July 2, 2025 (Wednesday)

The Senate’s passage of its version of the budget reconciliation bill yesterday sent House members rushing back to Washington today to debate passing what the Senate had sent them. The bill is hugely unpopular. It cuts taxes for the wealthiest Americans and corporations and slashes Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, energy credits, and other programs that help the American people, while also pouring money into Immigration and Customs Enforcement and detention facilities for migrants.

While Democratic representatives are united against the measure, people from across the country are flooding lawmakers with calls and demonstrations against the bill in hopes of swaying Republicans. At the office of Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), hundreds of his constituents held a die-in to demonstrate how cuts to healthcare in the bill would affect them.

Far-right Republicans think the bill doesn’t make steep enough cuts; Republicans from swing districts recognize that supporting it will badly hurt both their constituents and their hopes of reelection. But Trump has demanded Congress pass the measure before July 4, an arbitrary date he seems to have chosen because of its historical significance.

A new element in the Republicans’ calculation emerged a few days ago as billionaire Elon Musk reentered the fight over the measure, warning he would start a new political party over it. He has threatened to run primary challengers against lawmakers who vote yes, a threat that is a counterweight to Trump’s threat to run primary challengers against lawmakers who vote no. Already Musk has claimed to be donating to the reelection campaign of Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), an outspoken opponent of the bill.

Representative Sean Casten (D-IL) wrote today about the dysfunction on the House floor. “A functioning House leadership team would work the members, make changes as necessary and bring this bill to the floor once they knew they could pass it. But Mike Johnson does not run a functional House leadership team. He does what Daddy says and Daddy said pass it before July 4.” This morning, the House took a procedural vote, but recognizing that they did not have the votes to pass the bill itself, Republican leadership refused to close the vote.

Later, House leadership held another vote open for more than two hours when they could not win it. When Representative Joe Neguse (D-CO) challenged this trick, the chair told him that the rules established a minimum time for votes, but no maximum.

To find the votes Republicans need to pass the bill, Trump met today with those expected to vote no. Riley Rogerson and Reese Gorman of NOTUS reported that at a meeting with some of the swing-state Republican holdouts, Trump seemed to believe the lie that the bill doesn’t cut Medicaid. Three sources told the reporters Trump told Republicans they shouldn’t touch Medicaid, Medicare, or Social Security if they want to win elections. “But we’re touching Medicaid in this bill,” one of the members at the meeting answered.

Trump also met with far-right members, but because the Senate measure must pass the House unchanged, he can offer them little except to promise they will fix the bill after it passes. While that appeared to work on at least one representative, Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN) told the NOTUS reporters: “Now we’re having to once again hear the line, ‘Let’s pass this and then we’ll fix it later,’ And we never fix it later, and America knows that.”

Political journalist Judd Legum of Popular Information posted: “To review: Trump spent all day rounding up votes for his mega bill Trump did not round up enough votes So the ‘plan’ was just to start voting and bully anyone who votes no until they switch their vote (It could work.)”

Democrats called out Republicans from swing districts, listing the numbers of their constituents who will lose healthcare insurance if the measure passes. They urged Republicans to stand up to Donald Trump, and to stand up for their constituents.

Pennsylvania representative Fitzpatrick faced the die-in at his office and was also so angry at today’s news Trump is withholding weapons already pledged to Ukraine that he wrote to Trump today warning that Ukraine is “holding the line for the entire democratic world” and asking for an emergency briefing on the decision to withhold aid. He voted no on a key procedural vote tonight.

Just after 10:00 tonight, NBC News Capitol Hill correspondent Melanie Zanona reported: “Republicans are trying locate Rep Brian Fitzpatrick, who delivered a surprising NO vote on the mega bill rule. Likely to try to flip him. I told a member I saw him bolt out of the chamber & leave the area. ‘Smart,’ the member said.”

As of midnight, the Republicans did not have the votes to advance the measure.

Representative Maxwell Frost (D-FL) posted: “Speaker Johnson should just take the L on this vote. Most of America doesn’t want this bill to pass anyways. It’s…both the worst and most unpopular piece of legislation in modern history.”

On Bluesky, user shauna wrote: “say what you will about nancy pelosi (as one of her constituents believe me i have) she’d have impaled herself with a gavel live on the house floor before she’d have allowed this sh*tshow of a vote on her watch as speaker.”

I like the way Ms Cox Richardson advises, in the comments, as to whether her post is suitable for reading before bedtime, or to leave it till morning.

Thanks for posting the HCR letters.

I appreciate it. I usually read them. Sometimes, a day or few late.

Carrick Ryan

Even looking at US foreign policy from an entirely cynical perspective, Trump has fundamentally misunderstood one of the USA’s greatest geopolitical strengths.

For the last 80 years, it really mattered if the USA was your friend.

If you were a US ally, they had your back. In war, in trade, and with substantial influence throughout the planet. It was generally a very lonely place to be if you weren’t on Team USA.

But fortuitously, for most of the last century, it’s been pretty easy to stay on the team.
Either be a liberal democracy, or be useful.

If you were a dictatorship, a theocracy, or looked too much like a socialist… then they could deny you access to the economic infrastructure that they had largely built for the world.

Access to the international banking system, the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organisation, as well as access to technologies provided by US multinationals, has generally been contingent on the USA never perceiving you to be an adversary.

It meant it mattered what the US Government thought of your nation. But perhaps more importantly, it mattered what the voting public in the US thought of your nation. While US power was absolutely utilised for self-serving purposes, the fact it generally needed to appease the threshold of US public opinion meant that foreign policy had a filter of morality that other historic hegemonic powers haven’t.

Most nations of the world thus understood that if they couldn’t be geostrategically important to the Pentagon, they need only be recognised as peaceful and “freedom loving” to the American people to remain on Team America
The equation has now changed.

Trump’s repeated unprovoked use of trade as a weapon against former allies has made the international community increasingly nervous that the power of the US to impose substantial economic pain upon anyone and everyone, makes it a national security risk to everyone. There is no more Team America, there is only Team Trump, and he alone decides who is on his team.

Previously, US sanctions were a threat only to hostile regimes, or regimes the US determined to be illegitimate (again, unless they provided geopolitical value). But Trump has made democracies, once considered firmly within the US camp, wary that they too could fall victim to the capricious and vindictive impulses of a US President who doesn’t believe in alliances.

The BRICS group was formed by nations who sought a means to insulate themselves from the threat of sanctions or economic exclusion by the US. Ironically, their domestic ideological inclinations have never more closely aligned with the White House.

While I don’t expect a line of liberal democracies from the West queuing to sign up to the proudly illiberal BRICS forum, I suspect that economic powers across the European Union and Asia are making preparations already to insulate themselves from a global economic system that operates largely at the discretion of the US.

