The pattern is becoming impossible to miss: the hidden report, the voter-roll purges, the gerrymanders, and Postal Service changes targeting mail ballots in Democratic states.. Somewhere inside the White House right now there’s a federal intelligence report sitting in a drawer, and Trump’s lickspittles who put it there are betting you won’t see it before you vote in November. It’s an assessment of the security of America’s voting machines, produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Reuters revealed last week that White House officials have spent months refusing to authorize its release even as the 2026 midterms come barreling toward us. The findings are almost comic in their irony, but they could also become the weapon that brings down our democracy this November. I’ll get to that in a moment, but first the backstory.

A conservative Italian newspaper used the blunt type of word American journalists keep avoiding, and exposed how far our press will go to normalize the abnormal... This weekend, the right-wing Italian daily Libero, a major conservative newspaper that shares a fair amount of Donald Trump’s politics, ran a one-word verdict on the President of the United States across its front page. The Italian word is coglione. The polite translation is “idiot.” The translation that George Conway and half of social media reached for, and the one the paper plainly intended, is a good deal blunter than that and more dictionary accurate: “asshole.”

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Trump just handed America’s spy agencies to a man with no intelligence experience and no security clearance and that’s the whole point. — The head of the Justice Department cannot bring himself to tell a federal judge the truth in writing. — Trump’s closest friend in Europe just learned the lesson everyone who has ever worked with him eventually learns: flatter the man-child or get smeared — Washington, D.C. just elected a democratic socialist mayor, and the pearl-clutchers are missing the point so completely it’s almost impressive. — A scientist looked at Trump’s new research rule and said the quiet part right out loud: “the purpose of the rule is fascism.” — Good News Alert!

The pre-crime apparatus is no longer theoretical. Americans are now being prosecuted for meetings, messages, and protest activity… Back in April I wrote here about what I called the Department of Thought Crimes, the pre-crime apparatus the Trump regime had quietly stood up inside the FBI and DOJ to hunt for Americans who might someday break a law because of what they believe. Ken Klippenstein first identified the GOP’s hit list in Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, often referred to as “NSPM-7,” which is apparently the basis for these arrests. It identified as potential “domestic terrorist” threats those Americans who espouse: “[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.” Klippenstein then, three months later, discovered that the Trump regime — specifically, Bondi’s DOJ and Patel’s FBI — was already busily compiling lists of such potential terrorists, sharing the responsibility with some 200 FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) working collaboratively with local police departments across America.