Brad Reed, Common Dreams

A Trump voter is in shock after the president’s ongoing effort to conduct the largest mass deportation campaign in U.S. history impacted him personally.

In an interview with CBS News published Thursday, Texas businessman John Gannon expressed regret for supporting President Donald Trump in the 2024 election after federal immigration officials last month detained his fiancé, a Venezuelan immigrant named Yasmin Suarez Reyes.

Gannon said that he expected that Trump’s mass deportation campaign would only go after criminals who are unlawfully in the U.S., but instead found “they are picking up law-abiding citizens” and “destroying families, jobs.”

Gannon, the owner of over 1,000 billboards in the US and of a hotel and restaurant in Mexico, explained that Suarez Reyes was detained in July by multiple US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents after passing through security at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston.

According to Gannon, the ICE officers “swarmed” Suarez Reyes and “wrestled her off into a car” without providing an explanation.

“This is like the Gestapo,” Gannon said.

Anne Kennedy, an attorney representing Suarez Reyes, told CBS that her client entered the US legally and had a pending asylum case and had been able to get a work permit and a Texas driver’s license before she was detained. Kennedy also noted that Suarez Reyes had no criminal record.

“For almost two weeks now, she has been in a physical jail cell,” said Kennedy, “when she has done nothing more than follow the laws of the United States and do what our immigration laws allow her to do.”

When asked by CBS what message he had for Trump, Gannon encouraged the president to “go after the criminals” but “leave the mom and pops and the kids alone.”

“Man, he’s destroying families,” Gannon added.

Some critics expressed little empathy for Gannon’s situation, however, given Trump’s decades of racist attacks on immigrants.

“You voted for Trump to do this to other people,” commented journalist Molly Knight. “You’re mad because he’s not doing this to ‘the right people,’ as defined by you.”

Election forecaster Rachel Bitecofer was similarly unsympathetic, and sarcastically summed up Gannon’s position as, “I only wanted other people’s relatives deported!”

Gun safety activist Shannon Watts questioned why Gannon needed to be personally impacted by Trump’s policies to turn against them.

“The most horrible things shouldn’t have to happen to you in order to oppose them,” Watts wrote.

Even as President Donald Trump continues dismissing Americans’ concerns about affordability heading into the 2026 midterm elections, a study released on Monday reveals that US parents are about to pay a hefty premium to ensure their children are prepared for school this fall.

A joint analysis from Groundwork Collaborative and The Century Foundation finds that a typical basket of school supplies costs nearly 8% more than it did last year, with typical school lunch items costing 11% more.

Lunch boxes have posted the largest yearly price increase, as the analysis estimates they will cost nearly 27% more this year than in 2025. Other items whose prices have soared include one-subject notebooks (23% yearly increase), index cards (22%), and notebook paper (20%).

Trump’s illegal war with Iran, which has caused fuel prices including diesel to surge higher, has played a large role in increasing prices, as have his tariffs on foreign imports, the report notes.

The increase in diesel has been particularly troublesome for the price of food, the analysis points out, as the fuel is used both by farmers to power their agricultural equipment and by delivery trucks that ship food to grocery stores.

When it comes to the tariffs, the report points to Newell Brands—the company that makes Sharpies, Paper Mate, Elmer’s glue, and other school supply staples—which has been hit with a $174 million tax bill thanks to Trump’s policies and has consistently raised prices over the last year.

The report also points to changes made to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) made in Republicans’ 2025 budget law that will make it harder for low-income kids to qualify for food assistance this school year.

Lindsay Owens, president of Groundwork Collaborative, said Trump’s policies are forcing parents “to worry about whether they can afford to buy what their students need to be successful in the classroom.”

“If the president continues to treat our economy like a schoolyard game, our students and their families will pay the price,” said Owens. “When report cards come this year, Americans will give Trump an F.”

Janelle Jones, senior fellow at The Century Foundation, noted that school supplies aren’t luxuries for families, but rather “the baseline for a kid to show up ready to learn.”

“When notebooks and paper are up over 20%,” Jones emphasized, “we’re not just squeezing family budgets, we’re setting students up to fall behind. We know where this leads: lower test scores, more kids repeating grades, and worse outcomes well into adulthood.”