This is occurring at a time when unpredictable tariffs, ballooning government debt, and political interference with the operation of the Federal Reserve is making the status of the US dollar as the reserve economy alarmingly tenuous.
While this decentralisation of power might have benefits, it shouldn’t be forgotten how often the ability of the US to exert economic pressure has made the use of military power unnecessary. If it loses this weapon that has served it so well, it could make the deployment of its still vastly superior military substantially more likely.

Bogsnorkler said:

Carrick Ryan

Even looking at US foreign policy from an entirely cynical perspective, Trump has fundamentally misunderstood one of the USA’s greatest geopolitical strengths.

For the last 80 years, it really mattered if the USA was your friend.

If you were a US ally, they had your back. In war, in trade, and with substantial influence throughout the planet. It was generally a very lonely place to be if you weren’t on Team USA.

But fortuitously, for most of the last century, it’s been pretty easy to stay on the team.
Either be a liberal democracy, or be useful.

If you were a dictatorship, a theocracy, or looked too much like a socialist… then they could deny you access to the economic infrastructure that they had largely built for the world.

Access to the international banking system, the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organisation, as well as access to technologies provided by US multinationals, has generally been contingent on the USA never perceiving you to be an adversary.

It meant it mattered what the US Government thought of your nation. But perhaps more importantly, it mattered what the voting public in the US thought of your nation. While US power was absolutely utilised for self-serving purposes, the fact it generally needed to appease the threshold of US public opinion meant that foreign policy had a filter of morality that other historic hegemonic powers haven’t.

Most nations of the world thus understood that if they couldn’t be geostrategically important to the Pentagon, they need only be recognised as peaceful and “freedom loving” to the American people to remain on Team America
The equation has now changed.

Trump’s repeated unprovoked use of trade as a weapon against former allies has made the international community increasingly nervous that the power of the US to impose substantial economic pain upon anyone and everyone, makes it a national security risk to everyone. There is no more Team America, there is only Team Trump, and he alone decides who is on his team.

Previously, US sanctions were a threat only to hostile regimes, or regimes the US determined to be illegitimate (again, unless they provided geopolitical value). But Trump has made democracies, once considered firmly within the US camp, wary that they too could fall victim to the capricious and vindictive impulses of a US President who doesn’t believe in alliances.

The BRICS group was formed by nations who sought a means to insulate themselves from the threat of sanctions or economic exclusion by the US. Ironically, their domestic ideological inclinations have never more closely aligned with the White House.

While I don’t expect a line of liberal democracies from the West queuing to sign up to the proudly illiberal BRICS forum, I suspect that economic powers across the European Union and Asia are making preparations already to insulate themselves from a global economic system that operates largely at the discretion of the US.

This is occurring at a time when unpredictable tariffs, ballooning government debt, and political interference with the operation of the Federal Reserve is making the status of the US dollar as the reserve economy alarmingly tenuous.
While this decentralisation of power might have benefits, it shouldn’t be forgotten how often the ability of the US to exert economic pressure has made the use of military power unnecessary. If it loses this weapon that has served it so well, it could make the deployment of its still vastly superior military substantially more likely.

Seems a fair analysis.

July 4, 2025 (Friday)

An American flag in the rigging of “Old Ironsides,” the U.S.S. Constitution.

Let’s take the night off and pick it all back up again tomorrow.

July 5, 2025 (Saturday)

Yesterday afternoon, President Donald J. Trump signed the nearly 1,000-page budget reconciliation bill Republicans passed last week. Trump had demanded Congress pass the measure by July 4, and Republicans rammed it through despite the bill’s deep unpopularity and Congress’s lack of debate on it. When House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) presented Trump with the speaker’s gavel during the signing event, the symbolism of the gift was a little too on the nose.

“Today we are laying a key cornerstone of America’s new golden age,” Speaker Johnson said at the signing. The new law is the capstone to the dramatic changes MAGA Republicans have made to the U.S. government in the last six months.

The measure makes the 2017 Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, which were due to expire at the end of this year, permanent. At the bill’s signing, Trump harked back to the idea Republicans have embraced since 1980, claiming that tax cuts spark economic growth. He said: “After this kicks in, our country is going to be a rocket ship economically.”

In fact, tax cuts since 1981 have not driven growth, and a study by the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model of the University of Pennsylvania projects that the measure will decrease national productivity, known as gross domestic product (GDP), by 0.3% in ten years and drop the average wage by 0.4% in the same time frame.

From 1981 to 2021, tax cuts moved more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1%, and Penn Wharton projects the top 10% of households will receive about 80% of the total value of this law, too. Those in the top 20% of earners can expect to see nearly $13,000 a year from the bill, while those in the bottom 20% of households will lose about $885 in 2030 as the pieces of the law take effect.

Past tax cuts have also driven budget deficits and increases in the national debt, and like them, this law will increase the deficit by about $3.4 trillion over the next ten years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The CBO also projects that interest payments on that debt will cost more than $1 trillion a year.

Sam Goldfarb and Justin Lahart of the Wall Street Journal noted on Thursday that economists, investors and politicians are sounding the alarm that the U.S. is “bingeing on debt” when there is no national emergency like a pandemic or a war to require taking on such debt. The measure will raise the nation’s debt ceiling by $5 trillion.

The Republican reliance on tax cuts to increase economic growth has inspired them to cut public programs since 1981. The Republicans’ new law continues the cuts begun as soon as Trump took office, cutting $890 billion from Medicaid over the next ten years, and about $230 billion out of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that provides food assistance for low-income Americans. It cuts tax credits for wind and solar power while promoting fossil fuels.

At the White House on Friday, Trump said: “I just want you to know, if you see anything negative put out by Democrats, it’s all a con job.” He claimed the new law is the “most popular bill ever signed.”

But it is clear administration officials are well aware that polls showed Americans disapproving of the measure more than approving by the huge gap of around 20 points. They are now trying to sell the law to voters. Notably, the previously nonpartisan Social Security Administration sent an email to Social Security recipients yesterday claiming the bill “eliminates federal income taxes on Social Security benefits for most beneficiaries, providing relief to individuals and couples.” Except the law does not actually eliminate federal income taxes on Social Security benefits. Instead, it gives a temporary tax deduction of up to $6,000 for individuals older than 65 with annual incomes less than $75,000, or $12,000 for married couples with incomes less than $150,000.

What the law does do, though, is pour $170.7 billion into immigration enforcement—more than the military budgets of all but fifteen countries. The law provides $51.6 billion to build a wall on the border, more than three times what Trump spent on the wall in his first term. It provides $45 billion for detention facilities for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an increase of 265% in ICE’s annual detention budget. It provides $29.9 billion for ICE enforcement, a threefold increase in ICE’s annual budget.

According to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council, the law gives ICE more funding than the Federal Bureau of Investigations; Drug Enforcement Administration; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; U.S. Marshals Service; and Bureau of Prisons combined. In fact, Reichlin-Melnick told Democracy Now!, the law will make ICE the largest federal law enforcement agency “in the history of the nation.”

