In 2016, I attended the strangest dinner of my life.

I was in Cleveland covering the Republican National Convention for Fox News. Earlier that evening, I had been having a drink at a rooftop bar when a man in a fur coat swept in, trailed by a small entourage. He had a shock of blond hair and the largest Louis Vuitton bag I had ever seen, big enough to fit a severed head. It was July, and at a convention teeming with little Alex P. Keatons and slovenly MAGA types, a guy swanning around in fur was hard to miss.

He seemed to relish the attention. His minions had reserved a sea of chaise lounges in the middle of the space and he plopped himself down as though he were an A-lister arriving at the Chateau Marmont. Young men approached him with something close to reverence. Neither I nor the two guys from New Jersey I was drinking with had the slightest idea who he was.

A few hours later, I arrived at a dinner to which a Fox colleague had spontaneously invited me. There were several other surprise guests (at least they were a surprise to me), all of whom were early Trump advisors. Most of them were New York guys, the kind who cosplayed tough talkers in the Michael Cohen/low-level mobster vein. At the time, they were enjoying the ride, confident that Donald Trump would never be president and content to grift off the larger MAGA ecosystem while the grifting was good.

Then the door opened and in swept the fur-clad man from the rooftop bar.

That is how I met Milo Yiannopoulos.

Yiannopoulos spent the evening regaling us with his plan to go to Stockholm that very week and ride naked on a horse through a Muslim neighborhood there, like Lady Godiva. Everyone else at this dinner thought this was not only hilarious but absolutely the right thing to do. I had several questions, not the least of which was, “Why?”

The answer seemed to be that it would just be funny and also that Muslim migrants deserved it because they were coming to a Western country like Sweden and trying to change it. “Change it to what?” I asked. “A place where you can’t ride naked through the streets on a horse?”

No matter. The plan was set, with Yiannopoulos describing himself as a truth-teller and brave defender of Western civilization. Plus, as he made clear, it was good content, when “content” was still in its nascent stages. I sat there eagerly waiting for Hillary Clinton to hand Trump his ass in November, so people like these could crawl back to whichever hole they emerged from during what I assumed was the short-lived Summer of Trump.

We are now in our eleventh Summer of Trump. But now, karma finally seems to be coming for MAGA, however slowly. The green shoots are appearing at long last.

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On Tuesday morning, Senator Richard Blumenthal released a whistleblower complaint from a federal employee. It claims that the United States Postal Service threw together the machinery to deliver a third of the nation’s votes in a matter of weeks, and that this mechanism will likely break down, disenfranchising millions of voters in the process. The whistleblower warns of catastrophic failure.

The complaint describes the rollout of the Post Office's new mail ballot rule as fundamentally flawed, secretive, and rushed. An IT system that would normally take a year or longer to build has been stood up in mere weeks, with just days of user testing before going live. The bottom line is that millions of American voters may not receive their mail ballot in time, or at all.

Donald Trump, who has repeatedly voted by mail himself but declared a few months ago that “the cheating on mail-in voting is legendary,” issued an executive order in March imposing sweeping new rules on mail voting. In August, the Postal Service published a final rule in response to that order. A federal judge subsequently blocked USPS from enforcing several central provisions for the midterm elections. The whistleblower alleges that USPS continued developing the system while earlier injunctions were in force, despite publicly stating that it had stopped.

That’s not the worst of it. One particular detail underscores exactly how the Post Office will help Republicans steal the election. The new system developed by the USPS operates under a zero percent failure standard. When a county brings its ballots to the Postal Service, workers scan a sample of about 400 envelopes out of a batch of ten thousand. If even one barcode fails to scan or a single record fails to match the federal portal, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the election office for a do-over.

Let that sink in. One inadvertent smudge can disenfranchise ten thousand voters. Run that loop a few times across a few Democratic counties in Georgia or Maine and it will quickly be too late for thousands of voters to return their ballots.

Just hours after Blumenthal released the whistleblower complaint yesterday, the House passed a continuing resolution to fund the federal government through December. Only a few Democrats voted no, with everyone else handing over the minority's only hostage weeks before ballots start dropping. (The Senate had already blessed its version, with ninety votes, back in August.)

This is the entire problem that plagues the Democratic Party, compressed into a single day. In the morning, congressional Democrats identified a five-alarm fire. In the afternoon, they pretended the house was not in flames and went about their business as usual.

What fucking planet are these people living on and have they heard anything that the Democratic base is demanding of them? If they don’t think that this administration is so out of hand that they need to stop it in its tracks, why should the rest of us bother voting for them? Sorry, but “give us another term so we can continue going along to get along” is not exactly the “aux barricades!” rallying cry they think it is.

