Ahead of a vote on Republicans’ budget reconciliation package expected as soon as noon Saturday, U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources Chair Mike Lee revived his effort to sell off public lands.

Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough has blocked multiple provisions of the GOP megabill, including several under the jurisdiction of the Utah Republican’s panel. Among them is his attack on public lands.

“Here we go again,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said on social media after Lee released new text for his committee late Friday.

“Republicans are STILL trying to sell off public lands in their budget bill,” Wyden continued. “Republicans are trying to get this over the finish line by the end of the weekend. If you care about keeping your public lands please make your voice heard.”

“Americans left, right, and center have come together with one voice to say these landscapes shouldn’t be sold off to fund tax cuts for the uberwealthy—not now, not ever.”

Athan Manuel, director of Sierra Club’s Lands Protection Program, said in a Saturday morning statement that “the new version of Mike Lee’s public lands sell-off is like cutting ‘most’ of the mercury out of your diet. The fact of the matter is that Mike Lee has spent the better part of a decade trying to privatize our public lands, and with his new power in the Senate, he’s trying to push that agenda even further without public input, without transparency, and shame.”

“Americans left, right, and center have come together with one voice to say these landscapes shouldn’t be sold off to fund tax cuts for the uberwealthy—not now, not ever,” Manuel added. “Congress needs to listen to their constituents, not billionaires and private developers, and keep the ‘public’ in public lands.”

A document from Lee states that his “amended proposal dramatically narrows the scope of lands to be sold for housing… in communities where it is desperately needed” in the U.S. West. The new version would exclude all Forest Service land and reduce the amount of Bureau of Land Management acres to be sold by half.

“It’s still bulls—-“responded Noelle Porter, government affairs director at the National Housing Law Project.

Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has recently said: “This isn’t about building more housing or energy dominance. It’s about giving their billionaire buddies YOUR land and YOUR money.”

“From the Sierra Club to Joe Rogan, everybody is pissed off about Republicans’ public lands sell-off,” he wrote on social media Friday. “This is the broadest coalition I’ve seen around public lands in my lifetime, so keep making sure your voices are heard because we’re winning.”

Jane Fonda’s climate-focused political action committee similarly stressed on social media Friday that “Lee is committed to including a massive public land sale provision in the Big Beautiful Bill. We need you to keep up the pressure and reach out to your senators today and demand they reject any new sales of public lands in this legislation.”

And it’s not just the land sales in the Friday night text of what critics call the “big, ugly bill.” It also “creates new fees for renewable energy projects on public lands, and cuts royalty rates for oil, gas, and coal production on public lands,” noted Sam Ricketts, co-founder of S2 Strategies, which is working to build a clean energy economy. “Make it make sense.”

As Manuel and Heinrich pointed out, some right-wingers are also outraged by Lee’s push to sell off public lands. Benji Backer, founder of Nature Is Nonpartisan and the American Conservation Coalition, took aim at the committee chair on social media Friday night.

“Mike Lee just quietly doubled down on his mass public lands sel-loff by releasing new text,” Backer said. “The Senate could consider it as soon as tomorrow. The secrecy is gross—and intentional. Lee knows it’s his only path. America, we NEED to stand strong.

Tagging the Senate GOP account and Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), Backer added that “Americans are entirely UNITED in opposition against this. Please ask Sen. Lee to let this provision… stand on its own—at the very least.”

Even if the Senate somehow advances Lee’s legislation, it could face trouble in the House of Representatives, which is also narrowly controlled by the GOP. On Thursday, Republican Reps. Ryan Zinke (Mont.), David Valadao (Calif.), Mike Simpson (Idaho), Dan Newhouse (Wash.), and Cliff Bentz (Ore.) warned that “we cannot accept the sale of federal lands that Sen. Lee seeks.”

“If a provision to sell public lands is in the bill that reaches the House floor, we will be forced to vote no,” warned the lawmakers, led by Zinke, who was the interior secretary during President Donald Trump’s first term. Lee’s provision, they wrote, would be a “grave mistake, unforced error, and poison pill that will cause the bill to fail should it come to the House floor.”

