Politics

As voices that are independent and critical of the current administration vanish, please support PoliticusUSA by becoming a subscriber. Subscribe now In a shocking move, CBS announced that it would cancel Late Night With Stephen Colbert in May 2026 and exit the late-night television business completely. Colbert told his audience at Thursday’s taping: Next year will be our last season. The network will be ending our show in May. It’s the end of ‘The Late Show’ on CBS. This is all just going away. I do want to say that the folks at CBS have been great partners. I’m so grateful to the Tiffany network for giving me this chair and this beautiful theater to call home. And of course, I’m grateful to you, the audience, who have joined us every night in here, out there, all around the world. The news is not a complete shock as the Trump-allied Ellison brothers are taking over CBS, and one of their goals is to remove Trump critics from the network. PoliticusUSA is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. It was first speculated a few weeks ago that both Stephen Colbert at CBS and Jon Stewart at the now Ellison-owned The Daily Show could be pushed off the air. It was viewed to be less likely that Colbert would be canceled because the show is usually the highest rated in late night, and CBS spent decades struggling in late night until David Letterman moved over from NBC. The Trump impact on media is very real. Since Trump returned to office, critics of his administration have been removed from mainstream media. If Colbert wants to continue his late-night show, if the decision to pick him up was strictly about business, networks would be tripping over themselves to sign him. Where Colbert ends up next should be viewed as a test of the media’s willingness to stand up to Trump. If Stephen Colbert quickly finds a new high-profile home, it will be a hopeful sign. If not, the loss of Colbert will reflect the mainstream media’s complete cave to Trump.

PoliticusUSA is solely supported by readers like you. Please consider supporting us by becoming a subscriber. Subscribe now The Wall Street Journal is a conservative mainstream publication that will never be mistaken as liberal, which is why the fact that the WSJ was preparing to publish a big story on Trump’s close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein sent the president into a panic. The Status newsletter reported: The article, said to be in the works for days, had still not appeared as of Thursday afternoon—raising eyebrows and fueling speculation across Washington and New York. According to people familiar with the matter, The Journal is facing pressure from the White House over the story. In fact, Trump is said to have personally called Emma Tucker, The Journal’s editor-in-chief, to voice his objections. The specifics of the call remain unclear, but it’s hard to imagine Trump voiced anything but outrage. It’s unclear whether Trump reached out to Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corporation owns The Journal. While the specifics of what The Journal intends to report remain under wraps, the story is said to contain new material shedding light on the Trump-Epstein relationship. PoliticusUSA is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. If it were CNN, The Washington Post, or The New York Times that had this story, the White House might not be so frantic to kill it. The administration would attack the story as fake news and count on the fact that those media outlets had been poisoned long ago, so the odds of Trump’s supporters believing anything from those sources are minimal. The Wall Street Journal is a different story. An exclusive that contains bombshells from the Journal is likely to be believed across the political spectrum. If there is nothing to the story, Trump could have squashed it during his first term by releasing everything. The Epstein conspiracy theories were born because the Trump administration was shady after Epstein died in prison. Once Trump lost the 2020 election, he leaned into the Epstein conspiracies and tried to use them for political gain. The crisis that this administration is dealing with currently is Trump’s creation. Donald Trump responded to his supporters’ expectation that he would keep his campaign promise to release everything on Epstein by trying to shut them down. The story isn’t going anywhere, and with outlets like The Wall Street Journal digging around, the odds are high that it could get much worse. It isn’t the 34 fraud felony convictions or the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit that has done the most damage to Trump. Two impeachments and allegations of collaborations with a hostile foreign power bounced off of Donald Trump like they were nothing. What is sticking to Donald John Trump is Jeffrey Epstein. When Trump’s second term began, no one would have said that by the summer of 2025, Trump’s biggest problem would be Jeffrey Epstein. Even if Trump is able to kill the WSJ story, there will be others. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt faced multiple Epstein questions at the briefing on Thursday. If the most comfortable lap dogs in the corporate press are challenging the Trump administration on this, the dam is about to break, and even bigger problems could be coming. What do you think about Trump trying to kill the WSJ story? Share your thoughts in the comments below. Subscribe now

