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The president keeps saying he’s fine with higher gas prices as a result of his war. Plus, a US judge blocks Trump’s sanctions against the UN's Francesca Albanese for investigating Israel’s war crimes.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 14 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Republicans are growing increasingly frustrated with Donald Trump’s war with Iran. Three GOP senators just voted with Democrats to stop the war, and numerous news accounts report that GOP cracks are growing. This comes as an extraordinary New York Times exposé shows that Trump’s war has been substantially less successful than he and Pete Hegseth have claimed. Meanwhile, Republicans are running away from Trump’s bizarre tirade yesterday, in which he admitted he isn’t concerned with how inflation from the war is impacting ordinary Americans. Here’s the bottom line: all signs are that this will get substantially worse politically for Trump and the Republicans.So we’re checking in with Nicholas Grossman, a professor of international relations who has a new piece for MS Now, arguing that the economic fallout from the war is only just beginning. Thanks for coming on, Nick.Nicholas Grossman: Hi, thanks for having me. Great to be here.Sargent: So let’s start with the news from the U.S. Senate. Three Republicans joined with Democrats to support a resolution that would end the war in keeping with the War Powers Act, which requires a congressional vote after 60 days have passed. The three senators are Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Rand Paul. As Politico reports, there’s new frustration and deepening divisions among Republicans over this. Nick, what’s your reaction to all that?Grossman: I’m not surprised that some of them are starting to move away from it because the economic liabilities and associated political liabilities are rising. The senator who ended up making the vote fail was John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, which is unfortunate. So it was a 50-to-49 vote. If he had gone the other way, it would have passed. But also, the War Powers Act—the way that they’re acting now is a sign of America’s democratic backsliding, of shifting power towards the executive branch. And this actually happened in Trump’s first term because the way the War Powers Act is supposed to work is the president is allowed to use force in an emergency or self-defense without Congress’s permission. And then if he doesn’t get congressional permission in 60 days, it automatically ends.And what happened in Trump’s first term is when the U.S. was supporting Saudi Arabia’s campaign against Yemen, against the Houthis, and doing things like midair refueling—so actually directly involved, not just, say, sending weapons—the Senate passed a resolution saying that Trump had to stop that. He vetoed it, which is not supposed to be the way it goes. And then there were enough MAGA loyalists in Congress to prevent a veto override. So already the War Powers Act is not really acting like it’s supposed to. But now, when we have Congress trying to assert itself, I think that would be a positive thing. More of this power is supposed to be in Congress and it would be positive if they can get a resolution saying that we assert our power under the War Powers Act. I don’t know if Trump would listen, but even so it would be a good step.Sargent: Well, it would be a good thing, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen anytime soon. Trump, meanwhile, is very rattled by any hint that the war isn’t going as well as he’s claimed. He erupted on Truth Social saying this: “When the fake news says that the Iranian enemy is doing well militarily against us, it’s virtual treason.” Trump continued that the media is aiding and abetting the enemy. And he called the media “American cowards that are rooting against our country.” He called them losers, ingrates, and fools. You know, Nick, it’s going to be harder for Trump to continue claiming that anyone who questions his war is a traitor when even Republican senators are now doing so, right?Grossman: It makes it more politically difficult. And also just the objective reality of it makes it really difficult, because Trump seems to be approaching the war as if the goal is to get the U.S. media to speak positively of it, or to successfully lie to the American people—as if lying to the American people is his most important foreign policy goal. Whereas the realities of the war are going to continue whether or not he gets the U.S. media to say differently. So Iran has weapons. They are able to fire them to block the Strait of Hormuz. That is creating massive shortages in things like oil and gas and fertilizer and other essentials. Those will damage the economy. It doesn’t matter what Trump is able to bully the media into doing. And yet it seems like that’s his priority—as if he can somehow, “virtual treason” is such a great term for it, as if this is all a virtual reality, a reality show. Whereas it’s clearly not real treason. But if he can shape the narrative—it’s not going to make the situation better.Sargent: Well, it’s a sign of political desperation. He knows it’s going badly and his only hope is for the media to stop informing the American people of it.Grossman: Yeah, that shows a desperation about the politics because the facts of the war are just so bad.Sargent: Not only that—the tweet looks even more ridiculous when you consider this New York Times report, which used leaks from senior officials to demonstrate that Iran has access to nearly all of the 33 missile sites it maintains along the Strait of Hormuz. The Times reported also that Iran has 70 percent of its pre-war missile stockpile. Nick, this is a disaster. I’ve made this point on here before, but