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Trump Grows Pissed at Tulsi Gabbard as Israel-Iran Conflict Worsens

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President Trump is reportedly furious with Tulsi Gabbard after the director of national intelligence posted a professionally produced, three-minute-long X video last week referencing past nuclear disasters. Gabbard’s post went mostly unnoticed at the time, but now seems like a clear rebuke of U.S. support for Israel’s war on Iran.

I recently visited Hiroshima, and stood at the epicenter of a city scarred by the unimaginable horror caused by a single nuclear bomb dropped in 1945. What I saw, the stories I heard, and the haunting sadness that remains, will stay with me forever. pic.twitter.com/TmxmxiGwnV

“As we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before, political elite warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers,” Gabbard says in the video as ominous music swells in the background. “And perhaps it’s because they are confident that they will have access to nuclear shelters for themselves and for their families that regular people won’t have access to. So it’s up to us, the people, to speak up and demand an end to this madness. We must reject this path to nuclear war and work toward a world where no one has to live in fear of a nuclear holocaust.”

The president was apparently not a fan of Gabbard’s unauthorized rebuke of the direction his administration was leaning on Israel, as multiple war hawks visited Trump just days before Gabbard posted the video.

“I don’t care what she said,” Trump stated on Tuesday when asked about Gabbard’s video on Air Force One. “I think they were very close to having a weapon.”

“I don’t think he dislikes Tulsi as a person.… But certainly the video made him not super hot on her … and he doesn’t like it when people are off message,” a senior administration official told Politico.

The beef between Trump and Gabbard shows that the MAGA split between blind military support for Israel versus “America First” anti-interventionists, like Gabbard, is much more than just an online spat. There is a real ideological schism on display with regard to Trump’s deference to Israel’s wars, and even die-hard Trump supporters have begun raising their voices against another endless war in the Middle East—something Trump promised to stop during his campaign.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor gave a scathing dissent of the Supreme Court’s decision Wednesday upholding Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary teenagers.

“Tennessee’s ban applies no matter what the minor’s parents and doctors think, with no regard for the severity of the minor’s mental health conditions or the extent to which treatment is medically necessary for an individual child,” Sotomayor wrote of the decision in United States v. Skrmetti, which was 6–3 along ideological lines.

Sotomayor asserted that “intermediate” judicial scrutiny was called for in making any decision where “the rights of ‘discrete and insular minorities’ are at stake.”

“The majority contorts logic and precedent to say otherwise, inexplicably declaring it must uphold Tennessee’s categorical ban on lifesaving medical treatment so long as ‘any reasonably conceivable state of facts’ might justify it,” she wrote.

She added, “Thus, the majority subjects a law that plainly discriminates on the basis of sex to mere rational-basis review. By retreating from meaningful judicial review exactly where it matters most, the Court abandons transgender children and their families to political whims. In sadness, I dissent.”

Tennessee passed its ban on gender-affirming care in 2022, but the law was blocked in court before it could go into effect on July 1 the following year. Presiding Judge Eli Richardson, a Trump appointee, noted at the time that the defendants’ case for banning gender-affirming treatments was based entirely on the testimony of one doctor “who seems never to have treated an individual for gender dysphoria.”

But there is ample evidence, Richardson noted, that gender-affirming care “lowers rates of depression, suicide, and additional mental health issues” faced by trans and nonbinary minors.

In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the equal protections clause did “not resolve” the disagreements over “fierce scientific and policy debates about the safety, efficacy, and propriety of medical treatments in an evolving field.” This decision set a new precedent for reviewing bans and other restrictive laws under the lowest standard of judicial review—meaning such laws will more likely be upheld.

Roberts argued that Tennessee’s ban on hormone blockers to treat so-called “gender dysphoria” did not constitute discrimination, because it would not permit them to be prescribed to any sex for that purpose—which is, of course, still blatant discrimination.

The Supreme Court’s latest decision, which will undoubtedly endanger the lives of transgender and nonbinary people across the country, comes as the Trump administration has announced that it plans to shutter the suicide and crisis hotline specifically for LGBTQ youth within the next 30 days.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump has reportedly given White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller one of his patented uninspired nicknames. 

In an interview on The Daily Beast’s podcast Fire and Fury, biographer Michael Wolff revealed that the president has a juvenile nickname for the ghoulish man behind Trump’s inhumane immigration crackdown

You’ve heard Crooked Hillary, Sleepy Joe, and Laughing Kamala, but now get ready for … Weird Stephen.

“There is an awareness that Stephen Miller is a problem,” Wolff explained. “And even Trump calls him ‘Weird Stephen.’........

© New Republic