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Whew. It's been a time: "Open the Fuckin' Strait," "A whole civilization will die," puerile threats, boundless botches and cover-ups, deranged lurches into ballrooms, auto-pens, Davy Crockett, and a media sanewashing it all. And when their slapstick "ceasefire" and "peace talks" imploded, our Supreme Leader was at a UFC cage match watching men batter each other bloody for fun and profit. Then he depicted himself as Jesus, with a hotel on the moon. Breaking: "The president has lost his mind."
It's a historic given that the final act of any narcissist is inevitably a descent into psychosis. Thus are we now witnessing - and struggling to survive - the mayhem of "history's dumbest madman," a toddler with a gun, a Dunning-Kruger president with a brain of moldering oatmeal as supremely confident as he is utterly ignorant, leading to dazzling insights like, "I'll know the war is over when I feel it in my bones." A criminal braggart and loathsome human being, he is above all extraordinarily stupid, giving rise to the first time in history you can post, "He's an idiot," and 90% of the world knows who you're talking about. It may also be the first time aggrieved, enraged citizens regularly say of their purported leader, "Die as soon as possible, you child-raping worthless fuck."
Today, we find ourselves mired in "the worst-run war in US history," a witless war conducted mostly by thumb by "a depraved idiot" with no plan, no map, no clue, inexorably morphed into the "Worst. Ceasefire. Ever." In his staggering stupidity, Trump has done more damage to American status, power and respect in weeks than any adversary did in decades, experts say, empowering and enriching Russia, China and Iran while endlessly, mindlessly declaring, Baghdad-Bob-like, "victory" over "obliterated" enemy forces. Abetted by a cabal of inept sycophants whose "collective incompetence is unprecedented," a demented old crook who relishes carnage has rendered America a rogue state lacking all credibility, a beleaguered world's preeminent villain and laughingstock.
In the lead-up to his illegal war, the chaos begun on Day One had already wildly escalated, blunders coming fast and lethal. He gutted measures to reduce civilian casualties, decommissioned minesweepers, fired judge advocate generals who keep military action within international law, did no planning for the economic fallout, stupefyingly ignored warnings about Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz - universally deemed by anyone who's glanced at a map or history book the key vulnerability in Middle East geopolitics. The result: A Wild West lack of accountability that on the first day saw a US strike slaughter some 175 Iranian schoolgirls, an atrocity first met with lies and denials, then silence and as yet no apology from any American representative.
We've since seen a flood of senseless, trash-talking claims, threats and whiplash deadlines that sound either like a rabid 10-year-old schoolyard bully, a pissed-off late-night text to a mob sweetheart who hasn't called back, or a ransom note in crayon: "If they don't make a deal, I am blowing up everything," "Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today,” "WE DO NOT NEED THE HELP OF ANYONE!", "If it goes well we'll settle, otherwise we'll keep bombing our little hearts out," "TAKE THE OIL & MAKE A FORTUNE," "48 hours before all Hell will reign (sic) down," "We will bomb Iran back into the Stone ages (sic)." They're so dumb Iran trolls him online: When he claimed (fictional) “good and productive talks," they echoed him with a smiley face and, "To the president of peace."
They, and the world, were less amused when he went full genocidal and proclaimed, "Power Plant Day and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one. Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards," with a jeering, "Praise be to Allah," and then the more bonkers, "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again." Still-spineless legacy media translated that into, "Mr. Trump issued a new ultimatum." For Easter, Jonathan Larsen noted the day would be "commemorated with the traditional threatening of the war crimes (with the) ritual repetition of deadlines and horrific consequences...(The) incantation was followed (by) the miracle of the levitating oil prices. They were risen." The Strait, Iran officials asserted, "will not be opened through the ridiculous spectacle (of) the president of the United States." His name, they wrote, "will be etched in history as a supreme war criminal.”
Another deadline shuffled, the madness by "a dangerous delinquent idiot" went on. At a surreal Easter Egg Roll, he ranted about Iran's fighters beside a bewildered Easter Bunny, babbled to the assembled, equally baffled kids about Biden's auto-pen, insisted bombing was good for Iranian children, and silently stared down a reporter who asked about war crimes, stonily turning away with, "What else?" He gave a droopy, gibberish speech about America's "overwhelming victories on the battlefield,” though there haven't been any battles and "the whelmingest victory" was against a girls' school. It was rote stale lies, noted Colbert: "All the stuff you’ve heard before, delivered by a narcotized turtle” who'd disastrously "started a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle" and then walked away.
Online, amidst a war, he's ceaselessly spewed batshit claptrap: He raged at Somali Americans, wondered if Jasmine Crockett is related to Davy Crockett, trashed Bill Maher and "dried-up old prune" Springsteen (LOL), obsessed over his ballroom and Hitler-esque arch. He said "we can’t take care of daycare" or Medicaid/ Medicare "little scams" because we need more war; speaking of, he posted a bizarre, pre-Bonespurs photo of himself in military garb. He danced, partied as tankers burned, danced again: "Young man, there's no need to feel down!" Letting his homicidal freak flag fly, he fundraised off images of dead soldiers - him in his fucking baseball cap - and lied their families urged the war on. One non-fan: "He has the empathy of a serial killer."
He's also brazenly saber-rattled - the US military can do "whatever it wants in the world" - and blasphemed - God supports the war because He/She "wants to see people taken care of." Umm. Add the "heretical Christianist gibberish" of bombastic ghoul Drunk Pete - who's giddily celebrated “death and destruction from the sky," urged war-crimey "no quarter" against enemies, and prayed for "overwhelming violence against those who deserve no mercy" - and even devoutly apolitical church leaders have protested, "There are no new crusades. If God is present in this war, He is among those who are dying." Noted Pope Leo, "Jesus, King of Peace, does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: Your hands are full of blood.’"
