Friday, July 24, 2026

The White House press corps is boycotting its own gala, with one reporter telling Politico "Nobody wants this other than Donald Trump," while hours before the dinner the president endorsed subpoenaing journalists to hunt government leakers. The correspondents' dinner was always a ritual of access; the boycott is a belated admission that access to this administration means complicity.

At San Francisco International Airport, video captured ICE agents arresting a Ukrainian woman in a scene that raises questions about how the arrest was carried out. On Saturday, July 25, over 330 communities will hold vigils demanding justice for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Johan Sebastian Guerrero, and many more killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The migration apparatus kills with impunity; the vigils are where survivors name the dead.

Zeteo's weekly roundup tracks the authoritarian consolidation in Trump's second term. The Justice Department appears to be doing everything it can to sweeten the deal for Senator Lisa Murkowski, flooding Alaska with funding to secure her vote confirming Todd Blanche — Trump's former personal attorney — as deputy attorney general. Meanwhile the White House has admitted in court it deliberately canceled $7.5 billion in clean-energy grants to states that didn't vote for Trump. The DOJ is a protection racket; the budget is a weapon.

Trump's new forced-labor tariffs have drawn a lawsuit and criticism from American allies, though experts say the legal basis may make them harder to strike down than the previous "liberation day tariffs." Abroad, the haphazard, multibillion-dollar nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia keeps getting more nonsensical. At home, forecasters warn fires will spread more easily across Oregon, Idaho, and Washington, where dozens are already burning, while the EPA moves to silence questions about data-center pollution. Capital burns the planet and calls it policy.