POLITICS

President Trump, it’s well known, is into gold. Every day brings new evidence that he’s thoroughly enjoying the “golden age” he pronounced in his inaugural address — as few other Americans are — with stock trades, crypto profiteering and much more, even a new taxpayer-financed slush fund to reward his allies.

As for me, I’ve gone into silver. That is, I constantly look for the silver linings in Trump’s heinous acts.

One silver lining, of course, is his cratering job-approval numbers in the polls, especially among the young and Latino voters who made his reelection possible. But here’s another: By his humiliating failure to bring Iran to heel, nearly three months after starting a war that he said would last weeks at most, Trump has brought new, more positive attention to what he again this week derided as “Barack Hussein Obama’s Iran nuclear deal.” (The emphasis on “Hussein” is Trump’s, always.)

The president, along with his Republican cheerleaders, counts his first-term abrogation of the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as a signature achievement. This week, yet again, he falsely claimed that had he not done so, Iran would have a nuclear weapon. In fact, his action in 2018 taking the United States out of the multinational deal subsequently led to Iran’s rebuilding of its nuclear program, the emboldening of the Iranian hard-liners now in power and the Middle East morass in which the United States is now mired.

That quagmire has left Trump seeming desperate for a deal — almost certainly a worse deal than the one Obama struck. Call it JCPOA Lite.

If he were able to get Iran’s sign-off on the sort of detailed, restrictive agreement that Obama and other world leaders won 11 years ago, he’d be trumpeting himself as the world’s greatest dealmaker. (He does that anyway, but his record proves otherwise.) Instead, by his own failure to date, Trump has invited reconsideration of the very agreement he decried as the “worst deal ever” on his march to election and reelection.

No sooner was the 2015 deal signed than Trump and Republicans succeeded in defining it as a giveaway to Iran that assured, not hindered, its development of a nuclear weapon to threaten Israel and the world. Opponents condemned the agreement for not addressing Iran’s other threats, notably its support for militant proxies throughout the Mideast. Some Democrats, notably Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, were among the foes. Other Democrats, cowed by opposition to the agreement by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government and pro-Israel lobbyists, were all but mute in the pact’s defense.

Now some Democrats are belatedly finding their voice (and, post-Gaza, some willingness to defy Israel). Along with nonpartisan experts, those Democrats are drawing comparisons between the 2015 agreement, flawed yet successful, and Trump’s promised yet ever-elusive alternative. What’s ironic for Israel and Netanyahu, still implacably against negotiating with Tehran, is that they could end up, under Trump, with a nuclear deal that gives Iran more leeway than the hated JCPOA did.

As Americans are being reminded, the 2015 deal wasn’t just between Iran and Obama, as Trump has long suggested; other signatories were China, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and the 27-nation European Union. Reconstituting that group would be all but impossible today.

The pact’s 159 highly technical pages and five appendices — a far cry from the short-lived one-pager that Trump officials teased earlier this month — required Iran for 15 years to limit its nuclear program to civilian purposes, forfeit more than 97% of its enriched uranium and submit to intrusive monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure compliance. In return, Iran gradually got relief from some, but not all, international economic sanctions and access to Iranian funds that were frozen after the 1979 Islamic revolution. Presumably, after 15 years, the agreement would have been extended somehow.

By all accounts, including those of Trump’s first-term intelligence and national security officials, Iran was complying when he abandoned the deal. Its “breakout time” for building a nuclear weapon was about a year — time enough for the world to intervene — instead of two to three months. Now, though the president boasts he barred Iran from having that weapon by breaking the Iran nuclear deal, he incessantly tells Americans that he went to war against Iran on Feb. 28 because it was on the brink of a bomb — never mind that he also said he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program last summer, a program that was in a well-monitored box until he first took office.

If you’re confused, you’re paying attention.

A month ago, Trump posted online that he was close to a deal “FAR BETTER” than the 2015 accord. “I am under no pressure whatsoever, ⁠although, it will all happen, relatively quickly!” To several reporters, he suggested he in fact had a deal and that Iran had agreed both to suspend its nuclear activities and to forfeit all of its enriched, near-weapons-grade uranium.

Preposterous claims, given Iran’s current government, and Tehran promptly denied them. It was a sign of Trump’s squandered credibility that few, if anyone, believed him in the first place. Nor have folks believed his more recent talk of imminent success; oil markets, too, have learned not to trust the president, as prices at the pumps attest.

On Tuesday at the White House, amid a noisy tour of the billion-dollar-ballroom construction site, Trump told reporters he’d been “an hour away” from striking Iran again that very day but Mideast leaders asked for more time for negotiations.

Don’t hold your breath.

But for the tragic consequences, Obama might be enjoying some justifiable schadenfreude about Trump’s travails.

“We pulled it off without firing a missile. We got 97% of the enriched uranium out,” he told Stephen Colbert in an interview last week. Both U.S. and Israeli intelligence agreed that Iran was abiding by the nuclear limits, Obama added, “and we didn’t have to kill a whole bunch of people or shut down the Strait of Hormuz.”

That sure doesn’t sound like the “worst deal ever.” It wasn’t.

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At Jimmy Kimmel’s annual monologue to advertisers at Disney’s recent upfront presentation, the ABC late-night host offered sympathy to his ousted CBS cohort Stephen Colbert.

“First, it’s bad enough to lose your job,” Kimmel said. “Imagine getting replaced by the owner of the Weather Channel.”

Byron Allen, the media mogul whose holdings do include the Weather Channel, laughed when the gag was repeated to him during a recent phone conversation. “I like Jimmy Kimmel a lot,” he said.

Allen, never lacking in self-confidence, can afford to roll with the jokes. Episodes of his 20-year-old syndicated program “Comics Unleashed,” a half-hour show featuring mostly lesser-known stand-ups sharing routines and stories, are replacing “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” on CBS in the 11:35 p.m. time period starting Friday.

While it’s a triumph for Allen, 65, it’s also a sign of how the traditional late-night talk show — one of television’s most culturally influential formats — may no longer be sustainable in the era of streaming TV.

CBS said last year it canceled Colbert because it lost $40 million a year as the late-night viewing habit among audiences has eroded in the streaming era. Many in the TV industry are skeptical of the claim, believing Skydance Media wanted to silence the relentless Trump-bashing host in order to clear the government regulatory path for its acquisition of network parent Paramount. (The FCC’s approval of the deal came days after the cancellation was announced.)

Cedric the Entertainer, left, with Byron Allen on the set of “Comics Unleashed.”

(Allen Media Group)

But no one who has worked in late-night television in recent years can dispute how financial challenges are clouding the format’s future. Polished after-hours programs with a live audience, large teams of writers and producers and high-priced hosts are fighting off obsolescence as traditional TV audiences get smaller and ad revenues shrink. While CBS is the first to act, other networks have thought about getting out of the business altogether.

Since 2022, “The Late Show” lost 20% of its audience in the advertiser-coveted 18-to-49 age group, according to Nielsen data. Ad spending on all late-night television shows hit $209 million in 2025, down from $519.7 million in 2017, according to data from Guideline.

“Nothing is forever, especially in television,” said former network executive Ted Harbert, who oversaw the launches of “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” and “Late Night with Seth Meyers” at NBC. “Digital tech is killing late night.”

The hosts of the programs and their funniest bits are arguably seen by more people than ever before thanks to clips replayed on social media platforms. But the revenue generated by digital viewing doesn’t approach what the networks get for audiences watching live on TV.

Over the last 10 years, late-night shows flocked to YouTube as a way to be a part of the national conversation and bring attention to the shows. Harbert believes the notion that the clips alone — which may feature a funny bit or a snapshot of a conversation with a guest — would help lure viewers to traditional TV was folly.

“The shows cannibalized themselves by making their show available in snack-size clips after the network airing,” he said. “And viewers obviously would rather watch a couple of five-minute clips than a whole show.”

Late-night shows were once among the most profitable programs on TV because of their ability to reach viewers in the 18-to-34 age group that attract premium prices for commercial time. But the same demographic was the first to gravitate to streaming platforms and abandon traditional TV which thrives on appointment viewing.

Daniel Kellison, a former producer for “Jimmy Kimmel Live” and “The Late Show with David Letterman,” noted that Kimmel — who has also been targeted by the Trump administration for his harsh barbs — has seen his TV ratings increase this year.

But the overall trend for the time period is still down. While Kellison believes Colbert’s cancellation is an effort by CBS to appease Trump, he agrees that the genre needs to evolve and adapt to the changing media landscape.

“There’s always going to be an audience for conversation around politics and life and these sort of shows will exist in different formats and I think it’s incumbent upon people to figure out how to present them,” he said.

CBS executives have said they want to develop a new network show in the late-night time period. But for the next year it will lease the slot to Allen. His company Allen Media Group pays CBS for the time, covers the cost of production and sells the advertising. He is also the host. The deal will erase whatever losses the network experienced in that TV block.

“Comics Unleashed” has been running in the 12:35 a.m. hour since CBS canceled “After Midnight” last year. When that show moves to the earlier time slot, it will be replaced by another Allen program, “Funny You Should Ask,” a comic quiz show hosted by John Kelley.

Allen said he has great respect for the late-night TV tradition. His mother was a tour guide at NBC in Burbank and he was able to hang out on the studio lot to watch Johnny Carson tape “Tonight.” Allen would get advice from Carson, whom he calls his hero and mentor, and eventually got a shot at doing stand-up on “Tonight” when he was 18 years old.

Allen even asked CBS to move the start date of “Comics Unleashed” to May 22 because it is the anniversary of Carson’s final show in 1992. But his sentimentality ends when it comes to the economics of programming in that time slot.

“We will be in profit,” Allen said of “Comics Unleashed,” which according to Nielsen has seen its audience grow in the 12:35 a.m. time slot by 26% since October.

Kimmel has accused CBS of dumping Colbert for “Comics Unleashed” because Allen’s show doesn’t partake in political humor that could alienate the White House as Skydance moves to close its next acquisition: Warner Bros. Discovery.

“I feel like CBS is turning 11:35 p.m. into a ‘least’ time slot,” Kimmel said at the Disney presentation. “Least as in least likely to offend the president with the rerun of ‘Comics Unleashed’ from 2007 featuring Paula Poundstone and Andy Dick.”

Poundstone and Dick are not among the 1,000 comedians who have appeared on “Comics Unleashed” over the years, many of whom went on to become stars. But not having the program dabble in political humor is a business decision.

The guests stick to storytelling and slice-of-life material that doesn’t date, which is why the episodes can attract an audience years after being taped. They don’t plug books, movies, concerts or any other elements that would be dated by future airings.

“Twenty years ago when we shot our first episode I said ‘we’re making it ‘I Love Lucy,’” Allen said. “I want these shows to be funny today and 20 years from today.”

Allen said his company will produce 130 new episodes of “Comics Unleashed” for the 2026-27 TV season.

But the reason the current set of late-night hosts leaned into politics so heavily in recent years is because it works.

When Colbert took over “The Late Show” from Letterman in 2015, the program’s ratings sputtered as the audience did not really know Colbert outside of the satirical figure he played on Comedy Central with his show “The Colbert Report.”

The night Trump scored his surprising win in the 2016 presidential race against Hillary Clinton, Kelly Kahl, then an executive vice president of CBS Entertainment, sent a text to Chris Licht, then executive producer of “The Late Show,” telling him it was “the best thing to happen to the show.”

Colbert found his voice on the program, which rose to No. 1 in the ratings and has been there ever since.