Following in a long, grim American tradition, the regime's hands may prove more bloody than we know. Despite an "investigation" into the massacre of Iranian schoolgirls, there's been no accountability and many deem it unlikely there will ever be. Meanwhile, multiple reports suggest a series of cover-ups by officials seeking to hide the deadly cost of a catastrophic war nobody wants. A new report accuses military leaders of a "casualty cover-up," charging they're issuing “low-ball and outdated figures" of U.S. casualties of up to 750 Americans killed or wounded. Unsurprisingly, the chest-thumping, out-of-his-depth, lying- his-way-out-of-sexual-assault-charges Drunktank Pete is often at the center of reported deceptions, with angry soldiers themselves calling them out.
Survivors have disputed his account of a deadly March 1 Iranian drone attack in Kuwait that killed six U.S. soldiers and wounded dozens, with almost 40 hospitalized. Soldiers describe a grisly scene with many head wounds, perforated eardrums and shrapnel hits to abdomens and limbs; The Great Empathizer infamously shrugged off the carnage with, "That's the way it is." Hegseth claimed the drone was a "squirter," an anomaly that "squeaked through" a well-fortified operations center. But survivors call bullshit, saying they were left "unprepared to provide any defense." "Calling it a squirter is a falsehood," said one, citing "a bunch of little tin buildings” unprotected from the sky, in "a deeply unsafe area" not just within range of Iran's missiles but a known potential target. On the degree of fortification, he said, "I would put it in the 'none' category."
A new WaPo story also disputes Hegseth claims about Iran's losses that fail to line up with intel and reality. Despite his persistent boasts that Tehran's military might has been "decimated" by U.S. forces' "complete control of Iranian skies" in now-"uncontested airspace,“ experts say Iran still has over half its missile launchers and thousands of medium- and short-range ballistic weapons that can be repaired or pulled from underground facilities. They also say his focus on the number of Iran's missile launches is "a dumb metric" that ignores what matters: Not their volume, but their precision, or "hit rates," which are increasing as their strategy evolves. In another nod to his cluelessness, they note the downing of an F-15 and subsequent rescue of its airman - itself a suspected cover-up of a failed mission - is "what happens when you have air superiority but not air supremacy."
Finally, many have suggested a cover-up of possible sabotage on the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier, the Navy’s $13 billion crown jewel, which has morphed into a sort of McHale's Navy "Voyage of the Damned" for a war-weary crew of about 4,500 sailors stuck in a record-breaking 11th month of deployment. "It’s on fire. It’s heading to Greece. And the toilets don’t work," runs one succinct summary of its series of mishaps, from the breakdown of over 600 toilets - also suspected as sabotage - to a laundry-room fire that raged for 30 hours, caused far greater damage than initially reported, and left some 600 sailors sleeping on floors and tables before the ship limped to Greece for repairs. The Navy is now investigating whether the fire was deliberately set,
Between lies, blunders, mutinies against mindless wars and an addled Commander Bonespurs who doesn't know how batteries work, some WH officials have reportedly "raised concerns" - thanks legacy media - if lackeys are "explaining the evolving complexity of the conflict" to him. Seriously? The guy claims he invented the word "groceries," thinks migrants come from insane asylums, and gets his daily info from a two-minute video of "stuff blowing up" (which has never ended a war, except in Hiroshima) so what are the odds? This weekend, he again displayed his strategic acumen by railing against a (female) reporter who asked about the Strait. "We win, no matter what," he snapped. "We've defeated their military, it's all at the bottom of the sea (with sharks!), their leaders are dead. With all that, lets see what happens. But from my standpoint, I don't care."
Neither, apparently, do the whip-smart, deeply knowledgeable "negotiators" - a corrupt slumlord, clueless golf bro and creep who fucks couches - who just went to Pakistan for "peace talks." Less than shockingly, they gave up in under 24 hours and fled home empty-handed. According to Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, the Ugly Americans "derailed" the talks with "maximalist demands and shifting goalposts" just as the two sides were "inches away" from an agreement. "Zero lessons learned," Araghchi wrote. "Good will begets good will. Enmity begets enmity.” Profoundly weirdly - and aptly for this timeline - at the same moment J.D. was announcing their failure, Trump, slathered in clown makeup, was entering Miami's Kaseya Center to watch two men beat up each other, or pretend to, in a UFC cage match.
With Kid Rock blaring and accompanied by assorted bottom-feeders - UFC's Dana White, rapper Vanilla Ice, a few of his evil spawn and a hammered-looking, dead-eyed Marco Rubio who bafflingly skipped seeking peace, which is kinda his job, for this - Trump strutted into his last MAGA chud safe space, a symptom of the decline of Western civilization and a tacky haven for people who get off on watching other people get hurt. Last year, Trump was loudly cheered here; this year, he was cheered and booed, not a good sign for his shot at the UFC Peace Prize. Amidst our many crises, people mulled why Rubio was there. One sage: "He makes Trump look tall." Others: "This ain’t a cabinet. It’s a junk drawer," "This is not serious leadership. It’s amateur hour,” and "What a circus."
Trump, a fat, clumsy, longtime manosphere wannabe, watched the fighting intensely from ringside, occasionally dodging blood and spit, oblivious to the madness of attending a fucking cage match as the world burns. Ever-dazzled by celebrity, he went gaga for Brazil’s Paulo Costa when the fighter came over to shake his teeny, rotting hand. “You’re a beautiful guy," Trump crooned. "You could be a model, you look so good.” Filmmaker Jeremy Newberger: “This montage of dueling events" - UFC vs. war and peace - "would be the denouement of The Godfather Part VII: Corleone Nights, a straight to video release by a second cousin of Francis Ford Coppola’s tax attorney." We are adrift in a dumpster-fire idiocracy, wading through Trump's opus, I Really Don't Care, Do U?