And now, with the MAGA Republican political realignment in place, we wait to see whether it delivers the golden age Trump and his MAGA loyalists promise.

The early signs are not auspicious.

Within hours of Trump’s signing the bill into law, Gun Owners of America and a number of other pro-gun organizations filed a lawsuit claiming the measure makes the 1934 National Firearms Act (NFA) unconstitutional. That law regulated machine guns and short-barrel guns by imposing a tax on them and making owners register their weapons. The Supreme Court upheld that law as a tax law. The budget reconciliation bill ended those taxes and thus, the plaintiffs claim, the constitutional justification for the law.

In a press release, Gun Owners of America said its “team in Washington had been working behind the scenes with Congress since the November 2024 election to fully repeal the NFA,” and that the new law had teed up their lawsuit against the registry it called “an unconstitutional relic.”

Scholars of authoritarianism are sounding the alarm over the new law. Timothy Snyder warned that the extensive concentration camps that Trump has called for and the new measure will fund will be tempting sites for slave labor. Undocumented immigrants make up 4% to 5% of the total U.S. workforce. In agriculture, food processing, and construction, they make up between 15% and 20% of the workforce.

Comparing the detention camps to similar programs in other countries, Snyder warns that incarcerated workers will likely be offered to employers on special terms, a concept Trump appears to have embraced with his suggestion that the administration will figure out how to put workers back in the fields and businesses by putting them under the authority of those hiring them. Trump has called the idea “owner responsibility.”

“hey’re going to be largely responsible for these people,” Trump said. This echoes the system legislators set up in the U.S. South during Reconstruction thanks to the fact the Thirteenth Amendment permits enslavement “as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” That system permitted employers to pay the fines of incarcerated individuals and then to own their labor until those debts were paid. While we know that system from the chain gangs of that era, in fact employers in many different sectors used—and abused—such workers.

Today, according to the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute, of the 1.2 million people incarcerated in state and federal prisons, nearly 800,000 are prison laborers, working in the facility itself or in government-run businesses or services like call centers or firefighting. About 3% work for private-sector employers, where they earn very low pay.

Snyder urges Americans to be aware that the law paves the way to establish this system.

Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol identified “massive militarization of ICE” as “the real heart of this law.” She notes that American scholars have thought the federal system in the U.S., in which state and local governments control the police powers, bought the U.S. some protection against a police state.

But, Skocpol says, officials in the Trump administration “have figured out a devilishly clever workaround. Immigration is an area where a U.S. President can exercise virtually unchecked legal coercive power, especially if backed by a Supreme Court majority and corrupted Department of Justice. Now Congress has given ICE unprecedented resources—much of this windfall to be used for graft with private contractors Trump patronizes, but lots of to hire street agents willing to mask themselves and do whatever they are told against residents and fellow American citizens.

are not interested only in rounding up undocumented immigrants,” she wrote to Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo. “They will step up using ICE and DOJ enforcements…to harass Democrats citizen critics, and subvert future elections if they can.”

At an event in Des Moines, Iowa, on Thursday, Trump complained that Democrats had not supported the budget reconciliation bill. Less than three weeks after a gunman murdered a Democratic Minnesota lawmaker and her husband, and shot another legislator and his wife, Trump said Democrats had opposed the measure only “because they hate Trump. But I hate them, too. You know that? I really do, I hate them. I cannot stand them, because I really believe they hate our country.”

July 6, 2025 (Sunday)

At least 80 people are dead and more than 40 are still missing in Central Texas after almost a foot (30 centimeters) of rain caused flash floods overnight on Friday. Most of the deaths were in Kerr County, where the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet (8 meters) in 45 minutes, engulfing a Christian girls’ camp.

Even as rescuers search for survivors, the disaster has highlighted the dangers of MAGA governance. The steps that left people in the path of the floods on Friday are unclear, but observers are already pointing to the administration’s cuts to government as well as the lack of systems that could have provided earlier warnings to those in the path of the floods.

Immediately after the catastrophe became apparent, Texas officials began to blame cuts to the National Weather Service (NWS)—part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—for causing inaccurate forecasts. The “Department of Government Efficiency” cut about 600 staffers from the NWS. After the cuts, the understaffed agency warned that “severe shortages” of meteorologists would hurt weather forecasting.

All five living former directors of the NWS warned in May that the cuts “ the nation’s official weather forecasting entity at a significant deficit…just as we head into the busiest time for severe storm predictions like tornadoes and hurricanes…. Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.”

But former NWS officials maintain the forecasts were as accurate as possible and noted the storm escalated abruptly. They told Christopher Flavelle of the New York Times that the problem appeared to be that NWS had lost the staffers who would typically communicate with local authorities to spread the word of dangerous conditions. Molly Taft at Wired confirmed that NWS published flash flood warnings but safety officials didn’t send out public warnings until hours later.

Meanwhile, Kerr County’s most senior elected official, Judge Rob Kelly, focused on local officials, telling Flavelle that the county did not have a warning system because such systems are expensive and “axpayers won’t pay for it.”

Officials will continue to examine the crisis in Texas but, coming as it did after so many deep cuts to government, it has opened up questions about the public cost of those cuts. Project 2025 called for breaking up and downsizing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, claiming its six main offices—including the National Weather Service—“form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity,” by which it meant the fossil fuel industry.

CNN’s Andrew Freedman, Emma Tucker, and Mary Gilbert note that several NWS offices across the country are so understaffed they can no longer operate around the clock, and many are no longer able to launch the weather balloons that provide critical data. The journalists also note that the Trump administration’s 2026 budget calls for eliminating “all of NOAA’s weather and climate research labs along with institutes jointly run with universities around the country.”

Brad Plummer of the New York Times noted that the budget reconciliation bill passed by Republicans last week and signed into law on Friday boosts fossil fuels and destroys government efforts to address climate change, even as scientists warn of the acute dangers we face from extreme heat, wildfires, storms, and floods like those in Texas. Scott Dance of the Washington Post added yesterday that the administration has slashed grants for studying climate change and has limited or even ended access to information about climate science, taking down websites and burying reports.

When a reporter asked Trump, “Are you investigating whether some of the cuts to the federal government left key vacancies at the national weather service or the emergency coordination?” he responded: “They didn’t. I’ll tell you, if you look at that water situation that all is and that was really the Biden setup. That was not our setup. But I wouldn’t blame Biden for it either. I would just say this is a 100-year catastrophe and it’s just so horrible to watch.”

The tragedy in Texas is the most visible illustration of the MAGA attempt to destroy the modern U.S. government, but it is not the only one.

On July 2, Gabe Cohen of CNN reported that state and local officials are meeting a “wall of silence” from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Cohen reported that FEMA leaders have ordered FEMA personnel to stop communicating with the Office of Management and Budget, the National Security Council, members of Congress, and state and local partners, leaving those communications up to the political appointees running the agency.