in addition to the content of the leaks, which is bad enough, it’s also devastating for Trump that top officials are doing the leaking of this kind of thing, because it shows that there’s really serious dissent inside the administration about how this is all going. What do you make of all that?Grossman: It’s not at all surprising that people inside the U.S. intelligence community and inside the U.S. military are leaking information to the American people because the war was a really bad idea in the first place. It was bad in ways that were widely foreseen—that have been foreseen for really years. In particular, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been advocating U.S. war on Iran since he was first prime minister in the late 1990s, and Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden all turned him down. It was only Trump that in this term was willing to do it. And in doing so was not really articulating any type of strategic goal. He moved around so many times and eventually settled on something that was pretty small, which was degrading Iran’s missile program and degrading so that they would have fewer missiles. And even that is not any sort of strategic victory. All it would do, at absolute best, is set them back, where they would then have greater incentive to build up weapons and to possibly go for a nuclear weapon and to build up their missile stocks.And now we find, not too surprisingly either, that it’s not true. And that’s because Iran has been—and I’m very frustrated by this—but Iran has been fighting a lot smarter than the United States. In the beginning, under the American and Israeli assault, they reduced the amount of launches that they were doing. They more or less turtled and kept a lot of their capabilities in reserve so that they could do things like continue to block the Strait of Hormuz, as they did when the U.S. briefly tried that failed attempt that they called Project Freedom to get ships through it. And it’s not working. That’s because Iran retains its military capabilities and because they prepared to fight the United States, where it looks like the Trump administration prepared to do something quick and easy and get praise for it. And that situation in Iran was always much more difficult than they appreciated.Sargent: And you sort of see this same mistake being duplicated over and over by Donald Trump. It’s almost like he’s caught in this weird mental loop. He just keeps tweeting over and over, if Iran doesn’t do what I say, then the bombing will really start. And it’s a little hard to keep escalating that. We were sort of treated to the comic spectacle, I guess comic isn’t quite the right word, of Donald Trump threatening to obliterate Iranian civilization entirely, which would have killed 90 million people. And then when that didn’t bully Iran into opening the Strait of Hormuz, he said, well, I’ll tell you what, the bombing is going to really start. Like, how can you actually top obliterating Iranian civilization? You can’t. And so you can sort of see that we’re trapped in this fun house where Donald Trump won’t learn the lesson that force by itself can’t solve the problem, right?Grossman: It’s not even force by itself—it is threats that he’s trying to solve the problem with. One of the problems of this war is, while it was never a good idea in the first place, Trump did not deploy the type of force that would be necessary to accomplish it—they just thought bombing from afar. And the thing about bombing from afar is it has literally never won a war, ever. Bombing on its own—you can damage some stuff, but you can’t really win big concessions from a country. And so the U.S. didn’t put things like the large invasion army that Bush did to invade Iraq. And Trump seems to be thinking that we’re in this cycle where he does these big, over-the-top threats and that doesn’t cow Iran. And then he quickly reverses course and lies that there’s been some great progress in talks and maybe jawbones the markets—gets stocks to rise, gets headlines saying that there is peace imminent or progress in talks or anything along those lines. And then those things collapse because the Iranian position has not changed. It is based on the hard realities of the war—what they control, the fact that they can block the Strait of Hormuz, and that the U.S. needs it open.And so Trump is in the situation where his only two options are a humiliating surrender that leaves Iran decently stronger than it was before—getting to charge tolls for all these ships that used to be able to go through freely—or a military escalation. And he’s clearly afraid of that. And really he should be, because there is no good military option. More bombing won’t do it. He’s already killed the Ayatollah’s family—his father and daughter and mother—killed a lot of the leadership, killed a lot of the people who were more pro-negotiation inside Iran. They have empowered Revolutionary Guard hardliners, and those hardliners can see that they have a strong military position and want to get something out of it. So bullying won’t do it.And then even trying to do something like invade the ground around the Strait of Hormuz would be very militarily costly, difficult, risky, and has no end game. Sargent: The problem of trying to do a regime-change war with boots on the ground looks even less appetizing now that we’ve learned that Iran still has a whole lot of its capability. Grossman: And for a ground invasion, those capabilities would multiply, because then if there are U.S. troops on Iranian soil, there are a lot of different ways that Iran could get to them that they don’t currently. It’s worth noting that with the Project Freedom idea, U.S. destroyers did shoot down the projectiles that Iran shot at them. So a big weapons platform is able to do that. But