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The Big Story

Three senior Iranians poured cold water on the notion that a nuclear deal with the United States was close to being agreed upon, in an article Thursday in the Associated Press. Abbas Araghchi, the country’s foreign minister, wrote in a post on X that any agreement that doesn’t remove all economic sanctions placed on Iran and doesn’t allow the country’s nuclear program to continue would be unacceptable. The comments come a day after President Donald Trump said he’d asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to hold off on launching strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

This news was released amid a poll from Rasmussen Reports showing 57% of Americans support military action to block Iran’s nuclear ambitions, with 84% of voters who strongly approve of Trump backing strikes. Given Trump’s sensitivity toward his polling, the Rasmussen numbers beg the question of why the administration is breaking such sweats trying to engineer a new Iran deal. After weeks of negotiations, Iran still isn’t budging from its aforementioned red lines. Former National Security Adviser and current nominee for Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz said any Trump Iran deal must address all open issues, including the total dismantling of Iran’s vast nuclear facilities. If the administration managed to completely wipe out its nuclear program through negotiation, that’d be one thing, but with Iran refusing to back down from uranium enrichment, why continue pursuing a deal that seemingly can’t get past the failed framework of Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action?

One imagines that the pressure applied on Trump and the administration by the likes of Tucker Carlson and others may be one reason. Carlson has repeatedly warned against launching direct military action on Iran, making the claim in an April X post that a war with Iran would cause “thousands of Americans to die” and that the United States would lose the war. He then, of course, blamed the proverbial “neocons” for stoking the flames of war, accusing them of being “enemies” of the United States--which, at least according to the Rasmussen poll, pits him at direct odds with most of the core of the MAGA base. (Or, as one Tablet contributor puts it: “MAGA influencers seem to really hate MAGA.”) All of which comes against a backdrop this week of a bombshell intelligence report issued by Austria’s Directorate State Protection and Intelligence Service (effectively the country’s version of the FBI) claiming that Iran’s nuclear program is not just ongoing but “advanced,” and in possession of a “growing arsenal of ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads over long distances.” “Iran is striving for comprehensive rearmament,” the report stated plainly, “with nuclear weapons to make the regime immune to attack and to expand and consolidate its dominance in the Middle East and beyond.”

For those keeping track at home, the sourcing here is quite interesting: As Benjamin Weinthal of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies reports, these days Vienna is “full of Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security agents” due to the “continuous good relationship between Iran and Austria since the revolution.” Tablet contributor Lee Smith, who was in Vienna in 2015 to cover the negotiations leading up to the JCPOA, concurs with Weinthal’s assessment.

The city was flooded with Iranian spies walking in and out of bars. It became a running joke among some of the reporters there. An Iranian journalist would start to speak with you and they had to cut you off when they saw someone that looked like an intelligence officer.

In other words, if anyone is going to have solid intelligence on the Iranians, it would be the Austrians.

The intelligence negates a recent assessment by Tulsi Gabbard, director of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, who told a Senate Intelligence Committee in March that the intelligence community believes Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.” Conversely, the United Nations’ atomic watchdog said “the jury is out” on Tehran’s advancing nuclear program. With all these contradictory statements and information, at the very least something seems seriously off here.

On the bright side, our senior policy analyst remains skeptical that Iran actually has the ability to launch nuclear weapons. “I’m sure they have ballistic missiles with ‘warhead capabilities,’ and I’m sure they have the material and capacity to build a nuclear bomb,” but:

Melding those parts together into a deliverable package and being reasonably sure it will work, especially considering Israeli penetration of all levels of their nuclear program, is several orders of magnitude more difficult and, I estimate, beyond their capacities.

—Adam Lehrer

The Rest

→The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reinstated Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs Thursday, which we reported yesterday had been blocked by the U.S. Court of International Trade, according to Reuters. The decision allows the tariffs to stay in effect while an appeal is ongoing. While the judiciary does have the power to review and potentially overturn tariffs when they believe the executive branch has exceeded its legal authority, many analysts and politicians alike are stunned by what they see as judges overstepping boundaries to thwart the president’s agenda:

→Quote of the Day:

I was new to Washington, and it was suggested that I use The Federalist Society as a recommending source on Judges. I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real “sleazebag” named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions. He openly brags how he controls Judges, and even Justices of the United States Supreme Court. In any event, Leo left The Federalist Society to do his own “thing.” I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations.

That’s an excerpt from a particularly lengthy Truth Social post published by President Trump Thursday trying to answer the question, “Why is the administration facing so many problems with the judiciary despite the fact that he personally appointed so many of the judges in his first term?” As Trump says, he attacks the conservative and legal organization the Federalist Society, which advocates for an originalist interpretation of the Constitution. The man that Trump credits for advising him on his bad judicial decisions, Leonard Leo, was the longtime vice president of the Federalist Society and currently serves as co-chair of its board of directors and has been described as the man who “built the machine that remade the Supreme Court” (per ProPublica). Leo was measured in his response to Trump’s criticisms: “​​I’m very grateful for President Trump transforming the Federal Courts, and it was a privilege being involved,” he said in a statement.

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→Sum of the Day: $34 Billion

That’s the total sum in sales and higher costs that companies have lost since President Trump launched the “Liberation Day” tariffs, according to a Reuters analysis of corporate disclosures.

→Percentage of the Day: 20%

On the bright side, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that goods imports plummeted 20% in April to $276.1 billion, the biggest one-month drop ever recorded. A falling goods trade deficit generally suggests a strengthening economy, according to most analysts. Goods exports, on the other hand, rose 3.4% to $188.5 billion. Overall, the trade deficit shrank considerably—a positive sign for Trump’s tariffs policy.

→The attorney and right-wing political commentator Paul Ingrassia, who has been serving as the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security since the beginning of the year, has been tapped by President Trump to be the head of the Office of Special Counsel, an independent corruption-fighting agency safeguarding whistleblowers and enforcing some ethics laws, according to The New York Times. There are some details in his biography that seem, at the very least, concerning. In 2023 he published a Substack article called “Free Nick Fuentes”, and also posted this on X following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel:

→Video of the Day:

Canadian comedian and conceptual artist Nathan Fielder went on CNN to discuss the the second season of his series The Rehearsal, where he uses sets and hired actors to “rehearse” for difficult life situations. In the season’s third episode, Fielder uses the memoirs of famed commercial pilot Sully Sullenberger to recreate Sullenberger’s experiences and channel the pilot’s humble personality that, Fielder argues, allowed Sullenberger to successfully land a US Airways flight in the Hudson River, saving all passengers. Fielder argues that what allowed Sullenberger to pull off such a feat was being able to ask his first mate for advice during the crisis. Fielder and National Transportation Safety Board member John Goglia are now using the show to push the Federal Aviation Administration to adopt more training encouraging healthy communication among pilots (per the Washington Examiner), arguing communication breakdowns resulting from power imbalances cause disasters (in the clip, Fielder says that such a dynamic likely exists between the more prominent anchor Wolf Blitzer and his co-host Pamela Brown, making both visibly uncomfortable.) The FAA has pushed back, saying in a statement that they don’t see the evidence suggesting communication breakdown as the cause of plane crashes. The agency’s resistance is interesting given that the January crash over the Potomac River caused by an Army Blackhawk helicopter colliding with an American Airlines flight, claiming the lives of 67 people, may have been caused by the captain failing to heed the instructions of her co-pilot and flight instructor just 15 seconds before the accident (per New York Post).

→Former Assistant New York Solicitor General Brian Ginsberg, who reported to New York Attorney General Letitia James from 2019 and 2022, is now echoing the Trump administration’s assessment of her as an opportunist prone to corruption, according to The Washington Free Beacon. In a May 12 filing, Ginsberg warned the Supreme Court that James is abusing her prosecutorial powers in an ongoing Title IX case against a western New York school district over four disparate sexual misconduct allegations between its students, reminding the Supreme Court about James’ “history of allegedly abusing her powers.”

→Rest in Peace to “America’s Cop”: Former NYPD Commissioner Bernie Kerik, famed for leading New York law enforcement through the turbulent period following 9/11, died Thursday after being hospitalized for cardiac arrest. Kerik was appointed to lead the NYPD in 2000 by Mayor Rudy Giuliani and presided over a 63% decline in violent crime, according to the New York Post. His life in public wasn’t without controversy, however, and he withdrew his nomination by President George W. Bush to head the Department of Homeland Security when it was revealed he hired an illegal immigrant to work as a nanny, leading him to take a guilty plea for ethics violations in 2006. In 2009, he pleaded guilty to eight federal felonies, including tax evasion.

FBI Director and longtime Kerik friend Kash Patel said the former commissioner was “one of the most courageous public servants, guiding the NYPD through one of the darkest chapters this country has ever known.” Kerik is survived by his wife and three children.

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The Big Story

President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff presented Israeli officials with a new proposal for a 60-day cease-fire and hostage deal with Hamas, the details of which emerged Thursday. N12 News Chief Political Analyst Amit Segal outlined the terms of the deal in a post on X:

1. On the first day, five living hostages and nine deceased will be released.

2. On the seventh day, five living hostages and nine deceased will be released.

3. In exchange for the living hostages, Israel will release 125 Palestinians serving life sentences and 1,111 prisoners arrested after Oct. 7.

4. In exchange for the 18 deceased hostages, Israel will release 180 bodies of Gazans.

5. Israel will cease offensive military operations in Gaza.

6. President Trump will declare a cease-fire and act as guarantor to ensure that the deal is respected.

7. On the 10th day, Hamas will deliver a detailed medical report on the conditions of the living hostages still in captivity.

This deal would not be great for Israel. Most concerning is the absence of instruction about who will be responsible for distributing food in Gaza. If it’s to be the United Nations, Hamas would essentially be given a lifeline that will allow it to regroup and rearm during the 60 days of temporary peace.

Nevertheless, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told families of the hostages that he has accepted Witkoff’s proposal, according to Al Arabiya.

Hamas, perhaps unsurprisingly to Scroll readers, said Thursday it will not accept the terms of Witkoff’s new framework. A source told The Jerusalem Post that Hamas feels “screwed over” by the U.S. administration, claiming that being forced to give up the hostages within a week would leave the terror group without leverage in future negotiations. Hamas also wants some confirmation, like a statement from Trump, that the war will end.

Another source close to Hamas told Walla! News that the militant group believes Witkoff’s new deal is more biased in favor of Israel than previous frameworks were, and accuses the envoy of relenting to all the demands made by Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer during Witkoff’s meeting with him Tuesday. Those demands haven’t been made public.

Earlier this week, you may remember, Hamas claimed that it had accepted the terms of a cease-fire deal that would allow for the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza without condition (per Al Jazeera), but Witkoff quickly denied that it was his proposal that Hamas had accepted, adding that what he’d seen from the group was “totally unacceptable.” Hamas was likely lying, hoping that it could use the media to pressure Israel to accept a less favorable deal. Later Thursday, Hamas sources told i24News that it will take the group “days” to review the latest proposal, but that ultimately “it’s a bad deal.”

Tablet staff writer Armin Rosen believes that Israel wisely accepted the cease-fire knowing that Hamas would reject it, highlighting the terror organization as a bad actor that can’t be trusted. Ultimately, he says, there’s never going to be any deal in which Hamas agrees to release all the remaining hostages. “There’s been all but 18 months between the summer of 2006 and today where Hamas didn’t have a living Israeli to ransom, torture, and serve as the embodiment of a conquered enemy,” he said. “Hostages are of supreme strategic and psychic importance to them—a dark mirror to the Israelis, in a way.”

Conversely, Tablet contributor Lee Smith worries that by continuing to negotiate with Hamas, the United States is inadvertently conditioning the public to believe that the militant group is a legitimate international actor, potentially diminishing the administration’s credibility on other key policies.

“How do you deport someone for supporting a designated foreign terror organization when you treat a terror organization like a legitimate political body?” Smith asks, continuing:

My understanding is that Steve Witkoff is as loyal to the president as the president is to him. I’m sure he’s doing his best, but these negotiations are a disaster. Every news article, every social media post saying that Hamas turned down a U.S. proposal is a blow to American prestige—which is what happens when you give a terror group an opening to rub America’s nose in the dirt. Trump should end these talks as quickly as possible. An administration that promotes national sovereignty should not be reinforcing globalist norms by dealing with a terror group.

Smith believes that the only viable basis for freeing the remaining hostages, American and Israeli alike, is contained within the president’s March 5 Truth Social post:

—Adam Lehrer

The Rest

→Elon Musk announced his departure from the Department of Government Efficiency Wednesday. Musk criticized President Trump’s “big, beautiful” spending bill in an interview earlier this week, arguing that it will increase, not reduce, government spending, and complained that the spending package would undermine the work DOGE is doing. The comments earned rebuke from White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who said on X Tuesday that DOGE cuts are related to discretionary spending—which, according to Miller, can’t be cut in a reconciliation bill. Despite that, The New York Times reported Wednesday that Musk and the president are still on good terms, but Musk’s disillusionment with the limitations of the federal bureaucracy has raised questions about the alliance between the two men. Musk has said he will devote more time to his companies. Both Musk and the White House said that DOGE will continue after Musk’s departure, and Vice President J.D. Vance said last month that Musk will continue to serve as an adviser to both him and the president following his exit from the federal government. Russ Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, is expected to take over the lead role at DOGE after managing much of the agency’s work during Musk’s transition, according to Newsweek.

→Palmer Luckey, the founder of military technology company Anduril Industries, announced on X Thursday that Anduril would be teaming up with Meta to “make the world’s best AR and VR systems for the United States military.” It’s the culmination of one of the wilder stories in American business, in which Tablet’s Jeremy Stern ended up playing a role. As detailed in our blockbuster profile last summer, Zuckerberg ousted Luckey from Meta on the basis of politics —actually, because of a $10,000 donation to a pro-Trump troll group dedicated to “shitposting in real life” (really, if you haven’t already, go read the whole piece).

Quoted in Stern’s article, Mark Zuckerberg said, “I was sad when [Luckey’s] time at Meta came to an end, but the silver lining is that his work at Anduril is going to be extremely important for our national security. I hope we can find ways to work together in the future.” Now, it would seem, the future has arrived.

To read Stern’s article, click below
https://www.tabletmag.com/feature/american-vulcan-palmer-luckey-anduril

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→Some of the notable figures among the 24 people issued presidential pardons and sentence commutations by Donald Trump on Wednesday:

• Larry Hoover: This one may be a win for legendary artist and infamous antisemite Ye, who performed alongside Drake at the Free Larry Hoover Benefit Concert and reportedly lobbied the Trump administration on Hoover’s behalf. President Trump issued a sentence commutation to the founder and leader of the Gangster Disciples, a Chicago gang, who had been convicted of murder in Chicago in 1973. Hoover continued to direct criminal enterprise from prison and was sentenced on federal charges of drug trafficking and extortion in 1997, leading him to be held in solitary confinement in Colorado for three decades. Trump was only able to commute Hoover’s sentence on the federal charges. He doesn’t have the power to commute state charges, and Hoover will have to serve the remainder of his life sentence; he won’t be eligible for parole until 2062, when the convict will be 111 years old. Supporters of the former gangster say prison reformed him.

• Michael Grimm: The former Staten Island congressman who pleaded guilty to felony tax fraud in 2014 is said by Trump’s aides to have been subjected to a political witch hunt much like the one the president endured in 2024 (per The New York Times). Grimm has been a loyal supporter of Trump in the media over the years, until he was left paralyzed by a horse riding injury in September. He was issued a full pardon Thursday.

• Michael Harris: The cofounder of Death Row Records served 33 years of a 25-to-life sentence for conspiracy to commit first-degree murder of a rival member of a drug gang in 1987, according to the Los Angeles Times. Harris disavowed his criminal life in prison and became a social activist. He first had his sentence commuted by Trump at the end of the president’s first term. Harris endorsed Trump in October and was issued a full pardon Thursday (per The New York Times). With the pardon, Harris is absolved of his crime, and his civil rights have been restored.

• NBA YoungBoy: The Louisiana rap artist was sentenced to two years in a Baton Rouge court in 2021 for gun charges after a long history of legal issues (per The New York Times). The rapper’s Wednesday pardon was confirmed by two anonymous officials in the administration Wednesday (per Associated Press). “I want to thank President Trump for granting me a pardon and giving me the opportunity to keep building—as a man, as a father, and as an artist,” said the artist in a statement published online.

→In yet another example of judges seemingly having the power to veto all executive branch policy, the Court of International Trade blocked most of President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs Wednesday, declaring that the president overstepped his authority by imposing across-the-board duties on imports from U.S. trading partners, according to Reuters. The court said the Constitution gives Congress the authority to regulate commerce with other countries, and it can’t be overridden by the president’s emergency powers. Following the ruling, the U.S. dollar rallied and Wall Street futures rose.

→Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Wednesday that the administration will begin imposing visa bans on foreign nationals whom it deems are censoring Americans on social media platforms, according to Reuters. “It is unacceptable for foreign officials to demand that American tech platforms adopt global content moderation policies or engage in censorship activity that reaches beyond their authority and into the United States,” he said in his statement yesterday. Both Facebook and Meta have said that the EU content moderation law amounts to censorship of their platforms; the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, seems to agree, having warned in March that the EU law excessively restricts expression and speech. While Rubio didn’t address any specific acts of censorship by foreign actors, most analysts agree that the move is an escalation in the administration’s conflict with Europe over speech laws.

→That wasn’t the only announcement made by Rubio Wednesday concerning foreign nationals; the secretary of state also vowed that the administration would “aggressively revoke” visas of Chinese students, including those with ties to the Chinese Communist Party and those who are studying in “critical fields,” according to The New York Times. The State Department will revise criteria to “enhance scrutiny” of all future applications from China, including Hong Kong. In 2024, roughly 20% of student visas were issued to Chinese applicants. Analysts believe that the move will lead to reprisal from the CCP.

→Article of the Day:

A new report from Wired published Wednesday quotes former staffers of South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace who alleged that the congresswoman forced them to create burner accounts on social media to both promote her and combat criticism online. Mace, who told her staffers that she’s a “self-taught coder,” allegedly used those skills to obsessively monitor her image across social media platforms, enlisting her staff to assist her in her efforts. “We had to make multiple accounts and go and reply to comments, saying things that weren’t even true,” said one former staffer to the magazine. “We were congressional staff, and there were actual things we could be doing to help the constituents.”

To read the article, click below:

https://www.wired.com/story/nancy-mace-former-staff-burner-accounts/

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The Big Story

Was Elias Rodriguez, the man who murdered two Israeli embassy employees outside Washington, D.C.’s Capital Jewish Museum last week, an antisemite?

Usually, when someone guns down two people he believes are Jews (one, Yaron Lischinsky, was in fact a Christian), the answer to that question is generally an unambiguous yes. But at least a few somewhat prominent people are arguing the answer is no. On Tuesday afternoon, the independent journalist Ken Klippenstein published extracts from a group chat in which Rodriguez had participated, and interviewed some of the chat’s members, who were childhood friends of Rodriguez. In the published messages, we can see Rodriguez, a “self-professed Maoist Third Worldist,” praise Josef Stalin, rail against “the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie,” and speak of the need to “genocide white people to make [the United States] a normal country.” Klippenstein writes that Rodriguez …

… hated the Republican and Democratic parties, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, the right and left, the “bourgeoisie,” the United States, the West, and, of course, Israel. He even hated the only political group I could find he’d associated with. … “PSL sucks shit,” Rodriguez wrote in one of many messages lambasting the obscure Party for Socialism and Liberation that he had once participated in. “I wish I had just done a misadventure with FRSO [Freedom Road Socialist Org] rather than PSL lol,” he wrote.

But, Klippenstein writes, Rodriguez never expressed any antipathy for Jews outside of his obsessive hatred of Israel. Several friends and former coworkers of the shooter told Klippenstein that they’d never heard Rodriguez say anything negative about Jews, “not even in a joking way.” “Hatred of Israel and what it is doing in Gaza,” Klippenstein concludes, “is not the same as antisemitism.” Some on the right, including the red-pill prince himself, Curtis Yarvin, weighed in on social media to (sort of) agree, arguing that what Rodriguez was motivated by was “murderous global race communism,” not “antisemitism,” which Yarvin dismissed as a “communist bogeyman.”

At the level of idiot literalism, we suppose that’s correct. Rodriguez may have murdered two innocent people in protest of a fictive genocide perpetrated by Jews, the narrative of which was fed to him by a global propaganda machine involving every antisemitic actor on the planet ranging from Hezbollah to Jake Shields, but, in his own mind, he didn’t hate Jews as Jews. He didn’t privately joke about the Holocaust, he didn’t deride Jews as “Christ-killers” or allege they were responsible for World War I or the pornography industry, he didn’t use anti-Jewish slurs, and he didn’t talk about how Hitler was misunderstood. So I’m sure everyone reading this is quite relieved.

But formal ideology is a poor explanation for why things happen in the world. Sure, explicit antisemitism is more common on the extreme end of the political Right, in the sense that more people are willing to express anti-Jewish prejudice. And there is now a faction on the right working to instrumentalize antisemitic sectarianism, usually expressed in coded language about “neocons” and “warmongers,” as a tool for consolidating and wielding institutional power—an alarming development that we’ve been covering in detail here for the past few months.