Attorneys representing The New York Times have revealed that the Trump administration’s subpoenas of the newspaper’s journalists are far more aggressive than what had been previously reported.

In a letter sent to US District Judge Arun Subramanian on Saturday and unsealed by the court on Monday, attorneys David O’Neil, Douglas Zolkind, and Julie Edelstein said that the US Department of Justice was engaged in an “alarming pattern of conduct” beyond its recently revealed efforts to compel Times reporters to testify before a grand jury for a probe related to unspecified national security leaks.

The attorneys said the administration had gone so far as to subpoena phone companies for subscriber information and toll records for phone numbers used by one reporter’s mother and by two reporters’ spouses, among others.

They also revealed that two administration subpoenas seek records going back as far as January 1 this year, “long before the events that are purportedly the basis for the department’s investigation,” suggesting that “the department is using this investigation... to forage for information about the journalists’ source relationships more broadly.”

The subpoenas of the Times journalists, issued earlier this month, came days after the paper published a story that detailed security concerns about the luxury jet the Qatari government gave to President Donald Trump.

The issued subpoenas did not specifically name the Times’ reporting on the Qatari jet as the reason for the grand jury probe, although they were given to all four journalists—Tyler Pager, Julian Barnes, Eric Schmitt, and Eric Lipton—who reported the story.

It is highly uncommon for government investigators to subpoena journalists when they are probing national security leaks, as such actions are generally seen as having a chilling effect on reporters’ ability to gather information.

Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, described news of the department seeking phone records of reporters’ spouses and a parent as “an extraordinary escalation in the Trump administration’s campaign to intimidate the press.”

“The Justice Department didn’t stop at journalists—it went after their family members, too,” Fallow noted. “That sends an unmistakably chilling message to anyone thinking about reporting on this administration. Every American who values a free and independent press should see this for what it is: an abuse of power designed to silence scrutiny.”

Seth Stern, chief of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, was even more scathing in his denunciation of the administration’s actions.

“Even the Mafia says families are off limits,” said Stern. “It’s gross that the administration—in its never-ending effort to harass and intimidate reporters who reveal its incompetence—is going after the communications of journalists’ relatives.”

President Donald Trump’s decision to restart his illegal war with Iran has sent the price of oil back up, leading to a corresponding rise in the prices of gasoline and diesel fuel.

Data published by AAA on Thursday showed that the average price of diesel in the US is once again over $5 per gallon, which is 33% higher than the average price of diesel before Trump unlawfully attacked Iran without congressional authorization in February.

Oil industry analyst Patrick De Haan wrote in a Thursday social media post that diesel fuel powers “the trucks that move nearly everything you buy—groceries, goods, supplies,” meaning the current spike will lead to “higher prices down the line” for other key goods.

According to a Thursday report in The Wall Street Journal, the rise in diesel prices is unlikely to be short-lived given that there are now multiple factors pushing costs higher.

In addition to the resumption of the Iran war, the Journal writes, Russia has now banned diesel exports after its refineries came under attack by Ukraine. And in the US, domestic stockpiles of the fuel have now fallen to their lowest levels in 20 years.

Given all these factors, analysts told the Journal that diesel prices “could soon climb an additional 20 to 25 cents a gallon.”

An analysis published on Thursday by CNN Business senior reporter David Goldman pointed to another factor pushing diesel prices higher: Global refining capacities have taken a significant hit since the start of the Iran war.

Goldman noted that Iran has “damaged or destroyed 30 Middle Eastern refineries” since the start of the conflict, causing global refinery output to fall by “3 million barrels at the peak of the Strait of Hormuz disruption, and 2.1 million barrels of refining capacity remain offline.”

Energy analyst John Kemp said on Thursday that the diesel supply crunch will likely spill over to the price of regular gasoline in the coming weeks.

“US gasoline inventories have become critically low,” Kemp explained in a social media post, “as domestic refiners prioritize production of jet fuel and diesel to replace global supplies hit by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and Ukraine’s escalating attacks on Russia’s refineries.”

Kemp added that the US gasoline stocks “have depleted in 13 of the last 16 weeks by a total of 43 million barrels” since the start of the war, making it “by far the largest [depletion] on record for the time of year, and three times faster than average over the last decade.”