putting boots on the ground—they are a lot more vulnerable. It will definitely lead to American casualties if they do that. And that will not only most likely not resolve the war—in fact, it would probably end in a more costly humiliation—it also adds to the political liabilities, the domestic political liabilities. Which, already given that the war is so unpopular—even at the start, it was the most unpopular war since we have been measuring these things, since World War II. More unpopular than Iraq at the start. More unpopular than Obama’s intervention in Libya, you name it. Then with the economic costs mounting, trying to sell the lie that this is already over and he’s already won and it was such a great job and the Iranians are giving him everything—you can’t sell that lie if you have to go and escalate to putting troops on the ground. So he really is stuck. He’s gotten the U.S. into a terrible position and there is no good way out.Sargent: Republicans also have an additional problem here. On Monday, as everyone has heard by now, Trump admitted that he doesn’t think about the economic impact of his war on Americans at all when thinking about the situation. Let’s listen to how Republicans tried to spin their way out of this. Here’s JD Vance.Reporter (voiceover): Do you agree with the president’s position that Americans’ financial situations should not be a consideration in that decision-making process?JD Vance (voiceover): Well, I don’t think the president said that. I think that’s a misrepresentation of what the president said. But look, I agree with the president that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon.Here’s Mike Johnson.Mike Johnson (voiceover): I don’t know the context in which he made that comment, but I can tell you the president thinks about the American financial situation. I talked to him on average twice a day, sometimes three or four times a day.Here’s Senator Roger Marshall.Roger Marshall (voiceover): I would have to find out the context of it. I’m sorry.Here’s Senator Cynthia Lummis.Cynthia Lummis (voiceover): Did he say that? Yeah, I don’t have a comment about that. Mostly because I think he actually does care.Sargent: Nick, I’ve got to say, a lot of them are claiming they don’t know the context, but the context is not exonerating in the least, is it?Grossman: No. And it’s a very typical Republican move to pretend that they haven’t heard what he said or that they don’t understand the context as a way to try to duck being tied to it or some responsibility for it. But the weird thing about this one is—while I think it is almost certain that Trump personally does not care about the finances of the American people except in a way that it might be a political liability for him, which of course he thinks he could lie his way through and just say it’s great and that it’s not an issue—I think that one’s actually tied up in his understanding of and misunderstanding of negotiations, and why he was berating the media. Iran’s leverage over the United States comes from the economic damage that it’s causing. And when asked, effectively, so does Iran have leverage over you because of all this economic damage, he very quickly defaults to, no, no, no, I don’t think about that, I don’t care about it. But in the process, it’s probably revealing some of his personal beliefs and looking absolutely terrible politically, given that prices are rising in various ways. Gas prices—this is one of the only times in history where the gas price rise is directly the fault of the president and is very easy to understand as the fault of the president. And that statement from Trump seems like it is tailor-made for Democratic ads.Sargent: Okay, Nick. So what do you predict is going to happen in the end here? It sure looks like Donald Trump is going to have to accept something soon enough. We’re stuck in this dynamic where he’s only willing to accept something that looks like he’s pulled off this world-historically stupendous accomplishment. And yet at the same time, he can’t actually get such an accomplishment out of the situation. So he just keeps lying his way through it and bluffing his way through it. But at some point, he’s going to have to accept some sort of deal with Iran, right? What does that look like potentially? And how bad does the economic situation get in the United States in the long run after that?Grossman: So he’ll probably have to accept something at some point, although he always could try for a military gamble to attack them, or to either follow through on some of these threats, or who knows, escalate all the way to a ground invasion. I find it almost impossible to try to predict which one of those he’s going to do. But what I can tell you is that the pressure is mounting. So this is a hard calendar. It is not something you can lie your way through. It can’t be bullshitted away. The ships that came out of the Strait of Hormuz have reached their destinations. They have unloaded. The result now is kind of like a shell game where companies and countries are drawing down on their reserves. And they’re able to keep the price of oil from spiking and to keep some of the commodities flowing. But that is going to run out.And in not that long—a lot of the oil analysts I read seem to think it is probably sometime in June where those resources are being depleted, that they’re being drained, the storage at the fastest rate in history. And all of this adds up to an oil shock that is larger than the one in 1973, when OPEC put the United States under an oil embargo in response to the U.S. supporting Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. And that set off a recession that lasted over a year. It saw big stock market declines, although interestingly, the stock market didn’t really decline until after that embargo was