“As an adjudicated insurrectionist, Trump is an illegitimate president according to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and therefore every official act as president will be illegitimate.”
–Mike Zonta, co-editor of OccupySF.net
The 14th Amendment states: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
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After months of speculation and anger, the Democratic National Committee finally released its autopsy of the party’s loss in the 2024 presidential election just before Memorial Day weekend. Despite pledging to release the document publicly when first elected to lead the Democratic Party’s organizational arm in early 2025, DNC Chair Ken Martin reversed course in December of last year, announcing that the report would not be published. Why? Some speculated it was merely a way for party insiders to avoid accountability for their failures; many others that it showed Kamala Harris lost because of her refusal to disavow Joe Biden’s policy toward Israel. As it turns out, the coverup was due to a much more banal and embarrassing reason: Martin’s friend whom he hired to complete the report turned in a pile of garbage.
The document is long, running 192 pages in total, but is missing entire sections, including a conclusion and executive summary. It is also, in a word, bad. It is poorly written, poorly researched, and built on half-baked axioms and middle school–level comprehension of political history. Some have alleged that it was written by ChatGPT, though LLMs can usually be trusted to avoid grammatical errors. One detail illustrates the problem: Not once does the report mention the post-pandemic inflation, which topped almost every issue poll in 2024. It’s bush-league stuff.
And yet, within two hours of the autopsy becoming public, two prominent Democratic groups released written statements attempting to capitalize on the report’s findings, claiming it showed Democrats must move to the center.
CNN first published the autopsy at 10 a.m. Eastern time. Two hours later, centrist think tank Third Way put out a statement on X, née Twitter, from president Jon Cowan. He blasted the “chronically online, highly educated, left-leaning team at the DNC” for “bury[ing]” the report, although the first line containing the attack was edited out just eight minutes later. “[T]his report,” Cowan asserted, “should be case closed” on the need for Democrats to “reclaim the vital center.” Why the group chose not to stand by its original attack on the DNC for being too educated is unclear (Third Way did not respond to a request for comment), but it is a bit of an own goal to complain about excessive education in defense of a report that largely lacks citations.
Not long after Third Way put out their short statement, Liam Kerr, co-founder of WelcomePAC—which aspires to be the “Justice Democrats of the political center”—published a Substack post at 12:31 saying that the autopsy report is “too moderate to handle,” which is “possibly a reason the DNC’s own autopsy was not released.” The brief column at several points implies the reason the report got shelved was because the DNC wanted to bury its centrist conclusions. Welcome did not respond to a request for comment asking whether this meant that they disagreed with Martin’s stated rationale that the report was “not ready for prime time.”
Setting aside how suspiciously quickly these groups could digest a nearly 200-page report, this left-bashing is a conclusion in search of evidence. The autopsy is useful because it is a hyperlink with some tangential legitimacy from being commissioned by the DNC, not because of its actual analysis. This is especially the case for Welcome, given they already have a report from 2025 that, while it hasits limitations, is a far superior moderate analysis of where the Democratic Party is currently. It’s not only complete, but it doesn’t misspell key names or misstate election margins.
Of course, there is a good chance both WelcomePAC and Third Way’s analyses were prewritten attacks on their enemies to the left, prepared in advance no matter what the report might have said. It could be that, in their haste to be the first to pin 2024’s loss on the left, they rushed their preprepared conclusions out the door without even first checking why the report was buried.
The whole autopsy debacle is an excellent window into the rotting core of Democratic politics—just not in the way Kerr and Cowan think.
FOLLOWING HIS ASCENSION TO CHAIR of the Democratic National Committee, the governing body of the Democratic Party 75 percent of the time (in presidential election years, it’s the annoyingly similarly named Democratic National Convention), Ken Martin quickly commissioned an autopsy of the party’s 2024 loss. Martin had promised the postmortem both during and immediately after his campaign. To write it, he tapped his friend and Democratic consultant Paul Rivera.
Martin took office in February 2025. Despite promising an autopsy twice, he could not even commit to a timeline. First, the report would be released in the spring of 2025. That did not happen. On the contrary, according to reporting from CNN, Rivera waited months before even contacting key figures from the Harris campaign. Then in an August 2025 DNC meeting, Martin committed to releasing the autopsy report three weeks after the meeting. That stretched to October, then November. In early December, Martin abruptly changed course and announced that the report would actually not be released at all and that he believed the party should focus on recent off-year wins in Virginia and New Jersey instead.
February saw bombshell reporting from Holly Otterbein at Axios that the autopsy team had concluded that the Biden administration’s response to Israel’s aggression in Gaza damaged Vice President Harris during the 2024 campaign, something conspicuously absent from the autopsy draft released to the public in May.
Then in May, Edward-Isaac Dovere at CNN obtained slides summarizing the key points of the report and later, when CNN approached the DNC for comment, the entire report draft. Finally, as Dovere recounts, the DNC seemingly decided to just give up and release the report.
The most charitable reading of what happened is to take everything from the DNC at face value. By this view, the organization hired someone to do a report, retained that person and publicly covered for him for months, while he could not even fulfill basic requirements like supplying research documentation, lied to its own members about what was happening, spent months Streisand effect-ing the report, and then published a grossly unprofessional draft version in a panic, still supposedly without ever managing to get a completed version or documentation from the research team. Rivera, the point person on the autopsy, continued to be involved with DNC work until April 2026. That version of events reveals a severe lack of organizational competence, which tends to be important in running a massive nationwide political party.
