TRUMP THREATENS USING ‘ARMY’ TO RIG MIDTERM ELECTIONS. President Donald Trump is being criticized for his call for an “election integrity army” to fight against Democrats concerned about voter suppression, Oliver Willis noted at Daily Kos (5/11).
In a post to his Truth Social account on May 10, Trump fumed that former Attorney General Eric Holder plans to work with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to stop efforts to suppress the vote in the upcoming midterm elections. Trump lied and claimed that “unhinged” Democrats “will no doubt try to suppress Republican voters.”
Trump praised the Republican Party’s use of an “election integrity army” during the 2024 election cycle and added, “We will be doing the same again in 2026, but it will be much bigger and stronger.”
US Rep. Norma Torres (D-CA) called out Trump’s post, “The only thing ‘unhinged’ here is a President calling for a private ‘army’ to hover over legal voters. This blatant attempt to bully Americans out of their right to vote is pathetic. Our democracy doesn’t belong to anyone.”
Trump’s post was in reference to the April 29 announcement by Senate Democrats that they have launched a task force to protect the election and had enlisted Holder and election attorney Marc Elias.
“We know that some on the extreme right will try to rig the system,” Schumer said in a Senate speech. “Donald Trump said it, he said he can’t win the election except by rigging it. That’s more or less what he said.”
As evidence, Schumer noted Trump’s use of the FBI to raid a Georgia election office and seize 2020 election ballots, the election he has continually lied about and claimed he won.
Trump’s post comes as poll after poll shows Democrats surging ahead of Republicans in the congressional races, where control of the House and Senate are up for grabs. Voters have been looking for an outlet to express their displeasure with Republican mismanagement of domestic and foreign policy, and the midterm races seem to be the target.
Instead of correcting course, Republicans have instead tried to rewrite the borders of congressional districts to lock in their power. Voters have rebuffed these efforts in several states and Republicans have retaliated via conservative-led courts in states like Virginia to overturn the will of the people.
The GOP has a long history of voter suppression, with policies and rhetoric designed to lower turnout in areas that have historically favored the Democrats—particularly among younger voters and voters of color.
Democrats are hoping that a repeat of past trends, when increased turnout has usually meant a Democratic win, will give their party the majority this year and grant them power of oversight of Trump.
TRUMP IMMIGRATION CRACKDOWN BENEFITS REAL CRIMINALS. Drug dealers can thank President Donald Trump for getting law enforcement off their backs. A new analysis by Reuters reveals that his decision to redirect resources toward executing his anti-immigrant policies in Minnesota lowered federal law enforcement’s ability to tackle real crime, Oliver Willis noted at Daily Kos (5/7).
Between January and the end of April, only eight people were charged with gun or drug offenses by federal prosecutors, according to court records reviewed by the news outlet. Compare that to the 77 who were charged during the same period in 2025.
Many of the 2026 cases are questionable as well. Among the prosecutions pursued by federal authorities is the case pending against journalist Don Lemon, whose purported crime was documenting a protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement at a church. Another 17 cases were for alleged violations of immigration law, like people returning to the U.S. after the government had deported them.
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty told Reuters that Trump’s actions are leading to a flood of federal-level cases coming into her office, which doesn’t have the same prosecutorial resources as federal agencies.
“It’s a public safety issue that they’re not doing the types of prosecutions they should be doing,” she told the outlet, further noting, “You can’t tell me that sex trafficking and drug trafficking and that kind of thing is less important than people going into a church to protest.”
Data assembled by Reuters echoes previous findings about Trump’s immigration focus effectively assisting real criminals.
For instance, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat, released data this past October that showed FBI agents have been reassigned from investigating crimes like terrorism and have instead been deployed for immigration enforcement.
Last year, a study from the libertarian Cato Institute revealed that federal resources meant to fight against child predators are instead being used on immigration issues. Similarly, this past July, an internal memo from the Department of Homeland Security detailed how agents previously tasked with securing the border against the spread of illicit materials like fentanyl are instead being used as manpower for Trump’s deportation agenda.