lifted. And so what that suggests is that a lot of these things are being strung along for now.And even one crazy one—I saw this line from JPMorgan that their latest guidance on the oil market is that they expect this to be solved by June, kind of because it would be stupid if it weren’t. And the problem is that the people running the United States are not acting smartly. They’re acting quite stupidly in this. And so the pressure will continuously mount on Trump. And he’s going to have to either do something that is so clearly a surrender to Iran that gives Iran some sort of concessions, and gets maybe a fig leaf of Iran kind of promising to restrict their nuclear program in ways that are less than the JCPOA—the nuclear deal that Obama negotiated and that Trump tore up without cause and let Iran out of nuclear restrictions in exchange for nothing, which set us on this path to war or nuclear Iran. So yeah, I mean, I really wish that there was a way I could say, this is the way it’s going to end up, but it’s just a terrible position. There’s no way out. And he doesn’t seem like somebody who is willing to accept something that will be so widely acknowledged as a loss that cannot be spun away.Sargent: You know, Nick, it just seems like the built-in dynamics of this situation are really formidable and terrible in every conceivable way. The only way out is going to be the midterm elections. And even that might not help that much. Unfortunately. Nick Grossman, awesome to talk to you as always. Thanks for coming on.Grossman: Thanks so much for having me.

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President Donald Trump suggested earlier this week that Venezuela should be annexed by the United States. He reportedly told Fox News correspondent John Roberts—not to be confused with the chief justice—that he was “seriously considering a move to make Venezuela the fifty-first state.”This is a far-fetched idea, to say the least. Venezuela has no interest in voluntarily becoming a U.S. state, as its acting President Delcy Rodríguez told reporters on Monday. “We will continue to defend our integrity, our sovereignty, our independence, our history,” she said, adding that Venezuela was “not a colony, but a free country.”U.S. forces managed to infiltrate the country and arrest former President Nicolás Maduro earlier this year, which led to Rodríguez’s interim presidency. Trump suggested in January that the U.S. would play some kind of administrative role over the country after capturing Maduro, but no such direct control appears to exist. Venezuela retains every functional attribute of sovereignty.I would welcome anyone to join the United States, so long as they do so freely, voluntarily, and democratically, and so long as they agree to live under the Constitution and its principles. I would not support the forcible annexation of any country or territory to the U.S. under any circumstances. If the Trump administration sought to seize any territory by force or coercion, the next Democratic president would be legally and morally obligated to return it to its previous status.For that reason, it is worth thinking through the legal and constitutional implications of annexing Venezuela, Greenland, or even Canada—especially since they are not favorable to the Trump administration’s other political, social, and cultural priorities. The United States has not annexed a significant portion of foreign territory within living memory. While Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the Union in 1959, they had already been organized U.S. territories long before statehood.It is crucial that Trump specified that Venezuela would become the fifty-first state, not an incorporated territory or some insular possession. (He may be unaware of those options.) Some U.S. acquisitions have not resulted in statehood. After the Spanish-American War, for example, the United States took possession of a medley of former Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific. None of them have become U.S. states.The U.S. had no plans to hold Cuba long-term, and the island nation gained formal independence in 1902. The Philippines would only obtain independence in 1946 after decades of colonial rule. Puerto Rico and Guam remain under U.S. control to this day. Though Puerto Rican independence and statehood are often alternatively discussed on the island and in D.C., Congress has taken no steps down either path—and in the case of Puerto Ricans, the matter is the subject of heated internal debate.Trump’s described outcome—that the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela immediately becomes a state—most closely resembles that of Texas, whereby a fully independent nation was admitted to the Union without first being a territory. But it is unclear whether Trump has considered the full implications of statehood for Venezuela. The first and most obvious consequence is political representation. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that roughly 32 million people live in Venezuela, which would make it the second-most-populous state in the Union, behind only California.For clarity’s sake, let us imagine that Venezuela is formally admitted into the Union on January 1, 2027, by a joint resolution of Congress. At that moment, the U.S. state of Venezuela is instantly eligible for representation in the U.S. Senate. The state government in Caracas could fill these new vacancies through whatever method it prescribes by law until the next election cycle, as authorized by the Seventeenth Amendment.Venezuelans would not have the chance to vote for both senators automatically in the next election. When Alaska joined the Union in 1959, its two senators-elect flipped a coin to decide who would be the senior senator and who would be the junior senator. Bob Bartlett won