Because somebody has to say it.
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🔴 OUTRAGE #1 — THE DOJ WENT AFTER A REPORTER’S MOTHER
Let’s start with the one that should terrify anyone who still believes in a free press.
The Trump administration sought the phone records of several New York Times journalists and their relatives — including one reporter’s mother — in an effort to unmask the confidential sources behind reporting on security concerns with Trump’s new, Qatari-donated Air Force One jet. The Justice Department issued subpoenas to third-party phone providers for journalists’ phone and text messaging records, on top of subpoenas from earlier this month compelling reporters to testify before a federal grand jury — and it also sought call and message information from two of the reporters’ spouses.
The Times is now fighting this in court, arguing the DOJ violated its own media-subpoena guidelines by waiting a full week to even notify the paper the requests existed, calling the delay “deeply concerning.” A hearing is set for Thursday in New York.
Read that again: they subpoenaed a reporter’s mother’s phone records. Over a story about whether the president’s new plane is safe. This is what a leak investigation looks like when the actual goal is intimidation.
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🔴 OUTRAGE #2 — THE “BOMBSHELL” SPEECH, ONE WEEK LATER
We covered the speech itself last week — Trump promising proof of election interference and delivering nothing but recycled 2021 findings. This week, the White House is still trying to make it stick, issuing a “What They Are Saying” press release stacked with House Republican quotes cheering the address as exposing “Deep State Suppression.” One GOP conference statement read: “This is INSANE. Thank God President Trump’s Administration is getting to the bottom of this once and for all.”
Getting to the bottom of what, exactly? The same week, the administration’s own allies were pushing the SAVE America Act — new voter ID and citizenship-proof requirements — off the back of a speech that produced zero new evidence. The tell isn’t the speech. It’s the immediate legislative ask that follows it, every single time.
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🔴 OUTRAGE #3 — A NEW COURT NOBODY’S EVER SEEN USED BEFORE
The Justice Department activated the Alien Terrorist Removal Court for the first time in its history this week — a court that has existed on paper since the 1990s but has never once been used, precisely because of how sweeping its power is. At the same time, an open letter from 120 prisoners at Arizona’s Eloy Detention Center alleges human rights abuses inside the facility. A former Army veteran was arrested after setting a fire near a Manhattan ICE office. And in Houston, the community is demanding accountability after ICE killed a Mexican father, Lorenzo — a name that’s now joining the growing list this administration keeps producing and the growing list of investigations that go nowhere.
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🔴 OUTRAGE #4 — THE WAR NOBODY VOTED FOR IS ON NIGHT TEN
The U.S. bombed Iran for the tenth consecutive night. Tehran retaliated with fresh attacks in Jordan and Bahrain. At least three U.S. service members have been killed since hostilities resumed just a week ago. Yemen’s Houthis have now declared a naval blockade of Saudi Arabia, opening an entirely new front. An Israeli drone strike killed a family of six in Gaza City.
And the price you’re paying for all of it: gas is back to $4 a gallon nationally as the reignited war halts shipping and squeezes already-strained global refining capacity. Meanwhile Trump slapped an additional 50% tariff on Canadian goods, effective next month, over what the administration calls “discriminatory” trade barriers — one more cost stacked onto a country already absorbing a war, its side effects, and its price tag at the pump, all at once.
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🔴 OUTRAGE #5 — REWRITING THE MUSEUMS NOW, TOO
A White House report accused the National Museum of African American History and Culture of “ideological capture,” drawing an immediate rebuke from lawmakers who called the attack “revisionist history.” First it was library books. Then university curricula. Now it’s the Smithsonian. There is no institution too settled, too factual, or too foundational for this administration to decide needs “correcting.”
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🔴 OUTRAGE #6 — A JUDGE HAD TO STOP A $110 BILLION MEDIA MERGER
A federal judge halted Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery this week. Paramount Skydance — run by Trump allies Larry and David Ellison — is the same company that made sure the birthday UFC spectacle on the White House lawn was locked behind a Paramount+ paywall. A $110 billion consolidation of American media, run by people with a direct financial and personal relationship to the president, needed a judge to hit pause. Sit with that.
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FINAL THOUGHT
A reporter’s mother’s phone records. A tribunal court nobody’s ever used. A war on night ten with no exit and rising gas prices to match. A museum accused of “ideological capture” for telling the truth. Six items, one week, and we didn’t even get to Cuba.
— The Deep State Club | deepstate.club