Here is just a sample of what should have been done instead, if only they had the guts to actually stand up for our democracy — and, incidentally, for their own jobs, which are on the line because their own voters are being disenfranchised by the tens of thousands.

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When Google Maps users in the United States opened the app this weekend, Lake Ontario had vanished. The actual lake is still there, of course, but the name as we have known it all our lives is no more — at least according to Google. In its place is “Lake America,” which Google helpfully informs us is the “Smallest of the 5 Great Lakes.” Indeed — and not just because of its size.

On August 27, Donald Trump directed federal agencies to call this particular body of water “Lake America” and to update the federal naming database reflecting this executive order. Trump directed the Interior Department and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, the body responsible for standardizing names across the federal government, to enter “Lake America” in the federal database and to use it on government maps and documents. That mandated use of the name inside the federal government but it did not bind private companies such as Google. Google chose to carry Trump’s vengeance scheme — which is what this renaming was all about — all on its own.

If there is any doubt that Google bent the knee to Trump while attempting to placate everyone, just look at how Google Maps refers to this body of water outside the United States. Canadians still see Lake Ontario when they click on the map. Users elsewhere see both names, which is how Google bravely tries to avoid choosing between an unwell president and the reality-based community. Laughably, Google excuses this move by claiming it is following its standard practice of updating “Google Maps to reflect name changes in official government sources,” which is simply untrue. One look at Google Maps last night showed that the company apparently has no problem ignoring the wishes of other governments when it chooses. In France, for instance, the body of water separating Calais and Dover is officially called La Manche. But when you enter “La Manche” into the Google Maps search engine, all that pops up for this American user is "The English Channel,” though the United States presumably has no stake in a European waterway naming-rights fight. Tant pis.

When will powerful corporations learn? Bending the knee to Trump does not purchase peace. It simply advertises the price of submission. Time and again, the most powerful companies on earth have acted like little children attacked by the schoolyard bully. This is probably because the people running them were in the habit of giving up their lunch money to the local bully to avoid being beaten up in fourth grade.

Meanwhile, Google’s real reason for bending the knee on Lake Ontario is even more simpy than it appears.

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Summer is packing up and leaving us with back-to-school blues and the suspicion that pumpkin spice has a fantastic press operation. (It has to be a good press operation, right? Because there is no other reason on earth why anyone would buy into pumpkin spice being good. But I digress.)

So I’m sending the summer off with sharp opinions, zero patience for nonsense, and 15% off an annual subscription.

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Whether you’re shopping for yourself or your favorite democracy defender, this is your chance to save before the sale disappears faster than Melania whenever Natalie Harp walks in the room. (Speaking of Melania, you’ll get access to this deep dive on her too.)

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Julie

Friends,

Welcome to this week’s installment of the weekly series One Thing to Make Me Smarter.

This week’s story is about the frightening new methods the government is using to collect information on all of us. You will think that you are living in some dystopian novel after you read this. You aren’t. This is happening in the United States in 2026 — and the scariest part is that we are just now in the dawn of the AI era, which means that it will only get worse. Corporate media should be screaming from the rooftops about this.

If you value reporting that tells you what matters, please become a paid subscriber. Your support makes it possible for me to spend the time necessary to do deep dives into important stories. In particular, this one affects every single one of us.

The most dangerous surveillance system in the United States doesn’t actually exist. There is no single government database that contains every place someone travels, every person someone calls or texts, every car someone drives, every person in someone’s vicinity, every organization someone joins, and every trace someone leaves behind like digital DNA. For the government to know nearly everything about a person, there need not be.

This is because the government no longer needs to collect this type of information itself. One private company can supply identity records, another can supply location data, and a third can supply license plate histories. One private company can identify a face and another can extract information from a phone. The government can complete the picture by providing immigration, travel, benefits, and law enforcement records.

Finally, analytical software can connect the pieces. The real architecture of modern surveillance is what happens when all that information is joined together. Privacy law considers a warrant here and a subpoena or administrative summons there. Almost always, it contemplates a commercial procurement separately. But increasingly, the real surveillance happens when all those disparate fragments are combined.

Americans have spent the quarter-century since 9/11 arguing about how much information on each of us the federal government should be allowed to collect on its own. Today, the more consequential question is what happens when the government no longer needs to collect much of our information at all.

A frightening picture has begun to emerge since the first Trump administration. Rather than simply purchasing individual investigative tools, the federal government and even states and municipalities are assembling access to an ecosystem capable of turning scattered commercial and government records into something more revealing than any one database would provide on its own. Big Brother would blush at what the federal government, working with commercial data brokers, has managed to assemble about each of us.

