Misfit was here!

Glitter

“All journeys end when we reach our destination but the journeying remains a thing apart, unique unto itself. Most of us make life’s journeys without understanding that the journeying is a separate thing.”

Vincent Van Gogh Sold Only One Known Painting During His Life

Though he’s now considered one of history’s most talented artists, the painter behind such masterpieces as “The Starry Night” and “Sunflowers” was far from a success during his lifetime. Van Gogh took up painting around age 27 and met his untimely demise just a decade later, and in the years between he sold only one painting that there is any record of, “The Red Vineyard.” The piece, a dramatic Provençal landscape with vibrant red, orange, and yellow colors, was sold for 400 Belgian francs (approximately $2,000 today) in the winter of 1890 at an exhibition in Brussels, just six months before the artist’s death.

While “The Red Vineyard” is Van Gogh’s only officially recorded sale, historians theorize that he possibly bartered other paintings, especially at an early age in exchange for art supplies. Van Gogh biographer Marc Edo Tralbaut has also suggested that the artist may have sold a self-portrait to London art dealers in 1888, though his theory has not been proved. 

June 9, 2026

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 10

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Yesterday afternoon, President Donald J. Trump officially nominated acting attorney general Todd Blanche to become the attorney general of the United States.

Before going to the Department of Justice, Blanche was Trump’s personal attorney. He led Trump’s criminal defense team in the case of falsifying records to cover up hush-money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, as well as his defense against the two cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith: the one indicting him for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and the one indicting him for retaining classified documents after leaving office.

Since he took over for former attorney general Pam Bondi, Blanche has openly flouted the law in order to do Trump’s bidding. He secured indictments against people Trump perceives to be enemies, including former FBI director James Comey for posting on Instagram a picture of seashells arranged to form the number “8647.”

He backed the deal Trump made with the Department of Justice to establish a $1.776 billion slush fund to pay off those convicted of committing crimes surrounding Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Blanche put his name to the second half of that deal that seems to be being eclipsed by the slush fund: an agreement between Trump and the Department of Justice promising to drop any pending claims against Trump, his oldest sons, or the Trump Organization for past illegalities in tax returns, and promising not to conduct audits of Trump’s tax returns.

In the 1920s, gangster Al Capone kept his hands clean of direct evidence of the crimes he committed. The federal government finally took him down by convicting him of federal income tax evasion.

Trump’s nomination of Blanche directly challenges Republican senators to collude with him to flout the will of rank-and-file Republicans and break the law. In November 2025 the Senate voted unanimously to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act. This law required the Department of Justice to release all the files compiled by the FBI in its investigation of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein no later than December 19, 2025.

The Department of Justice has ignored that law. To date, it has released about half the files. Many of those it has released are heavily redacted although the law expressly prohibits such redactions. Instead, the Department of Justice released previously unknown names of Epstein survivors.

Mike Spector and Lindo So of Reuters reported yesterday that those survivors are now under threat from Trump supporters. “She’ll be unalived,” someone wrote under a news report of an accuser demanding the release of the files. “She really should’ve stayed quiet. RIP.”

In her testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Bondi told members of Congress that Blanche “was in charge of the process and the entire release of the Epstein files.” Bondi also said that she had “nothing to do with” the transfer of Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted sex offender, from prison to a minimum security camp. As Annie Grayer, M.J. Lee, Paula Reid, and Marshall Cohen of CNN reported, that transfer happened just after Blanche interviewed Maxwell for nine hours.

In that interview, Maxwell said nothing that would tie Trump to Epstein’s crimes, language Trump loyalists used to push back against the story reported just weeks before by Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo in the Wall Street Journal that what appears to be Trump’s signature is at the bottom of a birthday card to Epstein suggesting the two shared a “wonderful secret.” The words were written over a drawing of a naked girl.

MAGA Republicans supported Trump in 2024 because he promised to release the Epstein files, and Senate Republicans responded to their anger that the Trump administration was hiding those files by voting unanimously to require—not request—their release. Now Trump is demanding they abandon those voters to put the man behind that cover-up into office as the top law enforcement officer in the country.

As David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo explained today, if Republican senators confirm Blanche, they will be rubber-stamping Trump’s perversion of the Department of Justice and encouraging it to continue, blessing “wide-ranging and extreme” corruption. “No accountability, no roadblocks, no pumping the brakes.”

