Opinion

The Trump Administration Tells the Truth

A government lawyer admitted in a court filing that the administration withheld grants based on whom states had voted for.

By · July 28, 2026 · 6 min read

This article was originally published by The Atlantic and is republished here under license.

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In a court filing earlier this month, a government lawyer did something radical: He laid out the truth in plain English.

The surprise was not just the honesty from a chronically dishonest administration but also the substance: The Trump administration admitted that it had withheld federal money in retaliation against its political rivals. The disclosure, first reported by The New York Times on Friday, is part of a lawsuit from a group of researchers in California whose grants were canceled. In lieu of turning over documents to the plaintiffs in discovery, an Energy Department attorney acknowledged in a filing that decisions about which grants might be terminated had been “based solely” on a goal of political retribution. “With one exception, the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing Senators (‘Blue State’ grants),” the filing stated, contradicting previous public statements by officials.

Every administration has its own policy agenda and preferences, but this goes beyond that, subjugating science to partisanship and holding research and infrastructure money hostage throughout much of the country. If the United States is to remain legally and civically coherent—and scientifically dynamic—the rules have to apply consistently.

Even before Donald Trump returned to office, the country was in some ways pulling apart into two different policy worlds: one governed by Democrats and one by Republicans, as the journalist Ronald Brownstein wrote in The Atlantic in 2022. This was being driven largely by decisions at the state level, producing widely varying economic, health, and social outcomes. Trump is now using the power of the federal government to drive the two sections further apart, a glaring act of division as the nation celebrates its 250th anniversary. (Punishing states that lean Democratic also punishes many Republican voters. More Californians cast a ballot for Trump in 2024 than voters in Alabama, Indiana, Kansas, and Tennessee did combined.)

In some ways, the retaliation acknowledged in the suit is in step with other Trump-administration actions. Trump is not coy about his desire for political retribution, especially against high-profile critics, or his sense that he is president to only those who voted for him. This is not his first example of using federal funds to reward red states while punishing blue ones. Earlier this year, Politico calculated that in his first 14 months in office, Trump approved 89 percent of requests for disaster assistance from GOP-led states but just 23 percent of those from Democrat-led states. Yet when asked about the disparity, the White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson denied any political motive, saying, “There is no politicization to the president’s decisions on disaster aid.”

Jackson faced no legal penalty for such an obvious falsehood—which is one reason courts remain a vital bulwark against Trump’s abuse of power. I wrote during Trump’s first presidency that many depositions demonstrated a huge gulf between the president’s public bluster and balderdash and his meeker, franker statements made when under oath. The same has been true of attorneys representing his second administration. In several high-profile cases, they have been forced to admit in court that public claims by officials were false. Last year, for example, the official White House line was that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a dangerous MS-13 gang member who had been rightly shipped to a Salvadoran prison. In court, however, lawyers acknowledged that his deportation had been the result of an “administrative error.”

This past spring, charges against a group of people arrested at a protest near Chicago fell apart after federal prosecutors conceded a series of major mistakes to a judge: They impermissibly vouched personally for the credibility of evidence before a grand jury, spoke with grand jurors outside a courtroom, and, after failing to obtain an indictment, excused grand jurors who’d voted against charges and tried again. They then redacted transcripts to try to hide this from the judge. And last week, the Department of Justice dropped subpoenas issued to Times reporters after prosecutors admitted to a judge that they had not followed either DOJ policy or court precedent by not exhausting other options first.

(In some other instances, a related but inverted dynamic has emerged in which it’s not court statements that contradict the public ones, but the other way around: Government lawyers attempt to argue that administration decisions were made deliberately and without regard to politics, only for judges to point to public statements by the president that appear to reveal the true, improper motivations for the actions.)

Statements by government lawyers that contradict the official White House line are not merely the results of pangs of conscience. Attorneys understand that they can face sanctions, including disbarment, for lying in court. Earlier this month, a federal judge overseeing the lawsuit that produced Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund for political allies blasted Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche for testimony that was “at best, misleading and, at worst, disingenuous.” She also referred Blanche, who faces a confirmation vote on his elevation to permanent status, to the New York State Bar Association.

An Energy Department filing could put Energy Secretary Chris Wright in a tight spot too. Last month, he told a House panel, “No decisions were made on politics.” The Times reported that, according to a department spokesperson, Wright had been “making a distinction between that review process and the timing of when certain cancellations were announced.” Was he trying to mislead, or was he himself kept in the dark, and which would be more troubling? Trump sees his time in office as a chance to settle political scores, and aides who pretend otherwise risk making themselves look like fools—or worse.

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Today’s News

President Trump met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House to discuss the Iran war, a proposed peace framework between Israel and Lebanon, and a possible expansion of the Abraham Accords, a White House official told NBC News. Earlier, officials said, Trump had met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House to discuss the Russia-Ukraine war.
A 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck Japan’s southern island of Kyushu, leaving dozens injured or missing and at least two feared dead; rescue efforts continue. The earthquake prompted evacuation advisories for more than 260,000 people, mostly in the Kumamoto prefecture, Japan’s Fire and Disaster Management Agency said.
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Evening Read

a monarch butterfly perched on a green plant, set against a blue sky — A monarch butterfly in El Rosario butterfly sanctuary, in Angangueo, Mexico Anna Hop for The Atlantic

The Return of the Monarch

By Vann R. Newkirk II

“¡Mire! ” my guide, Silvestre, pointed upward, as if I wasn’t already walking with my neck craned as far back as it could go. The sky was alive with millions of fluttering shapes, congregating into clouds at random, occasionally turning into ribbons that wound through the trees. So many butterfly wings beat the air that their vibrations were audible, like a waterfall rushing in the distance. I understood for the first time the immensity of the event I’d come to see.

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