The News You Need, Wednesday, July 1, 2026
SCOTUS and birthright citizenship, Trump and sexual assault, a pardon bonanza, Nigel Farage and his money, and space's own chandelier.
Four SCOTUS Justices Want a Civil War Do-Over
Wall Street Journal
Scott: Most media outlets have gone with a headline stating that SCOTUS has rebuffed Trump’s birthright citizenship order, but the real news from this morning’s decision is that four of the nine justices believe that the express words of the Fourteenth Amendment must be disregarded, because it doesn’t comport with their view of a eugenically and racially edited America with fewer dark-skinned people. In other words, they want a do-over of the Supreme Court. This demonstrates that the Opus Dei core of the Supreme Court is not in the least conservative, nor does it care one wit about the Constitution and its original meaning. To the contrary, on the eve of the country’s 250th anniversary, it is dedicated to a falangist or fascist make-over of the American project.
Bill Bramhall, New York Daily News
The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down President Trump’s attempt to curtail birthright citizenship, a rejection of his most aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration.
The decision rebuffs Trump’s bid to upend the deep-rooted understanding that virtually everyone born on American soil is automatically a U.S. citizen. That understanding, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, was enshrined in the Constitution in 1868.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community,” Roberts wrote. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to every free-born person in this land. We keep that promise today.”
Six justices—three conservatives and three liberals—ruled against Trump, though only five did so on constitutional grounds. The court’s three most conservative justices dissented.
The case challenged an executive order that Trump issued on the first day of his second term. It declared that future children born in the U.S. wouldn’t be considered citizens if their parents were living in the country illegally or were visiting the country on temporary visas.
The executive order never took effect. It was quickly blocked by multiple lower courts because it appeared to conflict with the 14th Amendment, which states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
What did the WSJ reporter and his editors miss? It’s a classic case of a nonexpert reading a stack of opinions and not discerning what they actually said. The majority here is really 5–4. Because one of the concurring justices, Brett Kavanaugh (known to his contemporaries as “Bart”), says that Trump’s order does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, merely a federal statute. He says Congress could change the statute to effectuate Trump’s order in the future. And in a tweet, Trump has instantly seized on Kavanaugh’s opinion and requested the change that Kavanaugh suggests. But significantly, only five justices really think the North won the Civil War.
Trump Corruption Watch
Slumming It At $2.2 Billion A Year
The New York Times
Charles: Donald Trump boasts that he gives away his $400,000 official presidential salary. The New York Times explains why he can afford that.
In the first year of his second term in office, he pulled in at least $2.2 billion. That’s almost four times what he made in the year before he re-entered the White House.
That haul included $1.4 billion from his family’s crypto businesses. Once upon a time Trump slammed the industry as a haven for drug dealers and scammers and “a disaster waiting to happen.” But as Times reporters Ben Protess, Andrea Fuller and David Yaffe-Bellany pointed out, he has dramatically changed his point of view, now that he is not only “ a major crypto industry operator, but also its top policymaker.”
Famously the Trump’s sold an investment firm tied to the government of the U.A.E. a 49 percent stake in World Liberty for $500 million. As always in Trump world, you get what you pay for: soon after the transaction the Emiratis overcame the concerns of national security officials to get access to scarce computer chips that power artificial intelligence. Those chips quickly made their way to China including advanced AI chips from Nvidia (such as H100s) for Chinese military aerospace applications, such as PL-15 and PL-17 missile systems.
Beauty Queen Describes How Trump’s Threats Followed His Sexual Assault
Photo Illustration by Victoria Sunday/The Daily Beast/Getty Images
The Daily Beast
Scott: One of the more than two dozen cases involving Trump’s sexual assaults against women involves a Swiss beauty pageant winner, Beatrice Keul. As the Supreme Court was upholding Trump’s first rape adjudication by sustaining a monetary damages award for E Jean Carroll, Keul was busy telling her story to The Daily Beast.
A former beauty queen who accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her claims the president threatened her afterward, warning that “bad things can happen if you speak out,” she has revealed in an exclusive interview with PunchUp.
Beatrice Keul, 55, a former Miss Switzerland and Miss Europe contestant, told the Daily Beast’s new Substack publication that she has faced repeated threats to her safety since going public over the alleged 1993 assault, but refuses to back down. “I stood up to the American president to save lives,” she told PunchUp. “This is my truth, and I will not be silenced.”
Keul first came forward in October 2024, alleging that Trump—then 47, while she was a 23-year-old banking executive and part-time model—lured her to his Donald J. Trump American Dream Pageant in New York. She says an aide then asked her to join the property developer for a “private meeting” before he allegedly groped her in a suite at the Plaza Hotel.
Note the location: physically adjacent to the Bergdorf-Goodman store where Trump raped E Jean Carroll, as a Manhattan jury determined.
