In a livestream with xAI colleagues, the billionaire entrepreneur described current AI systems as “primitive” and not for “serious” commercial use.

/May 30, 2025/4:28 p.m. ETTrump Attacks Harvard With Social Media Screening for All VisasThis pilot program will soon be expanded across the country.Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesThe Trump administration has begun carrying out its expanded vetting for student visa applicants, surveilling their social media accounts to make sure they aren’t posting anything in support of Palestine, which the administration considers antisemitic. This vetting will start with Harvard visa applicants but is expected to be adopted nationwide.Secretary of Stato Marco Rubio sent a cable to all U.S. embassies and consulates on Thursday ordering them to “conduct a complete screening of the online presence of any nonimmigrant visa applicant seeking to travel to Harvard University for any purpose.” That would apply not just to students but also to faculty, staff, and researchers visiting the university.The Trump administration is taking particular interest in people who have their social media accounts on “private,” an obvious, ominous crossing of boundaries.The State Department has ordered officers to examine “whether the lack of any online presence, or having social media accounts restricted to ‘private’ or with limited visibility, may be reflective of evasiveness and call into question the applicant’s credibility.”This is yet another instance of Harvard serving as a test subject for the administration’s larger crackdown on free speech and international students at American universities. Trump has already revoked billions of dollars in research funding from the Massachusetts school, and even banned it from admitting any international students at all, although the latter policy was temporarily revoked by a judge. Most Recent Post/May 30, 2025/3:53 p.m. ETStephen Miller Grilled on Musk’s Drug Use as Wife Lands New GigTrump’s chief adviser seems desperate to avoid questions on Elon Musk. Does that have anything to do with his wife’s new job? Francis Chung/Politico/Bloomberg/Getty ImagesStephen Miller had a dismissive response Friday to new reports of Elon Musk’s drug use during Trump’s campaign last year. CNN’s Pamela Brown asked the far-right Trump adviser if there was “any drug testing or requests for him to drug test when he was in the White House given the fact that he was also a contractor with the government.”  A chuckling Miller ignored the question and said, “Fortunately for you and all of the friends at CNN, you’ll have the opportunity to ask Elon all the questions you want today yourself,” before he then segued into the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda. “The drugs I’m concerned about are the drugs that are coming across the border from the criminal cartels that are killing hundreds of thousands of Americans,” Miller said. Perhaps Miller laughed instead of answering because his wife, Katie Miller, has left her job as adviser and spokesperson for the Department of Government Efficiency to work full-time for Musk and his companies. Miller has probably had enough of Musk, as he has also been subtweeting the tech oligarch, trying to refute Musk’s criticisms that the Republican budget bill would raise the deficit. “The Big Beautiful Bill is NOT an annual budget bill and does not fund the departments of government. It does not finance our agencies or federal programs,” Miller said, in a long X post earlier this week. Is there bad blood between Miller and Musk that has now spiraled because Miller’s wife is working for the tech oligarch and fellow fascism enthusiast? Most Recent Post/May 30, 2025/3:19 p.m. ETOld Man Trump Repeatedly Fumbles in Weird Speech Praising Elon MuskDonald Trump couldn’t keep some of his words straight as he marked the supposed end of Elon Musk’s tenure at the White House.Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImagesHours after reports emerged Friday that Elon Musk had been under the influence of heavy drugs during his time advising the president, Musk and Donald Trump stumbled and fumbled their way through a White House press conference recognizing the end of the tech billionaire’s special government employee status.The wildly unusual joint conference featured Musk’s black eye, a giant gold key that Trump said he only gives to “very special people,” cringe-worthy regurgitations by Musk of Trump’s take on his Pulitzer Board defamation suit, and claims that Musk’s unpopular and controversial time in the White House was not quite over.But as Trump continued to praise Musk and his time atop the Department of Government Efficiency, the president’s verbal gaffes became more apparent. He claimed that DOGE had uncovered $42 million in wasteful spending, referring to expenditures related to Uganda, which Trump pronounced as “oo-ganda.” The 78-year-old also mentioned he would have Musk’s DOGE cuts “cauterized by Congress,” though he quickly corrected himself by saying they would be “affirmed by Congress,” instead. Trump’s on-camera slippage has gotten worse in recent weeks: Earlier this month, Trump dozed off while in a meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. That is despite the fact that the president received a clean bill of health in a medical report released in April that described Trump as being in “excellent health,” including neurological functioning.Musk, meanwhile, refused to acknowledge emerging reports of his alleged drug use. But the news of White House drug use under Trump’s helm is nothing new: In fact, if the reports prove true, it would be little more than a return to form. Last year, a report by the Department of Defense inspector general indicated that the West Wing operated more like a pill mill than the nation’s highest office. Common pills included modafinil, Adderall, fentanyl, morphine, and ketamine, according to the Pentagon report. But other, unlisted drugs—like Xanax—were equally easy to come by from the White House Medical Unit, according to anonymous sources that spoke to Rolling Stone.While other presidents were known to take a mix of drug cocktails to fight off back pain (like JFK) or bad moods (like Nixon), no previous administrations matched the level of debauchery of Trump’s, whose in-office pharmacists unquestioningly handed out highly addictive substances to staffers who needed pick-me-ups or energy boosts—no doctor’s exam, referral, or prescription required.