“What’s black and white and read all over?” That is the setup for what used to be the first joke learned by most every American kid. These days, delivering the punch line would leave the kids bewildered. They might just say, “What’s a newspaper?”

In our new media age, that is not a question with an obvious answer. Ask the people in New Orleans who just found out their venerable Times-Picayune will no longer be available in print every day. Based in a city and state with a perennially high level of corruption and dysfunction, the Times-Picayune has been a powerful and admired community watchdog. The question is, will it be as effective with a smaller staff and just three days of print publication a week? And there is a bigger question, one that applies to the newspaper industry as a whole: Can printless watchdogs still have teeth?

Newspapers are different from most other businesses because one of their paramount functions is to provide a public service that may bring no monetary return and may not even interest most of their customers. In a democracy, someone needs to keep an eye on the elected officlals, bureaucrats, business leaders, lobbyists, police and assorted shysters who have the power to mess with people’s lives. Traditional newspapers, from the big city dailies to the small town weeklies, have always had reporters who make it their mission to protect the public interest. Often, they write important stories that few people read — coverage of state legislatures, for instance. But those being watched by the watchdogs read those stories and it tends to keep them honest.

In the past, newspapers were so profitable that, so it was said, any fool could get rich owning one. That made it fairly easy for a publisher to pay for investigative reporters, foreign correspondents and governmental news, the kind of work that is expensive, time-consuming and does not offer any obvious payback, other than a good reputation. But, with so many advertising dollars jumping to the Internet, the newspaper business model has crashed and newsroom cuts have hit everywhere. Often, the newspaper coverage that gets axed first is the stuff that appears to contribute the least to the bottom line. A glaring example is the way reporters in state capitals have become a vanishing breed.

Some think independent bloggers can pick up the slack. Yet, good as they may be, no blogger has the institutional weight of an established newspaper. A newspaper can take on the powers that be because it is one of those powers.

What about online newspapers? After all, it’s the information that matters, not the means of delivering the information. Politico is proving to be a powerful online source of news about national politics. The Huffington Post, though primarily opinion-driven, is a rich source of information. MSNBC.com does a decent job of aggregating and creating news reports.

The best online news is being done by the biggest newspapers — the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. Of course, their online offering is largely a byproduct of reporting done for the print editions. Could the same quality be maintained if they were online only?

One answer to that can be found in the hometown of Microsoft and Amazon.com. Before moving to the L.A. Times, I had a long career at the Post-Intelligencer in Seattle. In 2009, after decades of winning awards and losing money, the Seattle P-I stopped print publication. About 150 talented journalists lost their jobs while 20 were kept on to reinvent the newspaper as a completely online endeavor. By some measures, seattlepi.com has been a success -– low operational costs and plenty of jazzy content — but it is not the comprehensive newspaper it once was. And lacking the institutional weight it once had, this all-electronic publication is no longer a serious player in community affairs.

Still, there is no going back. The future of the news business is online and I suspect it will come out just fine — as long as all involved can resist the ultimate temptation: becoming a “click whore.” For the uninitiated, that is anyone or any entity that will post any darn thing that draws lots of page views, or “clicks.” The problem here is not just the sort of “news” that is put online to chase clicks, it is the important news that is left out.

Sure, any fool can get a lot of page views by running photos of cute kittens, funny dogs, hot cheerleaders and bosomy models in bikinis. It might bring in a lot of money. It might be read all over.

But it would not be a newspaper.

The race for the 34th Congressional District in the core of Los Angeles was supposed to be a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party. The two dozen hopefuls vying for a spot in the top-two primary were full of self-proclaimed fighters ready to oppose President Trump and establishment Democrats.

Instead, it’s shaping up to be a contest between the powerful group of Latinos who make up a majority of the district’s voters and the small but politically potent Korean American community, as Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez and former city planning Commissioner Robert Lee Ahn grabbed the runoff spots that will determine L.A.’s next member of Congress.

“This is really ethnic politics 101,” said Matt Barreto, a UCLA professor of political science who helps run the polling firm Latino Decisions.

Ahn, an attorney and a relative unknown in the crowded primary field, surprised many with a victory that vaulted him ahead of multiple Latino candidates in a district where more than half the voters are Latino. If elected in the June 6 runoff, he would be the only Korean American member of Congress and the first in nearly 20 years.

But it wasn’t surprising to anyone who studies the intricacies of identity politics in Los Angeles, or to those who had been paying attention to Ahn’s aggressive focus on Korean American voters.

Ahn’s campaign staff spent dozens of hours registering voters at malls and outside restaurants in Koreatown, signing up hundreds of new voters. Ahn made his pitch at multiple Korean churches in the district, and a large portion of his donor base was from the Korean American community, which helped him raise more money than Gomez in the latter part of the campaign despite a deluge of cash Gomez received from political committees.

And when Virginia state legislator Mark Keam, also a Korean American, flew to Los Angeles to endorse Ahn, a bank of TV cameras from Korean American news stations was there.

Robert Lee Ahn raised the most money by far in latest campaign finance reports »

Daniel Hong, a 38-year-old who works in the film industry, voted for the first time Tuesday even though he’s been a citizen for about 20 years. Hong, who is Korean American, said he read numerous articles about Ahn and received multiple phone calls from his campaign.

“That was the first time anybody has ever reached out to me for my vote,” said Hong as he stood outside a polling place set up in a Korean Presbyterian church.

Deborah Choi, 62, said she voted for Ahn so “he can speak for Korean Americans here.” The first wave of Koreans immigrated to the U.S. “so many years ago,” Choi said, but their representation in the highest elected offices remains low. She hopes her 36-year-old son will one day run for office too.

Though county election officials have yet to process more than 13,000 ballots, the 41-year-old Ahn remains thousands of votes ahead of the third-place candidate, fellow former planning Commissioner Maria Cabildo.

With turnout expected to hover around 15% of registered voters, preliminary returns show Ahn’s strategy paid off big. The biggest strongholds of votes for Ahn centered on Koreatown, Westlake and Chinatown, while the 42-year-old Gomez was ahead in neighborhoods throughout the northeast part of the district.

In early absentee ballot returns headed into primary election day, Korean Americans made up nearly a quarter of votes even though they comprise just 6% of registered voters.

Few Korean Americans have come this close to winning a seat in Congress since 1998, when Republican Jay Kim of Diamond Bar lost to a primary challenger after three terms in office. (David Min, a UC Irvine professor, announced a challenge to GOP Rep. Mimi Walters of Orange County this week.)

“Korean Americans in Southern California have been hungry for political representation for a very long time,” said Taeku Lee, a professor of politics and law at UC Berkeley. Lee said the recent campaign that helped propel David Ryu, the first Korean American elected to the L.A. City Council, may have also helped the community learn on-the-ground skills that mobilized voters in the congressional race.

The symbolism of Ahn’s win was not lost on his supporters Tuesday night.

“It’s very significant,” said Jinha Park, a radiologist who attended Ahn’s election night party at a Mexican restaurant in Westlake. “The Korean American community has always felt voiceless at the federal level.”

The question now, as the two Democrats ready for what could be a costly runoff, is whether Ahn, the son of Korean immigrants, can broaden his appeal beyond the Korean American voters who are motivated to send him to Washington.

He faces a fierce challenge: While progressive candidates to his left spoke passionately about fighting for “sanctuary cities” that protect undocumented immigrants and single-payer healthcare, Ahn emphasized the “business sensibility” he would bring to the office and argued there was room to negotiate with Republicans on certain issues, an idea that could prove unpopular in a district where just 9% of voters are Republican, and where Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton in last year’s presidential primary.

Ahn will also have to make a case to Latino voters, who make up more than half of registered voters in the district, why they should choose him over Gomez. The three-term assemblyman is the son of Mexican immigrants, has amassed dozens of establishment endorsements from Democratic elected officials, labor unions and environmental groups, and touted his progressive record in the Legislature.

Among his backers is Xavier Becerra, who rose to become the highest-ranking Latino U.S. congressman and vacated the seat to become California’s attorney general.

Votes that went to the remaining Latino candidates in the primary made up more than 38% of voters at last count, and the district has sent a Latino to Congress for more than half a century.

“When [Ahn is] running against a guy named Gomez, as good as his outreach might be in the Latino community, Latinos’ gut and heart is going to be more with Gomez,” said UCLA professor Barreto.

Ahn dismissed the idea. “The notion that Latinos will only vote for a Latino … I think we’re really going to transcend that with our campaign,” Ahn said in an interview Wednesday. He appears to be positioning himself as an outsider, which would be similar to the campaign Ryu ran when he made his successful council run in 2015. Ahn called Gomez a “professional politician that is powered by special interests.”

Gomez’s camp shot back, saying voters will see through Ahn’s formidable fundraising and realize his credentials don’t match with the district.

“More than anything, he’s ideologically out of step with the district,” said Parke Skelton, a campaign consultant for Gomez. Skelton said Ahn, who changed his registration from Republican to Democrat in 2012, “has taken positions that really put him out of the mainstream Democratic base in this district.”

christine.maiduc@latimes.com

For more on California politics, follow @cmaiduc.

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WASHINGTON — Barney Frank, the longtime Democratic congressman and leading liberal who brought new visibility to gay rights and crafted the most significant reforms to the financial system in a generation, has died. He was 86.

Frank died late Tuesday, according to Jim Segel, Frank’s former campaign manager and close friend.

After representing broad swaths of Boston’s suburbs in Congress for 32 years, Frank and his husband moved to Ogunquit, Maine. He entered hospice there in April with congestive heart failure and is survived by his husband, Jim Ready, and sisters, the longtime Democratic strategist Ann Lewis and Doris Breay, along with brother David Frank.

A self-described “left-handed gay Jew,” Frank was known for his acerbic wit, combative style and focus on marginalized communities. He represented the party’s left wing while keeping close with Democratic leaders who sometimes frustrated progressives.

He is best known as a pioneer for LGBT rights. After decades of grappling with his sexuality, he publicly came out as gay in 1987, the first member of Congress to do so voluntarily. With his 2012 marriage to Ready, he became the first incumbent lawmaker on Capitol Hill to marry someone of the same sex.

But in an April interview as he entered hospice, Frank said he hoped he would be remembered for advocating a brand of politics that embraced progressive ideals without forcing them on voters prematurely. It is an approach he feared was being rejected as Democrats prepare for what could be a rollicking primary as they hope to retake the White House in 2028 and move past the Trump era.

“I hope I made the point that the best way to accomplish the improvements in our society that we need, particularly in making it less unfair economically and socially, is by conventional political methods,” Frank said. “The main obstacle to our defeating populism and going further in the right direction is that mainstream Democrats have to make it clear that we oppose that part of the agenda of our friends on the left that is politically unacceptable. They’re right about a lot of things but you have to have some discretion.”

“You should not take the most unpopular parts of your agenda and make them litmus tests,” he added. “And that’s what my friends on the left have been doing.”

Frank’s path to public life

Born in 1940 in Bayonne, N.J., Frank wrote in his 2015 memoir that he was drawn to public life after Emmett Till, a Black 14-year-old from Chicago, was lynched by white men in Mississippi. Frank would volunteer in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964, though he acknowledged the fast-talking style was a challenge in the Deep South.

“My direct organizing of Mississippi voters was limited by the fact that my accent [to this day more New Jersey than New England], my poor diction, and my rapid speech, especially when I got excited, rendered me largely incomprehensible to rural Mississippians of both races,” he wrote.

