement uses these systems, absolutely nothing stops that kind of abuse,” said Nathan Wessler, an ACLU lawyer who has argued surveillance cases at the Supreme Court.

An Electronic Frontier Foundation investigation documented deputies in Texas using a nationwide plate reader network to search for a woman who had a self-managed abortion. Both searches were logged as “had an abortion, search for female.”

Each of these surveillance systems gets evaluated on its own, if at all. But no one is assessing what happens when they all feed into the same task forces.

Barry Friedman, a law professor at NYU, was direct: “No oversight. None.”

The drug strategy’s surveillance architecture has no special court, no sunset clause, no congressional debate – none of the safeguards that even counterterrorism surveillance has under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

And the distinction between drug enforcement and counterterrorism may no longer hold.

Palantir Inside the Government

The company positioned to run the data architecture where those missions converge is already inside the federal health system.

HHS has an agreement worth up to $90 million, making Palantir’s platform available across the department. The department’s later-installed Chief Information Officer, Clark Minor, previously spent more than a decade at Palantir and oversees health data infrastructure across HHS.

Minor’s financial disclosure shows he held between $1 million and $5 million in Palantir stock for more than five months after taking office before selling. President Trump made Palantir stock purchases totaling six figures, disclosed in a transaction report signed May 8, 2026, while his administration has awarded the company more than $1 billion in federal contracts.

The concern is not that one company holds federal contracts. It is that the government is expanding integrated data infrastructure while failing to set boundaries around medical privacy, law enforcement access, and political repurposing.

What’s Off-Limits?

The administration’s 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy, also released in May, classifies fentanyl and its precursor chemicals as “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” merging drug enforcement with counterterrorism and opening access to the broader surveillance authorities that come with it.

“There’s a tremendous danger that you have the executive branch throwing together a whole bunch of stuff in an attempt to look tough,” Wessler said. “And it will be years potentially before judges are able to get involved.”

Maltz sees integrated data as a matter of public safety. Law enforcement and the intelligence community, he argues, have long needed systems that pull together data collected under court order, so agencies can map criminal networks rather than get buried in scattered records. “The data sets that these agencies are receiving from the providers pursuant to court orders and search warrants and things like that, it’s a tidal wave of data,” he said. “It’s impossible to go through it without having robust technology tools.”

But health data is not just another intelligence stream. It is generated when people seek care, fill prescriptions, get screened in pregnancy, use medication, receive addiction treatment, drive to clinics, or live in communities whose sewage is tested. Once those data streams are fused with law enforcement and counterterrorism tools, the question is not whether the system can find people. It is whether there is anything it is forbidden to find.

To some drug enforcement insiders, the answer is better oversight, not less technology. Maltz argues that the United States is falling behind sophisticated criminal networks and that agencies need modern tools to save lives. But public health and privacy experts see a surveillance architecture being assembled with no rules governing what it can do, and no limit on what it could eventually target.

Oliva saw a system capable of identifying and tracking virtually anyone. “You can get anybody with all of them for sure,” she said, “no matter how off the grid they think they are.”

Wessler called it “a completely unprecedented look at somebody’s medical history, their movements, their associations.”

The administration has already offered clues about who else could be targeted. The same counterterrorism strategy that classifies fentanyl as a WMD also identifies “violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist” as a priority target, alongside cartels and Islamist terrorists. It promises to use “all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership,” and to “cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent.”

The drug strategy builds the tools: prescription databases that track testosterone and abortion pills, wastewater that can detect hormones, AI on medical records, and license plate readers. The counterterrorism strategy identifies who they’re targeting and authorizes pre-emptive action.

Oliva offered the clearest warning. “Just pick something that they’ve decided, that MAHA [‘Make America Healthy Again’] has decided is bad tomorrow, despite all the scientific evidence, boom.” The HPV vaccine and mRNA vaccines. Tylenol. Hormones. Stem cell therapies. “It never ends. It just continues.”

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Dr. Céline Gounder a physician, epidemiologist, and medical journalist. Read her newsletter UNDERLYING CONDITIONS here.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.

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Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta – three tech giants who are driving the AI and data center boom across the United States – avoided paying $49.7 billion in taxes last year, according to a new report. At the same time, last year, the companies committed to spending a combined $250 billion on AI and data centers.

The shocking figures come from a new report from the Climate and Community Institute (CCI) that details how the government is facilitating the mass proliferation of data centers across the country.

The report – titled, “AI First: How the Federal Government is Prioritizing AI Over People and Planet” – reveals how the AI boom and data center build-up is not an inevitable process, but rather the result of choices by a select group of people, with little regard for what the populace thinks.