the toss and had to run for reelection in 1960, while his colleague Ernest Gruening waited until 1962.Even this small addition would change some of the basic math of the American legislative process. A happy coincidence of the last 60 years is that the Senate has had exactly 100 members. Two additional members would raise the filibuster threshold, which is pegged to three-fifths of the Senate’s membership, to 61 votes. Sixty-eight senators would also be required to meet the two-thirds threshold for certain votes, like overriding a veto or convicting an impeached official.What about Venezuela’s representation in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College? That is a trickier question. Every other state automatically obtained its House representation as soon as it was admitted to the Union, which also determined its number of presidential electors. Nevada famously sent its state constitution to D.C. by telegraph—the longest message of its kind at the time—rather than mail so Congress could approve it a few days before the 1864 presidential election.I mentioned earlier that the Census Bureau estimates that 32 million people live in Venezuela. But that number is only an estimate at best: Venezuela was obviously not part of the 2020 census, and the country does not appear to have conducted its own census since 2011. There is no evidence that Venezuela’s scheduled 2021 census took place, whether due to the pandemic, political instability, or some other reason.Congress could theoretically legislate that Venezuela would receive a certain number of House seats upon admission until the 2030 census, at which point it would be counted and reapportioned normally. This method was first adopted in 1845 when Congress admitted the Republic of Texas to the Union. Texas had been a short-lived breakaway state from Mexico and conducted no census of its own. Congress instead declared that the state would be admitted “with two representatives in Congress, until the next apportionment of representation.” It received the same number of seats after the 1850 census, so lawmakers had made a pretty good guess.Suppose that Congress, at Trump’s behest, made a similar guess here. Each House seat currently represents an average of 761,000 people after the 2020 census. As a result, one would expect Venezuela to temporarily receive roughly 42 House seats for the 2028 and 2030 House elections. That would amount to the second-largest delegation in the chamber and be greater than the combined House delegations of Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana. Under the Constitution’s formula for the Electoral College, Venezuela would also receive 44 electoral votes in the 2028 presidential election.Imagine the political power shift that such a large voting bloc would create in the nation’s capital. The House is already narrowly contested between Democrats and Republicans; those lines are expected to harden by the recent surge in partisan gerrymandering in recent years, and especially during the last two years. Venezuelan House members would effectively decide the passage of most existing legislation. If they sided en masse with one party or another, they would be granting it an extraordinary governing margin. If Venezuelan representatives voted as a national bloc, they would be the decisive factor in nearly every legislative debate.That power would extend to the executive branch, as well. The state of Venezuela would also be automatically entitled to votes in the Electoral College to choose the next president in the 2028 election. Under the Constitution, each state has a number of electors equal to its representation in the House plus its two senators. With roughly 44 electoral votes up for grabs, how Venezuelans vote could effectively decide Trump’s successor in the White House.After the 2030 census, Venezuela’s statehood would have dramatic consequences for existing House delegations. The Constitution allows Congress to decide the number of House seats. While Congress used to update that number after almost every census to reflect the nation’s growth, the Apportionment Act of 1929 ultimately capped the House’s size at 435 members.For the first four years of Venezuelan statehood, the House’s size would temporarily expand to 477 members under the math I outlined above. This would follow the precedent set by the admissions of Alaska and Hawaii in 1959, which expanded the House to a record 437 members until the 1960 census. But unless Congress passed a new Apportionment Act during that span, the House would automatically shrink back to 435 members after the 2030 census. That shift would shrink each state’s delegation proportionate to Venezuela’s population, even before factoring in the decade-long population shifts between the states. A Republican lawmaker from Texas or Florida who voted to admit Venezuela in 2026 might find themselves without a seat in 2032 without losing a single election. Even Democrats in California and New York would likely find themselves with more representatives than seats.Of course, it is possible that Trump and his allies would not follow past precedent to the letter. The Constitution does not obligate Congress to provide for House representation for newly admitted states between census counts, even though Congress has invariably done so. But even this would only delay the inevitable. After the 2030 census and the reapportionment that followed, no matter what, the state of Venezuela and its citizens would be entitled to full political representation in the federal government.I say “citizens” because, if Venezuala were annexed and admitted into the Union, that is what its residents would become: full-fledged citizens of the United States, with all the powers and protections that come with it. In every instance where the U.S. has