But the latter version—antisemitism not as saying or thinking bad things about Jews but as a tool of governance—is the one that matters in the real world. And on that score, the recent moves by Tucker Carlson and company are but a clumsy imitation of what we’ve spent a decade observing from the Obama Democratic Party. It was not The Daily Stormer but The New York Times that published a “Jew tracker” to identify which Congressional opponents of the Obama Iran deal were Jewish; it was students at Harvard and George Washington University and their well-credentialed professors, not revisionist podcasters, who rushed to celebrate the slaughter of innocent Israelis and made “Glory to the martyrs” the slogan of the modern American university. Even today, when anonymous “sources familiar with the administration’s thinking” whisper to the Washington Post that Iran hawks are loyal to a foreign power and that Israel wants to drag Washington into a “wider regional war,” they are merely repeating, point for point, the favored talkers of the Obama and Biden administrations as they made Jews into the instrument for reorganizing their party along sectarian-racialist lines.

So, to return to our original question—yes, of course Rodriguez is an antisemite. In fact, we’d go so far as to say that in murdering two innocents over a “genocide” that doesn’t exist, only to have the future thought leaders of the Democratic Party rush to defend his actions as a (tactically misguided) instance of “vigilante justice,” he is a perfectly representative antisemite of our times.

—Park MacDougald

The Rest

→Prepare to read this every few weeks until October:

As the Trump administration tries to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has been threatening to upend the talks by striking Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, according to officials briefed on the situation.

That’s from a Wednesday report in The New York Times, in a piece co-bylined by four journalists and based on interviews with “officials in the United States, Europe, and Israel,” which follows reports that Trump and Netanyahu recently had a phone call marked by “heated disagreements” on Iran and that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem warned Netanyahu not to strike Iran in a “candid” Monday meeting. In a press conference Wednesday, Trump confirmed he’d told Netanyahu that it wasn’t “appropriate” to strike Iran right now, and that he’d prefer to solve the issue with a “very strong document.”

→The more interesting part of the Times story is what it said about the ongoing U.S.-Iranian nuclear negotiations. Despite Trump on Sunday teasing “something good” happening within the next “two days” and Noem reportedly telling Netanyahu in Jerusalem to give U.S. negotiators another “week,” sources “familiar with the negotiations” told the Times that the only deal currently on offer is an agreement to “set the stage for further negotiations.” Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, the Times added, has “dropped his early objections to an interim understanding that lays out principles for a final deal”—a bad sign, given the Iranians’ desire to stall for time while they shore up their position in the region. Late Wednesday afternoon, The Jerusalem Post reported that Israeli officials, including Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, met in Washington with Witkoff and Vice President J.D. Vance, amid Israeli fears that the United States is preparing to sign an interim memorandum of understanding with Tehran.

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→Quote of the Day:

In operations like the DEA’s Sleeping Giant probe—a deep U.S. government investigation into alliances between the Sinaloa Cartel and Chinese Triads that continues to unfold—[Don] Im mapped a stunningly sophisticated system in which Chinese businesses and citizens, secreting their wealth out of the Communist economy, bid on pools of underground cash worldwide, generated from fentanyl-, meth-, ketamine-, heroin-, and cocaine-fueled economies.

The scheme vacuums up cartel proceeds—cash brokers literally warehousing fentanyl-stained bills in diaspora shops across North America—then places those funds up for auction in encrypted WeChat channels. From there, the money is cleverly funneled into legitimate global trade, ultimately laundering value back to Chinese factories and superlabs operating in Canada and Mexico.

That’s from an article at “The Bureau” interviewing retired DEA agent Donald Im on his career of investigating Chinese involvement in the North American drug-trade, particularly via the Chinese diaspora in Latin America and Vancouver, Canada.

Read it here:

The Bureau

From Dien Bien Phu to Fentanyl: How China’s State-Linked Narco Networks Engineered a Reverse Opium War

WASHINGTON — As a young DEA agent in 1990s Manhattan, Don Im stood at the fault line of a drug war few understood. Washington’s attention was fixed on Latin America—on Pablo Escobar, on Cali, on coca…

Read more

a year ago · 59 likes · 5 comments · Sam Cooper

→Scenes from Gaza:

That was the scene on Wednesday at a UN World Food Program warehouse in Al-Maghazi, in central Gaza. According to i24 News Middle East correspondent Ariel Oseran, this footage was taken after Gazan civilians, enraged by reports that Hamas operatives were seizing flour, stormed the warehouse. Hamas gunmen opened fire on the crowd, killing five, again per Oseran.

→Saudi Arabia’s new state-owned artificial intelligence company, Humain, is planning to launch a $10 billion venture capital fund focused on the AI industry, the Financial Times reports. Humain, owned by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, was unveiled the day before Trump’s trip to Riyadh, and has already secured major deals with Nvidia (for microchips) and AMD (for processors) as part of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s bid to muscle into the global AI industry. The new VC fund, to be dubbed “Humain Ventures,” is set to launch later this summer with up to $10 billion in investments in start-ups across the United States, Europe, and Asia. “U.S. tech firms increasingly view Gulf states and their powerful sovereign wealth funds as critical sources of investment,” the FT reports, “with American tech executives in talks with regional officials about investments and raising capital.” Humain CEO Tareq Amin told the paper he was “in talks” with a host of companies close to the Trump administration, including OpenAI, Elon Musk’s xAI, and VC firm Andreessen Horowitz.

→Israel and Syria are engaged in “direct talks” and “face-to-face meetings” aimed at preventing conflicts along the countries’ shared border, Reuters reported on Tuesday. The direct talks come after reports earlier this month that the two sides were engaged in indirect negotiations mediated by the United Arab Emirates. According to Reuters, the discussions on the Syrian side have been led by Ahmad al-Dalati, a senior security official who now serves as governor of Syria’s Quneitra province, which borders the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. During his recent visit to the Middle East, President Trump expressed hope that Syria, under the leadership of Ahmed al-Sheraa, would eventually be able to join the Abraham Accords and normalize relations with Israel, but said that the Syrians still have “a lot of work to do.”

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The Big Story

Late Friday afternoon, when most Americans—and most journalists—were offline preparing to celebrate the unofficial start of summer, Secretary of State and interim National Security Advisor Marco Rubio announced a major “restructuring” of the National Security Council. More than 100 NSC employees (out of a total of upwards of 350) were placed on administrative leave, with the intention to ultimately cut the NSC’s staff by “at least half,” per The New York Times. In comments to various media outlets, administration figures billed the move as a purge of “leakers” and disloyal career bureaucrats, as well as an attempt to streamline decision-making. “The NSC is the ultimate Deep State. It’s Marco vs. the Deep State. We’re gutting the Deep State,” one official told Axios.

Set aside the question of whether NSC employees and detailees—many of whom were hired by this administration only a few months ago—are more “Deep State” than, say, career foreign service officers at the State Department. And grant that President Trump has some legitimate reason to be suspicious of the NSC: His first impeachment, over a 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, originated with two NSC staffers, Alexander Vindman and Eric Ciaramella, who disagreed with the president’s departures from the standard “interagency process” for policymaking. Instead, let’s look at who just got fired, and by whom.

Among those dismissed at the NSC were Merav Ceren, the director for Israel and Iran policy, and Eric Trager, the senior director for the Middle East and North Africa, who also worked on the Iran file. Both were, unlike Vindman and Ciaramella, Trump’s political appointees—not “deep state” bureaucrats. And Ceren, in particular, had long been a target of the “restrainer” faction on the right as an alleged “neocon.” As we noted in our April 21 Big Story, shortly after Dan Caldwell, a Kochworld restrainer, was fired from the DOD, Ceren was targeted in a messaging op falsely claiming that she was a “member” of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. The story, which was sourced to restrainers in and around the administration, was published by the far-left outlet Drop Site News and amplified on social media by the Qataris, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the National Iranian American Council, and organs of the Koch network, including the Quincy Institute (co-helmed by NIAC founder and Iranian asset Trita Parsi) and Responsible Statecraft (the Quincy Institute’s online journal, which has recently started publishing Drop Site writers on Gaza).

At the time, NSC spokesman Brian Hughes defended Ceren as a “patriotic American.” But apparently that’s not enough once the Tucker Carlson-Don Jr. faction has you pegged as a disloyal Jew. On Sunday, Drop Site took to X to claim its scalp:

So the NSC “hawks” are down. Who is up? Well, according to The Scroll’s sources, the driving force behind the NSC dismissals was Vice President J.D. Vance’s national security adviser, Andy Baker, who is now set to take a “top role” in the restructured NSC while continuing to serve as an aide to Vance, per CBS News.

Meanwhile, those ousted in April appear on their way to getting rehabilitated. On Monday, The Guardian reported that “the White House” had lost confidence in the leak investigation that led to the firing of Caldwell and two other DOD employees in April. According to the report, “advisors” were initially told that Caldwell and the others had been caught leaking via an “unconstitutional” National Security Agency wiretap, which alarmed them so much they raised the matter directly with “people close to J.D. Vance”—only to later be told that there had been no wiretap and that all the information had been gathered within the Pentagon. “One Trump adviser,” The Guardian writes, “recently told [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth that he did not think Caldwell—or any of the fired aides—had leaked anything, and that he suspected the investigation had been used to get rid of aides involved in the infighting with his first chief of staff, Joe Kasper.”

Make of that report what you will—British papers have a reputation in D.C. for being particularly easy marks for running narratives up the flagpole. The important part is that Caldwell’s allies saw Vance as their protector, and that they ran to Vance, rather than to the president, with their concerns. At the same time, Vance’s office appears to be taking a leading role in purging the NSC of its Iran hawks—i.e., the people who would (a) oppose a bad nuclear deal with Iran and (b) have the knowledge and experience to tell a good deal from a bad one. And sources tell us that Rubio, who we expected might serve as a brake on some of the administration’s pro-realignment tendencies, has aligned himself with Vance and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.

We’d love to be wrong about some or all of this, and predicting Trump’s moves has traditionally been a fool’s errand. But at the moment, it looks as if the restrainers now control effectively every foreign-policy power center in the federal government and in Trump’s inner circle. And with the latest round of “restructuring,” they have sent a message to everyone in the administration: We can protect our friends and hurt our enemies, and the president won’t stop us.

It’s hard for anyone on the other side to say the same.

—Park MacDougald

The Rest

→The new U.S.-Israeli aid distribution mechanism, run by a nonprofit called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) and protected by American security contractors, made its debut on Tuesday in southern Gaza. Early results are in, via Ynet:

A Gaza-based source told Ynet that due to the large crowd at the aid distribution point, GHF security personnel fled. The source added that the site was destroyed, fencing was torn down and an Israeli combat helicopter fired warning shots to disperse the crowd. All aid packages, tables and chairs were taken, and the American staff evacuated the area.

Well done, everybody! Both GHF and Israeli officials have downplayed the incident, and the GHF claims that aid distribution has resumed, so maybe it’s not quite as much of a shambles as it looks.

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→OK, but let’s look at the glass half-full for a minute: A U.S.-Israeli aid mechanism is still an improvement over the old United Nations-based system, which functioned as a de facto logistics arm of Hamas’ war effort. We suspect that’s why—despite the frantic statements from UN officials denying that Hamas steals or diverts aid—Hamas warned Gazans on Monday not to cooperate with GHF mechanism, which it said was an “intelligence operation for information gathering.” On Saturday, The Telegraph noted that a source from Hamas had told the London Arabic-language newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat that members of Hamas’ military wing had not been paid since February because Israeli aid restrictions eliminated one of the group’s primary sources of revenue.

→A wave of reports on Monday, originating in Arab media, indicated that Hamas had accepted a cease-fire deal proposed by Witkoff, only for Israel to reject it. Those reports were—surprise!—not true. The “proposal” accepted by Hamas called for the release of five living and five dead hostages, whereas the latest proposal submitted by Witkoff called for the release of 29 hostages—10 living and 19 dead. Witkoff himself quickly denied the report to Axios, telling the outlet that “what I have seen from Hamas is disappointing and completely unacceptable,” which tells us that the reports were simply a ploy from Hamas to attempt to ramp up international pressure on the Israelis. That said, what we’re hearing about the cease-fire talks isn’t exactly encouraging, either. For one thing, there’s the direct line between Hamas and the Trump administration via Bishara Bahbah, the leader of Arab Americans for Trump, which appears to have played a role in the Monday fiasco. And then there are reports like this one, from Ynet:

The U.S. is reportedly pressing Israel to accept a version of the deal in which Hamas receives American guarantees for an end to the war, which could bring the terror group closer to accepting Witkoff's original terms.

Hamas, which has lost all trust in Israel after the collapse of previous negotiations, now insists that any new agreement be signed by Witkoff himself—who would also be required to shake hands with senior Hamas official Khalil al-Hayya. This gesture, while symbolic, would in practice amount to American recognition of Hamas.

Who knows what will happen, but given that Israeli sources are already patting themselves on the back for using military pressure to “bring Hamas to accept the original Witkoff plan,” we might be looking at a U.S.-mediated capitulation fairly soon.

→In the early hours of Monday morning, Russia launched its largest-ever drone-and-missile attack on Ukrainian territory, a day after hitting Kyiv with major airstrikes in what Russian officials said was a retaliation for Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory. In response to the Sunday attacks, Trump—who appears to be tiring of Russian President Vladimir Putin and of the Russia file more generally—told reporters that he was considering new sanctions on Russia and expressed his exasperation at Putin’s behavior. “I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin,” Trump said. “I’ve known him a long time—always gotten along with him—but he’s sending rockets into cities and killing people, and I don’t like it at all.” Trump added in a Tuesday Truth Social post that Putin is “playing with fire!” The Russians, however, seem unimpressed. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said that Trump’s comments on Sunday were an “emotional reaction."

→A U.S.-German dual citizen was arrested in Israel last week for attempting to burn down the U.S. Embassy Branch Office in Tel Aviv. On May 19, Joseph Neumeyer, 28, posted the following message to his Facebook account: “Join me as I burn down the embassy in Tel Aviv. Death to America. Death to Americans and f—k the west.” He was detained outside the embassy branch office later that day with a backpack full of Molotov cocktails and deported to the United States over the weekend. Neumeyer has been charged with the attempted firebombing and for threatening on his Facebook page to assassinate Donald Trump (he also threatened at various points to kill Elon Musk and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott). While the atmosphere of nonstop anti-Israeli propaganda no doubt influenced Neumeyer’s choice of target, the young man appears to be a schizophrenic rather than a hardened ideologue; the New York Post notes that he had spent months posting “rambling conspiracy theories” on his Facebook page and that his political beliefs are an “incomprehensible grab-bag” of beliefs ranging from the extreme left to normie liberal Atlanticism.

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The Big Story

Yesterday, we reported on the murder of Israeli diplomats Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim by Elias Rodriguez. In that edition, we noted Rodriguez’s connection to the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), a Leninist and Maoist political group that The Scroll last year linked to the Chinese Communist Party-connected tech entrepreneur Neville Roy Singham’s sphere of influence. In the wake of Rodriguez’s arrest and the publicizing of his affiliations, the PSL claimed he was only briefly associated with one of its branches and had not been involved with the party since 2017. As it turns out, Rodriguez was also identified in a 2018 local news report as a member of the Chicago branch of the ANSWER Coalition (per Reuters)—an acronym for Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, which has organized “pro-Palestinian” demonstrations (in 2002, for example, InfluenceWatch says that the group held the largest pro-Palestine protest at that point in American history, drawing 100,000 people to Washington D.C.,) and which is also one of the organizations that The Scroll found to be connected to Singham. As of September 2022, ANSWER was not a stand-alone nonprofit, but rather a fiscally sponsored project of the Progress Unity Fund (PUF), a Washington, D.C.-based 501(c)(3) organization and yet another group that The Scroll identified as part of Singham’s network.

Notably, PUF also funds the PSL. After ANSWER organized a protest against President Donald Trump in 2016, The Daily Caller requested that PUF disclose its funding sources. The group never responded. By 2019, however, PUF reported nearly $2 million in revenue—its highest on record. The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI)—an independent American organization that monitors the spread of ideological threats and disinformation—recently posted a compelling thread on X that included leaked call logs between Iranian state media outlet PressTV and leaders of both the PSL and the ANSWER Coalition:

According to these logs, of over 200 outgoing calls from PressTV, 69 were made to ANSWER’s national coordinator Brian Becker and 46 to PSL founder Gloria La Riva. Both Becker and La Riva have published articles in Liberation News revealing specific ideological leanings. Becker, for instance, bylined a piece titled “Tiananmen: The Massacre that Wasn’t,” in which he argued that the 1989 massacre was a “peaceful” clearing of students from “elite universities.” La Riva, who ran for president on the PSL ticket in 2020, frequently writes in support of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. In a 2024 article, she claimed that opposition candidate Edmundo González’s allegations of election fraud were part of a CIA-backed psychological operation.

The phone logs also include calls to Michigan activist Cheryl LaBash, whose Instagram features a photo of a protest sign reading “Stop Israeli Genocide.” In the caption, she describes Israel’s retaliatory war on Hamas as “the greatest crime of this century.”

While there is no definitive information suggesting that any foreign actors outright directed the May 21 murders, the NCRI stated on X:

“The evidence shows a consistent pattern: hostile regimes like Iran and China targeting and cultivating ties with U.S. extremist networks that promote divisive, radical messaging.”

It would seem logical to conclude that foreign actors—particularly those in Iran and China—are cultivating Western voices to amplify their narratives. Rodriguez’s online posts are rife with anti-Israel slogans like “Intifada Revolution” and “Resistance is Justified”—phrases commonly echoed by PSL and ANSWER. Even if these groups don’t explicitly endorse violence, they fail to clearly define what forms of “resistance” they do support—leaving that interpretation open. Rodriguez evidently took the most extreme view possible.

—Adam Lehrer

The Rest

→In its ongoing battle with the Ivy League, the Trump administration revoked Harvard University’s right to enroll international students Thursday in an announcement put out by the Department of Homeland Security, according to the Associated Press. DHS accused the elite university of creating an unsafe environment by allowing “anti-American, pro terrorist agitators” to assault Jewish students. It also accused Harvard of coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party, saying it hosted and trained members of a Chinese paramilitary group as recently as 2024. In retaliation, Harvard filed a suit in federal court Friday claiming that the school’s removal from the DHS’s Exchange and Visitor Program is a violation of the law. “[This] is the latest act by the government in clear retaliation for Harvard exercising its First Amendment rights to reject the government’s demands to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum, and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students,” the complaint states. The suit also asks a judge to immediately block the order made by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.

Shortly after, Judge Allison D. Burroughs issued a temporary restraining order in Harvard’s favor, agreeing that implementation of the federal edict would cause “immediate and irreparable injury” to the university (per The New York Times).

→The leaders of pro-Iran Palestinian factions who were close to former Tehran-backed ruler Bashar Assad have left Syria after being pressured by the new authorities, according to Arab News. Those factions, which enjoyed freedom of movement during the Assad regime, also handed over their weapons to the Syrian authorities. The deportation of Palestinian terrorists was one of the demands made by President Trump in his meeting with Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa last week under the agreement that if those conditions were met the United States would lift sanctions on Syria.

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→France and Saudi Arabia are collaborating on a proposal that would disarm Hamas and transform the terror group into a “purely political” entity, says Bloomberg. The Saudis have made contact with Hamas to discuss the proposal, but the report says it’s unclear if French officials have done the same. The problem, however, is that this proposal would allow Hamas to continue governing Palestine in some form, and it’s extremely doubtful that Israel could accept Hamas continuing in its role as a governing body. In early May, French President Emmanuel Macron described Israel’s policy on Gaza as “shameful,” to which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded by accusing Macron of supporting Hamas.

→In more Macron news, the French president ripped into his ministers during a defense cabinet meeting Wednesday about the botched release of a report on the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in France, according to Politico. A French official told the news outlet that Macron accused his ministers of failing to come up with adequate solutions to counter the threat posed by the Brotherhood. The report that leaked earlier this week called for action to put a halt to what it called the “slow-burning” of Islamic influence and accused the Brotherhood of waging a covert campaign via local proxies to subvert France’s secular values and institutions, according to Reuters. Predictably, French academics have decried what they call the “alarmist” tone of the leaked report; Franck Frégosi, a political scientist specializing in Islam in France whose work was cited in the report itself, spoke to France Inter to complain that the report suggests that even common Islamic behaviors, like wearing a headscarf, are pointed to as evidence of the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence. Nadia Fadil, an associate professor at Belgium’s KU Leuven university who researches Islam in Europe, says that the report lumps together disparate groups from across the spectrum of Muslim civil society—which she likened to tying all left-wing movements to Karl Marx. (Doesn’t seem like the biggest stretch!) In any case, Macron said he plans to release the full, official version of the report by the end of the month.