“It was kind of like the Wild West. Things were pretty loose. Whatever someone needs, we were going to fill this,” another source told Rolling Stone in March 2024.Meanwhile, pharmacists described an atmosphere of fear within the West Wing, claiming they would be “fired” if they spoke out or would receive negative work assignments if they didn’t hand pills over to staffers.Read more about the press conference:Trump and Elon Musk Have Ominous Warning About Future of DOGEMost Recent Post/May 30, 2025/3:00 p.m. ETElon Musk Gives Strange Excuse for Massive Black EyeMusk showed up a press conference with Donald Trump sporting a noticeable shiner.Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImagesElon Musk sported what looked like a black eye during his DOGE goodbye press conference with President Trump on Friday. When asked about it, he blamed the bruise on his 5-year-old son punching him in the face. “Mr. Musk … is your eye OK? What happened to your eye; I noticed there’s a bruise there?” one reporter finally asked near the end of the press conference.“Well, I wasn’t anywhere near France,” Musk said, in a weak attempt at a joke regarding footage of French President Emmanuel Macron’s wife slapping him in the face.“I was just horsing around with [my son] little X and said, ‘Go ’head and punch me in the face,’ and he did. Turns out even a 5-year-old punching you in the face actually does—”“That was X that did it? X could do it!” Trump chimed in. “If you knew X …”“I didn’t really feel much at the time; I guess it bruises up. But I was just messing around with the kids.”Musk chose an impeccable time to show up to a press conference with a black eye. Earlier in the day, The New York Times reported on Musk’s rampant drug use on and off the campaign trail, as the world’s richest man frequently mixed ketamine and psychedelics and kept a small box of pills, mostly containing Adderall. The shiner only adds to speculation around his personal habits.More on that Times report:Elon Musk Was on Crazy Combo of Drugs During Trump CampaignMost Recent Post/May 30, 2025/2:51 p.m. ETTrump and Elon Musk Have Ominous Warning About Future of DOGEElon Musk’s time as a government employee has come to an end, but his time with Donald Trump has not.Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImagesDespite the fanfare over Elon Musk’s supposed departure from the Department of Government Efficiency, Donald Trump says that the billionaire bureaucrat isn’t really going anywhere.“Many of the DOGE people are staying behind, so they’re not leaving. And Elon’s not really leaving. He’s gonna be back and forth, I think. I have a feeling. It’s his baby, and he’s gonna be doing a lot of things,” Trump said during a press conference in the Oval Office Friday.The press conference was held to mark the end of Musk’s time as a so-called “special government employee,” a title that allowed him to bypass certain ethics requirements during his 134-day stint in Trump’s administration. The president made sure to give Musk a gaudy golden key—what it actually unlocks went totally unaddressed—to make sure he could get back into the White House. “This is not the end of DOGE, but really the beginning,” Musk said, promising that DOGE’s “influence” would “only grow stronger” over time.Earlier Friday, the billionaire bureaucrat shared a post on X asserting that the legacy of DOGE was more psychological than anything else. Surely, it will take longer than four months to forget the image of Musk running around with a chainsaw. Read more about Musk:Elon Musk Was on Crazy Combo of Drugs During Trump CampaignMost Recent Post/May 30, 2025/1:21 p.m. ETDem Governor Vetoes Ban on Surprise Ambulance Bills in Shocking MoveThe bill had unanimous support in both chambers of the state legislature.Michael Ciaglo/Getty ImagesColorado’s Democratic Governor Jared Polis has vetoed a bill that would ban surprise billing by ambulance companies, over the unanimous objections of both chambers of the state legislature. Why would Polis veto a bill that’s popular with everyone, even Colorado Republicans? The governor wrote in his veto statement that drafting errors in the bill made it “unimplementable” and estimated that it would make insurance premiums go up by as much as $0.73 to $2.15 per person. “I am committed to working with proponents and sponsors to protect Coloradans from surprise bills, but I encourage all parties to work towards a more reasonable reimbursement rate that mitigates premium impacts and nets a better deal for Colorado families,” Polis wrote. In Colorado, if legislators in both chambers repass the bill with a two-thirds majority, they can override the governor’s veto, especially considering that the bill passed with the support of every single legislator. But the legislature adjourned on May 7, meaning that the bill has to be passed again when the legislature reconvenes in January.  For some reason, ending surprise ambulance billing nationally is not the slam-dunk issue it should be. Congress ended most surprise medical bills in 2020 but exempted ground ambulances from the bill. Was Polis’s veto due to badly drafted language and a (seemingly modest) price hike in insurance premiums, as he said, or was it for a different, more nefarious reason? We might not know unless and until the bill is reintroduced next year. More on surprise ambulance bills:Congress Doesn’t Care About Your Surprise Ambulance Bill Most Recent Post/May 30, 2025/12:21 p.m. ETTrump’s Pardons Since Jan 6 Spree Show an Infuriatingly Corrupt TrendSince his January 6 pardon spree, Donald Trump has tended to grant clemency a little closer to home.Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty ImagesA good chunk of the white-collar criminals pardoned by Donald Trump after his massive “Day One” pardoning spree either have a political or financial tie to him.The president has issued 60 pardons since he offered political forgiveness to some 1,600 individuals charged in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. But out of those subsequent 60 unrelated to the attack, 12 people—or roughly one in five—were already in Trump’s orbit, according to ABC News.They included several politicos, including former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who was convicted on several counts of corruption, including for an attempt to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat after he left the position for the White House; former Republican Representative Michael Grimm, who pleaded guilty to tax fraud; former Nevada gubernatorial candidate Michele Fiore, who allegedly stole public funds intended to commemorate a slain police officer; and former Tennessee state Senator Brian Kelsey, who pleaded guilty to campaign finance fraud in 2022.Trump also pardoned major financiers of his presidential campaigns. Trevor Milton, the founder of the Nikola electric vehicle company, donated nearly $2 million toward Trump’s 2024 campaign. Imaad Zuberi, who has donated to both parties, issued “at least $800,000 to committees associated with Trump and the Republican Party,” ABC reported.Others helped Trump advance his retribution campaign against his political enemies, or helped advance his own image in the broader Republican Party. Devon Archer and Jason Galanis, both former business partners of Hunter Biden, accused the younger Biden of leveraging his father’s name and influence in order to conduct business overseas. Archer had defrauded a Native American tribal entity, while Galanis was serving time for multiple offenses. Trump also forgave Todd and Julie Chrisley—reality TV stars known for their show Chrisley Knows Best who were sentenced to a combined 19 years on fraud and tax evasion charges—after their daughter Savannah Chrisley spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention.Speaking to press Friday after her parents’ release, Savannah Chrisley said that the “biggest misconception right now is I either paid for a pardon or slept for a pardon—,” but she couldn’t finish her sentence before Todd interjected: “That’s something I would have done,” he said.Read who else Trump is thinking of pardoning:Trump Considering Pardons for Men Who Tried to Kill Gretchen WhitmerMost Recent Post/May 30, 2025/12:04 p.m. ETTrump Knew He Was Deporting Innocent People to El Salvador All AlongMany of the people deported to El Salvador have no criminal record, and Donald Trump knew it.Michael M. Santiago/Getty ImagesDonald Trump’s administration was well aware that many of the 238 Venezuelan immigrants it shipped off to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador had no criminal records at all, according to a Friday report from ProPublica.  While Trump officials claimed that the deportees were brutal gang members and “the worst of the worst,” only 32 of the deportees had actually been convicted of crimes, and most of them were minor offenses such as traffic violations, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security reviewed by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune, and a team of journalists from Venezuelan media outlets. One of the men, 23-year-old Maikol Gabriel López Lizano, faced a misdemeanor charge after he was arrested in 2023 for riding his bike and drinking a can of beer.Little more than half of the deportees, 130 of the 238, were charged only with violating U.S. immigration laws. Twenty of them had criminal records from other countries. The U.S. government data showed that 67 individuals had pending charges, with only six being for violent crimes. In several cases, the government data about the pending charges differed from what ProPublica was able to find. In some cases, the men had actually been convicted, and in one, the charges had been dropped. But in many cases, these individuals were remanded to a foreign prison before their criminal cases were ever resolved. The Trump administration has touted allegations of gang affiliation as a justification for denying the deportees their due process rights. But none of the men’s names appeared on a list of roughly 1,400 alleged Tren de Aragua members kept by the Venezuelan government, ProPublica reported. Trump’s border czar Tom Homan tried desperately in March to downplay reporting that many of these individuals did not have criminal records. “A lot of gang members don’t have criminal histories, just like a lot of terrorists in this world, they’re not in any terrorist databases, right?” Homan said on ABC News. But the methods the government relies on to classify individuals as gang members—such as identification of gang-affiliated tattoos—have been disproven by experts. Not only were many of the men who were deported not proven gang members, they weren’t even criminals, and by denying them the right to due process, they were remanded to a foreign prison notorious for human rights abuses without ever getting to prove it. Trump has continued to pressure the Supreme Court to allow him to sidestep due process as part of his massive deportation campaign, claiming that the judiciary has no right to intrude on matters of “foreign policy.” But immigrants residing on U.S. soil—who are clearly not the bloodthirsty criminals the administration insists they are—are still subject to protections under U.S. law. Read more about the deportations:Trump Asks Supreme Court to Help Him Deport People Wherever He WantsMost Recent Post/May 30, 2025/11:41 a.m. ETJoni Ernst Stoops to Shocking Low When Told Medicaid Cuts Will KillSenator Joni Ernst had a disgusting answer when confronted by a constituent at her town hall about Trump’s budget bill.