And that story has some major cracks. For starters, a senior staffer at one organization that was consulted for the autopsy told me in no uncertain terms that the meetings they were in, which happened at the end of summer in 2025, included not just Rivera, but several people from the DNC, and that the whole thing was recorded by the research team. Also, Ken Martin said absolutely nothing about the poor quality of the report until the day it was made public—in fact, he had touted its insights for months.
More than what Martin said, though, the substance of the report draft would seem to impugn his insistence that it was being used to improve the DNC’s political strategy. Most of the defining elements of the campaign go unmentioned. In addition to glossing over Gaza, there is no discussion at all of Biden’s age and debate performance, or the failure of the party to pressure him to stand aside until after he imploded on national television, forcing Harris into an election already well under way and depriving the party of a rigorous primary to select the strongest candidate. As noted above, the report only mentions “inflation” in the context of inflation-adjusted campaign spending and fundraising despite polling finding that inflation and the cost of living was the single most important issue in the 2024 election. The phrase “cost of living” is totally absent.
Similarly, there is no mention of Harris’s brother-in-law Tony West taking over the campaign’s economic policy and messaging and reorienting it to be more friendly toward corporate interests. In fact, the word “populist” only appears once, in reference to how Trump appealed to working-class men.
The idea that anyone could understand politics in 2024 without covering inflation, populist messaging, or Israel and Gaza is ludicrous. It would be like a Republican autopsy of the 2008 election that didn’t mention the financial crisis or the war in Iraq.
Amidst these yawning lacunae, the autopsy does clumsily repeat some centrist shibboleths, which is probably what endeared it to Third Way types. It takes a moment to cover the “Kamala is for they/them” ad (though without the serious analysis Rob Flaherty, Harris’s deputy campaign manager, brought to bear on it), celebrates the halcyon days of the Democratic Leadership Council and the Democratic realignment it brought about through Bill Clinton, and blasts identity politics.
DESPITE THE ENTIRE DOCUMENT being riddled with annotations from DNC staff noting the lack of sourcing and factual inconsistencies, perhaps the most telling section is one largely unadorned by red ink: the historical section touting Ron Brown and the DLC for the return of successful Democratic politics. The DLC’s tacking to the center is something of a founding myth for the modern Democratic establishment. According to the autopsy, “In 1989, after losing three straight presidential campaigns, our party refocused the conversation around policy and purpose to reclaim the vital center of American discourse.”
The operative term in “founding myth,” however, is “myth.” It’s obviously true that DLC-aligned Bill Clinton won in 1992, but celebrations of his moderation misstate the order of events. Clinton’s ’92 campaign was fairly heterodox and included a healthy dose of progressive economic policy. The more aggressive pivot to the center under Clinton happened throughout 1993 and 1994. As such, the 1994 midterms are the first real referendum on third way politics. And Democrats suffered a shellacking there. Even as the report celebrates Brown’s focus on “the races we win,” it makes no mention of the fact that the 1990s saw the end of a half-century of Democratic dominance in Congress.
The early Obama years, toward which the autopsy is less reverent, rhyme with the Clinton myth. Centrists often mention Clinton and Obama in the same breath, as successful Democrats who won by pivoting to the center. But both of them tacked to the center mostly after taking office thanks in large part to Republican mistakes, and then proceeded to oversee midterm routs. There are certainly things to be learned from those campaigns, but those lessons don’t conform to a narrow view of “moderate, moderate, moderate” unless they are misrepresented.
Anyway, arguably the best point the autopsy makes is one commonly heard on the left: the crumbling of party infrastructure. It mentions “disinvestment in state Democratic parties at the start of the Obama presidency” brought on by establishment resignation to economic determinism, which led party leaders to believe that the work of political organizing was not worth doing. Wherever one falls ideologically, the question of organizing capacity is foundational to coming back from electoral defeat or indeed to any kind of politics. Failing to produce even a written report on the party’s loss does not speak well to its attempts to rebuild institutional capacity.
AS THE REPUBLICAN TRIFECTA in Washington continues to wallow in corruption and the destruction of democracy, much of the Democratic Party seems determined to do whatever it takes to avoid meeting the moment. Over the past year, two prominent Democratic governors have aligned with Republicans to kill pro-labor measures, House leadership has worked to kill a ban on congresspeople trading stocks, and the governor of Colorado (and onetime darling of the abundance crowd) commuted the sentence of a county clerk who tried to overturn the 2020 election. He then protested his censure by the state Democratic Party by duct-taping his own mouth shut on a Zoom call.
The autopsy itself is small potatoes. But it matters for what the entire episode reveals about Democratic Party politics. At a time when organizational effectiveness is paramount, it makes the DNC look incompetent. At a time when Democrats need to reassess the approach they’ve been leaning on, it falls back on tired but comfortable fables about the salvation of the center. More importantly, it reveals that those promising we’ll find salvation through moderation aren’t merely reporting the facts as they see them. They’re offering conclusions based on information they themselves haven’t even read. And amidst a five-alarm fire for American democracy brought on in part by Democrats failing to meet the moment when they held power previously, the report refuses to even mention many of the defining issues of 2024. There are hard lessons to be learned here. They just aren’t the ones centrists are pushing.
Pro-Palestinian protesters confront supporters of Israel outside The New School in lower Manhattan as tensions over the war in Gaza continue on campuses and inside of colleges and universities throughout the city on May 02, 2024 in New York City. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
This story originally appeared in Prism on June 04, 2026.
