REPUBLICAN ROADBLOCKS:  Getting Donald Trump’s legislative agenda past the Senate may not be an easy touchdown. Two of the Senate’s tightest-fisted fiscal conservatives said during television appearances yesterday that they would try to force significant changes to the “Big, Beautiful Bill” passed last week by the House. 

  Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rand Paul of Kentucky are particularly unhappy about the bill expanding the national debt by trillions of dollars. Johnson said on CNN that with Republicans in the majority he believes there’s an opportunity … “our only chance”  … to return federal spending to a “a reasonable prepandemic level.” He said, “I think we have enough to stop the process until the president gets serious about spending reduction and reducing the deficit.” 

  Speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” Rand Paul of Kentucky said that without a plan to puncture the ballooning national debt the “Big Bill” is “not a serious proposal,” and that Republicans need to cut deeper into Medicaid, Social Security, and food assistance programs. He said, “Somebody has to stand up and yell: ‘The emperor has no clothes.’” 

THE HARVARD GAME: President Trump continued his war against Harvard University over the weekend with the following post on his Truth Social feed:

“Why isn’t Harvard saying that almost 31% of their students are from FOREIGN LANDS, and yet those countries, some not at all friendly to the United States, pay NOTHING toward their student’s education, nor do they ever intend to. Nobody told us that! We want to know who those foreign students are, a reasonable request since we give Harvard BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, but Harvard isn’t exactly forthcoming. We want those names and countries. Harvard has $52,000,000, use it, and stop asking for the Federal Government to continue GRANTING money to you!”

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE:

— The President backed off on his 50 percent tariff on European goods, changing the effective date to July 9^th.

— NY Times reporter Peter Baker did a deep dive into how President Trump and his family are profiting off the presidency in a way that Trump himself might say, “Is like nothing you’ve ever seen before.”

  Baker reports that the family has collected $320 million in fees from sales of the $Trump meme coin and First Lady Melania Trump was directly paid $28 million in a film deal with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

  The Trumps are also opening an exclusive club in Washington called the Executive Branchcharging half a million dollars to join. 

— Defense secretary Pete Hegseth placed new restrictions on the Pentagon press corps, forbidding reporters to move unescorted around the executive office. Hegseth said it’s a matter of protecting national security. In January, the Defense Department made several major news outlets vacate their dedicated workspaces at the Pentagon.

— A record number of Americans — 6,618 —  applied for British citizenship in the first three months of this year. Authorities say it’s because people fear Donald Trump’s presidency.

THE WAR ROOM: Russia overnight Saturday hit Ukraine with one of its biggest drone and missile barrages of the war, killing at least 12 people and injuring dozens in cities and villages across the country. Ukrainian officials said the attack involved nearly 3709 missiles and drones. 

THE OBIT PAGE: Susan Brownmiller, the author, journalist, and activist whose book “Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape” revolutionized thinking about sexual assault, reframing it as crime of power and violence with a long history as a tool of oppression for women and even an instrument of war, died at age 90 in the Bronx.

  Published in 1975 while the feminist movement was rising, Brownmiller’s book helped to erase the thinking that rape was simply an act of passion and that women secretly want it. States began to change laws to make it easier to prosecute as a crime, some of them lifting the requirement that a woman needed an eyewitness to prove her claim.

— Marcel Ophuls, the German-born filmmaker whose 4 ½ hour documentary “The Sorrow and the Pity” exposed the myth of widespread French resistance to the Nazi occupation during World War II, has died at age 97.

  Released in 1969, the movie in particular revealed that while French citizens either cooperated or resisted the Nazis, most of them ignored the systematic liquidation of their Jewish countrymen. The movie caused outrage in France where the population had convinced itself  that they had staged a heroic resistance. The movie was not allowed to be shown on French television until 1981.

 THE SPIN RACK:  North Korean authorities over the weekend arrested three shipyard officials being held responsible for the disastrous launch of a new navy destroyer that land on its side in the water with a gash in its hull. North Korean dictator  Kim Jong-un was present for the accident and he was not pleased. — The movie “Un Simple Accident,” shot in secret by an Iranian writer/director, won the Palme d’Or, the highest prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The movie follows a group of men and women after one of them kidnaps a man they believe tortured them in prison. — The Texas house passed a bill requiring display of the Ten Commandments in all public school classrooms. It still needs to be passed by the Senate but Gov. Greg Abbott is waiting to sign it into law. — The US men’s hockey team won its first World Championship since 1933 yesterday in Stockholm.

BELOW THE FOLD: President Trump spoke at the West Point graduation. Here’s a sample of something he said about a man he knew:

   “He ended up getting a divorce. Found a new wife. Can you say a trophy wife? It didn’t work out too well. That doesn’t work out too well, I must tell you. A lot of trophy wives don’t work out.”

  Then the latest class of first lieutenants received their diplomas.

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