Episode Details

While the country watched the Iran war drag on, here’s what you might have missed.

Donald Trump Jr. is an investor in Vulcan Elements, a rare-earth startup that just received a $620 million Pentagon deal — a deal that, according to ProPublica, was pushed from the White House and increased the company’s valuation roughly tenfold. He’s also a shareholder in a drone company now positioned for a share of the Pentagon’s billion-dollar drone program, even as Iran downs U.S. drones over the Gulf and injures American personnel in Kuwait.

The U.S. Postal Service proposed mailing ballots only to voters on a federal list — a significant federal intrusion into an election system the Constitution reserves to the states — alongside two pending Supreme Court cases on mail-in ballot deadlines and party-candidate spending coordination, and the fallout from April’s Voting Rights Act ruling.

Trump established “Freedom 250” inside the congressionally chartered National Park Foundation, installed campaign staff on its board, and began selling access to himself at $1 million to $5 million per tier, while the National Park Service has lost more than a quarter of its workforce and faces a proposed 25% operations cut.

A federal judge froze Trump’s $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” 11 days after its launch, and a second judge reopened his lawsuit against the IRS to investigate whether it amounted to fraud on the court. Plus: a proposed $250 bill bearing Trump’s face, Justice Alito’s son working quietly at Treasury, and the Pentagon recruiting uniformed troops for Trump’s 80th-birthday UFC event at the White House.

Sources

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/30/trump-irs-suit-reopened

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/how-supreme-court-is-reshaping-us-midterm-elections-2026-05-31/

https://www.notus.org/us-news/samuel-philip-alito-trump-treasury-department

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