When members of The New School’s Student Senate were faced with a report detailing how Hillel International was providing material and logistical support to Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, they voted on May 1 to cut all ties with their campus chapter of the national Jewish college network and to strip its funding. The student leaders hoped the school’s administration would go on to investigate Hillel’s presence on its New York City campus.
Instead, after an intense pressure campaign by pro-Israel groups, advocates, and elected representatives, the university’s administration is now investigating the student senators who voted to cut ties with Hillel.
“We were hoping that the university would act on the the evidence provided by the Student Senate report about Hillel’s complicity in genocide. They are investigating us instead,” said Ryder Glickman, who is chair of The New School Student Senate and helped produce the report.
The Student Senate acted upon the recommendations of the Registered Student Organizations (RSO) Compliance Committee, which presented a comprehensive report about the ways in which Hillel had assisted the Israeli military during its ongoing genocide in Gaza.
The report found that students from The New School and a host of other New York City-based schools volunteered at the Israeli military’s Hatzerim Air Force Base in January 2024, as part of the Hillel on Base program. “Our students are packaging a days worth of rations to our soldiers,” stated an Instagram story by Hillel at Baruch College, the umbrella organization of Hillel at The New School, alongside a photo from the airbase, according to the report.
The Hatzerim airbase reportedly has been used by the Israeli Air Force for hundreds of airstrikes in Gaza, with F-15s from the base dropping bombs in civilian areas.
In the days following the publication of the report and the Student Senate vote to terminate funding to The New School’s Hillel, the university’s administration acted swiftly to discredit the findings.
“To avoid any misunderstanding, the University Student Senate does not have the authority to determine official status, funding eligibility, or the recognition of RSOs. Our Hillel chapter remains, as it always has been, in good standing, eligible for funding, and supporting Jewish life at The New School,” said an schoolwide email sent to from the university signed by President Joel Towers, Provost Richard Kessler, and Vice Provost Robert Mack.
“By distorting a qualified student organization and characterizing it as something it is not,” the statement continued, “the [University Student Senate] is using its platform to target fellow students in a misguided attempt to hold those students responsible for the acts of governments.”
On May 3, two days after the vote, Ilya Bratman, the executive director of Hillel at Baruch College, wrote in an email to Towers and other members of The New School’s leadership that the Student Senate’s actions were “a direct attack on Jewish students.” Bratman bcc’d the Student Senate email address, and members shared the email with Prism.
“We hope to meet with you in the coming days so that you can hear directly from the students affected by this action, and so that we can better understand the university’s plan of action moving forward. The [University Student Senate] has shown no indication that it intends to step back from these egregious and deeply troubling actions,” Bratman wrote.
The New School administration and Hillel at Baruch College did not respond to Prism’s inquiry about whether university leadership and Hillel officials had the meeting.
Days later, on May 8, Glickman received an email, viewed by Prism, from The New School’s office of Student Equity, Accessibility & Title IX. The email said that the school was investigating him for an allegation that the Student Senate’s decision to cut ties with Hillel was in “potential violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on the basis of race, color, or national origin in any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” The administration later clarified to Glickman that the university is investigating all student senators involved in the vote.
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External pushback
The university launched its investigation into student senators following a string of social media activity by pro-Israel groups, advocates, media, and elected representatives attacking the report.
Glickman was called a “virulent anti-Israel activist” in an X post by Canary Mission, the secretive group notorious for doxing and targeting pro-Palestinian activists.
A string of articles by pro-Israel publications, including The New York Post and The Times of Israel, reported on The New School administration rejecting the Student Senate vote while omitting the details and evidence found by the RSO about Hillel’s ties with the Israeli military.
Two New York members of Congress took to social media to denounce the report. Rep. Dan Goldman—who recently marched in New York’s Israel Day parade featuring Israeli cabinet ministers who are wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes or have made genocidal statements about Palestinians—said the students were engaged in “hateful and vile antisemitism.” Rep. Ritchie Torres also condemned the vote, calling it “shameful” and “discrimination against Jewish individuals and institutions.” Goldman and Torres are heavily backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
“The fact that there was such open repression and universal condemnation of the report shows that the administration’s response was coordinated with Zionist organizations accusing us of antisemitism,” Glickman told Prism. “This is extremely worrying when we made a very basic case about international law.”
Students volunteering with the Israeli military
Hillel at Baruch, which organized trips to Israel, acts as an umbrella organization for chapters in multiple New York schools in addition to The New School, including Fordham University, John Jay College, and City College.
“Volunteer on an IDF (Israeli Defense Force) base in Southern Israel, wear IDF uniform, give back to the community on base, and explore Israel!” reads a description about the program on Hillel at Baruch’s website.
The 38-page report by the RSO compliance committee found that Hillel at Baruch organized several trips between May 2022 and January 2025 for students to volunteer at multiple Israeli army and air force bases. Hillel International also operates the Onward Israel program which organizes internship trips for American students to Israel and facilitates volunteering opportunities within the Israeli military.
The report further found that in July 2024, another post from Hillel at Baruch and New School Hillel’s Instagram account said, “Tonight, some of our onward students had the incredible opportunity to volunteer at the Tze’elim army base, where they helped prepare a barbecue for over 700 soldiers from the Oketz, Kfir, Golani and Handasa units in the IDF.”
Soldiers of the Golani Brigade’s 631st Reconnaissance Battalion were behind the March 24, 2025, killing of 15 Palestinian emergency responders that included Red Crescent ambulance workers in Rafah, according to an investigation by Haaretz.