→The “politically neutral” National Public Radio reports on the gruesome antisemitic shooting in Washington, D.C., Wednesday …

→It’s officially over for pennies. The United States Treasury announced that it will phase out the production of pennies potentially as early as the end of 2025, according to CNN. President Trump announced in February that he planned to support the halting of penny production. Why end pennies now, you ask? Grok’s got the scoop:

→“The science behind Ozempic was wrong,” writes Sarah Zhang for The Atlantic. The exceedingly popular weight loss drug, chemically known as “semaglutide,” apparently functions in an entirely different manner in the body than what scientists initially believed. Ozempic was created based on the assumption that the hormone GLP-1, which signals to the brain that the body is full and nourished, could be mimicked in a drug. It turns out that the hormone is processed by the body in a matter of minutes and therefore has little function in terms of long-term weight loss. Semaglutide, on the other hand, signals to the brain for days after use that the body is full. This means that semaglutide and all the brand name drugs that the compound is packaged under exert their effects through the brain, not the gut—specifically influencing appetite and metabolic processes via our noggins. Studies show that these drugs can also impact metabolism, not just appetite, leading to increased energy expenditure and potentially contributing to weight loss. Of course, this is hardly the first time that the pharmaceutical industry created a billion-dollar drug based on false or misunderstood claims. Novo Nordisk, the manufacturer of Ozempic, said the drug’s sales reached $40.6 billion in 2024 (per The New York Times).

→The “one big, beautiful bill” has passed the House of Representatives.

→The Federal Trade Commission is backing a federal lawsuit led by 12 Republican states alleging that three of Wall Street’s biggest asset managers—BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard—are artificially constricting the coal market in violation of U.S. antitrust laws, according to The Washington Free Beacon. The filing represents the first time that the Trump administration has involved itself with a case related to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies. Led by powerful asset managers and banks, the ESG movements call for money being pulled away from the old energy industries like coal and oil and put toward green energy in the “fight against global warming.” “Competition in coal markets incentivizes companies to produce as much coal as the market demands,” the FTC said in its Thursday brief on the lawsuit. “Allowing the market to freely determine the intersection of supply and demand is thus critical to America’s energy security and economic dynamism.”

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The Big Story

Israeli Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and American Sarah Lynn Milgrim, 26, were shot dead by a lone gunman chanting “Free, free Palestine” near the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, according to The Washington Post. The tragedy of the murders is compounded by their personal story. The couple met while working at the Israeli Embassy 18 months ago, The New York Times reported. Milgrim recently told her parents she would travel with Lischinsky to meet his family in Jerusalem. Unbeknownst to her, Lischinsky had purchased an engagement ring and planned to propose during the trip—a detail her parents learned only after the shooting.

The horrific crime comes at the end of a week marked by the emergence of a modern blood libel alleging that Israel is deliberately “starving babies” in Gaza. It is not clear where this new messaging idea came from; what’s known is that it spread like wildfire, helped by a powerful amalgam of legacy press, Democratic Party politicians, and anti-Israel influencers on the right. On May 17, Tucker Carlson’s favorite historian Darryl Cooper posted a tweet raging against the death of a young girl apparently starved by Israel. When asked by an X interlocutor how he knew it was real, Cooper said “because I trust @tparsi”—Trita Parsi, the founder of the National Iranian American Council. Except it turns out the little girl in the picture is not dead; she has cancer, and is in the UAE for treatment. On Tuesday, United Nations humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher claimed on the BBC that 14,000 babies would die in Gaza within 48 hours. That was a lie—but by the time the BBC retracted it, it had already gone viral. NBC News not only published the same false statistic but added a picture of a starving child—who turned out to be from Yemen. After their post got nearly 5 million views on X, it was quietly deleted. Sen. Bernie Sanders said Wednesday on X that “The entire population of Gaza is acutely malnourished and many are on the brink of starvation. History will not forget U.S. complicity in enabling this humanitarian disaster.” Also Wednesday, Mehdi Hasan appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored, where he accused Israel of “killing babies as a hobby.” Morgan replied that for the first time ever he agreed with Hasan’s assessment that Israel’s war on Hamas constituted a “genocide.” On Wednesday night, right-wing influencer Candace Owens boosted a video of podcaster Theo Von weeping as Dr. Gabor Maté detailed the psychological impacts of the war on Gazan children on Von’s show Tuesday. The video went viral after Owens reposted it, who went on to praise Von and noted, “God will have vengeance on those that defend what is happening in Gaza.”

Well, someone certainly got vengeance. After the attack, the alleged shooter, identified by NBC News as Elias Rodriguez of Chicago, fled into the museum—where security detained him before handing him over to authorities. Rodriguez appears to have been radicalized by a mix of communism and Islamic extremism. A source familiar with the matter claims he was a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) until 2017, though the party denies any recent connection. The PSL, a Marxist-Leninist and Maoist political group advocating for communist revolution, according to InfluenceWatch, is in damage control on X. “We reject any attempt to associate the PSL with the DC shooting,” the group posted. X users have responded by sharing images of a purported PSL flag reading, “Exterminate Zionists!” The PSL denies authorizing the flag, and no independent media has verified its authenticity, but the optics are damaging.

On the Islamic extremism front, national security analyst Travis Hawley linked Rodriguez to an eBay account, elrodr-8199, that purchased Muslim prayer rugs celebrating 9/11.

In a manifesto published by the shooter on X before his crime and verified by the Anti-Defemation League’s Center for Extremism, Rodriguez called for an armed demonstration against the “genocide” in Gaza. Chillingly, the manifesto suggests the murders were premeditated, targeting the diplomats as “the only sane thing to do.” Rodriguez also claims his actions will resonate with more Americans today than a decade ago—a disturbing assertion that may hold some truth. The manifesto can be seen below:

It’s unclear how much impact the rhetorical atmosphere of today’s discourse could actually have on an attack like this one, but our senior policy analyst would wager that it has, at the very least, some measurable effect:

When you have a nonstop outpouring of hate targeting a specific community and accusing it of the most heinous crimes, supported by key elements of both major parties and platformed on the biggest social media site, you are creating conditions that will galvanize every stray atom in the country. This is a systemic crisis that the American Jewish community seems entirely unable to address, and therefore will continue to endanger the lives of Jews and Christians alike.

Can either the left or the right vanquish that plague from its ranks? “Trump could end the avalanche of antisemitism on the right with one tweet and a few well-placed firings,” continues our analyst. “The left is too far gone to reason with.”

To learn more about the PSL, refer to Park MacDougald’s May 2024 edition of The Scroll Below:

—Adam Lehrer

The Rest

→As if there weren't enough spurts of political violence for one day, a woman was shot by security guards Thursday morning outside the CIA headquarters in Virginia after crashing into a gate outside the building, according to NBC News. The woman, identified as Monia Spadaro, survived the shooting in what CIA officials are calling a “security incident.”

→TruthSocial of the Day

President Trump said Wednesday he was considering making two giant government-sponsored home lenders, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, public. Interestingly, Omeed Malik, the Persian mega donor, close friend and business associate of Donald Trump, Jr. and financier of Tucker Carlson’s post-Fox News career (per New York Magazine), was appointed to Fannie Mae’s board in April.

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→Stat of the Day: 72%

That’s the percentage of Americans who believe the cover-up of former President Joe Biden’s mental decline is a “serious scandal,” according to a poll conducted by Rasmussen. The poll also found that 44% of voters believe that “Joe Biden’s mental condition was already going downhill before he ever got elected in 2020.” Some 41% disagreed. 60% believe he would not have been mentally or physically capable of doing his job had he stayed in the 2024 race and beaten President Donald Trump to win a second term.

→Article of the Day

The Columbia Journalism Review published a piece on sexual misconduct allegations made against Wesley Lowery, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who rose to fame for his coverage of Black Lives Matter organizing in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. One Tablet contributor likened the following excerpt to “the modern liberal equivalent of a Henry James scene”:

To read the full article, click the link

https://www.cjr.org/feature-2/wesley-lowery-sexual-assault-journalists-attest-experiences.php

→Immigration and Customs Enforcement and local law enforcement officials arrested 13 alleged members of Armenian organized crime syndicates in both Los Angeles and Hollywood, Florida, Wednesday, according to an ICE press release. Among the defendants charged are Ara Artuni, 41, of Porter Ranch, California, who is charged with attempted murder in aid of racketeering, and a rival, Robert Amiryan, 46, of Hollywood, California, who is charged with kidnapping. Vahan Harutyunyan, 50, of Hollywood, Florida, made his initial appearance earlier today in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and was ordered detained. According to the affidavits filed with the criminal complaints, the Russian mafia-linked Armenian Organized Crime syndicate has made LA a center of its activities. Artuni, a syndicate leader known as an avtoritet—which translates as authority in Russian—is charged with ordering the attempted murder of Amiryan during the summer of 2023. In retaliation, Amiryan, also an avtoritet, allegedly conspired with members of his own criminal organization to kidnap and torture one of Artuni’s associates in June 2023. In addition to attempted murder, Artuni and his criminal enterprise have since 2021 also allegedly engaged in bank fraud, wire fraud, and “cargo theft” targeting online retailers such as Amazon. Artuni Enterprise members and associates enrolled with Amazon as carriers and then diverged from the Amazon routes and stole all or part of the shipment. To date, according to data provided to ICE by Amazon, Artuni Enterprise has allegedly stolen goods from Amazon worth more than $83 million. One more defendant remains at large, according to NBC Los Angeles. Alec Mouhibian, an Armenian American resident of Los Angeles and the host of the Filthy Armenian Adventures podcast, told us over text that he was surprised by the news. “Armenian organized crime isn’t as big a thing now as it used to be,” he said. “The heyday of it was the ’90s with the arrival of the new Soviet immigrants, usually doing stuff like credit card or medicare fraud. Now, I guess, it’s Amazon cargo fraud.”

→Bitcoin rises to $110,000

Bitcoin climbed to an all-time high Wednesday, reaching the $110,000 threshold, according to Forbes. Austin King, the founder of the layer-1 blockchain Omni Network, chalks the gain in value to three different “structural tailwinds” converging at once:

1. “Record-setting demand from U.S. spot ETFs is absorbing supply faster than miners can create it after last year’s halving, with BlackRock’s IBIT logging a 20-day inflow streak and total ETF inflows topping $3B in May alone.”

2. “Policymakers are shifting from hostility to embrace: the Senate’s bipartisan GENIUS stablecoin bill and Texas’ move toward a state-level Strategic Bitcoin Reserve both widen the regulatory aperture and give institutions the confidence to allocate.”

3. “A renewed bid for inflation hedges is pulling in large allocators—Blackstone just made its first ETF purchase—while everyday investors look for protection against sticky price pressures.”

→Chinese scientists discovered a novel strain of bacterium with “unique abilities” that allowed it to thrive on the Tiangong Space Station, says The New York Post. The bacteria, dubbed Niallia tiangongensis, is similar to bacteria Niallia circulans—often found in sewage and soil—but demonstrates mutations that scientists believe could prove beneficial in the study of “life as it moves into space.” Scientists said the novel strain “demonstrates a unique ability to hydrolyze gelatin suggesting that it can utilize gelatin as a substrate in nutrient-limited environments.”

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The Big Story

Stop the presses: “New” U.S. intelligence suggests that there is a “chance” that Israel could strike Iran’s nuclear facilities—a scenario that would become “more likely” if the United States and Iran reach a deal that leaves Iran’s nuclear program intact.

But wait—isn’t this public knowledge, and in line with months of official communications from the Israeli leadership, not to mention dozens of anonymously sourced stories in the U.S. and Israeli press? Well, yes. But the alleged strike preparations were nonetheless the big scoop from CNN on Tuesday evening, in a story citing “multiple U.S. officials familiar with the latest intelligence.” According to those officials, “intercepted Israeli communications and observations of Israeli military movements”—i.e., classified U.S. signals intelligence—“could suggest an imminent strike.” What are those “military movements?” Nothing terribly impressive: “the movement of air munitions and the completion of an air exercise,” according to the officials.

Lest there be any doubt about the purpose of the leaks, here’s CNN:

Such a strike would be a brazen break with President Donald Trump, U.S. officials said. It could also risk tipping off a broader regional conflict in the Middle East—something the U.S. has sought to avoid since the war in Gaza inflamed tensions beginning in 2023.

Which, translated into the language of social media, looks like this:

So the strikes would be a “betrayal of” and “brazen break” with Trump, who said in April that it wasn’t possible for Israel to “drag” the United States into war with Iran, because “if we don’t make a deal, I’ll be leading the pack.” And what better outlet for the MAGA faithful to leak to than CNN?

The language sounded pretty familiar, so we checked the last major U.S. news story on Israel’s plans for an impending strike on Iran. Here was The New York Times in mid-April (emphasis ours):

In a meeting this month—one of several discussions about the Israeli plan—Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, presented a new intelligence assessment that said the buildup of American weaponry could potentially spark a wider conflict with Iran that the United States did not want.

Of course, reading these stories, you’d be completely unaware there was a change in the U.S. government this year, since the language about a “wider conflict” and “regional conflict” is exactly the same as under Biden.

But OK, Israel is preparing for a potential strike. We assume the United States is too, since, according to every statement from the administration since taking office, Trump is committed to preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons—through kinetic means if necessary.

For instance, there’s been a lot of talk about U.S. deployments at the Air Force base at Diego Garcia in the British Indian Ocean. In March, the United States deployed six B-2 “Spirit” stealth bombers—capable of dropping the 30,000-pound bunker busters necessary for a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities—to the island, in what nearly all observers regarded as a clear signal to Iran. Those bombers left earlier this month, replaced by four B-52 heavy bombers and six F-15E “Strike” Eagles—a slightly less threatening deployment that has led to some speculation that attack plans are off. But as Bradley Bowman, the director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Scroll, “A lot of the folks hyperventilating about Diego Garcia may not understand that the United States has the capability to launch any bomber attack it needs to—B-2s, B-52s, or B-1s—from the Midwest of the United States. Those bombers can arrive in Iran plus or minus 60 seconds.”

“America has the muscles,” he said. “The question is, are we willing to throw a punch?”

Bowman was skeptical that the Trump administration would order a strike before exhausting diplomacy with Iran (a new round of talks was announced Wednesday), but he thinks the administration is in “a much better place” in the negotiations than it was a few weeks ago. He attributed that in part to Republicans in Congress “making clear what they believe is acceptable and unacceptable” from a deal. He added, in response to arguments that the United States should wash its hands of Iran and the Middle East to focus on “great-power competition” with China or Russia, that these nominally separate theaters are effectively connected.

“If you’re a China hawk, you’ve got to be an Iran hawk and a Russia hawk,” Bowman said. “Or if you’re an Iran hawk, you’ve got to be a China hawk and a Russia hawk. Because it’s just a matter of time until Moscow starts to pay back its IOUs to Tehran for the help Iran has provided Putin in his war in Ukraine. That’s going to make the Iranian military more capable. And we’re seeing Chinese investment and diplomatic support that is going to make Iran more immune to U.S. sanctions pressure. An Iran that is more militarily capable and more immune to sanctions pressure is a bad, bad situation.”

—Park MacDougald

The Rest

→Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday (quoted in The Times of Israel) that he is “ready to end the war” under “clear conditions,” including that “all the hostages come home, Hamas lays down its arms, steps down from power, its leadership is exiled from the Strip … Gaza is totally disarmed, and we carry out the Trump plan.” The “Trump plan,” we assume, is the relocation of Gazans, their replacement with “world people,” Washington’s assumption of a “long-term ownership position in Gaza,” and the development of the Gaza Strip into a “freedom zone” and/or “the Riviera of the Middle East,” to quote some of Trump’s various comments on his proposed future for the territory. (Whether anyone in the Trump administration besides Trump himself has any interest in those proposals is, of course, an entirely separate question.) Netanyahu also said that the purpose of the current operation is to “complete the war” and that when the operation is over, “all of Gaza’s territories will be under Israeli security control.” On the other hand, Bibi said he was ready for a “temporary ceasefire to free hostages,” so we’ll see.

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→A warning from Raheem Kassam, cofounder of the podcast “War Room,” about the social media hall of mirrors:

→On Tuesday, Trump unveiled his plans to construct a Golden Dome missile defense shield over the United States, modeled on Israel’s Iron Dome. In a press conference at the Oval Office, Trump said the system will cost $175 billion and should be operational “in less than three years,” with the capability of intercepting missiles fired from anywhere in the world. Trump didn’t offer much detail on how the system would work—and his cost estimate may be wildly optimistic—but previous reporting from The War Zone suggests that the Golden Dome would involve the deployment of space-based interceptors capable of downing enemy missiles during their initial boost phase, well before they achieve maximum velocity or approach U.S. territory. (In effect, this would represent a modern version of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative.) These interceptors would be supported by an expanded array of early-warning and tracking satellites. The below graphic, from the Defense Intelligence Agency, may be tough to read (especially if you’re on your phone), but the illustration should give you a sense of the kinds of missile threats from China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea that the Golden Dome is meant to address:

Read more about it here: https://www.twz.com/space/trumps-golden-dome-missile-shield-what-we-just-learned-and-its-implications

→Trump met with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa today in the White House, and the result was the strangest scene to come out of the new administration since the February meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. For background: Ramaphosa was visiting in a bid to “reset the strategic relationship between the two countries” following the United States’ decision last week to grant refugee status to Afrikaners—white South Africans of primarily Dutch ancestry—facing what the U.S. State Department said was “racial discrimination” at the hands of the Black majority. Asked by a South African journalist what it would take to convince him that there was no “white genocide” in South Africa, Trump allowed Ramaphosa to speak and then had his aides queue up a four-minute video presentation of Black South Africans, including the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters, Julius Malema, calling for violence against whites and expropriation of their property:

Claims that violence against South African whites constitutes a “genocide” are, of course, hyperbolic, but given South Africa’s sponsorship of equally bogus genocide accusations against Israel at the International Court of Justice, we won’t be shedding many tears about the unfairness of it all.

→The Federal Trade Commission may be planning to investigate doctors and medical providers for knowingly deceiving parents about the benefits of “gender-affirming” treatments for minors, The Daily Wire reports. According to an internal FTC memo obtained by the outlet, the commission plans to hold a one-day workshop in July on “transgender surgeries, hormones, and puberty blockers”—a step that is often a prelude to the commission initiating legal action. “There is now considerable reason to believe that the doctors and medical providers pushing [gender-affirming care] on minors are knowingly deceiving parents by exaggerating [gender-affirming care’s] ‘benefits’ and downplaying its harmful side effects,” reads the memo. As The Scroll has previously reported, internal communications leaked last year from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which issues “best practices” recommendations for insurers and health-care providers, showed WPATH members privately expressing concerns about the group’s recommended treatments, including hormone therapy and surgery. They worried the treatments were not only were less effective than publicly advertised but also were being provided to children too young or developmentally disabled to understand their long-term consequences, by doctors with minimal training in the relevant fields. Later reporting revealed that the Biden administration had pressured WPATH to bury concerns that life-altering surgeries, such as breast removal, might be inappropriate for children, for fear that Republicans might “pounce” on such findings.

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The Big Story

It’s barely been 48 hours since Israel resumed ground operations in Gaza, and already the “international community” is throwing a tantrum. On Monday, as Operation “Gideon’s Chariots” operation got rolling and Israel announced the resumption of “basic” aid deliveries to Gaza, Canada, France, and the United Kingdom jointly threatened “concrete” actions if Israel did not abandon its war effort. On Tuesday, the leaders of those three countries released a joint statement demanding that “the Netanyahu Government” cease its “wholly disproportionate” escalation in Gaza and “lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid” in coordination with the United Nations, while declaring their commitment “to recognizing a Palestinian state.”

The United Kingdom followed that up by suspending bilateral trade negotiations, summoning the Israeli ambassador for a reprimand, and announcing sanctions against Israeli settlers. British Foreign Minister David Lammy threatened “further measures” if Israel does not “stop the Gaza war.” The European Union’s foreign minister, Kaja Kallas, declared that EU foreign ministers would “review” the bloc’s association agreement with Israel and Sweden, for good measure, threatened EU sanctions against Israeli ministers. To cap off the farce, an official from the United Nations told BBC Radio on Tuesday that “14,000 babies” will starve to death within the next 48 hours if aid is not resumed; a nonsense figure that appears to be drawn from an estimate of how many pregnant women are “food insecure” in Gaza.

This mass escalation of international pressure comes at a convenient time for Hamas. As we noted yesterday, the Israeli aid blockade had been effectively bankrupting the terror group, and the IDF had succeeded in eliminating several senior Hamas military commanders, including Mohammed Sinwar, immediately prior to the launch of the current operation, disrupting the group’s capacity to organize an effective defense against the new IDF campaign. The degradation of the group’s financial and military position has, more recently, been paired with what appears to be a degradation of its political legitimacy in Gaza. On Monday, for instance, thousands of Gazans took to the streets of Khan Younis to chant “Hamas out” and “Ya Emadi”—a reference to the Qatari envoy to Gaza, Mohammed al-Emadi—“Wait patiently, the Gazan people will dig your grave”:

To put it bluntly, the European position is that Hamas must be preserved and that Israel must accept strategic defeat in Gaza. Hamas, to its credit, had the common decency to thank its friends. On Tuesday, the group released a statement praising the Europeans’ actions as a “step in the right direction.”

