The Status Kuo

I’m writing for The Big Picture substack today, which is a great complement to my daily writings here. Trump’s financial disclosures dropped on Tuesday, and hoo boy. They reveal the extent and amount of his corruption, which earned him well north of two billion dollars in 2025. The corruption is so extensive, and so non-stop, that it honestly can feel overwhelming. Crypto. Qatari jets. Stock trades. Tungsten mines. Paid pardons.

Photo credit: Al Drago / Getty Images On Tuesday, we breathed a collective sigh of relief. As expected, the Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship. The vote was 6-3, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing the majority opinion. “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community,” Roberts declared.

On Monday, the Supreme Court handed down two back-to-back decisions on the question of presidential power over the executive branch. The results are, by almost any honest accounting, impossible to square. In Trump v. Slaughter, the Court’s six conservative justices voted to demolish a 91-year-old precedent protecting independent federal agencies from presidential removal, declaring that President Trump may fire most independent agency heads at will and that Congress may not stand in his way.

On June 25, a federal judge issued the first binding order in the long, frustrating effort to force the Justice Department to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act. In a 48-page order, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan compelled acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to produce specific, long-withheld materials that DOJ had spent months insisting it was under no obligation to release. If DOJ could not produce them, it would have to specifically explain why.

Before we dive in, a small ask. Every day, I have lose a handful of paid subscribers who, due to personal financial circumstances, can no longer afford to support this newsletter voluntarily. I’m hoping to replace today’s attrition with at least three new supporters! If you enjoy The Status Kuo and have the ability to contribute, please help me keep this column paywall-free for those on fixed income or disability.

In my excitement and haste to get to NYC yesterday to present an award at a joint Human Rights Campaign / Asia Society Pride event, I managed to pack my charger…but not my iPad. Doh! I’m typing this with an index finger on my iPhone to say there sadly won’t be a Status Kuo update today.

Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images. In honor of FIFA, let’s review the biggest “own goal” yet, committed by the ailing U.S. president. On Wednesday, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) stood at the podium in Statuary Hall on Capitol Hill.

Photo courtesy of Reuters The most important judicial battles of Trump’s second term are not being fought at the Supreme Court. They’re being waged in federal district courts across the country, before individual judges whose names most Americans have never heard. The numbers alone are telling. The Trump regime has now lost more than 70 percent of the lawsuits filed against its actions.

I’m writing today for The Big Picture about a White House that is leaking like, well, an overstuffed diaper. Sorry for that visual, but it’s apt.

Illustration by Emma Kumer for The Washington Post A bombshell investigative report published over the weekend by reporter Jon Swaine of The Washington Post answers a question that has shadowed Tulsi Gabbard’s entire political career: Why has she never made any sense? The answer is laid out across more than 25,000 documents obtained by Swaine after nearly a year of investigation.