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Good morning! Andrew here, writing about one of my least favorite topics: the Supreme Court. Sometimes, people seem to forget the high court’s 6-3 supermajority is composed of far-right political operatives who were installed on the court via a pile of billionaire money, and who, underneath the black robes, remain full-on ideological extremists, bestowed with a lifetime of hard power. Unfortunately, the justices remind us of this reality often enough.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ the Supreme Court gives Donald Trump another king-like power, Colorado primary voters could replace a 15-term Democratic congresswoman with another young democratic socialist, and Michigan progressive Abdul El-Sayed picks up a key endorsement, ahead of his interview later today with Mehdi.

Our Malevolent Rulers

As we have written before here in ‘First Draft,’ Donald Trump is radically unfit to lead the U.S., and should be democratically and constitutionally removed from office, without delay. The right-wing justices in the Supreme Court supermajority see it differently: They want this monstrous man to be king.

That’s not because these far-right justices are all MAGA devotees, though surely some of them are. Some of the justices almost certainly can’t stand the man, with his constant demands of them and his propensity for launching loud personal attacks if they fail to side with him on every single issue, no matter how idiotic.

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Fundamentally, Trump and the justices are partners in fascism. With teamwork, a handful of elite, unelected far-right operatives and a narcissistic game-show host can take apart American liberal democracy piece by piece, and replace it with authoritarian rule.

This is not something you’ll hear every day in the mainstream media, but it’s precisely why the right-wing justices, three of whom Trump appointed, have repeatedly granted this president king-like powers – even though they surely know he is out of his mind.

On Monday, the high court gifted Trump, as liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted, a new king-like power, one exceeding the powers of King George III.

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It’s not everyday that the most-subscribed newspaper in the U.S. comes after you.

The New York Times – notorious for whitewashing Israel’s genocide in Gaza – published a profile piece on Darializa Avila Chevalier, one of three Mamdani-backed progressives who shocked the Democratic establishment when they won their NYC primaries last week.

“Who is Darializa Avila Chevalier?” the headline asks. The piece features old social media posts from Chevalier that say things like “Fuck Kamala Harris” – quotes that Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker amplified on Twitter:

Mehdi responded to Baker’s post, calling out the Times for scrutinizing progressives while giving right-wingers a pass, even though GOP politicians routinely traffic in much more extreme and racist rhetoric:

The New York Times PR team proceeded to tweet at Mehdi in response, implying that he was “misstating the facts”:

Of course, Mehdi responded – with receipts:

So, you can subscribe to the self-declared “both sides” journalism of the mainstream New York Times, where racists, Islamophobes, and literal Nazis get off easy.

Or, you can support a new kind of media that’s independent and unafraid – journalism that refuses to both-sides genocide, fascism, and white supremacy.

The choice is yours.

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If you believe in the work we do and want to see more of it, do consider becoming a paid subscriber. A donation to Zeteo also goes a long way.

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As in all war, there is talk – often laced with propaganda-like talking points – of winners and losers. Governments celebrate, or try to convince their respective publics they “won.” In reality, though, the “losers” are almost always those who are barely mentioned at all: the people, the individuals who likely had no choice in whether their country went to war, but those who paid the evil and ultimate price – with their lives.

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Thousands have been killed in Iran, Lebanon, and across the Middle East. Yes, some were fighters or part of a military, including at least 13 U.S. service members, but hundreds, likely thousands, were not: On the first day of Trump’s war on Iran, U.S. strikes killed more than 100 children at a girls’ school in Minab. Their parents’ screams should continue to haunt us all. In April, Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil survived an initial Israeli strike near the vehicle she was traveling in, only for the building she took shelter in to be hit. There was also Theodosia Karam, killed as she returned home after taking her final university exams in Beirut. She was known for her smile. And Hussein Qassir, one of more than 130 medics killed by Israeli strikes on Lebanon. He was weeks away from his wedding. Several migrant workers, including Pakistani Murib Zaman, were killed across the Gulf and Israel from Iranian strikes or debris from intercepted missiles. Palestine was also directly hit: four Palestinian women, Mais Aazi Masalma, Sahra Razak Masalma, Amal Sabhi Abd al-Karim Matawa and Aseel Samir Masalma, were killed when missile fragments hit the hair salon they were in as they prepared for Eid. And it was indirectly affected, as the war certainly provided a distraction for Israel to escalate its genocide.

If you follow non-Western media, you may have heard of some of these stories. But there are so many more like them that haven’t been told. Zeteo asked journalists in Lebanon and Iran to speak to some of the families of those who were killed or went missing during the fighting, those who did not choose war, and those who cannot celebrate if it finally comes to an end. Here are three of their stories:

Mojtaba Sajedifard Was 3 Days Old

by Peiman Salehi

The village of Amirabad, near the central Iranian city of Arak, was unknown to most Iranians before March 14.

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So will this war ever end? Are the old-guard, hawkish Democrats dragging their feet now when it comes to stopping the war on Iran? And what do actual Iranian-Americans think of the deal?