In an interview with Bloomberg published on Wednesday, International Energy Agency Executive Director Fatih Birol warned that renewed fighting between the US and Iran was again threatening to create a global fuel supply crisis that could come in “not months” but “weeks.”

“If the Strait of Hormuz remains closed,” Birol said, “we may again have some difficulty for global economies, including those in the region and developing nations and Asia.”

The Trump administration is coming under fire for its response to the outbreak of cyclosporiasis, a foodborne illness that causes explosive diarrhea and has so far been documented in more than two dozen states.

Public health officials still have not identified the source of the outbreak, which typically spreads via contaminated produce.

In an interview with Axios published Saturday, David Freedman, professor emeritus of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, suggested that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has not been on top of tracking the outbreak the same way it has been in the past.

“Right now it’s individual state health departments that are having to speak up,” remarked Freedman, “because the CDC is really not following it on a day-to-day basis.”

Omer Awan, vice chair and associate program director for the diagnostic radiology residency at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, told PBS in an interview published Monday that infections will likely only grow if the government doesn’t track down the source of the outbreak quickly.

“Because we haven’t pinned it down, that means that these cases are likely to disseminate,” said Awan. “People are still eating the contaminated food that’s leading to so many cases.”

Awan added that mass firings at the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), under the leadership of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., were hindering CDC’s ability to track the disease.

“The HHS and the federal government laid off a lot of CDC employees,” said Awan. “Many of them were the very employees that would track these particular outbreaks. And the other is that, from July of 2025 last year, the CDC has no longer required reporting cyclosporiasis. It’s become optional to report this to the CDC’s Foodborne Disease Active Surveillance Network.”

Brad Woodhouse, president of Protect Our Care, pointed to the CDC decision to stop monitoring the cyclospora parasite as an example of the Trump administration putting Americans “in another shitty situation after laying waste to our public health infrastructure and gutting emergency preparedness.”

“Because RFK Jr.'s CDC turned a blind eye to dangerous foodborne pathogens,” Woodhouse added, “this outbreak spread quickly and states are now scrambling to do their own detective work on what’s causing it. The catastrophic cuts Trump and RFK Jr. made to disease surveillance and research keep coming back to haunt us, yet they want to cut even deeper to make up for their tax breaks for billionaires.”

The Washington Post on Tuesday reported that both federal and state officials have launched an investigation into whether fast food chain Taco Bell “played a role” in the cyclosporiasis outbreak.

According to the Post’s sources, some people who got sick from the disease said they had eaten at Taco Bell shortly becoming symptomatic, although others who were infected by the parasite said they had not eaten at the fast food chain before growing ill.

“Public health officials have said this season’s unusually high number of illnesses, now reported in more than 30 states,” reported the Post, “means more information and more patients to help identify shared foods, shopping habits and restaurant visits among those sickened to help determine the source.”

Hours after Sen. Lindsey Graham unexpectedly died on Saturday, many of his Democratic colleagues in the US Senate posted statements on their social media pages paying tribute to the South Carolina Republican.

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said that he would most remember Graham (R-SC) for his “sense of humor and how he deployed it to move his policy positions forward.”

“Though we did not often agree,” Schiff added, “Senator Graham was never disagreeable.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) similarly said of Graham that “even though we disagreed on much, he was always willing to negotiate, with humor and wit,” adding “my heart goes out to his loved ones.”

Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) said he was “saddened” to hear the news of Graham’s death, which he said came “as a real shock.”

“I’m grateful I had the chance to work with Lindsey,” said Kim, “including several international trips working on foreign policy.”

However, many critics argued that these tributes to Graham overlooked his destructive legacy in public office, including his decades of war mongering and his slavish devotion to the authoritarian President Donald Trump.

“I don’t give a f--- that Graham used to be friends with Democratic senators,” wrote Thomas Lecaque, associate professor of history at Grand View University. “He was a bloodthirsty bastard who cheered the killing of Muslims and sold his soul to the fascists to be able to push it more effectively. I don’t care about any other part of him: his choices caused mass death. That’s it.”