What’s more, unlike the great surveillance controversies of the past, this system has not required Congress to authorize a single massive new spying program. Instead, it has built it one contract at a time. The surveillance infrastructure is gradually assembled by purchasing access to data from different companies and connecting those systems so they can exchange information automatically.

While we are distracted by celebrity gossip, here is what the government has collected on each of us.

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(Photo courtesy of ABC)

Has ABC completely lost its mind? On Thursday, news broke that Karoline Leavitt has been invited to join The View as a guest when the show returns for its new season this fall. CNN, which prides itself on platforming its own in-house MAGA liar, called it a “no-brainer booking.”

Sorry, CNN. This booking is a disgrace and ABC should cancel it before it beclowns itself any further. This is not evidence of balanced journalism. It is an editorial decision to give a national platform to a political operative whose public record is chock-full of lies.

Upon departing as White House press secretary, Leavitt told Fox News that she would “serve the president on the outside” and “cheer him on over the next two years.” In other words, we can expect more of the same from her when ABC platforms her in the coming months —more lying, more obfuscation, more gaslighting, all in service of the president.

For nearly two years, Leavitt represented the United States of America from the podium of the Brady Press Briefing Room and lied to the American people. Let us count just some of the ways.

Leavitt claimed that Trump’s tax-and-spending bill “does not add to the deficit,” despite independent analyses projecting $3 trillion to $4 trillion in additional deficits over a decade. She declared that “tariffs are a tax cut for the American people,” even though tariffs are taxes on imported goods whose costs are passed on to American businesses and consumers. She laughably promoted the claim that the government had discovered $50 million intended to buy condoms for Gaza, which may be the fever dream of some Groyper online fantasy but should hardly be promoted by a taxpayer-funded government official who knows better. She denied that January 6 was not an insurrection.

These were not simply differences in interpretation. They were factual claims presented to the public by the White House press secretary, whose responsibility was to speak on behalf of this country. Instead, she lied on behalf of her boss. When a spokesperson repeatedly presents demonstrably false claims as fact, it is simply deception in the service of a political agenda.

Scratch that. “Deception” is too meek a word. It is pathological lying in service of the most prolific liar-in-chief who ever set foot in the White House, a deeply unserious, unwell man who either does not know truth from fiction or has been mired in a stew of lies for so many decades that he no longer knows how to tell the truth. But Leavitt does know. She knows that Biden did not steal the election, that a Maryland father who was deported to a gulag in El Salvador was not a “foreign terrorist,” that a deadly aviation incident was not because of “DEI.” Yet, she lied and lied and lied some more on behalf of her boss because ambition was more important than leveling with the very people who paid her salary.

Leavitt is leaving the White House but, as she pointed out, she is hardly ending her service to Trump. She is joining MAGA Inc., the Trump-aligned super PAC, and remaining one of Trump’s outside advisers. In other words, she is moving directly from taxpayer-funded communications on behalf of Trump into partisan political advocacy on behalf of Trump. (But I repeat myself.)

And. since The View prides itself on being a show by and for women, it makes sense to note that Leavitt’s excuse for Trump snapping “Quiet, Piggy!” at a female journalist is that he was being “respectful” of the press corps.

That is whom ABC is platforming. So why is it giving her airtime?

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio once understood that standing up to authoritarians and dictators was the right thing to do, not just morally but strategically. As a senator, Rubio called NATO one of America’s great strategic advantages, arguing as recently as 2024 that “if NATO didn’t exist, we would have to create it.” The alliance, Rubio must have once understood, is not an altruistic enterprise where the United States is saving the Damsel-in-Distress Europeans. It was created to promote the Pax Americana and the soft and hard power from which this country derives its strength. That is, presumably, why Rubio was a Russia hawk throughout his time in the senate.

When Afghanistan collapsed in 2021, Rubio joined Democratic Senator Mark Warner, then the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, in warning President Biden that abandoning Afghans who had worked with American intelligence assets would damage America’s “reliability and trustworthiness” and become “a stain on our national conscience.” He was right.

That Marco Rubio would have recognized what is so cynical about the State Department he now leads. He would have been disgusted. But that is before Rubio actually became what Donald Trump had once called him — “Liddle Marco,” who makes himself smaller by trying to fit in Trump’s ideological pocket.

On Thursday, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau posted a shocking attack on foreigners who entered the United States on diplomatic or official visas and subsequently applied for asylum. Landau announced that the department had reviewed A and G visa admissions from 2019 through 2023 and discovered hundreds of subsequent asylum applications. He published charts showing that 420 people associated with one country applied for asylum and that asylum applications from another country amounted to more than seventeen percent of the people entering on these visas. Then he triumphantly declared that this is evidence of “systemic abuse.”

