Members of the white nationalist group Patriot Front marched through the streets of Nashville on Saturday, carrying confederate flags and a “Reclaim America” banner while wearing masks to cover their faces. But Utah Sen. Mike Lee suggested without proof that the event was a “false flag.”
“Without the iron-clad resolve of our ancestors, there would be no America. We are heirs to an expansive and continental homeland purchased with immeasurable sacrifice… Nationalism is natural. Patriotism is inevitable,” the group’s leader, Thomas Rousseau, chanted into a bullhorn during the weekend march. More than 100 Patriot Front members appeared to participate in the Nashville event. The group reportedly vandalized a bridge by spray painting it with their logo and, according to the Tenn
Matt Kriner, a senior research scholar at Middlebury University’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, told Rolling Stone in 2022 that the group is “deeply fascistic, deeply anti-Semitic, very racist, and they don’t hide it.”
But Republican Sen. Mike Lee claimed he has “never heard of” Patriot Front. The Trump loyalist posted video of the march on Saturday and wrote, “I’ve never heard of this group[.] Any chance this is a false flag operation?”
“So much uniformity,” Lee continued. “It hardly has the feel of a grassroots, patriotic group. I don’t think I’ve never seen one that looks or acts like this.”
Lee’s claim that he has “never” heard of Patriot Front almost defies belief. The group participated in the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally on the University of Virginia’s campus in Charlottesville, Va., and Rousseau was charged earlier this year for burning a tiki torch with the intent “to intimidate” at that event. Uniformity is part of the group’s brand. Members are often seen wearing khaki cargo pants, blue t-shirts, and face masks to hide their identities.
The group, which advocates for a white ethnostate, per the Southern Poverty Law Center, was in the news last summer when law enforcement, aided by the FBI, arrested 31 members for allegedly plotting a riot at an LGBTQ Pride event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Six of those arrested hailed from Utah, the state Lee represents, as Bloomberg reporter Steven Dennis noted on X. Utah is one of a few states where Patriot Front was most active in 2022, according to a report from the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. The charges against Rousseau related to that event were dropped in November.
“They’re basically just trying to get notoriety. That’s what this is all about,” Greg Rogers, a retired FBI agent who went undercover with militia groups, told the Deseret News of Patriot Front. “These kinds of groups get a lot of street cred by showing they’re actually doing something.”
“Just two days after celebrating the independence of our nation, white supremacists have taken to the streets of Nashville carrying Confederate flags and chanting ‘deportation saves the nation’ and ‘Seig Heil,'” the Tennessee Democratic Party said in a statement.
“This is what we’re fighting against in Tennessee. This is what we’re fighting against in America,” Tennessee Democratic Party Chair Hendrell Remus said in a statement responding to the Nashville march. “While our Republican State leaders sit quietly by, we refuse to let hate-filled racists terrorize our community.”
Lee has had an interesting weekend on X, formerly Twitter. Before denying he had ever heard of the white nationalist hate group, he circulated a false report that President Biden experienced a medical emergency aboard Air Force One. The untrue rumor was initially posted by far-right influencers — first by Laura Loomer and later by Monica Crowley and Dinesh D’Souza.
Donald Trump speaks in front of the American flag at the White House, on May 12, 2026.
It’s the Corruption, Stupid
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history.
Take two days in May as Exhibit A. Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day. This is a rapacious pace that would make a day trader on meth blush. Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing. The Trump Organization says all trades are made by a third-party investment advisor. If so, they appear to be psychic.
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change — merely millions of dollars — compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected. Trump, like many of his supporters, persistently confuses persecution with prosecution.
The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to persecuted political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal.
All of this is insane. All of it is unethical, and much of it is illegal and impeachable — but our system was not designed to deal with a shamelessly self-dealing president, a spineless Republican Congress, and a complaint conservative Supreme Court that has refused to enforce the emoluments clause of the Constitution and ruled that Trump has immunity for actions he takes as president. That ruling may prove to be the most consequential — and most corrosive — act of judicial abdication in American history. Against this partisan-group think, individual acts of courage matter. So kudos to the top lawyer at the Treasury Department, Brian Morrissey, who at least had the integrity to resign rather than oversee this tax-payer funded plunder.
Just to close out the corruption-palooza, Trump announced that he would endorse the Lone Star State poster-boy of corruption, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in his primary against incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn. Paxton’s scandals include a truly buffoonish array of fraud and bribery charges that resulted in him nearly being impeached by the state legislature. But corruption is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpland.All this smacks of late Rome and you’d be forgiven for half expecting Trump will next appoint a horse to an open Cabinet position, with Republicans rationalizing the need for more equine representation. It is no more absurd that the cavalcade of Trump appointees refusing to say that Biden won the 2020 election during their confirmation hearings in the Senate. The decision to parrot unreality for partisan gain defines deviancy down.
But in the search for something hopeful to hold onto in dark times, you can find some comfort in the fact that corruption is often the thing that turns the tide against authoritarian-adjacent administrations. And there is evidence this is happening.
Trump’s billions in self-enrichment, his reflexive twisting of U.S. policy to sell out long-term national interests and enduring values, comes at a moment when nearly half of Americans say they are feeling extremely anxious about their own financial situation.
That anxiety is driven by the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street, a gap set on fire by a trade war and a real war Trump started, which has no end in sight but promises to further raise energy prices, fertilizer prices, and strangle the global economy. While CEOs embrace the transactional nature of this president, kissing his ring and offering vigs, the situation is grim if you’re not lining up at the Trump trough. At a time when the super-rich are getting richer, everyone else is told to go to hell by the man in the White House.
These are precisely the kinds of conditions that turn people against an aging, autocratic president who shows contempt for the very people who put him in office. It is not just that Trump’s approval numbers have plummeted to the point where two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. It is that Trump, for the first time, is opposed by a majority of non-college-educated white voters — a.k.a. his base — and they feel betrayed because Trump is raking in billions of dollars while they struggle to pay rent and buy groceries. Trump has dismissed and discounted their concerns, turning a blind eye to the anger about rising costs that carried him back into the presidency.
Trump’s aim is to make his thievery so blatant that we collectively become numb to it and disfigure our democracy in the process. Once upon a time conservatives warned about the dangers of “crony capitalism” and corruption. Now they are silent and complicit. It is the temporary triumph of partisanship over principle. Patriotism demands that we reassert the basic American idea that no man is above the law and that our presidents are not kings.