Apr. 7, 2026, 6:13 PM EDT

Happy Tuesday. Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, the past week’s top stories from the intersection of technology and politics.

Trump seeks funds to snoop on liberals

Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pa., sounded the alarm on Monday over the Trump administration’s latest budget proposal, particularly its requests for “counterterrorism” funds to be used to target Americans. Scanlon flagged recent reporting from journalist Ken Klippenstein that highlighted the White House’s request for a “joint mission center” that would “proactively” target Americans deemed a terrorist threat due to opinions such as anti-Christian sentiment, “anti-Americanism” and “anti-capitalism.” Those definitions came from a national security memo the Trump administration issued last yearknown as NSPM-7.

The proposed budget references social media platforms as hotspots for the so-called terrorism the administration is “proactively” trying to target.

“We’ve been raising the alarm about Trump’s counterterrorism directive – NSPM-7 – a plan to label Americans as domestic terrorists over opposition to immigration enforcement, beliefs about capitalism, and positions on race, gender, and religion,” Scanlon wrote on X. “Now, the White House wants to use taxpayer dollars to spy on those who oppose its extremist agenda.”

DOJ privacy official quits Civil Rights Division

Kilian Kagle, a privacy official with the Civil Rights Division, which oversees voting rights at the Justice Department, resigned last week as the Trump administration works to compel states to hand over sensitive voter information. Kagle did not give a reason for his departure.

Read my blog on Kagle’s resignation here.

Propagandists join Trump’s Easter party

The founders of Tenet Media, a right-wing organization paid by Russian interests to launder pro-Russian talking points to Americans in an illegal scheme, apparently attended the White House Easter celebration on Monday.

Trump’s wasteful war enriches defense industry

The Pentagon is seeking $4.5 billion dollars to replenish its stockpile of Tomahawk missiles, which Trump has depleted over the course of his deadly and economically destructive war with Iran. During a recent episode of “All In with Chris Hayes,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., discussed how Trump’s reckless use of extremely expensive military weapons will likely benefit defense contractors that have agreed to fund the president’s legally dubious new ballroom at the White House.

Read more about the White House’s request at Bloomberg here.

Reporting for the record

A new report in the Gateway Journalism Review highlights how data journalists have helped establish a public record of the devastating effects of Trump’s racist, anti-immigrant crackdown.

Read more at the Gateway Journalism Review here.

TMZ targets vacationing lawmakers

Digital tabloid TMZ has had a field day outing lawmakers who have gone on vacation during the government shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security. One of those lawmakers, Rep. John James, R-Mich., has been facing mockery after he posted an old video of himself at a gun range, apparently in an effort to raise doubts about whether he went to Turks and Caicos during the shutdown.

Feast your eyes on the evidence:

Read more at the Daily Beast here.

After a bunch of conservative lawmakers posted artificial intelligence-generated images that purported to show the colonel who was rescued after his plane was shot down over Iran, the Daily Kos’ Alix Breeden wrote about the crisis of Republicans “getting tricked by AI slop.”

Read the post on Daily Kos here.

Holocaust Memorial pulls links

Blue Light News reported this week on alterations made last year to references to racism on the U.S. National Holocaust Memorial website, removing a page called “Teaching Materials on Nazism and Jim Crow,” which, according to the outlet, “Provided lesson plans and resources about the connections between Americande jureracism and the Nazi regime, including links to sites about ‘African American Soldiers during World War II’ and ‘Afro-Germans during the Holocaust.’” A spokesperson for the museum told Blue Light News, “The Trump administration has not requested any changes to the Museum’s content or programming,” pointing them to other, still-active pages that touch on related topics.

Read the Blue Light News report here.

Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.

Apr. 7, 2026, 5:15 PM EDT

President Donald Trump’s threat to wipe out “a whole civilization” in Iran has prompted growing calls from Democrats to remove him through a constitutional mechanism that has never been used to end a presidency: The 25th Amendment.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Tuesday morning. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

He continued, saying with a “different, smarter, and less radicalized” regime in Iran, he hoped Tehran would come to a deal on the Strait of Hormuz. But he left it open that the United States would strike Iran on Tuesday night if a deal was not reached.

“WHO KNOWS?” Trump asked.

The post came just 12 hours before the president’s previously announced deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or risk the U.S. attacking bridges and power plants. Or, as the president put it in an expletive-laced Easter morning social media post“Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.”

In response to Trump’s threats, Democrats started a new trend on Tuesday that put the onus for Trump’s removal on some of the president’s most obsequious officials, calling on Trump’s Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment and declare the president unfit for office. Doing so would, in effect, remove Trump from the White House and replace him with Vice President JD Vance.