Perhaps in response to pressure from the Europeans, but more likely as a favor to the Trump administration, Israel began further stepping up aid deliveries on Tuesday. On Monday, 5-9 aid trucks (reports vary) were allowed to enter the Gaza Strip. On Tuesday, however, Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories announced that 93 aid trucks had been allowed to enter Gaza. According to a U.N. official, the aid will be distributed through the “existing” system—i.e., the one involving U.N. agencies and nonprofits, such as the World Central Kitchen, and not the alternative Israeli-U.S. system set to begin some time in the coming weeks. So, for the moment at least, Israel will once again be sustaining Hamas with its left hand while attempting to destroy it with its right.

And what of the United States’ position in all of this? Yesterday, we noted with skepticism a report from The Washington Post that Trump had threatened to “abandon” Israel if it didn’t end the war. Several U.S. officials angrily denounced that report, with hostage envoy Adam Boehler calling it “fake news.” But on Tuesday morning, we got a new wave of doom and gloom. Barak Ravid reported, first in Walla News and then in Axios, that Trump was “shocked” by images of starving children in Gaza and was pressing Israel to end the war, which he sees as a “flash point” delaying his plans for the region. And in testimony on Tuesday to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said—in a remark that made headlines in Israel—that the United States viewed the limited amount of aid allowed into Gaza on Monday as “insufficient.”

Again, however, we think the reports of a serious rift are overblown. Despite Ravid’s blaring headline that Trump is “frustrated” and wants Israel to “wrap it up,” Israeli sources in the same story said that Netanyahu “does not feel much pressure from Trump” and that if Trump wants a cease-fire, he needs to “put a lot more pressure on both sides.” Boehler, though he reiterated the White House’s preference for a cease-fire, praised the IDF for escalating pressure on Hamas to reach a deal. And Rubio, in the same hearing mentioned above, defended the IDF’s current operation and said that Israel “can achieve their objective of defeating Hamas while still allowing aid to enter in sufficient quantities.” Rubio went on, “The central question for the future of Gaza is going to be: Who governs it? Because as long as there’s a group like Hamas there, it’s going to be very difficult to imagine long-term peace or prosperity. So, whether it’s Hamas or some successor organization that spins out of it, that’s a factor that has to be eliminated.” It’s also worth noting, on the question of the aid, that The Times of Israel has reported that the White House has threatened to cut U.S. funding to the U.N.’s World Food Program if it doesn’t cooperate with the new Israeli aid delivery plan.

Would it be better if Rubio echoed his fire-and-brimstone denunciations of Hamas from his time as a senator? Yes, of course. But realistically, there is nothing right now to indicate that the United States is exerting more than minimal pressure on Israel over Gaza. There is no “Italian strike” on arms deliveries, nor are there threats to back sanctions at the United Nations, nor has Trump taken any of the ample opportunities he’s been given to stick a rhetorical knife in Netanyahu’s side. What that adds up to is that, for now, as Michael Doran argued in the latest edition of Tablet’s “Israel Update,” “Gaza is in the hands of Israel,” and it’s “not Donald Trump that’s keeping Israel from winning in Gaza,” but Israel itself.

Our guess is that this state of affairs won’t go on forever. Trump, in all likelihood, will give the current operation some time to play out, but will eventually cut bait if it doesn’t seem like it’s leading anywhere. Which in turn means the IDF needs to act aggressively. In a statement on Tuesday, IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir said that Israel will “expand ground maneuver, conquer additional territory, [and] clear and destroy the terror infrastructure” until Hamas is either destroyed or agrees to release all of the hostages. Which sounds like the right idea. Here’s hoping that Israel will attempt to see it through.

—Park MacDougald

The Rest

→While Hamas no doubt finds the “genocide” rhetoric useful for gullible Westerners, for Arab audiences, it still needs to explain that, no, of course it’s not responsible for an actual genocide of Gazans. For instance, here’s Hamas’ Sami Abu Zuhri, in a clip from late March translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute, defending Hamas against claims that it had brought destruction on Gaza:

A house that was destroyed will be rebuilt ... The wombs of our women will give birth to many times over the number of martyrs. Did you know that the number of newborn babies in Gaza equals the number of martyrs who were killed in this war? At least 50,000 babies were born in Gaza during the war.

Zuhri, a senior spokesman for Hamas’ Doha-based political leadership, also suggested to the interviewer from Libyan television that the Gaza war was helping to spread the faith in the West. “What makes people in America, France, and elsewhere in Europe convert to Islam?” Zuhri asked. “We must not minimize this matter to 20, 100, or 1,000 homes destroyed in Gaza. The implications of this war far exceed the extent of Gaza and the region. The implications of this war exceed the boundaries of space and time.” Indeed.

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→In his Senate testimony, Rubio was twice asked about the nuclear negotiations with Iran. Here’s the second of those exchanges, with Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA):

Key points here:

1. The U.S. position remains zero enrichment of uranium in Iran

2. Rubio said the talks, “at this point,” had focused solely on the nuclear issue, and that the United States had not broached Iran’s support for terrorism or its ballistic missile program.

3. If a final deal does not address Iran’s proxies or missile program, then U.S. sanctions related to those issues would remain in place even in the event of a deal.

As The Wall Street Journal’s Laurence Norman observed on X about the third point, “This is extremely important. If terror and other sanctions stay on [the] books, you can forget [about] significant trade between [the] US and Iran.”

→In a Tuesday X post, Israeli journalist Tamir Morag, a diplomatic correspondent for Channel 14, sought to explain the seeming disconnect between the Trump administration’s Israel policy and popular perceptions of its policy based on social media conversations and anonymously sourced reports in the left-wing U.S. and Israeli press. The pro-Israel faction of the administration, Morag wrote, is “dominant” and includes “the vast majority of senior administration officials,” but there is nonetheless a “significant” number of “restraintist” officials at the junior and mid-levels of the U.S. government, who are working through the media to shift administration policy. Morag writes:

Administration officials aligned with the isolationist camp frequently brief Israeli and American journalists with claims of a “collapse in relations” or “Trump’s rage at Netanyahu.” And many journalists, most of whom hold left-leaning agendas and seek to undermine Netanyahu’s government, eagerly buy into this narrative.

Therefore, when a journalist reports that “an administration source says the Trump-Netanyahu relationship is in crisis,” he’s not necessarily fabricating or lying—he may very well have heard it from a real administration source. But in most cases, these claims do not reflect the administration’s actual position or the real situation. That’s why senior officials who do speak on the record so often issue strong denials shortly afterward.

This, for what it’s worth, accords with what The Scroll has heard in conversations with administration officials—i.e., that the “restraintist” faction is loud but consists principally of mid-level bureaucrats and junior staffers working with outside influencers and protected by the president’s son.

→On Monday, the United Kingdom and the European Union struck a trade and security deal to “reset” relations nearly a decade after British voters opted to leave the EU and five years after Britain left. The deal drops certain barriers on trade and movement but is less than comprehensive; according to the write-up in The New York Times, the deal should ease barriers to entry for British travelers, make “traveling with pets” easier, and allow for the sale of certain British meat products on the continent. (British Prime Minister Keir Starmer had ruled out rejoining the European single market or customs union.) Diplomatically, the most important part of the new “reset” is a security partnership, which calls for London and Brussels to ramp up cooperation on shared security issues—principally the war in Ukraine.

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The Big Story

Following the end of President Donald Trump’s trip to the Middle East and the collapse of the latest round of hostage negotiations in Doha, Israel is following through on its threats of a new major offensive in Gaza, dubbed “Gideon’s Chariots.” On Sunday, the IDF announced that it had begun a “broad ground operation throughout the northern and southern Gaza Strip” intended to “increase and expand our operational control in Gaza.” Other statements from IDF officials and Israeli political leaders have suggested the ultimate purpose of the new offensive is to “seize” and “retain” key areas of Gaza with the ultimate goal of defeating Hamas and “conquering” the territory—though officials, including IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir, have also said that Israel remains open to a deal that would secure the release of some of the hostages.

The below graphic, published by the UK newspaper The Sunday Times and reportedly based on leaked IDF documents, suggests that the immediate goal of the new offensive is to split Gaza into three civilian zones, separated by IDF-occupied corridors that would control the movement of Palestinians along the strip’s north-south axis:

If true, this would help contextualize the other big piece of Gaza news from the weekend, which is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has approved the delivery of a “basic quantity of food” into Gaza to “enable the expansion of intense fighting to defeat Hamas.” Militarily, the move makes no sense, because Hamas relies on the confiscation and reselling of aid, including food, to generate cash to fund its operations, as The Wall Street Journal confirmed in a report in April. Politically, however, it seems clear that Netanyahu judged the move necessary to secure continued U.S. support. Late last week, for instance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the United States was “troubled” by the humanitarian situation in Gaza, while Trump mentioned during his Middle East trip that people there were “starving.” In his remarks justifying the resumption of aid, Netanyahu said that pressure over the aid issue was approaching a “red line” and that even pro-Israel U.S. senators were telling him, “We’ll give you all the help you need to win the war … but we can’t be receiving pictures of famine.”

The prime minister’s office said that “Israel will act to deny Hamas the ability to seize control of the distribution of humanitarian aid in order to ensure that the aid does not reach Hamas terrorists.” Previous efforts to do so have failed, of course, but the new plan appears to be to work with the United States (via U.S. companies and security contractors) to hand out the aid at IDF-controlled distribution points, thereby cutting Hamas out of the equation. That should, in theory, be easier to accomplish if the IDF does indeed occupy large swathes of the strip and establish control over Palestinian movement throughout Gaza, per the above plan, though it also risks granting Washington additional leverage over Israeli decision-making by increasing its entanglement in aid delivery; you can imagine how the Tucker-Don Jr. vertical might respond to U.S. security contractors getting killed in an ambush.

By the same token, the United States’ direct involvement in aid-delivery mechanisms meant to bypass the United Nations cuts against the idea, popular in certain quarters, that the renewed offensive represents a unilateral Israeli action in defiance of the Trump administration’s wishes. For instance, an unnamed “source”—likely Israeli, though it’s not quite clear from the report—told The Washington Post Monday that “Trump’s people are letting Israel know, ‘We will abandon you if you do not end this war,’” while someone in the administration leaked to Axios that Vice President J.D. Vance had decided against a trip to Israel out of concern that it would be “perceived … as validation for Israel’s expanded operation.” Both outlets, of course, have been favored destinations for leaks from the “restrainer” wing of the administration, though these leaks have generally countersignaled administration policy—not reflected it.

Would Trump prefer an end to the war? In all likelihood, yes. And it’s not hard for us to believe the president asked Netanyahu to allow more aid to Gaza. But that is not the same as saying that Trump is going to color-revolution Bibi or “abandon” Israel if the cease-fire talks led by Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff don’t pan out in the near term. Even Witkoff told Arab mediators last week that the United States has no plans to force Israel to wrap up the war, according to a Thursday report in The Times of Israel. Trump himself, asked by Bret Baier if he was “frustrated at all” with Netanyahu, answered, “No. Look, he’s got a tough situation. You have to remember there was an Oct. 7 that everyone forgets.”

—Park MacDougald

IN THE BACK PAGES: Lee Smith remembers Michael Ledeen, who passed away on Sunday

The Rest

→Could it actually be time for Israel to end the war? Some pro-Israel voices in the United States have floated the idea that Israel’s recent assassinations of Gazan military leaders—including Hamas’ de facto Gaza commander, Mohammed Sinwar, and the commander of its Khan Younis battalion, Mehdi Kawareh—offer it a chance to end the fighting on its terms. Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, for instance, wrote on X on Sunday that “I believe now is the right time for Israel to pursue an agreement to end the war,” citing the Israeli public’s growing war weariness and the need to prepare for potential military action against Iran. Schanzer doesn’t say it outright, but we suspect he’s also thinking that ending the war would buy the Israelis credit with the Trump administration. But if the goal is to defeat Hamas, then now is precisely the wrong time to wrap things up, as the analyst “Dan Linnaeus” explains on X:

→Iran nuclear talks, meanwhile, appear to be hitting an impasse. In an interview on ABC’s This Week, Witkoff again repeated that the Trump administration’s “red line” was uranium enrichment. “We cannot allow even 1% of an enrichment capability,” Witkoff said, explaining that any enrichment capacity “leads to nuclear weapons.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt reiterated the zero-enrichment position in a press conference on Monday. The Iranians, for their part, have spent the past few days publicly lashing out over what seems to be a hardening U.S. negotiating posture. On Saturday, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei denounced Trump as a “liar” and said that his remarks in Saudi Arabia were “a source of shame for the American people.” On Monday, the Iranian Foreign Ministry accused Washington of having “a lack of seriousness and goodwill” in negotiations, while Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said, in response to Witkoff’s remarks, “No matter how many times they repeat it, our position will not change. Our stance is clear: we will continue enrichment.”

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→Qatar has ramped up its efforts to influence conservative media following Trump’s election, according to a recent investigation by Robert Schmad in the Washington Examiner. The paper’s review of lobbying disclosures revealed that between Jan. 1, 2024, and election day, “just over 10% of communications sent by Qatari foreign agents to the media were directed to conservative outlets or commenters,” but that since the election, more than half of Qatari outreach efforts have been directed at right-wing outlets, including Tucker Carlson Network, Just The News, Fox News Digital, the New York Post, the Daily Mail, and the Washington Examiner. The records show only attempted outreach, not whether the outreach was successful. But Schmad reports that at least two outlets, Fox News and the New York Post, ran stories painting Qatar in a positive light shortly after being contacted by one of the registered foreign agents on the list, GRV Strategies. As we noted earlier this month, GRV Strategies is the lobbying firm of Garrett R. Ventry, a powerful Republican operative and former “representative” of Omeed Malik—Donald Trump Jr.’s business partner in 1789 Capital, the venture capital firm backing Tucker Carlson Network, and Executive Branch, a Washington, D.C., private club with a $500,000 membership fee.

Read the rest here: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/investigations/3414894/conservative-media-targeted-qatari-foreign-influence-operations/

→In what should come as a surprise to exactly zero readers of The Scroll, the Examiner story also revealed that Tucker Carlson’s March interview with the Qatari prime minister, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, was facilitated by a “legal consulting” firm called Lumen8 Advisors LLC, which receives $180,000 per month from the Qatari Embassy. Here’s the relevant portion of Lumen8’s Foreign Agent Registration Act filing, which Eitan Fischberger posted on X:

The filing was signed by Rebecca Diaz-Bonilla, who describes herself on her website as an “international communications consultant.” Her husband, Mariano Diaz-Bonilla, formerly worked at Goldman Sachs and at Skanska, a global construction company, and lists Lumen8 Advisors LLC as his affiliation on the website of Thomas Aquinas College, a conservative Catholic private college where he is a member of the Board of Governors.

→NBC News reported on Friday that the Trump administration is in discussions to relocate 1 million Palestinians to Libya in exchange for the United States unfreezing billions of dollars in Libyan funds. The report cites “five people with knowledge of the efforts,” though after the report was published, a State Department spokesperson told the outlet that the report was “untrue” and that “such a plan was not discussed and makes no sense.” So our best guess is that the talks are taking place, somewhere, at some level, but haven’t risen to the level where they can be acknowledged officially. Which means that the most likely outcome of these talks is nothing. But hey, Trump did say last week in Qatar that the United States should “take” Gaza and turn it into a “freedom zone.” So at least somebody—maybe somebody in Libya—is taking the president’s plan seriously.

→Quote of the Day:

In some of these cases, the “there” you’re looking for is not there.

That was FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino in a Sunday interview with Fox’s Maria Bartiromo, discussing the investigations into the two assassination attempts last year against then-candidate Donald Trump. Bongino and FBI Director Kash Patel, who also sat for the interview, declined to discuss the second assassination attempt, given that the suspect, Ryan Routh, is still living and actively under prosecution. But Bongino effectively confirmed that there was no wider plot or conspiracy surrounding the first assassination attempt, by Thomas Matthew Crooks, in Butler, Pennsylvania. “It’s not there,” Bongino said. “If it was there, we would have told you.” Bongino also said, in the same interview, that Jeffrey Epstein had—contrary to widespread speculation—“killed himself.”

→Former President Joe Biden, 82, has been diagnosed with an “aggressive form of prostate cancer” that has “spread to his bones,” CBS reports, citing a statement issued by the Biden family. In the statement, the family said the cancer had a score of 9 on the Gleason scale—a 1-10 scale, with 10 denoting the most aggressive form—and was Stage 4, meaning it had spread beyond Biden’s prostate. Cancer experts cited in the CBS report and in The New York Times were upbeat about Biden’s treatment prospects, though the latter outlet noted in an aside that the cancer, having spread to the bones, is now “uncurable.” Scott Adams, the right-wing commentator and creator of the comic strip Dilbert, announced on his show Sunday that he has the same cancer as Biden—i.e. Stage 4 prostate cancer—and that he expects “to be checking out from this domain sometime this summer.”

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Michael Ledeen, 1941-2025

by Lee Smith

Michael Ledeen died Sunday at the age of 83 after a long illness. He was a scholar and author of dozens of books on subjects ranging from communism and fascism to the Middle East and Italy. He loved Italy, Naples in particular, which he saw as something like the heart of the world, full of life, chaos, and excellent food.

He first invited me to lunch at Tiramisu, one of his favorite spots, just off Dupont Circle, sometime after I’d just come to Washington. I wanted to ask him questions—lots of people went to Michael with questions about things, contemporary or ancient, American or foreign, sacred or profane. Sometimes it seemed like he knew everything you wanted to know about anything—Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy, the opposition to the Iranian regime, the landscape of Mantua, the Latin poet Virgil’s hometown. And so, from the start, I loved spending time with Michael because he made himself available to questions.

That may sound strange, but people who’ve spent time in Washington know that very few people in Washington answer questions—who knows what you might be giving away? And to be fair, there aren’t too many people who really ask questions. Not even journalists, because to be seen as not knowing something is an evident vulnerability. So, as often as not, a Washington lunch is two people not really talking. When I got to spend time with Michael, it was me asking him questions. And I reckoned it a great gift.

He worked as a political adviser in key U.S. institutions at crucial times in our history, but to my mind he was primarily a writer, someone who comes to understand a thing by speaking with people for the purpose of explaining it to others. He spoke with the dead, too—he asked them questions. He wrote an ongoing series of columns in which he summoned the ghost of the CIA’s famous counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton and asked him to illuminate contemporary events. (Here’s one where he asked the Cold War giant what he thought of Israel’s 2009 Gaza campaign.)

I want to say that his death marks the end of one era of American greatness—the broad-chested and quick-witted Reagan-style of big American life and talk and romance—but he isn’t really gone because I’m thinking all the time about the about what he wrote or said or a question he answered for me. For instance, on Saturday, the day before he died, I was remembering the time at lunch at Tiramisu we’d gotten into a long conversation about antisemitism and out of exasperation I said something to the effect of, “I don’t get it, what drives it, what’s driven it for so long?” And he said, “but that’s the point—nothing motivates antisemitism, there is no reason for it. It’s irrational. It’s a form of madness”

We call the man who helps us understand things like that—about madness and history and reason and duty—a mentor, but what is that? In the Odyssey, Telemachus seeks counsel from his father’s friend, Mentor, about his father’s fate. In other words, he wants to know where he has come from and where he must go to live a meaningful life. Michael Ledeen helped many, including me, to ask those questions. May he always stand as an example for those asking what it means to live a meaningful life, like his.

The Big Story

The peace talks between Ukraine and Russia, called by Russian President Vladimir Putin, were scheduled to take place in Istanbul on Thursday. But the plan hit a major obstacle when Putin declined to attend, according to NBC News. President Donald Trump dismissed concerns about Putin’s absence, telling reporters outside Air Force One en route to the United Arab Emirates that Putin wouldn’t attend unless both leaders could meet in person. “[Putin] wasn’t going if I wasn’t going there,” Trump said.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced he would meet the Ukrainian negotiation delegation in Istanbul on Friday, and indeed the talks continued—but yielded little beyond an agreement between the Russian and Ukrainian delegations to exchange 1,000 prisoners of war on each side, according to The Kyiv Independent.

President Trump’s frustrations seem to have shifted focus from Ukraine—readers will recall the heated Oval Office exchange between Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last February—to Putin and Russia. Earlier this week, Trump vented on Truth Social about his dismay that Putin wanted to hold the peace talks prior to agreeing to any kind of a cease-fire.

To better understand Putin’s motivations and the broader implications of the stalled negotiations, The Scroll spoke by phone with Tablet’s Ukraine expert, Vladislav Davidzon. “Putin doesn’t want a deal,” he said, continuing:

He sees himself as winning. He’s already absorbed the economic and political costs of the war, including Western and some Eastern sanctions, and he’s consolidated his regime. He views this as year two or three of a five- or seven-year war, which he intends to win.

After the Russia-Ukraine talks concluded, Zelenskyy and several European leaders—French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk—held a phone call with Trump, per The Kyiv Independent. No details of the conversation have been released, but Zelenskyy and the European leaders issued statements afterward.