He entered politics in 1968 as an aide to Boston Mayor Kevin White before winning a seat in the Massachusetts House in 1972. Frank was elected to Congress in 1980, an otherwise dismal year for Democrats as the party lost dozens of seats in the U.S. House and Republican Ronald Reagan won the White House.

Frank’s pragmatic style surfaced early in his congressional career. He joined the liberal Democratic Study Group to help push then-Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.) to respond more aggressively to the Reagan administration. But Frank said he found himself more often agreeing with O’Neill’s less confrontational approach.

Years later, as Congress prepared to pass a massive tax overhaul package, Frank intended to vote “no,” opposed to the bill’s lowering of top tax rates. He changed his mind, however, when he worked out a deal boosting affordable housing tax credits.

“I was happy to sacrifice my ideological purity to improve legislation that was going to become law with or without me,” he wrote.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat and former House speaker, called Frank an “idealist to the nth degree.”

“The goals, the vision, the promise of it all,” she recalled in an interview. “Nobody could ever surpass what he brought to the table in that regard.”

Making history in Congress

Through his early years in Washington, Frank led something of a double life.

Privately, he socialized in the city’s gay circles and had relationships but did not publicly acknowledge his sexuality. The media at the time rarely reported that someone was gay unless that person was involved in a scandal. When Frank in 1987 invited a reporter to his office to formally ask whether the congressman was gay, Frank responded, “yeah, so what?”

Other elected leaders, perhaps most notably San Francisco’s Harvey Milk, had come out years before. Members of Congress, including Rep. Gerry Studds (D-Mass.), were previously outed through scandal.

Frank’s approach made him the most prominent gay leader in national politics for much of the 1980s and 1990s. He helped secure AIDS funding and pressed the Democratic Clinton administration, unsuccessfully, to lift a ban on gays serving in the military.

But there were low points, too, most notably an overwhelming 1987 House vote to reprimand him for poor judgment involving a male prostitute he hired in 1985. Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia, the Republican whip at the time, pressed for the more severe punishment of censure, which was rejected by a large margin.

Frank became something of a punch line among conservative Republicans, with House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) calling him “Barney Fag” in 1995. Armey said he misspoke and later apologized from the House floor.

Along the way, Frank became known as one of the most quotable lawmakers in Congress.

Regarding abortion, he said Republicans believed “life begins at conception and ends at birth,” criticizing the party’s push to curb social programs. After Ken Starr released a report describing President Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky in sometimes intimate detail, Frank said it required “too much reading about heterosexual sex.”

Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) entered Congress the same year as Frank and he recalled his former colleague: “You may get a blow, but it was softened by the humor that came with it.”

Presiding over a financial overhaul

By 2007, Frank was the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, where he would leave his lasting policy mark as the U.S. economy careened toward collapse. He worked with the Republican Bush administration to pass a rescue package, providing vital support to financial institutions but spurring a populist revolt that still courses through American politics.

Once the initial crisis eased, Frank helped develop the most significant reform legislation since the New Deal. Working with then-Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), the Dodd-Frank Act would enhance consumer protections, impose new capital requirements for banks and boost the ability of regulators to monitor risk.

“Barney and I shared a fantastic relationship,” Dodd said. “I had many good moments in those 36 years in Congress, but none more significant, joyful, or productive than those almost two years working with Barney on our banking bill.”

During President Trump’s second term, his Republican administration has worked to roll back many of the legislation’s provisions, arguing they were too onerous.

Frank faced his toughest reelection campaign in years in 2010 as the tea party wave swept over American politics. He opted against running again in 2012, though remained engaged in politics long after leaving Congress and was a fierce critic of Trump.

Asked for his prediction on who might succeed Trump, Frank said “unfortunately I won’t get to vote for it.”

Sloan writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — Two police officers who helped defend the U.S. Capitol from an attack by a mob of President Trump’s supporters sued on Wednesday to block anyone — including Jan. 6, 2021, rioters — from receiving payouts from a new $1.776-billion settlement fund for people who claim to be victims of politically motivated prosecutions.

The officers’ attorneys filed the federal lawsuit a day after acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche defended the fund’s creation during a congressional hearing. Blanche, a personal attorney for Trump before joining the Justice Department, wouldn’t rule out the possibility that rioters who assaulted police on Jan. 6 would be eligible for fund payouts.

The lawsuit claims the government’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is an illegal slush fund that Trump will use to “finance the insurrectionists and paramilitary groups that commit violence in his name.” It describes the fund’s creation as “the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century” and calls for dissolving it.

“No statute authorizes its creation, the settlement on which it is premised is a corrupt sham, and its design violates the Constitution and federal law,” the suit says.

The fund stems from a settlement of Trump’s $10-billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. It’s designed to compensate those who believe they were mistreated by prior administrations’ Justice Department. Decisions on payouts will be made by a five-member commission appointed by the attorney general.

More than 100 police officers were injured during the Capitol riot. Nearly 1,600 people were charged with Jan. 6-related crimes, but Trump used his pardon powers to erase all of those cases in a sweeping act of clemency last year.

The plaintiffs suing Trump over the fund are Metropolitan Police Department officer Daniel Hodges and former U.S. Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn, who is running in Maryland for a seat in Congress. Hodges and Dunn both testified before Congress about their harrowing experiences on Jan. 6. Videos captured a rioter ripping a mask off Hodges as he was pinned against a door during a fight for control of a tunnel entrance.

The officers claim the fund “encourages those who enacted violence in the President’s name to continue to do so.”

“Dunn and Hodges already face credible threats of death and violence on regular basis; the Fund substantially increases the danger,” the suit alleges.

On Tuesday, members of Congress peppered Blanche with questions about the fund. He described it as “unusual” but not unprecedented. Blanche failed to acknowledge that Trump’s Justice Department has investigated and prosecuted some of the Republican president’s political enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey and New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James.

Blanche and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also are named as defendants in the officers’ lawsuit. Spokespeople for the Justice and Treasury departments didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on the suit.

One of the attorneys for the officers is Brendan Ballou, a former Justice Department prosecutor who handled Jan. 6 cases.

Kunzelman writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — The YOLO caucus is in session.

In a Republican-led Congress defined by deference to President Trump, there’s a small but steadily growing cohort who have found themselves more willing to break with the White House. Although the president maintains a firm grip on Republican voters, the expanding club could hinder his agenda on everything from the Iran war to immigration funding at a moment when his party holds a tenuous majority on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana is the newest member of the club. Just days after losing his primary to a Trump-backed challenger, Cassidy on Tuesday reversed himself on legislation involving the war in Iran and voted with Democrats to rein in U.S. military action.

“The way our Constitution is set up, Congress should hold the executive branch accountable,” he told reporters the day before.

Sen. John Cornyn of Texas could be next after Trump endorsed Ken Paxton, Cornyn’s rival for the Republican nomination in next week’s runoff.

Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky is perhaps a founding member of the YOLO caucus — slang for “you only live once,” used to punctuate unbothered or even foolhardy behavior. He frustrated Trump since the president’s first term, and his status was solidified after losing his primary on Tuesday to a Trump-backed challenger. Massie has enraged Trump by voting against his signature tax and spending bill and by pushing for the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

He hinted there’s more to come before he leaves office.

“I got seven months left in Congress,” Massie said with a grin during his concession speech as the crowd erupted.

More Republicans feel free to shrug off Trump

Other similarly situated Republicans include Sen. Thom Tillis, who was a fierce critic of former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and has more recently turned his attention to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. There’s also Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who joined Democrats last week in a bid to curb Trump’s war powers in Iran. Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky have voted against some of Trump’s Cabinet picks. And in the House, Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska has pushed to reclaim congressional power over tariffs.

“If the legislative branch always votes with the president, we do have a king,” Massie said in his concession speech Tuesday.

This hardly amounts to a revival of the Never Trump movement that some Republicans unsuccessfully hoped would curb the president’s excesses during his first term or block him from returning to office. Many in the party, including Trump’s occasional detractors, have either stood by or been unable to block the president as he launched the war in Iran and presided over an aggressive immigration enforcement operation and the dismantling of the federal workforce.

Today’s unencumbered Republicans don’t fit into an ideological box. But they are united by a sense of emboldening that can only be attained in a few ways in Trump’s Washington.

Many, like Tillis, McConnell and Bacon, have decided to retire and can cast votes knowing they’ll never again have to face Republican primary voters. Others like Collins and Murkowski have more leeway because they represent states that tend to reward political independence. And some like Massie banked on the idea that voters could support both Trump and someone who occasionally crossed him.

It’s a paradox for Trump. As he demands total loyalty and pushes out Republican dissenters, he’s left with a growing cohort who, for one reason or another, owe Trump nothing.

Democrats look to capitalize

That could be a problem for Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson, who are already governing with threadbare majorities. Shifting loyalties of even a few Republican lawmakers could dramatically complicate the ability for either chamber to pass substantial legislation ahead of the November midterm elections.

Thune called Cornyn a “principled conservative” and “very effective senator” on Tuesday.

“None of us control what the president does,” he said.

The next tests could come later this week as Thune pushes a funding package for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection designed to pass on a party line basis.

Democrats are eager to pounce.

Speaking at an event in Washington on Tuesday sponsored by the Center for American Progress, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said he would aim to drive a wedge between Republicans by using a so-called discharge petition to bring issues directly to the floor for a vote.

That tactic has been successful in securing House passage on issues including the Epstein files and temporary protection of Haitian immigrants.

“When we’re disciplined and when we’re focused and when we put pressure in particular on the so-called swing seat Republicans, they have been breaking with us,” Jeffries said.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom told reporters on Tuesday that Trump’s endorsement of Cornyn’s rival was a sign that his political power lies within the Republican base — not the American public at large.

“He’s showed the only influence he has, and that’s an outsize influence within the base of the party,” the potential 2028 Democratic presidential contender said. “Otherwise he’s shown little to no influence with the American people.”

Counting the votes

That leaves Republicans gaming out how they might cobble together the votes needed to pass legislation.

Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota called Cassidy a “good friend” and said the loss was “tough for him.” He said Cassidy “will always vote in line with what he thinks is best” but doubted he will become a less reliable Republican vote.

His fellow Louisianan, Sen. John Kennedy, said Cassidy deploys power “rationally and maturely” and “will continue to do the same thing.”

Cassidy repeatedly rejected the notion that he will spend his final months in Washington as a troublemaker for Trump, saying he’s going to do “what’s good for my country and my state.”

Yet the independent streak that ended his political career quickly resurfaced. A week after Trump visited China, Cassidy spoke of a Western alliance that’s “totally falling apart” and will be unable to “push back on the threat China represents.” He seemed stunned that the administration would create a nearly $1.8-billion fund to compensate Trump allies who they believe have been unjustly investigated and prosecuted.

“I just came off the campaign trail,” he said. “People are concerned about making their own ends meet, not about putting a slush fund together without a legal precedent.”

Sloan and Cappelletti write for the Associated Press. AP writer Stephen Groves in Washington contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — Republican senators are considering dropping a proposal for $1 billion in security money for the White House complex and President Trump’s ballroom after it has failed to win enough party support on Capitol Hill.

Pressured by the White House, Republicans have tried to add the money to a roughly $70-billion bill to restore funding to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol. But the security proposal has met with backlash from some GOP lawmakers who are questioning the cost and the lack of detail from the White House and U.S. Secret Service about how the taxpayer dollars would be used.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said Wednesday that the bill was “back to square one” without the security money because “the votes are not there.”