The next day, he announced a blockade to block the blockade that’s blocking the Strait of Hormuz that wasn’t blocked before he caused it to be. "Any Iranian who fires at us, will be BLOWN TO HELL!" he bellowed. "We are fully 'LOCKED AND LOADED.'" He went on Fox, babbling about the Gulf of Trump and stunning into wide-eyed silence Maria Bartiromo when she asked if he thought gas prices would be lower by the midterms. "I hope so. I mean, I think so. It could be," he yammered. "It could be or the same or maybe a little bit higher." Online, he (again) trashed Pope Leo, who's "weak on crime," for being against war. Rep. Ted Lieu, who earlier reminded the military not to obey illegal orders, added, "If you receive an illegal order to attack the Vatican, you will also disobey that order."
In a social media frenzy, he rage-posted 12 times through Sunday night. He posted an AI image of a Trump Hotel on the moon. Then he posted an image of himself cosplaying as Jesus healing a sick man, who if things weren't weird enough many thought looked like Epstein. Cue flags, eagles, jets, angels, widespread outrage even from MAGA world - most charged "blasphemy," not insanity - who maybe should've seen this coming? Taken aback by the uproar, he sputtered it "had to do with red cross as a red cross worker," but took it down. Still, America's eyes hurt. The consensus: "This man is not well." And, said John Brennan, "The 25th Amendment was written with Donald Trump in mind.” Aaron Rupar sent out the image as a plea. "I'm not sure it has broken through to the general public that the president is a megalomaniac crazy person," he wrote. "Hopefully posts like this help." Or not.


Hundreds of health experts are demanding the removal of Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin over his gutting of key regulations that they say will endanger Americans' livelihoods.
A letter released Thursday by Climate Action Campaign outlines Zeldin's threats to public health and explains why he should not be serving as the top US environmental regulator.
"Administrator Zeldin is pursuing a deregulatory agenda that will result in a massive increase in health-damaging air pollution, toxic chemicals, and climate-heating greenhouse gases," says the letter, which is signed by nearly 300 medical experts, including physicians, nurses, and public health researchers.
"And just last month, the administration laid bare its decision to no longer count the economic value of health benefits when setting Clean Air Act rules," the letter adds, "refusing to acknowledge the value of lives saved, hospital visits avoided, and lost work and school days prevented."
The letter also points to the EPA's February decision to revoke the so-called "endangerment finding," which gave the agency authority to regulate greenhouse gases as threats to public health.
Repealing this finding, the letter contends, "will increase the frequency and severity of climate disasters."
According to a Wednesday report from The Associated Press, Zeldin celebrated the EPA's revocation of the finding while delivering a keynote address at the Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank that has long pushed climate denialism.
"Today is a moment to celebrate," Zeldin said at the event. "It is a day to celebrate vindication."
Margie Alt, director of the Climate Action Campaign, said her group decided to organize the letter among medical experts because "Lee Zeldin is too dangerous to ignore."
"When health experts—the people who see the effects of pollution on their patients every single day—say enough is enough, the rest of us need to pay attention," said Alt. "Zeldin is not just failing Americans. He is actively endangering us. We cannot tolerate an EPA administrator who treats our families as expendable."
This is the second "Game Over Zeldin" letter, following another from over 160 advocacy groups, including Climate Action Campaign and Moms Clean Air Force, last month.
“You know you're in trouble when you can't describe reality without sounding crazy.”
That's how renowned author and activist Naomi Klein described society's relationship with rapidly—some say dangerously—evolving artificial intelligence technology during a Tuesday livestreamed panel discussion with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) hosted by the Sanders Institute.
Khanna and Klein are both fellows at the institute, cofounded by Sanders' (I-Vt.) wife and son, Jane O'Meara Sanders and David Driscoll. The Sanders Institute over recent years has convened an array of conferences and events focused on bringing together the best minds, top experts, and policy advocates on a host of issues.
“This AI and robotics revolution is the most sweeping technological change that the world has ever seen,” said Sanders. “People talk about the changes that the Industrial Revolution brought, which were profound. This is going to move a lot faster, with a lot more impact.”
“This revolution is being pushed by the wealthiest people in the world,” Sanders continued. “We’re talking about Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and other multi-multi-billionaires who are spending hundreds and hundreds if not trillions of dollars combined trying to do the research and the implementation for these technologies.”
Turning to Khanna and Klein, the senator asked: “What are the motives of these guys? Do the American people think that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are sitting up nights saying, ‘Wow, we got this technology, we're going to improve life for working people?’”
Klein contended that “their motives are exactly the opposite, and they're very blunt about this, that they are in a race to reach something that they call AGI—artificial general intelligence—or even something beyond that, superintelligence.”
While agreeing with Sanders that AI will prove as transformative as the Industrial Revolution, Klein underscored one big difference between the two.
“Unlike the Industrial Revolution, which created huge numbers of jobs, the goal of this revolution is to eliminate jobs,” the Shock Doctrine author explained. “They've been absolutely transparent about what they want to achieve, which is a jobs apocalypse. They want to be free from their workers."
"They really don't like it when their workers organize and push back, whether in unions or outside of unions," Klein added. "And I think that's part of the appeal of AI for these guys, is the idea that they could become trillionaires with virtually no employees.”
Khanna, a potential 2028 presidential candidate who authored the book Progressive Capitalism: How to Make Tech Work for All of Us, has been a leading voice in the US House of Representatives on the issue of AI. The congressman pointed out that tech titans are “using technology to eliminate workers and maximize their profits, and if you look at the Industrial Revolution, for 60 years, worker wages fell… even as Britain became wealthy."