That rubber stamp on criminality would fall just as the corruption of the administration has become too obvious to pretend doesn’t exist.

New stories out today examine new aspects of that corruption.

Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica reported that an Indian billionaire appears to have gotten Trump to ease sanctions against his family’s energy empire by investing $100 million in a Texas start-up company in which Donald Trump Jr. is an investor.

Upon the Ambani family’s investment in America First Refining, the start-up secured beneficial U.S. policies for which it had been lobbying. The journalists report that longstanding problems with the company make it unlikely that the refinery America First has promised will ever get built, especially at a time when refineries are expensive and unprofitable.

The journalists note that it has become “a theme of Trump’s second term: overseas investors with interests before the administration putting money into the Trump family’s business interests.” Last December, looking only at publicly disclosed investments—the one the journalists uncovered today was secret—Forbes estimated that Don Jr.’s net worth had jumped from about $50 million to about $300 million since the 2024 election.

In Mother Jones today, scholar of corruption Casey Michel explored the many connections between Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Middle East billionaires who have invested billions in his investment fund Affinity Partners, essentially buying access to the president and U.S. policymaking even as the inexperienced Kushner represents the U.S. in sensitive negotiations in the region.

Kushner’s plans include a deal for a $1.6 billion tourist resort in Albania along a stretch of coastline and a pristine island protected as a critical area of biodiversity. Critics claim Prime Minister Edi Rama backed the Affinity Partners project to curry favor with the Trump administration. Protesters have taken to the streets in Albania’s capital, Tirana, chanting “Albania is not for sale!” and calling for Rama’s resignation.

White House press spokesperson Anna Kelly told Mithil Aggarwal, Raf Sanchez, and Mo Abbas of NBC News that Kushner is a “volunteer” for the government and that his business activities “have nothing to do with the President or the administration.” Asked if Rama’s government had backed the project to gain favor with Trump, she said: “This is the same, tired narrative that Democrats have pushed against President Trump, his family, and his administration for a decade.”

An investigation by Tom Bergin, Michelle Conlin, Koh Gui Qing, and Tom Wilson of Reuters today shows that the Trump family has made at least $2.3 billion in their crypto currency licensing adventures since Trump began his second term. It also shows that more than a million people who invested in their enterprises have suffered at least $2.3 billion in losses.

The journalists report that the investors they interviewed believed that Trump’s position as president and “what they perceived as his business acumen” guaranteed they would make money. “Some said they still hold on to the hope that Trump will make things right. Others expressed regret, anger and embarrassment.”

Trump and MAGA Republicans celebrated the model of governance used by prime minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán during his 16 years in power, calling for the U.S. government to mimic his rejection of immigration, undermining of the rule of law, and destruction of liberal democracy in favor of what Orbán called “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy.”

After voters threw out Orbán and his party with a supermajority that would empower the country’s new leaders to investigate their predecessors, the extraordinary corruption is coming to light. Marton Dunai of the Financial Times reported today that tracking the financial transactions of the Orbán government has shown that it siphoned off at least 160 billion euros, equivalent to about $185 billion dollars, from European Union funds, with the corruption peaking in Orbán’s last year in office as loyalists worked to grab what they could as Orbán’s power was crumbling.

But, as Andrew Higgins and Lili Rutai reported in the New York Times just before the election that swept Orbán and his party out of power, many Orbán loyalists jumped ship. Although they risked government persecution from Orbán should he win reelection, they took the gamble that the future belonged not to him but to his opponents.

Trump appears to be trying to prevent such defections in the ranks of the Republican senators by forcing them to confirm Blanche, thus rubber-stamping his perversion of the rule of law and joining him in his utter disregard of the demand of Republican voters for the release of the Epstein files.

There may well be an effort to downplay the Blanche confirmation process, but make no mistake: it is a very big deal indeed.

June 8, 2026

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 9

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On June 8, 1789, Representative James Madison of Virginia stood up to address the House of Representatives in order to introduce a series of amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Initially, Madison had been opposed to the idea of spelling out the rights on which the new government couldn’t intrude because he thought the document itself limited what the government could do. But he had come around to the idea of specifying the areas in which the new government could not intrude after voters opposed ratifying the Constitution until it included protections from government interference in their rights.

When Madison rose to introduce his amendments to the Constitution, ten of which would eventually be adopted and become the Bill of Rights, the Constitution had been ratified, but ratification had stalled. Two states of the original thirteen, North Carolina and Rhode Island, had not yet ratified the Constitution. Others had done so only with the promise that a list of rights would be forthcoming.