Princeton historian Kevin Kruse, responding directly to Schiff’s post, reminded him of Graham’s behavior during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings when he “threw an angry tantrum in defense of a SCOTUS nominee credibly accused of rape.”

“Did you all have a good collegial chuckle over that?” Kruse asked.

Brandon Friedman, co-founder of the Rakkasan Tea Company and a veteran of the Iraq War, also responded directly to Schiff.

“What I’ll remember most about Senator Graham,” Friedman wrote, “is how he sent my friends to die in an unnecessary war in Iraq.”

Jen Rubin, editor-in-chief of The Contrarian and former columnist for The Washington Post, described the Democrats’ tributes to Graham as “nauseating” and “everything that is wrong” with the US Senate.

Nicholas Grossman, professor of international relations at the University of Illinois, said the Democrats’ statements were just one more signal of weakness from the party.

“The Democratic Party’s approval rating is in the toilet,” Grossman wrote, “and the main reason is voters see Dem leaders and prominent members acting like things are basically okay instead of fighting like there’s an emergency. Slot ‘my friend Lindsey Graham, so funny, how great to work with him’ comments into that.”

Cartoonish Eli Valley was apoplectic about Democrats’ fawning hagiography of their late Republican colleague.

“That Democrats see mass-murdering fascists dismantling the country as nothing more than ‘colleagues they dislike’ is why we’ve been in a non-stop plummet,” Valley wrote. “Incredible this is still debatable, by people who ostensibly oppose fascism, ten years into this?!?”

Political consultant Jamison Foser wrote a parody of the Democrats’ statements that imagined them paying tribute to none other than Satan.

“Deeply saddened to learn of the loss of my dear friend Satan, the Prince of Lies,” wrote Foser. “Though we often disagreed about matters such as the appropriate role of torture in the afterlife, I will most remember how his quick wit and affable nature made our weekly golf outings a ritual. He will be missed.”

Some critics of the Trump administration are reacting with horror to revelations that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been serving as the de facto ruler of Venezuela.

According to a Saturday report in The New York Times, Rubio for the last several months has been acting informally as the “viceroy” of Venezuela ever since its recognized president, Nicolás Maduro, was abducted by the American military in January and brought to the US to face charges related to “narco-terrorism.”

The Times’ sources revealed that Rubio “effectively controls Venezuela’s finances, the distribution of its natural resources, and its government” and “is deeply involved in the country’s day-to-day operations,” while maintaining regular contact with acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez.

Under current arrangements, the US Treasury Department takes in revenue from Venezuela’s exports, including its petroleum, and then disperses the money back to the country through its private banks with strict conditions set by Rubio over what it can be spent on.

In explaining the system, the Times likened it to “parents handing out allowances to children,” adding that it gives Rubio “immense leverage over... Rodríguez, who depends on the money to pay workers and prop up the national currency.”

Elizabeth Saunders, professor of political science at Columbia University, described Rubio’s power over Venezuela as “insane,” as well as “derelict, unconscionable, and impeachable.”

“The secretary of state’s time is scarce, valuable, and not [outsourceable],” Saunders emphasized.

Orlando J. Pérez, professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas at Dallas, said the Times report made a mockery of Rubio’s professed claims to want to bring democracy back to Venezuela.

“It appears Rubio has transformed from democracy promotion warrior,” Pérez commented, “to transactional realpolitik operative!”

Kenneth Roth, former executive director at Human Rights Watch, wrote that US control over Venezuela appeared similar to the kind of imperial power wielded by European nations in the 19th Century.

“Trump has turned Venezuela into an effective US colony,” said Roth, “with Marco Rubio as the viceroy and Washington controlling the country’s oil revenue and dictating major foreign and domestic policies. Democracy has been relegated to the distant future.”

Bradley Simpson, historian at the University of Connecticut, also saw the current US arrangement with Venezuela as a return to overt imperialism.

“We are literally back in the Dollar Diplomacy days of the 1910s,” Simpson wrote, “when the United States invaded countries and took over their financial systems and ran them as effective colonies. Flagrantly illegal, enormously corrupt. Where is the organization of American states or UN in denouncing this?”