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In this video, Mehdi interviews Yassamin Ansari – the first and only Iranian-American Democrat in Congress – who explains why she “hopes” this deal will mark the end of this war. She also discusses why some Democrats are trying to rally against the peace deal.

“It’s the natural inclination to want to criticize Donald Trump and what he’s done, because what he did was insane,” Ansari says to Mehdi. “Sometimes in that effort, we may inadvertently become obstacles to peace as Democrats.”

In this wide-ranging interview, Mehdi and Ansari discuss the ongoing negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, her party’s handling of the war, and more. She also, for the first time, accuses Israel of committing genocide in Gaza – joining the growing list of Democrats willing to use that term.

Here are some highlights of the discussion:

• Her impeachment articles against Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and his alleged war crimes in Iran (“That bombing at the school in Minab… was the final straw for me.”)

• Vice President JD Vance claiming this current deal with Iran is better than the 2015 Obama administration nuclear deal (“I don’t believe a word that JD Vance or anybody in this administration says.”)

• Why it has taken so long for Democrats to constrain Trump and his war on Iran (“We need to be the anti-war party.”)

• Whether the victories of democratic socialist candidates in New York, backed by Mamdani, will ultimately hurt Democrats in swing states (“I just find all of this attacking each side of our party really exhausting.”)

• Ansari’s rejection of future donations from pro-Israel lobby groups such as DMFI and AIPAC.

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Editor’s Note: This interview was recorded before the U.S. and Iran exchanged strikes against each other over the weekend.

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Good morning, and Happy Monday. Martin here, writing from a capital awash with either popular enthusiasm for Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair, down on the National Mall, or quite a lot of summer rain. Last time I looked out the office window it was… decidedly the latter.

Today’s edition of ‘First Draft’ is brought to you without a paywall, courtesy of our sponsor Ground News.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we consider the latest report of multi-billion-dollar Trump corruption, this time around a deal for Kazakh tungsten, and note encouraging signs of clear Democratic communication to voters of how utterly unacceptable this must be. We also consider the president’s choice of Sunday entertainment: a rather damp tour of the capital he wants to remake in his image, even as his Iran war threatened to roar back to life. Let’s dig in.

‘An Inbred Family Tree’

JD Vance may or may not be right that in Trump’s America, staggering presidential corruption makes for a “12-hour news story” at best, but it is undeniably true that the kind of alleged corruption the New York Times reported Sunday should occupy the nation much longer than that – even if it’s just the latest instance in an absolutely staggering succession of reports of Donald Trump, his family, and their allies enriching themselves at voters’ expense.

The Times headline was stark: “Trump Cut a Billion-Dollar Mining Deal. His Sons Stand to Profit.” The lede described how last year Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick secured a deal with the president of Kazakhstan to give “a little-known American company access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten, a metal that the United States desperately needs for the production of missile warheads, fighter jets, computer chips, and other critical goods.”

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“Within weeks,” the Times’s Eric Lipton and Paul Sonne wrote, a firm part-owned by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump joined with partners to take a 20% stake in “a corporate entity related to the Kazakhstan project.” Lipton and Sonne also noted how Cantor Fitzgerald, the investment company controlled by the Lutnick family and overseen by the commerce secretary’s sons, Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, worked to raise $210 million in capital for an entity related to the deal, work that would “typically net Cantor millions of dollars in fees.”

In November, six days after the Trump boys bought in, the U.S.-Kazakh deal was signed. It was just the tip of the iceberg. One or both of the Trumps and Lutnicks “have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals, including the Kazakhstan project,” the Times said, citing federal filings.

“All 14 of these companies have either benefited directly from offers of financial assistance from the Trump administration, or have pending permit applications before the Commerce Department, which Mr. Lutnick oversees, the Times found. The total amount of federal funding that the Trump administration has provided or is considering providing to the companies exceeds $8.9 billion, according to public statements by the companies and federal government.”

All parties concerned denied wrongdoing, of course.

As for outrage? Well, the Times quoted Rep. Maxine Dexter of Oregon, the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. She said: “Congress needs to make sure that taxpayer dollars are being used in the public’s interest and not to benefit family members or those closely tied with the Trump administration.”

Well… yeah. Was that it? Was that all the most relevant Democrat could manage? When, as the Times put it, that Democrat was confronted with a prime example of “emboldened mixing of federal policymaking and personal business [that] began shortly after Mr. Trump returned to office last year, when the Trump and Lutnick sons played a role in billions of dollars of cryptocurrency deals as the fathers helped set policies that supercharged the crypto industry?” And when, “the families’ ethically tangled pursuit of profits is extending to the new arms race for critical minerals?”

It seemed so.

Fortunately, better was on offer elsewhere. California Democratic Congressman Mike Levin did a good job laying out the Times story in digested form and communicating outrage: “The fathers set the policy. The sons cashed in… This is your tax money. It is supposed to secure our supply chains and protect our troops, not pad the portfolios of the president’s children and the commerce secretary’s children.