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said the effort to add the security package to the bill was a “bad idea” and he does not think there is enough backing to pass it, even if it were reduced.

The text of the bill has not yet been released. But Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) acknowledged “ongoing vote issues” as leaders try to measure Republican support, as well as “ongoing parliamentarian issues” as they try to figure out what will be allowed in the bill under the chamber’s rules.

The wrangling comes as Democrats have criticized Republicans for trying to fund Trump’s ballroom when voters are concerned about basic affordability issues — and as some GOP lawmakers have grown increasingly frustrated with Trump. Several have spoken out against the administration’s $1.8-billion settlement fund designed to compensate Trump’s allies, and many were upset by the president’s endorsement Tuesday of Texas Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton in the party primary runoff next week against Sen. John Cornyn.

“There’s always a consequence with taking on United States senators,” Thune said. Trump “obviously has his favorites and people he wants to endorse and that’s his prerogative. But what we have to deal with up here is moving the agenda, and obviously that can become slightly more complicated.”

Republican opposition blocks Secret Service request

Under the Secret Service request, about $220 million would pay for security improvements related to the ballroom. The rest would go for a new screening center for visitors, training and other security measures.

Tillis said the bill should not have included the other security improvements “because it’s just giving everybody the ‘billion-dollar ballroom.’”

“They need to explain to me why we need this,” Tillis said, noting that Trump had originally said private money would cover the project.

Several other Republicans in the House and Senate have questioned the request, and senators left a briefing with the director of the Secret Service last week saying they needed a lot more information.

People “can’t afford groceries and gasoline and healthcare, and we’re going to do a billion dollars for a ballroom?” asked Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who lost reelection in the GOP primary on Saturday after Trump endorsed one of his opponents.

Sen. Jim Justice (R-W.Va.) said he is supportive of the security money and thinks it is necessary to protect the president. But he acknowledged that the optics are not very good for Republicans, and that they have not communicated about it well.

“We’ve got people out there who are worried about how in the world they’re going to have enough gas to get home,” Justice said.

Tensions rise between Senate and White House

As Republicans challenged parts of his agenda, Trump unloaded on the Senate in a social media post.

He urged Republicans to fire the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, who said over the weekend that parts of the $1-billion security proposal cannot remain in the ICE and Border Patrol bill. Trump renewed his long-standing calls for the Senate to pass the SAVE Act, a Republican bill that would require all voters to prove U.S. citizenship, and to end the Senate filibuster.

“Republicans play a very soft game compared to the Dumocrats,” he wrote. “It is their single biggest disadvantage in politics.”

Trump said Democrats would eliminate the filibuster “on the First Day” if they ever get full power in Washington again and that Republicans need to “get smart and tough” or “you’ll all be looking for a job much sooner than you thought possible!”

Republicans have been loyal to Trump on most issues, but they have resisted his repeated calls — even in his first term — to kill the filibuster, which triggers a 60-vote threshold in the Senate.

Hanging over the growing GOP rift is Trump’s surprise endorsement of Paxton. That intervention has Republican senators privately fuming that it could cost them their majority in November as they view the incumbent, Cornyn, as the better candidate in the November general election.

Democrats test Republicans on settlement fund

As Republicans move forward on the immigration enforcement legislation, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Democrats plan to force a vote on Trump’s proposed settlement fund.

Democrats have an opening because Republicans are trying to pass the immigration enforcement bill through a complicated budget process that requires a long series of amendment votes. Democrats are considering multiple amendments potentially to block that new fund outright or to ban any payments to Trump supporters who harmed law enforcement officers in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Those amendments, along with others, could pass as a growing number of Republicans speak out against the fund and other parts of Trump’s agenda.

Thune said he was “not a big fan” of the new fund, which the administration announced as a part of a settlement that resolves the president’s lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. Cassidy called it a “slush fund” and said “you can’t just make up things.”

Tillis said he thinks it is a “real risk” that some of the rioters charged — and later pardoned by Trump — in the Jan. 6 attack could get compensation through the fund. He said that would be “absurd.”

On Wednesday, two police officers who helped defend the Capitol in the 2021 assault sued to block the payouts. Acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche, a personal attorney for Trump before joining the Department of Justice in Trump’s second term, would not rule out the possibility that rioters who assaulted police on Jan. 6 would be eligible for compensation when he testified in a Senate hearing this week.

Jalonick, Freking and Cappelletti write for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — Republicans are unhappier with President Trump’s handling of the economy than they were a few months ago, but they’re largely continuing to stand behind him as the war with Iran continues, a new AP-NORC poll finds.

About 6 in 10 Republicans approve of how Trump is handling the economy, according to the poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. That’s down from about 8 in 10 in February, before the war began.

The poll comes as the Mideast war fuels higher gasoline prices, while the U.S. and Iran struggle to move toward a permanent ceasefire. Trump’s hold on the GOP remains strong, as he demonstrated Tuesday when his handpicked candidate defeated Rep. Thomas Massie, a critic of the president, in a primary election challenge. The findings highlight Trump’s continued strength within the Republican Party, even as economic frustration grows.

Ariel Gutierrez, a 55-year-old Republican in Wisconsin, usually requires his teenage children to pay for their own gas. But with spiking gas costs, he’s helping out his 15-year-old, who’s just learning to drive.

“The whole Iran issue has just exacerbated it,” he said. “Maybe we were seeing it in groceries before, but now — with this push on gas and travel and all that — that is how people want to live the leisure part of their lives … and it is directly impacting us there now. And yes, that is, I believe from Trump’s policies, not from his predecessors.”

Trump remains unpopular outside his base. Most Americans continue to disapprove of Trump’s approach to both Iran and foreign policy. His overall approval rating in the new poll stands at 37%, up slightly from 33% in April. Nearly all Democrats disapprove of his performance as president, as do about 7 in 10 independents.

The economy remains a struggle

About one-third of U.S. adults approve of how Trump is handling the economy. That’s in line with an AP-NORC poll conducted in late April, but down slightly from the start of his second term, when 40% of U.S. adults approved.

The economy was a strength for Trump in his first term, but he’s struggled with skepticism about his handling of the issue since his return to the White House last year, after repeatedly promising to bring prices down. His second-term economic approval has fallen among Republicans, in particular. While a majority, 63%, still approve, that’s down from 79% in February, a few weeks before the war with Iran began.

Richard Baumgartner, a 77-year-old Republican from Las Vegas, believes higher costs are a necessary side effect of the war, which he supports.

“Unfortunately, because of the war, the economy is a little bit off-kilter,” Baumgartner said. “I think it’ll fall back into place after things resolve over there. Temporary price increases — it’s unfortunate, but it’s something that has to be confronted in a situation like this where you have a very serious problem.”

Trump regains some strength on immigration

Although economic promises were pivotal to Trump’s reelection, so were his goals of stricter immigration enforcement — and this issue may be reemerging as an asset.

Immigration emerged as one of Trump’s strengths early in his second term, with about half of U.S. adults saying they liked his approach, but approval of his handling of the issue dipped to 38% in January and February, after months of aggressive immigration enforcement that led to the shooting deaths of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis.

Now, just under half of U.S. adults, 45%, approve of how he is handling that issue.

Brenda Theiss, an independent from Cullman, Ala., doesn’t like everything Trump is doing. But she gives him credit for being willing to disrupt the status quo to reduce the flow of immigrants who are in the country illegally, compared with Democratic Presidents Obama and Biden.

“I liked Obama; I voted for Obama — but Trump was the only one that did something. All of the other presidents sat back and went, ‘Well, there’s nothing we can do,’” the 73-year-old said. “He’s closing the border. He did it. Biden didn’t do it. For that, I give him one hundred.”

Over the last few months, the Trump administration has appeared to recalibrate its approach on immigration, moving away from aggressive, public-facing tactics toward a quieter approach to enforcement.

Immigration remains one of Trump’s stronger issues among Republicans. About 8 in 10 approve of his handling of the issue, which is roughly 10 points higher than the share who say he’s doing a good job as president.

Few approve of Trump on Iran or issues abroad

Trump’s handling of the war with Iran remains unpopular.

Only about one-third of U.S. adults approve of how he is handling Iran. Roughly two-thirds of Republicans approve, though an AP-NORC poll conducted last month found that younger Republicans are more likely to disapprove of Trump’s performance on the issue than older ones.

Similarly, about one-third of Americans approve of Trump’s approach to foreign policy. Though Trump has zeroed in on a more aggressive international approach this year — including capturing the leader of Venezuela and threatening Cuba — Americans’ views of his overall handling of foreign policy have not shifted significantly in recent months.

Amanda Wylie, a 22-year-old who lives in Athens, Ga., says Iran is one of the few issues where Trump doesn’t have her support.

“I feel like we’re wasting resources over there at this point and not for the benefit of the American people,” said Wylie, who identifies as a Republican-leaning independent. “Especially if everyone is worried about gas prices and the ultimate goal of this is to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon. Yes, that’s important, but at what cost?”

Sanders and Thomson-Deveaux write for the Associated Press. The AP-NORC poll of 1,117 adults was conducted May 14-18 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.

NEW LONDON, Conn. — President Trump told the U.S. Coast Guard Academy’s graduates on Wednesday that they show “unbelievable heroism and exceptional selflessness” but that the cadets will “be tested further” as they embark on their military careers.

Trump’s remarks to the class of 2026 were the first time he has given a commencement address at one of the nation’s military academies after sending U.S. troops to fight a new war.

He told the cadets that they will be America’s “first defenders” and “first responders.”

“You’ve all been tested. You’ll be tested further and probably at higher levels as your career goes on,” Trump said.

During his address, Trump quickly touched on the war with Iran, now in its 12th week, as a sign of U.S. success from “the hottest country anywhere in the world.”

“The only question is, do we go ahead and finish it up or are they going to be signing a document? Let’s see what happens,” Trump said.

The Republican president had threatened to launch renewed strikes on Iran this week as talks with Tehran seemed to have stalled and a fragile ceasefire appeared to be teetering. But Trump on Monday said he was giving Iran a few more days because “serious negotiations” were underway.

He has not offered details and has in the past backed away from following through on threats to Iran, citing breakthroughs in talks that have not publicly materialized.

Earlier Wednesday, he told reporters that he’s “in no hurry” to strike a deal to wrap up the war because of political concerns and the November midterm elections.

The commencement was held on a day with scorching heat and there was little shade available as the crowd waited for the ceremony to begin.

At least one person required medical attention after passing out. Others pleaded with organizers for elderly attendants to sit in the shade under tents. Chilled water bottles were distributed freely but quickly became warm.

Trump, who spoke at the academy’s graduation in 2017 during his first term, said he was proud to be the first president to give two commencement addresses at the school.

“We’re going to have to try it maybe a third time, too, to keep that record intact,” Trump said Wednesday.

The president and vice president traditionally speak at one of the military service academies every year. Vice President JD Vance is set to give the commencement address on May 28 at the U.S. Air Force Academy.

Before he flew to Connecticut, Trump told reporters that his message to the cadets would be, “Just enjoy your life.”

“You know, you don’t really realize how important Coast Guard is until you have a hurricane,” Trump said as he praised the maritime service.

Price and Kruesi write for the Associated Press. Price reported from Washington.

MIAMI — Federal prosecutors on Wednesday announced charges against former Cuban President Raúl Castro in the 1996 downing of civilian planes operated by Miami-based exiles as the Trump administration escalated pressure on the socialist government.