President Trump’s health was thrust into the spotlight on Thursday afternoon, as the White House revealed he had been diagnosed with has chronic venous insufficiency after an exam. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt shared a note from Trump’s physician during a press briefing that detailed the exam. Trump underwent ultrasounds and a “comprehensive exam” that included…

New concerns about President Donald Trump’s mental state are being raised after he recounted a story purportedly involving his college professor uncle and the Unabomber that simply never happened. Speaking in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, Trump claimed that his late uncle John Trump taught Unabomber Ted Kaczynski at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then claimed that he quizzed his uncle about his supposed student. “Kaczynski was one of his students. Do you know who Kaczynski was? There’s very little difference between a madman and a genius,” Trump told the audience. “I said, ‘What kind of a student was he, Uncle John—Dr. John Trump? I said, ‘What kind of a student?’ And he said, ‘Seriously good.’ He said he’d go around correcting everybody. But it didn’t work out too well for him.” YouTube Video None of this ever happened. As CNN reports, Trump’s uncle died in 1985. While Kaczynski’s streak of homicidal bombings began in 1978, his identity was unknown to the public until his arrest in 1996—11 years after John Trump’s death. Also, Kaczynski was not a student at MIT. He attended Harvard University and the University of Michigan. “We have no enrollment record or information that Ted Kaczynski ever attended MIT,” a spokesperson told CNN. The completely invented interaction gives renewed fodder to ongoing concerns about Trump’s mental state. California Gov. Gavin Newsom and President Donald Trump In June, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said that Trump “lost it,” and that he noticed a change in Trump’s behavior compared to past personal interactions. “He is not the same person that I dealt with just four years ago, and he’s incapable of even a train of thought,” Newsom told Fox 11 Los Angeles. And this keeps happening. Trump has repeatedly mixed up key historical facts and figures, including forgetting the leaders of foreign nations—a vital part of his job as president. When running for office in 2024, he confused former Speaker Nancy Pelosi with his then-GOP rival Nikki Haley. While corporate media tirelessly went after President Joe Biden’s mental acuity and age, there has largely been silence about Trump’s numerous episodes of mental misfiring. As recently as last Friday, Trump even claimed that he saw Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth “on Fox News this morning.” Hegseth did not appear on the network. As commander in chief of the U.S. military, Trump recently used his presidential power to order a strike on Iran. In addition to his other duties, which give him access to national security secrets, his inability to demonstrate mental soundness adds to existing concerns about his fitness to lead.

Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats walked out of a hearing on Thursday in protest of their GOP colleagues advancing President Donald Trump’s nomination of his scandal-plagued personal criminal defense lawyer, Emil Bove, to serve as a lifetime judge on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals. Democrats were irate that Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, refused to hear a whistleblower’s testimony accusing Bove of willfully defying court orders that blocked some of Trump’s deportations. Grassley instead ended debate and called for a vote to advance Bove’s nomination to the Senate floor. “This lacks decency. It lacks decorum. It shows that you do not want to simply hear from your colleagues,” Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey said as Grassley ordered the vote. “This is us simply trying to rush through one of the most controversial nominees we’ve had under this presidential administration.” And Democratic Sen. Mazie Hironi of Hawaii called the Senate Judiciary Committee a “kangaroo court” as she walked out. YouTube Video Democratic Sen. Peter Welch of Vermont explained why he and his colleagues left instead of casting their votes—which wouldn’t have mattered anyway, given that every Republican voted in favor of Bove’s nomination. “Senator Grassley violated the rules and refused to allow Senators to speak against Emil Bove’s lifetime judicial appointment. So I and every Democrat on the Judiciary Committee walked out of the hearing,” Welch wrote on X. Emil Bove, President Donald Trump’s former personal criminal defense lawyer and nominee for a lifetime federal court appointment Bove, for his part, doesn’t deserve to step foot in a federal court, let alone serve as a lifetime judge on one. Aside from being accused of willfully defying a court order, Bove also oversaw the pardons of hundreds of Capitol insurrectionists—many of them violent—and then led the charge to purge the Department of Justice of agents and prosecutors who worked to bring those traitors to justice. Bove also ordered federal prosecutors to dismiss the charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in exchange for Adams’ cooperation with Trump’s deportation agenda. And he’s even been accused of lying in court. So it’s unsurprising that hundreds of former DOJ officials and dozens of retired judges have spoken out against Bove’s nomination. “It is intolerable to us that anyone who disgraces the Justice Department would be promoted to one of the highest courts in the land, as it should be intolerable to anyone committed to maintaining our ordered system of justice,” read a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was signed by more than 900 former DOJ employees. Related | Trump rewards yet another one of his defense attorneys with a cushy gig Similarly, several retired judges signed on to a letter declaring that Bove does not deserve to be a federal judge. “Mr. Bove’s egregious record of mistreating law enforcement officers, abusing power, and disregarding the law itself disqualifies him for this position,” the judges wrote. But that didn’t stop Senate Republicans from advancing his nomination—including Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who recently claimed that he would never vote for a Trump nominee who supported the Jan. 6 insurrection. Apparently TACO applies to the rest of the GOP, too.