“This is the most corrupt administration in American history. It is not close… Either we will end the corruption, or the corruption will be the end of us.”

Jon Ossoff, the Democratic senator from Georgia who is up for re-election against a predictable MAGA lickspittle, was already on the case. Addressing supporters earlier this month, Ossoff used the Kazakhstan deal in an efficient evocation of how the Trump administration is using billions of taxpayer dollars to enrich the Trump family, “while you pay more for gas, for groceries, for health care.”

Ossoff promised accountability, should Democrats regain control of Congress in November. His message was clear, and crisp, and pointed.

And yet, despite such efforts, the roar from Trump’s flood of corruption threatens to become mere background noise. However hard to parse – Was he admitting how corrupt his boss was? Did he actually think Tricky Dick Nixon wasn’t so bad? – Vance’s remarks last week about the news cycle and numbness to scandal came close to a dangerous truth. In a national conversation debased by such nihilism, Democrats must make sure voters know the sheer scale and threat of Trump’s corruption and don’t just treat it as something built in. Democrats must persuade voters it’s not the case that all politicians are just in it to get rich. At a Knicks watch party in New York the other week, a friend told me: “Red or Blue, politicians are all the same. Cut ’em, they bleed green.” I should’ve shown him Ossoff’s remarks.

On Sunday, outside Congress, Adam Bonica, a Stanford professor of political science, offered another efficient distillation of the story about the Trumps, the Lutnicks, and Kazakh tungsten. Linking to the effectively simple Times graphic pictured above, illustrating how the dollars flow, Bonica made an equally simple but clear point about the source of the poison: “Usually these political corruption maps have complicated plumbing. You know it’s bad when it’s just a closed loop that looks like an inbred family tree.”

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🇮🇷 Iran War Updates

• More strikes: Amid a supposed ceasefire, the U.S. and Iran traded attacks. Blaming Iranian drone strikes on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. said it shot down drones and missiles aimed at bases in Bahrain and Kuwait. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed to have destroyed eight U.S. military sites.

• Trump threat: Donald Trump said, “There may come a point when we are no longer able to be reasonable, and will be forced to militarily complete the job that we very successfully started. If that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist!”

• Strait talk: Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said, “Any attempt to establish new or separate arrangements from those currently being carried out by… Iran will only lead to further complications, delay the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and increase the level of tension.” Later, a U.S. official told the New York Times an agreement to halt attacks in the Strait had been reached. Iran did not immediately confirm it.

• Whither Congress? Rep. Ro Khanna pointed out that U.S. strikes were in “blatant violation of the War Powers Resolution” passed by both houses of Congress. Khanna said Congress should take Trump to court to compel an end to strikes.

• Talks unclear: U.S.-Iran negotiations were set to resume in Qatar on Tuesday, Axios and other outlets reported. But Iran said on Monday those reports couldn’t be confirmed. “The first round of technical talks within the framework of the designated working groups will be held when conditions are met,” Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi said.

• Lebanon latest: Israel carried on striking southern Lebanon, two days after signing a deal to end violence in the country. Iran is demanding an end to Israeli strikes in Lebanon, as a condition for ending the wider war.

‘Criminally Made Algae’

Donald Trump’s renovation mania extends to wanting Lafayette Park, by the White House, to contain 47 maple trees to mark his status as the 47th president, the Washington Post reported.

Noting that Trump spent a sodden Sunday morning touring projects including “the East Potomac Park golf course, where reporters saw him reviewing blueprints, and the roundabout where he hopes to erect a triumphal arch,” the paper said the Lafayette Park renovations would not be complete by July 4, as Trump has loudly claimed.

According to the New York Times, Lafayette Park work will cost $17 million, part of a whopping $1.2 billion bill for Trump’s DC projects. Even that is only approximate, subject to ever-spiralling costs of work such as the East Wing ballroom rebuild and the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool clusterfuck. (“Noun, vulgar slang, ‘a complex and utterly disordered and mismanaged situation,’” Merriam-Webster.) Furthermore, much of Trump’s White House work is of unknown cost.

After his DC jaunt, Trump used Truth Social to post a 594-word boast about his plans, replete with batshit (“adjective, vulgar slang, ‘very irrational, excited, or angry,’” Merriam-Webster) claims. The Reflecting Pool, he said, was “now in full use” despite supposed vandalism, though it would be drained again after July 4. “The criminally made algae is gone,” the president burbled, about what he presumably thinks was… wait for it… an antifa plant.

Trump also announced that work on the East Potomac Golf Links would begin Sept. 1, under golf course architect Tom Fazio, who took the Sunday DC tour. According to Trump, the course will be rebuilt to major championship standard. Whether his mound of toxic East Wing debris will remain as a sort of novel sand trap remains to be seen.