This diversion of resources is happening in tandem with the hollowing out of the Department of Justice, where experienced prosecutors and other investigators have been purged and loyalty to Trump has become a litmus test.
Meanwhile, the anti-immigration deployments in the U.S. are causing crime problems of their own.
Moriarty recently announced that ICE agent Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr., who was part of the Trump-ordered “Operation Metro Surge” in Minnesota, is being charged for allegedly drawing a firearm on two people amid a traffic dispute.
At the same time, people have repeatedly disguised themselves as ICE agents as cover to commit crimes, since the agents are often masked.
Other criminals, like many of the convicted Jan. 6 rioters whom Trump pardoned, are being convicted of new crimes, such as child molestation.
FUEL PRICES HAVE SPIKED MORE IN ‘ENERGY INDEPENDENT’ U.S. THAN IN NATIONS THAT HAVE MOVED AWAY FROM OIL AND GAS. Average gas prices in the United States are quickly climbing toward $5 per gallon this week as US President Donald Trump’s war with Iran shows little sign of resolution.
Where average prices were about $2.98 the day before the war’s launch, they had shot up to $4.48 as of May 5, according to AAA’s gas price tracker, as Iran’s restriction of ships traveling through the Strait of Hormuz has squeezed global oil shipping and the shipping of other fuel sources like liquefied natural gas (LNG), causing global price hikes.
And while Trump has touted America’s supposed “energy independence” as an ace in the hole, achieved by ratcheting up fossil fuel production while canceling solar and wind power projects, data shows that the US has been hit harder by the price shocks than any other major economy in the world, with those that have embraced renewable energy being especially resilient, Stephen Prager noted at Common Dreams (5/5).
Although the US leads the world in oil production by a large margin, data from JP Morgan Commodities research, analyzed by MarketWatch, showed that between Feb. 23 and April 27, the US experienced a 42% increase in gas prices, the fifth-highest in the world.
“The spike in US gasoline prices over the past two months has outpaced everywhere except Southeast Asia, the region most dependent on oil from the Persian Gulf,” explained Yahoo Finance geopolitics reporter Jake Conley.
Rebecca Babin, senior energy trader and managing director at CIBC Private Wealth, explained to MarketWatch that while increased fuel production gives the US a “buffer,” oil is a global market and “it doesn’t operate in a vacuum.” She said, “Global tightness and domestic bottlenecks still show up in gasoline prices.”
Meanwhile, some of the countries that have best survived the price hikes include France and Spain, which derive large shares of their power from nuclear energy and renewables, respectively.
Craig Hanson and Jessica Isaacs, a pair of researchers at the World Resources Institute, explained last month that while a mix of factors is at play, countries less reliant on fossil fuels generally “find themselves in a better position to withstand the current crisis.”
“Every country has homegrown access to at least two clean energy resources—the sun shines, and the wind blows just about everywhere at some point,” they said. “The same cannot be said of oil and gas, where production is concentrated in a small number of countries and exposed to geopolitical disruption.”
“Renewable resources like wind, solar, and geothermal have zero fuel costs, and the fuel cost of nuclear power is quite low. Again, the same cannot be said of fossil fuels, which have costs set by volatile global markets,” they added. “These two advantages are why some of the world’s clean energy frontrunners are faring better than other countries amidst the Iranian energy crisis.”
TRUMP COUNTERTERRORISM STRATEGY PUTS ‘ANTI-FASCISTS’ ON PAR WITH ISIS, AL-QAEDA. The Trump administration May 5 released an official counterterrorism strategy that puts “anti-fascist” organizations on par with terrorist organizations such as Islamic State and al-Qaeda, Brad Reed noted at Common Dreams (5/6).
In outlining its strategy, the document argues that the US faces three “major type” of terrorist threats: “Legacy Islamist Terrorists,” such as al-Qaeda and ISIS; “Narcoterrorists” that sell illegal drugs; and “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists.”