There is just one problem with this absolutely cynical ploy and it speaks to both Rubio’s moral bankruptcy and the danger this kind of behavior poses to the national security of the United States.

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On Sunday, I wrote that it felt like August 2001, which the 9/11 Commission later called “the summer of threat.” I was referring to the atmosphere before catastrophe, with warning lights flashing, officials holding fragments of the picture, and a distracted country unable to imagine that the unthinkable might actually happen.

After the events of the past several days, August 2001 no longer appears to be the right analogy. This feels more like August 1939. An expansionist power may be reading hesitation, division, and wishful thinking as permission. Things are getting more dire by the moment.

The most alarming signal is last night’s report from the Wall Street Journal that CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s surprise trip to Moscow was intended to warn Russia not to attack a NATO country. The mission followed new American intelligence assessments that Vladimir Putin could test the resolve of the NATO alliance with anything from a cyber attack to a small land incursion of Latvia, Lithuania, or Estonia, which were once Soviet republics.

There is an ominous precedent that shows how much Putin cares about warnings like this. In November 2021, CIA Director William Burns traveled to Moscow to tell the Kremlin that Washington knew it was preparing to invade Ukraine and to warn of the consequences. Russia launched its full-scale invasion roughly three months later. Burns later assessed that Putin was “stewing in a combustible combination of grievance and ambition for many years. … He’s created a system in which his own circle of advisers is narrower and narrower. … And it’s a system in which it’s not proven career enhancing for people to question or challenge his judgment.” That was more than four years ago. Putin’s grievance has only gotten worse, while his ambition has not slackened.

When a CIA director personally travels anywhere to deliver a warning, the underlying intelligence is serious enough that no one should dismiss the trip as semi-routine. When a CIA director personally travels to Moscow to deliver a warning, precedent says that Moscow ignores the warning.

Ratcliffe is a relative Russia hawk within Trump’s orbit. He has supported maintaining CIA assistance to Ukraine and, on his way to Moscow, he stopped in Latvia, one of the nations that appears at risk from a Russian land incursion. Latvia is a NATO ally but it is precisely the sort of Baltic country Putin might choose for a deliberately limited, ambiguous test. In his warped worldview, it is as much a part of Russia as Ukraine.

This may be why the more we learn about the Ratcliffe trip, the more it may portend horror.

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CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s unannounced trip to Russia on Tuesday is deeply concerning because of what we can reasonably infer about its purpose if we look deeply enough. The visit is the first publicly known trip to Moscow by a sitting CIA director since William Burns traveled there in November 2021. During that trip, Burns warned the Kremlin to abandon its plan to invade Ukraine, which the Putin regime denied that it was preparing to do. Russia invaded Ukraine three months later.

Ratcliff’s airplane departed Camp Springs, Maryland on Sunday and flew to Riga, Latvia, where it spent almost forty-eight hours. Ratcliff then left Riga on Tuesday morning aboard a different aircraft and flew across Belarus to Moscow’s Vnukovo airport, the hub closest to the center of the city.

Much of the initial media coverage has offered a two-item menu of explanations by saying that Ratcliffe was likely in Moscow to meet with Vladimir Putin and Ratcliffe’s Russian counterpart about either Ukraine or Iran. Maybe — but I’m not so sure. In fact, based on what I wrote about on Sunday and what the American media has failed to cover in any real detail, I fear that this is about something much more dangerous than even the two current fronts of what I believe is already a world war.

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By intervening in the rules governing the 2026 election without even putting a justice’s name on the opinion, the Supreme Court has revealed itself once again as the judicial arm of the Republican National Committee. Enough of this bullshit. It’s time for Democrats to break glass and fight fire with fire if they capture control of Congress next year.

Yesterday, the Court’s conservative majority granted the Trump administration emergency relief that allowed part of the president’s executive order that restricted mail voting to proceed. As has happened over and over, a federal judge — naively believing that the United States is still a nation of laws — had previously concluded that Donald Trump lacked the authority to rewrite election rules that the Constitution entrusts to the states and to Congress.

The Supreme Court kicked the ultimate resolution of that question down the road because it no longer occupies itself with solving weighty constitutional matters. Instead, in what is increasingly its roundabout way to give Trump whatever he wants, the nation’s highest court issued yet another unsigned order removing one of the obstacles standing in Trump’s way. This time, just a little more than two months before the midterm elections, the Court has decided that Trump would be able to restrict mail voting in part.