"And so the question, in my view, for AI is, are we going to let a few billionaires, trillionaires, call the shots, or are we going to make sure that the technology is actually used in any way to enhance workers, to enhance total productivity?” he asked.
Sanders noted that Bezos, Amazon's founder, "wants to raise $100 billion to do what? To automate factories in America and around the world."
"You know what that means? It means there will no longer be manufacturing jobs in the United States or in warehouses," the senator added. "He wants to get rid of the 600,000 Amazon workers and replace them with robots. Elon Musk is converting Tesla partially to a robotics company. He wants to produce a million robots a year… What do you think a robot is there for? It's to replace a union worker.”
Klein said that “if we lived in a world that took care of people… [where] if a job was eliminated, people had a guaranteed income, they knew that they had healthcare, they knew that they weren't going to get evicted, we'd be having a different conversation.”
It may be more than just jobs that are eliminated if humanity does not proceed with utmost caution.
Sanders cited AI pioneers like Geoffrey Hinton who have warned that superintelligent artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity. According to Hinton and others, the senator explained, c“it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when [AI] will become smarter than human beings, and the fear of these guys, which used to be science fiction, is that AI will essentially establish its independence from human control in order to protect itself... raising the possibility of horrific things happening.”
Khanna agreed that such an outcome is “a real risk" as countries remove guardrails to breakneck AI development with the excuse that if they don't do it, their rivals will—the same dangerous thinking that fueled the Cold War nuclear arms race between the US and Soviet Union.
“I don't know whether it will happen or not, but why would we not take every precaution to make sure it doesn’t?” the congressman asked. “And this is what I don't understand, when people say, ‘Well, we want to compete with other nations and have a race to the bottom."
While the specter of an AI apocalypse is growing, it remains much more a reflection of human anxieties that any sort of impending threat. The same cannot be said for lethal autonomous weapon systems—better known as killer robots, which are defined as arms that can operate without any meaningful human control.
Activists like those at the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots have long sounded the alarm on the development of weapons that can operate without human control. However, Khanna said that human decision-making alone “is not enough.”
“If AI is doing all the data analysis and saying, OK, here's the target, and you just have a human being saying, OK, I'm the one who's going to give the order [to attack]… well, there's a human last-minute judgment,” he said. "What's happened is just a dependence on these machines."
As an example, Khanna pointed to what he said was the US military's use of AI that “gave the target of the school” in southern Iran where 168 children and staff were massacred in a February 28 cruise missile strike.
Sanders raised the possibility that a future in which robots largely replace humans on the battlefield “makes it easier” for countries with such technology to wage war.
However, Khanna countered that such conflicts are “deeply asymmetrical," meaning that they're only "easier" for the more technologically advanced side.
“The United States can have drones and technology, and Israel can do that,” the congressman said. “But the people who were killed in what I call the genocide in Gaza, 70,000 people, they don't have that technology. The starving people in Cuba, because of our fuel blockade, don't have that technology. The people in Iran who were killed don't have that technology."
"So you have one side of political leadership in our country that doesn't have to worry as much about deaths for our people," he contended. "But then there’s no… moral deliberation about the dignity and worth of people who were killed.”
While such life-and-death matters are far removed from the reality of most Americans’ lives, the panelists gave examples of how AI is impacting everyday citizens and their privacy.
“We heard reports from a lot of people on the ground who were standing up to ICE,” Klein said, referring to the nationwide protests and individual acts of resistance against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Trump administration’s overall anti-immigrant blitz.
“They were having these very creepy experiences where ICE knew their names before they had said anything. They knew where they lived before they said anything," she added. "Scanning a face, scanning a license plate.”
Not everyone attends protests. But nearly everyone uses the internet and its accoutrements; most notably, social media. To that end, Khanna said that Big Tech isn’t just “taking our data, they’re trying to figure out what we think.”
“We've had no pushback to these companies,” he continued. “They have a profit motive to do this. They have a profit motive to get us as addictive to screen time as possible."
"They’re targeting young people… especially young girls that have had eating disorders... and suicidal thoughts because of the junk they've been fed," Khanna noted, calling the situation “a dereliction of Congress.”
“We have not passed any privacy legislation or restrictions really on social media companies as they've had total carte blanche to do what they want,” he said.
Sanders said that “to my mind, it is very clear why Congress is not dealing with this issue, and that is the power and the wealth of people who do not want us to deal with it.”
“To the best of my understanding, as of now, just for the 2026 elections, AI has already put $400 million into elections, and we've go… five to six more months to go,” he explained. “So let's assume that any candidate who gets up there and says, ‘You know, I have some real concerns about AI, let's slow it down, let's make it work for people rather than Elon Musk,’ that candidate will have billions of dollars thrown at him or her, which speaks to a corrupt campaign finance [system].”
Klein has similarly sounded the alarm about far-right tech oligarchs, including in a "must-read" essay with Astra Taylor about the fight against "end times fascism" published by The Guardian last year. The pair plans to release a related book in September.
“If we look at these Silicon Valley billionaires who lined up behind [President Donald] Trump during the election campaign… if you listen to what they have been saying about why they flipped, a lot of it was because there were some gentle regulations on crypto and AI during the Biden administration, including things like trying to figure out how to prevent AI from killing us all, and keeping it away from nuclear weapons," Klein said during Tuesday's panel. "Really sort of sensible policy… Apparently this was too much.”
While Congress fails to act, the people are stepping up.