On Telegram, Zelenskyy said Ukraine is willing to take the “fastest steps” to achieve “real peace.” Tusk blamed Russia for abruptly ending the negotiations and condemned its unwillingness to end the bloodshed. Starmer called Russia’s negotiation position “unacceptable.”

What is that position? Russia has demanded that Ukraine relinquish four territories—Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia—according to Reuters. These areas are already partially occupied by Russian forces, but the demand is untenable for Kyiv, as it would not secure lasting peace but merely initiate a temporary cease-fire.

Russia’s demand seems designed to be unacceptable, allowing Moscow to avoid a cease-fire altogether. “It’s basically Russia saying, ‘Give up all those villages you’ve been valiantly defending without a fight,’” Davidzon said. “Not in exchange for a lasting peace deal, but for a cease-fire that Russia will likely violate anyway.”

Zelenskyy and the European leaders stressed the need for tougher sanctions on Russia in response to these excessive demands, but it remains unclear whether intensified sanctions could facilitate peace.

These developments place Trump, who made ending the Russia-Ukraine war a campaign pledge, in a precarious position. In 2023, Trump claimed he could end the war in “one day,” but the conflict’s dynamics have shifted dramatically, making a peace deal more elusive than ever. Russia may have gained too much leverage during Joe Biden’s presidency, and by the time Trump took office in 2025, it was arguably too late. “If Trump had taken power in month three, he could have had a deal,” Davidzon said. “If he had taken power after the failed Ukrainian counteroffensive in the summer of year two he would have had more leverage to stop the fighting.” Russia believes victory is imminent, while Ukraine, Davidzon notes, is faring better than it was six months ago.

Failure would be catastrophic for both. For Ukraine, defeat would be practically existential, given the devastation that the conflict has already wrought upon it. For Russia, it would be politically disastrous. “Russia is an autocracy,” Davidzon said. “Autocracies can’t lose wars without risking legitimacy.”

Trump may have drastically underestimated the challenge of securing agreement from both sides. So far, most of his pressure has been directed at Ukraine, which was compelled to enter negotiations before securing any robust security guarantees, beyond the minerals deal made with the U.S. in April. Davidzon suggested that Zelenskyy’s threshold for a deal might be lower than that of the Ukrainian public, as he knows his government risks bleeding out if the war continues. If anything, Trump’s pressure may have given Zelenskyy something of an off-ramp given that the appearance of Trump’s coercion allows him to maintain an image of defiance in the eyes of his people.

But how pressure can be applied at this juncture to Russia, now that Putin seems confident of victory, remains more uncertain than ever.

—Adam Lehrer

The Rest

→Saudi Arabia and France will host an international conference in New York in June with United Nations backing to establish a road map for the creation of Palestinian statehood, according to Israel Hayom. The plan for Palestinian statehood won’t require Palestine to recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli state and disregards Israel’s security concerns. The conference is being held in the wake of French President Emmanuel Macron’s pro-Palestinian declarations and is said to move beyond recognizing statements to establish objectives with full implementation plans, including sanctions against states that obstruct the process. In the invitation to U.N. member states, conference organizers say the event will “pave the way for ending the occupation and promote a permanent settlement based on the two-state solution.” Even worse, the invitation blames the violence and Oct. 7 attacks on “both sides.” The document, says the outlet, attempts to force Israel into a diplomatic process without its consent.

→The Department of Homeland Security asked the Pentagon to provide 20,000 National Guard troops to assist in the deportation of illegal migrants, The New York Times reported Thursday. Pentagon lawyers were reviewing DHS’s request with “interior immigration enforcement,” according to a Defense Department official. While National Guard troops have assisted local law enforcement officials at the border, this would be the first time they were called to directly assist with deportations. The request comes as President Trump is trying to fulfill his campaign pledge to carry out mass deportations, which so far have fallen short of what the administration wants.

→REMINDER: The Scroll is leaving Substack and moving behind a paywall on June 1.

Scroll readers who subscribe before June 1 will receive one free gift subscription. And if you subscribe this week you can use the discount code CHAITABLET for 18% off.

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→Former FBI Director James Comey posted a cryptic image on his Instagram Thursday, where the numbers “86 47” are spelled out through rock and shell formation on the sands of some beach. In military parlance, to “86” something can be interpreted as to refuse service or to “get rid” of it, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. 47 is … well, let’s just say that Donald Trump is our 47th president. For obvious reasons, the post led to immediate controversy, and he is now being investigated by the Secret Service. He has since deleted it, claiming he didn’t know that “86” had anything to do with violence, and apologized. In a Fox News interview Friday morning, the president himself wasn’t buying Comey’s apology or explanation: “He knew exactly what that meant,” said Trump. “A child knows what that meant. If you’re the FBI director and you don’t know what that meant, that meant assassination, and it says it loud and clear.”

→Crypto trading app Coinbase announced Thursday that cybercriminals had bribed some of the company’s overseas support agents to steal customer data in social engineering attacks, according to CNBC. The incident could likely cost the company around $400 million. The crypto exchange operator received an email on May 11 from someone claiming they obtained information about certain Coinbase customer accounts as well as other internal Coinbase documentation, including materials relating to customer service. Coinbase and its subsidiaries are covered by Coinbase Global Inc.’s crime insurance, which protects a portion of digital assets from theft, like cybersecurity breaches.

→Yesterday, we reported that Trump’s tax bill was near to being passed. On Thursday, however, the bill appeared to hit a roadblock when hardline conservatives demanded bigger cuts to Medicaid in exchange for their support in a key procedural vote, according to Reuters. House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington warned that the vote, scheduled for today, could be delayed due to opposition to the measure, which could add trillions to the nation's $36.2 trillion debt over the next decade. House Speaker Mike Johnson said the bill was still on track for a floor vote next week. The two hardliners opposing this version of the bill are Reps. Ralph Norman and Andrew Clyde. Rep. Chip Roy expressed disapproval of it and Rep. Josh Brecheen called for more time to examine its costs.

→Secretary of State Marco Rubio met his Syrian counterpart, Foreign Minister Asaad Hassan al-Shaibani, on Thursday, days after President Trump vowed to lift sanctions on Syria during his trip to Saudi Arabia. The New York Times said that the meeting further signals that relations between the U.S. and Syria are warming. Rubio and al-Shaibani discussed a road map for the remaining sanctions on Syria to be lifted, according to both Syrian and Turkish officials. Rubio told reporters that the goal was to help create a peaceful and stable Syria.

→Is being the first “Catholic convert Vice President” as groundbreaking as being the first American pope? Our sources say no, but Vice President JD Vance needs his acknowledgement nonetheless.

→Boeing reached a tentative nonprosecution agreement with federal prosecutors in a fraud case that emerged after two 737 MAX planes crashed and killed 346 people, according to Reuters. The agreement forestalls the June 23 trial date set to litigate the charge Boeing was hit with for misleading U.S. regulators about a flight control system on the 737 MAX, but still requires the approval of a judge. Boeing withdrew its guilty plea, prosecutors told the families of the crashes’ victims. Officials of the Department of Justice are still mulling over whether to take the nonprosecution deal or to go ahead and bring the case to trial.

→REMINDER: The Scroll is leaving Substack and moving behind a paywall on June 1.

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The Big Story

The New York Times published an article Wednesday documenting Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s effort to consolidate control of the president’s Daily Brief by moving it from the CIA headquarters to her own office complex. The brief, a “summary of intelligence and analysis of global hot spots and national security threats,” is presented to the president by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), but CIA officers write much of the analysis and produce the document. Gabbard’s office announced the move in a memo published Tuesday.

As with almost everything that happens in this administration, the motives from all sides are hard to decipher. It’s clear that Gabbard is concerned about power—President Donald Trump has wondered aloud about the point of the ODNI—and is looking for ways to gain more of it, or at least protect what she has. Maggie Haberman and Julian E. Barnes write:

President Trump has openly mused to aides over time about whether the office she leads—which was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to improve interagency coordination—should continue to exist, according to two people with knowledge of his remarks.

In the wake of Russiagate and other alleged efforts to undermine President Trump—not to mention two assassination attempts, the details of which remain suspiciously cryptic almost a year later—it might make sense to wrest some power from the CIA.

Still, the CIA is currently run by two Trump loyalists who have served the president as honorably as anyone else who has worked in either of his administrations. In 2016, while still serving Texas as a congressman, current CIA Director John Ratcliffe brutally questioned former FBI Director James Comey about the bureau’s decision not to charge Hillary Clinton in the email controversy (per Fox News). Ratcliffe later proved to be a star while serving on Trump’s impeachment team in 2020. And CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis was the lawyer who discovered that the Obama administration had been spying on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign (per The New York Times).

This is not the CIA of the “deep state” that Trump has so often railed against; it’s now the CIA of MAGA. Which is why, while Gabbard’s move might seem in line with the “anti-CIA” and anti-deep state thinking of some around Trump, what she’s actually doing is targeting two of her boss’ most trusted longtime consiglieres—people who backed him long before she did (hell, long before she was even a Republican.) “It’s another case of MAGA schemers going against the real MAGA loyalists,” one source told The Scroll.

There are many reasons why Gabbard might feel insecure in her role at the ODNI. For one, the DNI is largely a ceremonial position. Ratcliffe served as ODNI director at the end of Trump’s first term, and some sources say he could have taken that position again in the second administration if he had wanted. Instead, he opted for the CIA. Why?

The ODNI was established after 9/11 as a means of addressing the CIA’s intelligence failures on the day of the World Trade Center attacks. Officially, it is meant to “improve intelligence coordination and integration within the entire Intelligence Community,” but had those planes not hit the towers, it would not exist. 9/11 turned the Intelligence Community into a boondoggle, bringing more money and power to those agencies than ever, ultimately leading to a bloated and wasteful intelligence sector. Given Trump’s desire to curb government waste, it makes perfect sense that he’d want to eliminate the agency created to oversee the CIA in the wake of an intelligence failure from decades ago. Now, our source says, the ODNI has become nothing more than an additional layer of imprudent intelligence bureaucracy. Gabbard, who just weeks ago refused to rule out the possibility of running for president in 2028 while speaking for an interview with Megyn Kelly, now finds herself leading an agency that the current president wants to dismantle.

There’s also a possibility that Trump is retaliating for a recent staffing kerfuffle. You might recall that Trump blocked a senior fellow at the Koch Brothers-funded Defense Priorities, Daniel Davis, from serving as Gabbard’s deputy director at the ODNI in March. Nevertheless, William P. Ruger, a self-styled foreign policy “realist” who served as the vice president of the Charles Koch Institute and openly opposed Trump’s tariff policies in a series of since-deleted tweets in 2019 (per The Washington Free Beacon), got the job instead in April. Our source believes that Trump, seeking to avoid the perception of high turnover and chaos that plagued his first term, is instead choosing to punish those who welcome schemers into his administration through more covert actions, like diminishing the power of the ODNI.

Gabbard’s power as ODNI director has always been on shaky ground. Some even speculate that she may not have been given her position, as many believed, as a quid pro quo for her 2024 endorsement of the president, but rather as a favor to donor Omeed Malik. Malik told the Washington Reporter that he was Gabbard’s biggest donor during her 2019 presidential run in the Democratic primaries. Attempting to take full control of the president’s Daily Brief would be a smart way for her to maintain any position in the administration at all.

—Adam Lehrer

The Rest

→On Monday, The Scroll asked: “Will Trump knife Israel?” and documented the myriad ways in which President Trump has appeared to abandon the successful foreign policy of his first term. Yesterday, Reuters published an article reporting on how Israeli officials have responded to Trump’s focus on cutting deals across the Middle East and in Qatar (which Israel has long accused of helping Hamas), relaxing of sanctions on Syria, negotiating with Hamas to free Edan Alexander from captivity, and other decisions that have created the impression that Trump might be turning his back on the Jewish state. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the article says, has faced widespread public perception that Israel, under international pressure over the war in Gaza, has been left behind by its best ally. “The United States is a sovereign country,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman said to Reuters after being asked if there was concern that Israel had been sidelined over the release of Alexander in particular. “Israel’s ‘intimate dialogue’ with the United States would be conducted directly and not through the media.”

While some Israeli officials have been dispatched to Doha to join cease-fire talks coordinated by Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, Netanyahu has signaled that Israel will continue its intensified war campaign in Gaza.

To read the full article, click below
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/bypassed-by-trump-israel-dismayed-silent-2025-05-14/

→Congressional Republicans advanced elements of President Trump’s budget package on Wednesday, with key committees approving tax cuts that some analysts warn could add to the U.S. debt, Reuters reports. With Democrats boycotting the package’s spending cuts on health care, Republicans relied on their majorities in the tax-writing House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee and the Energy and Commerce panel overseeing Medicaid and other health care programs to advance the controversial package of bills. Republicans managed to defeat all of the Democrats’ proposed amendments to the spending bill. House Speaker Mike Johnson says that Congress hopes to pass the bill before Memorial Day.

→REMINDER: The Scroll is leaving Substack and moving behind a paywall on June 1, as part of Tablet’s shift to becoming a premium, subscription-based product and the preferred in-flight reading of Qatari Air Force One.

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→California Gov. Gavin Newsom called for his state to scale back health coverage for illegal immigrants Wednesday, in an effort to balance the ballooning state budget—relinquishing his stated desire to deliver “universal health care for all” and giving Republicans the immense satisfaction of a “we told you so,” according to The New York Times. The announcement came two days after the Trump administration targeted a separate state program for immigrants and signaled it would continue to scrutinize benefits for illegals. Newsom proposed freezing the enrollment of illegal immigrants in the state’s version of Medicaid, known as Medi-Cal, as of January. People who remain in the program will from that point be charged $100 a month and long-term care and dental benefits for undocumented adults and other noncitizens will be eliminated.

→The Department of Health and Human Services launched a civil rights investigation into allegations that Jewish students at Northwestern University have faced discrimination, according to The Washington Free Beacon. On Tuesday, the HHS’s Office for Civil Rights announced that it will probe whether Northwestern "complied with its obligations under Title VI not to discriminate against Jewish students, such that it denied them an educational opportunity or benefit." While the announcement didn’t name Northwestern directly, referring to it instead as a “prestigious Midwest university,” a spokesman from the school confirmed that the institution was being investigated. In March, the school released a progress report documenting what it holds are policies better ensuring Jewish students aren’t faced with discrimination at the school, including “mandatory antisemitism training” and enforcing all violations of its discrimination policy appropriately, whatever that all means.

→Video of the Day

No one appreciates a good Qatari sword dance ceremony quite as much as President Trump does.

→Minnesota Rep. Shri Thanedar, the Indian American politician whom you likely never heard of, has already pulled his Trump impeachment resolution after being humiliated on the national stage, according to the Washington Examiner. Filed on Tuesday and scheduled for a vote on Wednesday, Thanedar was forced to delay the proceedings so he could “rally the support of Republicans and Democrats.” That support never came, and even Democrats have lambasted Thanedar for his “unserious” approach, especially after the congressman equated his push for impeachment to historic civil rights movements such as the abolition of slavery and the right to vote for women at a press conference Wednesday. Democratic leadership isn’t supportive of Thanedar’s approach, with Chairman Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., saying Wednesday that there are more important issues to focus on than another Trump impeachment. Thanedar admitted yesterday that members of his own party have taken to agreeing with President Trump that he is a “lunatic.” Given how quickly the Congressman’s effort was shut down, one could assume that the Democrats are perhaps reconsidering their approach to Trump during his first administration, when they impeached him twice.

→Have you tried the new Ben & Jerry’s flavors Gooey Gaza Goop, Martyrmelon, or Global Intifudge?

Here is Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen scaring the crap out of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. yesterday at a Senate Health Committee. To be fair, the Secretary of Health has reason not to like surprise outbursts in political settings. We all scream for ice scream, indeed.

→REMINDER: The Scroll is leaving Substack and moving behind a paywall on June 1, as part of Tablet’s shift to becoming a premium, subscription-based product and the preferred in-flight reading of Qatari Air Force One.

Scroll readers who subscribe before June 1 will receive one free gift subscription. And if you subscribe this week you can use the discount code CHAITABLET for 18% off.

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The Big Story

Here’s some moderately good news: President Donald Trump met with Syrian leader Ahmad al-Sheraa in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Wednesday, prior to leaving for his state visit to Qatar. According to a readout from the White House, confirmed by Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on X, Trump “urged” Sheraa to sign on to the Abraham Accords with Israel, expel foreign terrorists from Syria, deport Palestinian terrorists, cooperate with the United States on fighting ISIS, and “assume responsibility for ISIS detention centers in northeast Syria.”

Yes, Sheraa may have had a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head until December, but Trump appeared charmed by the man, commenting that Sheraa was “tough” and “handsome.” And in his Tuesday speech in Riyadh, the president made clear exactly who his Syria moves were supposed to be a favor for. “Oh, what I do for the crown prince!,” Trump said after announcing his intention to lift all U.S. sanctions on Syria. The crown prince, of course, being Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman.

So, why is that a good thing? Sheraa is a former jihadist after all, and we’ve seen plenty of outraged commentary in pro-Israel circles connecting Trump’s Syria policy to his acceptance earlier this week of a $400 million jet from Qatar, or to the presence of pro-Qatari elements in his inner circle. Others have framed the move as a disappointing sop to the Turkish menace, given that Sheraa is heavily backed by Turkey. But we think that’s too pessimistic by far, for two main reasons.

The first is that it’s simply good policy. Yes, the Qataris wanted the move, but so did every other one of Washington’s major Sunni allies, with multiple analysts we spoke to pointing to the significance of the announcement being made in Riyadh, not in Doha. “It’s one of the first moves that he’s done that’s in keeping with his first-term foreign policy,” Tablet News Editor Tony Badran told The Scroll. “Already in December, while everyone was freaking out, Trump was like, Yeah, man. Turkey’s our ally, and they took over Syria, and that’s smart. There was no outrage, or mention of jihad or minorities; that stuff’s just not in his vocabulary. Which actually makes him super ‘realist,’ because he’s dealing with nation-states. He folded Syria into his Turkey and Saudi policy, which is exactly what you’re supposed to do.”

Trump also saved the Israelis from their ill-conceived plans to “ally” with Syria’s minorities—which, as Middle East analyst Phillip Smyth told The Scroll, “never actually work out.” As Badran put it, “Trump told the Israelis, We’re going to figure out some sort of modus vivendi between you and the Turks. It’s a perfect Trump move because it drives everybody crazy.” Smyth added, “I just don’t see how this is a net loss for the United States. The Chinese have been reaching out [to Syria] hardcore, despite the fact that they were kissing [former Syrian dictator Bashar al-]Assad’s ass for ages. This opens the door for us to block them out—and to block out the Iranians.”

Second, as we noted yesterday, the embrace of Sheraa is a decisive rebuke of the Tucker Carlson-Tulsi Gabbard info op that we’ve been chronicling since December, which has painted Sheraa as an al-Qaeda asset of Barack Obama’s “neocon” CIA and flooded conservative media with fake stories about the “jihadists” massacring Christians in Syria. For instance, here was Gabbard in her confirmation hearing in January:

I have no love for Assad or Gaddafi or any dictator. I just hate al-Qaeda. I hate that we have leaders who cozy up to Islamist extremists, minimizing them to so-called rebels. As Jake Sullivan said to Hillary Clinton, “Al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria.” Well, Syria is now controlled by an al-Qaeda offshoot, HTS [Hayat Tahrir al-Sham], led by an Islamist jihadist [Sheraa] who danced in the streets on 9/11 and who is responsible for the killing of many American service members.

Gabbard went on to explain that Sheraa had been trained by “the CIA’s Timber Sycamore program” to help “overthrow” the Assad regime and start “yet another regime change war in the Middle East.” He had also—why not?—“already begun to persecute and kill and arrest religious minorities like Christians in Syria.”

All of that was, of course, fake, and part of a messaging campaign to (a) target pro-Israeli American evangelicals and (b) box the Trump administration into a structurally pro-Iran policy in the Levant. Trump has now confirmed what we wrote at the time, which is that the Gabbard-Carlson line about the “neocons” and “jihadists” in Syria has nothing to do with Trump’s policy. Which suggests that some of that faction’s other messaging—about Iran, Israel, Russia, etc.—might be on similarly shaky ground.

—Park MacDougald

The Rest

→During Trump’s Wednesday visit to Doha, the White House announced that it had secured $243 billion worth of “deals” with Qatar, including a $96 billion deal for the emirate to buy more than 200 commercial jets from Boeing. That’s less than the $600 billion promised by the Saudis yesterday, but Bloomberg reports, citing White House messaging, that today’s announcements were “laying the groundwork for a bigger $1.2 trillion economic pledge” with Doha; however, given that the latter figure represents more than five times Qatar’s annual GDP, we’re a bit skeptical. But given the recent tendency of Boeing planes to come off the assembly line over-budget and behind schedule—and at times to fall apart in midair or crash themselves—maybe the way to read today’s announcement is that Trump has convinced the Qataris to buy our lemons.