FEMA is housed in the Department of Homeland Security, whose secretary, Kristi Noem, is tightening her control over the agency and recently called for the firing of employees “who don’t like us.”

On June 30, the medical journal The Lancet published an analysis of the impact of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and consequences of its dismantling. The study concluded that from 2001 through 2021, programs funded by USAID prevented nearly 92 million deaths in 133 countries. It estimates that the cuts the Trump administration has made to USAID will result in more than 14 million deaths in the next five years. About 4.5 million will be children under 5.

On June 30, Dr. Steven H. Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University warned in the New York Times that a health catastrophe is brewing in the U.S. as well, as “he administration has upended the operation of almost every agency that deals with our health and medical care, leaving behind fewer staff members and programs to address critical needs, and changing policies in ways that could endanger us all.” Woolf lists cuts of 39% to the institute that researches heart disease, chronic lower respiratory diseases, and diabetes; 37% to the institute that researches cancer; 40% to the institute that researches stroke, 40% to the institute that researches Alzheimer’s; 38% to the institute that researches drug overdoses and suicide; and 36% to the institute that researches covid, flu, and pneumonia.

Those cuts, along with the deregulation of industries that pollute our environment and the destruction of programs and agencies that address mental illness, suicide, chronic diseases, poisoning, car accidents, and drowning, Woolf writes, are putting Americans at risk. In May, Laura Ungar and Michelle R. Smith of the Associated Press noted the elimination of 20,000 jobs at national health agencies as well as cuts of $11 billion in covid-era funding to state and local health departments that inspect restaurants, monitor wastewater, and so on.

In a New York Times op-ed on July 4, Dr. Perri Klass added that changes to the childhood vaccine schedule under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. threaten to bring back diseases that routine immunizations had all but eliminated in the U.S.

Yesterday, Deidre McPhillips of CNN reported that measles cases in the U.S. have surged to a record high since the country declared the disease eradicated twenty-five years ago. There have been at least 1,277 confirmed cases of measles in the U.S. this year, passing the previous record of 1,274 set in 2019 and likely a “severe undercount.”

On July 2, Nahal Toosi of Politico reported that cuts to the National Security Council (NSC) have created a “dysfunctional” policymaking process. The NSC is supposed to coordinate policymaking across the different parts of the government. But Toosi reported that when the Pentagon recently announced it was reviewing whether the AUKUS security pact between the U.S., Australia, and the United Kingdom advances Trump’s “America First” agenda, the announcement came from Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby without input from other key U.S. officials, who were blindsided by the move.

The acting national security advisor, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has downsized the NSC and held so few meetings that career staffers are kept in the dark and others are jockeying for power. One person told Toosi, “It’s Game of Thrones politics over there.” Under Trump, the NSC has gone from being a body that can give the president advice to one designed simply to advance the president’s agenda.

And that is the point of the dismantling of modern government systems under Trump: to give him and his loyalists the power to control the country. On July 3, Charlie Savage of the New York Times reported on letters Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote to companies like Google and Apple, claiming Trump has the constitutional power not just to ignore laws himself, but to authorize others to ignore them too.

Last year, Congress passed a law banning TikTok in the U.S. unless its China-based parent company, ByteDance, sold its stake in the platform to a non-Chinese company within nine months, or twelve if a sale was in progress. The Supreme Court upheld the law unanimously and TikTok disappeared from U.S. app stores.

But when he took office, Trump told the Department of Justice not to enforce the law for 75 days while his administration reviewed it. He also told Bondi to tell companies they can continue to carry the TikTok app “without incurring any legal liability,” no matter what the law says.

The letters she wrote, newly available through Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, suggest Trump can ignore the law because of his “unique constitutional responsibility for the national security of the United States, the conduct of foreign policy, and other vital executive functions.”

The law banning TikTok— that Congress passed, President Joe Biden signed, and the Supreme Court upheld 9–0— had to give way, she wrote, to Trump’s “core presidential national security and foreign affairs powers.”

July 7, 2025 (Monday)

At about 10:30 this morning local time, heavily armed masked agents in trucks, armored vehicles, a helicopter, on foot, and on horseback, accompanied by a gun mounted on a truck raided the MacArthur Park area of Los Angeles. Journalist Mel Buer reported that agents from Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), the National Guard, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) brought what she called a “massive federal presence.”

Fox News Channel personnel were embedded with the raiders and broadcast throughout the operation, suggesting that it was designed for the media as a show of force to intimidate opponents. CBP brought its own press team, and its people were also taking photos of bystanders. After Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass arrived and spoke with Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino, the agents left. It is not clear that there was a specific target for the raid, or that anyone was arrested.

Later, Bovino told Bill Melugin of the Fox News Channel, “I don’t work for Karen Bass. Better get used to us now, cause this is going to be normal very soon. We will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles.”

Immigrants rights groups sued Bovino last week to block what they call an “ongoing pattern and practice of flouting the Constitution and federal law” during immigration raids.

Steve Beynon of Military dot com reports that about 70 National Guard troops have been deployed to the new detention facility in the Florida Everglades as the administration “leans harder on the military to enforce its nationwide immigration crackdown.” Unlike the National Guard troops Trump federalized in Los Angeles, these troops are operating as state troops under Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Another 8,500 active-duty and National Guard troops are stationed along the border between the U.S. and Mexico.

The Trump administration is also sending 200 Marines to Florida to aid ICE, part of a push to increase deportations by using active-duty troops.

The U.S. Marine Corps has launched a pilot program to station ICE agents at Camp Pendleton in California, Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, and Marine Corps Base Hawaii. Sarah Rumpf-Whitten of Fox News writes that the plan is to strengthen security at those bases, although University of Tampa defense professor Abby Hall Blanco pointed out: “It gives kind of an odd impression that the Marine Corps is not handling its own security sufficiently. Having known quite a few Marines in my time, I can’t imagine that they would find that to be a particularly flattering interpretation.”

As Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol pointed out in Talking Points Memo, it appears that officials in the Trump administration are using immigration as a way to establish a police state. Indeed, they are using the concept that presidents have control of foreign affairs as a way to work around the laws in place to prevent a dictatorship.

In its 2024 Donald J. Trump v. United States decision, the Supreme Court majority held that a former president has “absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority,” as well as “presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.” In April 2025 the court specified that it considered foreign affairs to fall within a president’s constitutional authority, writing in Noem v. Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia that the executive branch was owed “deference…in the conduct of foreign affairs.”

Although the Framers of the Constitution put the power to make laws in the hands of Congress, they divided power in foreign affairs between Congress and the president. Almost immediately, presidents began to assert their authority over foreign affairs, noting that the Constitution gave them power to appoint ambassadors and negotiate treaties and pointing to the president’s role as commander-in-chief of the Army. The branches have tussled over this power ever since, but as James Goldgeiger and Elizabeth N. Saunders wrote in Foreign Affairs, presidential power over foreign affairs has grown dramatically since 2000.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, members of Congress were unwilling to appear soft on terror and so allowed President George W. Bush great leeway in the nation’s “war on terror,” even after it became clear that Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 was failing. In Foreign Affairs last month, Saunders wrote that a lack of accountability for either the failures of the Iraq War or the 2008 international financial crisis fed the idea that the president could make sweeping decisions about both foreign intervention and the international economy without check by Congress.

