The News You Need on Thursday, May 28, 2026.
Israel is forcing people in Southern Lebanese Tyre to leave. Trump might have dementia. Timothy Snyder says his $1.8bn J6er fund is "creating a regime that is based on immunized paid terrorists."
IDF Orders Evacuation of Tyre, Largest City in Lebanon After Beirut
Ha’aretz
Scott: Perhaps to mark the feast of Eid al-Adha (The Feast of Sacrifice), one of the most sacred days of the Muslim calendar, Israel’s military have demanded the complete evacuation of Lebanon’s second-largest city in preparation of massive bombings intended to reduce it to a pile of rubble.
This in the midst of a “ceasefire” in hostilities between Israel and Lebanon.
The announcement comes as defense minister Israel Katz clarifies the Netanyahu government’s broader plans for a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing against Palestinians: “The plan for voluntary emigration from Gaza will also be implemented, all at the proper time and in the proper manner.”
Tyre is home to 174,000 people, with about 200,000 residents including those in adjacent refugee camps. All throughout Tuesday and into Wednesday, Hezbollah attack drones struck Israel’s northern border.
The Israeli military said it began striking “Hezbollah command centers in the area of Tyre” on Wednesday, two hours after issuing an evacuation order for the Lebanese coastal city’s 200,000 residents.
“Evacuate your homes immediately and proceed north beyond the Zahrani River,” the IDF’s Arabic-language Spokesman Avichay Adraee said to residents of the second largest city in the country, after Beirut, earlier on Wednesday.
“Be warned – any movement south of the Zahrani River may put your lives at risk.” The Zahrani River flows north of the Litani and is roughly 40 kilometers (25 miles) north of Lebanon’s border with Israel.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel
New York Times
Charles: When the history of our time is written, the longest-serving Israeli prime minister will be remembered as a corrupt, bloodthirsty extremist who turned Israel into a pariah state without any allies.
Maryland Sen. Chis Van Hollen has written a cri de coeur for The New York Times decrying the way apartheid and ethnic cleansing have become the hideous hallmarks of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel.
He notes that in the last twelve months the number of Democratic senators voting against unfettered weapon transfers to Israel has grown from 15 to 40. But, Van Hollen, says Democrats must do much more:
“The Democratic Party has provided reflexive and unconditional support to Israeli governments, even as their actions have increasingly undermined American interests and values.”
[F]or too long most Democrats have unquestioningly accepted Israel’s argument that American weapons are needed and used solely for its defense. We have not yet fully confronted the fact that Israel has used its strength not only as a shield, but also as a sword to bury the two-state solution and advance the far right’s vision of a “Greater Israel.”
The evidence on the ground is overwhelming: Violent settlers in the West Bank have attacked Palestinians with impunity, and Israeli security forces are increasingly complicit. Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank has pushed Palestinians into shrinking enclaves. Mr. Netanyahu’s government has sabotaged the Palestinian Authority, which, unlike Hamas, has accepted Israel’s right to statehood. Anyone who visits the West Bank under Israeli occupation can see an apartheid system at work…
I’ve seen these developments with my own eyes. I’ve visited Israel and the West Bank seven times and witnessed the rapid expansion of illegal settlements across land that was supposed to be part of a Palestinian state. I’ve spoken to Palestinian families pushed out of their homes and off their land. I’ve sat down with families, both Israelis and Palestinians, who have lost loved ones to violence. In Ramallah, I spoke with Palestinian American parents who can’t get justice for their children killed by violent settlers or Israeli security forces. I’ve seen aid trucks turned back from Israeli checkpoints while children in Gaza were starving on the other side. And I’ve seen how the once bustling city of Rafah was reduced to rubble by the Israel Defense Forces with American bombs and bulldozers.
It is these experiences—and watching this dangerous trajectory accelerate—that have shaped my growing alarm, which the American people increasingly share. They do not want to be complicit in ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, or what human rights organizations and scholars have determined to be genocide in Gaza.
Israel’s Colonization of Southern Lebanon Is Already Under Way
Middle East Eye
Imogen: Today, on Eid-al-Adha, Israel has ordered Lebanese people to flee their homes as it “expands ground offensive.”
Writing in Middle East Eye, Lebanese journalist Paul Khalifeh offers a warning about what Israeli ministers truly have planned for southern Lebanon.
Despite official Israeli denials and the refusal of some Lebanese to acknowledge the reality, the colonisation of south Lebanon is neither a myth nor a fantasy. It is a concrete and structured project.
On 14 May, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir revealed that Israel had a “settlement plan for Lebanon”. The far-right minister made the statement on the very day Lebanon and Israel were due to resume direct negotiations in Washington under US auspices aimed at normalising relations and reaching a comprehensive agreement.