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🗞️ What You Need to Know

• Book blast: Trump broke his own embargo (as reported by Zeteo) on commenting about bestselling book Regime Change, managing to misspell his abusive nickname for Maggie Haberman while claiming her work with fellow New York Times reporter Jonathan Swan was “mostly made up.”

• Dictatorship watch: The Times also reported the extreme lengths the Trump White House went to in order to remove protections for federal workers it wanted to fire. Democracy Docket noted how Trump admitted pressuring California officials to ensure GOP gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton made the general election.

• Make your mind up: On Truth Social, Trump took aim at the presumptive new Washington, DC, mayor, Janeese Lewis George, whom he called both a “communist” and a “communist adherent.”

• OK rules: Trump named Lance Schroyer to lead ICE. The former Oklahoma state trooper is an adviser to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, also from Oklahoma.

• Primary win: In Louisiana, Trump-endorsed Rep. Julia Letlow, who beat incumbent Bill Cassidy in the first round, secured the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate with a run-off victory over state treasurer John Fleming.

• Dire warning: A group representing central banks said debt-fueled spending on AI data centers risks a financial crunch similar to the 2008-09 global crisis.

• Birthday bigotry: Elon Musk spent his 55th birthday on Sunday boosting a fascistic, anti-migrant film from German director Uwe Boll, which glorifies vigilante violence against migrants and which was denied classification in Germany.

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🧠 Pop Quiz!

The early 19th-century Decatur House, on Lafayette Square by the White House, contains a rare surviving urban example of what sort of building?

Keep your eyes out for the answer below!

🌏 Anywhere But America

• 🇵🇸 Don’t forget Gaza: Israeli strikes killed at least four Palestinians, including a 13-year-old girl, Gaza officials said Sunday. Heavy tank shelling was reported with drones overhead. Israel has killed at least 1,045 Palestinians in Gaza since the so-called “ceasefire” last October, and more than 73,000 since October 2023.

• 🇻🇪 Quake toll: Venezuela’s government reported 1,450 dead from twin earthquakes last Wednesday. Thirty-three rescues were reported. Amid criticism of official efforts, the UN said more than 2,200 international rescuers had arrived.

• 🇺🇦 🇷🇺 Kyiv strikes: Ukraine hit two Russian oil refineries, President Volodymyr Zelensky said. Russian President Vladimir Putin admitted his country was going through a “difficult period” amid the war it started in February 2022.

• 🇵🇰 🇦🇫 Pakistan-Afghanistan escalation: Tensions along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border flared Sunday, with Taliban officials claiming Pakistani strikes and ground operations killed more than 35 civilians. Pakistan said it launched a ground operation late Sunday against militant hideouts, killing more than two dozen fighters, AP reported. Afghanistan warned it would retaliate.

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😳 WTF?!

Fox is really shilling for Donald Trump’s “Great American State Fair” on the National Mall, despite overwhelming evidence it’s a flop for the ages. On Sunday, a day of biblical downpours in DC, it might not have been the best choice of words to claim “a great wash” of people were taking in the displays.

🧠 Trivia answer: Slave quarters.

📺 Sunday Show Roundup

• Presented with “centrist” Democrat Josh Gottheimer’s claim that “If you’re a socialist, you’re not a Democrat,” and publication of a centrist manifesto to that effect, Zohran Mamdani laughed, telling ABC’s ‘This Week’ hawking manifestos “sounds pretty socialist to me.” The New York mayor added: “I’m not interested in writing a manifesto, or frankly, in reading one. I’m interested in delivering, and that’s exactly what we’ve been showing.”

• On CNN’s ‘State of the Union,’ North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis lamented Donald Trump’s fixation on supposed voter fraud, asking: “Why are we doing more things to undermine our confidence in elections, rather than getting the strong message out that will win for Republicans this year?” Tillis is not running, having chosen to retire, only then to speak against his party’s Trumpist insanity.

• Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana GOP senator, who also speaks out, but only because he lost his primary to a Trump-backed opponent, said Trump sees Congress as “merely an appendage,” adding: “And frankly, sometimes Congress acts like it’s an appendage.” Cassidy did not tell CBS’s ‘Face the Nation’ what sort of appendage he meant.

🗓️ Mark Your Calendars

• Monday, June 29: All eyes will be on the Supreme Court as it releases opinions before the end of its term on July 1. The Trump administration’s challenge to birthright citizenship is among cases not yet decided by the far-right-dominated court. So are questions about how much Trump can control the Fed and government agencies.

• Tuesday, June 30: Colorado holds primary elections. Among Democrats, all eyes will be on the first district, where Rep. Diana DeGette faces Melat Kiros, a democratic socialist endorsed by Bernie Sanders, and the Senate race, where incumbent John Hickenlooper is looking to stave off Julie Gonzales, a progressive state senator.

• Wednesday, July 1: Trump will visit the Theodore Roosevelt presidential library in Medora, North Dakota, set to open to the public on Saturday, July 4. Plans for opening night include a display about Roosevelt’s life mounted by 1,776 drones.

