June 23rd
Mark David
1) Top 20 lessons from military super-genius Donald Trump
How to succeed in warfare by lying constantly, insulting your allies, and throwing money at your enemies by Mark Jacob STOP THE PRESSES NEWS
There’s a yearbook photo of young Donald Trump in military school, an array of medals attached to his dress jacket. Except it wasn’t his jacket. Trump had borrowed it from a classmate because it had more medals than his own.
Then there was the time in 2015 when Trump touted himself as an expert in national security. “I know more about ISIS than the generals do,” he said.
Just last week, Trump joked about giving himself a Medal of Honor. At least it seemed like a joke.
2) The Southern Baptist Convention Was Going Mainstream. Then the Christian Nationalists Weighed In.
The SBC appears to be making a significant course correction in the form of a sharp rightward tack. By Kiera Butler for MOTHER JONES
With more than 12.7 million members across some 46,000 churches, the Southern Baptist Convention is massive. As easily the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, it’s also one of the loudest voices in American religious life—it also runs six of the nation’s 10 largest theological seminaries, which train future pastors. As Bob Smietana, a veteran religion reporter with Religion News Service, told me last week, the SBC’s sheer size “gives them some kind of clout that other people don’t have.”
Or as William Wolfe, the president of the Center for Baptist Leadership, a group that aspires to make the SBC more conservative, put it to me in a phone call this weekend, “When the Southern Baptist Convention sneezes, the whole country says, ‘Excuse me.'”
3) Tucker and MTG Are Leaving The GOP. Not Because They Lost. But Because They Won. By Adam Kinzinger
The bomb throwers were never going to be satisfied — even with everything.
Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene announced today that they are leaving the Republican Party. The coverage will almost certainly treat this as a story about a party coming apart, about cracks in the MAGA coalition, about dissent and fracture and the inevitable entropy of political movements. That framing is understandable and almost entirely wrong.
Tucker and MTG are not leaving the Republican Party because it failed them. They are leaving because they won the debate. The party became, over the course of a decade, almost exactly what they wanted it to be. It absorbed their grievances, adopted their language, and made their worldview the official ideology of one of the two major parties in the United States. They won. And winning, it turns out, is a problem for people whose identity is built on fighting.
4) 168 Dead Children. One Secret Report. And Elon Musk’s AI. The Hartman Report June 23rd
The Pentagon investigation is finished. Congress still hasn’t seen it. The families of Minab deserve answers—and so do we... Thom Hartmann
On the morning of February 28th, the first day of Donald Trump’s war on Iran, the children of the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in the southern Iranian town of Minab were at their desks a little after ten o’clock when the missiles arrived. The name of the school means “The Good Tree.”
By the time the dust settled, as many as 175 people were dead, most of them girls between the ages of seven and twelve. Iran’s confirmed count came to around 155, and the list its state broadcaster released documents dozens of dead little boys, dozens of dead little girls, more than two dozen dead teachers, several dead parents, a dead school bus driver, and a dead pharmacy technician from the clinic next door.
5) The Hypocrisy Is the Point by Susan J Demas
for LINCOLN RSQUARE 6.23
How Donald Trump turned flagrant reversals on foreign wars, the swamp, and inflation into the ultimate test of MAGA devotion.
When Britney Spears’ younger sister, Jamie Lynn, got pregnant at 16, Bill O’Reilly routinely assailed her parents on Fox News and slammed her as a “pinhead.” It was evidence of Hollywood’s moral rot, the godless left, the collapse of American values. There was a particular relish to it — the kind of gleeful condemnation that suggests Bill O. had been waiting years for some ingenue to make exactly this mistake.
A couple of years later, Sarah Palin’s teenage daughter, Bristol, showed up pregnant on the 2008 campaign trail. As John McCain’s running mate, the Alaska governor brought new fire to his sagging campaign against Obama with her religious-right fervor (and penchant for pricey shttps://www.lincolnsquare.media/p/the-hypocrisy-is-the-point?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3561893&post_id=202955675&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=5jaee&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=emailtilettos).
6) How Alan Greenspan’s stint as President Ford’s top economic adviser cemented his passion for public service and prepared him to lead the Fed
1. Simon Bowmaker Distinguished Clinical Professor of Economics, New York University
2. Paul Wachtel Emeritus Professor of Economics, New York University
For The Conversation June 23rd
Alan Greenspan, who died on June 22, 2026, at the age of 100, is best remembered for his 18 years at the helm of the Federal Reserve. What many people don’t know is that an earlier and more obscure stint during the administration of President Gerald Ford shaped him as a public servant.
