Week 73: The Week the Checks Pushed Back

“`markdown This was a week in which the executive branch tested nearly every boundary available to it, and the institutions built to resist that testing—mostly courts, occasionally Congress—pushed back with unusual force. By week’s end, judges had struck down a visa tax, ordered the president’s name off a federally chartered arts center, and shielded the Federal Reserve chair from retaliatory subpoenas, even as Congress delivered the administration $70 billion in unconditional immigration enforcement money in the same stretch that a major surveillance law was allowed to lapse over a personnel dispute. Overseas, policy toward Iran swung from announced airstrikes to a disputed ceasefire within days. At home, a New Jersey detention facility became the site of a hunger strike met with tear gas, and a television correspondent with 37 years at his network lost his job for refusing to shade the news in the government’s favor.

**The Weekend**

The country was still absorbing an active military confrontation with Iran as the weekend opened, even as the president’s public attention seemed to drift elsewhere. While Iranian missiles and drones struck American military facilities, Trump posted self-promotional videos and aired grievances about golf course landscaping at Joint Base Andrews; a clip appeared to show him dozing at his desk during an official signing, prompting widespread mockery. That same weekend, he sat for a combative interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker, who pressed him for evidence behind his claims that the 2020 election and a recent California election had been rigged. He called her "crooked or stupid," unclipped his microphone, and left early.

In France, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used a D-Day commemoration to describe European immigration as an "invasion," language borrowed directly from white nationalist rhetoric that strained relationships with allied governments at a ceremony meant to honor a shared military sacrifice. Away from the cameras, ICE denied Senator Andy Kim access to speak with detainees during an oversight visit to the Delaney Hall facility in Newark, where he witnessed a detainee in apparent medical distress and received no information about her condition — at a facility with a single full-time doctor for hundreds held there. And in a federal courtroom, a Justice Department attorney argued that courts had no authority to review the administration’s demolition of the White House’s East Wing, a position that, pressed to its logical end, would place even the Statue of Liberty beyond judicial reach.

**Monday**

The courts began answering back. A federal judge in Massachusetts struck down Trump’s $100,000 supplemental fee on H-1B visa petitions, ruling it an unlawful tax that only Congress could impose and calling the administration’s justification "cursory." The same day, a different judge ordered Trump’s name removed from the Kennedy Center, finding that only Congress had authority to rename the institution, and temporarily halted a quarter-billion-dollar renovation. The Center complied by scrubbing the name from its website ahead of a Friday deadline — though the larger fight over physical compliance was only beginning.

Monday also brought troubling revelations from inside network news: fired CBS correspondent Scott Pelley alleged that news director Bari Weiss had pressured him to misrepresent anti-ICE protesters as more violent than they were and to distort a shooting victim’s story to match the administration’s preferred account. He said the pressure was unlike anything in his career, and that he was dismissed after refusing to comply.

Elsewhere, Vice President Vance announced he would refer Minnesota’s governor and attorney general to the Justice Department over unsubstantiated claims of fraud tied to Somali immigrants, a move both officials dismissed as political retaliation against a Democratic-led state. Trump, meanwhile, demanded that Senate Majority Leader Thune fire the chamber’s nonpartisan parliamentarian after she ruled that a voter-restriction bill could not ride through budget reconciliation, while border czar Tom Homan announced plans for an ICE surge in New York explicitly tied to the state’s sanctuary legislation. The day closed with Trump attending an NBA Finals game at Madison Square Garden under an extraordinary security footprint that closed streets and canceled public watch parties, only to be greeted with loud boos from the crowd.

**Tuesday**

Tuesday’s developments centered on congressional oversight and personnel. House Oversight Chair James Comer declined a Republican colleague’s request to subpoena Todd Blanche over the Epstein files, a refusal Democrats characterized as enabling a cover-up. That same day, Trump formally nominated Blanche — his former personal defense attorney, who as acting Attorney General had pursued cases against Trump’s perceived enemies and backed a $1.8 billion discretionary fund — to lead the Justice Department permanently.

In a separate and consequential move, Trump accelerated the departure of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and announced that Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency with no intelligence background, would take over as acting DNI. The decision triggered immediate bipartisan alarm in the Senate, given a looming deadline to reauthorize a major surveillance authority — a fight that would come to a head by week’s end. Elsewhere, Bill Gates answered closed-door questions from House Oversight about his past contacts with Jeffrey Epstein, and the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion concluding that longstanding federal guidelines for proving workplace discrimination were unconstitutional, raising the bar for future claims.

**Wednesday**

Wednesday brought one of the week’s defining legislative moments. After eighteen hours of debate in which Senate Republicans blocked Democratic amendments targeting the administration’s discretionary spending fund, ballroom expenditures, and leadership conflicts at DHS, the House passed the Secure America Act by a two-vote margin, and Trump signed it into law. The bill ended a 75-day Department of Homeland Security shutdown and locked in $70 billion in unrestricted funding for ICE and Customs and Border Protection through the end of Trump’s term — money delivered without the accountability conditions Democrats had sought for an agency with a documented record of deaths in custody. The same day, Trump pressed Congress to simultaneously pass a $350 billion military spending increase and the SAVE America Act, a bill requiring proof-of-citizenship for voting and restricting mail-in ballots, attempting to move both through reconciliation and splitting his own party over the maneuver.

