Your Taxpayer Dollars Funded an Evangelical Revival at the National Mall
Plus: This Ebola outbreak has no vaccine. No treatment. No USAID. What's next? Attack at San Diego mosque. The price of appeasement. Mangione wins some, loses some. And the ugly side of monkey fame.
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“How is this legal?”
I get that question a lot.
How is the administration using federal funds for a prayer service promoting Christian nationalist beliefs? How did the president cut USAID and WHO funding without Congress — moves critics say delayed the Ebola response and cost lives?
The unsatisfying answer is: Laws are not Roombas. They do not wander around enforcing themselves.
People enforce them. And the people specifically hired by voters to do that job — Congress — have so far displayed the urgency of a committee studying a pothole.
But consequences have their own schedule.
For a while, much of the pain was private — a lost job, a closed office, a family with fewer benefits, an agency quietly losing the people who know how to make the system run. Real damage, but still behind closed doors and easy for Washington to file away as a staffing issue, a budget line, a policy dispute.
We may now be entering the public “find out” phase.
Not because the damage is new.
Because it is becoming harder for the people in power to ignore.
In today’s newsletter: A deadly hate crime at San Diego’s largest mosque. Your tax dollars helped fund a Christian nationalist rally on the National Mall; the speakers called it a spiritual war. The CDC took a step it has taken exactly once in 80 years over an Ebola outbreak that experts say we caught too late. Bill Cassidy tried appeasement, Thomas Massie tried defiance — both are finding out the price of loyalty. The Luigi Mangione trial lost some evidence but kept two pieces prosecutors really wanted. And celebrity comes for the monkey enclosure.
Here Are Your Headlines
Breaking: Investigators say two teenage suspects carried out a shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego, killing at least three people, including a security guard. Police are treating the attack on the city’s largest mosque as a hate crime. The two suspects were found dead of self-inflicted gunshot wounds in a nearby car. The Center also hosts a school, which the organization’s imam said was safe. Investigators haven’t released a motive, but say hate speech was involved. The Council on American-Islamic Relations condemned the attack. According to its most recent civil rights report, released in March, “complaints of discrimination and bigotry” against Muslims “remain at a record high for the third year in a row.” Police in New York and LA announced they would increase their presence near houses of worship following the shooting.
Living on a Prayer: Thousands packed into the National Mall Sunday for a partially-taxpayer-funded daylong rally the White House described as a religious “revival.” Senior administration officials, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance, hailed the country’s Christian heritage in video messages. Speaker Mike Johnson, there in person, called on the crowd to “rededicate the United States of America as one nation under God.” Multiple evangelical faith leaders addressed the crowd, echoing that message. “We are in a spiritual war,” one pastor said. Another, who was last at the Mall on January 6, 2021, called it “the fruit of what we prayed for five years ago.” Trump did not attend in person; he went golfing instead. Organizers played a video of him reading a passage from the Old Testament — a section one scholar called “a hallmark of the religious right,” which was also read during the Jan 6 attack — that was recorded in early April for a separate marathon Bible-reading event.
Blurred Lines: The Trump administration is making the case that America was founded as an explicitly Christian nation. This is the central belief of Christian nationalists, who think the United States should be governed by conservative Christian values. Many scholars reject that. One noted that many Founding Fathers were not traditional Christians and “did not intend to create a Christian nation. Not a single Founding Father made such a claim.” Some scholars further argued the rally was a violation of the First Amendment and the separation of church and state. One professor called it “flagrantly unconstitutional.” All of the speakers were evangelical Christians, except for two conservative Catholics and a single Orthodox Rabbi.
Rise and Fall: New research suggests that more Americans are in favor of Christian nationalism — the proportion has doubled in the last four years — and support making Christianity the official religion. But they remain small minorities; the majority believe the government should preserve separation of church and state.
God Works in Mysterious Ways: One of the rally’s evangelical speakers claimed God raised Trump “to bring that ballroom finally to stand where it needs to stand.” The day before, the Senate parliamentarian struck hundreds of millions in ballroom funding from the GOP’s immigration enforcement bill, ruling it violated strict budget rules. Republicans are working on rewriting the bill’s language to keep the ballroom funding, though some have told GOP leadership they don’t want to vote on it — and Democrats have said they will “challenge any future language the Republicans try to pass to use taxpayer dollars to fund Trump’s ballroom.”
One Outbreak After Another: The CDC invoked a public health law restricting entry into the US in response to an Ebola outbreak, which the WHO declared a global health emergency. It’s the second time the CDC has invoked Title 42 since its creation 80 years ago; the other time was during COVID. The outbreak is currently in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda; 10 cases have been confirmed, but the outbreak is suspected to have killed over 100 people, including multiple health workers, and infected hundreds more. Several Americans have been exposed. One of them, a Christian missionary physician, tested positive after treating patients; he’s being sent to Germany for treatment. The WHO warned of a “potentially much larger outbreak than what is currently being detected” due to gaps in surveillance and reporting. The current outbreak is already in multiple “health zones” and at least two countries; it’s been detected in urban areas, where density enables spread. Some health experts expressed shock at how late this outbreak was detected, connecting the delay in part to the Trump administration’s cuts to global health programs. Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of Brown University’s Pandemic Center, said that “it’s possible that we’re starting to see the consequences of severe and sudden cuts to global health programs that have eroded surveillance and allowed deadly viruses to spread undetected.”
