CNN fact checker Daniel Dale is scorching President Donald Trump for employing a “time-tested conspiracist tactic,” namely, altering his conspiracy theory when the facts disprove it.

Dale reminds readers that when then-President Barack Obama in 2011 had to publish his long-form birth certificate, which proved decisively that he was, in fact, born in the U.S., Trump didn’t cease and desist — instead, he changed tactics and suggested that the birth certificate itself was fake.

“It’s a time-tested conspiracist tactic,” Dale writes. “And he’s now using it again when trying to explain why Steve Hilton succeeded in the California primary elections Trump had baselessly declared were a fraud and were being rigged against Hilton.”

“If you’re pushing the baseless conspiracy theory that the results of last week’s California primary elections were rigged against Republicans like gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton, it would seem highly inconvenient that Hilton has succeeded in qualifying for the November runoffs,” Dale argues. “But if you’re a seasoned conspiracy theorist, as President Donald Trump is, you don’t just stop telling a fantastical tale when it is contradicted by new facts. Rather, you simply adjust the conspiracy theory so that the new facts now fit within it.”

Trump is now alleging that “he had jawboned the riggers into submission,” says Dale, “but only in Hilton’s case, not the case of unsuccessful Republican Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt.”

For his part, Hilton hasn’t alleged any fraud, and, in fact, “he has said he has ‘seen nothing’ to justify any legal intervention.”

But Trump warned that California authorities had “approved” of Hilton advancing to the top tier for November.

“And then I hit them hard on that (Pratt’s defeat), but I started talking about Steve Hilton, who’s a fantastic guy,” Trump said, as Dale noted. “And I saw them say it was going to be two weeks before they knew, and I started hitting them. ‘It’s going to happen to Steve Hilton, too.’ It’s – ‘Watch, you gotta watch’ – and they approved Steve Hilton very quickly. They didn’t want, there was too much heat on them. The only reason he got approved – he had all the votes he needed, probably to be first place – but the only reason they approved Steve Hilton, it was going to be two weeks, they said, and then they approved him that night. Because the heat was on them, because they’re cheatin’ dogs.”

Dale calls Trump’s allegations “complete hogwash” and a “new round of foolishness.”

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The Republican-led Congress has been a “bitter disappointment,” the Bloomberg Editorial Board argues. It points to the body’s “lackluster effort,” its “ham-handed” cuts to medical coverage, and how it dropped much of its agenda “in favor of writing big checks.”

“After two years in charge of a unified federal government, what has the Republican Party accomplished? If current polling is any indication, not enough,” the Editorial Board writes. It points to the Senate’s $70 billion budget reconciliation bill — which passed the House of Representatives — “that will mostly add to a glut of immigration funding.”

This GOP Congress has “fattened the budgets of immigration authorities while doing little to fix the broken incentives that lure unauthorized migrants in the first place (let alone to rationalize the legal immigration system).”

The Board accuses Congress of pledging to fight inflation, while standing “aside as the president has imposed a costly global tariff regime. After coming into office promising ‘massive reform’ to the health-care system, they’ve mostly cut coverage in ham-handed ways.”

Saying Congress “has done nothing to rein in long-term liabilities,” the Board calls the trajectory of the federal government’s debt “unsustainable.”

“More egregiously, the party that flatters itself as fiscally responsible hasn’t lifted a finger to rein in budget deficits,” it writes. “Last year’s tax cuts alone increased projected deficits by $4.7 trillion over the next decade. For all the turmoil engendered by the Department of Government Efficiency, the country’s spending problem has worsened decisively.”

The Board warns that the midterms are just months away, and Congress shouldn’t “congratulate themselves prematurely” — but it could take several steps.

Among them, it could “commit to respecting the Federal Reserve’s independence under new Chairman Kevin Warsh,” and promote permitting reform “to slash red tape, reduce costs, and accelerate energy and infrastructure projects.”

Congress could work on expanding housing supply and medical transparency, or “remind the president that his tariffs are harming workers and inflating consumer prices.”

And in an apparent rebuke, Bloomberg writes, “With federal spending threatening to slow income growth and drive up interest rates — or indeed prompt a fiscal crisis — they could take the minimum step of empaneling a commission to ponder the problem.”

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Historian and professor of strategic studies Phillips P. O’Brien is warning that President Donald Trump’s military may be committing war crimes, and doing so seems to be “official” U.S. policy.

“The USA seems to have deliberately and with foresight, committed a war crime as an act of policy,” O’Brien writes at his Substack newsletter. “If this is right, and all evidence seems to say it is, committing acts of terror is now an acceptable method of war in the judgement of the US government and, by extension, the American people.”

O’Brien points to the U.S. military’s strike on “two reservoirs and a water treatment facility in southern Iran,” cutting off water to 20,000 civilians in what OBrien says is 115-degree heat, similar to America’s Death Valley.

He explains that it likely was a deliberate attack because there are no military installations in the area, “and the destruction was precise.”

It is “hard to see this as a mistake,” he writes. “The target was too specialized, too localized and the effect seems calibrated.”

Asking, “Is It A War Crime?” O’Brien answers, “Without a doubt.”

The U.S. “has attacked, seemingly deliberately, a facility vital to the maintenance of human life that has no discernible military utility. So yes, it is a war crime.”

Making the act even more “perverse,” writes O’Brien, is that “this war crime was deliberately committed because Donald Trump is getting frustrated that the Iranian government is not doing what he wants them to do and that the Iranian military attacked a legitimate military target, a US Apache helicopter that was enforcing a blockade (an act of war remember) against Iran.”

O’Brien calls it “typical, Trump,/organized crime style behavior.”

Trump “attacks a small civilian facility as a threat and warning to Iran that he might go on and commit even greater war crimes if they do not do what he wants.”

Later, “while speaking to Fox News reporters, Trump went ahead and said he might start mass attacks on Iran’s bridges and electricity power generation.”

“He also tweeted out that if Iran did not do what he wants it to do, that it would have to “pay the price” of their defiance,” says O’Brien.

He concludes that a “historic war crime” was committed “because the President of the USA can think of nothing better to do.”

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