Enough of this nonsense. Democrats should stop responding to this Court as though it were anything other than a subsidiary of the Trump administration. Instead, they should campaign on hitting these justices where it hurts — and then make good on their promise should they regain control of Congress in January.

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(Photo: Courtesy of George Skidmore)

The most revealing thing about Hakeem Jeffries’s recent private meeting with Jared Kushner may not be that it happened — although it is shocking that he would sit with someone like Kushner, who should be the subject of the first House Oversight Committee hearing when Democrats gain control of the House. Still, Jeffries can make the argument that political leaders talk to adversaries for a number of reasons, including that back channels to the executive branch can be useful, even if the president of the United States is off his rocker and neither he nor anyone around him is an honest broker.

The worst thing about this meeting is that Jeffries allowed himself to be entrapped in a way that a fourth grader would have seen coming. This alone raises questions about his ability to maneuver as speaker and lead an opposition party against a malignant force whose playbook, after a decade, should be patently obvious.

Let’s review the background of how we came to learn about Jeffries’ recent sit-down with Kushner, the corrupt man-child who has parlayed his marriage to the president’s favorite child into a multi-billion dollar grift. We do not know who gave the story to Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni but if you have followed the Times’ coverage of the Trump era and particularly these reporters’ stories about the Kushners, a clear pattern emerges. Jared and Ivanka Trump always come across looking like the reasonable statespeople trying to temper the crazies in the room, including Donald Trump.

(In reality, Kushner and Ivanka are worse than Trump’s enablers. They have grifted off their proximity to the president, enriching themselves at the expense of America’s national security. Kushner’s ties to foreign officials raised so many concerns during his White House stint that the national intelligence community opposed giving him a security clearance — a decision that his father-in-law disgracefully overrode. For more on Kushner, I invite you read this or this or this or this.)

The fingerprints of this leak point in one direction. And that direction explains in stark clarity why Jeffries should never have sat with Kushner, under any circumstances. More tellingly, it underscores why he is not prepared for primetime in the Trump era.

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This is the shit people are sick of.

The New York Times reported today that House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries met privately with Jared Kushner in New York, in a room supplied by a “mutual friend,” for what one source called a broad conversation about “potential areas of common ground.” Neither Jeffries nor Kushner will go into much detail about what they discussed but we can safely guess why this meeting took place. The Trump orbit expects Democrats to gain control of the House of Representatives next year and to anoint Jeffries as speaker. Suddenly, the White House has dispatched Kushner, of all people, as its diplomatic envoy to House Democratic leadership.

Pardon my language, but are you fucking kidding me? The only time Democratic officials should be meeting Kushner is when a Democratic committee member is holding the gavel and Kushner is under oath. Kushner is emblematic of everything wrong and corrupt about this administration, of which he is not officially even a part but in which he has more power than any White House advisor or cabinet member. Rather than meeting with him, Jeffries should be running against him.

Does Jeffries not get that we are all just supremely exhausted by a politics in which powerful people denounce corruption in public and then retreat behind closed doors to kibbitz with the very figures they told us were corrupt? Does he not get that we are sick of knowing that the rules are for the rest of us but not for the men at the top, who always seem to find “common ground” in some private room?

Kushner is emblematic of all this and if Jeffries had any common sense, he would understand the deep well of anger that Democrats harbor towards him. This man-child is not a Republican member whose vote Jeffries needs on a budget. He is a member of the lucky sperm club who married the president’s favorite child, which is the only reason he is not declaring his sixth bankruptcy on his family’s real estate business or following in the family tradition of serving time in federal prison.

If Jeffries needs to deal with the White House next year, he should speak to the president’s chief of staff. The conversation should go something like this: there will be no deals on anything until you give us what we demand. If you want to pass a budget, give us everything we want on taxes, health care, and the judiciary. Fire your incompetent cabinet secretaries who have caused so much death and distraction, from Pete Hegseth to Robert Kennedy, Jr. Develop a more humane immigration policy that shuts down the for-profit gulags your donors have built. If not, good luck passing a budget, because we will finally learn how to develop a message that lays the blame entirely at your feet.

Instead, Jeffries is meeting with Kushner, who has attempted to charm him by leaking that he considers Jeffries “the most serious person among Democratic leaders.” This deeply unserious man-child has the temerity to assess who among the adults in the room is actually “serious.” And yet, Jeffries has caved and agreed to give him his precious time.

Because Kushner married strategically, he is now the de facto secretary of state, while also owning a private equity firm bankrolled overwhelmingly by autocratic foreign governments whose interests intersect with the policies he helps shape as the president’s closest advisor. That’s it in a nutshell. What more does Jeffries need before he swears to haul him before a committee and make him the face of this administration’s corruption?