“What we are seeing all over this country, from conservative areas, in progressive areas, [is] people saying, hey, thank you very much, we prefer not to have a data center in our community,” said Sanders—who recently introduced the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)—pointing to one example of people-powered victories.
“So this is really an unprecedented grassroots revolt, not only against the data centers, but against this whole idea... of very, very wealthy people operating in a secretive mode, pushing through what they want against the needs of ordinary people,” he added.
Klein said that “we need to have a national and international conversation, because these are global technologies, about how we can use these very powerful tools to make our lives better, to enhance life, to have a human-first AI policy.”
“And that means that we look at it holistically,” she continued. “We figure out how we do it in the least resource-intensive way to have the best results. And then it isn't about turning a bunch of guys into trillionaires.”
“It's about what kind of society we want to live in, how we want to treat each other, how we want to protect the natural world,” Klein added. “I think we should be having town hall conversations about it, and we might find out that we have more in common with our neighbors than we thought."
The Democratic leaders of the congressional Monopoly-Busters Caucus said Wednesday that a recently floated megamerger of two of the largest airlines in the US—United and American—would be so awful for consumers that it shouldn't even be considered, let alone approved by federal regulators.
"The rumored scheme to merge United and American should never see the light of day," said Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.), Pat Ryan (D-NY), and Angie Craig (D-Minn.). "This disaster of a merger would be illegal, consolidating more than a third of the US airline market, eliminating direct competitors on hundreds of routes across the country, and creating a near-monopoly on flights in many cities."
The House Democrats went on to say that if a United-American merger is formally proposed and approved by President Donald Trump's regulators, a future Democratic administration could break up the resulting airline behemoth.
"In a time when too many Americans just struggle to even go on vacation, much less afford their housing, childcare, and healthcare, these airline executives should not mistake the corruption of this administration as a green light to break the law," the lawmakers said. "They should also remember that there is no statute of limitations on breaking up bad deals."
"In case it is not crystal clear," they added, "that is absolutely a threat to break up this merger should it ever happen."
The lawmakers' statement came a day after Bloomberg reported that United Airlines (UA) CEO Scott Kirby floated the idea of merging his company with American Airlines (AA) "directly" to Trump during a meeting in late February. Kirby also pitched the merger idea to other "senior government officials," the outlet noted, without providing names.
"A combination would create the largest airline on the planet," Bloomberg observed. "As a result, any merger between the two aviation giants would pose serious antitrust concerns and likely face significant backlash from consumers, politicians and rival US airlines."
"That the United CEO raised the idea of a merger with American directly with Donald Trump suggests he thinks he might obtain direct approval from the president for a merger that would otherwise never be permitted.”
Contrary to claims of a "surging MAGA antitrust movement" in the early days of Trump's second White House term, the president's administration has proven friendly to corporate merger efforts, from Paramount-Skydance to UnitedHealth-Amedisys and more. Reuters reported Wednesday that "investment banking fees—earned from advising on mergers and acquisitions and underwriting deals—surged an average of 27% across six major US banks in the first quarter, with record dealmaking a key profit driver."
William McGee, senior fellow for aviation and travel at the American Economic Liberties Project, said Wednesday that "thanks to the federal preemption clause in the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act, states have virtually no airline oversight."
"So effectively the only sheriffs overseeing airlines are [the Department of Transportation] and [Department of Justice]," McGee observed. "Under Trump they've been derelict in policing competition."
"To be clear: A UA-AA merger is absurd," McGee added. "A monolith mega-mega-carrier operating 4 of every 10 domestic flights is so harmful that anyone favoring it doesn't understand airlines. Or is a regulator eager to please a president who 'loves to see big deals.'"
Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said in a statement Tuesday that "it would be easy to dismiss the prospect of such a merger passing antitrust scrutiny—except that the Trump Department of Justice seems content to bless dangerously high levels of corporate concentration, so long as administration cronies, allies, or flatterers are in charge of corporate goliath."
"That the United CEO raised the idea of a merger with American directly with Donald Trump," Weissman added, "suggests he thinks he might obtain direct approval from the president for a merger that would otherwise never be permitted.”
As Republican policies, union-busting corporations, and the imminent threat of artificial intelligence put unprecedented pressure on the US workforce, Sen. Bernie Sanders headlined Sunday's launch of a movement "to strengthen the labor movement and expand worker power across the country."
Sanders (I-Vt.) spoke at the “Union Now: Building the Labor Movement” rally at Terminal 5 in Hell's Kitchen in Midtown Manhattan alongside New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Association of Flight Attendants-CWA international president Sara Nelson, and other labor and social movement leaders.
“Unless we fundamentally transform our economic and political systems, the worst is yet to come,” Sanders warned. “If the middle class of this country is going to survive, we must understand that status quo politics and status quo economics is no longer good enough."
LIVE Bernie Sanders Zohran Mamdani UNION NOW Rally in NYC https://t.co/uC6atxCK7N
— Status Coup News (@StatusCoup) April 12, 2026
“It’s absolutely important that all of us here and every American understand that in the ruling class of this country today, there is an extraordinary level of arrogance and cruelty,” the senator said.
"The truth is that the 1% the people on top, people running this country have never, ever had it so good,” Sanders told the crowd. “But the sad reality is that for these people, all that they have is not good enough. They want more and more and more, and they don’t care who they step on to get what they want."
“These guys are extremely, extremely greedy people, and they could care less in terms of what happens to our children, what happens to our parents and our grandparents, and what happens to our environment today," the senator argued.
“One of the goals of the oligarchs and the media that they own is to make ordinary people feel that there is nothing that they can do to shape the future,” he added. “And what we are here today to say to [Elon] Musk and his friends: Go to hell.”