acquired territory from a sovereign nation, U.S. citizenship has followed it.In 1819, for example, Spain ceded what is now Florida to the United States in the Adams-Onis Treaty. One of the treaty’s provisions held that the state’s current inhabitants “shall be incorporated in the Union of the United States as soon as may be consistent with the principles of the Federal Constitution, and admitted to the enjoyment of all the privileges, rights, and immunities of the citizens of the United States.”Florida, however, did not join the Union until 1845. The state’s population remained too low to meet Congress’s usual standards for admission, only crossing the informal 50,000-person threshold after the 1840 census. Sectional disputes over slavery also played a role: Florida’s admission as a slave state was paired with Iowa’s entry as a free state to preserve the antebellum balance of power.Even before Florida’s formal admission to the Union, however, its Spanish inhabitants had become American citizens. In 1828, the Supreme Court heard a case involving an esoteric admiralty-law dispute from a local court in what was then the Florida Territory. As part of its decision, the justices considered “the relation in which Florida stands to the United States.” Chief Justice John Marshall concluded along the way that Congress could properly naturalize all of Florida’s Spanish inhabitants through the Adams-Onis Treaty.“This treaty is the law of the land, and admits the inhabitants of Florida to the enjoyment of the privileges, rights, and immunities of the citizens of the United States,” he wrote in American Insurance Company v. Canter. “It is unnecessary to inquire whether this is not their condition independent of stipulation. They do not, however, participate in political power; they do not share in the government till Florida shall become a state.”Marshall’s caveat that the court need not decide whether they would be citizens “independent of stipulation” is constitutionally interesting. At minimum, the chief justice was suggesting that Spanish Floridians may have automatically become U.S. citizens by virtue of the territory’s acquisition by the United States. In that case, the stipulation merely confirmed for Spain what was already the law of the land, so to speak.Unless the Supreme Court abrogates birthright citizenship in the next few months in Trump v. Barbara, every child born in the state of Venezuela after January 1, 2027, would instantly become a U.S. citizen upon birth. I would argue that the existing citizens of any country annexed by the United States automatically become U.S. citizens, as well, under the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause.That reading would reflect the settled practice of the U.S. government before the amendment’s ratification. The Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo, which transferred most of what is now the Western United States from Mexico to the U.S. government in 1848, set a one-year deadline for inhabitants of the newly acquired lands to choose whether to stay or leave. As a fail-safe, it declared that anyone who stayed in the newly acquired lands “without having declared their intention to retain the character of Mexicans, shall be considered to have elected to become citizens of the United States.”When the United States purchased Alaska from the Russian Empire in 1867, the treaty ratified by the Senate declared that the “inhabitants of the ceded territory” were free to return to Russia within three years. Those who stayed, aside from the Alaska Natives, “shall be admitted to the enjoyment of all the rights, advantages, and immunities of citizens of the United States, and shall be maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty, property, and religion.” (Alaska Natives later received U.S. citizenship through the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.)Extending U.S. citizenship to Venezuelans would have profound implications for the national budget, for programs like Social Security and Medicare, and for every program that distributes funds through state governments. I could not even begin to calculate the fiscal impact. About 770,000 Venezuelan citizens already live in the U.S., according to a 2023 report, though that number may have changed since then thanks to the Trump administration’s immigration policies.The irony of all of this annexation talk is that the Trump administration has gone to great lengths to remove Venezuelan immigrants from U.S. soil. Last year, it even invoked the Alien Enemies Act to accelerate the deportation process for tens of thousands of Venezuelan nationals inside the U.S. Trump and his top officials have sought to reduce the U.S. immigrant population through mass deportations and aggressive campaigns to deter migration. Their all but stated goal is to substantially reduce the number of nonwhite Americans in the United States.Trump’s proposal to annex Venezuela and admit it into the Union would run counter to this policy program, to say the least. Though its people would not technically be “immigrants,” Venezuelan statehood would dwarf any previous immigration flow into the United States, creating upward of 33 million new U.S. citizens in a single move. For that reason, it is worth treating Trump’s “fifty-first state” suggestions as unlikely to happen—even if it is fun to imagine how much Stephen Miller would hate it.