The indictment was related to Castro’s alleged role in the shootdown of two small planes operated by the exile group Brothers to the Rescue. Castro, now 94, was Cuba’s defense minister at the time. The charges included murder and destruction of an airplane.

Acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche and other top Justice Department officials made the announcement in Miami at a ceremony to honor those killed in the shootdown.

President Trump has been threatening military action in Cuba ever since U.S. forces captured the Cuban government’s longtime patron, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. After ousting Maduro, the White House ordered a blockade that choked off fuel shipments to Cuba, leading to severe blackouts, food shortages and an economic collapse across the island.

Since Maduro’s capture, Trump has ratcheted up talk of regime change in Cuba after pledging earlier this year to conduct a “friendly takeover” of the country if its leadership did not open its economy to American investment and kick out U.S. adversaries.

Trump’s first administration indicted Maduro on drug-trafficking charges and used that to justify removing him from power during a surprise military raid in January that whisked the Venezuelan leader to New York to face trial.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday urged the Cuban people to demand a free-market economy with new leadership that he said will chart a new course in relations with the U.S.

“In the U.S., we are ready to open a new chapter in the relationship between our people,” Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, said in a Spanish-language video message. “Currently, the only thing standing in the way of a better future are those who control your country.”

Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, Carlos F. de Cossío lashed out at Rubio on X, saying he “lies so repeatedly and unscrupulously about Cuba and tries to justify the aggression he inflicts on the Cuban people.” Rubio “knows full well that there is no excuse for such cruel and ruthless aggression.”

Raúl Castro believed to wield power behind the scenes

There’s no indication Castro will be taken into U.S. custody anytime soon.

He took over as president from his ailing older brother Fidel Castro in 2006 before handing power to a trusted loyalist, Díaz-Canel, in 2018.

While he retired in 2021 as head of the Cuban Communist Party, he is widely believed to wield power behind the scenes, underscored by the prominence of his grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, who previously met secretly with Rubio.

Last week, CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Havana for meetings with Cuban officials, including Castro’s grandson. Two other senior State Department officials met with the grandson in April.

“The symbolic nature is absolutely crucial,” said Lindsey Lazopoulos Friedman, a former prosecutor at the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami who handled national security cases and crimes involving Cubans.

“Even though Raúl Castro will likely stay and die in Cuba, you can use the indictment as a pressure point, a tactical advantage, to extract other concessions like the release of prisoners or to keep Russia out,” she added.

The investigation into Castro stretches back to the 1990s

Starting in 1995, planes flown by members of Brothers to the Rescue, a group founded by Cuban exiles, buzzed over Havana dropping leaflets urging Cubans to rise up against the Castro government.

The Cubans protested to the U.S. government, warning that they would defend their airspace. Federal Aviation Administration officials also opened an investigation and met with the group’s leaders to urge them to ground the flights, according to declassified government records obtained by George Washington University’s National Security Archive.

“This latest overflight can only be seen as further taunting of the Cuban Government,” an FAA official wrote in an email to her superiors after one intrusion in January 1996. “Worst case scenario is that one of these days the Cubans will shoot down one of these planes.”

But those calls went unheeded and on Feb. 24, 1996, missiles fired by Russian-made MiG-29 fighter jets downed two unarmed civilian Cessna planes a short distance north of Havana just beyond Cuba’s airspace. All four men aboard were killed.

Raúl Castro faced earlier indictment

Guy Lewis, who was a federal prosecutor, uncovered evidence linking senior Cuban military officials to cocaine trafficking by Colombia’s Medellin cartel. Following the shootdown, the investigation expanded, and prosecutors pursued charges against Raúl Castro for leading a vast racketeering conspiracy by Cuba’s armed forces.

“The evidence was strong,” Lewis said in an interview.

In the end, the Clinton administration indicted four individuals, including the MiG pilots, the head of the Cuban air force and the head of a Cuban spy network in Miami — the only one to see the inside of a U.S. prison — for providing valuable intelligence about the flights.

The incident led the U.S. to harden its position against Cuba, even though the Cold War had ended and the Castros’ support for revolution across Latin America was a fading memory.

But Castro himself was spared as the Clinton administration — which had quietly sought to expand relations with Cuba prior to the incident — raised foreign policy concerns about such a high-profile indictment.

“Raúl was definitely one who slipped through the noose,” Lewis said. “The crime is notorious. Three U.S. citizens and one legal permanent resident were killed in a premeditated orchestrated murder. That should never be forgotten.”

Goodman and Richer write for the Associated Press. Richer reported from Washington.

A few weeks ago, Argentine journalist Martín Caparrós recalled at an event commemorating the 50th anniversary of Spanish newspaper El País that Venezuela, in 1964, was the first place in the world to abolish the death penalty. These were the times of Marshal Juan Crisóstomo Falcón, and the word “federation” had become the epitome of the supposed solution to all the nation’s ills in a young, devastated, and empty republic.

Although this was true on paper, in practice we had Antonio Guzmán Blanco, trained in the federalist ranks and who became the supreme leader of the Liberal Cause, decreeing in 1872 the execution by firing squad of his former ally, the caudillo Matías Salazar. In less than a decade, this declaration of principles had been easily overturned by one of its promoters.

The self-proclaimed revolutions continued to undermine national life until Cipriano Castro and his crony Juan Vicente Gómez defeated them all and proclaimed the restoration of liberal principles. “New men, new ideals, new procedures,” declared the man who moved the presidential office from the Yellow House to Miraflores Palace. But, having consolidated his regime and enjoying his days for vanity and festive revelry, in 1907, amidst delirium and a display of brute force, he ordered the execution of his great opponent, General Antonio Paredes, once the Army frustrated a supposed new revolution.

After sending him to the firing squad, Castro did not remain in power for long. At the end of 1908, Gómez toppled him with a palace coup, justifying the murder of Paredes as the reason his former crony was never allowed to enter Venezuela again.

The Gómez regime (1908-1935) was cruel. It tortured and imprisoned its opponents. However, he was careful to avoid such incidents. He defeated them in prisons and in the military fray to maintain his sepulchral order. It wasn’t until the next military dictatorship in the 1950s that news emerged of what we might call summary executions of members of the Acción Democrática resistance and union leaders. Thus, Leonardo Ruiz Pineda, Antonio Pinto Salinas, and Luis Hurtado remained in the collective memory when neighborhoods were named after them. The tortures inflicted by the fearsome Seguridad Nacional or the days spent in the Guasina concentration camp became literature or anecdotes in a historical thread woven by this type of political violence.

Perhaps the great Venezuelan tragedy has not only been the repetition of violence, but the inability to fully transform its tragedies into republican memory.

Later, the great unifying word was Democracy. Under this system, the country had achieved greater pluralism, freedoms, and social development. That said, excesses were committed during the counterinsurgency campaign, and thus, among others, the names of Alberto Lovera and Jorge Rodríguez Sr. remained, cases that were openly denounced in the media and for which some form of justice was sought.

In the 1980s, we witnessed the extrajudicial killings known as the “false positives” of the El Amparo Massacre and the repressive chaos of El Caracazo, a moment when the system should have been more deeply confronted with its errors and adopted more profound forms of reparation. Although political violence did not disappear with democracy, it had ceased to be accepted as a natural aspect of public life. The problem was that many of its wounds were poorly healed, if at all, and festered into resentment.

The return of horror

The 1999 Constitution was born with the idea of ​​refounding the Republic and making it “Bolivarian.” Initially, this meant defeating corruption, building a “participatory democracy,” and erasing all traces of what they began to call the “Fourth Republic.” This refounding ultimately meant reusing and multiplying the evils of the past and waging a systematic battle against democratic resistance.

The cruelty quickly became apparent: the impunity and flippant treatment of the April 11 murders; the shootings in Plaza Altamira in December of that same year; the political assassination of the controversial prosecutor Danilo Anderson and the subsequent witch hunt; the exponential increase in repression in 2014, 2017 and 2019, and the widespread fear following July 28, 2024. This cruelty is replete with numerous new stories of deaths under the indifference or custody of the State, from Franklin Brito to Fernando Albán, Raúl Baduel, Rodolfo González “El Aviador”,  the extrajudicial executions, and the cases we still don’t know about.

The ordeal Carmen Navas endured to learn about her son, Víctor Hugo Quero, and the cruelty with which his death was concealed have shaken Venezuelan society, which sees mothers as its embodiment of grief and national outrage, and which finds in women its greatest source of peaceful resistance.

As an old folk song, collected by Aquiles Nazoa and sung by Simón Díaz in his second volume of Tonadas (1976): “Little girl who embroiders the white cloth, little girl who weaves on your loom, embroider for me the map of Venezuela and a little handkerchief to cry with.” Perhaps the great Venezuelan tragedy has not only been the repetition of violence, but the inability to fully transform its tragedies into republican memory.

Every time pain becomes merely an anecdote or a slogan, the country remains haunted by the same monsters and ghosts. But, just as we have had this tradition of assassination and political cruelty, which today are multiplied in family tragedy and shared horror, on each occasion Venezuelans have been deeply moved by injustice, and this has led us to mobilize to transform darkness into brighter moments for our republic. May the future be not only bright, but much more lasting.

WASHINGTON — Bold conservative thinkers with clear public records need not apply.

An increasing number of conservative activists fear that is the message President Bush is sending with his two choices for the Supreme Court.

This week’s nomination of White House Counsel Harriet E. Miers, following Bush’s earlier selection of John G. Roberts Jr. as chief justice, means that the president has chosen two Supreme Court nominees with limited — or virtually no — public records on the key constitutional controversies dividing the parties. In the process, he’s bypassed a long list of judges with consistent conservative records on state and federal courts.

“I don’t know that there is a deliberate message — I think he is just trying to avoid trouble — but the message comes through: Do not be controversial, do not express strong opinions that arouse opposition,” said Robert H. Bork, the conservative legal scholar and former federal judge. Bork’s extensive writings keyed an explosive confirmation battle that culminated in his rejection by the Senate when President Reagan nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1987.

During almost five years of bruising partisan warfare on issues from taxes to Iraq, few people have ever accused Bush of dodging a fight. But that’s exactly the charge he is now facing from disgruntled conservatives.

They contend that Bush has chosen Miers, and even Roberts, largely because he fears Democratic resistance to conservatives with more concrete public records, such as appellate court Judges J. Michael Luttig and Edith H. Jones.

“Is the president sending a message that these distinguished conservatives are too controversial to be nominated for the high court, even with a Senate containing 55 Republicans?” a Wall Street Journal editorial asked Tuesday.

White House officials and some Bush allies on the right deny the charge that he is gun-shy about promoting nominees with extensive public records. They note that the president has consistently appointed known conservatives, such as Janice Rogers Brown and Priscilla R. Owen, to the powerful federal appellate courts — even renominating them after they were initially blocked by Democratic filibusters.

“In the president’s mind, it is not disqualifying if you have a public track record of conservatism, and he has proved that through his appellate court appointees,” said White House counselor Dan Bartlett.

Bush, at a Tuesday news conference, sought to assure his supporters that Miers shared his conservative views and would remain steadfast to them.

“I know her well enough to be able to say that she’s not going to change, that 20 years from now she’ll be the same person, with the same philosophy, that she is today,” he said.

But Bush’s critics on the right maintain that his reluctance to nominate a known conservative for the Supreme Court sends a strong signal encouraging caution and consensus among conservative legal thinkers and judges.