Please support PoliticusUSA by considering becoming a subscriber. Subscribe now Republicans in the House and Senate are so desperate to do Donald Trump’s bidding before they potentially lose power next November, that they are now violating the rules of their bodies to please Donald Trump As Senate Democrats walked out of the Judiciary Committee hearing on the nomination of Emil Bove to the federal bench, ranking member Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) said behind to deliver a statement before he too left. Booker said: Why are you doing this? This is outrageous. This is a kangaroo court. That’s all we have here. Mr. Chairman, to violate your own rules without going by the mandates of the parliamentarian. This is unbelievable. There’s a way to do this if you want to force this through. If you want to ram this through, there’s a way to do it in accordance to the rules as spelled out by the parliamentarian. It is simple. It is clear there’s a pathway to achieve what you’re trying to achieve. It shows that you do not want to simply hear from your colleagues. This is absolutely wrong. And, sir, this is this is, to me, one of those moments where we are not showing common respect for each other on both sides. I have sat here when we were in the majority and listened to my colleagues arguments, listen to their passionate statements, and then we voted. This is not that. This is us simply trying to rush through one of the most controversial nominees we’ve had under this presidential administration, sir. God bless America. You are a good man. You are a decent man. Why are you doing this? What is Donald Trump saying to you that are making you do something which is violating the decorum of this committee, the rules of this committee, the decency and the respect that we have each other to at least hear each other out? PoliticusUSA is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I’ve sat through so many long speeches of my colleagues, heard their objections. Listened with sincerity to try to see what their arguments are. But we are not doing that, sir. This is wrong, and you know it. There are some people on this committee who are the least firebrand people, and they’ve walked out some of the least controversial people in the Senate, some of the people that worked the hardest to find bipartisan common ground have just walked out of this committee, and you don’t even seem to care. But I know you do. I know your heart, Senator Grassley. This is wrong. I know the kind of person you are, and you know this is wrong. There’s no this is not necessary. What is another half an hour to allow senators to be heard? It’s what the Constitution mandates. It’s the ideals of the United States Senate. The world’s most deliberative body should take a decent amount of time to deliberate. But here, we’re not doing that here. We are jamming this through with some sense of false urgency. It’s one thing not to hear from whistleblowers. It’s another thing not to hold another hearing. But to not even allow my colleagues to have their moment to speak against this justice. It’s just wrong. And I know you know this. I know you know this. The only time this rule has ever been overturned by both parties was done when one minority was trying to pull some stunt to stop the committee from hearing this is not that. This is not the two-hour rule. This is a basic element of the ideals of this committee, sir. It is the basic understanding of having debate and deliberation. It’s a basic understanding of we can listen to each other, even if we disagree, that we should have time and space and a forum to listen. Sir, this is just wrong in every way. It is wrong in every single way. This is an abuse of power. It’s an undermining of the well-being and the integrity of this, this senate and this committee that I have for so long. I’ve been so honored to be a part of. This is wrong, sir. And I joined with my colleagues and leaving. This is a sham vote. This is wrong. Committee Republicans violated the committee rules that require at least two members of the minority party be present before a vote can be held. Chairman Chuck Grassley held the vote on the nomination with zero Democrats present. Republicans took these extreme steps to silence a whistleblower whose claims suggest that Bove is completely unfit and unqualified for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench. What was more important than the Democratic walkout was Cory Booker explaining exactly why they were walking out. The American people need to understand that the disease of lawlessness has infected more than the White House. It has also consumed the Republican majorities in Congress. Republicans are abusing their power, and it is up to Democrats to expose them. What do you think of the Democratic walkout and Republican abuse of power? Share your thoughts in the comments below. Leave a comment