Since it overturned his IEEPA tariffs in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, Donald Trump has clearly had the Supreme Court on his mind. In addition to complaining about “his” justices voting against him even when they “knew where [he] stood, how badly [he] wanted this Victory for our Country,” Trump set off significant speculation when he discussed potentially nominating three more justices. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have both said that they have no plans to retire (though the prospect of an Alito memoir later this year calls his intentions into question), but that has not stopped aspiring MAGA justices and their supporters from jockeying for position and auditioning for the boss.While this response is unsurprising, the conversation surrounding it has revealed a significant shift in Republican views of prospective nominees. The conservative legal movement finally caught the car in Trump’s first term and secured a supermajority of right-wing justices willing to impose their vision on the country. But under Trump, the movement has so thoroughly radicalized itself that even solid conservatives like Justice Amy Coney Barrett supposedly can’t be trusted. Conservatives’ refrain for decades had been “no more Souters,” referring to Justice David Souter, a George H.W. Bush appointee who drifted leftward after joining the court. Now, even though they voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, gut the Voting Rights Act, kill the administrative state, and many more longtime conservative goals, the call has shifted to “No more Souters. No more Robertses. No more Barretts.”Skirmishes are now breaking out over which judges are the true heirs to “heroes of the republic” Alito and Thomas, and even some of Trump’s most extreme lower court nominees are taking heat. Consider Fifth Circuit Judge Andrew Oldham. Oldham is a Federalist Society favorite whom Trump nominated to the country’s most MAGA-influenced appeals court during his first term, and as expected, the judge has turned out to be an aggressive culture warrior and Trump stalwart widely discussed as a potential future Supreme Court nominee. Oldham has built his reputation on extreme opinions attacking administrative agencies, voting protections, abortion rights, and immigrants, often in rhetoric designed more to provoke than persuade. Oldham pushes such far-right legal ideas that even the highly conservative Supreme Court regularly reverses his opinions as steps too far.Despite Oldham’s clear record supporting right-wing priorities, conservative commentators have called him a “meh in robes” and said that his potential nomination doesn’t even pass the “laugh test.” Many prefer Oldham’s Fifth Circuit colleague Judge James Ho. Ho’s jurisprudence—and even more, his public commentary—have made him a favorite among the conservative legal movement’s most combative voices. They see Ho as a champion advancing their broader political and cultural agenda who revels in “sticking it to the libs.” With a straight face, Ho has written actual judicial opinions including warnings against a “woke Constitution,” the idea that anti-abortion physicians can sue over the “aesthetic injury of abortion” because fetuses “are a source of profound joy for those who view them,” and a version of great replacement theory where “adversaries … weaponize mass migration to harm America.” Ho’s appeal to the MAGA legal movement lies precisely in his willingness to turn the bench into another front in the broader political war. They are not satisfied with just winning—they want champions willing to fight dirty and rub it in.That helps explain why the movement Trump unleashed increasingly seems incapable of accepting anything less than Ho-style bombast from its next Supreme Court nominee. The Federalist Society, which guided the movement for decades, was more aligned with the establishment Republicanism that MAGA strangled. It managed to ride the tiger of Trump’s first term and cap off the conservative takeover of the courts, but it has fallen out of favor with Trump and his adherents aligned with Trump’s maximalist (read: unconstitutional) approach to his second term. The confirmations of Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Barrett—once seen as the culmination of decades of organizing—have produced impatience rather than satisfaction. If anything, they have intensified the sense that more is possible, and therefore more is required.Republicans no longer even pretend that this is a debate about judicial philosophy in the traditional sense, but Democrats have been incredibly slow to accept the openly cynical view of courts as centers of political power. For years, Democratic officials have treated Republican objections to court reforms like expansion, term limits, and jurisdiction stripping as good-faith concerns about institutional stability, where playing hardball would risk blowback.But the blowback is already here. When even judges like Andrew Oldham are considered potential Souters, it is clear that there is no limiting principle. Progressive legal organizations and law professors have spent years developing concrete proposals to respond to exactly this moment. Even Bill Kristol, a longtime fixture of the conservative movement, has called for “ruthless” court expansion. A fundamental question for Democratic nominees up and down the ticket in 2026 and 2028 needs to be what they will do about the courts. What is the left’s version of “no more Souters”?Honestly, there are many answers to that question. Democrats cannot keep treating the judiciary as a sacred institution while Republicans treat it as a captured one. The conservative legal movement has spent decades building structural advantage, and it has largely succeeded. Countering it will require using every legitimate institutional lever available to dismantle that advantage: expanding capacity where the courts are artificially constrained, imposing enforceable ethics rules on a judiciary that has largely exempted itself, reconsidering jurisdiction and tenure in light of modern polarization, and refusing to preserve procedural norms that only one side respects. If one party is openly playing to dominate the courts indefinitely, the other cannot treat “balance” as something that will reemerge on its own. It has to be rebuilt, deliberately and unapologetically, through power.