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesRepublican Senator Joni Ernst had a particularly unhinged response to questions from her constituents at a town hall in Parkersburg, Iowa, on Friday.Ernst was asked about the GOP’s budget bill kicking people off of Medicaid, and her condescending answer quickly became callous and flippant as the Iowa politician smirked at the audience.“When you are arguing about illegals that are receiving Medicaid, 1.4 million, they’re not eligible, so they will be coming off, so—” Ernst began, before an audience member shouted, “People are going to die!”“People are not—well, we all are going to die,” Ernst responded, as the audience drowned her in loud protests.What was Ernst thinking with that answer? Almost every Republican town hall this year has gone badly for the politician holding it, thanks to President Trump upending the federal government, and Ernst surely knew that choosing death over Medicaid wouldn’t go over well with the crowd. Earlier this week in Nebraska, Representative Mike Flood was heckled after he admitted that he didn’t read the budget bill.Ersnt’s town hall wasn’t even the first one in Iowa to go badly for a Republican. On Wednesday, Representative Ashley Hinson was met with jeers and boos, with audience members in Decorah, Iowa calling her a fraud and a liar. But at least Hinson had the good sense not to seemingly embrace death over a vital, lifesaving government program. More on Trump’s bill:Here Are the Worst Things in Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill Most Recent Post/May 30, 2025/11:35 a.m. ETKetanji Brown Jackson Blasts “Botched” Supreme Court Ruling on TPSSupreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a scathing disssent, called out the rest of the court for allowing Trump’s harmful executive order to stand.Anna Moneymaker/Getty ImagesSupreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson thinks the Supreme Court “botched” a decision to allow the Trump administration to revoke the Temporary Protected Status protections of about 500,000 Haitian, Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan immigrants.Jackson and fellow liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor were the only two dissenters.“The Court has plainly botched this assessment today. It requires next to nothing from the Government with respect to irreparable harm,” Jackson wrote in the dissent. “And it undervalues the devastating consequences of allowing the Government to precipitously upend the lives of and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.”TPS is a long-standing program that allowed those 500,000 immigrants to stay in the U.S. after they fled violence and risk in their home countries. After the Supreme Court’s ruling, all of them are at high risk of sudden deportation. “It is apparent that the government seeks a stay to enable it to inflict maximum predecision damage,” Jackson wrote.Read the full dissent here.View More Posts

Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) dean joined Alan Garber, the university’s president, in condemning the federal government earlier this week after it moved to block the university from being able to admit international students. GSD has a higher proportion of international students compared to the rest of the University’s student body, and Dean Sarah M. Whiting said international students are an integral part of the school. “I join President Garber in condemning the government’s illegal action against our school, and in affirming the immense value our international students bring to the GSD community,” Dean Sarah M. Whiting said in a note shared online Saturday. Whiting, who’s also a Josep Lluis Sert professor of architecture, said GSD is “one of the most international schools at Harvard” and that the school’s international makeup “goes back to the founding of the GSD.” Nearly a third of Harvard GSD students are international, which is higher than the 14% of international students who make up of the general student body at large, according to Peterson’s, an educational services company. Six of the school’s eight class of 2025 commencement marshals who represent their disciples at graduation are from outside the U.S. Whiting added that its international student body “is part of our DNA—our student body, our faculty, our staff, and the discipline and practice of design all thrive on this internationalism. The extraordinary breadth of experience and perspectives that the international members of our community provide is essential to who we are.” The school offers programs through its departments of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and design, design studies, and design engineering. A spokesperson from the school declined to comment for this piece. A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from rescinding Harvard’s ability to admit international students on Friday after the Department of Homeland Security revoked its Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification for admitting foreign students. Now, Trump is attempting to go after the university in other ways, including calls to redirect grants from the university to trade schools and no longer scheduling student visa appointments. Trump said Wednesday Harvard should have a cap of about 15% on international students and accused the university of being antisemitic and a “disaster.” Garber, the university president, told NPR Wednesday that Harvard should “stand firm” to its “commitment to the good of the nation” in the face of Trump’s retaliation over the private university’s policies around admissions, DEI programs, hiring, and international students.

