Loyalty, it turns out, has a very short shelf life in Trump world—and this week Jeanine Pirro found out just how short.
A month ago, Pirro stood at a podium and promised she’d prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that an Olympian “forcefully and violently” vandalized Donald Trump’s repainted Reflecting Pool. This weekend, her own office admitted the damage was never vandalism—it was a botched, rushed installation, timed to hit Trump’s America250 deadline. The case collapsed. And instead of thanks for finally telling the truth, Pirro got a public flogging from the man she served, who insists it was a “pure case of VANDALISM,” evidence be damned. A source tells CNN she’s “highly likely” gone. Add her to the pile.
Todd Blanche got his own lesson in how fragile these arrangements are. He rescinded the $1.8 billion fund meant to pay off January 6 defendants—the exact demand that got Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis to drop their blockade. Deal done, right? Not quite. Trump told reporters in the Oval he never even read the settlement that was supposedly just gutted, which means it could snap back the moment nobody’s watching. We walk through why legal experts are calling it theater, and why the sweeping immunity shield for Trump and his family survived almost completely untouched.
Then there’s the story nobody’s talking about anymore, which is kind of the point. New Brennan Center polling shows Americans overwhelmingly believe corruption is a problem—and increasingly, they’ve stopped being surprised by it. We dig into why that numbness is doing more damage than any single scandal, using Trump’s market-moving Truth Social habit as exhibit A.
Which is exactly why we brought in Joshua Graham Lynn and George Lee, the team behind RepresentUs, to make the case that courage—not outrage—is what actually spreads. If you’ve been feeling like you’re drowning in bad news with nowhere to put it, this one’s the antidote. Find their work at RepresentUs.
And because we always need a laugh by the end, we welcome Vancouver artist Wendy Chartrand to the DEFIANCE this week, whose Trump portrait—made entirely of horse poop—sold for $1,800. Somewhere, an anonymous buyer is very happy with their new centerpiece.
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