When it comes to the purported domestic left-wing threats, the document says the administration will “prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”
“We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home,” the document adds, “identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent.”
The document makes no mention of the threat posed by members of right-wing groups such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, many of whom received pardons from Donald Trump in 2025 for their role in violently storming the US Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021.
A report published last year by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that, while left-wing political violence has grown since Trump’s first election in 2016, it “remains much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers.”
Journalist Ken Klippenstein reported on May 5 that the strategy “is the brainchild of White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka, an eccentric figure I have reported on, who last year hinted at terrorism charges being levied for political opponents of the administration.”
Digging into the details of the document, Klippenstein said it was essentially a strategy for prosecuting “pre-crime,” which he noted “aims to build cases against people for what they might do, most ominously based on speech or beliefs.”
At the end of his analysis, Klippenstein warned that the document makes clear “the global War on Terror has come home.”
The counterterrorism strategy document builds on the framework established by National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), a directive signed by Trump in September that demanded a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”
Rights groups have for months been sounding the alarm about the implications of NSPM-7, which they said could be used to initiative a widespread crackdown against the Trump administration’s critics.
WHY WON’T GOP LAWMAKERS ABANDON TRUMP? LOOK TO INDIANA. President Donald Trump is getting more unpopular by the day as his war in Iran leads to ballooning gas prices here at home. But if you think that would give GOP lawmakers cover to vote against Trump’s wishes, you’d be wrong. The results in Indiana’s primaries May 5 show why, Emily Singer noted at Daily Kos (5/6).
Trump endorsed primary challenges against a set of seven Republican state senators in the Hoosier State, seeking revenge for those senators refusing to heed his demand to redraw Indiana’s congressional maps and further rig the state in favor of Republicans. Trump-aligned groups spent millions against them as well.
And it paid off. Five of those seven Republicans lost their primaries May 5 by large margins. One of the seven, state Sen. Greg Goode, beat his Trump-backed challenger. Sen. Spencer Deery was ahead by two votes May 11, with eight provisional ballots remaining.
Those results show that even though Republican support for Trump has fallen, it has not fallen enough for Trump-skeptical lawmakers to survive primaries when Trump endorses against them. Trump’s die-hard MAGA base simply remains too loyal to him.
“Almost every day I get asked some version of the question, ‘So with Trump’s approval so low when will House Republicans finally break from him?’ I always reply by saying it’s not going to happen. Below is the reason why,” Democratic Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania wrote in a post on X, referencing Trump’s successful revenge campaign in Indiana. Meanwhile, Trump’s team is taking a victory lap.
“Hey @RepThomasMassie….you are next,” Chris LaCivita, Trump’s 2024 campaign manager who helped spearhead the revenge effort in Indiana, wrote in a post on X. LaCivita is referring to Trump targeting Massie in Kentucky’s May 19 primary because Massie helped lead the charge to force the Trump administration to release the Epstein files.
But while Trump and his aides may be riding high after May 5 results, it may be little more than a pyrrhic victory.
In November’s midterm elections, Republicans in competitive districts will need to create distance from their unpopular leader if they want to win over the broader electorate. Yet they know they can’t do that if they want to first win their GOP primaries. Thus they are locked in a catch-22: forced to suck up to Trump to win a primary election but then forced to distance themselves from him to win a general election.
AFTER MORE PRIVATE SOCIAL SECURITY DATA EXPOSED BY TEAM TRUMP, WHERE WILL GOP ‘DRAW THE LINE’? A newly reported failure of the Trump administration’s ability to handle sensitive private information in the social programs it is tasked with operating triggered a fresh wave of anger over the weekend after it was revealed that healthcare providers’ Social Security numbers were made public as part of a faulty Medicare portal rollout, Jon Queally noted at Common Dreams (5/3) .
The Washington Post discovered the compromised database and alerted the administration before publishing a story about it May 1, after efforts had been made to protect the sensitive information from further compromise.
According to the Post, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) last year created a directory to help seniors look up which doctors and medical providers accept which insurance plans, framing it as an overdue improvement and part of the Trump administration’s initiative to modernize health care technology.