On Wednesday evening, the American Jewish Committee held a reception at DC’s Capital Jewish Museum. The gathering, aimed at Jewish foreign policy professionals between the ages of 22 and 45, featured speakers from humanitarian groups. One such groups, IsraAID, said in a statement that the event “focused on bringing humanitarian aid to Gaza through Israeli-Palestinian and regional collaboration.”At around 9 pm, a gunman killed two attendees leaving the event. Their names were Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim: They were young people working at the Israeli Embassy and a couple planning to get married.Their murders were undoubtedly political. In video of the perpetrator’s arrest, he yells “free Palestine” — a slogan that eyewitnesses also heard him repeat after the killing. A manifesto, published on Twitter/X under the shooter’s name, lays out a clear motivation: punishing those he saw as complicit in Israel’s mass killing of the Palestinians.Reflecting on this sequence of events, it’s hard not to spiral into ever-greater depths of anger and despair. This is partly for personal reasons: I grew up Jewish in Washington, DC, and am the kind of young professional this event would be marketed to. But more fundamentally, it’s for political ones: these murders underscore how dangerous the current political moment is, and may materially make it worse.Wednesday was not the first time that a pro-Palestine activist in America attempted political murder. Last month, a man attempted to burn down the governor’s mansion in Pennsylvania in retaliation for, in the suspect’s words, “what [Governor Josh Shapiro] wants to do to the Palestinian people.”These events were not only predictable but predicted. Since October 7, 2023, prominent elements of the pro-Palestinian movement have glorified political violence. Though repeatedly warned that this was harmful, including by fellow critics of Israel’s war, this kind of talk became normalized — including in the sort of online left-wing social media spaces where the DC suspect apparently spent time. The vast majority of the pro-Palestine movement is peaceful, but the most radical subfaction created a climate where real-world violence might become more thinkable.“Fears of anti-Israel political violence on the left are real, and last night that threat became deadly,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, the leader of the pro-peace J Street activist group, said in an emailed statement. “We urge all those in the pro-Palestine movement to take stock of this moment and recognize the danger of extreme rhetoric as it hits the ears of unhinged individuals.”Moreover, the killing in DC actually endangers the chances for peace in Gaza — changing the domestic politics on Israel-Palestine in a way that decreases the chances of the US government reining in Israel even as it begins a nightmarishly violent offensive.“Every single act & word that can associate the Palestinian cause with terrorism, hatred & antisemitism is an act or word that hurts Palestinians in Washington, DC. [This] act of terrorism did all three,” writes Monica Marks, a professor of Middle East politics at NYU Abu Dhabi.There is no good here, no silver lining. Two young people were murdered in cold blood by an ideologue who convinced himself that murder, not democratic activism, is the right way to advocate for the downtrodden. He is not the first to do so — and the track record of those like him is bloody.How pro-Palestine extremists made violence more likelySince the October 7 attacks, a number of leading American pro-Palestine voices have publicly and loudly embraced violence.Students for Justice in Palestine, the national convening group for campus protests, described Hamas’s killings on October 7 as “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.” Within Our Lifetime, a New York-based activist group that embraces violence as a Palestinian tactic, uses similar language. University of Pennsylvania students chanted in support of Hamas’s military wing (“al-Qassam, make us proud, take another soldier down”). Prominent left-wing media figures compared October 7 to John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and valorized anti-Israel terrorist groups. Perhaps the most relevant case for current purposes is Khymani James, a Columbia student who served as a spokesperson for the campus protest group CUAD. James fantasized about going out and murdering “Zionists” — a loose label that could include, say, attendees at a Jewish networking group in DC. While CUAD initially condemned James, the group later reversed its stance and issued a statement calling for more violence.