One of the amendments Madison proposed was especially dear to him. It was, as he told his colleagues, that “[t]he civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, infringed.”

That proposal was the basis for what became the first part of the First Amendment to the Constitution, which reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

With the wounds of religious persecution both in Europe and in the colonies still fresh, Madison cared deeply about keeping the government away from religion.

In 1772, when he was 21, Madison watched as the government of Virginia had itinerant preachers arrested for preaching against the established church in the state. By the next year, he had begun to question whether established religion, which was common in the colonies, was good for society. By 1776, many of his broad-thinking neighbors had come to believe that society should “tolerate” different religious practices; he had moved past tolerance to the belief that men had a right of conscience.

In that year, he was instrumental in putting Section 16 into the Virginia Declaration of Rights. It reads, “That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.”

In 1785, in a “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” he explained that what was at stake was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants.

The concerns about inequality behind the First Amendment are being illustrated right now in the twenty-first-century United States. Those concerns come from an unlikely direction.

On Thursday, June 4, 2026, Nick Mordowanec of Military dot com reported that under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Department of Defense had removed about 180 faith traditions from its number of recognized religious faiths and belief systems. As John Ismay, Alexandra E. Petri, and Aimee Ortiz of the New York Times note, of the 31 religions still recognized by the Defense Department, 22 of them are Christian denominations.

Left off the new list of Christian faiths was the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, whose members are commonly known as Mormons.

MAGA has worked to impose the ideology of evangelical religion on America. In the military, Mordowanec notes, Hegseth has pushed Christian theocracy through extremist Christian-based prayers services with a Christian nationalist preacher who has said women’s suffrage was a bad idea and has defended slavery, has described Trump’s war on Iran as a holy war. Michelle Boorstein and Sammy Westfall of the Washington Post add that Hegseth has urged chaplains to focus on scripture rather than psychology and has said those who disagree with him are God’s enemies.

Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) is a Mormon and represents Mormons in Utah. Lee has been a staunch MAGA supporter to the point that he was a key figure in urging President Donald J. Trump to stay in office in 2021 despite the fact he had lost the election.

But on Friday, Lee—the ultimate MAGA insider—found his religion excluded from the “Christian” category that the Trump administration embraces, turning him abruptly into an outsider.

Lee spent the weekend posting angrily about the slight that suggested Mormons aren’t Christians, only to have other posters deride his faith. He posted 37 times on social media insisting that the Defense Department’s classification be expanded to include Mormons under the “Christian” category, recording and reposting a video saying “As of two days ago, the Pentagon recognizes every Christian faith in America as Christian. Except one. That’s not okay, and it needs to change—now.”

Finally, yesterday, he posted that he had “just got off the phone with President Trump[.] We discussed the Pentagon’s ‘Christian list’[.] I won’t speak for him, but I’m thrilled about where this is heading[.] We’re most fortunate that President Trump (1) loves Latter-day Saints, and (2) is our commander in chief[.] Stay tuned[.]”

Today the Defense Department edited its list of religions so that no group is labeled “Christian.” Lee posted that he was grateful to Hegseth “for correcting the error” and said he agreed with Hegseth’s statement that “[t]he Pentagon’s job is not to adjudicate theological debates, but instead to ensure sincerely-held faith is respected and encouraged in our ranks.”

Madison and those who wrote, debated, passed, and ratified the Bill of Rights believed that making people’s religion—their right of conscience—depend on the approval of the president would destroy self-government..

A former U.S. Army chaplain told Mordowanec that the Defense Department’s limit to the religions it recognized was “horrible.” “When I raised my hand to become an Army chaplain, I swore that I would support and defend the Constitution. The First Amendment is the free exercise of religion for everybody. That’s what I was buying into.” Referring to the revised list, the former chaplain added: “As far as I’m concerned, that’s a violation of the United States Constitution.”

On June 8, 1789, Madison urged his colleagues to pass the new amendments to demonstrate that those who had pushed the adoption of the Constitution “were as sincerely devoted to liberty and republican government” as those who opposed it, and that those who wanted a strong new government were not, in fact, trying “to lay the foundation of an aristocracy or despotism. “ It would be a good thing, he said, to cement support for the government by reassuring Americans that those in favor of the new government had no “wish to deprive them of the liberty for which they valiantly fought and honorably bled.”