In May 2024, a BBC analysis found that 11 soldiers of the Kfir brigade were responsible for posting photos and videos of Palestinian prisoners being abused.
By registering for the Hillel on Base program, participants also automatically register for the Volunteers for Israel (VFI) program, the report found.
“VFI is the ONLY organization that creates opportunities for American students to volunteer in Israel on IDF bases,” says a description of the program, which includes activities such as packing medical supplies and repairing machinery and equipment for military units.
The VFI program is run by Sar-El, an Israeli volunteer nonprofit organization under the direction of the Israeli Logistics Corps, a support branch of the Israeli military, establishing direct collaboration between Hillel and the Israeli government, according to the report.
“I am nauseated by the fact that I have classmates who have provided direct material and logistical support to genocide,” Glickman said.
A week after The New School vote, the student leadership of the Hillel chapter of Middlebury College, Vermont, voted to change its name to the Jewish Association at Middlebury, after growing demand from its members to disaffiliate from Hillel International and its activities, according to reporting by the school’s newspaper.
Editorial Team: Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor Lara Witt, Top Editor Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor
Biplob Kumar Das is an investigative reporter based in New York City. His reporting focuses on politics and business. He graduated from Columbia Journalism School with a Master’s in Journalism in May 2025. More by Biplob Kumar Das
Healthcare workers put on personal protective equipment (PPE) in the dressing area under the supervision of specialists before going to examine patients in the isolation ward during their shift at the Ebola Treatment Center (ETC) following its rehabilitation by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Munigi on June 2, 2026. Photo by Jospin Mwisha / AFP via Getty Images
In 2018, when the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) experienced a severe Ebola outbreak, more than 30 experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), close to 20 disaster-response specialists from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and 120 additional USAID staff were on the ground attempting to manage the outbreak, according to estimates from Friends of USAID, an advocacy organization mainly made up of ex-USAID staffers. With that level of staffing in 2018, by and large, they succeeded in limiting the extent to which the disease spread.
This year, as a particularly virulent strain of the Ebola virus — the Bundibugyo strain, against which there is no approved vaccine and for which there are no medicinal cures — runs rampant in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Friends of USAID estimate there is only one CDC staffer on the ground there, along with five additional State Department personnel. There are of course no USAID workers present, since the Trump administration dismantled USAID during the purges led by the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) in 2025, summarily firing local health care contractors around the world, including in countries with extreme poverty rates such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The consequences have already been devastating. In past Ebola outbreaks, even before mass testing of disease victims got underway, the CDC and USAID were able to tell when an epidemic was picking up steam based on on-the-ground medical observations and data about excess mortality figures. And, in response, they were able to position medical resources effectively.
In the current outbreak, the decimated remnants of the CDC were caught unawares, only finding out about the outbreak once hundreds, and possibly thousands, of people had already been infected — thus making it far more likely that this outbreak will prove particularly difficult to corral.
Because so many experts have been fired over the past 16 months, and because political overseers have been limiting what the remaining scientists can say and write, “the CDC is not really functional anymore,” Angela Rasmussen, professor of virology at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, told Truthout. Rasmussen, who also serves as science chair for the Save America Movement, a nonpartisan organization that works to stop ongoing assaults on public health, added that the administration was no longer bothering to consult remaining CDC experts when making policy to respond to the outbreak. “It used to be an evidence-driven process and now it’s a political-driven process,” Rasmussen said.
“I equate it to having the mayor’s office taking on a fire without having a fire department or a fire hose,” Demetre Daskalakis, former director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told Truthout. Daskalakis, who resigned last August because he was so concerned about the direction that the Department of Health and Human Services was taking under Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s leadership, says that when faced with grave public health challenges, the administration is simply resorting to “a lot of posturing, with, I think, bad consequences.”
I equate it to having the mayor’s office taking on a fire without having a fire department or a fire hose.
Faced with the twin public health emergencies of the Ebola virus outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, alongside the hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship from which people disembarked to the four corners of the Earth, the Trump administration’s response has been, at best, ad hoc. Instead of implementing expert-driven protocols, it has leaned on its nativist instincts to simply attempt to lock the virus out. That attempt proved a colossal failure during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. And, according to Rasmussen and Daskalakis, the signs are not auspicious for it being a successful strategy against the global health crises of 2026.
For U.S. residents exposed to hantavirus, the Trump administration has ordered mandatory 42-day quarantines in a secure facility in Omaha, Nebraska — despite the fact that experts say the virus doesn’t spread easily and that home quarantine would be just as effective. For U.S. residents exposed to the Ebola virus in Africa, the response has been to refuse them entry back into the United States and to instead have them isolated and, if need be, treated in Kenya — a situation that Rasmussen and other experts say makes little sense given the huge investments made over the past decade in secure biocontainment units in the U.S. “They’re throwing evidence-based risk assessment out the window, and are trampling people’s 14th Amendment rights,” Rasmussen told Truthout. “If we’re going to take Americans’ freedom away, there should be a real basis for that — and there’s not.”
It took so long for the CDC to say anything about hantavirus or to hear from the DRC about Ebola. Relationships that took decades to build have simply disappeared.
Telling people in the U.S. that if they get exposed to the Ebola virus, they won’t be allowed back into their home country for months is, experts believe, a surefire way to discourage U.S. doctors and public health professionals from heading to Africa to try to contain the outbreak. In other words, it is a strategy all but guaranteed to make a bad situation worse.