Kushner’s very existence is an affront to the values Democrats hold. If the party takes control in 2029, there need to be tribunals and he should be first in the dock. His many transgressions require it. The anger of the Democratic base demands it.

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Friends,

Welcome to this week’s installment of the weekly series One Thing to Make Me Smarter.

This week’s story is about the winds of war that are gathering once more. This was a difficult one to write — not just because it too a lot of research but because of what it appears is coming.

If you value reporting that tells you what matters, please become a paid subscriber. Your support makes it possible to keep pursuing difficult stories.

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As Yogi Berra famously said, “it’s deja vu all over again.” It was 2001 and I was working as the communications director for a United States Senator in Washington. That was “The Summer of the Shark,” with the media running wall-to-wall coverage of shark attacks. On the Hill, all anyone wanted to talk about was the disappearance of Chandra Levy, a Bureau of Prisons intern who was rumored to have had a sexual relationship with Rep. Gary Condit.

L’Affair Condit was a good mix of true crime and gossip in the early internet age and it’s one that the cable news networks, which were then dominant, ran with ad nauseam when they were not hyping shark attacks. As the August recess cleared the Hill of legislators, there was scant political news to report. It was all sharks and Levy, all the time.

But something else was happening that August as well. On Monday, August 6, the CIA delivered the President’s Daily Brief to George Bush. It warned of the threat posed by Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, including the suspicion that bin Laden wanted to hijack planes to force the release of the Blind Sheikh and Ramzi Usef, the masterminds of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The brief ominously added that the FBI was concerned about “suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.” The title of the PDB was “bin Laden Determined To Strike in US.”

Thirty-six days later, on September 11, he did.

History does not repeat, but it rhymes. It is August and we are focusing on whether another young woman is having an inappropriate relationship with a powerful elected official. This time, it is Natalie Harp, the human printer, emotional support aide, and Trump deification enthusiast.

I’m as up for good gossip as the next person and I’ve written my share of stories on Harp. But while the media is fanatically focusing on the exact nature of Harp’s relationship with Trump and whether Prince Harry will ever truly be welcomed back by the House of Windsor, something is brewing on the edge of Europe that urgently needs at least the same kind of attention — because it may lead to terrifying consequences.

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President Donald Trump drafts a Truth Social post alongside Vice President JD Vance and Assistant to the President Natalie Harp during a meeting with European leaders, Monday, August 18, 2025, in the Oval Office. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok

Is Natalie Harp a security threat? Counterintelligence is not merely the hunt for proven traitors but the management of access, leverage, and vulnerability before damage occurs. By that standard, the arrangement created exclusively for Harp for well over a year was plainly a security risk, for which the White House owes the country an explanation.

Yesterday, MSNOW reported that, for over a year, Harp repeatedly declined to seek the routine clearance generally obtained by West Wing staff. Two people familiar with the matter said that there is still no explanation for why she did not pursue the clearance. Still, she kept receiving extensions, even after the Secret Service and senior aides raised concerns. Only after the White House counsel’s office escalated the matter and Donald Trump personally intervened did Harp submit the requisite forms, undergo a federal background investigation, and receive a clearance.

According to MSNOW, “One national security official voiced concern that Harp’s proximity to the president — in the West Wing and his residence — gives her access to the most sensitive information around Trump, more than nearly all other senior White House officials.”

Three other people told the network that the Secret Service had raised security concerns about Harp during Trump’s first year back in office, both because of her extraordinary access to the president and because of her failure to obtain a clearance.

It is unclear whether she eventually got the clearance on her own or because of Trump’s intervention. Still, even if we take the administration’s explanation at face value that she passed the vet without help, several questions remain about the counterintelligence risk permeating this White House.

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I wasn’t going to write about Bill O’Reilly — ever — because I couldn’t stand him when I was one of the lone Democrats at Fox News and it was pretty obvious that he couldn’t stand me after I “disrespected” him on his show once by calling bullshit on something he said. But try as I might not to think of this malignant narcissist, he popped up in my timeline yesterday with a statement so brazen, so utterly devoid of self-awareness that he left me no choice but to write this.

On Tuesday, O’Reilly erupted over Sen. Jon Ossoff’s jab at Donald Trump’s close aide Natalie Harp. Ossoff’s comment — heavens to Betsy! — was that Trump would rather “travel with Natalie” than do his job.