“I suppose a lot of people are not going to want to join the Federalist Society,” said Bork, in a reference to a conservative legal group.

Both sides agree that the 1987 defeat of Bork marked a turning point in Supreme Court nominations. Since then, both parties have generally favored nominees without the detailed and controversial record he carried to the witness table.

“It’s almost become a qualification,” said Bork, a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute think tank.

But Bush’s conservative critics say he has carried this tendency to a new height through his selection of Roberts, who had served just over two years as a federal judge, and Miers, who has never served on the bench or written publicly on major legal questions.

In contrast, both of President Clinton’s Supreme Court appointees — Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg — had served for more than a decade on federal appellate courts. And Ginsburg had written widely as a law professor and general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Bush’s conservative critics acknowledge that Roberts’ limited public record made it more difficult for Democrats to organize against him, an advantage that Miers may also benefit from.

But the president’s critics maintain that Bush is underestimating his ability to win confirmation for a more clearly defined candidate while Republicans hold 55 Senate seats; only twice since 1930 has a president’s Supreme Court nomination been rejected while his party controlled a Senate majority.

“If Bush feels he could have put a Mike Luttig on there without a fight, he would have done it,” said Mark Levin, president of the conservative Landmark Legal Foundation and a former chief of staff to Edwin Meese III, who was attorney general under Reagan. “It’s a political calculation that he’s got enough on his table right now, and why instigate a fight?”

Luttig, of Virginia, is a favorite of conservative activists.

The critics on the right see two principal risks in choosing justices without a long pedigree. One is that without a firm anchor in conservative legal views, they will trend leftward on the court — the way almost all conservatives believe David H. Souter, appointed by President George H.W. Bush, has done. This fear is greater about Miers because Roberts’ advocacy for conservative positions in previous GOP administrations has left the right considerably more, though not completely, confident about him.

The other fear is that the nomination of candidates without lengthy public records will discourage conservatives from advancing controversial positions that challenge legal conventional wisdom — either in their writings or on the courts. The Wall Street Journal said that by appointing Miers, the president “missed a chance to send a message that taking firm sides in our judicial debates is not politically disqualifying.”

Bush advisors and allies say such conclusions misread his logic for the Miers appointment. They say his long personal relationship with Miers gives him more confidence about her judicial philosophy than he could obtain from reading a judge’s opinions or from a short interview.

“Harriet Miers reflects less a reticence to appoint someone with a record and more a commitment to appoint someone he knows shares his judicial philosophy,” said Leonard Leo, a former vice president of the Federalist Society now working with groups supporting the president’s court nominees.

Still, the uneasiness on the right about Bush’s decision-making has reached the point that two prominent legal conservatives this week joked that the best thing that ever happened to Roberts was the refusal by the Senate, then controlled by the Democrats, to confirm him after President George H.W. Bush nominated him to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1992.

If Roberts had been confirmed then, his lengthy legal record might have dissuaded the current President Bush from nominating him to the Supreme Court this summer, said one of the conservatives, who asked not to be identified.

It’s entirely possible — as hard as it may be to conceive in these deeply tribal, us-vs.-them times — for two competing notions to be true.

Tina Peters personally enriched herself and betrayed the public trust by perpetrating a harebrained scheme to “prove” the 2020 election in Mesa County, Colo., was rigged against President Trump. The former county clerk and MAGA warrior deserved to go to jail.

But the nine-year sentence she received was unduly harsh and, according to an appeals court decision, improperly meted out as punishment for the false and reckless public statements Peters made, a clear violation of her 1st Amendment rights. The court kicked the case back for resentencing.

That’s when Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, stepped in.

And stepped in it.

Over the strenuous objection of fellow Democrats and many Republicans — including Peters’ prosecutor and a majority of Colorado’s election clerks — Polis commuted her sentence, clearing the way for Peters’ parole on June 1 after less than two years in prison.

Which just goes to show three wrongs don’t make a right.

Peters, 70, was convicted on multiple criminal counts, four of them felonies, for conspiring to let an unauthorized person access supposedly compromised voting equipment. She then lied to cover up her actions.

Trump carried Mesa County, a conservative stronghold, by nearly 30 percentage points, making Peters’ actions — apart from illegal — unaccountably stupid. But her conniving made her a belle of Mar-a-Lago and a celebrity on the election-denial circuit, jetting around the country and spewing cockamamie conspiracy theories.

Trump loudly agitated for her release.

His corrupted Justice Department sought to get Peters sprung from Colorado prison, presumably to set her loose from a federal facility. The president issued a symbolic “pardon,” though Peters’ conviction on state charges put her beyond his crooked reach. Trump insulted and belittled Polis, suggesting, among other things, he “rot in hell.” More significantly, the vengeful president waged economic war against Colorado.

Among the retributive acts, Trump slashed federal funds earmarked for the state, closed a climate research center in Boulder and moved the U.S. Space Command headquarters from Colorado Springs to Alabama.

Polis, who has a broad libertarian streak, insisted his freeing of Peters was not a capitulation to Trump, but rather a matter of principle, which seems plausible to the extent the governor could have anticipated the unshirted hell he’s gotten from fellow Democrats.

Among the great many infuriated by Polis’ decision are Colorado’s two U.S. senators, as well as other vocal critics up and down the ballot. (One of those indignant senators is Michael Bennet, who is running to replace Polis.) There have been calls, within his own party, to investigate and impeach the governor, who had been spoken of as a potential presidential candidate in 2028.

“He was aiming for a national profile,” said Floyd Ciruli, a pollster who’s been taking soundings of Colorado voters for decades. “This makes it much more difficult.”

Given Democrats’ molten outrage, that seems like an understatement.

The judge who sentenced Peters in October 2024 was unsparing.

“You’re as defiant … a defendant as this court has ever seen,” District Judge Matthew Barrett scolded her. “You are as privileged as they come and you used that privilege to obtain power, a following and fame. You are no hero…. You’re a charlatan who used and is still using your prior position in office to peddle a snake oil that’s been proven to be junk time and time again.”

Amen.

The problem, according to the Colorado Court of Appeals, was that Barrett wrongly punished Peters not just for her illegal actions but for speaking out about alleged election fraud.

“Her offense was not her belief, however misguided the trial court deemed it to be, in the existence of such election fraud,” the three-judge panel wrote in a unanimous April decision. “It was her deceitful actions in her attempt to gather evidence of such fraud.”

The judges — all Democratic appointees — upheld Peters’ conviction and denied her request to transfer the case from Barrett. They ordered him to come up with a new sentence.

And that’s where Polis, who placed Barrett on the bench, should have let things alone.

Instead, the governor interceded and essentially cut Peters’ sentence in half.

“The crimes you were convicted of are very serious and you deserve to spend time in prison,” Polis wrote in his commutation letter. “However, this is an extremely unusual and lengthy sentence for a first time offender who committed nonviolent crimes.”

In response, Peters thanked Polis, apologized and expressed contrition.

“I made mistakes, and for those I am sorry,” Peters wrote in a statement addressed to the governor. “I have learned and grown during my time in prison and going forward I will make sure that my actions always follow the law, and I will avoid the mistakes of the past.”

We’ll see about that. If Peters clambers back aboard Mike Lindell’s crazy plane — he of MyPillow and election denial fame — we’ll know Polis was duped.

It’s easy to see his actions as surrendering to Trump. If so, Polis’ cave-in was pointless. The president is a bully to his core, always demanding more.

But if you take the governor at his word, and his actions weren’t meant as appeasement, what he did was bad nonetheless. He emulated one of Trump’s worst habits, short-circuiting a well-established, independent process by substituting his own headstrong judgment.

Pride, the saying goes, comes before a fall. In Polis’ case, so does arrogance.

SACRAMENTO — Human rights advocates on Tuesday rallied outside the state Capitol to push back on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed budget plan to reduce state-sponsored healthcare coverage for undocumented immigrants.

“We are here to demand a budget that protects California’s values,” said Kiran Savage-Sangwan, executive director of California Pan-Ethnic Health Network. “We are fighting for a budget that rejects Medi-Cal cuts, seeks new revenues and strengthens our safety net reserve to keep families whole.”

Newsom last week unveiled his revised budget proposal, which would further move away from his previous policy to provide free healthcare coverage to all low-income undocumented immigrants.

His proposal would require monthly premiums for undocumented immigrants receiving coverage from Medi-Cal, the state’s version of the federal Medicaid program. It would also continue to block new adult applications, a cutback imposed last year.

The governor has explained that his original policy was more costly than expected and that difficult decisions must be made as the state could soon face an economic downturn.

Speakers at Tuesday’s rally argued this was unacceptable.

The cuts would force many immigrants to choose between putting food on the table or visiting a doctor, said Savage-Sangwan. She said certain groups, including refugees, older adults and those with disabilities, would be left especially vulnerable.

“These are the kinds of actions we would expect from a federal government that scapegoats immigrants and sends violent ICE forces to terrorize our community,” she said. “Instead, these proposals were made by our own governor in a state that claims to value immigrant communities. We know California is better than this.”

The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment about the rally.

The event drew about 100 attendees, including Anahi Araiza, a policy researcher with Imperial Valley Equity and Justice. She told The Times that many immigrants in their community struggle to afford medical care and subsequently put off doctor visits.

“They wait until it’s an absolute emergency,” she said. “We’ve heard stories where people delay care and then get diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer.”

The event was supported by several organizations, including California Pan-Ethnic Health Network, Survivors of Torture International, Communities Organized for Relational Power in Action, Health4All Coalition, and Organizing Rooted in Abolition, Liberation and Empowerment.

One man carried a large sign with an image of the Virgin Mary that read “Safety Net For All.” Other marchers donned flowing monarch butterfly wings. The orange-and-black insect became a symbol for the pro-migrant movement years ago because it travels long distances between Mexico and the United States.

Meanwhile, another group gathered outside the Capitol for a news conference to raise awareness about the instability caused by federal healthcare cuts.

Assemblymembers Patrick Ahrens (D-Sunnyvale), Robert Garcia (D-Rancho Cucamonga) and Tina S. McKinnor (D-Hawthorne) joined several doctors and nurses to call for a $500-million state investment into public hospitals.

“Public hospitals are the backbone of our healthcare system,” Ahrens said. “It is estimated that federal cuts will strip over $3 billion a year from the California public hospital system — we cannot balance our budget on the backs of the most vulnerable Californians.”

The Republican-backed “Big Beautiful Bill” signed by President Trump last year shifted federal funding away from safety-net programs and toward tax cuts and immigration enforcement. During a legislative hearing this year, healthcare professionals warned state lawmakers the cuts would harm all patients, including those with private insurance.

Nearly three months after the United States and Israel launched their large-scale bombing campaign against Iran and about six weeks since the April 8 ceasefire took effect, President Trump faces an inflection point. Does he return to war? Maintain the ceasefire and U.S. blockade on Iranian ports in the hope of cutting a deal on American terms? Or drop his maximalist negotiating stance?

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), an informal foreign policy advisor for the White House, continues to press for more aggressive U.S. military action. Trump’s political advisors would prefer that the war end as soon as possible to minimize political repercussions against the Republican Party in a midterm election year.

Trump seems conflicted. Despite weeks of U.S. bombardment and an ongoing naval blockade, Tehran is as protective of its nuclear program today as it was before the war began. “For Iran, the Clock is Ticking, and they better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them,” Trump wrote on Truth Social over the weekend. A day later, Trump took to the social media platform again to announce he suspended planned U.S. attacks on Iran to give talks more time.