Mamdani, who marked 100 days in office, said: "When we talk about the importance of taking on the crisis of income inequality, we know that the most effective tool to do so is increasing union density. Organizing drives and strikes can, frankly, be lonely work. So Union Now is going to support workers and provide them with more resources, and my administration will stand right alongside them. This moment demands nothing less."
“AI and robots are coming for human jobs," the mayor warned. "Worker protections are being eroded. There are companies that think that exploitation is a viable business model. They are wrong.”
Nelson asserted that “growing union membership and bargaining power is crucial for workers' rights and economic justice.”
“Too often, the boss has all the power to starve workers during a fight," she said. "Union Now will work with unions directly to ensure workers have the means to win."
Brittany Norris, a Delta AFA Organizing Committee member and flight attendant, told the crowd that "when it comes to striking, when it comes to public actions, a lot of those things cost money and it’s a lot of time, dedication, and efforts coming from the workers."
“We continuously hear about the profits... that our industry is making, but then we’re begging for a raise that comes up close to what the cost of living increase is every year,” she added.
Sunday's Union Now launch comes amid Sanders' ongoing "Fighting Oligarchy" tour, which has drawn large crowds across the country, including in so-called "red" states. The rally also follows last year's "Workers Over Billionaires" Labor Day rallies and marches in over 1,000 locations.
The Union Now launch also coincides with growing wealth inequality not only in the United States but around a world in which the richest 10% of the global population own three-quarters of planetary wealth and account for nearly half of all consumer spending.
“If [President Donald] Trump and his fellow oligarchs get their way, we will be living in a society where fewer and fewer people have more and more wealth and more and more power, where democracy will be undermined, where workers will be thrown out on the street with no recourse," Sanders said Sunday. “That is not the America we want for ourselves or for our kids."
“The good news is," he added, "if we stand together and we not let Trump and his friends divide us up, when we stand together and fight for a government that works for all of us, there is nothing that we cannot accomplish."
Is Cuba next in line for a US attack?
US President Donald Trump has repeatedly said it could be, and USA Today on Wednesday cited "sources familiar" with the matter who said that the Pentagon is "quietly ramping up" preparations to wage war on the socialist nation if Trump gives the order.
On Monday, Trump flippantly declared that “we may stop by Cuba after we’re finished with this," referring to the illegal US-Israeli war of choice on Iran that's left thousands of Iranians dead or wounded, including hundreds of children.
Trump has also said that he believes he’ll “be having the honor of taking Cuba,” language echoing the 19th century US imperialists who conquered the island along with Puerto Rico and the Philippines from Spain in another war waged on dubious pretense.
"Whether I free it, take it—I think I can do anything I want," Trump said of the island and its 11 million inhabitants.
The USA Today report—authored by Kim Hjelmgaard, Rick Jervis, and Francesca Chambers—sparked widespread alarm among advocates for peace.
"This is not a drill. Trump is preparing to take the US into another illegal war against Cuba to appease the Miami mafia," Progressive International co-general coordinator David Adler said Wednesday on X. "We must stop him. It’s not too late."
Cubans—who have been subjected to generations of privation and hardship due largely to the internationally condemned US economic embargo of their island—have mostly shrugged off Trump's threats, with some observers noting that Cuba's socialist era has outlasted a dozen American presidents.
Responding to a question about a possible US attack on his country, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said Sunday on NBC News' "Meet the Press" that “if that happens, there will be fighting, and there will be a struggle, and we will defend ourselves, and if we need to die, we’ll die, because as our national anthem says, ‘Dying for the homeland is to live’.”
Numerous observers expressed shock, but not surprise, that Trump—the self-proclaimed "peace president" who has bombed 10 countries, more than any other US president—is setting his sights on Cuba, which American presidents since Thomas Jefferson have coveted.
Trump has been threatening Cuba since his first administration, when he systematically rolled back the Obama administration's diplomatic normalization with the island's socialist government. He also activated a provision of the Helms-Burton Act allowing lawsuits over property confiscated after the Cuban Revolution.
On the last day of his first term, Trump re-designated Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism, a move critics slammed as absurd given that Cuba has never carried out any acts of terrorism—unlike the United States and the militant Cuban exiles it harbors, who have a decadeslong record of terrorist bombings and other attacks, as well as numerous failed or aborted attempts to assassinate former revolutionary leader Fidel Castro.
Since returning to office, Trump has ratcheted up military threats and economic pressure on Cuba, which was already reeling from decades of US sanctions and the inefficiencies of centralized state control. Trump tightened the embargo by severely restricting fuel imports, exacerbating an energy emergency characterized by blackouts and deadly suffering among the most vulnerable Cubans, including sick people and children.
Last month, US Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) introduced a war powers resolution aimed at preventing Trump from attacking Cuba without congressional authorization as required by law. Numerous war powers resolutions related to Iran, Venezuela, and Trump's extralegal high-seas boat bombings have failed to pass.
"Today's charges reflect an important milestone in our efforts to seek accountability for the harms inflicted on our community," said Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty.
Prosecutors in Minnesota charged a federal immigration enforcement agent with assault on Thursday for pulling a gun on two local residents during a February traffic dispute.
The Hennepin County prosecutor's office charged US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr., a resident of Maryland, with two counts of felony assault for the incident that took place along Highway 62 on February 5.
During a press conference, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty alleged that Morgan was driving a rented, unmarked Ford Expedition illegally along the shoulder of Highway 62.
The alleged victims, objecting to Morgan illegally driving on the highway shoulder, swerved in front of him briefly to block him, then pulled back into the regular lane.
Morgan then allegedly sped up his vehicle, pulled up alongside the victims' car, and drew his gun on them.