Context: This outbreak involves the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, for which there are no approved vaccines or treatments. Symptoms can take up to 21 days to develop. It has a fatality rate of between 25% and 40%; previous Ebola outbreaks have had fatality rates of up to 90%. Ebola is extremely infectious, meaning a tiny amount can cause sickness. But it’s not very contagious, because it’s spread through contact with bodily fluids, not through the air.
The Response: The CDC announced a range of measures, including entry restrictions on non-US passport holders who’ve been in the DRC, Uganda, or South Sudan in the last three weeks. People arriving from affected regions will face enhanced health screenings. The CDC is sending personnel to affected areas and are working to remove several Americans believed to have been exposed to the virus. The agency said the risk to the US public is “low.”
Reap What You Sow: The chief of the WHO blamed “steep and sudden” cuts for worsening outbreaks of both Ebola and hantavirus. The US was the largest funder of the WHO; the Trump administration withdrew from the organization earlier this year. USAID traditionally played a large role in containing outbreaks, including of Ebola; the Trump administration shuttered it last year, cutting US support for efforts to contain Ebola. “With no USAID money and CDC expertise,” the president of the Uganda Medical Association said during an Ebola outbreak last year, “it was like Uganda was left to die.”
America is so polarized these days there is precious little the right and left agree on. So I pay attention when the same concern starts showing up in very different corners of the media landscape.
That’s what’s happening around AI and the massive data centers being built to power it.
On the right, Steve Bannon has formed a group pressing the Trump administration to regulate AI more aggressively. On the left, environmental and community groups are organizing against new data center construction, warning about water use, energy demand, and possible health impacts on nearby communities.
Different politics. Same suspicion.
Ground News is useful for precisely this kind of story. It shows how the same issue is being covered across left, center, and right-leaning outlets; compares headlines side by side; and flags stories getting major attention in one part of the media ecosystem and far less in another. It also makes it easier to track where local opposition is growing — and whether the coverage is coming mostly from one side, or across the spectrum. That’s why I check it regularly. It doesn’t replace reporting. It helps you understand the reporting environment: who is covering a story, how they are framing it, and what you might not be seeing.
Ground News is part of what helps make my independent journalism possible.
If you’d like to get 40% off Ground News’ Vantage plan, you can subscribe here.
Price of Appeasement: Trump scored another victory in his revenge campaign. He’d targeted Louisiana’s Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy for defeat, after Cassidy — a doctor — raised concerns about RFK’s vaccine policies and previously voted to impeach Trump after Jan 6. No doubt in an effort to appease the president, Cassidy cast the deciding vote to advance RFK’s nomination as Health Secretary. Trump nevertheless backed a primary opponent and Cassidy became the first previously elected senator to lose a primary in over a decade. Now former Trump aide and State Treasurer John Fleming and Trump-endorsed Rep. Julia Letlow (R-LA), advance to a runoff election. Trump attributed Cassidy’s defeat to the senator’s “disloyalty to the man who got him elected.”
Messy Election: Trump’s influence over Republican voters will be tested again Tuesday, as Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) faces his toughest primary since he was elected in 2012. It’s become the most expensive House primary in US history, with outside groups pumping in millions of dollars and Massie raising millions more. The election has become a referendum on loyalty to Trump. Massie has clashed with the president on the Epstein files and foreign conflicts. “Get rid of this loser,” Trump told local voters in March. Trump endorsed dairy farmer and retired NAVY Seal Ed Gallrein, who is ahead in recent polls. Gallrein skipped all eight planned debates with Massie. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth campaigned for Gallrein Monday. The chair of the county’s Republican Party called the election a “pick-a-side moment.… Are we with the president, or are we with our congressman?”
Also: An ugly sub plot in the Massie race. Pro-Israel groups are spending millions to unseat Massie for breaking with the party’s pro-Israel positions. On the other hand, his defenders are using antisemitic tropes to make the case for him. A pro-Massie PAC ran an ad portraying one of his opponent’s Jewish donors as a shadowy force importing “trans madness” into Kentucky — complete with a rainbow-colored Star of David.
Keep reading to find out…
Why a convicted election conspiracist will soon walk free
What a jury thought of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Sam Altman
The evidence a judge allowed prosecutors to use against Luigi Mangione
Why a costumed American man tried to break into a zoo enclosure housing a world-famous monkey
How Gulf leaders convinced Trump to delay strikes on Iran, once again
What the White House thinks of Iran’s latest peace offer
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