Senate Republicans voted in the wee hours of Thursday morning to cut $9 billion worth of congressionally appropriated funds to NPR, PBS, and foreign aid—yet another move that hurts the rural communities that back Republicans at the ballot box. The funding cuts—which were made using a rarely used budget maneuver called a recissions package that is not subject to filibuster rules—passed by a vote of 51-48. Two Republicans—Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska—voted no alongside Democrats. The package now goes back to the House, which is expected to quickly pass it before the Friday deadline that would require the Trump administration to spend the funds. The $9 billion in cuts make permanent some of the funding reductions former co-President Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency wanted to make. “Warning Siren” by Mike Luckovich Cutting public radio and television funding will hurt rural communities, which rely on public media for extreme weather warnings. It will also hurt rural farming communities, which took in billions of foreign aid dollars to grow the food that was shipped abroad to help end hunger in poor countries. But President Donald Trump, who would rather line the pockets of his billionaire buddies than help the poor, didn’t want to spend funds helping end world hunger. He also loathes public media, which accurately covers his corrupt behavior—unlike the right-wing propaganda networks like Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN that fawn all over him and feed lies to viewers to scare them into voting for the GOP. “Republicans are gutting PBS and NPR because Trump hates the truth,” Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) said in a post on X. “Millions rely on public broadcasting for free, local, even lifesaving news. I’ll vote NO against any cuts—and hold the line against censorship.” Even some Republicans were wary of voting for the recissions package, saying the Trump administration was not clear enough on what exact programs would be cut, or how it would impact the rural communities they represent. But since Republicans do whatever Trump tells them to, they ultimately went along with undermining their own power of the purse to give Trump what he wanted. “Let’s not consider this a precedent,” Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) told Politico, adding that he voted for the bill “with reservation.” Passing the recissions package could have other long-term negative consequences for the GOP. Because Republicans showed Democrats that any deals they make during a government funding negotiation are meaningless, as the GOP will renege on those agreements in future recissions packages, it will make passing a government funding bill this fall more challenging. “There’s little reason for the minority party in Congress to agree to a deal when the Administration and the majority party can strip away funding they don’t like in a purely partisan way, or if the Administration may attempt unilaterally—and illegally—not to implement it at all, with no pushback from the majority party in Congress,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said in a piece warning Republicans not to pass the recissions package. “As a result, it would be far more difficult to reach the bipartisan agreements necessary to fund the government on time and with the resources required to serve the country’s needs.” Democrats said as much ahead of the vote. “What they’re doing is cutting out of the budget all the things that DOGE targeted. With this recissions bill they are going after all the foreign aid funding that DOGE hates, and they’re going after PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. They’re literally going to take Sesame Street off the air,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) said in a video posted on X. “Why would Democrats ever again negotiate a bipartisan budget with Republicans if Republicans two months later can just pass a partisan bill that keeps the spending that Republicans like and cuts the spending that Democrats supported in the bipartisan process? So this isn’t just really bad policy, this is just another way that Republicans are corroding the rule of law, the institutional norms that have held together our democracy for decades.”