Investigative reporting added further texture to the week. ProPublica detailed how a $100 million investment from an Indian billionaire into a company tied to Donald Trump Jr. coincided with sanctions relief and tariff exemptions, while Reuters found the Trump family had earned $2.3 billion from cryptocurrency licensing since the term began, with over a million investors suffering losses, and that a pharmaceutical executive facing FDA enforcement had donated $1 million to Trump’s political operation during the agency’s response window. Separately, reporters uncovered that betting platforms Polymarket and Kalshi had sponsored influencers spreading false claims about a rigged Los Angeles mayoral race, and that the dark-money group One Nation was running fabricated local news sites across six Senate battleground states.

**Thursday**

Thursday was the week’s most volatile day on the international front. Trump posted that the United States would strike Iran "VERY HARD TONIGHT," floating the seizure of Kharg Island and Iran’s oil infrastructure in terms reminiscent of the earlier seizure of Venezuelan oil assets. Hours later, he announced the strikes were off, claiming a deal had been reached and endorsed by multiple regional governments — an account that Israeli officials and Iranian state media immediately disputed. The reversal left the actual state of American policy toward Iran unresolved heading into the weekend.

That same day, the fight over intelligence leadership came to a head: the House failed to extend FISA Section 702 in a 218-198 vote, as Democrats and a number of Republicans withheld support in protest of Pulte’s planned elevation to acting DNI. Trump then withdrew the Pulte nomination in favor of Jay Clayton, who likewise lacked intelligence experience, setting up a rushed confirmation process even as the surveillance authority lapsed with Fourth Amendment questions about ongoing collection left unaddressed.

Elsewhere, roughly 100 FBI agents raided the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a voter-registration nonprofit serving historically disenfranchised communities, seizing devices and visiting staff members’ homes under a warrant citing fraud concerns that statistical evidence does not support. Federal prosecutors also unsealed an indictment against eight pro-Palestinian activists accused of running an intimidation campaign against University of Michigan officials, and DHS issued a waiver suspending environmental and historic-preservation law to permit border wall construction through Big Bend National Park, an area accounting for a fraction of one percent of unauthorized crossings nationwide. A federal judge, meanwhile, acquitted former New York City comptroller Brad Lander of obstruction charges stemming from his protest at an ICE facility, crediting his account over the government’s. Economic warning signs surfaced as well: oil executives privately told the White House that gasoline could reach five dollars a gallon, with strategic reserves near 1983-era lows, while wholesale inflation climbed to its highest annual rate since 2022.

**Friday**

Friday brought the week’s reckonings to their sharpest points. The Kennedy Center’s board, facing the court-ordered deadline to remove Trump’s name, amended its bylaws hours beforehand to claim that compliance would trigger a requirement to return every donation received since Trump had taken control of the institution — a maneuver legal experts described as a textbook breach of fiduciary duty designed to hold the board itself hostage. The D.C. Circuit denied an emergency stay, Judge Cooper separately rejected a similar request from the Justice Department, and workers removed the lettering from the building’s facade that evening, after the department had asked for extra time specifically to avoid public visibility of the compliance.

The same day, it emerged that the administration had redirected $352 million in Secret Service funding toward the White House ballroom project, after Congress had explicitly declined to appropriate $1 billion for it — a reversal of Trump’s repeated public promise that the project would be entirely privately financed. Trump also pushed Congress to pass a symbolic resolution "expunging" both of his impeachments, a gesture with no legal effect but clear historical intent.

At Delaney Hall, the standoff over detention conditions escalated sharply: nearly forty women began a hunger and labor strike, joining more than 300 men who had been striking since late May, while New Jersey and Newark police deployed tear gas against supporters outside the facility and arrested dozens. ICE and the private contractor Geo Group responded by canceling visitation and transferring roughly ninety detainees, even as the Department of Homeland Security publicly denied the strike was occurring at all.

On the Iran front, state media in Tehran published what it described as draft terms of a new agreement, including a $300 billion reconstruction package, which the White House disputed; Trump called Iran’s account "weak and pathetic" while making unverified claims of his own about extracting Iranian oil during the conflict.

Courts remained active through the week’s final day as well: Judge Brinkema extended her injunction against the administration’s $1.8 billion discretionary fund, requiring sworn declarations from senior officials that it would not proceed, while Judge Boasberg declined to lift his order shielding Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell from subpoenas he found were politically motivated.

**Taken as a whole**

The week showed an unusually direct contest between an executive branch willing to test nearly every limit on its authority and the narrower set of institutions still capable of enforcing one. Courts did the heaviest lifting — vacating an unlawful tax, defending a statutorily named cultural institution against a board’s own resistance, and shielding a central bank chair from prosecutorial pressure — while Congress proved more uneven, delivering vast enforcement funding with no strings attached in the same week it allowed a major surveillance law to expire over a dispute about personnel qualifications. Abroad, the handling of the Iran crisis moved by presidential announcement and reversal rather than through any visible deliberative process, leaving allies and adversaries alike uncertain which version of American policy to credit. And within the country’s own borders, the treatment of detained immigrants, a fired journalist, and a raided voter-registration group pointed to a pattern in which dissent and oversight met resistance rather than response. Historians of this period are likely to note not any single event but the recurrence: courts ruling, the executive complying slowly or defiantly, and the public left to judge, week after week, how much the compliance was worth. “`