At the same time, African victims of the disease, who could certainly benefit from access to the treatment center being established in Kenya, are being deliberately excluded from it. “There’s an equity issue,” Daskalakis says of this policy. This, too, will end up hurting public health, as the Ebola patients denied access to the Kenyan facility will, in all likelihood, end up spreading the disease further in their communities or in poorly resourced medical facilities to which some eventually may turn.
Aryn Backus, a CDC employee who has been on administrative leave for more than a year since her job was targeted by DOGE, and who is now deputy executive director of the National Public Health Coalition, told Truthout that the ham-handed U.S. response to the outbreak overseas makes it more likely that the disease will ultimately find its way to the United States. “Diseases don’t understand borders,” she said. And, without detailed international coordination, the likelihood of their spreading far and wide grows.
“We are seemingly not at the table anymore,” Daskalakis added, as he detailed the myriad ways that the U.S.’s role as global public health leader has been corroded. “It took so long for the CDC to say anything about hantavirus or to hear from the DRC about Ebola. Relationships that took decades to build have simply disappeared.”
Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist and a part-time lecturer at the University of California at Davis. Abramsky’s latest book, American Carnage: How Trump, Musk, and DOGE Butchered the US Government, is available for pre-order now and will be released in January. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, New York Magazine, The Village Voice and Rolling Stone. He also writes a weekly political column. Originally from England, with a bachelor’s in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford University and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he now lives in Sacramento, California. More by Sasha Abramsky
US President Donald Trump holds artists’ renderings as he talks to reporters about his proposed White House ballroom next to the worksite on May 19, 2026 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“Corporations wrote big checks to build Trump’s golden ballroom,” said Rep. Jason Crow. “Now they’re receiving billions of dollars in kickbacks—paid for by your tax dollars.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warrensuggested President Donald Trump is running a “pay-to-play loyalty program for wealthy donors” after a report on Thursday revealed that more than half the companies that contributed to his White House ballroom project have been awarded government contracts over the last six months, totaling over $50 billion.
Examining the 27 publicly known corporate donors to the president’s $400 million gold-plated vanity project, the watchdog group Public Citizenfound that 14 of them—more than half—had received either new or expanded contracts over the past six months after donating millions to the ballroom and appearing at a lavish White House banquet in October as Trump prepared to demolish the building’s East Wing.
Over two-thirds, 19 of the 27 companies, received government contracts since fiscal year 2021, totaling over $338 billion. At least 16 out of 27 are also either facing federal enforcement actions and/or have had them suspended by the Trump administration.
“These giant corporations aren’t funding the Trump ballroom fiasco out of the goodness of their hearts. They have massive interests before the federal government, and they hope to curry favor with, and receive favorable treatment from, the Trump administration,” said Public Citizendemocracy advocate Jon Golinger, an author of the report.
According to Public Citizen, more than half of the publicly identified corporate donors to Trump’s White House ballroom project have won new or expanded federal contracts worth over $50 billion during the past six months.
By far the biggest monetary beneficiary has been the military contractor Lockheed Martin, which received a $43.8 billion in new or expanded contract funding over the past six months after it pledged $10 million to fund the dance hall last fall.
Booz Allen Hamilton, a consulting company that serves military and intelligence agencies and pledged at least $5 million to the project, received $4 billion in contracts over the same period.
Meanwhile, Palantir—the data-mining surveillance giant with deep ties to the Trump administration—reaped over $1 billion in contracts after giving its own $5 million donation.
“Millions to fund Trump’s bizarre fever dreams are nothing compared to the billions they’re getting back in contracts and favorable government enforcement decisions,” Golinger said. “The American people are paying the price.”
Other ballroom benefactors that have brought in more than $100 million worth of contracts over the past six months include Microsoft, Amazon, HP, and Caterpillar, while T-Mobile, Google, NextEra Energy, and Comcast have all brought in more than $10 million.
Public Citizen noted that while the White House has publicized some of the ballroom donors and others have been revealed by news organizations, not all of the companies that have contributed to the project are publicly known, since the secret funding agreement obtained by the group through a Freedom of Information Act request allows their identities to remain private.
In a statement to The Washington Post, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle suggested that critics should be grateful that Trump was soliciting donations from the wealthy for this very important undertaking.
“The same critics who are alleging fake conflicts of interest would also complain if American taxpayers were footing the bill for these long-overdue renovations,” he said, ignoring the fact that Trump has previously pressuredRepublicans in Congress to appropriate hundreds of millions in taxpayer funding to secure the ballroom.
Ingle added that “the donors for the White House ballroom project represent a wide array of great American companies and generous individuals, all of whom are contributing to make the People’s House better for generations to come.”
But several Democratic members of Congress have pointed to it as evidence of Trump selling out the government “to the highest bidder.”
“Corporations wrote big checks to build Trump’s golden ballroom,” said Rep. Jason Crow (D-Col.). “Now they’re receiving billions of dollars in kickbacks—paid for by your tax dollars.”
“Wild coincidence or taxpayer-funded corruption?” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). “You be the judge.”
Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) said that “the part that should make your blood boil” is the fact that many of the companies identified in the report “were facing federal enforcement actions, antitrust reviews, labor cases, [or] securities charges.”
“Many of those cases have been quietly dropped or scaled back since Trump took office. You write a check, your legal problems disappear,” Levin said. “That’s not a coincidence.”
