THE OUTRAGE REPORT
Deep State Club | May 19, 2026
Because somebody has to say it.
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🔴 OUTRAGE #1 — THE GREATEST SELF-DEAL IN AMERICAN HISTORY
Let’s be crystal clear about what happened on Monday.
Donald Trump sued the government he controls — the IRS, which he runs — for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns. A leak that already happened. A contractor already caught, already convicted, already sentenced. Case closed years ago.
Trump’s DOJ, run by his own appointee Todd Blanche, announced the creation of a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” — funded entirely by taxpayers — as part of a deal where Trump dropped his own lawsuit against himself. He was both the plaintiff and the defendant. He negotiated with himself. And he won.
Trump and his sons and the Trump Organization received a formal apology but “no monetary payment or damages of any kind.” Instead, $1.776 billion will be directed at Blanche’s discretion to “hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare.”
Translation: a $1.776 billion slush fund — that number is not an accident, that’s the year of the Declaration of Independence, they do love their cosplay — to pay out Trump allies, J6 rioters, and anyone Trump decides was “wronged” by the prior administration.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called it “depraved,” saying “Trump is shaking hands with himself in order to fund his insurrectionist army to the tune of billions.” Public Citizen called it plainly “a January 6 payment fund.”
Trump told reporters he wasn’t involved in the fund’s creation. He also said it was meant to reimburse “people that were horribly treated.” When asked whether people who committed violence against Capitol Police officers should be eligible, he said it’ll depend on “a committee being set up of very talented people.” A committee he appoints. To spend money from a settlement he made with himself. With no judicial oversight — Trump’s lawyers argued the motion was “self-executing” and that “no judicial analysis is appropriate,” effectively bypassing the federal judge assigned to the case.
I am absolutely outraged by this one. This is not politics. This is not even corruption in the traditional sense. This is open, daylight theft of the United States Treasury. No prior president in American history has ever sued the government they lead and then settled it with public funds into a personal reward pool. Not one. This is a first. And yet here we are on a Tuesday.
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🔴 OUTRAGE #2 — TRUMP THREATENS TO ANNIHILATE IRAN. AGAIN.
The US and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28. We are now in month four of a war that has blockaded the Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly 20% of global oil exports pass in peacetime.
On May 19, Trump threatened to resume strikes on Iran “in the coming days,” telling reporters: “I hope we don’t have to do the war, but we may have to give them another big hit.” When asked how long he would wait, he said: “two or three days, maybe Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Something maybe early next week — a limited period of time.”
He also posted to Truth Social warning that Tehran must move quickly toward a peace deal or there would be nothing left of it.
So. The president of the United States is giving a sovereign nation a deadline of “maybe this weekend, maybe Monday” to agree to terms or be annihilated — on social media — between golf rounds. This is how we conduct foreign policy now.
There are 2,900 dead in Lebanon alone. The Strait of Hormuz is still choked. And the man at the wheel is posting countdown clocks on Truth Social.
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🔴 OUTRAGE #3 — THE GOLDEN CALF AT DORAL
A 22-foot golden statue of Donald Trump — fist raised, business suit gleaming — erected at his Doral Golf Club, funded by cryptocurrency investors who released a $PATRIOT meme coin to pay for it.
Sit with the symbolism for exactly one moment.
The Republican Party — the self-described party of Christian values, the Ten Commandments in classrooms, prayer in public life, God on the currency — has erected a literal golden idol of a man on a golf course. Paid for with fake money created specifically to worship him.
Exodus 32. The Golden Calf. They didn’t even try to be subtle about it.
The people who screamed about a “war on Christmas” are bowing before a gleaming golden statue on a putting green funded by a meme coin called PATRIOT. No irony detected. No self-awareness in sight.
And if you think this is just aesthetics — a gaudy rich guy thing, harmless ego — ask yourself what kind of movement builds golden statues of its leader. Ask yourself what always comes next.
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🔴 OUTRAGE #4 — ORLÍN HERNANDEZ REYES, AMERICAN CITIZEN. AGED 3.
This one will stay with me.
Orlín Josué Hernandez Reyes was born in Pensacola, Florida. He was an American citizen. His mother, Wendy Hernandez Reyes, was pulled over in Alabama on her way to work in January. The Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office handed her to ICE. She was deported to Honduras without her son.
Throughout her detention she requested to be reunited with Orlín. She communicated through a tablet with an immigration agent and explicitly asked whether her son could accompany her to Honduras. The request was denied without explanation. She was facilitated to sign a power of attorney to her brother-in-law so he could potentially obtain a passport for Orlín to travel later.
The last time Wendy spoke to her son, the 3-year-old was blowing her kisses over the phone. The next call she received was a voicemail from his uncle saying the boy had gotten very sick and an ambulance had been called.
Orlín died on March 4 in Pensacola from what the medical examiner described as a month of repeated physical abuse. The Escambia Sheriff’s Office says the child had 17 strikes on his head alone, along with multiple burns consistent with a lighter being heated and pressed against his skin. Multiple ribs were broken. One was completely detached from his spine. He suffered a transected pancreas. His collarbone was broken. There were signs of possible sexual abuse.
His uncle, Samuel Maldonado Erazo, was indicted on murder charges and has pleaded not guilty. ICE subsequently lodged an immigration detainer against him — the man they allowed to take custody of an American toddler — claiming he entered the country illegally in 2021.
ICE’s response to Orlín’s death? Acting Director Todd Lyons accused Wendy Hernandez Reyes of “abandonment,” stating she “chose to leave her son here with a violent murderer who took his life.”
She responded: “How could I abandon my son, if my son was the love of my life? I did everything with my son. I am not a bad mother who left my child with a killer.”
Court records reviewed by the Washington Post directly contradicted ICE’s account. Hernandez Reyes had repeatedly requested to take her son. She was deported without even her passport. Her only wish now is to hold him one last time. Orlín Josué Hernandez Reyes is buried in a country he never lived in.
He was 3 years old. He was American. He blew his mom kisses on the phone. The government that got him killed blamed his mother for his death.
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🔴 OUTRAGE #5 — REPORTING THE NEWS IS TREASON NOW
The administration is now floating the idea that journalists who report on leaked government information are engaged in treason. Not the leakers — the reporters. The people reading the documents and publishing them in the public interest.
The First Amendment covers exactly this. It was written precisely because a free press is the mechanism by which power is held accountable. This is not a debatable constitutional point — it has been settled law for over 200 years. New York Times v. United States, 1971. The Pentagon Papers. Look it up.
What they are describing is not a legal theory. It is authoritarianism with a dictionary. When you criminalize the reporting of what the government does, you eliminate the last check on what the government does. That is the point. That has always been the point.
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🔴 OUTRAGE #6 — I DIDN’T HAVE TO LOOK ANY OF THIS UP
Here is what outrages me separately from all of the above.
I didn’t research any of this before writing it. Every single one of these stories was already sitting in my head — the slush fund, the golden statue, the dead toddler, the Iran countdown clock — because they all happened in the last 72 hours and every single one of them would have been a six-month congressional investigation and a front-page banner headline for a week under any prior administration.
Now they stack. One on top of the other, every single day, until the sheer volume makes it impossible to hold any one of them in focus long enough to be appropriately outraged.
That is not an accident. The volume is the strategy. You can’t fight what you can’t see clearly. You can’t organize against what you can’t name because there are thirty new things by the time you name the last one.
So name them anyway. Every day. One by one. That’s what this is.
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If you still support this, ask yourself why. Then ask yourself what that answer says about you.
— The Deep State Club | deepstate.club
The Outrage Report publishes when there is something to report. Lately, that is every day.