O’Reilly decided that this was not merely cheap politics but a descent into moral depravity. “You don’t get lower than that,” he bloviated, calling Ossoff a “smear merchant.” Then, determined to demonstrate the high-minded standards for which he is famous, O’Reilly announced that he would vote for Vladimir Putin over Ossoff and suggested that, were he Trump, he would be “combing everything that Ossoff’s ever done.” (Maybe Bo Dietl can take on the task of “combing through everything Ossoff’s every done” for Trump, the way he once took on that task for Fox’s lawyers when a young woman came forward alleging that O’Reilly sexually harassed her.)

Nothing says principled objection to smear tactics like demanding that an adversary’s entire life be raked for dirt. But the real obscenity here is O’Reilly’s assumption that he gets to lecture anyone about the gutter.

First, a little background about Fox News and me. For many years, I was one of the network’s few on-air liberals. After I sued Fox and its former chairman, Roger Ailes, for sexual harassment and retaliation, I signed a nondisclosure agreement as part of the settlement. Knowing what I know now, I never would have agreed to a gag order. In fact, I later cofounded an organization dedicated to eradicating these kinds of silencing mechanisms in the workplace. (You can check out that work here.)

But I can certainly talk about O’Reilly, because my case had nothing to do with him. And here is what I can tell you about what was going on at the network while he was the undisputed primetime ratings king of cable news.

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Remember when the FBI was told to stand down from a counterintelligence inquiry into whether Donald Trump might be compromised by a foreign power? Add this week’s developments to the growing ledger of actions that raise the same disturbing question of whether Trump is advancing the interests of forces determined to weaken the United States and undermine the security of its allies.

On Sunday, Trump abruptly ordered the Pentagon to “substantially reduce” the annual U.S.–South Korean Ulchi Freedom Shield military exercises, just as the drills were getting underway. He complained about their cost, attacked Seoul for refusing to participate in his Iran debacle, bragged about his personal relationship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, and described exercises with South Korea as sending “a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile” to North Korea.

Shockingly, Trump declared North Korea “unthreatening and respectful.” Really? In just the past few years, North Korea has expanded its nuclear arsenal, repeatedly threatening to use it against South Korea, which Kim has branded a “most hostile enemy.” North Korea has also deepened its alliance with the Kremlin, signing a mutual defense pact and sending troops and weapons to support Russia’s genocidal war in Ukraine.

On Monday, Trump went further still. When reporters asked why Kim had not responded to his attempts to reestablish contact, Trump said simply: “He has.” He refused to clarify the nature of the contact but added, “Kim Jong ​Un has always treated me with great respect. I understand him. He understands me.”

None of this should be construed as merely another example of Trump’s bizarre thirst for the approval of authoritarian strongmen. Now that he has directly impacted South Korea’s security by signaling a total end to joint military exercises in the future, the question is what led the president to effectuate this policy change — seemingly out of nowhere.

The absence of evidence for a secret deal does not make the sequence of events any less alarming. In fact, the timing of Trump’s decision makes getting answers that much more urgent.

Trump’s sudden order appears to have come without prior consultation with South Korea, even though South Korean forces comprise half of the alliance whose exercises he was ordering reduced. The directive landed as the eleven-day Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise was already beginning. It appears to have taken Trump by surprise, which means that whatever caused his decision must have happened quite recently.

These are not military pageants. By our military’s own account, Ulchi Freedom Shield is an exercise intended to strengthen combined defense posture and improve the ability of American and South Korean forces to respond together to threats. This year, it involves about 18,000 South Korean troops and is designed to include command-post training and field exercises.

That interoperability matters enormously. It ensures that American and South Korean commanders do not meet each other for the first time after North Korean missiles are already in the air. Communications systems, command structures, logistics, air defenses, and targeting procedures have to work together immediately. That only happens when militaries practice together.

Trump is reducing Ulchi Freedom Shield while insisting that the nuclear dictatorship the exercises are principally intended to deter is somehow “unthreatening.” A few months ago, I actually visited the DMZ, the most heavily militarized border in the world. The South Koreans certainly don’t believe that their neighbor to the north is “unthreatening.” Standing at the border, the immense risk to Seoul, only thirty miles away, becomes quite apparent.

The timing of all this is not coincidental. Once you connect the dots, it is impossible to ignore and it may go back to the same counterintelligence concerns the FBI had a decade ago about Trump.

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Let’s talk about Natalie Harp, Donald Trump’s “human printer.” I am not going to pretend to know all about what is going on between the president and his thirty-five-year old aide but what I do know is enough to give me a good understanding of how far Trump’s state of mind has devolved from what was once normal even by his standards.

There is one image that explains Natalie Harp’s extraordinary ascent through Trumpworld better than any résumé ever could — and it underscores Trump’s completely warped worldview and self-regard. In fact, it proves that if this were anyone other than the president of the United States, medical professionals would have long ago been called in to assess whether he has a realistic view of his own humanity, in the truly literal sense of the word.