But a publicly accessible database used to populate the directory contains some of the providers’ Social Security numbers, linked to their names and other identifying information. For at least several weeks, CMS made the database available for public use as part of its data transparency efforts.
While the reporting noted that the files were “not immediately visible to users who [visited] the provider directory,” lawmakers and experts said the compromised information would be a treasure trove for fraudsters.
Critics pounced on the new reporting, calling it “yet another mess-up by the Team Trump” and only the latest evidence that the administration cannot and should not be trusted to protect the nation’s most successful anti-poverty programs or the sensitive personal data of the American people who entrust the government with that information.
“Over and over again, the Trump administration is exposing private Social Security data,” said Social Security Works, an advocacy group that serves as a public watchdog for the nation’s social programs.
MORE THAN 50 ELECTION DENIERS VYING TO OVERSEE VOTING ACROSS US. As President Donald Trump continues to push Republicans to aggressively gerrymander ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, a new analysis has found more than 50 candidates running for key offices who have in the past engaged in efforts to nullify election results, Brad Reed noted at Common Dreams (5/4).
As reported by NPR May 4, election watchdog States United Action has released a report showing that election-denying candidates are running for offices in 23 states where, if victorious, they would have a direct role in certifying future elections.
States United classifies election deniers as candidates who meet one of five criteria: Falsely claiming that Trump won the 2020 election, spreading conspiracy theories about the election results, refusing to certify the 2020 election, supporting litigation to overturn election results, and refusing to concede a race after being defeated.
In total, States United found at least 53 such candidates running for positions this year, including secretaries of state and governorships, that would put them in position to try to block or impede the certification of elections.
The threat is particularly acute in Arizona, where election deniers are running for governor, secretary of state, and attorney general.
This prospective Arizona election denial ticket is headlined by MAGA hardliner Andy Biggs, who voted against certification of the 2020 election results as a US congressman and who is running to unseat incumbent Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs.
States United CEO Joanna Lydgate told NPR that her organization is tracking election deniers running for office to “provide voters with the most accurate information possible” and “understand exactly what these candidates stand for and whether they fundamentally believe in free and fair elections in this country.”
As election deniers are trying to win key offices throughout the US, the Trump administration is working to get more directly involved in purging voter rolls ahead of the midterms.
According to a report from CNN, “Republicans and the Trump administration are now testing the scope of the federal law that imposes that ban on ‘systematic’ removal programs within three months of an election, as President Donald Trump pushes for more aggressive reviews of voter rolls for non-citizens and other ineligible voters.”
What this means is that states could in theory purge voter rolls just weeks ahead of elections, giving people removed from the rolls almost no time to file challenges.
Wren Orey, director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Elections Project, told CNN that purging voter rolls less than three months before an election means there’s a high risk that “voters won’t have adequate time or notice to be able to provide the documents that they’ll need ahead of the election.”
“Maybe their birth certificate doesn’t meet the requirements,” Orey explained. “Maybe they don’t have one handy, maybe they don’t have a passport. That could take months to get.”
Brent Ferguson, the senior director of strategic litigation at Campaign Legal Center, told CNN that he was particularly disturbed by the Trump White House’s involvement in this effort to manage voter rolls.
“It sets up a situation where the federal government itself is the actor trying to purge voters from the rolls in the days before the election,” Ferguson said, “which is clearly illegal.”
TRUMP OFFICIAL CELEBRATES 4.3 MILLION DRIVEN OFF FOOD AID. US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins on May 2 openly celebrated millions of people losing their food assistance, which experts say is a direct result of the Republicans’ 2025 budget law that slashed funding to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by $186 billion over a decade, Brad Reed noted at Common Dreams (5/4).
In a social media post pointing to preliminary data from her department, Rollins boasted that there were now “4.3 million off SNAP and counting!”
“Under President Trump, Americans are getting back to work!” Rollins added. “Healthy employment numbers mean less reliance on government programs. Leaving benefits for those who truly need them. America is back in business!”