“You cannot afford to donate to Trump’s ballroom, so he does nothing to improve the quality of your life,” said Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). “But for those who can, there are billions in government contracts.”
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CBS Sunday Morning May 31, 2026 More than 6,300 children under 18 – some as young as two months old, and almost all with no criminal record – have been arrested by federal immigration authorities during President Trump’s second term. Nearly half have been detained by ICE at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center outside San Antonio. “Sunday Morning” correspondent Jim Axelrod talks with a family that was held at Dilley for almost four months; and with Rep. Joaquin Castro, who is calling for Dilley to be shut down due to inhumane conditions, charges the Trump administration denies. “CBS News Sunday Morning” features stories on the arts, music, nature, entertainment, sports, history, science and Americana, and highlights unique human accomplishments and achievements. Check local listings for “CBS News Sunday Morning” broadcast times.
Congressional candidate Connie Chan and Rep. Nancy Pelosi attend a rally supporting Chan in San Francisco on Saturday. Pelosi has endorsed Chan to fill her seat representing San Francisco in the House.Benjamin Fanjoy/For the S.F. Chronicle
During my 30 years as a journalist, I’ve heard plenty of people deny, defend and explain away corruption. But only once did I ever see a San Francisco public official explicitly praise misconduct by a government official.
Once employed by San Francisco, Thom became known as the “phantom supervisor” because, several of his underlings told me, he was often absent during his shifts due to what records said were simultaneous full-time jobs with the state fair police in Sacramento and then the state lottery police, while ostensibly working for San Francisco.
I didn’t envy Connie Chan, then the Recreation and Parks Department’s spokeswoman, who was going to be saddled with the task of defending that mess. To my surprise, she did it with relish, admonishing me for my reporting, asking how dare I tarnish the reputation of a hard-working Asian American city employee who was only trying to provide for his family.
Chan, I was later alarmed to learn, gained a seat on the Board of Supervisors in part by positioning herself as a corruption fighter, dishing weak-sauce scandals to the press.
On Wednesday, I was even more appalled to learn she advanced to a runoff against state Sen. Scott Wiener to replace Rep. Nancy Pelosi in Congress.
The endorsement is a sad epilogue to a monumental career. But it may be fitting. Pelosi, like Chan, has experience with defending the indefensible.
For years, she resisted bringing bills to the House floor that would have limited financial trading by members of Congress, stating that her colleagues should be allowed to participate in the “free market economy.”
Pelosi has, of course, achieved great things, not least of which was to usher the Affordable Care Act into law under President Obama.
Back home, however, Pelosi tended to less visible tasks, such as helping provide what ended up being at least $1 billion in public funds to prepare the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard for what turned out to be the basis for profits of a private company connected to former Mayor Willie Brown.
Chan has promoted herself during her campaign to succeed Pelosi as having “worked for the people,” but hasn’t spent much time touting herself as a good government candidate.
Instead, she’s positioned herself as a “progressive,” savoring endorsements from Pelosi and groups like the San Francisco branch of the Progressive Democrats of America, as well as labor groups such as the San Francisco Building Trades Council.
Even so, there’s more to being an effective member of the House than picking the “progressive” lane and gathering endorsements. Chan’s opponent, Wiener, is one of our state’s most effective legislators. After decades in which Sacramento was known as the place where housing legislation went to die, Wiener arrived and pushed through housing bills with teeth, requiring communities to do their part in addressing our housing shortage.
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Chan, by contrast, is a NIMBY. That alone should be enough to keep San Franciscans from voting for her. But I also keep going back to her 2011 outlandish defense of Thom and the misconduct I described in my Park Patrol article.
The best way to honor the best of Pelosi is to send to Washington another legislator who knows how to get results, rather than someone the speaker emeritus endorsed during a career moment I hope we’ll eventually forget.
Matt Smith has been a journalist for three decades, half of which time was spent as a San Francisco city columnist.
No, he’s not over over. I wish he were. But something important has changed.
Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to direct him to withdraw U.S. forces from Iran or win approval from Congress to continue the war. It was a remarkable rebuke. Four Republicans sided with Democrats.
His “short-term excursion” into Iran, which he promised in late February would last no more than “four to five weeks,” has now entered its fourth month, with no end in sight. His claim to have “destroyed” Iran’s missiles and drones is belied by Iran’s massive attack on Kuwait on Tuesday. Iran still controls the Strait of Hormuz. Its highly enriched uranium remains hidden. Even MAGAs have had enough of his forever war.
Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are rebelling. They’ve forced Trump to abandon the $1 billion request for his gilded ballroom, which was becoming ever more grotesque as Americans struggle to make ends meets.
His $1.8 billion Thug Fund is also dead, largely because a significant number of previously gutless Republicans (including — gasp! — Lindsey Graham) pushed back.
Trump’s name is coming off the Kennedy Center because a federal judge ordered it off and no Republicans came to his defense.
Even Trump’s endorsement is losing its magic. On Tuesday, Iowa voters rejected Trump’s choice for governor, Randy Feenstra, whom Trump called “MAGA all the way.” It was Trump’s first major endorsement loss.
And even with Stephen Colbert off the air, Trump has become a bigger late-night joke than ever. All the entertainers — even the B- and C-list also-rans desperate for exposure — dropped out of his 250th anniversary ego trip. So he’s going to be the headliner in a four-hour Fidel Castro speech. Good luck with that.
His Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the White House’s South Lawn has become a one-liner. To attend, military members have to pay their way to Washington and cannot have a waist size more than 55 percent of their height. (“No Fatties at UFC White House Event,” declared a Facebook page.) We’ll see how many show up.