As professors of economics, we haven’t just covered Greenspan’s legacy for our students. We also knew him personally, in different capacities: One of us interviewed him in 2016 for a book on public service, and the other was present as a young professor when Greenspan defended his dissertation at New York University in 1977.
7) Senate Passes Landmark Housing Bill: What It Means for Veterans, Homeowners
By Sam Stevenson Associate Editor for News Week
Millions of Americans could see changes to how they buy, finance and maintain their homes after the Senate approved one of the most significant housing packages in decades.
In an 85-5 bipartisan vote on Monday, June 22, the Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a sweeping measure designed to increase housing supply, improve access to homeownership and curb some of the influence of large institutional investors.
8) The Trust-Fund Brats of American Democracy
Our fathers crossed oceans to defeat fascism and protect the rule of law. The modern Republican Party inherited that legacy—and squandered it out of fear.
By Stuart Stevens for LINCOLN SQUARE June 23rd
I thought about my father on Father’s Day.
Like so many men of his generation, he rarely spoke about the war. He was an FBI agent when the war broke out, chasing possible German spies around New York City, going to Broadway theaters at night, and having the time of his life. He resigned from the FBI, joined the Navy, and spent three years fighting in the South Pacific, 28 island landings.
He came home and raised a family, built a career, paid his taxes, coached Little League, and lived his life with the quiet assumption that duty was simply what grown men did. His brother was grievously wounded after D-Day, injuries from which he never fully recovered. He devoted his life to Civil Rights law, believing that the freedoms he had nearly died defending abroad were worth defending at home, as well.
9) Class Warriors, Class Worriers, and Class Wimps by Robert Reich
Democrats must take on America's oligarchs. Here's how.
The last time Americans faced such overwhelming evidence that the monied interests were screwing them over was the Great Crash of 1929 and ensuing Great Depression, resulting in the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, starting in 1933.
The one silver lining of the current Trump-Musk-Bezos-Ellison-Murdoch-Koch horror show is that most Americans now know beyond any reasonable doubt that they’re on the losing side of a class war, and are justifiably pissed,
America’s first trillionaire is a vicious white supremacist who’s stirring up hate around the world and backing Republican candidates with big bucks. American billionaires, meanwhile, are openly sucking up to America’s first dictator, spending lavishly on whatever he wants, and gobbling up media outlets so most Americans won’t know what’s going on.
10) June 22, 2026 Letters from an American
It appears to be more and more clear that the Trump administration is mired in its own mistakes.
There is no way to spin the memorandum of understanding Trump signed last Friday at Versailles to advance peace talks with Iran as a win. Trump deliberately shut off both Congress and allies from the decision to go to war, making the conflict his own. That means the MOU, which achieves none of the goals Trump claimed while at the same time giving Iran access to hundreds of billions of dollars, belongs to Trump, too.
A wide range of U.S. commentators are calling the MOU a “disaster” and saying the United States lost the war. As Isaac Arnsdorf and Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post reported, right-wing hardliner on Iran Mark Dubowitz said: “The actual MOU is deeply flawed. The administration needs to stop defending it beyond stating the truth: It’s a stopgap measure to resupply energy markets, lower gas prices, and help Republicans in the midterms.”
Today, after a quick trip to Switzerland for talks with Iranian negotiators, Vice President J.D. Vance told reporters that Iran had agreed to allow international observers periodically to inspect its nuclear program. Vance called it a “major milestone for the American people, and the first step in permanently denuclearizing or permanently ending a nuclear weapons program in Iran,” and Trump heralded the plan.
11) Trump: Really Big Loser Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance June 23rd
By Joyce Vance
New week, more losses in court for the Trump administration.
In Minnesota, there was one you don’t see often. A federal judge quashed grand jury subpoenas, something that’s almost unheard of. Federal prosecutors issue subpoenas on their own authority; they don’t need approval from a judge or from the grand jury itself. Typically, an effort is made to voluntarily obtain information or items before a subpoena is issued, and subpoenas have to be narrowly tailored to obtain relevant information— prosecutors aren’t permitted to go on a fishing expedition. Prosecutors know, and routinely abide by, the rules. Unless it’s a subpoena to an attorney or a member of the media, in which case approval from Main Justice is necessary, prosecutors routinely issue and enforce subpoenas without any interference.
But today, Judge Patrick Schiltz, a George W. Bush appointee who clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, quashed subpoenas that prosecutors issued as part of an investigation into Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. Judge Schiltz called the subpoenas part of a retaliatory effort because the two refused to assist in executing the administration’s mass deportation policies.