On February 12, 2025, the Trump administration made clear that its members intended to expand Trump’s power by pushing the boundaries of what foreign affairs entails. In an executive order, Trump claimed the Constitution “vests the power to conduct foreign policy in the President of the United States.”

Trump’s actual work in foreign affairs has been different from what he promised during his presidential campaign. His vow that he could end Russia’s war against Ukraine with one phone call has resulted only in Russian president Vladimir Putin’s accelerating his attacks on Ukraine.

As foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum wrote on July 4 in The Atlantic, it is clear that Putin believes he can conquer all of Ukraine because Trump is abandoning the longstanding U.S. bipartisan support for Ukraine and pivoting the U.S. to back Russia.

Last week the administration said it would not send Ukraine a large shipment of weapons already funded under President Joe Biden. It claimed that U.S. stockpiles of weapons are insufficient, a claim former Biden officials and independent analysts contradict. Applebaum notes that Russia has interpreted the change as a sign that the U.S. is ending its support for Ukraine.

The U.S. is also essentially lifting the economic sanctions that have hamstrung Russia’s economy. By not adjusting sanctions to combat developing Russian workarounds, the administration is allowing Russia to rebuild its economy. In addition, the Trump administration has stopped countering Russian disinformation around the world, while Trump appointees, including Trump’s main negotiator with Russia, Steve Witkoff, regularly parrot Russian propaganda.

Trump’s launching of strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapon production sites without input from Congress earned pushback from congress members who noted that the president’s authority to launch emergency operations depends on an actual emergency. Trump’s own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told Congress in March that the Intelligence Community assessed Iran was not, in fact, building a nuclear weapon.

Then Trump’s claim he had “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program turned out to be exaggerated, although as journalists questioned his statement, the administration doubled down on it. Today, Barak Ravid of Axios reported that Israeli officials believe Trump will green-light further Israeli attacks on Iran. Trump has said twice since the U.S. strikes that the U.S. could attack Iran again if Iran renews its nuclear program.

But the claim to domestic power based in the president’s alleged right to control over foreign affairs has fueled much of the administration’s domestic agenda. The administration claimed the power to render undocumented Venezuelans to the notorious terrorist CECOT prison in El Salvador by arguing that the Venezuelan government was sending members of the Tren de Aragua gang to invade the U.S. After wrongfully delivering Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador in violation of a court order, the administration claimed courts could not order him returned to the U.S. because that order would interfere with Trump’s ability to conduct foreign affairs.

Documents filed in court today said Salvadoran officials told the United Nations that the U.S. retained jurisdiction over the migrants it sent to El Salvador, undermining the administration’s insistence that it has no control over migrants once they are out of U.S. territory. El Salvador simply had an agreement with the U.S. to use the Salvadoran prison system to detain U.S. prisoners, they said. “In this context, the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons lie exclusively with the competent foreign authorities, by virtue of international agreements signed and in accordance with the principles of sovereignty and international cooperation in criminal matters.”

In a lawsuit against the administration, Abrego Garcia says he was tortured in El Salvador, severely beaten, deprived of sleep, inadequately fed, denied bathroom facilities, and tortured psychologically. He says he lost 31 pounds in two weeks.

Today the administration ended temporary protection from deportation for about 72,000 migrants from Honduras and another 4,000 from Nicaragua. The decision strips them of their legal status and echoes similar decisions made about migrants from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Haiti, Nepal, and Venezuela. A federal court has blocked the early termination of protected status for Haitians.

July 8, 2025 (Tuesday)

One hundred and eleven people are dead and more than 160 are still missing in Texas after Friday’s tragic flood.
​​
“‘Who’s to blame?’” Texas governor Greg Abbott repeated back to a reporter. “That’s the word choice of losers.” “Every football team makes mistakes,” he continued, referring to Texas’s popular sport. “The losing teams are the ones that try to point out who’s to blame. The championship teams are the ones that say, ‘Don’t worry about it, ma’am, we’ve got this.’”

Abbott’s defensive answer reveals the dilemma MAGA Republicans find themselves in after the cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service that came before the Texas disaster. Scott Calvert, John West, Jim Carlton, and Joe Barrett of the Wall Street Journal reported that after a deadly flood in 1987, officials in Kerr County applied for a grant to install a flood warning system, but their application was denied. They considered installing one paid for by the county but decided against it. Then county commissioner Tom Moser told the reporters: “It was probably just, I hate to say the word, priorities. Trying not to raise taxes.”

Since 1980, Republican politicians have won voters by promising to cut taxes they claimed funded wasteful programs for women and racial and ethnic minorities. Cutting government programs would save money, they said, enabling hardworking Americans to keep more of their hard-earned money. But leaders recognized that Republican voters actually depended on government programs, so they continued to fund them even as they passed tax cuts that moved more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

Now, in Trump’s second term, MAGA Republicans are turning Republican rhetoric into reality, forcing Americans to grapple with what those cuts really mean for their lives.

Today the Supreme Court cleared the way for the administration to fire large numbers of employees at 19 different federal agencies and to reorganize them while litigation against those firings moves forward, although it required the administration to act in ways “consistent with applicable law.” A lower court had blocked the firings during litigation. Ann E. Marimow of the Washington Post notes that this court has repeatedly sided with President Donald Trump as he slashes the federal government. The court said it is not expressing a view on the legality of the cuts at this time.
The administration’s cuts were in the news today as Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket reported that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has just 86 people deployed in Texas today although Trump declared a disaster on Sunday. At a press opportunity at a cabinet meeting today, Trump said it wasn’t the right time to talk about his plans to phase out FEMA.

The administration is getting pushback in a number of other places as well, including from medical organizations. Yesterday the American Academy of Pediatricians, the American College of Physicians, and four other groups sued the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the changes Kennedy has made to the vaccine advisory panel, to the availability of covid vaccines, and to vaccine recommendations. The lawsuit calls those changes “unlawful” and “unilateral” and says they violate the Administrative Procedure Act.

Just who is in charge of the administration remains unclear. In the New York Times yesterday, Jason Zengerle pointed to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller as the “final word” on White House policy. Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem defers to him. Attorney General Pam Bondi “is so focused on preparing for and appearing on Fox News that she has essentially ceded control of the Department of Justice” to him. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles is concentrating on “producing a reality TV show every day,” a Trump advisor told Zengerle.
So Miller, with his knack for flattering his boss, wields power.

Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth did not inform the White House before he stopped the shipment of weapons to Ukraine last week. Natasha Bertrand and Zachary Cohen of CNN reported today that Hegseth’s lack of a chief of staff or trusted advisors means he has no one to urge him to coordinate with other government partners. Trump has ordered Hegseth to restart some of the shipments. When a reporter asked the president today who had authorized the pause, Trump answered: “I don’t know, why don’t you tell me?”
At today’s press opportunity, Trump was erratic, at one point veering off into a discussion of whether he should put gold leaf on the moldings in the room’s corners.

The administration has so few successes to celebrate that, as Jarrett Renshaw of Reuters reported today, it is claiming credit for investments that were actually made under former president Joe Biden. A government website touting the “Trump effect” claims more than $2.6 trillion in U.S. investments, but Renshaw found that more than $1.3 trillion of those investments originated under Biden or were routine spending. One company has warned that its pledge of investments worth $50 billion is threatened by Trump’s policies.

When asked why the administration had taken credit for projects that happened under Biden, White House officials said “the final investment decisions were announced under watch and prove his economic policies are triggering U.S. investment.” Renshaw noted that “t was not clear in many cases what role, if any, Trump or his policies played in getting the deals across the line.”

Instead of embracing proven economic policies, the administration appears to be turning to ideologically based ideas that seem far fetched. Today, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins rejected the idea that the government would find a way to protect undocumented agricultural workers. “There will be no amnesty,” she said. “The mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way. And we move the workforce towards automation and 100% American participation, which again with 34 million people, able-bodied adults on Medicaid, we should be able to do that fairly quickly.”

The administration is now facing a rebellion from MAGA supporters who expected that, once in power, a Trump administration would release information about those men implicated in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal as people for whom Epstein provided underage girls. MAGA loyalists maintained the “deep state” was hiding the list to protect unnamed Democratic politicians, and MAGA leaders fed the conspiracy theory to stoke anger at the Democrats.
Once in power, though, Trump officials have failed to produce a list of Epstein’s clients. MAGA loyalists have now turned their anger on those officials, especially Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said in February that the Epstein list “is sitting on my desk right now” and who now maintains that no such list exists.

Perhaps to distract their supporters from the issue, the Fox News Channel today announced that the FBI is launching criminal investigations of former Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan and former FBI director James Comey over their investigation of ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives.
The Fox News Channel also announced that the White House has waived executive privilege for former president Biden’s White House physician Kevin O’Connor, who had asked to postpone his testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee about former president Biden’s mental acuity and use of an autopen. On Saturday, O’Connor’s lawyer wrote to committee chair James Comer (R-KY) asking for the postponement, noting: “We are unaware of any prior occasion on which a Congressional Committee has subpoenaed a physician to testify about the treatment of an individual patient. And the notion that a Congressional Committee would do so without any regard whatsoever for the confidentiality of the physician-patient relationship is alarming.”

As its popularity sinks, the administration appears to be turning to extraordinary measures to enforce its will. Ellen Nakashima, Warren P. Strobel, and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post reported today that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has tried to get access to emails and chats of people working in the Intelligence Community in order to root out those perceived as insufficiently loyal to Trump.

Gabbard’s press secretary claimed the effort was designed to “end the politicization and weaponization of intelligence against Americans,” but Representative Jim Himes (D-CT), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told the reporters that Trump’s loyalists “zeal to root out ‘politicization” “often seems to be shorthand for anything less than unconditional support for the president.” He noted their effort risks “creating an echo chamber within the intelligence community or creating counterintelligence risks.”

The Internal Revenue Service today changed longstanding policy to say that churches can now endorse political candidates without losing their tax-exempt status. According to Gary Grumbach and Dareh Gregorian of NBC News, the rule prohibiting churches from endorsing candidates is rarely enforced, and Trump, whose strongest supporters are white evangelical Protestants, has called for an end to it.

A judge will have to agree to the change.

The administration’s show of force in Los Angeles yesterday, when immigration officers and about 90 National Guard members descended on MacArthur Park with 17 Humvees and four tactical vehicles in what looked like a military operation, appears to have been designed to intimidate immigrants and Trump’s opponents.

And today, Trump suggested he could take over New York City if voters elect Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. He then suggested the administration could take over Washington, D.C., as well. “We could run D.C. I mean we’re, we’re looking at D.C. We don’t want crime in D.C. We want the city to run well,” he told reporters. “We would run it so good, it would be run so proper, we’d get the best person to run it…. We want a capital that’s run flawlessly, and it wouldn’t be hard for us to do it.”

Carrick Ryan

Has Trump, finally, crossed a red line that MAGA can’t ignore?

To figure this out, it’s worth unpacking why Epstein is so politically consequential to MAGA, and how a concerted disinformation campaign designed to help Trump may end up being his downfall.

To start with, we need to understand how the MAGA information space relies on simple messages designed to appeal to emotions more than critical thought. One of the tenets of this was its inflated preoccupation with the issue of child sex trafficking.

When I say “inflated preoccupation”, I don’t mean to downplay how horrific a crime it is, but as someone who investigated child sexual exploitation rings as a job… I can say that it’s just nowhere near as prolific as many on the political right seemed to be convinced it is.

But paedophilia is so unequivocally immoral, and is an act entirely irredeemable by context, nuance, or any conceivable justification, that it provokes a visceral emotional reaction from any reasonable person. It breeds contempt from the pit of our stomachs, and pushes peaceful people to thoughts of violence – so it’s a perfect weapon to use against your political adversaries, especially if obedience to the truth isn’t a priority.

Right-wing social media influencers have, for decades now, promoted an array of conspiracy theories that all included themes of systematic child abuse and sex-trafficking.

Pizzagate, QAnon, and a host of other MAGA-aligned conspiracy theories all rested upon the premise of cult-like paedophilia networks being operated by powerful liberal elites. Every left-leaning politician, actor, or international organisation could be immediately besmirched with an implication in this mythical paedophilia network.

It’s difficult to overstate the emotional response every single one of us would have if we actually believed that there was a cabal of wealthy and powerful people running a child sexual slavery network. Thanks to a well-orchestrated and strategically relentless disinformation campaign spanning over a decade… millions of Americans do.

It was a perfect narrative in its moral simplicity; the Democrats were paedophiles, and in that reality, anything Trump does to stop them isn’t just permissible, it’s necessary.

When asked about QAnon, Trump played into the conspiracy, saying only: “…I do know they are very much against paedophilia, and I agree with that.”

From this, a broader theme emerged, even beyond a literal acceptance of the QAnon lore. Soon almost every culture war issue, from LGBTQI rights to Islamic immigration, was viewed through a child abuse nexus.
A movie about child sex smuggling, “The Sound of Freedom”, became hugely influential in MAGA circles, promoting this notion of a cover-up of systemic child abuse by shadowy leftist elites, while MAGA mouthpieces like Marjorie Taylor Greene called Democrats “the party of paedophiles”. Fox News referred to President Biden as the “Groomer in Chief”.