→Or maybe it’s about competition with China? Writing in Defense One, Tye Graham and Pete Singer note that Trump’s Gulf diplomacy comes amid a wave of major Chinese investment projects in the Gulf Arab states, including these in just the past few months:

Graham and Singer write that the Persian Gulf, which began strengthening ties with Beijing as a hedge against the pro-Iranian tilt of U.S. policy under President Joe Biden, is “quickly turning into China’s favorite testbed for the next-generation of digital infrastructure.” That’s led to a situation in which, in many Gulf states, Chinese-made 5G digital infrastructure exists side by side, literally, with U.S. military installations, raising concerns about electronic spying. In Bahrain, for instance, Chinese 5G provider Huawei operates the mobile telecommunications infrastructure used by the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet.

→REMINDER: The Scroll is leaving Substack and moving behind a paywall on June 1, as part of Tablet’s shift to becoming a premium, subscription-based product and the preferred in-flight reading of Qatari Air Force One.

Scroll readers who subscribe before June 1 will receive one free gift subscription and—in addition!—can use the discount code CHAITABLET for 18% off.

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→Trump said Wednesday, after speaking with Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, that he has “a feeling it’s going to work out with Iran.” Whatever that means, it comesone day after Trump delivered a moderately bellicose speech in Riyadh in which he called on Iran to not only drop its nuclear program but also cease its “bloody proxy wars,” while promising that the days of the United States “empowering Iran” are “over.” We’ll have to wait and see, but on the bright side, congressional Republicans are expressing their preference for playing hardball with the mullahs. On Wednesday, 52 Republican senators—all of them except for Kentucky’s Rand Paul—wrote a letter to Trump praising his first-term Iran policy and calling for him to ensure that Iran’s “ability to enrich uranium is permanently eliminated.”

→Quote of the Day:

At that point [November 2024], 1789 [Capital] was a microscopic player in the world of venture capital. It had raised less than $200 million, and it hadn't made many investments beyond leading a group that put $15 million into Tucker Carlson's new media company.

That’s from a Business Insider report on Donald Trump Jr.’s business dealings, which offers some additional confirmation of our speculation last week concerning the, uh, limited personal financial resources of Don Jr.’s business partner in 1789 Capital, Omeed Malik, who was making a salary of about $500,000 when he was fired from Bank of America in 2018. Though we’re sure he’s doing fine now. As the report goes on to detail, 1789 has since invested $50 million in Elon Musk’s SpaceX and xAI—via “coveted” private stock offerings that most investors have to pay to get access to, per BI—and undisclosed sums in several other defense contractors, including Anduril.

→A struggling tech company with ties to China announced earlier this week that it would buy as much as $300 million worth of $TRUMP, a cryptocurrency token owned by subsidiaries of the Trump Organization, The New York Times reports. The company in question, GD Culture Group, runs an e-commerce operation on TikTok—which recorded $0 in revenue last year—and employs eight people. Yet it announced Monday that it would spend $300 million to buy Bitcoin and $TRUMP, using “proceeds from a stock sale to an unnamed entity in the British Islands,” for the purpose of “enhancing its balance sheet with high-performance, scalable digital assets,” according to the Times’ review of the company’s disclosures. Sounds legit! The extent of GD Culture Group’s “ties” to China aren’t exactly clear, but the tiny, unprofitable, yet apparently flush-with-cash firm has a subsidiary in Shanghai and is led by a man named Xiaojian Wang, which sounds, well, pretty Chinese.

→A judge in Virginia has ordered American Muslims for Palestine, a Muslim Brotherhood front group and sponsor of Students for Justice in Palestine (another Brotherhood front), to turn over its financial documents as part of a terror-financing investigation by Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, Jewish Insider reports. The Virginia investigation is one of several congressional investigations and lawsuits faced by AMP, which, as we’ve explained before, is a successor group of the Islamic Association of Palestine, which was shuttered in the 2000s over its ties to Hamas. The judge’s ruling, issued Friday, means that AMP “has now exhausted all of the available legal delay tactics it has used to resist the attorney general’s efforts to procure documents as part of a winding investigation launched weeks after the Oct. 7 attacks,” according to JI.

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The Big Story

Why did Donald Trump abruptly call a halt last week to the U.S. campaign against the Houthis? Because the U.S. military was no match for the mighty Houthi Wehrmacht, according to a report in The New York Times. Apparently the Pentagon, with its $850 billion budget, can’t quite suppress a band of desert pirates.

The report, which boasts five bylines and cites more than a dozen “current and former officials,” claims that Trump pulled the plug after concluding that the operation was too expensive and wasn’t working. The United States failed to establish “air superiority” over the Houthis, burned through $1 billion in munitions in a month, lost half a dozen MQ-9 Reaper drones plus two fighter jets that fell off an aircraft carrier, and saw “several” jets “nearly” be struck by Houthi air defenses, “making real the possibility of U.S. casualties”—all while achieving only “some degradation” of Houthi capabilities. Pentagon contingency planners, moreover, grew “increasingly concerned” that the United States was depleting critical munitions stocks that would be needed “to ward off an attempted invasion of Taiwan by China.” The usual suspects—Vice President J.D. Vance, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, now reportedly joined by Secretary of State Marco Rubio—favored wrapping up the operation, while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “went back and forth.” Former National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who had supported the operation, had of course been duly cashiered from his role and demoted to the United Nations.

It should go without saying that this is an entirely different note from the one that Trump has struck publicly. Last week, Trump said the Houthis had “capitulated” and “don’t want to fight anymore,” while White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Trump had “swiftly deliver[ed]” on his “promise” to “restore the freedom of navigation in the Red Sea.” Speaking in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, Trump again touted the Houthi campaign as a success:

The United States military launched more than 1,100 strikes on the Houthis in Yemen. As a result, the Houthis agreed to stop. They said, we don’t want this anymore. It’s the first time you’ve heard that from them. They’re tough. They’re fighters. Just days ago, we [asked them] to cease targeting commercial. They were not going to be targeting commercial ships in any way, shape, or form, anything American. And they were very happy that we stopped. But we had 52 days of thunder and lightning like they’d never seen before. This was a swift, ferocious, decisive, and extremely successful use of military force.

So which is it? The Houthis have declared victory and promised to continue attacking any shipping that they consider helpful to Israel, which in practice means any ships, since the Houthis have shown no ability or inclination to distinguish between Israeli and non-Israeli commercial vessels. Representatives of the world’s five largest shipping companies told The Wall Street Journal last week they have no plans to return to the Red Sea anytime soon. And Egypt, which as of March was losing about $800 million in revenue per month from the decline in traffic through the Suez Canal, is now offering a 15% discount in a bid—thus far apparently unsuccessful—to lure shipping companies back to the route. As if to underscore the point, during Trump’s visit on Tuesday, the Houthis launched yet another ballistic missile at Israel, which had to travel through Saudi airspace to get there.

We have a few observations to make about the Times report. One is that yes, sure, the Houthis are fairly robust for what they are, which is a primitive nonstate actor. They have decent air defenses relative to their general technological level, thanks to some leftover Soviet technology and a steady supply of weaponry and advanced targeting equipment from Iran. That’s why it makes little sense to attack them without simultaneously imposing costs on Iran, given that their entire purpose is to provide Tehran with “deniable” deterrence. And that’s also why it makes sense that, according to several reports, the Iranians ordered the Houthis to strike a deal only after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted a direct threat to Iran on X on May 1.

On the other hand … the Houthis are a primitive nonstate actor. The United States has the most sophisticated Air Force and Navy in the world, with semi-recent experience of suppressing and destroying the air defenses of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia. The Israelis, flying U.S. aircraft, have been able to consistently operate in Syria—with its much-touted Russian-made S-300 air-defense systems—and in Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran. Just last week, they obliterated one of the Houthis’ major ports, as well as the Sanaa airport. It’s one thing to say, for instance, that the United States used the Houthi campaign as a chit to trade in talks with Iran. But saying that the United States was deterred by the loss of Reaper drones—which are already being phased out by the U.S. Air Force due to their lack of “survivability” in contested airspace—or by jets “nearly” being struck (impossible to say what that means) simply does not pass the smell test.

What makes us particularly suspicious is that all the purported rationales for abandoning the campaign are a near-exact match to those deployed by the Kochworld “realists” who now staff the Pentagon for why the United States shouldn’t have bothered with striking the Houthis in the first place. The Houthis are too strong! They withstood the mighty Saudis and Emiratis! We need to defend Taiwan (except we don’t want to go to war over Taiwan either)! It’s too expensive! All America can do is lose! Come to think of it, some of those same experts (like current Deputy Secretary of Defense for the Middle East Michael Dimino) spent most of 2024 arguing that any Israeli escalation with Hezbollah would fail, invite massive and catastrophic retaliation against Israel, and force the United States to join a regional “war with Iran” in order to bail out its hapless client. What happened instead, of course, was that Israel decapitated Hezbollah within the space of a few weeks, with no U.S. involvement, and in doing so prompted the collapse of the Assad regime and with it the Iranians’ strategic position in the Levant. Iran did nothing, because there was nothing much it could do.

Trump appears to at least understand that We Are Losers is not a good message to broadcast to the world, which (we assume) is why he claimed victory. But his subordinates don’t want to let him get away with even that. Instead, they are rushing to leak to the Times that, in fact, the president is lying, and everything is just as they said: I.e., a weak and overextended America was humbled by Iran’s JV team and is now going home with its tail between its legs. By extension, all of Washington’s threats are fundamentally empty, because the most powerful military on the planet is incapable of projecting power and too broke to replace its munitions.

In other words, the fire and brimstone rhetoric is bullshit, and if you push us, we’ll fold. You know, peace through strength and all that.

—Park MacDougald

The Rest

→President Trump arrived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Tuesday to kick off his four-day swing through the Gulf Arab states on his first official foreign trip as president. The headline for today was the announcement of a series of U.S.-Saudi economic deals—including what the White House has said is the “largest defense sales agreement in history,” per The Wall Street Journal—that would collectively amount to a Saudi investment of $600 billion in the U.S. economy over the next four years. (At least, we think that’s the number, which is the one included in the White House press release on the deal. Trump said Tuesday that Riyadh was committing to investing $1 trillion, roughly equivalent to the country’s entire annual GDP.) Aside from the arms sales agreement, valued at $142 billion, the centerpiece of Tuesday’s dealmaking appears to be a series of major joint ventures between Saudi Arabia and various U.S. tech firms, including a partnership between Humain, a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, and the chipmaker Nvidia to build AI data centers in the kingdom.

→At the same summit in Riyadh, Trump announced that he would lift all sanctions on Syria following discussions with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness,” Trump said. Despite Syrian President Ahmed al-Sheraa’s terrorist background and connections with the Muslim Brotherhood nexus (i.e., Turkey and Qatar), the lifting of sanctions is, on balance, a good thing. As Tablet’s Tony Badran told The Scroll, “You want to stabilize Syria so that, among other things, the Turks and the Gulfies take over and help them out, the refugees go back, and you snuff out any attempt at an Iranian insurgency, etc. But it’s a shit show, so who knows who will be able to launder money through the Syrian banking system.” The proposed lifting of sanctions is also, in our view, a somewhat amusing rebuke to the heated Tucker Carlson conspiracy theorizing about Syria, according to which (last we checked) former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was a heroic pro-Western protector of minorities chased out of power by a cabal of CIA/deep state/neocon/Obama/Jewish “warmongers” and replaced with the “jihadist” Sheraa, who has since been committing fictional massacres of Christians on behalf of, uh, the Qataris (?), who are otherwise our friends against said CIA/Obama/Jewish warmongers. We think. It’s sort of hard to keep track.

→A few other notes from Trump’s Saudi visit:

1. Trump said in his speech that his administration was working to end the war in Gaza and bring back all of the hostages, and told an interviewer on the sidelines of the conference that he had been pressing the Israelis to allow more aid into Gaza. Over the weekend, reports emerged that U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee had presented the Israelis with a U.S. plan to use private aid groups and U.S. security contractors, working in coordination with the IDF, to deliver aid to Gazans while cutting out Hamas and the United Nations.

2. Trump once again addressed the Iran file but this time seemed to dial down the threat considerably. “If Iran’s leadership rejects this olive branch and continues to attack their neighbors,” Trump said, “then we will have no choice but to inflict massive maximum pressure [and] drive Iranian oil exports to zero like I did before.” Which is funny, because previously “maximum pressure” and “oil exports to zero” were the stated current policies of the administration, not the threat in the event of noncooperation, which was bombing.

3. Trump railed against the “neocons,” “nation builders,” and “interventionists,” who he said had “wrecked far more nations than they built” and “intervened in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.” (Trump needs a different speechwriter, because this one is not capturing his voice.) That led to the most unintentionally funny quote of the day. “No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits,” the president said. “Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves.” Yes, people of the region themselves, like Saudi Aramco (previously Standard Oil of California), Kermit Roosevelt, and His Royal Highness Jerry Inzerillo of the Medina Inzerillos, whose grandfather was famously played by Omar Sharif in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia:

→Israel targeted the head of Hamas’ military wing, Mohammed Sinwar, in a massive strike on an underground bunker beneath the European Hospital in Khan Younis, the IDF announced on Tuesday. According to Axios, the Israelis received intelligence about Sinwar’s location earlier today and moved quickly to try to hit him, but there has been no confirmation yet as to whether Sinwar or any other Hamas commanders were killed.

→On Monday, the United States and China agreed to a temporary truce in their trade war, with Washington agreeing to lower import duties on most Chinese goods from 145% to 30% over the next 90 days. (Tariffs on certain goods, like steel and aluminum, will remain in place, meaning that the effective U.S. tariff rate on China will be closer to 39%, according to The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip, though some analysts have cited figures as high as 55%.) Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a press conference in Geneva, where the interim deal was negotiated, that “neither side wants to decouple” and that the United States was working toward a “long-lasting and durable trade deal with China.” Speaking Tuesday morning in Riyadh, Bessent added that Washington was still looking to reshore “strategic industries” like medicines and semiconductors and expressed hope that the United States and China could achieve a “big, beautiful rebalancing,” according to a report in Bloomberg.

In a thread on X, China analyst Christopher Balding observed that the deal—which locks in a higher base tariff rate than the pre-Liberation Day rate—is a “move in the right direction” but warned that simply agreeing to further talks with China is “the Chinese black hole of negotiations.” He added, in a comment that applies equally to the administration’s Iran diplomacy, that Trump’s recent tendency to back off threats risks sacrificing its credibility in negotiations. “If you are a hit man people will live in fear of you,” Balding writes, “but every so often you have to actually kill someone or else after a while people will learn not to take your threats seriously.”

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scrollletter@protonmail.com.

If you’re wondering why today’s Scroll email is coming early—well, it’s not a normal Scroll email. We’ll have a full edition coming at the usual time this afternoon.

As we mentioned in our note yesterday, Tablet and The Scroll will be shifting to a paid, subscription-based model on June 1 (read about it here). We were thrilled to see how many of you signed up, but a few of you reached out to say you were experiencing problems with the subscription link. So we’re posting a fresh one, right here:

LINK

The same special offer for Scroll readers still applies: If you sign up for a year’s subscription now, you will receive one free gift subscription to go to an email address of your choice, and you can also use the discount code CHAITABLET for 18% off.

And if you didn’t sign up, it’s ok. We still love you and there’s plenty of time to rectify your error.

We’ll see everybody back here this afternoon.

—Park MacDougald

Dear Scroll Readers,

If you consume the news at all these days it’s likely that most of what you see on a daily basis is bullshit. Some of it pretty obviously so. When one prominent former cable TV host tells another that he called the Israeli government to demand an end to attacks on him by American Twitter users, you probably know that’s bullshit without us needing to tell you—not least because, if you’ve been reading The Scroll, you know the idea the Israelis could direct a successful campaign on American social media is bullshit on par with “Joe Biden is as sharp as a tack behind closed doors.”

Sometimes the bullshit isn’t quite so obvious. Sometimes it’s a story—“reported” and “fact-checked” by Pulitzer-winning newspapers—in which the facts are true but presented so as to create an impression that is mostly if not entirely false. Sometimes it’s an utterly trivial story hyped as an event of world-historical importance, or an important story dismissed as the preserve of cranks or simply ignored altogether. Sometimes it’s “news” that is in fact a foreign information operation, or a domestic information operation, or a domestic information operation disguised as news about a foreign information operation (hello, Russiagate). Sometimes it will be a fake story from the left that shadowy Zionist financiers are trying to drag the United States into another war. Sometimes it will be a fake story from the right that shadowy Zionist financiers are trying to drag the United States into another war. Social media is not much better at the best of times, and lately, it’s been getting worse and worse.

The point of The Scroll, according to our internal strategy document, is to give you, our readers, “a skeptical and discerning account of world events delivered by writers who they specifically expect to filter out overhyped media bullshit, expose the material interests and power politics behind PR language and ideological posturing, and cut through to underlying realities.” Another way of saying this is that it’s our job to cut through the bullshit—without fear or favor, as the old adage goes. Which means, specifically, that it’s not your job. Sure, some of you want to spend hours sifting through everything that’s reported in a day and making sense of the daily deluge of memes, propaganda, and social media meta-commentary in order to figure out what’s real. But for many of you, that sounds like a recipe for going insane. “You are not the media,” as Tablet Editor Alana Newhouse writes. We’re the media, which means we mediate between you and the world at large.

As you may have heard, starting June 1, Tablet will be relaunching as a subscription-based product. Subscribers will receive a gorgeous, monthly print magazine, edited by the Tablet team you've known for 16 years, plus some brilliant new additions. Your subscription will also grant you access to our premium digital content, including an enhanced version of The Scroll, which will be migrating on June 1 from Substack to the Tablet website. The Scroll will still be a newsletter, however, meaning that if you sign up, it will still be delivered every day to your email inbox just like before.

Until June 1, existing Scroll readers who subscribe will receive one free gift subscription to share with someone else (link HERE). In addition, you can use the discount code CHAITABLET to receive 18% off the price of your annual subscription.

We won’t be changing anything about our approach to cutting through the shit and telling you what matters. The only difference is, now we’ll be asking you to pay.

The Big Story

For those of us who hoped that Donald Trump’s election would herald a return to the successful Middle East policy of his first term, it’s been a rough couple of weeks. The sky hasn’t fallen, exactly, but there’s been a steady drip of concerning news from in and around the White House suggesting the president is inclined to listen to those of his close advisors and family members who apparently see his first term as a record of failure and “neocon” sabotage. Much remains unknown, media reports are often unreliable, and hysteria usually doesn’t age well, so read any hot takes with an appropriate grain of salt. But the news hasn’t looked good, and it’s tended to look worse and worse by the day.

For instance, here are a few of the big storylines since our last full edition on Wednesday:

• On Sunday, Hamas agreed to release the Israeli-American hostage Edan Alexander as a “goodwill gesture” ahead of Trump’s trip to the Middle East—the result of what appears to have been a side deal negotiated between the United States and Hamas, without Israeli involvement. Obviously, it’s a good thing that (a) that Alexander is now free and (b) that Israel didn’t have to release any security prisoners to get him. What we can’t say for sure right now is what the diplomatic implications of the deal will be. What seems clear is that Hamas, either at the request of Qatar or under Qatari pressure, consented to Alexander’s release in a bid to drive a wedge between Israel and the United States and to increase pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to consent to a cease-fire…

• …which is apparently how the gesture was sold to Hamas. The Times of Israel reports that a “non-governmental individual” acting as an intermediary between Hamas and Trump envoy Steve Witkoff told “the terror group that the move would go a long way with the Trump administration and potentially open the door to Washington coaxing Israel to agree to a deal that would bring about an end to the war in Gaza in exchange for the release of the remaining hostages.”

• True to form, Witkoff revived an old Biden administration canard by telling Israeli hostage families that Netanyahu was pointlessly “prolonging the war,” according to a weekend report from Israel’s Channel 12.

• Also on Sunday, reports emerged that Trump—technically, the Department of Defense—was preparing to accept a $400 million Boeing 747 as a “gift” from Qatar, which Trump promptly confirmed on Sunday night in a Truth Social post and then again in a press conference on Monday morning. The jet, according to multiple press reports, will be used as Air Force One—Trump has long griped about Boeing’s inability to deliver him a new plane on time—and then will have its ownership transferred to the Trump Presidential Library at the end of his term, which would effectively make it a gift for Trump’s personal use. According to ABC News, Attorney General Pam Bondi—who received $115,000 per month to lobby for Qatar from 2020 to 2022—provided a “legal memorandum” to support the legality of the arrangement. The value of the jet, as Tablet’s Alana Newhouse observed on X, is about four times what the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC (which is not a foreign government), spent on the 2024 election, and that’s not even counting the more than $600 million that Qatar paid to Witkoff for the Park Lane Hotel in New York City, nor the other Qatari deals with the Trump organization and Trump family.

• In a Saturday interview with Breitbart’s Matthew Boyle, Witkoff slammed the “neocon element” that “believes that war is the only way to solve things,” one again aligning himself with the Tucker Carlson faction for whom “neocon” plainly means “Jew.” On the (moderately) more positive side, Witkoff—who had previously floated reviving the 3.67% enrichment limits of the Obama Iran deal—said in the same interview that “an enrichment program can never exist in the state of Iran ever again. That’s our red line.” Still, Trump said Monday, following the start of the latest round of U.S.-Iranian talks in Oman, that Iran has been very “reasonable” and “intelligent” in the talks so far, and Witkoff clarified over the weekend that Iran’s support for its terrorist proxies was a “secondary” issue.

