Trump got booed at the World Cup final. Honestly, the least important thing that happened this weekend, but it’s the one moment that felt good.
Because everything else didn’t. Iran is escalating into what one U.S. official is now calling a “wider war,” American troops are dying, and even some of Trump’s own supporters online are starting to ask why, if his administration insists Iran’s military is basically destroyed, Iran is still hitting U.S. bases. That’s not a question from the left. That’s confusion from MAGA accounts.
On immigration, the administration pulled out a court that hasn’t been used once in almost 30 years — built for terrorism cases, running on classified evidence the accused may never get to see — and used it for the first time to try to deport someone. Even the judge reviewing the case sent it back, unconvinced.
At the same time, a New York Times investigation was quietly showing that a lot of the government’s own cases against people accused of assaulting ICE agents don’t hold up. Almost immediately after, the FBI told field offices to stop investigating confrontations involving ICE, and handed that job to a DHS division that doesn’t actually have authority to look into civil rights violations. DOJ and DHS say nothing changed. The internal memo says otherwise.
All of it comes back to the same question we keep circling on this show: how much power is this administration trying to consolidate, and what’s actually left to check it. That question gets a direct answer today from David Walbert, who’s spent more than four decades litigating voting rights cases, including several before the Supreme Court. He recently wrote a piece for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution asking why the FBI really wants Fulton County’s election records, and his argument isn’t that this is about relitigating 2020. He walks through why he thinks this is groundwork for handing a future election to Congress. His book, Stealing Elections: American Style, is available for preorder now here.
We also welcome photographer and conservationist Thomas D. Mangelsen to the DEFIANCE today, after he responded to Trump’s new national park pass design — which features Trump’s face — by making something better. Go check out his work here.