Moriarty said that Morgan's alleged actions were unjustified and outside the course of his duties, which would be enough for the state to avoid violating the US Constitution's Supremacy Clause that prevents state governments from infringing upon the federal government's sovereignty.
"Our opinion is that illegally driving on a shoulder, pulling up to a car and pointing a gun at the heads of two community members who are not doing anything at the time, is well beyond the scope of their authority as federal agents," said Moriarty. "So they may say that, but we will litigate that in court. And there is no such thing as absolute immunity for federal agents who violate the law in the State of Minnesota or any other state."
Moriarty also brushed off concerns about the federal government retaliating against Minnesota for criminally charging ICE agents.
"Not a concern of ours," she said. "Our role, by the way, is to hold people accountable if they violate the laws of the state of Minnesota. And in this particular case, we feel strongly that this agent committed second-degree assault against both of these victims. We have charged the case and our intent is to hold them accountable."
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty: "Are we concerned as to whether there would be federal blowback? Not a concern of ours. Our role is to hold people accountable if they violate the laws of Minnesota. We feel strongly that this ICE agent committed 2nd degree assault." pic.twitter.com/G6aPyewU3q
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 16, 2026
The case against Morgan is the first state prosecution related to Operation Metro Surge, the federal immigration enforcement operation that targeted the Twin Cities earlier this year and generated unprecedented mass protests that included a one-day general strike.
Morgan's prosecution may also be a preview of future cases, as there have been calls for months to prosecute the federal immigration officers who fatally shot Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
While speaking with reporters, Moriarty emphasized that "today's charges reflect an important milestone in our efforts to seek accountability for the harms inflicted on our community during Operation Metro Surge," vowing "we will not rest until we get the answers we seek about federal agent conduct across Hennepin County, and accountability is delivered wherever appropriate."
"If Ireland is facilitating the monstrous ICE project, then we fear the government has lost its way. Rather than cower and capitulate, it must show courage, compassion, and principle," said the head of Amnesty International Ireland.
A pair of human rights groups on Thursday called for the Irish government to stop letting the administration of US President Donald Trump use Shannon Airport as a refueling stop for Immigration and Customs Enforcement's deportation flights.
In a joint letter to Ireland’s transport minister, Darragh O’Brien, and foreign affairs and trade minister, Helen McEntee, Amnesty International Ireland and Human Rights First urged the Irish government to stop cooperating with President Donald Trump's efforts to deport migrants to third countries.
Using data from its ICE Flight Monitor, Human Rights First determined that Shannon Airport has been used to refuel deportation planes during at least five of these removal operations, which involved what the groups described as "transfers of individuals to countries... they have no ties to and where they have faced arbitrary and prolonged detention and other abuse."
After one of the flights in May 2025, eight migrants from several countries, including Cuba, Mexico, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, and Sudan—some of whom had legally been resettled as refugees—were dropped in the East African nation of Djibouti. There, they were held in a shipping container at a US base for at least six weeks before being sent to war-torn South Sudan, where they were promptly detained by authorities. Six of them remain in detention today, with little ability to communicate with their lawyers.
Another group of five men from Cuba, Yemen, Vietnam, and Laos was taken to the southern African country of Eswatini in July. Four of them remain in state custody more than eight months later, despite the authorities giving no official reason for their ongoing detention.
Another flight stopped in Ireland on its way back from dumping eight Palestinian men, who were shackled for the entire journey, on the side of the road in the occupied West Bank. Some of the men had green cards in the United States, and several had wives and children from whom they had been forcibly separated, despite facing no accusations of having committed a crime. Two such flights have taken place.
In total, the groups found that at least 28 migrants had traveled through the Shannon Airport on their way to third countries.
About 300 migrants have been sent to third countries as part of the Trump administration's "mass deportation" campaign, according to a February report by Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The administration has spent more than $40 million, part of which has gone to countries willing to take in deportees, including Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda, El Salvador, Eswatini, and Palau, each of which has received multimillion-dollar lump sums.
Most infamously, the administration last year secretly sent more than 280 young men, most without criminal records, to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a megaprison in El Salvador, where they were subjected to torture and cut off from communication with their families and lawyers for more than four months before a judge ordered most of them released.Amnesty and Human Rights First have described this practice as a form of "enforced disappearance" under international law.
"To carry out its mass deportation campaign, the Trump administration is flouting international law and cutting deals with dictators. It is also endangering lives, through its opaque web of third country agreements to send people against their will to countries where they have no connection”, said Uzra Zeya, the CEO of Human Rights First.
“Beyond their cruelty, these agreements reflect a transactional foreign policy driven by xenophobia, and they undermine due process and human rights globally," she said. "Ireland should play no part in facilitating these unlawful removals, including to third countries notorious for rights abuses.”
Shannon Airport has become a target of protest over its use as a hub for American military planes, which many in Ireland see as an affront to the country's long history of military neutrality. It has previously come under scrutiny for helping transport detainees renditioned for torture by the CIA during the post-9/11 global War on Terror.
Last week, a man was arrested for allegedly breaking into the facility and damaging a US military plane that was en route to a bilateral military exercise in Poland, according to The New York Times. Though no motive has been made public, the incident evoked other acts of vandalism by anti-war activists opposed to the US military presence.
"People across Ireland and the world look on in horror as the Trump administration continues implementing its vile, racist, and xenophobic executive orders that dehumanize and criminalize people who are, or are perceived to be, migrants and refugees. The administration has brazenly violated the right to due process by unlawfully removing people and subjecting some to enforced disappearance,” said Stephen Bowen, the executive director of Amnesty International Ireland.
Following a request last month for it to stop US deportation flights from using Shannon to refuel, Ireland’s Department of Transport contended that under the 1944 Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation, US aircraft do not require permission to refuel at Shannon. Transport Minister O’Brien has said the US did not request authorization for the flights to land and that his department had no knowledge of them.