“We support liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance,” the group said. “In the face of violence from the oppressor equipped with the most lethal military force on the planet, where you’ve exhausted all peaceful means of resolution, violence is the only path forward.”I want to be clear: these extremists do not speak for the vast majority of pro-Palestinian activists and demonstrators. There have only been a handful of incidents of violence at pro-Palestine rallies in the United States since October 7; these examples of extreme rhetoric are not a justification for painting an entire movement with a broad brush. And yet, the fact that there are influential organizations and individuals talking like this matters. It creates a social and political climate where violence targeting American Jews becomes more likely, even if we cannot (and should not) draw a straight line between any one instance of extreme rhetoric and the violence on Wednesday.In trying to understand the role of violent ideology in inciting terrorism, scholars Donald Holbrook and John Horgan suggest thinking of ideas as fundamentally “social” things. Most people who come across radical ideologies online, even explicitly pro-violence ones, do not become terrorists. But when there are communities either online or in person that are seen as validating violence, individuals become more likely to escalate to real-world killing.This is part of why we saw a deadly wave of white nationalist violence in 2019. Even though each killer acted independently, the existence of online spaces valorizing their acts of violence creates incentives for more people to turn violent.“The sharing of ideas that convey an understanding of collective grievance, aspiration and a sense of community is relevant to terrorism in a variety of often interweaving ways. Perhaps the most obvious concerns ways in which ideological output legitimizes certain targets or methods employed through terrorist violence,” they write.The DC shooter says something similar in his alleged manifesto. He writes that violence would have been justified as far back as 11 years ago, during the 2014 Israel-Gaza war. However, he writes, there were not enough Americans who would have agreed with his actions to make it politically effective. In 2014, he wrote, people would think it simply insane; today, he thinks “there are many Americans” who will see the killings as “highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.”His expectations were not wrong. Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan, one of the most prominent pro-Palestine journalists in America, published a post condemning the DC shooting — only to face a wall of replies justifying the violence. (“The only good zionist is a dead Zionist” is but one of many examples.)The likely political consequences for Palestinians are disastrousMore broadly, there is good reason to believe that the evil in Washington is likely to abet Israel’s ongoing evil in Gaza.Israel has launched a new offensive in Gaza with a horrifying endgame: essentially, the full and complete ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. Yet the offensive is in its early days, and there is still time to prevent the worst-case outcome from coming true.A lot will depend on the political climate in the United States. As Israel’s chief weapons provider and patron, Washington has immense leverage to push Jerusalem to back down. The question is whether Trump cares enough to pick a fight with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Prior to the attack in DC, the two men were seemingly growing apart. Barak Ravid, Axios’s well-sourced Israel-Palestine correspondent, reports that Trump is increasingly “frustrated” with the ongoing Gaza war but still has not applied significant pressure on Netanyahu to back down.Now, however, the spotlight has been turned away from Gaza and back on the domestic American pro-Palestine movement — with much of the MAGA base seeing the Washington shooting as proof that the pro-Palestine left is indeed an internal enemy that deserves to be crushed. Andy McCarthy, a right-wing legal analyst at National Review, predicted a renewed crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech:I believe the consequences of these terrorist murders will include a stepping up of civil rights investigations of antisemitic violence and intimidation by the Justice Department, as well as a reaffirmation of the administration’s commitment to deport from the United States aliens — even legal aliens — who have participated in pro-Hamas agitation on American campuses and elsewhere.The political winds have shifted in a direction that makes the Trump administration less likely, not more likely, to confront Netanyahu.“Less than one full day ago the global news cycle, including Israeli newspapers, were focused on Israel terrorising foreign diplomats. Now a self-proclaimed ally’s act of terrorism shoots diplomats dead, shifts our focus & snatches that moral high ground away,” writes Marks, the NYU professor.It’s hard to say exactly how much the attack damages prospects for stopping Israel’s nightmare plan for Gaza. But we can be certain that it does not help.Much like the October 7 attacks themselves, the attack in DC is thus a double crime. It is an indefensible murder of innocents that also harmed the very people it claimed to be defending.See More: Politics