The controversy surrounding the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by federal immigration enforcement officials is growing amid new reports that the Trump administration is trying to deport three witnesses to the fatal shooting.

Juan Proaño, CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said in a Thursday interview with The New Republic that the witnesses, all undocumented immigrants who were detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials after the shooting, are “being pressured to sign self-deportation orders.”

“They’re currently in detention,” said Proaño, who is serving as a representative for Salgado Araujo’s family. “These men hold the key to what actually happened.”

Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican national who ran a small construction business and had been living in the US for more than three decades, was pulled over by ICE officers in unmarked vehicles on Tuesday morning.

ICE officers claimed that Salgado Araujo, who was driving to work along with three coworkers, tried to evade arrest by ramming his car into them.

Purportedly fearing for his life, one ICE agent opened fire on Salgado Araujo and killed him, the officers said.

However, The Washington Post reported on Friday that all three men who were in the car with Salgado Araujo are strongly disputing the ICE agents’ account of the deadly incident.

In fact, all three witnesses said that the ICE officer involved in the shooting opened fire immediately after exiting his vehicle, and that Salgado Araujo did not try to drive into him.

Detainee Jose Trinidad Rojas, 51, in a handwritten statement obtained by the Post through attorney Hugo Balderas-Ibarra, bluntly contradicted the ICE officers’ claims.

“That is a lie,” Trinidad Rojas wrote. “It is impossible for them to say that they were going to get run over … there were no officers in front of or behind the vehicle. They were on the sides.”

Balderas-Ibarra told the Post that he interviewed the other two men in the car, who both gave the same account.

“All of them reiterated that there were never any ICE agents in front of the van,” Balderas-Ibarra said. “They came in and started shooting from the sides.”

David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said in a Friday social media post that the Post’s reporting seems to show “ICE appears to have lied yet again about killing someone.”

“Unbelievable,” he added, “but actually totally believable given that they lie about events fully captured on video.”

In a separate post, Bier examined a video of the shooting scene and noted that there appeared to be no damage to the front of Salgado Araujo’s van, even as ICE claimed Salgado Araujo had tried to use it as a weapon against them.

“These people are not credible,” Bier remarked.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, pointed out that all three witnesses to the shooting were telling the same stories even though they were being detained separately, which he said bolsters their credibility.

“When you add the videos showing a lack of evidence of damage to the front despite ICE’s ramming claim,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick added, “ICE’s story is falling apart.”

President Donald Trump’s illegal war with Iran is sending oil prices surging — again.

While attending the 36th NATO Summit of Heads of State and Government in Türikye on Wednesday, Trump said that the ceasefire agreement he struck last month with Iran is “over,” while adding, “I don’t want to deal with them,” in reference to the Iranians.

Shortly after the president’s remarks, Brent and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil prices each jumped by more than 4% during Wednesday trading, marking the end of a steady decline in prices that occurred in the weeks since the ceasefire deal was first announced.

Later in the day, Trump went on a lengthy rant about Democrats criticizing his failed campaign promise to bring down the price of groceries starting on his very first day in office, and he falsely claimed that the price of oil “is coming down very big.”

At this point, a reporter interjected and said that oil prices on Wednesday were surging upward.

“If we hit Iran, oil goes up a little bit,” Trump replied. “That’s all right.”

Although the price of gasoline has been following the price of oil downward, any increase in petroleum prices will almost certainly send it back upward.

In a social media post, petroleum industry analyst Patrick De Haan said the renewed fighting between the US and Iran, combined with Russia banning exports of diesel fuel, would likely cause more pain at the gas pump in the near future.

“With news of Russia suspending diesel exports, markets have accelerated their climb,” De Haan explained. “In addition, the current national average for diesel of $4.75 per gallon could head back to $5 per gallon in the next week or two, while the national average gas price heads to $4 per gallon.”

De Haan added that spot gasoline prices on Wednesday were up by between $0.14 and $0.20, projecting that “today’s jumps could start being passed along tomorrow and in the days ahead.”

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Friday delivered a speech commemorating the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America that drew a sharp contrast with President Donald Trump’s vision for the country.

Speaking from New York City Hall, Mamdani recounted how his city had long served as a refuge for people from across the globe who came seeking a new life an opportunity.