The Guardian reports Donald Trump’s family is looking to install a legacy in the White House.

Eric Trump told Financial Times that he or another member of the Trump family could run for president when his father’s second term in the White House ends more than three years from now.

Donald Trump’s third child and second son is currently co-executive vice-president of the Trump Organization, and says he is “wholly unimpressed by half the politicians” he sees and believes he could do the job “very effectively”.

READ MORE: A made-for-TV war came with made-for-TV humiliation for Trump

“You know, if the answer was ‘yes’, I think the political path would be an easy one, meaning, I think I could do it,” said Eric Trump. “And by the way, I think other members of our family could do it too.”

The president’s son denied to Financial Times that the Trump family has profited from the presidency.

“If there’s one family that hasn’t profited off politics, it’s the Trump family,” he said, despite the Guardian reporting Donald Trump getting $630 million last year from a range of products, including cryptocurrency, “as well as licensing his name for real estate projects, watches, guitars, and Bibles.”

Trump raked in about $148 million from a dinner and a White House tour he offered to the top 25 leading $Trump memecoin buyers. The president’s stake in Trump Media & Technology Group is now worth about $2 billion, which the Guardian claims rivals the family’s crypto holdings.

READ MORE: ‘We cannot support’: 17 GOP governors ask Congress to ‘strip this provision’ from megabill

“I would sit there and say that we [would have] had many more zeros behind our name had my father not run in the first place,” Eric Trump insisted. “The opportunity cost, the legal cost, the toll it’s taken on our family has been astronomical.”

The Guardian predicts Vice President, JD Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio to be frontrunners in GOP primaries, but Eric Trump argued the field could easily be wider than just Vance, Rubio and himself.

“Time will tell. But there’s more people than just me,” he said.

Read the full Guardian report at this link.

When it comes to stretching the threads of truth, Trump seems to have met his match in the heart of the Iranian capital of Tehran. On Thursday, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei released a video hailing Iran’s “victory” over Israel and the United States, and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd says “Trump was shocked, shocked at this blatant lie.”

“As a man of great faith, he is not supposed to lie,” the president said on Truth Social.

This, said Dowd, was from a president who’d bragged that the strikes had “OBLITERATED” Iran’s nuclear capabilities, only to be fact-checked when CNN’s Natasha Bertrand and her colleagues broke the story of a preliminary classified U.S. report suggesting the strikes had actually set Iran back by a few months. The Times later confirmed her scoop. Later, CNN revealed the military didn’t even use bunker-buster bombs on one of Iran’s most prime nuclear targets.

READ MORE: Another Trump family member suggests a run for the presidency — but it’s not the one you think

But Dowd notes “Trump went on to his usual authoritarian etiquette lesson, complaining that the proper response by Khamenei to getting hit with 14 30,000-pound bombs should have been: ‘THANK YOU, PRESIDENT TRUMP!’”

Trump claims he deserves gratitude because he stopped Israeli and U.S. forces from killing the ayatollah where he was hiding. He said that it was he who made Israel recall a group of planes targeting Tehran.

“I SAVED HIM FROM A VERY UGLY AND IGNOMINIOUS DEATH,” Trump claims. “… I wish the leadership of Iran would realize that you often get more with HONEY than you do with VINEGAR. PEACE!!!”

Nobody’s confirmed this claim yet, but Dowd notes “Mr. Honey” was already moving on to post “a typically vinegary post abruptly cutting off ‘ALL’ trade talks with Canada.

READ MORE: A made-for-TV war came with made-for-TV humiliation for Trump

There’s a new element to the nonsense today, though, Dowd warns. The problem with Trump’s “untruthful hyperbole” now is that “he’s getting help on his alternate universe from all the new partisan reporters in the White House briefing room who are eager to shill for him.”

“So many Americans still have questions about the 2020 election,” one reporter fawned at a news conference on Friday. She went on to ask Trump would be appointing someone at D.O.J. to investigate judges “for the political persecution of you, your family and your supporters during the Biden administration?”

“I love you,” Trump beamed to the young woman. “Who are you?”

