Matthew Chapman

President Donald Trump took to his Truth Social platform on Tuesday to triumphantly announce that the White House Correspondents' Dinner will get a do-over.

"In a sign of Strength and Fortitude, it was just announced that The White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which violently ended rather abruptly on April 25th, will be rescheduled to July 24th," Trump wrote. "This announcement is a very good thing in that we cannot allow Lunatics to change our way of life, or even its scheduling."

"I was asked to be there, and speak, by Weijia Jiang, President of The White House Correspondents’ Association, and have accepted," Trump continued, adding, "I don’t know whether or not I will give the same rather nasty statements, at least as it concerns certain people, but we will soon find out. In any event, it will be a 'HOT' ticket! Interestingly, the location will be The Waldorf Astoria, on Pennsylvania Avenue, a Building and Ballroom that I built."

The shooting that shut down the previous dinner earlier this year left much of the press badly shaken. The alleged gunman was found to have a manifesto listing Trump administration targets.

MS NOW's Rachel Maddow kicked off Monday night's broadcast with a devastating round of mockery for President Donald Trump's recent celebrations to himself.

She set the scene by covering an episode she had already reported on in Philadelphia, where the Trump administration tried to take down memorials to enslaved people at the President's House, only for locals to sue and stop him — but then the National Park Service only restored half the memorials, leaving the entire site looking obviously unfinished.

That, said Maddow, is a perfect metaphor for the half-realized festivities Trump is putting on to honor himself and, ostensibly, the country.

"I know you've heard all about Trump kind of botching the celebrations that are planned for the 250th in Washington, right?" said Maddow. "Putting a cage match on the lawn of the White House, sponsored by what multiple state gambling authorities widely considered to be an illegal gambling operation?" This was further botched by a disastrous marketing campaign for Trump's car race in D.C., where he sold white T-shirts that said "One Nation, One Race," that had to later be taken down.

Meanwhile, Maddow continued, "Trump now has called for the cancellation of a concert that he had tried to plan in Washington for the 250th after, again, a melange of celebrities and former celebrities they thought they had persuaded to come perform" ended up dropping out amid backlash. As a result, she said, Trump "has announced that he himself should be the headliner instead. So, okay, that'll be great."

This, she said, is already shaping up to be a rerun of Trump's inaugurations. The first one's musical performances were "poorly organized, poorly attended, and sort of sadly underwhelming when it came to star power. The vibe was like cut-rate wedding DJ and desultory junior varsity marching band." This is why, she said, Trump probably found it "kind of a relief when his second inauguration came around and had to be moved indoors for poor weather."

Many more of these flops abound, said Maddow, from Trump's smaller-than-planned birthday military parade, to the utter flop of the right-wing alternative Super Bowl halftime show where "Kid Rock kind of just lost the thread trying to lip sync and gave up halfway through."

Ultimately, she concluded, all of this can be easily symbolized by what Trump left at the President's House in Philadelphia: "This half there, half not there, half taken down mess thanks to Donald Trump."

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Pro-Trump influencers have all suddenly started waging war on Harley-Davidson motorcycles — and it's clearly not an organic movement, Will Sommer wrote for The Bulwark in an analysis published on Monday.

This week, he wrote, "has seen wave after wave of MAGA personalities and meme accounts decide, seemingly out of nowhere, that Harley-Davidson was company non grata." For example, he noted, "MAGA influencer Priya Patel declared the manufacturer 'fundamentally anti-American,' while Hercules actor-turned-tweeter Kevin Sorbo said his friends were abandoning Harley-Davidson en masse." Even Nick Adams, a Trump envoy, boosted the campaign.

There's just one problem, he noted: almost none of the influencers slamming Harley-Davidson are actually naming any sort of corporate decision or messaging they object to. Additionally, "every influencer throwing a grenade at Harley is also simultaneously boosting its competitor," Indian Motorcycle.

For example, said Sommer, Prison Mitch, another far-right influencer who trashed Harley motorcycles as "woke and gay," was quick to simultaneously say “Indian Motorcycle spent years building motorcycles and honoring American heritage.”

The pattern was such an obvious paid influence campaign that even Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz, who posted — and then deleted — an image of an anti-Harley post, saying, “copy and paste talking points about a random issue. And yes, foreign countries also pay influencers for certain campaigns like this. We need stronger disclosure laws!”

All of this, wrote Sommer, "is extra awkward in part because many conservative politicians enjoy their Harleys," including Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-WI) and Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA). It's also ironic because "it’s pitching a company called 'Indian' at a time when the American right has been consumed with hate for people from the country of India" — though some MAGA influencers are even commenting on this, with the Wall Street Mavericks account posting, “I know nothing about them, other than it is not a reference to the country of India.”