• Late last week, Reuters reported that the United States had dropped its demand that Saudi Arabia normalize diplomatic relations with Israel as a precondition for U.S. approval of a Saudi civil nuclear program. That news was met with much wailing and gnashing of teeth in Israel and pro-Israel circles in the United States, despite the linkage of the two issues being a pre-Oct. 7 Biden administration innovation designed to wring concessions on the Palestinians out of Jerusalem.

There’s even more we could go into (i.e., the Houthi cease-fire, the incorporation of openly antisemitic social media influencers into a de facto administration comms shop), plus a whole host of single-source or unconfirmed reports in the Israeli and Arab press about the cratering Trump-Bibi relationship, Trump’s intention to recognize a Palestinian state, or whatever. Most of the latter, we assume, are either official disinformation from Arab government sources or misleading leaks from the Israeli opposition as part of the never-ending campaign to oust Bibi. But the overall impression is still clear enough, which is that Trump is willing to twist the Israelis’ arms, diplomatically go behind their backs and above their heads, and allow his subordinates to run them down in the establishment press, while allied “influencers” justify the policy with crude Jew-baiting on social media.

Indeed, by Sunday, things were looking sufficiently bleak that Netanyahu told the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that “I think we will need to wean ourselves off American military aid,” according to a report in Maariv. Which is a good idea, as we’ve argued at Tablet for years. But if Bibi is serious about it, he probably should have floated during his latest meeting at the Oval Office, as Rod Sales points out on X.

In essence, the question is: Is it time to hit the panic button? One foreign-policy analyst we spoke to said yes, definitely:

People need to understand that there are no necessary limits to how far Trump will go. If Biden had done the shit Trump has been doing, the right would be up in arms. It’s literally the same shit. And Bibi saying it’s time to reconsider U.S. military aid shows how far this has gone.

Trump is doing an Iran deal, a Saudi deal, and a Hamas deal while making Qatar the official supplier to the Trump Royal Court—basically rebuilding a new version of the traditional American alliance structure in the region, minus Israel.

Bibi gets it now. The big question will be what he does after Trump’s visit is over. Namely, does he invade Gaza in force and hit Iran, or not?

On the other hand, at least some of the “bad news” is not as bad as it might look. For instance, Tablet News Editor Tony Badran told us that the demise of the Saudi-Israel deal is “good news,” despite what some in Jerusalem may be saying. “The Saudis aren’t interested,” Badran says, “and the Israelis don’t need it. If the price of admission is ‘the Palestinians,’ which is Obama policy, then the proper response is ‘No, thank you’—especially since, until further notice, it remains the president’s policy that Gazans should be removed from Gaza and relocated elsewhere.” (One could say something similar about Trump’s offer to mediate between Turkey and Israel in Syria—a good idea that has prompted considerable grumbling from the Israelis.)

But whether things are terrible or merely not great, the analyst is correct that the ball is now in Bibi’s court. Netanyahu did an excellent job managing the Biden administration’s pressure, but he has thus far been unable to adapt to a Trump administration that is clearly not behaving in the way he hoped it would. A Monday report by Jewish Insider’s Lahav Harkov, for instance, cited U.S. and Israeli sources who said the reports of a “rift” were exaggerated, but also noted that Jerusalem had developed something of an optics problem in Trumpworld:

A Trump administration source said the relationship remains positive and close, but also criticized Israel for not adapting to the president’s transactional approach to foreign policy. Gulf states are likely to announce major investments in the U.S. during Trump’s visit, while Israel has largely been asking the administration for help. Jerusalem could be putting a greater emphasis on jobs created by U.S.-Israel cooperation in the defense and technological sectors when they speak with Trump, the source suggested.

Not a good look for the man who complains constantly that the United States is getting “ripped off.”

Indeed, the prime minister who pulled off a series of brilliant coups under Biden—effectively reshaping the strategic landscape of the Middle East—now appears to be paralyzed. “Israel’s leadership has put itself in a weak, reactive posture since Trump won the election,” Jacob Siegel wrote in an email to The Scroll. “Instead of capitalizing on the U.S. regime change by taking independent action to set conditions in Gaza or vis-à-vis Iran, the Netanyahu administration has spent its time trying to parse every new Trump statement and then litigate them through the press. As a result, the Israelis look like whiny supplicants with their hands out.”

No doubt the Israelis hope, as we do, that Trump will come to his senses, return the Qatari jet, repudiate those in his circle who favor Obamaism from the right, and curb the worst impulses of his idiot son. But they would be fools to bet on it. As Siegel goes on to say, “The more Israel asks for from the Trump administration, the more it will handcuff itself. The alternative is to publicly support Trump initiatives and carry out the kind of strategic operations, like the one targeting Hezbollah’s leadership, that the Israelis excel at.”

In other words, don’t ask for the king’s permission and then sulk when it turns out you’re not his favorite courtier anymore. Just do what you need to do. If you act like an American dependency, on the other hand, you can eventually expect to be treated like one.

—Park MacDougald

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scrollletter@protonmail.com.

You Are Not the Media

And that’s good news

by Alana Newhouse

More than a decade ago, I gave a speech in Cleveland. During the Q&A, a man in the back asked me what I thought of the then-emerging Iran deal, and I hemmed and hawed my way through a bullshit answer that said nothing. As I was leaving, he approached me. “Listen,” he said firmly. “I’m a dentist. It’s my job to wake up in the morning and fix people’s teeth. It’s your job to tell me what to think about the Iran deal or Greenpeace or whatever. If my patient’s teeth end up falling out of their mouth, they’ll find another dentist. If your ideas about the world don’t help me better understand and navigate it, I’ll find another magazine. But that’s your job, and you have to do it.”

I thought about my dentist friend the day after Trump’s reelection, when Elon Musk posted on X, “You are the media now.” It isn’t the richest man in the world’s most liked post—that honor still belongs to 2022’s “Next I’m buying Coca-Cola to put the cocaine back in”—but, with 1.2 million likes and 107 million views, it’s up there.

I wouldn’t enter a rocket-making competition against Musk or a baby-making one or a who-can-survive-on-less-sleep contest. He’s even been to Auschwitz more recently than I have. In fact, this isn’t about him at all. This is about you, and making sure you haven’t been confused by recent events.

You are not the media.

Thankfully, neither are the people who had been for decades. Those individuals and outlets—newspaper, magazine, and television brands that collectively controlled public opinion for decades—have been dethroned, and not a minute too soon.

So, who is the media now? Are we all meant to sit on X all day looking at videos from the latest hurricane to know whether we like our president or not? Is it now your responsibility to curate your TikTok feed so you can know what to think about taxes? Social media is a miracle, but when it comes to enlightenment, it turns out that you get what you pay for. In exchange for their zero dollars, Americans have been dropped—gradually, and then seemingly all at once—into an ocean of free propaganda and mental confusion.

You are not the media, because the media’s job is to mediate, which in this case means forming a usable and trustworthy connection between people and the world at large. Doing that for yourself is like being one's own therapist; it just doesn’t work. And while your ability to see that world more directly through your phone certainly tweaks the old definition of our profession, it doesn’t undo it. If anything, between government-sponsored spin, social media engagement farming, and deep fakes, there’s an even greater need for people whose job it is to wake up every day and tell you the truth—and before it’s too late for you to do anything about it.

For 16 years, Tablet’s central feature has been our ability to observe the world clearly—a skill that gave us a spooky ability to see around corners, which was especially useful as legacy outlets proved uninterested in acknowledging, let alone interpreting, obvious realities that people could see with their own eyes. We then took advantage of the web’s new instruments of accessibility and speed to bring that foresight to as many people as possible.

But now the internet is dying, in large part because it creates audiences that are broad but shallow—a majority of which these days are bots, driven by AI. On internet platforms, you may indeed feel like the media, but you are mainly its food.

By liberating you from the responsibility of being your own media, we are freeing you up to be something much more important and, frankly, much more radical in this moment: human.

Meet us back here on May 12. We’ll see you on the other side.

The Big Story

In their 2006 book The Shadow Party, David Horowitz and Richard Poe penned the following insight on the structure of astroturfed revolutions:

In a 1957 tract, Czech Communist Party theoretician Jan Kozák explained how a small number of communists managed to gain power in Czechoslovakia through parliamentary maneuvers. The trick was to exert pressure for radical change from two directions simultaneously—from the upper levels of government and from provocateurs in the streets. Kozák called this tactic “pressure from above and below.”

One way to exert “pressure from below,” as Kozák explained, was to fill the streets with rioters, strikers and protesters, thus creating the illusion of a widespread clamor for change from the grassroots. Radicals in the government would then exert “pressure from above,” enacting new laws on the pretext of appeasing the protesters in the street—even though the protesters (or at least their leaders) were themselves part of the plot. The majority of the people would have no idea what was going on. Squeezed from “above” and “below,” most would sink into apathy and despair, believing they were hopelessly outnumbered by the radicals—even though they were not. Thus could a radical minority impose its will on a moderate majority, even under a democratic, parliamentary system.

The purpose of that book was to expose the close relationship between Democratic financier George Soros—and his army of lavishly funded radicals—and the camp of Hillary Clinton, whom the authors expected to win the presidency in 2008. Barack Obama won instead, but he went on to inscribe the program described by Horowitz and Poe into the Democratic Party’s political DNA.

Countless times over the past decade, from the initial Black Lives Matter protests of 2015 to the “racial reckoning” of 2020 to the Gaza protests of last spring and summer, we’ve seen a version of this pincer tactic, in which activists posing as representatives of an illusory mass movement demanded changes from “below” that would then be granted from “above” by ideologically sympathetic politicians and other authority figures. Often, if you scratched the surface, it turned out that the activists and politicians were funded by the same people.

The analogy to the contemporary right is inexact; 2016 fever dreams of Matthew Yglesias aside, there are no MAGA mobs roaming the streets hunting for minorities and demanding that Donald Trump implement new Nuremberg Laws. But let’s accept, as a thought experiment, the idea that social media is the “new public square.” If that is true, then who are the “rioters, strikers and protesters” who might be deployed to create “the illusion of a widespread clamor for change from the grassroots,” with the implicit backing of figures at the top?

Rhetorical question. Entirely unrelated, here’s a collage of screenshots from Saturday morning, following the publication of a strange story in The Washington Post—famous for its trustworthy and disinterested reporting on Trumpworld palace intrigue—alleging that former National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was ousted for “operating hand in glove with the Israelis,” engaging in “intense coordination” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Iran, and working to “subvert” Trump’s foreign policy on behalf of “another country,” per a handful of unnamed administration officials:

Now, one could note that the Post story doesn’t make much sense. One of the paper’s own sources dismissed the idea that Waltz was given the boot for Iran-related policy reasons, echoing reporting from Axios’ Marc Caputo that this was a “vibes”-based personnel decision—a claim strengthened by the fact that Waltz’s replacement as NSA, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, is another Iran hawk. In our one unvarnished look into the Trump administration’s internal communications about foreign policy, the leaked Signal chat from March, it was Waltz, along with White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who was on Trump’s side in wanting to strike the Houthis, while Vice President J.D. Vance and a staffer for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard argued that the president was making a “mistake.” Netanyahu’s office, for its part, has issued a public denial that it had “intensive contact” with Waltz.

Instead, we’ll simply observe that there is nothing suspicious at all about the real-time convergence of messaging about the Post story from two blue-check MAGA influencers, a left-wing antizionist news outlet with a mysterious Rolodex of White House “sources” that just published a friendly interview with a member of the Hamas Politburo, and Trita Parsi, the Iran lobbyist who now serves as executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, part of the Koch foreign policy network that has supplied a number of high-profile “restrainers” to Trump’s Pentagon and ODNI.

We also feel confident that this totally organic messaging campaign has nothing whatsoever to do with this upcoming panel at the Qatar Economic Forum in Doha later this month:

For those of our readers inclined to paranoia, it is completely unremarkable that Don Jr. is preparing to give a talk in Qatar on “monetizing MAGA” with his “partner” Omeed Malik, the “lifelong Democrat” who is the main financial backer of Don Jr.’s good friend Tucker Carlson, who recently interviewed the Emir of Qatar to the effect that the Zionists are attempting to engineer a regime-change war with Iran. Nor does it seem at all strange to us that Malik’s former “representative” Garrett Ventry is getting paid $1 million per year for PR services by the International Media Office of the State of Qatar. Come to think of it, it’s also perfectly normal that Malik somehow amassed enough money to start his own “merchant bank,” buy into The Daily Caller, float Tulsi Gabbard’s 2020 presidential campaign, launch a venture capital firm with the president’s son, and become Carlson’s sugar daddy, despite reportedly making less than $500,000 per year at the time he was fired from Bank of America in 2018, which is coincidentally right around the time that the Qataris made a major play to buy into Trumpworld. Speaking of which, here’s the website for Malik’s bank, Farvahar Partners (i.e. Malik and two other guys):

Again, this is all just normal, conservative, MAGA stuff here—and exactly what Americans voted for last November. In fact, it’s all so normal that we forget what we were talking about at the beginning of this newsletter.

Oh well. If it’s important, it’ll probably come back to us at some point.

—Park MacDougald

The Rest

→Israeli airstrikes on Tuesday “completely disabled” Sanaa International Airport in Yemen, one day after a Houthi ballistic missile struck Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. According to IDF sources quoted in The Times of Israel, Israeli jets targeted the runways, aircraft, and infrastructure of the airport, which they said were used to ferry in weapons and advisory personnel from Iran, and rendered it “effectively inoperable,” per Ynet. Israel also targeted several power stations and a concrete factory in Sanaa, and on Monday night, it carried out significant airstrikes against infrastructure at the Houthi-controlled port of Hodeidah.

→At a Tuesday press conference, Trump announced that the Houthis “have announced to us that they don’t want to fight anymore” and that the United States will “stop the bombings.” “They have capitulated,” Trump added, “and they say they won’t be blowing up ships anymore.” CNN reports that the cease-fire was negotiated by U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff through Oman and is “aimed at building momentum for Iran nuclear deal talks”; a U.S. defense official confirmed to the outlet that the U.S. Air Force and Navy had received stand-down orders on Monday night. The Omani Foreign Ministry also confirmed in a statement that “neither side will target the other, including U.S. vessels, in the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab Strait.” What remains unclear is whether the United States will allow the Houthis to continue attacking Israel and Israeli vessels. Though Trump said the Houthis “won’t be blowing up ships anymore,” both the CNN report and the Omani statement said only that the United States and the Houthis would not attack each other. And roughly an hour after Trump’s announcement, a member of the Houthi Politburo told Al-Mayadeen TV that Trump was “lying” and that “no Israeli ship will reach any port until the siege is lifted and the aggression on Gaza ends.” For the pessimistic view, here’s Israeli journalist Amit Segal:

→In the same press conference, Trump teased a “big as it gets” announcement in the coming days ahead of his planned visit to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. “Before we leave we’re going to have a very, very big announcement to make—like, as big as it gets—and I won’t tell you on what,” the president said. He went on, “It’s very positive. I’d tell you if it was negative. It is really, really positive. An announcement will be made either Thursday or Friday or Monday before we leave, but it’ll be one of the most important announcements that have been made in many years about a certain subject.” Speaking last night at the Israeli embassy in Washington, U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff said the administration hoped to have an announcement soon about the “expansion of the Abraham Accords,” so, gun to head, that’s our bet as to what this could be about.

→Quote of the Day:

Given these and other concerning allegations, this letter is to inform you that Harvard should no longer seek GRANTS from the federal government, since none will be provided. Harvard will cease to be a publicly funded institution, and can instead operate as a privately-funded institution, drawing on its colossal endowment, and raising money from its large base of wealthy alumni. You have an approximately $53 Billion head start, much of which was made possible by the fact that you are living within the walls of, and benefiting from, the prosperity secured by the United States of America and its free-market system you teach your students to despise.

That’s from a letter from Education Secretary Linda McMahon to Harvard President Alan Garber, which the secretary posted to her X account on Monday evening. The “concerning allegations” include that Harvard has admitted foreign students who “engage in violent behavior,” continued to engage in racial discrimination in admissions in violation of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, mismanaged its finances, and hired “failed Mayors Bill De Blasio [sic] and Lori Lightfoot” to teach leadership, which is “like hiring the captain of the Titanic to teach navigation to future captains of the sea.” McMahon’s Trumpian stylistic quirks aside, we find it hard to muster much sympathy for Harvard, though we suspect some court somewhere might. Last month, Harvard sued the Trump administration for violating its constitutional rights and due process.

→What is the “woke right”? A discussion between James Lindsay and Jordan Peterson:

→And why does the phrase “woke right” invite such mockery and contempt?

→NOTE TO READERS: To improve security and ease of use, we’ve changed the email address for the Scroll tip line. The new address is in its usual place, in the subscribe button below.

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scrollletter@protonmail.com.

The Big Story

Israel approved plans today to occupy the Gaza Strip in its entirety in order to eradicate Hamas, two Israeli officials told the Associated Press.

The plan, approved early in the morning by cabinet ministers, calls for the IDF to stay in Gaza for an unspecified period of time, during which it would directly administer the territory, including taking charge of delivering and distributing food and other critical supplies to the civilian population. News of the plan, which is reportedly set to commence after U.S. President Donald J. Trump completes his forthcoming trip to the region, unleashed torrents of criticism from opponents of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government—making clear what one Tablet contributor calls the “competing war aims” inside the government.

Some speculate that Israel’s announcement of expanded war aims may be intended to pressure Hamas into making concessions in cease-fire negotiations. But Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, representing the National Religious Party-Religious Zionism—which has long supported the taking of Gaza on political grounds—said Monday that Israel should not exit Gaza even if there is another hostage deal, according to The Times of Israel. “We are finally going to occupy the Gaza Strip,” said Smotrich to Channel 12 journalist Amit Segal. “We are cleansing the strip, bringing back the hostages—and defeating Hamas.” Smotrich believes that the only way to bring back the hostages is to “subdue Hamas” entirely.

The Hostage and Missing Families Forum, the political body established by some of the families of the Israeli hostages held in Gaza by Hamas, accused the government Monday of “choosing territory over hostages.” At the Knesset on Monday, Einav Zangauker, mother of hostage Matan Zangauker, voiced anger about the cabinet’s decision, going as far as to call for reservists to not show up to duty: “The cabinet decided to send heroic soldiers to an operation that will result in the murder of hostages in captivity, and the loss of soldiers,” she said.

The statement led to a rebuke from Knesset member and National Religious Party member Simcha Rothman, who instructed Zangauker to avoid calling for military refusal, enraging the mother of the hostage. “Don’t put words in my mouth!” responded Zangauker. “I said not to show up to reserves for moral and ethical reasons!” But refusal due to moral and ethical reasons is still refusal.

One could easily accuse Netanyahu’s opposition of again using the understandable frustration and pain of the hostages’ parents as shields in their long-game effort to topple the prime minister. Some of the statements made by members of Netanyahu’s opposition would seem to support this notion. Knesset member and chairman of The Democrats Party—the only Zionist party in that opposes the occupation of the West Bank—Yair Golan said on X Sunday night that the plan to occupy Gaza was not a measure to “protect the security of Israel” but a measure meant to “save Netanyahu and his government of extremists.”

Avigdor Lieberman, chairman of the Yisrael Beiteinu Party that formed in the late 1990s due to Lieberman’s disappointment in Netanyahu for negotiating with the Palestinian Authority, accused Netanyahu of acting like the allies in World War II who knew about the Nazi death camps but made rescuing Jews a lower priority than military victory.

What these criticisms fail to acknowledge is that seizing Gaza and saving the hostages from captivity are not irreconcilable goals. On the contrary, the more leverage Israel has over Hamas, the more negotiating power it will have in getting the remaining hostages home. In an interview with national broadcaster Kan today, Culture Minister Miki Zohar of Netanyahu’s Likud Party acknowledged that the move to seize Gaza could potentially endanger hostages but insisted that a renewed offensive could force Hamas to the table in a serious way: “Hamas may soon realize that it has no choice but to return the hostages and exile itself from Gaza,” he said.

Zohar’s remarks underline another reality that some hostage families and opposition leaders prefer not to confront: namely, that Hamas has consistently refused to return the remaining hostages for anything short of a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, which would leave the terror organization in full control and able to launch future attacks—a situation that no sane Israeli leader can agree to. In other words, the suggestion that Netanyahu is not taking a deal with Hamas for political reasons assumes that there is indeed a deal on the table when, in fact, there is not.

One analyst argued to The Scroll that taking control of Gaza could push Bibi out of a reactive posture and help Israel consolidate its gains as a regional power. “To win wars in the Middle East, you have to take land,” he said. “You can’t leave Hamas in power for obvious reasons, and the only way to destroy them is with conventional forces inside of Gaza.”