READ MORE: ‘We cannot support’: 17 GOP governors ask Congress to ‘strip this provision’ from megabill

Dowd says she a reporter for “Mike Lindell of ‘MyPillow’ fame, who has his own ‘news’ network.”

“Talk about fluffing your pillows,” Dowd said.

Read the full Times column at this link.

Lawrence O’Donnell has said the worst is still to come for President Donald Trump, even after a federal trade court shot down his “illegal and unconstitutional” tariffs.

The Court of International Trade said Wednesday that Trump had exceeded his authority and unanimously ruled to block his sweeping “Liberation Day” import levies from early April. However, the Court of Appeals suspended the ruling, saying that the tariffs can remain active while it “considers the motions paper” from the White House. The next hearing in the case is on June 5. If that doesn’t go Trump’s way, it could go all the way to the Supreme Court.

O’Donnell said during a blistering monologue on MSNBC’s The Last Word Wednesday evening that the levies “were constitutionally insane.” Following up on Thursday, O’Donnell said the worst is yet to come for the president.

The majority of Trump’s

The multi-hyphenate host, who is also an actor, screenwriter and TV producer, pointed out that Trump, through his lawyers to the appeals court, had pledged to issue refunds to affected businesses if his tariffs are found to be illegal in a final court ruling.

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“And so, as many humiliation days as Donald Trump has had since he started his failed trade war ‘Refund Day’ will be the ultimate ‘Humiliation Day’ at the end of Donald Trump’s disastrous trade war,” O’Donnell warned.

“‘Refund Day’ is coming, and it will be the most humiliating day Donald Trump will suffer in his losing trade war.”

A former customs official told the BBC that if the appeal is unsuccessful, Customs and Border Protection would issue directions to its officers to refund tariff payments made at U.S. borders.

John Leonard, a former top official at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency added that, for now, Trump’s duties will continue to be paid.

A three-judge panel of the New York-based federal trade court ruled Trump’s tariffs illegal on Wednesday. / Getty Images

O’Donnell added that on Thursday evening, Trump “humiliated himself once again by showing how irreversibly stupid and flawlessly ignorant he is of the actual words of the Constitution and their meaning.”

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He was referring to a rambling Truth Social post in which Trump said the courts had “incredibly ruled against the United States of America on desperately needed Tariffs.”

The host said the post reveals Trump’s “most severe mental weakness, not just in the history of the presidency, but in the history of federal elected officials in this country.”

O’Donnell said that the U.S. Court of International Trade had in fact ruled in favor of the United States of America and added that even high school students know the usual process for trade deals.

“Donald Trump goes on to say, if allowed to stand, this would completely destroy presidential power. The presidency would never be the same. Exclamation point,” O’Donnell went on.

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“No, Donald, no, no no, Donald. If the Court of International Trade’s decision is allowed to stand, that means the presidency would be the same as it has always been…the presidency in which no president, other than Donald Trump, ever tried to randomly set new tariffs all around the world, all by himself.”

He called Trump the “utterly lost occupant of the White House,” and called the director of his National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett, “permanently smiling and utterly incompetent.”

“The second Trump presidency has turned out to be much, much, worse than his first presidency,” he concluded.

Draw a circle around all the assets in America now devoted to Artificial Intelligence.

Draw a second circle around all the assets devoted to the U.S. military.

A third around all assets being devoted to helping the Trump regime collect and compile personal information on millions of Americans.

And a fourth circle around the parts of Silicon Valley dedicated to turning the United States away from a democracy into a libertarian dictatorship led by tech bros.

Where do the four circles intersect?

At a corporation called Palantir Technologies and a man named Peter Thiel.

In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, a “palantir” is a seeing stone that can be used to distort truth and present selective visions of reality. During the War of the Ring, a palantir falls under the control of Sauron, who uses it to manipulate and deceive.

Palantir Technologies bears a striking similarity. It sells an AI-based data platform that allows its users — among them, military and law enforcement agencies — to analyze personal data, including social media profiles, personal information, and physical characteristics. These are used to identify and surveil individuals.

