The White House Burn Book

Trump’s latest enemies list targets journalists, his administration pressures California vote counting, defends presidential bulldozer power, spins a shaky economy, watches the Iran war spread.

Good morning! The White House has apparently decided that governing was too subtle and has moved directly into the “official enemies list with federal branding” phase of democratic collapse.

Yes, the administration has launched a page called “Media Offenders,” because nothing says “free press” like the executive branch maintaining a searchable burn book of journalists, outlets, and commentators it would like its followers to despise. The page comes complete with a “Media Offender of the Week,” an “Offender Hall of Shame,” a “Leaderboard,” repeat offenders, categories like “left-wing lunacy,” and even a “Report Bias” form, which is basically a tip line for people who believe the First Amendment was a scheduling error.

I checked, and I am not on it yet, which frankly feels like professional motivation. Apparently, I will have to try harder. Maybe one more paragraph with verbs in it will do the trick.

But the real story is not that Trump dislikes the press. We have known that since somewhere around the moment he discovered cameras could be pointed at other people. The real story is that the White House is now using official government space to name and shame journalists as enemies. This is not criticism. Criticism is a press secretary saying a story is wrong. This is the state building a public-facing target board and calling it accountability.

It lands on a day when the rest of the domestic news is basically one long civics lesson delivered by a malfunctioning leaf blower.

In California, the governor’s race has turned into a preview of November’s inevitable fraud theater. Xavier Becerra, the low-key institutional Democrat who was practically written off until the final weeks of the race, has now advanced to the general election after a late surge in California’s top-two primary. Steve Hilton, the Trump-endorsed former Fox News host, and Tom Steyer, the billionaire Democrat and former hedge fund manager, are still fighting for the second slot as millions of ballots continue to be counted.

Normally that would be the whole story: California counts slowly, mail ballots take time, late ballots can shift the results, and democracy occasionally requires more patience than a drive-through burrito window. But Trump has already seen the gap between early returns and final counts and recognized his favorite raw material: a conspiracy theory waiting for a camera.

As Hilton’s early lead began shrinking and Becerra surged, Trump started claiming “rigging” and “cheating,” because in Trump’s cosmology, votes only become suspicious when they are counted after his preferred candidate starts losing. Late-arriving mail ballots? Fraud. Signature verification? Fraud. Counting every valid vote? Believe it or not, also fraud.

The Justice Department sent a federal prosecutor to observe ballot processing in Los Angeles. California officials say the process is normal. Election experts say the shift is predictable. Republicans are more likely to return ballots early or vote in person, while many Democrats waited until the final stretch this year because the race was crowded and voters were trying to figure out which candidate had the best chance of making the runoff. State law gives counties time to count, and valid mail ballots postmarked by Election Day can still be processed if they arrive within the legal window.

The thing Trump is calling suspicious is the counting of legally cast ballots. But facts are not the point here. The point is pretext. Trump is watching a blue-state election unfold and rehearsing the lines he will use in November if the results do not suit him. “They found ballots.” “The numbers are changing.” “The DOJ is looking into it.” “Many people are saying structural vulnerabilities.” It is the same rotten script with a new California backdrop and slightly better weather.

This is why the White House burn book matters, the DOJ observer matters, and why the language matters. The administration is not simply reacting to events. It is creating an atmosphere in which journalism becomes enemy activity, vote counting becomes fraud, courts become inconveniences, and federal power becomes the only legitimate referee, provided, of course, that the referee is wearing a red hat under the robe.

Speaking of courts becoming inconveniences, the Justice Department also had a fresh little episode in the litigation over Trump’s White House ballroom project, which has already resulted in the demolition of the East Wing after Trump previously promised the project would not interfere with the existing building. A normal president might have treated “we accidentally destroyed part of the White House while building a ballroom” as a scandal. Trump treats it as an interior design choice with a budget line.