President Donald Trump wants Coca-Cola to taste like it used to, even if it means shaking up a key part of the American economy to do it. On Wednesday, Trump announced on his Truth Social platform that he’s pushing soda giant Coca-Cola to replace high-fructose corn syrup with cane sugar in its flagship product. And in true Trump fashion, he claimed victory before anything had actually changed. “I have been speaking to Coca-Cola about using REAL Cane Sugar in Coke in the United States, and they have agreed to do so,” the president posted. “This will be a very good move by them — You’ll see. It’s just better!” Coke fans have long praised Mexican Coke, which is made with cane sugar and, according to enthusiasts, tastes crisper and less syrupy than the U.S. version. But within hours of Trump’s post, Coca-Cola issued a carefully worded statement that did not confirm any sweeping change, saying only that it would have “more details on new innovative offerings” coming soon. Still, Trump’s pressure campaign was enough to unsettle the corn industry—and send markets into a spin. A farmer uses a corn combine to harvest his crop in October 2022, in Johnson, Nebraska. “Replacing high fructose corn syrup with cane sugar doesn’t make sense,” said John Bode, president and CEO of the Corn Refiners Association, a large trade group. “President Trump stands for American manufacturing jobs, American farmers, and reducing the trade deficit. Replacing high fructose corn syrup with cane sugar would cost thousands of American food manufacturing jobs, depress farm income, and boost imports of foreign sugar, all with no nutritional benefit.” Wall Street appeared to agree. According to Axios, shares of Archer Daniels Midland, a top corn processor, dropped nearly 6% in pre-market trading on Thursday—a loss of about $1.5 billion in value. Ingredion, another major corn refiner, fell almost 7%. Coca-Cola has used high-fructose corn syrup in U.S. products since the 1980s. Cane sugar remains more common in countries like Mexico and India, and the Mexican version of Coke is sold in even some American stores. A full switch to cane sugar, however, would likely hurt Midwestern states like Iowa—America’s top corn producer—while benefiting sugar-producing states, like Florida. That’s not lost on political observers, nor is the fact that Trump’s announcement comes at a time when his relationship with American farmers is already strained. In Iowa, soybean farmers are still recovering from Trump’s revived trade war with China. The New York Times reported in May that exports have plummeted and prices are falling as China turns to other suppliers. Meanwhile, Trump’s administration has abandoned earlier commitments to protect undocumented agricultural workers, instead pursuing mass deportations that threaten farm labor pipelines. And now, with his Coke campaign, Trump is aligning himself with another culture-war figure. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has criticized high-fructose corn syrup as “just a formula for making you obese and diabetic,” is leading a broader push to eliminate artificial dyes and additives from food. A recent report from his “Make America Healthy Again” commission flagged high-fructose corn syrup as a driver of obesity and metabolic disease, despite minimal scientific consensus that cane sugar is significantly better. So sure, Trump may be trying to Make Coke Great Again. But if he gets his way, he might devastate corn country—and alienate the very voters who helped send him to the White House.

The Justice Department on Wednesday fired Maurene Comey, a federal prosecutor who successfully prosecuted Ghislaine Maxwell, the associate of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The firing comes as President Donald Trump is under fire from all sides for his handling of the Epstein scandal and his administration’s failure to release information connected to the infamous case. Comey led the court case where Maxwell was convicted for her role in sex trafficking minors alongside Epstein. She worked as his recruiter and transported underaged girls. Comey also led the recent successful prosecution of Sean “Diddy” Comes for prostitution-related crimes, though he was acquitted in the same trial of other alleged crimes. She is the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump infamously fired in 2017 for investigating Trump’s alleged ties to Russian election interference. Conspiracy theorist and anti-Muslim bigot Laura Loomer, a close ally of Trump, pushed for Maurene Comey’s dismissal. The firing is yet another recent instance of Trump apparently following Loomer’s demands. Conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer stands outside the courthouse where the hush-money trial of Donald Trump is underway, in April 2024, in New York. Trump was a longtime friend of Epstein, and his decision to fire Comey, along with his administration’s stonewalling on the Epstein issue, has raised new questions about his potential involvement in the deceased sex offender’s crimes. While campaigning for office, Trump often invoked the Epstein case as a cudgel against his Democratic political opponents, and his decision to now cover up details of the case has created a scandal within his administration. Trump’s MAGA base has been up in arms over Trump’s mishandling of the Epstein issue, demanding that the information they were long promised be released. Trump has lashed out, falsely claiming that the Epstein case was manufactured by Democrats. “It’s a hoax, I know it’s a hoax,” Trump complained to reporters on Wednesday. Trump has often claimed that real things, such as climate change and his loss in the 2020 election, are hoaxes or fraudulent. Trump also said that Republicans pushing the issue are “stupid” and “foolish.” Democrats have been on the attack, mocking congressional Republicans for voting against Democratic-led attempts to force the government to release Epstein-related information. The public is not with Trump on this issue. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Thursday showed that 69% of Americans, including nearly two-thirds of Republicans, believe the government is hiding Epstein’s alleged client list. Only 17% of Americans approve of how Trump has handled the scandal. Firing a prosecutor connected to the Epstein case is likely to only feed the fire of the controversy Trump finds himself in.

A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | Trump really, really wants to tank the economy