In March, Trump signed an executive order requiring all agencies and departments of the federal government to share data on Americans. To get the job done, Trump chose Palantir Technologies.

Palantir is now busily combining personal data on every American gleaned from the Department of Homeland Security, Defense Department, Department of Health and Human Services, Social Security Administration, and Internal Revenue Service, including their bank account numbers and medical claims.

Will the Trump regime use this emerging super database to advance Trump’s political agenda, find and detain immigrants, and punish critics? Will it make it easier for Trump to spy on and target his ever-growing list of enemies and other Americans? We’ll soon find out.

Thirteen former Palantir employees signed a letter this month urging the corporation to stop its endeavors with Trump. Linda Xia, a signee who was a Palantir engineer until last year, said the problem was not with the company’s technology but with how the Trump administration intended to use it.

“Combining all that data, even with the noblest of intentions, significantly increases the risk of misuse,” she said.

Palantir’s work on such a project could be “dangerous,” Rep. Warren Davidson, (R-OH), told the Semafor news site. “When you start combining all those data points on an individual into one database, it really essentially creates a digital ID. And it’s a power that history says will eventually be abused.”

On Monday, a group of Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Palantir, asking for answers about huge government contracts the company got. The lawmakers are worried that Palantir is helping make a super database of American’s private information.

Behind their worry lie several people who are behind Palantir’s selection for the project, starting with Elon Musk.

Palantir’s selection was driven by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. At least three DOGE members formerly worked at Palantir, while others had worked at companies funded by Thiel, an investor and founder of Palantir, who still holds a major stake.

Thiel has worked closely with Musk, who devoted a quarter of a billion dollars to getting Trump reelected and then, as head of DOGE, helped eviscerate swaths of the government without congressional authority.

Thiel also mentored JD Vance, who worked for Thiel at one of his venture funds. Thiel bankrolled Vance’s 2022 senatorial campaign, introduced Vance to Trump, and later helped convinced Trump to name Vance his vice president.

Thiel also mentored billionaire David Sacks, who also worked with Thiel at PayPal. As a student at Stanford University, Sacks wrote for the Stanford Review, the right-wing student newspaper Thiel founded as an undergraduate in 1987. Sacks is now Trump’s “AI and crypto czar.”

The CEO of Palantir is Alex Karp, who said on an earnings call this year that the company wants “to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.”

Palantir recently disclosed that Karp received $6.8 billion in “compensation actually paid” in 2024 (you read that right) — making him the second-highest paid chief executive of a publicly traded company in the U.S. (behind Musk).

A former generation of wealthy U.S. conservatives backed candidates like Barry Goldwater because they wanted to conserve American institutions.

But this group — Thiel, Musk, Sacks, Karp, and Vance, among others — doesn’t seem to want to conserve much of anything, at least not anything that occurred after the 1920s, including Social Security, civil rights, and even women’s right to vote.

As Thiel has written:

“The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

Hello?

If “capitalist democracy” is becoming an oxymoron, it’s not because of public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire capitalists like Musk and Thiel are intent on killing democracy.

Not incidentally, the 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when America’s robber barons ripped off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest of the U.S. had to go deep into debt both to maintain their standard of living and to maintain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced.

When that debt bubble burst in 1929, we got the Great Depression. Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler then emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy the modern world had ever witnessed.

If America learned anything from the first Gilded Age and the fascism that grew like a cancer in the 1930s, it should have been that gross inequalities of income and wealth fuel abuses of political power — as Trump, Musk, Thiel, Karp, and other oligarchs have put on full display — which in turn generate strongmen who destroy both democracy and freedom.

The danger inherent in Palantir’s AI-powered super database on all Americans is connected to the vast wealth and power of those associated with the corporation, and their apparent disdain for democratic institutions.

Last Saturday, had you walked to the end of Trump’s military-birthday parade and gazed above Trump’s reviewing stand, you’d have seen on a giant video board an advertisement for Palantir — one of the chief sponsors of the event.

Tolkien’s palantir fell under the control of Sauron. Thiel’s Palantir is falling under the control of Trump. How this story ends is up to all of us.

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Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com