The Trump administration’s unrelenting anti-trans crusade has many familiar Trump II elements: performative cruelty; using the powers of the state to bully a vulnerable, marginalized, disfavored group; and outrageous misconduct in pursuit of poisonous policy objectives.

Chris Geidner, publisher of the Law Dork newsletter and the leading American journalist covering these issues, will join Editor-at-Large David Kurtz o talk about this sweeping assault on transgender Americans. Join us at 3 pm ET on Substack Live.

I generally focus more on the iterative, step-by-step developments in a story like the Broadview Six case. So I want to make sure you see this Josh Kovensky piece on the context in which it all happened: Washington pressuring Chicago prosecutors to fall in line and abuse their power in the service of “Midway Blitz,” a U.S. attorney’s office hollowed out through high-level resignations and departures in 2025. All a mix desperation, violence and misconduct that brought us to that moment last October and today. Also don’t miss David Kurtz’s look at how the Broadview Six scandal is spreading to and endangering other cases which aren’t really tied to Midway Blitz at all.

I want to remind us of something that is easy to lose track of amidst the violence, predation and anger. Operations “Midway Blitz” and “Metro Surge” — both hideous faux-military operation tag lines — were never only or even mainly about mass deportation or even harassing immigrants (documented and not), though they did lots of both. Their aim was to terrorize blue cities, attack the communities that inhabit them and the states which are sovereign over them. This may strike some as a bold or ungenerous claim. But these operations were never efficient at rounding up undocumented immigrants. ICE has many more effective ways of doing that.

The U.S. and Iran have drifted back into active combat and President Trump is on Truth Social promising again to rain destruction down on the country and now more explicitly promising the outcome which triggered this conflict in the first place: the idea that Trump would duplicate in Iran what he has, kind of amazingly, pulled off so far in Venezuela. It’s a good moment to remember what’s going on here — what we’re doing here, big picture.

This war has been going on for almost four months. But most of that time has been under one or another kind of ceasefire, albeit often honored in the breach. A friend recently compared it to the so-called “Phoney War”, the eight-month period in 1939 and 1940 when Germany, France and Britain were nominally at war, though full-scale combat didn’t begin until the invasion of France in May 1940.

I’m not a huge basketball fan. A casual one, mostly. But it’s become more central to my sports interests over the years. When I was a kid, baseball and football were the only sports and baseball was … well, baseball. What else was there to say? At least in our home that’s how it was. But I’ve been pulled in the same way as the whole society has by the rise of American basketball over the course of my lifetime. And I’ve been pulled hard into Knicks’ destiny run. You’ll see other commentary about last night’s game, literally the biggest comeback in NBA playoff history. But I wanted to share one moment with you, one that came after the game when Knicks captain Jalen Brunson went on ESPN’s Inside the NBA post-game show.

I attended an afternoon hearing Wednesday in D.C. federal court, where Judge Richard Leon declined to block President Trump’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” — but in a way that might actually have some teeth. I joined Executive Editor John Light on Substack Live after leaving the courtroom to talk about what went down and why it might be a pyrrhic victory for the administration.

I want to share a few more thoughts about yesterday’s news out of the defunct Broadview Six case, specifically the all-but-unprecedented release of the transcript of the grand jury sessions from which the indictments came. This was always a case of wild over-charging at a minimum. And that raised the question of just how prosecutors managed to get the case through a grand jury, even with how low a bar that usually is. Well, now we know. They cheated. They wouldn’t take no for an answer.

As David Kurtz notes here, this case seemed fuzzier than most of the other Trump retribution prosecutions. While the indictments singled out a Democratic candidate and lawmaker and those closely associated with them, none of those were high-profile Trump “enemies” like Tish James or James Comey. The prosecutor who initially led the case showed no signs of being especially Trumpy. Defense attorneys tried from the beginning to pry free evidence of White House and/or DOJ interference or direction in bringing the case. But prosecutors said they looked and there was no communication about it. The judge accepted that statement at face value.

It was almost certainly false.

Be sure to see Josh Kovensky’s write-up of the grand jury transcript from the Broadview Six case which was released today. It’s as bad as predicted. A federal prosecutor, clearly under instructions to get an indictment no matter what, committed repeated instances of prosecutorial misconduct to get an indictment. That included telling the grand jurors to simply take her word for it that it was a good case and not worry if they didn’t actually have evidence that showed that. She also ejected two grand jurors who seemed adamant that they didn’t have a case. “I heard this case like last week and I thought it was a crock of shit then and I still think it is,” one hold-out grand jury told prosecutor Sheri Mecklenburg. Check out Josh’s piece which includes the transcript itself, which you can read.

Where Things Stand last night covered what seems to be the beginning of the 2026-specific flooding of the “zone” with “shit,” to use Steve Bannon’s infamous terminology. (I am distinguishing these state- and primary-specific attacks from the more general muck of election conspiracy theories we have been wading in daily for the better part of a decade.) The conspiracy theory machine is off and running, fueled by conservative dismay that reality TV star-turned-dilettante politician Spencer Pratt (R) will not advance to the November general election against LA Mayor Karen Bass (D). Perhaps making it more painful is that he was in recent days supplanted in second place by Nithya Raman, a DSA-backed Democrat. The AP projected Monday that Raman and Bass will face off in November.

JD Vance is the latest person to get involved with spinning false narratives from conservatives’ ire. “Do you trust this election?” a grinning Jesse Watters asked Vance last night on Fox, teeing him up. 

I just heard the news that Gordon Wood, a towering figure in the scholarship of Early American history, died yesterday at 92. Adding more upset to the news is the fact that he died after being struck by a car in East Providence. He died later in a Providence hospital. (One knows that people in their 90s are in the last years of their lives; a violent death like that makes it more of a gut punch.)

As I’ve mentioned a few times over the years Wood was my dissertation advisor at Brown. So he played an important role in my life. What ended up being my area of specialty, the topic of my dissertation, was pretty distant from the focus of his scholarship. He was concerned with the decades surrounding the American Revolution and the early Republic. My focus was on the middle 17th century and the interplay between economic interactions and inter-communal violence between English settlers and the Indians of Southern New England. In a way he indulged my interest in these questions that were pretty distant from his. He had very little time for cant or jargon or, as he saw it, theory.

From TPM Reader BP …

As a Mainer, I have been waiting (and waiting and waiting:-) for you to weigh in on Platner, since I respect your opinion so much and this whole thing has been crazy. I have been amazed at the over the top reactions and use of new info to verify black and white priors from so many in the media and on socials.  Most of that is from people outside Maine. In my little corner here:

1. Mainers REALLY respect the hard work Platner is putting in. Quiet hard work is highly valued here.  It’s not just 80 town halls. He goes anywhere and everywhere to talk with any group that invites him, walks any picket line he’s invited to. It’s probably hundreds of meetings, town halls, and just showing up for a cause at this point in the campaign. He appears with other candidates to boost their visibility, and has helped the three best candidates (in my opinion) form a ranked choice coalition in the tight governor’s race.