The Jeffrey Epstein case, therefore, became the perfect piece of evidence to confirm this growing sense within MAGA of systemic child sex trafficking that was being covered up by the political establishment.

A billionaire from New York, who was associated with everyone from the Clintons to Bill Gates, being charged with child sex trafficking… he even had a secret island like a cartoon villain.

…and then like a Hollywood script, Epstein dies under suspicious circumstances. Seemingly confirming, yet again, the complicity of all powerful elites, potentially murdering Epstein to cover up their crimes.

As a result, the mythical Epstein “client list” became a rallying point through which MAGA became convinced that these elites would finally be exposed. This was the smoking gun to prove the moral depravity of liberals and moral righteousness of MAGA… and Trump was the anti-establishment force that could finally provide it.

In the lead-up to the 2024 election, Trump promised to release the list, JD Vance made multiple statements declaring the public’s right to see it, and the incoming FBI Director, Kash Patel, stated that he had the list under his control. Trump’s Attorney-General Pam Bondi then teased the MAGA faithful, assuring them the list was on her desk, about to be released…

This was the culmination of decades of intense information warfare, inducing an obsession from right-wing media, convinced this list would confirm the perverted truth about their political adversaries. The anticipation has been palpable.

Then, in June last year, when a Fox News host asked Trump to confirm that he would release the list, he suddenly began to awkwardly walk back his election promise, saying:

“I guess I would. I think that less so, because you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that world.”

Despite this, MAGA remained convinced that Trump would deliver on his promise, and early indications were that it was coming…

Until this week, when Bondi announced that there is no list… and Epstein killed himself… and Trump is suddenly, and quite remarkably, asking why people are still talking about him.

Many of us have always suspected Trump’s name would feature in any evidence linked to Epstein’s conduct. He’s been photographed with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell more than possibly any other celebrity. Epstein is even on tape saying Trump was his “closest friend”.

It was also noted that in his first term, Trump appointed a little-known US Attorney, Alex Acosta, to be his Secretary of Labor. It turned out, Acosta just happened to be the same US Attorney that negotiated Epstein’s initial plea deal in 2007, which granted Epstein immunity from federal prosecution, along with any “unnamed co-conspirators”.
It always seemed likely to the rest of us that a man caught on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women could be implicated in Epstein’s sexual exploitation of young girls. But for his base, circumstantial evidence is easier to dismiss.

Which raises the question: what is Trump so afraid of that has caused him to backflip on this issue so publicly?
Having spent years riling up the angry mob waiting for this great reveal, Trump is asking his supporters to simply move on, and not ask any more questions?

It is unlikely this evidence is proof of criminality against Trump, but after MAGA’s social media influencers have committed so much time to frame this list as evidence of complicity in Epstein’s heinous crimes, it’s going to be very difficult for this genie to be placed back in the bottle.

The story of Trump is one of defiance against moments that would have ended the careers of any other politician, so I am not going to pretend that this is a turning point, or that his base is suddenly going to turn on him. Already the talking heads are shifting the blame to deep state operatives, and Pam Bondi seems to be taking the fall.

But because of the subject of this implication, and because of the history associated with Epstein, and the years spent framing the moral narrative around this list… this will truly be his greatest escape if he pulls it off.

How much can he control the news cycle? and how easily can his base be pre-programmed to suddenly not care about something that has been a feature of their moral grievance for years?

This will be fascinating to watch.

It’s a background rather than a news piece today.

July 9, 2025 (Wednesday)

On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation without systematic Black enslavement.

In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had prohibited slavery on the basis of race, but it did not prevent the establishment of a system in which Black Americans continued to be unequal. Backed by President Andrew Johnson, who had taken over the presidency after actor John Wilkes Booth murdered President Abraham Lincoln, white southern Democrats had done their best to push their Black neighbors back into subservience. So long as southern states had abolished enslavement, repudiated Confederate debts, and nullified the ordinances of secession, Johnson was happy to readmit them to full standing in the Union, still led by the very men who had organized the Confederacy and made war on the United States.

Northern Republican lawmakers refused. There was no way they were going to rebuild southern society on the same blueprint as existed before the Civil War, especially since the upcoming 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons for the first time in the nation’s history, giving southern states more power in Congress and the Electoral College after the war than they had had before it. Having just fought a war to destroy the South’s ideology, they were not going to let it regrow in peacetime.

Congress rejected Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction.

But then congressmen had to come up with their own. After months of hearings and debate, they proposed amending the Constitution to settle the outstanding questions of the war. Chief among these was how to protect the rights of Black Americans in states where they could neither vote nor testify in court or sit on a jury to protect their own interests.
Congress’s solution was the Fourteenth Amendment.

It took on the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision declaring that Black men “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens.”

The Fourteenth Amendment provides that “ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

The amendment also addressed the Dred Scott decision in another profound way. In 1857, southerners and Democrats who were adamantly opposed to federal power controlled the Supreme Court. They backed states’ rights. So the Dred Scott decision did more than read Black Americans out of our history: it dramatically circumscribed Congress’s power.
The Dred Scott decision declared that democracy was created at the state level, by those people in a state who were allowed to vote. In 1857 this meant white men, almost exclusively. If those people voted to do something widely unpopular—like adopting human enslavement, for example—they had the right to do so. People like Abraham Lincoln pointed out that such domination by states would eventually mean that an unpopular minority could take over the national government, forcing their ideas on everyone else, but defenders of states’ rights stood firm.

And so the Fourteenth Amendment gave the federal government the power to protect individuals even if their state legislatures had passed discriminatory laws. “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” it said. And then it went on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
The principles behind the Fourteenth Amendment were behind the 1870 creation of the Department of Justice, whose first job was to bring down the Ku Klux Klan terrorists in the South.

Those same principles took on profound national significance in the post–World War II era, when the Supreme Court began to use the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment aggressively to apply the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states. The civil rights decisions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures.

Opponents of these new civil rights protections quickly began to object that such decisions were “legislating from the bench,” rather than permitting state legislatures to make their own laws. They began to call for “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted only as the Framers had intended when they wrote it, an argument that focused on the creation of law at the state level. Famously, in 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, an originalist who had called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions, for a seat on that court.
Reacting to that nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) recognized the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to equality: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….”

Kennedy’s comments foreshadowed the world advanced by today’s MAGA Republicans. In 2022 the Supreme Court, stacked as it is with right-wing justices, overturned the federal protection of abortion rights provided in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and sent the question of abortion back to the states, many of which promptly banned the procedure.
When the court overturned the federal protection of abortion rights, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that federal protections for access to birth control and same-sex marriage should also be reexamined. In 2024, President Donald Trump suggested he would be open to letting states decide whether to restrict access to birth control, walking his statement back after a ferocious backlash.

Justice Samuel Alito has joined Thomas in attacking the Obergefell v. Hodges decision that provides federal protection for same-sex marriage, claiming that right, too, ought to be left up to voters in the states, even as Republican-dominated states are passing laws to limit who can vote.