It was these immigrants who ultimately shaped New York and made it into what it is today, said Mamdani—who is an immigrant and among the rising number of democratic socialists who have recently won at the ballot box.

The mayor then moved to the present day, where he took aim at the anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies emanating from Trump and his MAGA movement.

“The story of America has been written by those who have so often been told by those with power and influence and wealth that they were anything but exceptional,” Mamdani said. “For generation after generation, we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores, it has not sent its best.”

Mamdani took aim at the ideology espoused by many rich and powerful people who see America as “an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal.”

“America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes,” the mayor continued. “America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit.”

“How small they are,” Mamdani remarked. “How weak, how unoriginal. At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power for themselves by turning us against one another.”

The mayor then pivoted to a more hopeful tone by arguing that “time and again, including 250 years ago, those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress.”

Mamdani insisted that the greed shown by American oligarchs and the division sown by its current political leadership are “not all we see when we look for America.”

“We see it too in the nurse who works a double shift and then stops on her way home to check on her ailing neighbor,” he said. “Yes, we see in America corporate landlords for whom negligence is a business model. We see it too in the father who tucks his children into bed in a ceiling stained with leaks, who wakes before dawn to go to work, and who still believes this country can do better by his family.”

In his conclusion, Mamdani paid tribute to “those ideals upon which our nation was built,” which he described as “strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if we reach for them.”

“Ours is a nation working each day towards the perfection in which it was conceived,” he said. “A nation striving each day to better itself. Therein lies the work of America: The striving, the bettering, the reaching towards perfection. What a privilege each of us has to live in a nation that every one of its inhabitants can shape.”

Right-wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel is accusing Pope Leo XIV of doing the work of the Chinese Communist Party with his criticisms of artificial intelligence.

According to a Thursday report from CNN, Thiel told the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado on Tuesday that the pope was inadvertently serving as a “Chinese communist agent” when he released a 42,000-word encyclical that called for strict regulation of AI, a technology that the pontiff said heightens the “risk of dehumanization” throughout the world.

Thiel argued that this sort of thinking was dangerous, CNN reported, because it could result in the US losing the “race” to build more advanced AI to China. Because of this, Thiel continued, the pope is essentially “working for the Chinese communists” by trying to tap the brakes on AI development.

Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, has long decried AI critics in harsh terms. Over the last year, he has been delivering a series of lectures in which he has said that opponents of AI development are working as agents for the Antichrist.

Journalist Christopher Hale, who writes the Letters From Leo newsletter, noted on Friday that Thiel in the past has even speculated that Pope Leo could be “a manifestation of the Antichrist.”

Thiel has said that he instructed Vice President JD Vance, a longtime political ally who received major funding from the tech billionaire for his 2022 Senate campaign, to ignore the pope’s moral guidance despite influencing Vance to convert to Catholicism, Hale added.

“Thiel seeded the vice president’s Catholic faith,” Hale wrote, “and he now tells wealthy festival audiences that the leader of that faith works for a communist government.”

In addition to his attacks on the pope, Thiel also warned about “a democratic-socialist takeover of the Democratic Party,” pointing to recent victories in New York and Colorado of candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America.

Thiel said that this “takeover” would doom the US, arguing that “when the Democratic Party goes, this country is over,” according to CNN.

The New York Times reported in May that Thiel has grown so concerned about the political situation in the US that he’s created a “foothold” for himself in Argentina, which is currently being governed by ideologically likeminded libertarian President Javier Milei.

“Thiel, who has a history of collecting backup countries as he hedges his bets against the United States, is considering making Argentina another Plan B,” the Times reported. “Born in Germany and raised in the United States, he received citizenship in New Zealand in 2011, and applied for a passport in Malta in 2022.”

A report published Friday reveals how President Donald Trump’s policies have jacked up prices for a host of potential Father’s Day gifts this year.

Overall, the analysis by Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive economic think tank and advocacy group, finds that prices for popular Father’s Day gifts have risen by nearly 19% on average over the last year, highlighted by a 30% increase in the price of Remington electric shavers, a 16% jump for Blackstone electric griddles, and barbecue tools up by 11%.