In reality, the unemployment rate is currently higher than when President Donald Trump took office in February 2025 and there has been almost no growth in net employment since the president announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs just over a year ago.
The Associated Press published a fact check of Rollins’ claims about SNAP, finding that Republicans’ cuts to the program were far more likely responsible for the historic drops in enrollment than any purported improvement in the economy.
Caitlin Caspi, an associate professor at the University of Connecticut who studies food insecurity, told the AP that current job creation numbers are nowhere near strong enough to explain the massive number of Americans losing access to SNAP.
“We’re not seeing a linear kind of drop-off,” Caspi said. “We are not seeing, if you look at the unemployment rates, things that might be an indicator that a strong economy was driving this change. We don’t see, for example, a pattern of decline in unemployment that would match the pattern of decline in SNAP participation.”
Caspi’s analysis was echoed by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), which last week published an analysis finding that “economic conditions haven’t been improving as the number of people receiving SNAP has plummeted in recent months, representing the sharpest decline in decades.”
Instead, CBPP pointed the finger squarely at the GOP’s budget law as the biggest culprit behind the decline.
“The deep cuts to federal funding for SNAP are shifting significant new costs to states,” wrote CBPP, noting that the GOP law “also dramatically expands SNAP’s already harsh and ineffective provision taking away people’s benefits for not meeting the work requirement.”
EXPERT PUTS TRUE COST OF IRAN WAR AT $72 BILLION — NEARLY 3 TIMES HIGHER THAN PENTAGON SAID. The Pentagon’s official estimate of the direct financial cost of the US war on Iran is a nearly threefold undercount of the actual price tag of the war, according to an expert analysis published May 5.
Stephen Semler, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, produced the new cost estimate for the Popular Information newsletter. Accounting for armament use, troop deployments, and other factors, Semler estimated that the US government spent $71.8 billion on the Iran war over the course of 60 days—an average of $1.2 billion per day, Jake Johnson noted at CommonDreams (5/5).
“Like the estimates from Pentagon leadership and unnamed officials, this figure refers only to direct war costs—near-term expenses for military operations, munitions, and the like—and not indirect costs, which include broader economic impacts, interest on the national debt, and longer-term expenses like veterans’ care,” explained Semler, who argued that the Pentagon’s $25 billion cost estimate suffers from “incomplete accounting of damaged or destroyed military assets, the exclusion of costs outside the department (including billions of dollars in State Department-funded military aid to Israel), and a flawed method for tracking munition expenditures.”
Semler, who detailed his methodology in a separate post, accused top Pentagon officials of attempting to deliberately mislead lawmakers and the American public about the true cost of the war, which is historically unpopular.
“The $25 billion war cost given by Pentagon Secretary [Pete] Hegseth and acting Comptroller [Jules] Hurst before Congress was a lie,” Semler wrote Wednesday. “It was a denial of the Iran war’s spiraling costs, one of several foreseen consequences of the Trump administration’s decision to go to war. The closing of the Strait of Hormuz is another predictable consequence.”
Semler’s analysis was released days after unnamed Trump administration officials told CBS News that they believe the actual US cost of the Iran war is roughly double the estimate offered under oath by Pentagon leaders.
“US officials familiar with internal assessments suggested the war’s price tag is closer to $50 billion so far,” CBS News reported. “Much of the gap is accounted for by munitions that have been used and need to be replaced. For instance, the Pentagon has lost 24 MQ-9 Reaper drones—sophisticated unmanned aircraft that can cost $30 million or more apiece—underscoring how quickly the financial toll has mounted. Taken together, the higher estimate reflects not only the tempo of operations but also the often unseen costs of attrition, as material lost in the field reshapes the ledger.”
Ongoing efforts to calculate the costs of US-Israeli war—which has killed thousands, displaced millions, sent global energy markets into chaos, and sparked fears of a worldwide food crisis—come as Trump continues to threaten Iran with an even more aggressive bombing campaign, which would send the conflict’s price tag soaring further.
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