Trump just "LOVES" inflation now

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The May inflation report landed Wednesday morning showing prices at their highest point in three years, and Donald Trump's answer was to declare, live and on camera, "I love the inflation."

He also casually revealed that the U.S. has been secretly "taking millions of barrels of oil" from Iran — news to literally everyone in his cabinet, including Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who had to admit on television that a social media post he'd made about the Strait of Hormuz was never true. Wright also screamed "Bullshit!" at a reporter who suggested he'd yanked energy grants from blue states. Hours after Trump told Fox News he wanted "peace for the world," he ordered fresh strikes on Iran — Iran having fired missiles at a Jordanian air base hosting U.S. forces the day before.

The administration does not appear to have a plan.

A new NYT report on how Trump's inner circle melted down over the Epstein files has set off a White House leak hunt. The report revealed that Trump's team considered JD Vance a conspiracy theorist for pushing the files, that Trump personally exploded at Charlie Kirk for letting Turning Point colleagues discuss the files, and that Trump's former personal attorney is now facing backlash over what looks like an active cover-up role. MTG, who resigned from Congress over this fight, used Trump's own words to call him a "traitor" on Wednesday.

Bill Gates testified before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday, claiming Epstein tried to blackmail him over extramarital affairs and nearly succeeded in leveraging him for philanthropic access. Trump launched his rage-posting session about Joe Scarborough approximately one hour after "Morning Joe" connected the Epstein dots on air.

SoFi Stadium's food and beverage workers — represented by their union — reached a pre-World Cup deal that includes a contractual right to walk off the job if federal immigration agents show up to threaten their coworkers. This is, per HuffPost, "unprecedented in modern labor history."

The deal averted a strike while creating a new template for labor contracts in the age of mass deportation.

It's also a workaround for something that should never have required a workaround. Human Rights Watch has called on FIFA to pressure the US government for a formal "ICE Truce" for the duration of the tournament — a public guarantee that agents would stand down at venues and games. No such truce has materialized. Instead, workers are negotiating their own private versions of it, one stadium at a time.

The broader picture isn't pretty. Amnesty International has issued a formal travel advisory warning that World Cup visitors may face arbitrary detention, racial profiling, and device searches. Iran — a qualified team — was effectively forced to relocate its base camp from Tucson to Tijuana, crossing into the US only for matches, after its football federation sought assurances about visa access and safety that apparently couldn't be guaranteed on American soil.

Meanwhile, the United States has barred a FIFA World Cup referee from Somalia, citing "vetting concerns."

Democrat Graham Platner won Maine's Senate primary and is already signaling he'll run a sharper, more aggressive campaign against Susan Collins than any of her previous challengers — who, notably, kept losing by playing nice. According to Portland Press Herald reporter Billy Kobin, Platner is leaning hard into populist, anti-billionaire rhetoric and direct attacks on Collins, a break from the soft-pedal approach that's let her survive for decades. There are controversies around Platner's personal conduct that have national Democrats worried, but Kobin says Maine voters he's interviewed aren't particularly bothered — some are actually angry at the press for covering it. Collins has outlasted every Democrat who tried to be reasonable at her. Platner is betting that fury, not civility, is what finally takes her down.

Newly released grand jury transcripts reveal that federal prosecutors under Trump's DOJ went to extraordinary lengths to secure indictments against six immigration protesters in the Chicago area — and grand jurors pushed back hard, with one calling the case "a crock of sh*t" directly to a DOJ attorney's face. AP's reporting adds a damning detail: prosecutors dismissed jurors who disagreed with the case and kept empaneling new ones until they got what they wanted. A Trump DOJ attorney was, per multiple accounts, "humiliated to her face" in open proceedings. Separately, the DOJ has now indicted eight pro-Palestinian activists at the University of Michigan who were pushing for divestment from Israel.

Why it matters: This is a documented portrait of political prosecution — the DOJ cycling through grand jurors until it found ones willing to indict protesters. Combined with the Michigan indictments, a pattern of using the criminal justice system to suppress dissent has become undeniable.

This all comes as Trump signed a $70 billion immigration enforcement package Wednesday allocating $38 billion to ICE, $26 billion to Customs and Border Protection, and $5 billion more to DHS — money that will still be flowing to immigration enforcers three presidents from now.

That’s it for today. We’ll see you tomorrow!