President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency cuts are hitting the state of Texas hard, as a long-controlled pest is threatening to resurge and decimate the livestock industry.

The New World screwworm, the larval stage of a parasitic fly known for laying eggs inside livestock animals and letting the maggots chew their way out, could cause massive damage to cattle herds. In the past, the U.S. managed to work together with Mexico to drive back screwworms, but they have been expanding their territory recently.

"Back in the 1950s, the United States led a successful charge against screwworms by buggering up their breeding cycle. But that was back when divisions of the government, like the U.S. Department of Agriculture were well funded and well organized," noted Boing Boing in a piece published last month.

In an urgent public letter, GOP state Rep. Don McLaughlin outlined the danger to the state — and demanded immediate action.

"For more than a year, I have joined Texas ranchers in sounding the alarm while federal regulators have moved at a snail's pace," McLaughlin said in the statement. "Today, the threat is no longer hundreds of miles away. It is at our doorstep. Texas cannot afford to wait until the New World Screwworm crosses the border and begins devastating our livestock and wildlife populations."

Attorney Blake Allen weighed in on the matter: "Screwworms coming back into the U.S. cattle herd/stock is going to potentially devastate the industry and jack up meat prices. Worst part is, this was preventable. Trump & DOGE pushed funding cuts on/destroyed agencies that were directly responsible for fighting this pest."

Despite DOGE's proclaimed mission to identify and eliminate government waste, fraud, and inefficiencies, the cuts by the project do not seem to have been effective in even achieving the core purpose of reducing spending.

A federal judge in Colorado has put a stop to the Trump administration's plans to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, slamming the move as an effort to exact political revenge on the state.

According to The Colorado Sun, Senior U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson called the administration's plans to transfer NCAR's supercomputing facility to the University of Wyoming “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.”

NCAR is a critical facility for climate research, studying changes to Earth's atmosphere. The Trump administration has long sought to marginalize climate research.

But beyond that ideological issue, Jackson agreed with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), the plaintiff in the case, "that breaking off parts of NCAR, dismantling projects and potentially firing thousands of employees was intended by Trump and agency officials as direct political revenge."

Colorado has been the subject of Trump's fury multiple times since taking office, including over the imprisonment of Tina Peters, a far-right election conspiracy theorist who tampered with voting equipment to try to prove the 2020 election was stolen. Peters was released on parole this month as part of a highly controversial commutation by outgoing Democratic Gov. Jared Polis.

The state's senators have been fighting tooth and nail to preserve NCAR, even obstructing national spending bills in protest.

House lawmakers have demanded that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton produce documents related to his lawsuit against ActBlue, a critical Democratic Party fundraising platform, according to the Austin American-Statesman.

This lawsuit alleges that ActBlue failed to act sufficiently to prevent illegal donations from foreigners or people who had already hit their campaign contribution limit.

The new letter sent by Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Robert Garcia (D-CA), and Joseph Morelle (D-NY) accuses Paxton of ignoring far more serious consumer complaints brought against WinRed, the platform Republicans launched as their answer to ActBlue — in particular, the platform's practice of pre-checking a box to make donors' contributions recurring without them intending to do so.

"While you have done nothing to investigate dozens of such complaints from Texans about being defrauded by WinRed, the platform used to process campaign contributions to Republican candidates and political committees, your office has opened an investigation into an unrelated entity, ActBlue, which processes donations to Democratic candidates and causes," said the letter, noting that Paxton's office has received at least 27 complaints about WinRed, some of them alleging people had their life savings drained from their bank accounts.

The lawmakers are demanding Paxton, now the GOP's candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas, turn over any documents about the complaints and communications around them, although they cannot compel this by force without Republican votes on the House Oversight Committee.

This comes after a federal judge in Massachusetts, where ActBlue is headquartered, already warned Paxton that the ActBlue lawsuit is unlikely to succeed on the merits.

Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-NJ) has been mystifying Capitol Hill for months with his protracted absence due to an unspecified medical issue. Now he's introducing legislation — even though he hasn't actually returned to work yet.

According to NOTUS, Kean "became the lead sponsor of H.R.9061" on Friday — a bill that would require clear guidance from the federal government to states on whether to cover early screenings for preeclampsia, a life-threatening pregnancy complication, in Medicaid and CHIP.

This comes even though he is still out of work and nobody knows where he is.

Republican lawmakers are growing increasingly concerned, as his absence has now extended past 75 days, and his office has not given any clarification on what his medical condition is or when he will be able to return to work. His aides are simply assuring the public that he will be back to work "soon."

Filing legislation is not the only standard congressional activity Kean is carrying on with, despite not actually showing up to the Capitol. His office is also sending out his newsletter, with no indication that anything is amiss.