Facing what officials described as a credible threat from Iran, Trump was secretly spirited out of Turkey following last month’s NATO summit. The president publicly boarded the aircraft everyone expected him to fly home, then slithered away by hiding in a catering truck that was transferred to a smaller military jet. The original aircraft departed as a decoy.

On that decoy were Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other senior administration officials. Harp made it on to the protected plane with Trump. It should be no surprise — but not for the reasons everyone in Washington is implying.

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There is something about watching Hakeem Jeffries sit across from Kristen Welker on Meet the Press yesterday. Jeffries was doing what serious American politicians have been taught to do for generations. He put on the suit, drove down to the NBC Washington, DC bureau, and submitted to questions from the Very Serious Moderator. If he were anyone other than the Democratic leader, he would have then instructed his staffers to make sure that the bookers would invite him back.

It used to be that Hill communications aides were judged precisely by how many times their bosses would appear on the Sunday shows. For many Capitol Hill offices, that is still the absurd standard by which success is measured.

For most of my professional life, that was how power worked. In politics, television, entertainment, publishing — really, almost everywhere — there were gates and there were people standing in front of them. The goal was to get through those gatekeepers or die trying.

Today, the entire architecture of fame, media, and political power is being dismantled and the gatekeepers are disappearing. This is why politicians would be wise to pay attention not just to Donald Trump, Joe Rogan, or TikTok but to something as seemingly unrelated as an actress from Harry Potter joining OnlyFans.

(Yes, yes, I know. But I promise that this column is not really about OnlyFans.)

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The most important meeting in the escalating war over American football did not take place inside NFL headquarters or at a television network. It took place over dinner at the White House.

Last February, Rupert Murdoch and several Fox lieutenants sat down with Donald Trump over a meal to discuss a problem worth billions of dollars. Murdoch warned Trump that the NFL’s push to reopen existing media deals to give Amazon, YouTube, and other streaming platforms the right to bid more money to air football games threatened traditional television and, particularly, Fox — the smallest of the NFL’s partners. If the streamers obtained access to more football, Murdoch warned, they could decimate the broadcast networks.

Fox was effectively running to daddy to throw the NFL, its longtime partner, under the bus. In many ways, Murdoch’s position is understandable. At a time when the networks are suffering from cord-cutting and viewership decline, nothing gets as many eyeballs on broadcast television as the NFL. Without football, Fox and other broadcast networks will be on the verge of teetering even more.

There is no evidence that Trump promised Murdoch anything that night, that Murdoch promised Trump something in return for acting on his request, or that Murdoch asked Trump to unleash federal investigators on the NFL. Still, what happened after the dinner raises all sorts of questions about how Fox News’ constant fluffing of Trump may lead to an outcome that stands to transform how Americans watch the country’s most popular sport.

How this impacts the future of football depends a lot on what Trump does next — and for whom.

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There are coincidences in business and then there is a sequence of events so extraordinary that pretending not to notice it is willful blindness. That is what is happening with mainstream media coverage surrounding the sale of the Los Angeles Lakers to Joshua Kushner and former Disney chief Bob Iger.

In June 2025, billionaire financier Mark Walter agreed to acquire control of the Lakers in a deal valued at roughly $10 billion, with the NBA approving the transaction in October. But in the intervening four months, something considerably less glamorous happened. Last September, federal agents seized Walter’s phone and computer as part of a broader investigation into his sprawling financial empire.

Walter is not some neophyte sports owner. In addition to the Lakers, he owns the Dodgers and has stakes in multiple other franchises, including the Los Angeles Sparks, the Chelsea Football Club, RC Strasbourg, the Cadillac Formula 1 team, and all of the Professional Women's Hockey League. In other words, he is not some dilettante who flips sports teams months after acquiring them. In fact, he has owned the Dodgers for almost fifteen years. There is no indication that he plans to sell off any other part of his sports empire, aside from the Lakers.

We do not know precisely when prosecutors opened the investigation into Walter but there are reports that an internal whistleblower complaint had attracted federal prosecutors’ attention by 2025, when Trump returned to the White House. What we do know is that within months of Walter agreeing to buy the Lakers, the FBI was executing a search warrant against him. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan and the Securities and Exchange Commission are now examining about $16 billion in loans involving companies tied to Walter, his TWG Global conglomerate, and insurance companies under his control.

Now comes the truly remarkable part, which should raise questions about the timing of this investigation — particularly in the context of how another member of the Trump family has serendipitously found himself in the right place, at the right time when there is unlikely financial transactions from which to benefit.

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