Also, it may well be that Israel has done all it can to mitigate the suffering of the hostage families and their captive loved ones while continuing its war against a cruel foe who seems willing to see all of Gaza pulverized into dust before ceasing its attacks and releasing the remaining hostages. To date, Israel’s strategy of pressuring Hamas into returning captives by continuing to fight has saved the lives of a majority of the hostages—at the price of delaying a final battle while ceaselessly generating battlefield footage and images that have severely degraded the country’s image abroad. Now, the country’s ability to achieve the dual goals of necessary self-defense and rescuing captives may have reached its limit.

—Adam Lehrer

The Rest

→The Houthis launched two missiles that landed near the main terminal at the Ben Gurion Airport outside Tel Aviv Sunday, according to The New York Times. While no fatalities were reported, four people were mildly injured by the attack while two others were hurt attempting to flee the blast site, according to personnel from the Magen David Adom emergency service. The Israeli military said it made several efforts to intercept the strike, and that the occurrence was under review. President Trump wrote a post on social media claiming that Iran, which last week was in talks with the U.S. government about a new nuclear agreement that temporarily stalled, would be held accountable for the Houthi aggression. Prime Minister Netanyahu reposted Trump’s statement and added his own: ​​“Israel will respond to the Houthi attack against our main airport AND, at a time and place of our choosing, to their Iranian terror masters.”

Iran denied supporting the Houthis’ strike in a Monday statement, saying that the rebel group took action independently in support of Gaza, which seems unlikely given that the group has been backed by Iran since the 1990s, according to International Affairs.

→The Jerusalem police released Riyad Abu Tir—a 63-year-old resident of East Jerusalem’s Umm Tuba neighborhood who was detained last Wednesday on suspicion that he started the massive wildfires that spread throughout East Jerusalem last week—to house arrest over the weekend, according to The Times of Israel. When they detained him, police said they found a lighter and combustible materials on his person. Abu Tir’s lawyer argued that his client had gone to the area to smoke, adding that he also had a pipe and tobacco on him at the time of his arrest. Authorities wanted to detain him for five more days but were rejected by Jerusalem’s Magistrate Court. So far, Jerusalem’s fire officials have declined to attribute the fires to arson, claiming it was more likely the region’s unfavorable topography and conditions that caused the fires to spread.

→British counterterrorism authorities arrested eight men Saturday, seven of them Iranian nationals, in connection with two separate investigations, according to The New York Times. In one of those cases, four Iranians and a man whose nationality hasn’t been identified were detained for preparing a terrorist attack against an unnamed site, which The Telegraph reported “may have been a synagogue or another target linked to the Jewish community.” The other three Iranians were arrested as part of a separate counter-terror investigation, say the authorities. They added that the men were detained under the National Security Act 2023, which was introduced to tighten protections against hostile acts against Britain.

→Beijing has stopped publishing some of the data needed to gauge the strength of China’s economy, according to a Wall Street Journal article published over the weekend. The article states that data on Chinese land sale measures, foreign investment data, and unemployment indicators have all vanished in “recent years”; “even official soy sauce production reports are gone,” wrote the reporters. Chinese authorities haven’t explained why the data can’t be found anymore, but the reporters point out that China’s economy has faltered recently due to huge debt and crumbling real-estate value. Because of this and its trade war with the United States, Chinese officials have made concerted efforts to control the economic narrative. After a Chinese economist at state-owned SDIC Securities, Gao Shanwen, said at a conference in Washington that China’s economic growth “might be around 2%” and that “the past few years, we do not know the true number of China’s real growth figure,” Chinese President Xi Jinping ordered that Gao be “disciplined.” The vanishing data can be attributed, suggests the article, to China seeking to control the world’s view of its internal economy.

The graph below, from the National Bureau of Statistics, for example, demonstrates the plummeting value of Chinese national land sales.

To read the full article, click the link below:

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-economy-data-missing-096cac9a?st=WjKKCU&reflink=article_copyURL_share

→Virologist Steven J. Hatfill, who served in President Trump’s first administration and was known during the pandemic for his promotion of Ivermectin as an effective treatment of COVID-19, joined the Department of Health and Human Services under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last week, according to The Washington Post. As of today, Hatfill begins his second week as a special adviser in the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, an agency responsible for preparing for pandemics and other biological and chemical attacks. Hatfill was investigated by the Justice Department in the early 2000s as a “person of interest” in the 2001 anthrax letters attack but was formally exonerated in 2008 and offered a settlement of $4.6 million by the Justice Department. Hatfill has said that in his new role for the administration, he plans to research and discover new treatments and medications for COVID-19.

→“In times past, we did not hesitate to lock up the most dangerous criminals, and keep them far away from anyone they could harm,” said President Trump on Truth Social last night. “That is why, I am directing the Bureau of Prisons to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders.” Trump’s new directive to reopen the long-shuttered Alcatraz is part of his efforts to overhaul how and where federal prisoners and illegal immigrants are detained, according to the Associated Press. The prison was closed in 1963 due to its crumbling infrastructure and has been a tourist destination ever since. Its mythology as a prison has been accentuated by several films, such as Don Siegel’s Escape from Alcatraz (1979)—based on the real historical attempt of three convicts to escape the San Francisco island prison in 1962—and Michael Bay’s The Rock (1996). The Federal Bureau of Prisons said in a statement today that it will comply with all presidential orders. California Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi said Trump’s directive is “not a serious one.”

→In a Sunday Truth Social post, President Trump announced a 100% tariff to be imposed on all films made outside the United States. Trump said he had authorized Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, to begin the process of taxing “any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.” Hollywood executives declined to comment on the announcement, according to The New York Times. If you’re someone who agrees with filmmaker John Waters that “feel-bad French films with full-frontal nudity” objectively make up the best film subgenre, this may be the first tariff announcement that genuinely concerns you.

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

The Big Story

The fourth round of nuclear talks between the United States and Iran, scheduled to take place tomorrow in Rome, have been postponed, according to Reuters. One can assume that the halted talks have something to do with President Donald Trump’s Thursday Truth Social post announcing that any country that purchases oil from Iran will be barred from doing business with the United States—and under threat of secondary sanctions.

Indeed, Iran accused the United States of “contradictory” behavior on Thursday, likely referring not just to Trump’s warning about purchasing Iranian oil, but also to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s Wednesday statement threatening Iran if it continues to support Yemen’s Houthi rebels.

According to eight sources who spoke with Reuters, the “initial framework” of a new nuclear deal would preserve the core of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—the infamous Iran deal that Trump once called “the worst deal ever”—but he would extend that plan to 25 years, tighten verification, and expand so-called sunset clauses that delay aspects of Iran’s nuclear program. In addition, Iran would limit stockpile size and centrifuge types and dilute, export, or seal its 60% uranium stock under unprecedented International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) scrutiny in exchange for sanctions relief. Dennis Ross, a former negotiator for both Democrats and Republicans, told Reuters that these terms don’t go nearly far enough and that a new agreement must impose a permanent structural change in Tehran’s nuclear capabilities to the point where ever building a bomb becomes all but impossible.

The issue of Iran enriching uranium poses an entirely different set of problems. For one, Iran claims that its right to enrich uranium is “nonnegotiable.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was reportedly “blindsided” by Trump’s thwarting of his plans to launch military strikes when he visited the White House in early April, is demanding “zero-enrichment” of uranium and a Libya-style deal that dismantles Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff said that Iran also must stop and eliminate its uranium enrichment program.

In reality, however, the proposals made during the first three discussions between U.S. and Iranian officials would cap Iran’s uranium enrichment at about 3.67%—directly in line with the original Iran deal, according to Iranian sources who spoke with Reuters.

But in a Thursday appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, Secretary of State and Interim National Security Advisor Marco Rubio dismissed the 3.67% “limit” as meaningless, telling Hannity:

The level at which they enrich it is not really relevant per se because, really, if you have the ability to enrich at 3.67%, it only takes a few weeks to get to 20%, and then 60% and then the 80 and 90% that you need for a weapon.

Rubio said that Iran’s insistence on continuing to enrich uranium despite claiming it doesn’t want a nuclear weapon is absurd. “The only countries that have enriched uranium are countries with nuclear weapons,” Rubio noted. If Iran wants to keep its nuclear facilities and continue to develop economically, said Rubio, it must agree to give up on enrichment, give up on sponsoring terrorists, and give up its long-range missiles.

CNN reported earlier this afternoon that Iran is crafting a new proposal for a nuclear agreement with the United States, couching it in rhetoric that flatters the president’s pledge to “make America rich again.” Tehran’s argument is that a war with Iran would bleed American coffers, while diplomacy could open the door to economic prosperity. Iranian officials believe the best way to pitch a new nuclear deal to the president would be to present it as a win for the U.S. economy.

These developments beg the question: What exactly does President Trump want? As has often been the case with this administration, it’s difficult to discern whether this is a form of controlled chaos consistent with The Art of the Deal or simply undiluted chaos. One senior policy analyst is concerned that the administration isn’t quite sure of what it’s doing with Iran. “One is left with the choice between cosmic fifth-dimensional chess genius and total disorganization by a bunch of amateurs who are all waiting for the boss to actually decide,” he says.

One intriguing possibility is that all of these negotiations with Iran have been a smokescreen to allow President Trump to appease his anti-interventionist base by saying he did everything he could to negotiate before the Islamic Republic forced his hand, allowing Trump to do what he maybe always wanted to do: launch military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The problem with that is the opposite could also be true—meaning, the president’s threats and warnings are the smokescreens meant to appease the hawkish elements of Trump’s base, justifying his real intentions of negotiating a new JCPOA. As ever, it’s anyone’s guess.

—Adam Lehrer

The Rest

→Shortly before The Scroll published, Politico reported that Secretary Rubio will serve as both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State for at least six months, and that the White House is urging others to stop campaigning for the role. Rubio is the first statesmen to fill both roles since Henry Kissinger, who served as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor from 1973 to 1975 under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

→A shipping loophole known as the de minimis exemption, which allowed shipments of goods worth $800 or less to come into the United States duty-free, expired today, according to CNN. The end of the loophole could signal the beginning of Americans experiencing some of the financial hardships associated with President Trump’s tariffs policy on China, analysts argue. The loophole reshaped the way Americans shop, allowing Chinese e-commerce sites to pour cheap products into the country. One of those sites, Temu, already announced today that it will no longer sell goods imported from China into the United States directly and that instead it will rely on “locally based sellers,” with orders fulfilled within the country. The media is framing the ending of the de minimis exemption in the least flattering light possible, but Temu’s announcement is some proof that one of Trump’s goals with the Chinese tariffs policy—diverting business away from China and toward domestic manufacturers and sellers—might be achievable.

→Quote of the Day

You can see why we’re in this mess today. With so much change, chaos and conflict, too many people and organizations are abandoning these principles. But we know from history, this just makes the problems worse. And people have forgotten that when principles are lost, so are freedoms.

That’s billionaire Charles Koch accepting an award at the Cato Institute Thursday, reported by The New York Times, claiming that America is losing touch with its core “principles.” Though the philanthropist didn’t mention President Trump by name, it’s clear that’s who he was talking about. Considering the Koch fortune stems from the oil refineries Fred Koch helped build for dictatorial regimes in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and other authoritarian governments, it’s a bit rich for Charles to be the one defining American values.

To read more about what far-right influencer Laura Loomer has alleged to be the “Koch coup” of Trump’s White House, check out the Tablet article linked below:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/trump-administration-staffing-sergio

→Victory Day

President Trump announced late last night that he was renaming two holidays as “Victory Day”: Victory in Europe Day (May 8), which is celebrated by our European allies as the day the Nazis were defeated in World War II, as well as Veterans Day (Nov. 11), which is celebrated to mark the United States’ victory during World War I. “We did more than any other Country, by far, in producing a victorious result on World War II,” said Trump on Truth Social. “We won both Wars, nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery, or military brilliance, but we never celebrate anything!” While May 8 corresponds with the day that combat with Nazi Germany ended, Trump critics are pointing out that the United States continued to fight with Japan until September 1945. Changing the name of Veterans Day might also prove to be controversial, given that the holiday was broadened in the 1950s—from one that celebrated WWI veterans specifically to one that honors all American vets.

→Graph of the Day

A few notions can be gleaned from this graph, put out by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, that compares the deportations made during every administration from George W. Bush to Joe Biden. First, we can see how unprecedented the Biden border policy was, in the context of other administrations. Second, we can see that President Barack Obama absolutely lived up to the name “deporter in chief,” given to him by immigrants—which in turn underscores the overblown nature of Democratic opposition to President Trump’s border policy. CNN reported in 2024 that one reason deportations in Trump’s first term lagged behind those in both of Obama’s terms is that local law enforcement authorities stopped cooperating on deportations when Trump took office in 2016.

→The IDF is set to begin expanding its military efforts in the Gaza Strip next week, preparing for a mass call-up of reservists as it looks to expand its military operations in the region, according to Ynetnews. In “recent days,” many reserve officers have informed troops to prepare for an unexpected call-up, with reserves divided into two groups: battalions tasked with offensive frontline operations in Gaza, and brigades that will replace regular forces as the “spearhead” in the upcoming operation. Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, who has stressed the need for the IDF to grow in response to Israel’s security needs, said bringing back the hostages still held by Hamas is the number one goal. Last weekend, the IDF issued a statement clarifying that the call-up of reserve soldiers will be conducted “thoughtfully” and “responsibly.”

→Truth Social of the Day

Two weeks after threatening to do so, President Trump says he’s pulling the plug on Harvard’s tax-exempt status. He followed that with a speech at the University of Alabama’s commencement in which he implied that red-state schools should be the ones forging America’s future, not elite coastal universities like Harvard, according to Washington Examiner. “Congratulations to the Alabama class of 2025, standing here before you in this magnificent arena,” said the president. “It is clear to see that the next chapter of the American story will not be written by the Harvard Crimson. It will be written by you, the Crimson Tide.”

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

The Big Story

On the Thursday morning edition of his show, The Morning Meeting, Mark Halperin reported that the White House had decided to fire National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and his deputy Alex Wong, as well as much of the current NSC staff. A few hours later, Trump confirmed on social media that Waltz would indeed be assuming the role of ambassador to the United Nations. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been named interim NSA, but the leading candidate to replace Waltz, according to Halperin, is the man currently leading the negotiations for said Iran deal: billionaire real estate developer and Donald Trump golf buddy Steve Witkoff.

Internal administration panic about a potential Witkoff NSA appointment, according to Halperin, was the proximate cause of a Wednesday article from the New York Post’s Washington, D.C., correspondent Caitlin Doornbos. The article quoted several Israelis, experts from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and first-term Trump figures—including former National Security Adviser John Bolton—who savaged Witkoff’s competence and attacked his approach to negotiations with Iran, Russia, and Hamas. The bill of particulars includes charges that Witkoff is naive about his interlocutors’ motivations, ignorant about history and technical details, and that he has operated without the support of U.S. diplomatic staff, at times having to rely on Kremlin translators. But the general idea was summed up by an unnamed member of Trump’s first administration, who said Witkoff was a “nice guy, but a bumbling fucking idiot” who “should not be doing this alone.”

The White House, and several influencers close to it, however, blasted the two stories as the work of “neocons” and “warmongers” attempting to undermine Trump’s foreign policy. A White House deputy press secretary told the New York Post that it was a “badge of honor to be the target of a John Bolton tantrum” and that Bolton and his “fellow warmongers … thrive off forever war—lining their pockets while young people die.” On X, Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump Jr. weighed in with similar insults to the intelligence of their followers:

Which is, of course, absurd:

Wall Street Journal reporter Laurence Norman observed in a perceptive post that “A decade ago, Dems were attacking FDD. Now it’s conservatives/Trump supporters.” We’d add that they’re attacking it using the same language, and straw-man arguments, pushed by the Obama echo chamber to sell the 2015 Iran deal—i.e., that we face a choice between a deal and “forever war,” pushed by the “deep state” and sinister foreign political interests.

So why are MAGA influencers, including the president’s son, aligning behind Witkoff to sell a new Iran deal? We can’t peer into anyone’s heart, but our guess is that it’s a family affair. Here at The Scroll, we’ve been skeptical of Witkoff since January, when he reportedly strong-armed Israel into accepting the Biden administration’s cease-fire plan for Gaza. We’ve noted at various points that Witkoff (a) was one of the “Trump influencers” that the Qataris approached in 2018 to lobby Trump on their behalf; (b) sold a hotel to the Qatari sovereign wealth fund for more than $600 million in 2023; and (c) effusively praised the Qataris as “peacemakers” in a March interview with Tucker Carlson, which came two weeks after Carlson interviewed the emir of Qatar. Witkoff’s son Zach is in the crypto business with Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr., whose family business, the Trump Organization, just inked a major real estate development deal in Qatar.

But wait, there’s more! Don Jr., a major ally and protector of Carlson within Trump’s inner circle, is in turn business partners with Omeed Malik (via 1789 Capital), one of Carlson’s major financial backers. Don Jr., Malik, Zach Witkoff, and Steve’s other son, Alex, are also partners in Executive Branch, a recently launched “MAGA moguls” club in Washington, D.C., with a $500,000 membership fee, which effectively allows one to buy access to administration insiders. Here’s the guest list from Executive Branch’s launch party, from Politico:

That highlighted name is Garrett Ventry—a former top aide to Elise Stefanik typically identified as a Republican “operative” and “lobbyist.” As of 2023, however, Ventry was being quoted in press reports about Malik’s and Don Jr.’s business ventures as a “representative” of Malik, and last year, Malik and Ventry became business partners by investing together in a new conservative news outlet, The Washington Reporter (which appears to have been a flop).

In addition to Malik, Ventry has at least one other deep-pocketed partner: Qatar. Last September, Ventry registered as a foreign agent of the International Media Office of the State of Qatar, for which he would receive $960,000 for one year of PR work on behalf of the emirate, according to a November 2024 story in The Wrap. Ventry’s firm, GRV Strategies, advertises on its website that it can help clients “land persuasive pieces in the conservative and mainstream press that will influence policymakers and the public.”

—Park MacDougald

The Rest

→A positive sign?

At the very least, it’s probably good that Hegseth is literally typing like Trump while threatening Iran, which suggests he thinks that’s a good way to ingratiate himself with his boss.

→A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the release of Mohsen Mahdawi, the Palestinian Columbia graduate student targeted for deportation by the Trump administration, pending the resolution of his habeas corpus petition. After being freed on bail, Mahdawi held a defiant press conference outside the federal courthouse in Vermont, telling “President Trump and his cabinet” that “I am not afraid of you” and quoting Martin Luther King Jr. The government’s court filings in the case, however, included some fairly damning information about Mahdawi, highlighted by Marina Medvin on X. According to the government, a gun shop owner in Windsor, Vermont, warned police in 2015 that Mahdawi had expressed an interest in buying a “sniper rifle and automatic weapon” and told the owner he had “considerable firearm experience and used to build modified 9mm submachine guns to kill Jews while he was in Palestine.” The owner added that he’d spoken with a “gun enthusiast” who reported a similar conversation with Mahdawi, in which Mahdawi allegedly said “I like to kill Jews.”

→Washington and Kyiv have signed a minerals deal that will see the United States share in revenues from Ukraine’s natural resources via a jointly managed “reconstruction investment fund.” “The fund,” according to the Financial Times, “will invest in extraction of critical minerals, oil and gas, as well as in related infrastructure and processing, and projects will be jointly selected,” with “all profits generated by the fund … reinvested in Ukraine” for the first decade of the agreement. And while the deal does not include explicit U.S. security guarantees, Washington dropped its demand that Ukraine pay back more than $100 billion in military aid. William B. Taylor, who served as ambassador to Ukraine under George W. Bush and as chargé d'affaires in Ukraine in Trump’s first term, told The New York Times that the Ukrainians “got a much better minerals deal” than the one that was initially proposed, which was a “good sign for cease-fire negotiations.” On Tuesday, the White House notified the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that it was preparing to authorize the sale of upward of $50 million in “defense articles” to Ukraine.

→Chart of the Day:

That’s from a story in The Wall Street Journal on how Trump’s tariffs are damaging the Chinese economy. In yesterday’s edition, we noted that U.S. GDP contracted by 0.3% in the first quarter of 2024—reflecting a massive “pull-forward” of imports, even as underlying economic indicators remained strong. In China, on the other hand, rosy official numbers mask what appears to be a sick economy, dragged down by the dual threats of a trade war and real estate crisis. The “pain for China” in the trade war “is likely to go deeper” than in the United States, the Journal concludes, “because [China] has increased, rather than decreased, its focus on exports as a cornerstone of the economy.”

→Quote of the Day:

Land warfare has transitioned to drone warfare. If you can be seen, you can be killed.

That’s from Gen. (ret.) Jack Keane, the former vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army, quoted in a Wall Street Journal feature on the Army’s transition to drones in what the report calls its “largest overhaul since the end of the Cold War.” The Journal reports that the Army, in an attempt to adapt to the battlefield conditions it has observed during the Russia-Ukraine war, plans to eventually equip each of its combat divisions with 1,000 drones. It is also planning to spend $3 billion on antidrone technologies, such as battlefield lasers, and to develop its “electronic warfare capabilities” as part of its $36 billion effort to modernize its systems.

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