Of all President Donald Trump’s kleptocracy schemes, perhaps the most shameless are his financial legal claims against the same executive branch over which he presides. Now Trump is on the verge of settling one of these, a lawsuit he filed in January against the IRS seeking $10 billion in damages for the leak of his tax returns to The New York Times. With negotiators working both sides of the table, Trump is nearing a very generous agreement, which is to say a shameless fleecing of the American taxpayer.Before proceeding, let’s catalog Trump’s three personal financial claims against his own administration. The first two are administrative claims under the 1946 Federal Tort Claims Act that Trump filed with the Justice Department after his first term ended. An administrative claim is not a lawsuit against the government; it’s an attempt to extract financial compensation from the government under threat of litigation. Trump’s first administrative claim, filed in 2023, concerned the FBI’s supposed tortious conduct in its Russiagate probe. Trump’s second administrative claim, filed in 2024, concerned the FBI’s supposed tortious conduct in its Mar-a-Lago document search. Trump sought $115 million for each of these claims—$230 milliion total—to cover compensatory and punitive damages. He continued to pursue them after he reentered the White House in January 2025, even though he was now negotiating with his own Justice Department. Neither claim is yet resolved.Trump’s IRS lawsuit differed from these by interposing, inconveniently, a party who is independent from Trump—namely, a district court judge. The judge, Kathleen M. Williams, was elevated to the bench under President Barack Obama, but it’s hard to see how even a Trump-appointed hack could view favorably a president suing his own Justice Department (unless, of course, that judge sat on the Supreme Court). On April 24, Judge Williams pointed out that “although President Trump avers that he is bringing this lawsuit in his personal capacity, he is the sitting president and his named adversaries are entities whose decisions are subject to his direction.” She therefore ordered both the Justice Department and Trump to produce, by May 20, memoranda addressing “the issue of whether a case and controversy exists in this matter.” I can’t imagine that either party is eager to write such a memorandum. Instead, the race is on to settle before May 20. And whaddya know, the parties turn out not to be very far apart, even though Trump’s case would be weak even if he weren’t president. (More on that here.) According to Andrew Duehren and Alan Feuer of The New York Times, a settlement is in the works that would drop any IRS audits of Trump, his family, or his businesses. One advantage to this approach is that it would spare Trump having to pretend he’ll donate the proceeds to charity. Since nobody knows what the penalties from such audits would be, nobody can pinpoint such a settlement’s monetary value. On the other hand: Do any such audits still exist, and, if they do, is there any chance they’ll be resolved during Trump’s presidency? Even if the answer to the first part of that question is “yes,” the answer to the second part is surely “no.” So perhaps what Trump’s lawyers seek instead is some sort of indemnification against future IRS action akin to the blanket immunity the Supreme Court gifted him in 2024. If any adversarial relationship exists in this lawsuit at all, it’s probably between Trump and his own lawyers, because he has a well-documented tendency either to fire them or to refuse them payment. Given such tensions, I’d  guess the two unnamed sources who described this possible settlement to the Times were floating it as a trial balloon, not to the public but to Trump himself. Will Trump go for a settlement in which no money changes hands? Very possibly not; he really likes money. It would be very like Trump to grouse that his Justice Department settled Russiagate lawsuits from Carter Page and Michael Flynn, each for sums reportedly in excess of $1 million, but that the IRS wouldn’t do the same for him. And I’m the biggest victim of all!On the other hand: If the IRS were to audit Trump’s tax returns rigorously, the likelihood is he would end up owing quite a lot. In 2024, the Times calculated that just one of Trump’s apparent violations would, if he were held accountable, cost him a penalty in excess of $100 million.If Trump agreed to settle, could Judge Williams block the settlement? Judges do occasionally invalidate court settlements, and there would be excellent reason to do so in this case. But what’s Judge Williams’s next move? If she throws out the lawsuit, or if Trump voluntarily withdraws it, it’s not clear anything can stop the IRS from settling with Trump at that point, except possibly another lawsuit brought on behalf of taxpayers arguing that Trump’s in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses. But as I’ve complained before, nobody seems to want to file emoluments clause lawsuits against Trump these days. That’s because, when Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington tried that during Trump’s first term (over crimes that now seem quaint), the Supreme Court sat on the case until Trump left office so it could declare the issue moot.When Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency in 1974 rather than face likely impeachment over his Watergate crimes, everybody said “the system worked.” The trouble with Trump’s presidency, which entails much worse crimes, is that the system doesn’t work, or anyway isn’t working now. Which leaves people like me little to say except: Mayday! I repeat. Mayday!