Kean represents a New Jersey House district that will likely see a competitive race in November, where Democrats are strategizing how to capitalize on a wave of public anger at President Donald Trump and reclaim the House majority after having lost it in 2022.

The American Civil Liberties Union is filing a lawsuit against the Trump administration over conditions at the controversial Camp East Montana migrant facility near El Paso, Texas, alleging that the site is turning into a "civil rights catastrophe."

According to ABC News, civil rights organizations "are accusing Immigration and Customs Enforcement of subjecting immigrant detainees to wide-ranging 'inhumane' conditions and treatment, including physical abuse, sexual harassment, 'abhorrent medical care,' spoiled food, and inappropriate use of force" — all of which comes after a series of suspicious deaths at the facility.

Camp East Montana is a makeshift tent facility that was set up at the Fort Bliss military base. It is the largest migrant detention center in the United States, capable of holding up to 5,000 people.

Per the complaint filed by the ACLU, detainees "are confined to windowless enclosures in tents and suffer egregious physical abuse by guards; abhorrent medical and mental health care, including for people with chronic conditions like cancer and HIV; indiscriminate use of solitary confinement to punish and silence victims of guard abuse; and other flagrant constitutional violations, including exposure to measles, tuberculosis, and other diseases."

A spokesperson for the facility denied all the allegations, saying in a statement, "It is a longstanding practice to provide comprehensive medical care from the moment an alien enters ICE custody."

All of this comes amid reports that "Alligator Alcatraz," another makeshift detention facility created independently from DHS by the state of Florida but once enthusiastically supported by the Trump administration, is shutting down amid ballooning costs that make the project unviable for DHS to assist with.

President Donald Trump's administration pulled the plug on his $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" after a federal judge temporarily blocked it over the weekend — but that doesn't mean the rising confrontation it's caused between the White House and Republicans on Capitol Hill is over, Punchbowl News' Jake Sherman told MS NOW's Katy Tur on Monday.

"Maybe you have some information about what Speaker Mike Johnson might have said to the president when he was at the White House a little bit earlier today," Tur asked Sherman, referring to the recent meeting on the status of the reconciliation bill, which Republicans have debated updating with language limiting the fund.

Sherman acknowledged he didn't know exactly what was discussed there about the fund, but that his sources tell him "the administration is going to announce through DOJ that they are going to comply with the court order ... but the administration plans to say they plan to take no further action."

Despite that, he argued, this "is not going to be an immediate salve for Capitol Hill" because Trump could simply decide at a later date to restart it up again when the court order expires. "They're going to want to put language in ... the reconciliation legislation, which funds ICE and CBP, to make sure that the administration can't, at some point, return and do this again."

In other words, he said, Republicans will take a "trust, but verify" attitude and "put teeth into legislation to make sure that the administration doesn't, in a couple of months, say, actually, we've changed our minds. We're going to go back and set up this $1.8 billion fund."

Ultimately, though, he said, this is probably good news for Republicans because the administration's surrender means they can move forward with the broader reconciliation bill.

"This was the only path, Katy, to get this done," he said. "The administration would have been frozen up here for weeks, if not months ... if this weaponization fund was put in place, they would have had to deal with this on every single bill that the House and Senate were looking to pass." As a result, Trump had "no other option" but to throw in the towel on the slush fund.

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President Donald Trump's administration is planning to pull the plug on his $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" to pay out people supposedly victimized by "lawfare" — a controversial plan that critics claimed was a slush fund to pay out money to Jan. 6 rioters and other allies of the president convicted of crimes.

According to Axios, White House officials are set to comply with a court order putting the fund on pause and don't have plans at this time to contest the court's action or try to resume it later.

"It's dead for now," one official told Axios.

The fund was created as a supposed "settlement" of Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against his own IRS for failing to safeguard his tax information from a whistleblower who illegally leaked it.

However, the optics of the fund led even a number of Republicans to speak out in criticism, and GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill are debating a provision in the Homeland Security reconciliation bill that would put sharp restrictions on how any payouts from the fund could potentially be spent.

This also comes as a separate court is reopening the IRS lawsuit at the behest of dozens of retired judges, so as to review whether the settlement in question was appropriate.

The Trump Justice Department's criminal case against former FBI Director James Comey got a worrisome sign on Monday — and it wasn't a development in that case itself, but one in an unrelated case involving the National Park Service.

According to Politico, U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss has issued a two-week restraining order prohibiting the park service from doing anything to interfere with a protest by the liberal group Accountability Now USA, which has for months been protesting President Donald Trump outside a federal courthouse near the National Mall — by flying a huge banner that says "86-47," with "47" being a reference to Trump and "86" a common slang term for getting rid of something.