As if all this weren’t enough, he’s nominated an unqualified sycophantic MAGA mortgage clown to be the director of national intelligence — an action so absurd that even Mitch McConnell had to object: “Anyone performing this role of such immense public trust must have the extensive national security experience required by statute, and no nominee who falls short of this requirement will earn my vote.” Get ready for a circus of a Senate confirmation fight.
No, Trump’s not done. He’ll continue to torment us with his cruelty, corruption, and criminality for some time, so we have to keep fighting.
But his power is disappearing. He’s become a lame duck whose quack no longer causes anyone to quake.
He has no one to blame but himself. His hubris finally reached its own breaking point.
House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries helped Republicans tank Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s war powers resolution to limit US military involvement in Lebanon on Thursday, holding up the effort to curb the conflict for at least another several weeks.
Despite Israel’s invasion of Lebanonpushing deeper, with more than 3,500 people killed and 1.2 million displaced since early March, the Michigan Democrat’s resolution was defeated in a 324-92 vote, with a large number in her own party joining Jeffries (D-NY) and the Republican majority against it.
In a joint statement shortly ahead of the vote on Tlaib’s resolution, House Minority Leader Jeffries of New York, along with Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), and Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), said: “We stand with the Lebanese people, the government of Lebanon, and the Lebanese Armed Forces in their efforts to live peacefully and defeat Hezbollah.” The statement included no mention of Israel.
The lawmakers said they’d support a different resolution introduced by Tlaib on Wednesday, which was crafted in tandem with Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
That resolution likewise required President Donald Trump to remove US forces “from any hostilities in Lebanon” within seven days of passage. But it also added the caveat that it could not be construed to “prevent or limit security cooperation with the Lebanese Armed Forces.”
Our government is supplying Israel with white phosphorus bombs that melt human flesh to the bone. These bombs are targeting civilians, schools, hospitals, and places of worship. The U.S. must end its complicity in these war crimes, and pass the Lebanon War Powers Resolution. pic.twitter.com/HUeBrd8Esl
— Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (@RepRashida) June 4, 2026
Jeffries, Clark, and Aguilar said, “There are no US servicemembers involved in combat operations or hostilities in Lebanon.”
However, supporters of Tlaib’s original measure have noted that the US military is heavily involved in Israel’s actions in the country without having boots on the ground.
“The US is actively cooperating with Israel on coordinating strikes, intelligence sharing, and planning, including Trump green-lighting major attacks on Lebanon multiple times,” Janet Abou-Elias, a researcher at the Democratizing Foreign Policy Project at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told Common Dreams.
While the resolution’s passage wouldn’t “end US involvement overnight,” she said, “it fundamentally changes the landscape of accountability” by giving opponents of US collaboration a legal mechanism to conduct oversight.
And while the resolution would not cut off US military aid to Israel, Abou-Elias said Israel could continue its occupation “only for a limited period of time” without US assistance.
“Israel would be absorbing losses while also draining its broader manpower and firepower reserves,” she said. “At some point, the cost-benefit of continuing their occupation without US support would shift.”
Because war powers resolutions are privileged, they can be forced to a vote even without approval from the Republican majority.
However, committees are given 15 days to act before a resolution is forced onto the floor, followed by three days for a House vote. This means it could take until June 21 for the new version to pass. The Senate would also have to pass it, and it would then take another week to go into effect.
“The people of Lebanon can’t wait another month for Congress to act,” Tlaib said on social media following news that the proposal would be voted down. “Every day that we do nothing, 11 more Lebanese children are killed or injured by the Israeli military in this US-supported invasion. Congress must pass today’s Lebanon war powers resolution.”
Abou-Elias said that despite the setback, Tlaib’s introduction of the measure was not a wasted effort.
“Even if the resolution doesn’t pass today, the vote forces every representative on record on the US participation in the attacks on Lebanon,” she said. “That alone has value.”
Though resolution failed, proponents of the measure championed the 92 lawmakers who did vote in favor.
“Congress’s failure to act has thus far enabled multiple Israeli invasions of Lebanon and war crimes against Lebanese civilians,” said Beth Miller, political director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, in a statement. “Tonight’s vote demonstrated that a growing block of members of Congress are beginning to listen to their constituents. Americans don’t want the US involved in atrocities against Lebanese, Palestinians, Iranians, or anyone. This vote is just the beginning, and we will continue to organize until all of Congress acts to end these atrocities.”
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An election worker processes mail-in ballots at the Los Angeles County Ballot Processing Center during California’s state primary election in the City of Industry on June 2, 2026.
(Photo by Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)
“That this administration would direct USPS to adopt measures to impede voters from casting their ballots is shameful.”
A leading civil rights organization on Wednesday accused the US Postal Service of unlawful complicity in President Donald Trump’s assault on mail-in voting, which he launched in late March with an alarming executive order that is facing its own legal challenges.
With a new legal motion filed in a federal court in Washington, DC, the NAACP is challenging rules the Postal Service unveiled last week that would require states to notify USPS “of the individuals to whom they are mailing a mail-in or absentee ballot.” The rules would also “identify new standards for the envelope design and review for outbound and return ballot envelopes.”
The NAACP’s filing—which reignites a pandemic-era legal fight—warns that under the proposed rule, “USPS would refuse to transmit mail-in ballots in states that did not use specific envelopes with specific codes, and would refuse to deliver ballots for voters not included on a state-specific Mail-In and Absentee Participation List.”