Unfortunately for Trump, he’s proved to be his own worst enemy on this subject. Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium and Tehran’s effective control of the Strait of Hormuz, the regime’s two biggest cards, are a byproduct of Trump’s own policy decisions.

The first is a clear indictment of Trump’s first-term order to withdraw the United States from the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a highly technical accord that put Iran’s nuclear work in a box by restricting the number and quality of centrifuges it could use, capped the amount of enriched uranium it could produce and compelled Tehran to ship 97% of its stockpile out of the country. When the Trump administration scrapped that hard-won deal, Iran responded by enriching more nuclear material at a faster pace and accumulating the very stockpile the Trump administration is now seeking to neutralize.

The Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s second card, would not even be an issue today if the Trump administration had refrained from going to war in the first place. On Feb. 27, the day before the conflict began, more than 150 tankers and vessels traveled through the strait. The international waterway was open for business.

Not so today. On Thursday, a grand total of three crossings were registered in the waterway. This collapse of commerce is a consequence of Iran’s ability to harass civilian tankers so much that shipping companies no longer view the journey as worth the cost. As Adm. Brad Cooper, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday: “The Iranian capability to stop commerce has been dramatically depleted through the strait, but their voice is very loud. And those threats are clearly heard by the merchant industry and insurance industry.”

By virtue of his own actions, Trump is now left with a series of policy options that range from least bad to terrible. None of them are ideal, and all of them carry some risk.

For starters, Trump could resume the war. Any renewed U.S. bombing campaign would probably expand the U.S. military’s original set of targets to include a portion of Iran’s energy infrastructure, which Trump has threatened repeatedly to hit. A U.S. invasion of Kharg Island, where 90% of Iran’s oil processing takes place, might also be up for discussion. The aim would be to destroy Iran’s remaining military capabilities and further squeeze its oil revenue until Tehran’s strategic calculus on the war shifts to Washington’s liking.

Yet there are no guarantees that doubling down on military force will work. Trump’s entire strategy has relied on a baseline assumption: The more punitive the United States is, the more likely Tehran will be to cave. Yet that simply hasn’t occurred. If anything, Iran is more dug in now than it was in the opening days of the conflict. For the regime, capitulating to Trump is as dangerous as losing the war. Why would more bombing succeed where previous bombing failed?

The risks of additional U.S. military action are considerable as well. Before the ceasefire, Iran was launching ballistic missiles and attack drones across multiple gulf Arab states, hitting Qatar’s largest natural gas processing facility, Saudi Arabia’s east-west oil pipeline and Dubai’s luxurious high-rises. As the Iranians have stated, such attacks will not only resume if Trump orders a resumption of the war but will expand to new targets, including desalination facilities and nuclear power plants. Such strikes would raise global oil and gas prices to even more absurd levels, adding to the extra $40 billion the American people are already paying for fuel since the war began.

What about continuing the status quo? While this contingency would be less costly than another round of bombing or a U.S. ground invasion, it’s unclear whether it would help or hurt negotiations toward a settlement. There’s a possibility that extending the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports could merely reaffirm the regime’s earlier decision to preserve its own shutdown of the strait. Iran is now urging Washington to end its blockade before talks on the nuclear file can be held. And it’s a mystery whether Trump’s blockade is working anyway; the U.S. intelligence community assesses that Iran could withstand this pressure point for three to four more months, which may be too long for Trump to sustain given the oil disruptions that are bound to get worse.

Striking an agreement to end the war, return the strait to open traffic and restrict Iran’s nuclear program would be the most beneficial policy for the United States with the least amount of cost attached — not quite undoing the harm from Trump’s first-term decision to scrap the nuclear deal and his second-term decision to start a war. U.S. and Iranian negotiators are passing proposals back and forth as we speak. But as of now, Trump can’t stomach agreeing to a deal that covers some of Iran’s terms, including but not limited to a shorter suspension of enriched uranium and some kind of Iranian role in the management of the strait. Even if Trump did reassess his position, he would be forced to confront the hawks in his political coalition who would consider anything short of Iran’s total surrender a failure.

In short, Trump is in an unenviable position. He’s got nobody to blame but himself.

Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist.

Immediately after Proposition 8 passed, many who supported same-sex marriage tried to make sense of the results. A set of assumptions gained wide acceptance. Some are correct. Most, however, are just plain wrong. And it’s crucial that we know what happened in the last election before launching another attempt to legalize marriage for all.

I recently headed a team that analyzed data from polls conducted by the No on 8 campaign during the run-up to the election. Our analysis sheds new light on what fueled the Proposition 8 victory.

One big question after the election: Who moved? Six weeks before the vote, Proposition 8 was too close to call. But in the final weeks, supporters pulled ahead, and by election day, the outcome was all but certain.

After the election, a misleading finding from exit polls led many to blame African Americans for the loss. But in our new analysis, it appears that African Americans’ views were relatively stable. True, a majority of African Americans opposed same-sex marriage, but that was true at the beginning and at the end of the campaign; few changed their minds in the closing weeks.

The shift, it turns out, was greatest among parents with children under 18 living at home — many of them white Democrats.

The numbers are staggering. In the last six weeks, when both sides saturated the airwaves with television ads, more than 687,000 voters changed their minds and decided to oppose same-sex marriage. More than 500,000 of those, the data suggest, were parents with children under 18 living at home. Because the proposition passed by 600,000 votes, this shift alone more than handed victory to proponents.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise. The Yes on 8 campaign targeted parents in its TV ads. “Mom! Guess what I learned in school today!” were the cheery-frightening first words of the supporters’ most-broadcast ad. They emerged from the mouth of a young girl who had supposedly just learned that she could marry a female when she grew up.

Among the array of untrue ideas that parents could easily take away: that impressionable kids would be indoctrinated; that they would learn about gay sex; that they would be more likely to become gay; and that they might choose to be gay. California voters, depending on where they lived in the state, were exposed to the Yes on 8 ads 20 to 40 times.

The lesson: It’s not enough to make the case for same-sex marriage. It’s also important to arm voters — particularly parents — against an inevitable propaganda attack. And it’s crucial to rebut lies so parents don’t panic.

Another misconception was that those who voted for Proposition 8 were motivated by hate. This does not describe most of the 687,000 who changed their minds in the closing weeks. After all, they supported same-sex marriage before the opposition peeled them away. Yes, they turned out to be susceptible to an appeal based on anti-gay prejudice. But they were frightened by misinformation. No on 8’s one TV ad that directly responded to the fear-mongering helped assuage some of the fear, but it was too little, too late.

One final false assumption by same-sex marriage supporters was that the election was so close that it will be easy to pass same-sex marriage the next time out.

It’s true that the official election results — 52% to 48% — appeared quite close. But the truth is more complicated. The data we analyzed show that the No on 8 campaign benefitted from voter confusion.

Polling suggests that half a million people who opposed same-sex marriage mistakenly voted against the proposition. They were confused by the idea that a “no” vote was actually a vote for gay marriage. This “wrong-way voting” affected both sides, but overwhelmingly it helped the “no” side. Our analysis suggests that the division among California voters on same-sex marriage at the time of Proposition 8 was actually 54% to 46% — not so close. We are actually 1 million votes away from being able to reverse Proposition 8.

This analysis makes absolutely clear that supporters of same-sex marriage have a lot of work to do before we return to the ballot. But that work is already underway, and now real knowledge can underpin our efforts.

David Fleischer heads the LGBT mentoring project, which is now part of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center’s new leadership program Learn Act Build. The project’s full report and data can be viewed at prop8report.org.

WASHINGTON — Shouting over the banging and clanging sounds from heavy construction equipment, President Trump on Tuesday gave a group of reporters a closer look at the construction for the White House ballroom he’s building on the site of the former East Wing to mount a defense for the project that has hit a speed bump in Congress.

The administration has asked for $1 billion from taxpayers for security additions on the White House campus, including for the ballroom. But the Senate parliamentarian ruled the proposal could not be included in a bill to fund immigrant enforcement agencies for three years, and several Republican lawmakers have balked at the price tag in an election year where voters are grappling with gasoline, grocery and other prices spurred to new heights by the Iran war and the disruption in oil supplies.

So Trump, ever the pitchman, surprised White House reporters by bringing them to a platform overlooking the construction site on a hot and breezy morning as workers in hard hats and fluorescent yellow vests milled about below.

Easels were set up to display renderings of the ballroom building and at least one of them blew off in the wind. “Give that to me, I’ll hold it,” Trump told an assistant.

“There will never be another building like this built, that I can tell you,” Trump told reporters.

He highlighted the security aspects of the building, notably its “dead flat” roof made of “very strong steel” and said it is “drone-proof” because “if a drone hits it, it bounces off, it won’t have any impact — but it’s also meant as a drone port, so it protects all of Washington, the roof of the building.”

He said the military will “stay on it” to keep watch over the city.

There’s no air conditioning or other equipment on the roof for safety reasons, Trump said, explaining that all duct work and equipment like it was hidden within the walls of the complex, which will serve as a “shield” for a military hospital, research facilities, offices for the first lady and her staff, and a full-service kitchen — in addition to a ballroom big enough for 1,000 people.

He said the ballroom building goes down six stories underground and is really “complex” because “everything is intertwined.”

“The roof goes with the ground floor, the ground floor goes with the roof. The roof also goes down into the basement,” the president said. “This is one well-knit building. One thing doesn’t work without the other.”

Trump says the ballroom is a ‘gift’ to the country

He reiterated that the $400-million ballroom cost will be covered by donors, including him, and that the work is being done “in strict coordination” with the military and U.S. Secret Service.

“This is not going to be paid for by the taxpayer,” Trump said. “This is a gift to the United States of America.”

But it’s somewhat of an unwanted present as polling shows most Americans oppose the ballroom, which is embroiled in litigation in federal court. A Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted in April found that a majority, 56%, of U.S. adults oppose Trump’s decision to tear down the East Wing to make way for the ballroom, while only 28% are in support.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation sued to halt construction until Congress approves plans for the building.

Trump insisted he will have “very little” time to use the ballroom. He recently announced that it will be ready in September 2028, less than six months before his term ends.

“This is really for other presidents,” he said.

Trump sidestepped a question about whether he’ll kick in any more of his own money if Congress rejects the $1-billion funding request.

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said Trump’s tour was not in response to the difficulties brewing in Congress. “President Trump is the most transparent president of all time and was excited to showcase to the press and American people the amazing gift he is giving to the White House and generations of future presidents to come,” Ingle said.

Trump also touched on some of the other beautification projects he’s undertaking across the city, such as restarting dormant park fountains. He claimed to be spending much less to clean up the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool than did his immediate predecessors — both Democrats.

“I’m doing a job on the Reflecting Lake for a fraction of what they paid,” Trump said. He’s having the surface coated in a shade of blue and wants to reopen it by July 4. A separate nonprofit group, the Cultural Landscape Foundation, has sued to halt this project.

Superville writes for the Associated Press.

California and a coalition of other Democratic-led states are suing the Trump administration over new limits on federal borrowing by aspiring nurses, physician’s assistants, therapists, social workers, mental health practitioners and other healthcare workers, arguing the changes will further reduce a struggling but vital workforce.