The group has been harassed by the Secret Service, and more recently, a National Park Service official issued an email ordering the group to remove it as it is "obscenity" not protected by the First Amendment. This is in line with a number of Trump officials and allies who have claimed "86-47" is a call for violence against the president."

Moss, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, disagreed in his ruling.

“The Court does not doubt that political violence is on the rise and that it poses a grave threat not just to the targets of the threats but to the country as a whole," wrote Moss. "But the enormity of that problem does not change the meaning of Plaintiff’s speech, which by any reasonable measure merely advocated for the President’s impeachment and removal from office — that is, ‘to throw [him] out.’”

This could have grave implications for the administration's separate efforts to prosecute Comey, who was charged with violent threats for a social media post from last year depicting seashells arranged to spell out "8647." Comey deleted the post and apologized, but has made clear he was never advocating violence.

All of this comes as the DOJ quietly reassigned a prosecutor in charge of the Comey case.

President Donald Trump's $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization" slush fund is now facing jeopardy on multiple fronts, with one just pausing the fund and another reopening the Trump lawsuit against the IRS that formed the basis for it. And things could be about to get ugly for the president, former federal prosecutor Preet Bharara told MS NOW's Jen Psaki on Friday evening.

"Let's just start with Judge Williams' ruling tonight, which effectively reopens the IRS case that Trump supposedly settled, kind of pulled it out of court, I guess," said Psaki. "Give us your thoughts on how that order came to be and what it means."

The key takeaway, Bharara said, is that "tonight we're seeing the third branch of government as listed in the Constitution really asserting itself, right? You have the judge you just mentioned reopening the case that you've been talking about. You have another judge who's frozen the quote unquote, 'slush fund.' And the first judge undertook the thing that happened at the behest of and at the urging of 35 retired judges."

This is notable, he said because "judges, whether they're in office or out of office and still thinking about the rule of law, have made a very important statement here" — and the sitting judge in the IRS case doesn't want to be complicit in "something that's a little too cute for school," and wants a proper investigation of whether the court system is being abused to help Trump pay his allies.

Ultimately, Bharara said, "I think it might be quite bad for the administration when discovery takes place, when the court examines things."

He finally noted that even as all this is going on, Trump and his allies are effectively living on a different planet in their response to this, with many of them more outraged at retired judges injecting themselves into the case than the actual improprieties they raised. And further, "notwithstanding these rulings that are that are very devastating to Donald Trump, what is the thing that Donald Trump fulminated about at great length today? Not having his name on the Kennedy Center."

"So a lot of people revealing themselves tonight," he concluded.

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After President Donald Trump endorsed South Carolina Lt. Gov. Pam Evette in the crowded gubernatorial primary on Friday, all eyes turned to Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), who has been running a very intense campaign for the same office and casting herself as a MAGA warrior.

Mace, writing on X, blamed the snub on her support for the release of the Jeffrey Epstein trafficking case files — and insisted she didn't want the endorsement if that's what robbed her of it.

"I know I put the likelihood of an endorsement on the line when I demanded transparency on the Epstein files," wrote Mace. "I demanded it because you deserved the truth — ALL OF IT — and as a survivor of a corrupt and broken court system, I will always pursue justice for those who deserve it."

"If sacrificing my values is the price of an endorsement, I will never pay it," she concluded.

Also snubbed out of an endorsement was Rep. Ralph Norman, a fellow South Carolina lawmaker who was enthusiastically cheerleading Trump's push to redraw congressional districts and delete majority-Black seats to give more to Republicans. That push in South Carolina died earlier this week, at least for now, as Republicans conceded they didn't have time this session.

President Donald Trump made a major endorsement in Oklahoma on Friday evening — and it left Republican officials there flabbergasted.

"It is my Great Honor to endorse MAGA Warrior, Mike Mazzei, who is running for Governor of Oklahoma, a State which I love, and WON BIG," wrote Trump on his Truth Social platform, describing Mazzei as "a successful Businessman, and former Chairman of the State Senate Finance Committee, and later, as Oklahoma’s Secretary of Budget" who will embrace "AMERICA FIRST Policies."

But this endorsement didn't make any sense to Oklahoma insiders.

"Ummm Trump endorses @MazzeiMike for Governor of Oklahoma," wrote Reese Gorman of NOTUS on X. "Mazzei is widely considered a massive underdog against AG Drummond, McCall and Chip Keating. Absolutely unexpected and wild endorsement."

Gorman went on to add, "My phone is blowing up with Oklahoma officials and politicos absolutely SHOCKED at this endorsement. Nobody saw this coming."

This comes as Trump makes a number of other endorsements in key races around the country, including Pam Evette in South Carolina's gubernatorial race, which deals a blow to Reps. Nancy Mace and Ralph Norman, who had been vying for that endorsement themselves.