Several weeks earlier, on 26 March, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared that “the Litani must be our new border with the state of Lebanon, just like the ‘Yellow Line’ in Gaza and like the buffer zone and peak of the Hermon in Syria“.
Donald Trump Is Finally Cracking Up for Real
The New Republic
Scott: In the erstwhile in-flight magazine of Air Force One—not in the Trump age, however, since no one can afford to be caught reading—Michael Tomsky and Molly Jong-Fast tackle the most underreported story in the US media today.
What makes this piece effective is the reliance on a stream of quick clips of Trump, furnished by Angelo Carusone and Aaron Rupar, who form a modern documentation center for Trump’s public appearances.
The pair faithfully preserve precisely what The New York Times and other legacy media scrupulously elide: Every manifestation of senile dementia, Freudian slip and brain fart. And what emerges is this: It’s a colossal undertaking to make Trump seem sane, because he plainly isn’t.
Dementia. No one can say, of course, whether Trump has dementia, an umbrella term for a range of mental conditions, among which Alzheimer’s is the most notable. The common visible symptoms, according to the website of the Alzheimer’s Association, include difficulty performing a number of tasks Trump hasn’t had to perform in years or perhaps ever: Paying bills, preparing meals, remembering appointments. The symptoms listed on the Mayo Clinic website are, for present purposes, more on point: Problems communicating or finding words; issues with reasoning or problem-solving; confusion and disorientation.
So: Is the president demented? Harry Segal is a clinical psychologist at Cornell University and a former co-host of the podcast Shrinking Trump. (His co-host was psychologist John Gartner, who in 2017 started an organization of mental health professionals, Duty to Warn, that sought to caution Americans about Trump’s unfitness for office). Shrinking Trump ran for 70 episodes, from May 2024 until October 2025, when it was stopped out of fear of being sued by the president. In an interview, Segal was quick to note that he is not offering a clinical diagnosis of Trump. That, he said, would be unethical. But it’s not unethical to comment on “behaviors so striking that you would recommend an assessment for someone in your family who demonstrated” them.
What has he seen? Three concerning things. One: “He began to have odd quirks of speech where he would begin a word or a phrase and seemingly lose his place, slur, and end up with some kind of compromise word,” Segal said. This is called phonemic paraphasia. It’s a possible sign of dementia (though it could have other sources), and Trump has been doing it for a long time: He coined the “word” “infantroopen,” for example, back in 2019. The same year, he referred twice to the need to look into the “oranges” of the Robert Mueller investigation. He finally carefully enunciated “origins” on the third go.
Second, Segal “began to notice the tangential digressions.” After the mainstream media picked up on how aggressively random and disjointed his stump speeches had become, Trump gave it a name, “The Weave,” and said it was all intentional. But the claim was nonsense. The pattern has continued into his second term—recently, for example, in a late-March Cabinet meeting about the war, when he got lost in a five-minute digression on how much money he’d saved by using Sharpies to sign legislation and executive orders.
The third thing that caught Segal’s ear was that, on certain occasions, Trump said or posted something really shocking even for him: “The outlandish things he’s been saying when people died, right? Like Robert Mueller, I am glad he’s dead, or Rob Reiner.” Maybe that’s just an older man losing patience with decorum, Segal said; but “this feels a little bit more like dysregulation. Like, ‘I have a wildly aggressive thought, I am just going to say it.’”
After Trump’s crazed post on Easter Sunday, Vin Gupta made national headlines by posting on X: “Erratic. Can’t finish sentences. Often confused. Illogical train of thought. Word finding difficulties. Developing and worsening gradually over time. The President is exhibiting all the signs of dementia.”
In an interview, Gupta kept returning to the word “impulsivity.” Speaking the week after Easter, he said: “I think his impulsivity and his erratic behavior, as we’ve all seen just in the last two weeks, seems like it’s getting worse. Like he just has less of a filter. Even at baseline, he had no filter. But it seems like the disinhibition is worse. And when you think about the family history, I think reasonable people can ask reasonable questions.”
What’s missing in this piece is clinical diagnostic rigor, though that would hardly appeal to the audience it targets.
Still, it’s a solid start.
The Horton-Kaiser Report is independent, different from other US media.
Charles: Scott Horton and I first bonded 20 years ago when we were each blogging about the horrendous torture being carried out by the second Bush administration during the so-called War on Terror. The New York Times news department never called torture torture. They always called it ‘enhanced interrogation.’
We both thought it was a terrible thing.
Scott: On the issue of the journalist and the journalist’s responsibility, I’m really quite struck by something that Pope Leo said. That the moral, ethical and professional responsibility of journalists is not to be regurgitating the views of people in power—like political figures and wealthy corporate interests that control commercial media—but to be an independent voice.
To assess carefully whether the things that are claimed as facts really are facts, and to discover what the facts are.
Listen to Scott speaking to NPR’s On The Media in 2009 about torture.
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