• Friday, July 3: Trump is due to speak at a fireworks display at Mount Rushmore, in South Dakota.

ICYMI From Zeteo

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When the Iranian football team left Los Angeles after their second match at the 2026 World Cup, they left behind a handwritten note in their locker room thanking the city for “its hospitality.” Iranian politeness is famous, but “hospitality” is not the word that comes to mind when I think of how the Iranian national team has been treated by FIFA and the United States, one of the World Cup’s 2026 host countries. Not only did President Donald Trump welcome the team back in March by saying that he did not think the team’s participation in the tournament was “appropriate,” citing possible dangers to their “lives and safety,” but his administration also denied as many visas as possible, required the team to leave the U.S. immediately after every match, and forced them to be based across the border in Mexico, initially allowing entry to the great United States only within 24 hours before a match. When the Iranian national anthem played, as is customary, before their two games in a Los Angeles Stadium, parts of the crowd booed.

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At every press conference, journalists who have spent careers lobbing softballs at sportsmen made sure to quiz Iranian captain Mehdi Taremi as obnoxiously as possible, asking him after the team’s 1-1 draw against Egypt whether he supports LGBT people. “We respect all of the LGBT people,” Taremi answered, before wondering if the journalist had any questions about the actual game of football that had been played. One can only assume that Kylian Mbappé, the French captain, was quizzed on Emmanuel Macron’s stalling of the French economy, the Austrian captain questioned about his country’s love of far-right politicians, and Argentina’s team captain made to answer about why Javier Milei is such a weirdo. They weren’t. Was the U.S. captain asked about his country’s funding of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, or its bombing of a girls’ school that killed at least 100 children in Minab on the first day of Trump’s war on Iran? No? What a surprise.

I am old enough to remember when American celebrities and British pundits made a hue and cry about Qatar hosting a World Cup.

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Something’s got to be wrong when JD Vance starts making sense. Last week, while defending his boss’s Iran dealmaking, the vice president cautioned against conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and delivered a sharper dressing-down of the Israeli government than I’ve heard from nearly any politician on either side of the aisle:

“Over the past three months, two-thirds of the defensive weapons that have protected your homeland have been built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars … anybody in Israel who thinks their biggest problem is the president of the United States needs to wake up and smell the reality of the situation that country is in.”

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Refreshing, uncommon clarity for any politician – that should not make you forget Vance’s servile cheerleading for the war his boss just launched alongside Israel and his sympathy for neo-Nazis at home and abroad.

Hearing tough talk on Israel from Vance, the presumptive 2028 Republican nominee, I had a frightening premonition: Vance and other younger Republicans claiming the anti-war, tough-on-Israel lane and winning over voters frustrated with Democrats’ perceived incoherence on both issues.

Pro-Palestinian voters shouldn’t trust Vance’s new talking points, but Democrats should be asking themselves why Vance can even pretend to be on the right side of U.S.-Israel policy, and what they can do about it.

By any measure, Trump-Vance has been the most pro-Israel administration in decades

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On Tuesday, a UN commission inquiry confirmed what we already knew: Israel is deliberately killing and abusing Palestinian children in its genocide in Gaza.

Not even 24 hours later, Israel killed another child. His name was Ahmed Mohsen al-Raqab.

Ahmed wasn’t the only person Israel killed this week. Raghad Ashour was a high school student. Israel reportedly killed her in a double-tap strike as she walked to take an exam. Maysara Al-Khawaja was a paramedic, killed in another strike in Gaza. And Ahmed Weshah was an Al Jazeera photographer – the 12th Al Jazeera journalist killed by Israel since October 2023. Where is the outrage?

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Where, too, is the outrage over the obvious abuse journalist Mujahid Bani Mufleh suffered while in Israeli custody? It’s difficult to look at the side-by-side photos of Mufleh from before and after his abduction by Israeli forces. But looking at the photos, knowing the names of the people killed, reading the devastating reports, is our obligation – to not only know what Israel continues to do, but to not normalize the killing and abuse.

Here’s more on their stories, and others, from another troubling week in Palestine:

Saturday, June 20 – Israel Kills Al Jazeera Journalist in Gaza

Israel killed Al Jazeera cameraman Ahmed Wishah in a strike on a house in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza. He’s the 12th Al Jazeera journalist killed since October 2023, and one of at least 260 Palestinian journalists Israel has killed during its genocide in Gaza.

His killing came just weeks after Israel killed his brother, Mohammed, who also worked for Al Jazeera.

Sunday, June 21 – Israel Arrests Palestinian ‘Doctor of the Poor’

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Between the Knicks’ championship, World Cup fervor, and effervescent atmosphere Mayor Zohran Mamdani has fostered – the city is abuzz. Following the three candidates around the city… buzz is an understatement. We couldn’t go more than a few steps without people of all ages and backgrounds stopping these three new Democratic congressional nominees.