That would violate a previous USPS agreement, reached in 2021, to prioritize “timely delivery of election mail” and run afoul of federal law, the motion argues, calling for a swift injunction to stop the Postal Service from implementing the rules.
“The proposed rule manifests USPS’ intent to disregard its commitment to timely deliver mail-in ballots to all voters,” said Sam Spital, associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF). “This all is part of a coordinated effort by this Administration to create chaos and confusion in our elections, which creates particular dangers for Black voters who are already at the greatest risk of suffering discrimination in voting. The attempt to usurp the right of eligible voters to cast mail-in ballots is directly contrary to the legally enforceable agreement the parties reached in this case, and to USPS’ obligations under federal law. We are confident it will be rejected by the courts.”
Allison Zieve, director of Public Citizen Litigation Group—which joined LDF in filing the suit on behalf of the NAACP—said it is “shameful” that the Trump administration would “direct USPS to adopt measures to impede voters from casting their ballots.”
“And that USPS would allow itself to be used for political purposes to advance the president’s irrational objection to mail-in voting is disgraceful, unlawful, and contrary to the commitments it made to settle our [2020] litigation,” Zieve added.
The proposed USPS rules stem from an executive order that Trump issued on March 31, instructing the agency to obtain from states “a list of voters eligible to vote in a federal election in such state to whom the state intends to provide a mail-in or absentee ballot to be transmitted via the USPS.” Trump directed his handpicked postmaster general, David Steiner, to advance “provisions specifying that the USPS shall not transmit mail-in or absentee ballots from any individual” who is not included on state mail-in ballot participation lists.
Last week, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Washington, DC declined to immediately block the president’s executive order. But another federal judge in Boston “sharply questioned” Trump’s order during a hearing for a similar yet separate legal challenge earlier this week.
Attorneys representing the plaintiffs in the latter case said in a statement after Tuesday’s hearing that “the Trump administration is attempting to seize that power for itself with an unlawful and dangerous executive order.”
“Together with our courageous clients, we’re seeking a preliminary injunction to stop further chaos in our elections, uphold the rule of law, and protect the millions of citizens who rely on mail-in voting, including people with disabilities, students, rural voters, and the elderly,” the attorneys said. “We won’t let the Trump administration continue to trample on the fundamental right to vote.”
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Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche testifies before a House Committee on Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies hearing at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC on June 2, 2026.
(Photo by Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“If the administration and its allies in Congress are truly walking away from the $1.8 billion criminal enrichment fund, they should have no problem joining us in banning it outright,” the Maryland Democrat said.
Though acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche has said President Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion “weaponization” slush fund is now “dead,” Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin on Thursday unveiled draft legislation that would eliminate what he describes as a “super pardon” buried in the Department of Justice settlement reached last month.
While Blanche—whom Trump said he plans to nominate for a full term as attorney general—has backed off the fund that would allow the DOJ to disburse taxpayer money to Trump allies and January 6 insurrectionists amid bipartisan backlash, a news release from Raskin’s (D-Md.) office on Thursday said the acting AG has done nothing to rescind “the mother of all sweetheart deals he tucked into his unprecedented settlement with Trump.”
The settlement, created in exchange for Trump dropping a $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for improperly leaking his tax returns, gives Trump, his entire family, and all their business ventures total and permanent immunity for “any matters currently pending or that could be pending” not only before the IRS, which Trump sued in the case that led to the settlement, but also before “other agencies or departments.”
The Maryland Democrat also said that despite retreating on the “weaponization” fund, the DOJ is still using its Judgment Fund to improperly reward the president’s allies.
According to the Washington Post, as of April, the DOJ had already paid $8.5 million to prominent Trump allies who claimed to have been wrongly targeted by the Biden administration, even though no court formally determined that they had been.
“If the administration and its allies in Congress are truly walking away from the $1.8 billion criminal enrichment fund, they should have no problem joining us in banning it outright,” Raskin said. “But no one should be fooled by Trump and Blanche’s tactical pause: Nothing has been dismantled, and nothing has been renounced. Trump’s scheme to raid the Judgment Fund, bankroll political allies using taxpayer cash, and score a sweeping Super Pardon is alive and well and remains a clear and present threat to our constitutional order.”
Raskin, who is the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, introduced a new legislative package on Thursday, aiming to destroy the remaining vestiges of the DOJ deal and ensure that future presidents can never use federal settlements to reward themselves.
The Block Lawless Agreements and Nullify Corrupt Handouts and Emoluments (BLANCHE) Act, bars sitting presidents from entering settlements for money damages with the federal government and requires independent judicial oversight of any such agreements, including ones that grant the president “super pardons” like the one granted to Trump by the DOJ.
“My legislative package would end the slush fund, outlaw collusive settlements, and make clear that no president can use taxpayer dollars to cut partisan loyalty reward checks,” Raskin said.
He also introduced the Constitutional Rights Defense Act, which would allow individuals to file suits against the federal government when their rights are violated by agents of the state.
In contrast with the January 6 Capitol riot participants who have been claiming compensation under the fund, Raskin said his bill “ensures that all people who have actually had their constitutional rights violated by the government will have access to justice.”
Raskin has previously introduced legislation that would block the use of federal funds to finance the Trump IRS settlement and prohibit payouts to January 6 Capitol riot participants and other Trump allies, including family members.
“Congress must act with urgency to shut down this presidential plunder once and for all,” Raskin said.
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