The analysis traces price increases of popular personal care products to Trump’s global trade war, which he began last year with his “Liberation Day” tariffs levied on practically every nation in the world.

“Many shavers and trimmers are imported from China, which has faced multiple layers of tariffs,” notes the report, “in addition to containing steel and aluminum components, which are also subject to additional tariffs.”

The report also points out that electric shaver manufacturer Braun “increased the price of its Series 9 All-in-One Beard Trimmer by $50” last year after Trump’s big tariff announcement, and that the price has since gone up by another $10.

Examining the increase in grilling product prices, the report pins the blame not only on Trump’s tariffs, but also his illegal war of choice with Iran.

“The Middle East is a major producer of the petrochemical used to make plastics and synthetic fibers,” the report explains. “Trump’s reckless war on Iran has increased the price of these petroleum-derived products, helping drive up the cost of items like grilling tools, which cost nearly 22% more this year.”

Elizabeth Pancotti, managing director of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, summarized the report’s findings by warning that “Dads are in for disappointment this Father’s Day” thanks to Trump’s economic policies.

“While dads across the country should be able to relax and enjoy the day with loved ones,” Pancotti added, “they’re instead forced to worry about how they’ll make ends meet in Trump’s economy.”

Trump’s tariffs and the Iran war have sent inflation in the US to its highest levels in three years. As data released by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) last week showed, overall prices in May posted a yearly increase of 4.2%, highlighted by a 23.5% yearly increase in energy prices.

Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, said last week that inflation has now grown “so high that it’s erasing all wage gains” being made by American workers.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire last week, and now a prominent economist is warning that his unprecedented wealth poses a grave threat to human freedom in the US and across the globe.

In a column published by The Guardian on Tuesday, Paris School of Economics professor Gabriel Zucman argued that Musk’s enormous fortune is fundamentally at odds with a democratic system of governance because it gives him “the power to stifle competition, the power to shape public discourse, the power to influence policymaking, the power to buy elections, the power to stall social progress,” and much else.

Zucman noted that wealth concentration is even greater now than it was during the original Gilded Age, as the top 0.00001% now have fortunes large enough to “buy 14% of everything produced in a given year in the US.”

The economist added that while Musk—whose infamous destruction of the US Agency for International Development is projected to kill millions of people in the coming years—makes a particularly compelling villain, trillionaires would be a major problem for democracy even if they were of a more benevolent variety.

“No one should want to live in a society where one single individual can be worth $1 trillion, no matter their personal virtues,” Zucman emphasized. “Such levels invariably skew power, distort markets, and sap our democratic ideals.”

The best solution to this crisis, Zucman said, is to “create an unavoidable minimum tax on their wealth” that will “make it impossible for the super-rich to pay less tax than middle-class workers—a matter of basic equality before the law.”

“It is time to break decisively with the perverse logic in which retirees, the poor, or immigrants are expected to balance the budget,” Zucman concluded, “while the rich are to be allowed to live tax-free in their own parallel society. There cannot be a law more lenient for the rich and powerful than for the rest of us. If ever there was a time to act, it is now.”

Zucman’s thoughts on extreme wealth and democracy were echoed by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who on Tuesday published an essay on his Substack page where he likened President Donald Trump’s White House cage-fighting matches to the kinds of spectacles put on by Roman emperors before noting ominous similarities between the US today and the Roman Empire.

“While the causes of the decline of republican government and Rome’s eventual transition to one-man rule were doubtless complex,” Krugman wrote, “there is broad consensus among historians that a key factor was the emergence of extreme inequality. A handful of men became incredibly wealthy from the spoils of Rome’s eastern conquests, and their wealth and power eventually became too great for the rules of constitutional, republican government to contain. Sound uncomfortably familiar?”

Gautam Mukunda, a professor at the Yale School of Management, similarly warned that Musk’s newly minted trillionaire status was bad news for American self-governance.

In a Monday column published by Bloomberg, Mukunda pointed to the vast sums of money being spent by billionaires in US elections, which he noted “dwarf what candidates can raise themselves.”

And like Krugman, Mukunda saw disturbing parallels between the US today and Ancient Rome.