“This case is about protecting access to education, protecting our healthcare workforce, and protecting patients who rely on these providers every single day,” California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said during a virtual news conference Tuesday. “The Trump administration is going out of its way to make it harder and more expensive for students to pursue the advanced degrees necessary to serve their communities and pursue meaningful careers that allow them to support themselves and their families.”

Bonta said the new limits on loans sought by nursing and other healthcare students — which the U.S. Department of Education initiated in response to Republicans passing broader student loan caps as part of last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act — was an illegal overreach by the agency that was “deeply shortsighted” and went beyond the scope of the legislation.

“Congress can act,” he said. “But what the Department of Education can’t do is — contrary to law and in an arbitrary and capricious way and in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act — redefine what a professional student is.”

In response to the litigation, Trump administration officials defended the new rules, saying they will help student borrowers in the long run by driving down schooling costs at universities nationwide and preventing them from taking on too much debt.

“After decades of unchecked student loan borrowing that gave schools no reason to control costs, these commonsense loan caps — created by Congress — are already incentivizing colleges and universities to lower tuition,” Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent said in a statement to The Times.

Kent said Bonta and his fellow Democratic litigants “are more concerned about institutions’ bottom-line [than] American students and families’ ability to access affordable postsecondary education.” As one example of institutions responding to loan caps by lowering costs, Kent pointed to UC Irvine reducing the costs of its master’s in business programs by up to 38% to keep them below a federal loan cap for such programs.

The One Big Beautiful Bill, passed by Congress in July 2025, placed new limits on student loans, which could previously be sought for the full cost of such degrees. Starting this July, applicants categorized as “graduate students” will be capped at borrowing $20,500 per year and $100,000 in total, while applicants categorized as “professional students” will be allowed to borrow up to $50,000 annually and $200,000 in total.

On May 1, the U.S. Department of Education issued a new rule defining the “professional student” category as including those pursuing degrees to become doctors, pharmacists, dentists, veterinarians, lawyers, various medical specialists, pastors and other religious academics, and excluding those pursuing nursing and other advanced healthcare degrees.

In announcing the change, Kent said it would “simplify our complex student loan repayment system and better align higher education with workforce needs,” “drive a sea change in higher education by holding universities accountable for outcomes and putting significant downward pressure on the cost of tuition,” and “benefit borrowers who will no longer be pushed into insurmountable debt to finance degrees that do not pay off.”

Others fiercely disagreed, including healthcare industry leaders who also had objected to the rule change during a public comment period. Some said the changes would simply increase student reliance on less favorable, private-sector loans.

The American Assn. of Colleges of Nursing, in a statement, said it and its members were “angered by the Department of Education’s failure to support the nursing profession as the demand for patient care services rises.”

Nearly 150 members of Congress — including more than a dozen Republicans — wrote a letter the day after the rule was promulgated expressing “disappointment” over the exclusion of post-baccalaureate nursing degrees.

“At a time when our nation is facing a health care shortage, especially in primary care, now is not the time to cut off the student pipeline to these programs,” the lawmakers argued.

Rachel Zaentz, a spokesperson for the University of California, which is not party to the lawsuit but operates a vast network of public health programs, said in a statement Tuesday that UC “strongly opposed” the administration’s new caps on federal loans for nurses and other health professionals, which she said “will be felt most strongly by lower-income graduate students.”

“UC will continue to do all we can to ensure that cost is not a barrier for anyone who wants to pursue higher education, and we will continue to advocate with our federal partners for the programs and policies that make this possible,” Zaentz said.

Bonta rejected the administration’s argument that the new caps would help students pursuing a dream of a medical career avoid taking on too much debt — calling it “tone deaf.” He said those students are already “struggling with all costs right now” thanks to the Trump administration’s tariffs, war in Iran and lax approach to regulating monopolies and other big business.

He also rejected the idea that the new loan caps would force institutions to reduce costs for students, calling that “wishful thinking.”

The lawsuit is the 68th filed by Bonta’s office against the second Trump administration. Joining Bonta in the lawsuit — which was filed in the U.S. District Court in Maryland — were the attorneys general of Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, as well as the governors of Kentucky and Pennsylvania.

Times staff writer Jaweed Kaleem contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — The Senate advanced legislation Tuesday that seeks to force President Donald Trump to withdraw from the Iran war, as a growing number of Republicans defied the president’s wishes.

Since Trump ordered the attack on Iran at the end of February, Democrats have forced repeated votes on war powers resolutions that would require him to either gain congressional approval for the war or withdraw troops. Republicans had been able to muster the votes to reject those proposals, but Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy — fresh off a primary election loss in which Trump endorsed his opponent — switched sides to deliver a crucial vote to pass the legislation.

The 50-47 vote tally demonstrated the small but crucial number of Republicans voting to halt the war with Iran. The legislation will get a vote on final passage, but the timing was not immediately clear.

Republican Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska had all previously voted for similar war powers resolutions and did so again Tuesday. Cassidy voted for the legislation for the first time.

After his primary election loss last week, Cassidy returned to Washington saying that he was proud of his work to uphold the Constitution and would carefully consider how he would vote on several priorities of the Trump administration.

Groves writes for the Associated Press.

A $30 minimum wage for hotel and airport workers will be delayed after Los Angeles elected officials persuaded a group of business leaders to drop a ballot measure that would have devastated the city budget.

On Tuesday, the City Council approved the 18-month delay, which will postpone the wage increase until after the 2028 Olympics and fend off the business-backed initiative to eliminate the gross receipts tax, which is the city’s second-largest revenue stream.

The minimum wage will still increase to $25 in July and continue in increments until reaching $30 in January 2030.

Because the 11 to 4 vote was not unanimous, the new pay schedule will head to a second vote next week. Councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez, Ysabel Jurado, Nithya Raman and Hugo Soto-Martínez cast the “no” votes.

In May 2025, the council approved a proposal that would have increased the minimum wage to $30 in July 2028 and also raised an hourly payment for healthcare coverage.

In response, a coalition of airline and hotel businesses gathered enough signatures to place a measure on the Nov. 3 ballot that took aim at the city’s gross receipts tax, which is imposed on a vast array of businesses, including entertainment companies, child-care providers, law firms, accountants, healthcare businesses, nightclubs and many others.

If approved by voters, the measure would have stripped $740 million from the city’s general fund over the first year, according to city officials, and over five years would have amounted to a $860 million loss annually on average.

City officials, hotel and airport businesses and labor unions had been in continuous negotiations since last Wednesday, when the council narrowly approved an initial postponement of the wage increase to allow time to reach an agreement. The business coalition agreed to withdraw the measure if the council permanently approved the delay.

In addition to delaying the $30 minimum wage, the council on Tuesday pushed back the hourly healthcare payment to start at $8.15 an hour for airport workers in July 2027 and $4.25 for hotel workers July 1 of this year.

The council also voted to set up a committee to study possible changes to the business tax structure.

“Imposing wages and benefits without bringing business to the table is not reasonable,” said Nella McOsker, president and CEO of the downtown business group Central City Assn., at the council meeting. “It is reasonable to ask us to partner together to be on the other side of the table and negotiate, but it is not OK to do so without that process.”

Kurt Petersen, president of Unite Here Local 11, which represents the hotel workers, accused city officials of giving “into blackmail.”

“They now have a playbook. The next time workers win something, they’ll threaten to blow up the city,” Petersen said of the business coalition. “It’s a bad day for workers.”

Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson described the process as painful but nearing a conclusion.

“I think we walked away from the negotiating table, like many negotiating tables, where no one was happy about the outcome, but everybody came away better than when we started off,” he said.

Shortly before the council vote, Mayor Karen Bass issued a statement that said she was called in by both business and labor leaders to close the deal.

She called the proposed repeal of the gross receipts tax “an existential threat to the city budget and the services it supports,” including street repairs, public safety and efforts to clean the city.

“This agreement ensures workers are paid fairly and that businesses that create jobs can continue serving LA and hiring Angelenos,” Bass said.

On Tuesday, the council chamber was filled with union workers in red, purple and yellow shirts.

Laura Esquivel, a janitor at Los Angeles International Airport, expressed frustration that council members were not standing by their earlier commitment.

“We’re sick and tired of being exploited. Some members of the council that are here, now we know, do not stand with workers,” Esquivel said. “We are not giving up, we will continue to fight and we’ll be back here in 2028.”

Before voting against the delay, Soto-Martínez, a former Unite Here organizer, called it sad and enraging.

“I cannot support anything that is going to take away money from workers,” he said.

Councilmember Imelda Padilla, who spoke in Spanish, was critical of the way the negotiations unfolded.

“If this thing about the gross tax receipts passes, we don’t have a city,” Padilla said. “The business community has us by our necks.”

She said workers deserve the wage increase, though she voted for the delay.

“Next time, let’s negotiate, and let’s negotiate well,” she said.

Times staff writer Suhauna Hussain contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — In the latest escalation of a fight over the use of paid social media creators, Tom Steyer’s campaign for governor filed a complaint Tuesday accusing influencers who posted content supportive of Xavier Becerra’s campaign of failing to disclose that they had been paid, which is required by California law.

The complaint, filed with California’s Fair Political Practices Commission, accuses Jay Gonzalez of producing at least 14 pro-Becerra posts on Instagram and Facebook in late April and early May, after he was hired by the campaign, and only belatedly editing the posts to acknowledge they had been sponsored by the campaign.

The complaint also said that a social media creator named Maggie Reed, who posts under the username mermaidmamamaggie, created four pro-Becerra posts on Instagram and had previously offered to create paid posts for another gubernatorial campaign, though the complaint doesn’t specify how the campaign knows Reed was paid.

Reed and a talent agency that represents her did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Becerra campaign maintained that it has not paid influencers who have created posts in support of the campaign.

“All of the content you see online is entirely and purely organic,” said Becerra spokesman Jonathan Underland.

Becerra and Steyer have been the top two Democratic candidates in recent polling for the governor’s race, with Becerra consistently maintaining a slight edge in those polls.

The complaint by Steyer’s campaign comes after two influencers who support Becerra filed a complaint last week accusing social media creators hired by the Steyer campaign of failing to disclose that they had been paid to produce their posts.

The campaign of the billionaire candidate for governor had previously disclosed payments to some influencers with large audiences, including one creator with the user name zayydante, who has 1.8 million followers on TikTok, and another with the user name littleyeg, who has nearly 350,000 followers on TikTok. The complaint filed last week said that both of these influencers failed to disclose that they had been paid by the campaign to produce content.

The complaint also highlighted several accounts created by user who don’t appear to live in California who created posts promoting Steyer and, in at least one case, posted elsewhere that they had been paid by the campaign.

The influencers who filed the original complaint said they saw the newly filed complaint as an attempt by Steyer’s campaign to deflect criticism.

“All he’s done is attack his opponent instead of taking accountability for violating the law,” said Kaitlyn Hennessy, one of the two influencers who filed the complaint against Steyer’s campaign. Hennessy and the other influencer who filed the complaint both said they have not been paid by the Becerra campaign.

In a post on Substack, Steyer defended his campaign’s use of paid social media influencers and said that it had been transparent about their use.

“Every creator we compensate has been and will be publicly disclosed as required by law,” he wrote.

Under a California law passed in 2023, social media creators who create paid content on behalf of a political campaign are required to disclose in their post that the material was sponsored and who paid for it.

The onus is on creators to provide the disclosure, but campaigns are required to notify influencers they hire of the requirement.

Violation of the rules doesn’t trigger criminal, civil or administrative penalties but the FPPC can take alleged offenders to court and ask a judge to force compliance with the law.