But Bowen says that even though states are not required to obtain permission to land, the convention still requires them to abide by international law, and that the Irish government ultimately has the power to decide how its sovereign airspace is used.
“The Department of Transport’s public responses are just not good enough,” he said. “There are depressing parallels with Ireland’s failure two decades ago to stop CIA-leased civil aircraft using Shannon as a stopover for rendition operations during the US ‘War on Terror’. Despite promises to ‘enforce the prohibition on the use of Irish airspace, airports, and related facilities for purposes not in line with the dictates of international law’, it appears that no concrete actions were ever taken.”
“The government’s timidity in its dealings with President Trump is already a cause for concern," Bowen added. "If Ireland is facilitating the monstrous ICE project, then we fear the government has lost its way. Rather than cower and capitulate, it must show courage, compassion, and principle."
The coalition organizer called on party leaders "to withdraw from negotiations and stand with us and the public lands, waters, and wildlife of the West to build momentum for a progressive permit reform effort."
Amid permitting reform negotiations and votes in the Republican-led Congress this week, dozens of organizations from the US West on Thursday urged Democratic leaders to reject "a reactive capitulation to energy and technology industry demands and the Trump administration's deliberately engineered regulatory chaos."
"There is simply no precedent for what this administration has wrought, and permitting reform proposals under consideration—which scapegoat environmental laws—will only deepen the harm," warned 73 community, conservation, faith, and Indigenous groups in a letter to the top Democrats in each chamber, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), as well as those on two relevant Senate panels.
In December, 11 Democrats came under fire for voting with nearly all Republicans in the US House of Representatives to advance the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (SPEED) Act. Led by retiring Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) and Committee on Natural Resources Chair Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), it would amend the crucial National Environmental Policy Act, a frequent target of climate polluters and their allies in Congress.
With the SPEED Act pending in the Senate—where the GOP generally needs some Democratic support to advance legislation, due to its narrow majority and the filibuster rule—House Committee on Energy and Commerce Chair Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) took to the chamber's floor on Wednesday to promote three other bills. The FENCES Act, FIRE Act, and RED Tape Act, he said, "are an essential part of the committee's broader efforts on permitting reform and align with White House permitting priorities."
The House passed the FENCES and RED Tape bills on Thursday. Golden and Democratic Reps. Jim Costa (Calif.), Henry Cuellar (Texas), Don Davis (NC), Adam Gray (Calif.), and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.) joined Republicans in backing the former. Those Democrats, plus Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (Texas), also voted with the GOP for the latter.
Meanwhile, in the upper chamber, Republicans on Thursday passed a House-approved resolution to reverse a 20-year moratorium on mining in the watershed of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Still, Senate Environment and Public Works Ranking Member Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) told Politico's E&E News earlier this week that "we're making steady progress" on permitting reform talks, "and it would not be unreasonable to have something to show our caucuses by the August recess."
The coalition of Western groups argued Thursday that "given Congress' ideological composition and alignment with the Trump administration's agenda, any permitting legislation that could conceivably emerge from this Congress and be signed into law by the president would unacceptably erode bedrock community and environmental safeguards, exclude the public from federal decision-making, and diminish the transparency and accountability now demanded of government agencies by federal law."
The groups pointed to various examples, including what critics called President Donald Trump's recent $1 billion "taxpayer-funded bribe" to get TotalEnergies to cancel its planned wind farms in favor of oil and gas projects, as well as his so-called God Squad's unprecedented exemption allowing fossil fuel operations in the Gulf of Mexico to ignore policies intended to protect endangered species. The letter also stresses that "Congress has not checked this abuse—it has enabled it."
"Rather than press forward with ill-fated legislation in this fraught moment, we therefore ask that you stand with us in defense of climate action and the public lands, waters, and wildlife, and communities of the West," the coalition wrote to Whitehouse, Schumer, Jeffries, and Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member Martin Heinrich (D-NM).
"It is this fight—in this moment—that can build shared trust and set the conditions for constructive legislation that strengthens and revitalizes the federal government's capacity to serve the public interest," the coalition continued. "This means, to us, the build-out, protection, and restoration of green infrastructure (built or natural) and the full integration of ecological and community considerations into climate and energy policy as a precondition of our ability to thrive in kinship with an abundant world."
The letter urging "no deal with [the] devil on permit reform" was authored by Western Environmental Law Center executive director Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, who stressed in a statement that "the first rule of negotiation is that it's impossible to reach workable solutions with bad-faith actors."
"Today's Republican Congress has shown unprecedented hostility to climate, environmental, and community protections," he said. "It is glaringly obvious that any changes to our bedrock environmental laws signed by President Trump would sacrifice far too much and compromise the imperative to foster a just and equitable transition to an economy powered by renewable energy."
Schlenker-Goodrich called on Heinrich and Whitehouse "to withdraw from negotiations and stand with us and the public lands, waters, and wildlife of the West to build momentum for a progressive permit reform effort with stronger bargaining power after the midterm elections" in November.
Other signatories include leaders at the Center for Biological Diversity, Climate Justice Alliance, Friends of the Shasta River, GreenLatinos of New Mexico, Orange County Coastkeeper, Oregon Wild, Sierra Club Montana Chapter, Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, Umpqua Watersheds, Western Watersheds Project, WildEarth Guardians, Wyoming Wilderness Association, and more.
"Deregulatory permitting reform right now only means the fossil fuel industry will be forever dominant in this nation, which is why they are the biggest cheerleader for making a deal now," said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. "Democrats must focus on fighting the lawless Trump administration and the fossil fuel industry, not cut deals with people that only seek to destroy clean energy and a livable future."