In court, DOJ attorneys argued that judges lack authority to halt the project and that only Congress can stop it. Judge Patricia Millett pressed the government’s theory with a hypothetical about whether the executive could bulldoze a national landmark like the Statue of Liberty if it moved quickly enough. The government’s answer was not exactly “Goodness, no, what a terrible misunderstanding.” It was closer to: well, Congress exists, doesn’t it?

In New York Harbor, Lady Liberty just checked whether she has standing.

This is the Trump domestic agenda in miniature: gold leaf, bulldozers, legal impunity, and the faint sound of a DOJ lawyer explaining that by the time anyone can object, the rubble has already been grandfathered in.

Back in the economy Trump keeps insisting is entering a “golden age,” the numbers continue to commit lese-majesty by existing. The May jobs report gave him a headline he could boast about: employers added 172,000 jobs and unemployment held at 4.3 percent. Trump celebrated the numbers as “fantastic” and immediately demanded lower interest rates, because every economic statistic in Trump’s mind is either proof of his genius or a personal betrayal by the Federal Reserve.

Beneath the headline, the story is much less golden and much more “spray-painted cardboard crown.” Wage growth is cooling, workers are losing ground to inflation, and lower-income consumers are getting hit hardest as essentials remain expensive. Job growth was concentrated in sectors like leisure and hospitality, health care, social assistance, and local government, useful work, certainly, but not exactly the roaring industrial renaissance Trump keeps describing as if he personally welded a factory back together with his bare hands.

Then there is manufacturing, where the gap between Trump’s announcements and reality is becoming impossible to miss. Companies have announced enormous investment pledges since he returned to office, but actual manufacturing construction spending has fallen. Factory employment has dropped. The big ribbon-cutting promises have not translated into a factory boom. The supposed golden age of American manufacturing is starting to look like one of those Trump steaks: loudly advertised, strangely packaged, and not available where promised.

Even local examples tell a more complicated story. In Indiana, some industrial activity is returning in fits and starts, but the recovery is uneven and incremental, not the grand restoration of the 1950s that Trump keeps selling like a man who thinks supply chains are built from nostalgia and hairspray. One old tin mill restart adding a couple hundred jobs is good news for those workers. It is not a national manufacturing resurrection, more a candle in a very large abandoned warehouse.

Trump spent his Friday gaggle spinning the jobs numbers, berating the Fed, talking about public-private stakes in AI companies, dismissing unaffordable NBA Finals tickets by saying people can watch on TV, and floating various schemes involving Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Intel, artificial intelligence, oil prices, Venezuela, Iran, and possibly whatever topic wandered past the airplane window.

He also traveled to Wisconsin to talk about farming families, which would have been more convincing if his broader agenda were not hammering the very people he claims to champion. As I wrote yesterday, the relief he’s selling is relief from a wound he made: fertilizer up roughly forty percent and gas above four dollars since the Iran war began, and there he was promising prices would drop “just like they were four months ago,” four months ago meaning before the war he chose. It is the toll-booth pitch in a hayloft: charge admission to the disaster, then run for office promising to validate your parking. Farmers remain exposed to tariff retaliation, labor instability, higher costs, and the same trade-war uncertainty that keeps capital sidelined. Trump’s heartland pitch is that he alone can bring back prosperity, when his policy mix is the thing keeping the prosperity away.

In case anyone forgot that Trump’s favorite business model is suing people until reality gets tired, there is also his $10 billion defamation suit against the BBC. Trump claims a Panorama documentary deceptively edited his January 6 speech and harmed the value of his brand, properties, and businesses. But now BBC lawyers want financial records to test those damages claims, and Trump’s side is refusing to hand over the books.

This is one of those rare moments when the lawsuit performs a public service by walking directly into a rake. Trump wants to claim massive financial harm, but proving financial harm requires financial evidence. The BBC has reportedly produced tens of thousands of pages of documents. Trump has produced none. He wants the intimidation value of a giant lawsuit without the discovery obligations that come with saying, in court, that your brand has been damaged.

