The Trump Department of Justice will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to allow it to intervene in President Donald Trump’s appeal of the E. Jean Carroll defamation case, which Trump lost and was ordered by a jury to pay $83.3 million. The DOJ wants SCOTUS to allow it to substitute itself for Trump — which effectively would result in the defamation case being dismissed because the federal government cannot be sued for defamation under federal law.

The DOJ, Bloomberg News reports, will claim Trump was acting as a government employee when he denied Carroll’s sexual-assault claims.

“A panel of appeals court judges previously denied the government’s request to invoke the Westfall Act in the case,” Bloomberg notes. “Carroll alleges Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1990s and then defamed her by calling her a liar when she went public with the claim in 2019.”

Critics blasted the DOJ’s decision to go to the Supreme Court.

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“This is outrageous. This has nothing to do with Trump as a public official or president. More corruption in the Justice Department in service of the Cult Leader,” charged The Atlantic’s Norman Ornstein, a prominent political scientist.

“Of course they have. They’re the president’s personal law firm at this point,” said MS NOW legal analyst Joyce Vance, a former U.S. Attorney.

“Most corrupt president ever,” alleged HuffPost White House correspondent S.V. Dáte.

“This is insane—the DOJ is not the president’s personal law firm,” noted Democratic strategist Mike Nellis.

“In case you have any doubt that the DOJ is just Trump’s personal lawyers now,” wrote journalist Franklin Harris.

“There really needs to be a lot more alarm about the level of fascism and corruption unfolding right now,” observed former Obama and Biden official Jesse Lee.

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Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House’s National Economic Council, is boasting that rising consumer spending — including on gasoline — proves the economy is thriving, even as Americans put those costs on their credit cards.

“And so the consumer is really, really firing on all cylinders, just like the corporate sector you’re seeing in the earnings reports, and they’re doing that because they have so much more money in their pockets,” Hassett told Fox Business.

Bragging that “credit card spending is through the roof,” Hassett said, “They’re spending more on gasoline, but they’re spending more on everything else, too.”

The data shows a different story.

Polls show that the majority of Americans are worried about their finances, more now than at any time in decades.

Late last month, Gallup reported that 55 percent of Americans say their finances are getting worse.

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“That percentage is the highest Gallup has recorded since it began asking Americans about their finances in 2001, showing consumers are less optimistic than they were during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the Great Recession in 2008,” CBS News reported.

Since President Donald Trump was sworn into office in January 2025, Americans are paying roughly 45% more for gas — with the national average hitting $4.53 per gallon today, per AAA, up from $3.13 that week.

“Almost 3 in 10 Americans now have less savings than they did a year ago, and for many, the safety net they once relied on is already gone,” reports MoneyWise. “According to a recent DepositAccounts survey, 37% of Americans have less than $500 set aside, and nearly half (45%) wouldn’t be able to cover more than a month of essential expenses if their income stopped.”

Kevin Hassett: “The consumer is really, really firing on all cylinders…Credit card spending is through the roof. They’re spending more on gasoline, but they’re spending more on everything else too.” pic.twitter.com/QHxcpIyQJT

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) May 6, 2026

READ MORE: MAGA’s Greed and ‘Willful Ignorance’ Will Kill Many Americans: Economist

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Nobel laureate Paul Krugman calls right-wing politics “deadly” — and predicts that “MAGA Will Kill Many Americans,” by the thousands, driven by greed and willful ignorance.

Krugman goes one step further, arguing outright that this is not by accident:

“Does MAGA want to see thousands of Americans die prematurely from smoking and refusal to get vaccinated? Yes,” he writes.

He argues that the right’s decades-long opposition to health care is driven by greed, especially from “wealthy donors unwilling to pay taxes to help others in need.”

Krugman points to Tuesday’s decision by Trump’s FDA to allow blueberry and mango-flavored vapes, which critics warn will increase use among the young.

Why?

“Trump is reportedly hoping that support for vaping will win back support from young men,” Krugman writes — a constituency the president has been losing during his second term in office.

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There’s also the recent decision, again by Trump’s FDA, to block the release of studies finding the COVID-19 and shingles vaccines safe, with side effects rare.

“Beyond this,” he continues, “right-wing politics in America often goes hand in hand with hostility to science in general and medical science in particular. The deadly linkage between reactionary politics and rejection of science was obvious during the Covid pandemic.”

Krugman also implicates greed in the anti-vaccine movement, saying that “quack medicine is big business.”

“Right-wing radio and social media have long relied on peddlers of snake oil for a large part of their revenue. So much of the attack on medical science can be seen as financially motivated,” he writes.

Ideological willful ignorance plays a part as well — driven by the alliance between oligarchs and white Christian nationalism, the latter of which is “deeply hostile to Enlightenment values, modern science very much included.”

To prove his point, Krugman points to the widely-reported resurgence of measles, that was seen as eliminated from the United States decades ago, thanks to vaccines. Now, many parents are choosing to forego vaccinating their children against this highly contagious and potentially deadly disease.

He adds to that the refusal of many red states to expand Medicaid, a program largely paid for by the federal government under the Affordable Care Act.

The data bear him out. Life expectancy in “Trump-leaning” states trails blue states significantly.

There’s “a strong, clear negative correlation between Trump-leaning orientation and low life expectancy at the state level,” Krugman writes. “Deep red states like Alabama and West Virginia have life expectancy comparable to, say, Kazakhstan.”

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