In midtown, between constant smiles-and-waves, Lander told me the “joyful energy” Mamdani ran on is contagious. “People are pissed off and anxious, and want to fight fascism and protect our immigrant neighbors – but to do it with some joy and hope. It feels pretty special.”

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In Brooklyn, a young boy in a Messi jersey ran to Valdez, smiling from ear to ear, saying he’s seen her everywhere. A man in his 30s asked Valdez about the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), saying he was on the fence; she convinced him to consider joining.

In Harlem, as Avila Chevalier and I talked about her being arrested in the Columbia student demonstrations, a group of children, some in school uniform, squealed in delight from across the park: “DARIALIZA?!”

After years of compounding struggle – Covid-19, civil rights protests, skyrocketing prices, increasingly egregious inequality, all while people’s tax dollars have gone toward livestreamed massacres – a new politics is brewing. And the epicenter is New York City.

In the wake of Tuesday’s elections, in which Mamdani and his movement’s candidates swept the field, pundits have scrambled to cope with what’s unfolded. Watch the video above to hear directly from Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander – straight from New York – on exactly how Tuesday happened.

This is a truly important and unique set of conversations with candidates who have been demonized by mainstream media, so we’re publishing the video without a paywall and for everyone to watch for free. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, please do consider becoming one today so we can fund more independent journalism like this, challenging the corporate media’s version of political events. If you’re already subscribed to Zeteo, thank you and please do consider donating to help us do more of this work, and to ask the questions so many ‘mainstream’ journalists fail to do.

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Donald Trump ordered the U.S. military to strike drone, missile, and radar sites in Iran on Friday, in response to an Iranian drone attack on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz the day before. The strikes came amid a supposed 60-day ceasefire to allow for talks aimed at ending the war.

One exasperated senior U.S. official told Zeteo the U.S. strikes showed Trump had “started a forever war.”

Earlier on Friday, Trump told reporters at the White House they would “find out soon” if he was going to order new strikes, in response to the Iranian attack on a Singapore-flagged ship that Tehran said was using an unapproved route through the Strait.

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“I don’t like the fact that they took a shot yesterday, actually four of them,” Trump said. Asked why he would order a strike when he had said ceasefire talks had been going well, Trump said of Iran: “They’re a little bit different.”

Ebraham Azizi, a senior Iranian national security official, responded to Trump’s comments by saying the U.S. should “respect the rules” of the Strait of Hormuz, over which Iran claims control, and “not mistake control for escalation.”

U.S. Central Command then said it conducted “a powerful response” to the Iranian strike on the ship that was “exiting the Strait of Hormuz along the Omani coast at the time of Iran’s attack.”

The statement continued: “The unwarranted aggression against commercial shipping by Iranian forces clearly violated the ceasefire. Furthermore, Iran’s dangerous behavior undermined freedom of navigation as commerce increasingly flows through the vital international trade corridor.”

The New York Times quoted a U.S. official as saying the strikes hit targets along the Strait and on Queshm Island.

After the U.S. strikes, Azizi said: “The U.S. attacked Iran in the middle of negotiations once again. The failed U.S. president has shown he has no commitment to the principles of negotiation or a ceasefire. This reckless violation of the ceasefire will, as always, lead to retreat and regret on their part. The blame game does not work anymore.”

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In a statement carried by Iranian state media, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said the U.S. had violated the ceasefire and any further strikes would be met with a “more extensive” response.

Vice President JD Vance, who has been leading U.S. negotiators in talks held in Switzerland, said: “Iran signed a ceasefire agreement. We have honored it. If they have disagreements about how the MOU is being applied, they can pick up the phone. But violence will be met with violence.”

As the markets closed for the weekend – the time when Trump has privately told U.S. officials he prefers bombing Iran – several administration officials and others close to the Trump White House told Zeteo that this was the scenario many predicted, or feared.

Trump, they said, had started not just another disaster in the Middle East. He had quite possibly started the exact kind of conflict that he at least said he would keep the U.S. out of: a never-ending war that stretches far past the American government’s “mission accomplished” moment, that commits U.S. forces to combat well past the patience of voters and the elite, and that has reverberating unintended consequences for years if not decades to come.

Friday’s events were further evidence that’s precisely the road Trump put the U.S. on, where any idea of a meaningful exit strategy is proven immediately laughable.

A Trump administration official referred to the latest events as another instance of “peacetime bombings,” an intentionally ironic term that further underscores how Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attacks on Iran have produced perhaps the most Orwellian war of our lifetimes.

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This week, Donald Trump kicked off America’s 250th celebrations with a campaign-style rally, declaring “America is back.”

You’ve got to hand it to the president, perhaps America is back: Back to a time when racism dictates policy; back to a time, when just a few ultra-rich (white) men – whose wealth was built at least in part on corruption – hold all the power; back to a time, when climate change wasn’t acknowledged, much less thought about. We could go on and on.