Then there is the Epstein mess, because of course there is the Epstein mess. Released testimony from Pam Bondi before House Oversight adds another layer to the administration’s accountability shell game. Bondi testified that Todd Blanche, Trump’s intended nominee to replace her as attorney general, was “in charge” of the DOJ’s Epstein files release. She insisted she was not blaming him, praised him as ethical, and said she delegated oversight to him. Nothing says “transparent investigation” like a hot potato wearing a suit.

Bondi also acknowledged redaction problems in the Epstein file release, said she was not certain how much Trump knew about Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s crimes before they became public, and claimed she had nothing to do with Maxwell’s controversial prison transfer, learning about it from the news. She opposed any pardon for Maxwell and said Maxwell should die in prison, but declined to discuss conversations with Trump.

So the administration’s position is roughly: Todd Blanche was in charge, Pam Bondi was not responsible, Trump was totally exonerated according to the White House, Maxwell is a monster, the transfer was a surprise, the files were mishandled but not politically, and nobody should ask too many follow-up questions because transparency is a sacred value best practiced behind a locked door.

Democrats now want Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel to testify. Good. Bring chairs and maybe refreshments. This scandal has more side doors than Mar-a-Lago.

While the domestic front is already doing its best impression of a constitutional stress test, the Iran war continues to widen. Al Jazeera reports that Iran fired missiles and drones at Kuwait and Bahrain after clashes with the United States. The U.S. military said it intercepted seven Iranian missiles targeting those Gulf states, shot down four Iranian drones headed toward the Strait of Hormuz, and struck Iranian coastal surveillance radar sites on Qeshm Island and Goruk. Kuwait and Bahrain condemned the attacks. Jordan called them a dangerous escalation.

This is no longer a conflict contained in the tidy phrases officials prefer: “limited strikes,” “regional pressure,” “deterrence,” “de-escalation.” It is missiles over Gulf states, drones near one of the world’s most important oil chokepoints, U.S. strikes on Iranian coastal infrastructure, and diplomacy trying to keep its shoes clean while walking through a battlefield.

The negotiation track is still supposedly alive, but every new attack hardens the politics around it. Al Jazeera’s Zein Basravi framed the dynamic clearly: the longer the tit-for-tat continues, the harder it becomes for mediators and negotiating sides to climb down. Military action is being used to create leverage at the table, but leverage has a nasty habit of turning into wreckage, especially when Israel’s attacks in Lebanon and Gaza keep expanding the battlefield faster than diplomats can narrow it.

Lebanon is again being pulled into the machinery of regional bargaining. Christian Lebanese politician Samir Geagea backed President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam’s rejection of Iran using Lebanon as a “card” in negotiations with the United States. He called for Iran to end its intervention in Lebanese affairs and for Hezbollah to surrender its weapons. Salam, meanwhile, discussed the reopening of Qlayaat airport in northern Lebanon as a political and development decision, not an alternative to Beirut’s airport.

Lebanon is not just a side note. It is one of the places where regional powers keep trying to turn another country’s sovereignty into negotiating currency. Every “ceasefire” exists on paper until the next strike — or, as Trump put it in the Oval Office on June 3, a ceasefire over there is just “shooting in a more moderate manner.” Every diplomatic opening comes with a shadow war attached.

Gaza, as always, remains the human catastrophe beneath the geopolitical theater. Israeli tanks and quadcopters reportedly opened fire near Al-Durra children’s hospital east of Al-Tuffah in Gaza City, in an area described as a “yellow zone.” Even when the headlines shift to Gulf states, oil routes, and military leverage, the civilian infrastructure keeps taking the blows.

We had internet connection hiccups this morning, which is why today’s roundup is arriving later than usual. Nothing like trying to document the collapse of democratic norms while your own modem decides to join the resistance movement against productivity.

Marz and I are heading out to work off the frustrations of modern life the old-fashioned way: fresh air, movement, and one very good dog who has never once built a federal enemies list, argued for presidential bulldozer immunity, or blamed mail ballots for being counted.

Take care of yourselves today. Hydrate. Stretch. Touch grass if you can. And if the White House is keeping score, please know I am still available for consideration.