In a social media post, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., called for “this unhinged lunatic” to “be removed from office.” Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said“Threatening war crimes is a blatant violation of our constitution and the Geneva Conventions.” And Rep. Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., wrote“In the last 48 hours alone, the rhetoric has crossed every line.”

“Donald Trump’s instability is more clear and dangerous than ever,” said former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

As of early Tuesday evening, more than four dozen Democrats had called on Trump’s Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment, including Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md.; Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif.; Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif.; Rep. Adriano Espaillat, DN.Y.; Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y.; and Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, D.N.M.

Of course, these calls are unlikely to do much of anything.

To actually remove Trump from office, the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet would have to agree that the president “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” If the president were to dispute that assessment, as he almost certainly would, at least two-thirds of the House and Senate would have to agree that the president is unfit to serve to remove him from office.

The threshold in Congress is actually higher than what is required through a straight impeachment and conviction.

The bar, said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., is too high to clear at this moment, as Republicans on Capitol Hill and in Trump’s Cabinet remain in lockstep with the president.

“We’re going to have to buckle down and win this the old-fashioned way,” Whitehouse added in another post.

Some Democrats, such as Rep. Diane DeGette, D-Col.were clear that, if the Cabinet refused to invoke the 25th Amendment, then Congress should begin impeachment proceedings, an unlikely endeavor on its own in the GOP-controlled Congress.

But Democrats have increasingly argued that Trump’s war with Iran, coupled with what they have described as bellicose and progressively unhinged rhetoric, have crossed the line. (Some of the YOU are faithfulsuch as former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and conservative commentators Alex Jones and Candace Owens, have also called on Trump’s Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment.)

Still, almost every Republican in Congress has stood by Trump. In fact, rather than pushing back on the president, some criticized Greene on Tuesday.

“The TRUE madness is calling for the 25th to be used against one of the greatest presidents our nation has ever seen! @POTUS is making the entire planet safer,” Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., wrote on Xadding that Greene is “starting to sound like” Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Tucker Carlson.

Most other Republicans have remained silent on Trump’s threats. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., made two posts Tuesday, one touting the “no tax on tips” from the GOP’s reconciliation bill and one cheering the International Olympic Committee for recognizing that “women’s sports are meant for biological women.”

Johnson, like Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has remained silent on Trump’s escalating rhetoric.

Notably, however, some Republicans have started to offer indirect criticism.

During an appearance on conservative journalist and commentator John Solomon’s podcast on Monday, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said he is “hoping and praying” that Trump’s threat against Iran “really is bluster.”

“I do not want to see us start blowing up civilian infrastructure,” Johnson said. “I do not want to see that.”

Rep. Nathaniel Moran, R-Texas, also posted online that he does not support “the destruction of a ‘whole civilization.’”

“That is not who we are, and it is not consistent with the principles that have long guided America,” he said.

And Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., told MS NOW on Tuesday that while the president’s words about eliminating “a whole civilization” are “reckless,” he argued it is the president “negotiating Trump-style.”

“I do want to see the regime buckle and make a true peace,” Bacon said in a statement.

Democratic leaders in Congress have also been predictably critical of Trump’s threats, though they have stopped short of immediately calling for the 25th Amendment.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.; Majority Whip Katherine Clark, D-Mass.; and leading Democrats have instead called for the House to “come back into session immediately and vote to end this reckless war of choice in the Middle East before Donald Trump plunges our country into World War III.”

And top Senate Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., in a statement condemned the president’s messagesaying it is “not strength.”

“Intentionally destroying the power, water, or basic infrastructure upon which tens of millions of civilians depend to punish the very civilians who suffer at the hands of the Iranian regime would constitute a war crime, a betrayal of the values this nation was founded on, and a moral failure,” they wrote.

While calls have grown for the invocation of the 25th Amendment, some Democrats have targeted others in the administration, such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

On Monday, Ansari said she planned to introduce articles of impeachment against Hegseth “for repeatedly violating his oath of office and his duty to the Constitution.”

“Only Congress has the power to declare war, not a rogue president or his lackeys. Hegseth’s reckless endangerment of U.S. servicemembers and repeated war crimes, including bombing a girls’ school in Minab, Iran and willfully targeting civilian infrastructure, are grounds for impeachment and removal from office,” she said.

For months now, Democrats have wrestled with the question of presidential accountability — namely, how much to focus on it as part of their party’s midterm messaging and potential governing agenda.

The fear among some Democrats is that focusing too much on anti-Trump sentiment could distract from a positive, kitchen-table agenda.

But as the second year of Trump’s presidency careens from domestic crises to an escalating overseas conflict, the president may be forcing Democrats’ hand. And depending on what happens Tuesday night, the entire political landscape could change with his military actions — and the debate over accountability could shift from theoretical to immediate very quickly.