“Marcus Crassus was the richest man in ancient Rome,” he explained. “So rich that, by Plutarch’s account, he thought no man truly wealthy unless he could pay an army from his own purse. He spent that fortune bankrolling Julius Caesar and building the triumvirate that sidelined the Senate and, in fact if not in name, overthrew the republic.”

As soccer fans from across the world travel to the United States this month to cheer on their countries’ teams at the 2026 FIFA World Cup, a poll released Wednesday by Data for Progress suggests Americans don’t believe many visitors have warm feelings toward the host country after a year-and-a-half of President Donald Trump’s leadership.

Overall the poll found that 62% of American voters think the country’s reputation has deteriorated under Trump, with just 32% saying it’s gotten better.

Republicans were the only political faction to believe Trump has improved global views of the US, while Independents and Democrats overwhelmingly said the president has made them worse.

The poll also found 52% of US voters believed Trump’s mass deportation policies have hurt the country’s image in the world, with just 34% saying the deportations have helped.

Trump’s immigration policies collided with the World Cup earlier this week when Somali referee Omar Artan, who was selected by the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) to work at the celebrated event, was barred from entering the US despite having a valid visa.

A Trump administration official claimed Artan had an “association with suspected members of terror organizations,” but provided no evidence for the allegation. US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) called his treatment by the US “a disgrace.”

Polling data published last year by Pew suggests that Democrats and Independents are more accurately measuring global public sentiment of the US under Trump’s leadership than Republicans.

Specifically, Pew found that net positive perceptions of the US dropped by 10 percentage points or more among residents in a dozen countries between 2024 and 2025, including in key allies such as Canada, Mexico, Germany, and France.

What’s more, Pew found only five countries where the United States’ reputation has improved since Trump’s election: South Africa, India, Israel, Nigeria, and Turkey.

Trump during his second term has taken a number of actions that have sparked anger from foreign governments, including making repeated threats to seize Greenland as a US territory, invading Venezuela and abducting its president, imposing an oil blockade on and threatening to take over Cuba, launching a global trade war, and waging an illegal war of choice on Iran.

US Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Thursday reiterated his threat to remove Customs and Border Protection agents from airports at so-called “sanctuary cities” that bar local police from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement operations.

During a Fox News interview, co-host Brian Kilmeade asked Mullin whether this plan would essentially halt all international flights to major US airports in travel hubs such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York.Mullin responded by saying DHS wasn’t “going to halt the flights,” but rather “won’t be able to process them because we won’t have officers there.”

The DHS secretary said that the CBP officers needed to be sent to protect DHS employees at the Delaney Hall migrant detention center in Newark, New Jersey, which has been targeted in recent days by protesters demanding humane treatment of immigrants.

“If things don’t change, we’re going to have to make this step pretty quick,” Mullin emphasized. “I’m not going to put my employees and my [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents at risk going to and from this [facility].”

Critics were quick to point out that Mullin’s plan would lead to massive chaos at major international airports and would be a significant economic disruption at a time when Americans are already under financial pressure from the rising price of food and energy.

“This would be deliberately stabbing the US economy in the back,” argued Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. “It would cause enormous economic damage and disrupt air travel nationwide, as airlines would be forced to cancel flights en masse. That he’s even contemplating this publicly is a sign of madness.”

Minneapolis-based attorney Will Stancil questioned whether Mullin had fully gamed out how his plan would play out politically for his boss, President Donald Trump, whom polls show is historically unpopular.

“If I’m sitting at 35% approval,” Stancil mused, “the thing I definitely want to do is to cause apocalyptic levels of chaos at all of America’s largest airports.”

Retired air traffic controller Vivian Lumbard similarly marveled at the self-destructive consequences that would come from enacting Mullin’s plan.

“If customs isn’t there processing international flights, US citizens won’t be permitted to re-enter the United States either,” she wrote. “Do any of these people have a working brain or understand how life works in the real world?”

Mullin’s threats appear to be more than bluster, however. The Atlantic reported last week that the DHS chief recently “convened a small group of airline and travel-industry executives at DHS headquarters in Washington and told them he may reduce [CBP] staffing at major airports that serve sanctuary jurisdictions,” including airports in New York, Washington, DC, and Portland, Oregon.