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This year should be about celebrating American democracy – the progress the U.S. has made, and recognizing the progress yet to come. But instead, it’s a reflection of the very worst of America.

Just this week, Trump and his cronies ramped up their efforts to interfere with elections, ended temporary protective status for hundreds of thousands of people, and held bipartisan legislation meant to lower housing costs because… the president isn’t getting his way on voter restrictions.

It was yet another week that exemplified the fascism that has defined Trump’s second term. Here’s more about how Trump and his allies harmed democracy, undermined the Constitution, and hurt societies worldwide this week:

Saturday, June 20 – FBI Tried to Turn Delaney Hall Protesters Into Informants

The Intercept reported that at least half of the roughly 90 people who have been arrested in recent weeks for protesting at the Delaney Hall ICE detention center in New Jersey have been contacted by FBI agents who tried to get them to become informants.

The move prompted a complaint by a deputy public defender representing multiple protesters, who argued it violated the constitutional rights of his clients.

Sunday, June 21 – Trump Admin Quashed Criminal Investigation of Clemency

The New York Times reported that the Trump administration shut down a criminal investigation into Trump’s December 2025 commutation of the sentence of David Gentile, a private equity executive who was convicted in 2024 of securities and wire fraud charges in a case prosecutors described as a $1.6 billion scheme that defrauded thousands of investors.

As part of the probe into Gentile, who served less than two weeks of his seven-year prison sentence, investigators learned about jailhouse communications where he discussed making payments of $2.5 million or more to people or companies to help secure his clemency.

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Monday, June 22 – Trump Ramps Up Efforts to Interfere in Elections

CNN reported that the Trump administration is threatening to withhold tens of millions of dollars in federal Homeland Security funds to states unless they make sweeping changes to their election laws, including submitting their voter rolls through the DHS’s citizenship verification database.

The changes, which would be required under new rules for several homeland security grant programs, would also force states to phase out certain electronic voting systems and instead use hand-marked paper ballots.

Tuesday, June 23 – Anti-ICE Protesters Get Up to 100 Years in Prison

Federal judges gave a group of anti-ICE protesters, who were convicted for their roles in a 2025 demonstration in Texas as alleged members of “antifa,” prison sentences that ranged between 30 and 100 years. The person who got 30 years wasn’t even at the protest. The person who received 100 years was convicted of attempted murder, along with other charges, after a police officer was shot and injured.

The landmark case marks the first to incorporate Trump’s presidential declaration that labeled “antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization (antifa, which simply means “antifascist,” is not an organization). The protesters’ sentences are notably longer than those given to Jan. 6 insurrectionists.

“The prosecution of the protesters is part of an increasingly disturbing pattern of the Trump administration criminalizing speech and assembly in the United States,” Zeteo contributor Kim Wehle wrote. “And it should alarm us all.”

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Wednesday, June 24 – Trump Holds Housing Bill Hostage

On Truth Social, Trump abruptly canceled the signing of a bipartisan bill designed to lower the cost of housing until the Republican-led House and Senate pass the SAVE America Act, which would disenfranchise millions of voters by requiring proof of citizenship and photo ID to cast a ballot in elections.

Trump doesn’t have much leverage to hold the bill hostage, as legislation can still become law 10 days after it’s presented to the president while Congress is in session. Additionally, the bill received enough support from Congress that lawmakers could override a veto by the president if he tries to do so.

Thursday, June 25 – Supreme Court Allows Trump to End TPS for Haitians, Syrians

The Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to remove the Temporary Protected Status of roughly 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians, in a move that will require them to leave the country or risk being arrested and deported once a termination date is set.

In the ruling, Justice Samuel Alito concluded that the TPS law authorizes Trump to end the program without intervention from the courts, a finding that threatens protections for people from the other 15 countries under the program.

Friday, June 26 – Hundreds of Thousands of Children Have No Lawyer for Deportation Hearings

Drop Site reported that more than half of the over 750,000 children facing deportation hearings have no legal representation, according to data from the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review.

The rate of children navigating immigration court proceedings without a lawyer (57%) is slightly higher than the 54% of adults who are unrepresented in their cases.

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Did you miss previous weeks of ‘This Week in Democracy’? Catch up here. And check out more of Zeteo’s reporting from this week below:

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“People who want to kill Americans, we are less prepared to stop them than at any point since 9-11,” says Taylor, as he answers questions from John Harwood and Zeteo’s subscribers during this latest Substack live.

Watch the full video above to hear how Trump could weaponize the U.S. Postal Service to jeopardize elections, the security threats political appointees like Kash Patel pose, and a special announcement from Taylor towards the end of the discussion.

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This was a live conversation on Zeteo.com and the Substack app, where subscribers could ask questions. Be sure to subscribe to catch the next Substack Live.

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