Not only have today’s Republicans launched an attack on the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirement that the federal government protect Americans against discrimination in the states, President Donald Trump has launched an assault on the birthright citizenship that is the centerpiece of the amendment.

That section of the amendment— the first section— acknowledges that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens,” who enjoy the same rights, and that no state can take those rights away without due process of law.

July 10, 2025 (Thursday)

Just a week ago, Republicans in the House of Representatives passed the nearly 1,000-page budget reconciliation bill President Donald Trump demanded, and at the signing ceremony for the bill the next day, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced Republicans were “laying a key cornerstone of America’s new golden age.”

But the past week has shown a nation—and an administration—in turmoil.

On July 4, the day Trump signed the bill, flash floods devastated central Texas, leaving more than 100 people dead and about 160 still missing. Local officials immediately blamed cuts to the National Weather Service (NWS) for the disaster, but reviews showed that NWS meteorologists had predicted the storm accurately and had sent out three increasingly urgent warnings at 1:14 a.m., 4:03 a.m., and 6:06 a.m.

But four hours passed before the police department in the City of Kerrville issued a warning. It wasn’t until 7:32 that the city urged people along the Guadalupe River to move to higher ground immediately. The missing link between the NWS and public safety personnel appears to have been the weather service employee in charge of coordinating between them. He took an unplanned early retirement under pressure from the “Department of Government Efficiency” and has not been replaced.

Then, as Gabe Cohen and Michael Williams of CNN reported, search and rescue teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) could not respond to the disaster because Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose department is in charge of FEMA, had recently tried to cut spending by requiring her personal sign-off on any expenditure over $100,000. That order meant FEMA couldn’t put crews in place ahead of the storm, or respond immediately. Noem didn’t sign off on the deployment of FEMA teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding started.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, told Cohen and Williams that Noem did not authorize FEMA deployment because DHS used other search and rescue teams. “FEMA is shifting from bloated, DC-centric dead weight to a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers state actors to provide relief for their citizens,” McLaughlin told CNN in a statement. “The old processes are being replaced because they failed Americans in real emergencies for decades.”

“DHS is rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and is reprioritizing appropriated dollars. Secretary Noem is delivering accountability to the U.S. taxpayer, which Washington bureaucrats have ignored for decades at the expense of American citizens,” McLaughlin said. Noem has called for the elimination of FEMA.

Meanwhile, FEMA’s acting director, David Richardson, has been nowhere to be found, making no public appearances, statements, or postings on social media since the disaster, and not visiting the site. Former FEMA officials told Thomas Frank of Politico that Richardson’s absence suggests Noem is controlling the FEMA response. Trump appointed Richardson after his team fired his first appointee, Cameron Hamilton, for telling Congress he did not think FEMA should be scrapped.

The day after he took office in May, Richardson, who has no experience with emergency management, told staff: “Don’t get in my way…because I will run right over you. I will achieve the president’s intent…. I, and I alone in FEMA, speak for FEMA,” he said.

Even as rescuers were still at work today in Texas, DHS cancelled a $3 million grant that had been awarded in New York to make sure the NWS can communicate effectively with local officials.

Tariffs are back in the news as Trump’s postponement for his high tariff has ended. They are as chaotic and as problematic as ever.

On April 2, Trump announced tariffs on countries around the world. He said that, beginning on April 9, he would impose a baseline tariff of 10%—a significant increase from the 2.5% rate then in effect—and additional tariffs of up to 50% on countries using a bizarre formula apparently cooked up by his trade advisor, Peter Navarro.

Immediately the stock market lost more than $5 trillion. So rather than let the tariffs go into effect on April 9, Trump pushed the start of the tariffs off until Wednesday, July 9 (yesterday), vowing to negotiate trade deals with individual countries rapidly: 90 deals in 90 days, Navarro said. But only two deals have been forthcoming—one with the United Kingdom and one with Vietnam—meaning that on July 9 the high tariffs of April 2 would take effect.

Then, on Tuesday, Trump announced on social media the real date for the start of the tariffs would be August 1. Somewhat bizarrely, he told reporters he had not changed the date the tariffs would go into effect, although on Monday he signed an executive order changing the date of the start of the levies from July 9 to August 1.

Throughout the week, Trump has been sending letters to world leaders informing them that he intended to impose high tariffs on their countries unless they negotiated with him. At a press opportunity at a cabinet meeting, as Danielle Kurtzleben of NPR noted, he tried to rebrand his letters as deals. “A letter means a deal,” he told reporters. “We can’t meet with 200 countries. We have a few trusted people that know what they’re doing, that are doing a good job, but you can’t do it. You have to do it in a more general way. But it’s a very good way. It’s a better way. It’s a more powerful way.”

On Tuesday, Trump also announced a 50% tariff on copper. Copper is vital to the defense industry, batteries, electric wires, plumbing, and so on, and the U.S. imports more than half of what it uses. Trump claims to want to see the U.S. produce the copper it needs, but getting the industry to that point will take years. He also announced a 35% tariff on goods from Canada.

Paul Wiseman of the Associated Press notes that the 10% tariffs are apparently here to stay because the administration needs that money to cover some of the hole the new tax cuts from the budget reconciliation bill will blast in the deficit.

While Trump continues to insist—incorrectly—that foreign countries pay tariffs, his former vice president Mike Pence reiterated the truth today. On Bloomberg “Surveillance,” he said of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s boast that tariffs will bring in $300 billion this year: “Well, tariffs are a tax, and American importers and businesses and, ultimately, consumers pay almost all of that. And so literally a week after we managed to extend the Trump-Pence tax cuts and prevent a $2,000 tax increase on working families, the administration is right now boasting of the fact that the average American household is going to see about $3,000 increase in the cost of goods.”

Last month, Trump nominated Department of Justice prosecutor Emil Bove to be a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, covering Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and the Virgin Islands. Bove is a Trump loyalist who defended Trump in his criminal indictments and participated in firing officials who investigated Trump and the January 6 rioters. He was also a central player in the dropping of corruption charges against New York mayor Eric Adams and the rendition of Venezuelan migrants to the CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador.

On June 24, Erez Reuveni, a former Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyer, filed an official whistleblower complaint about abuses in the department. Reuveni was fired after telling a court that the administration had made an error when it rendered Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia to CECOT despite a court order not to do so. In the whistleblower complaint, Reuveni alleged that the leaders at the Department of Justice and the White House had deliberately defied court orders and “engaged in unlawful activity, abused their authority, created substantial and specific threat to health and safety.”

Reuveni alleged that Bove insisted the planes carrying the men to El Salvador must take off and that he said DOJ “would need to consider telling the courts ‘f*ck you’ and ignore any such court order.” Reuveni then laid out the events of the March days in which the men were deported, along with the determination of the Department of Justice to violate the orders of the court.

Bove told the Senate Judiciary Committee last month he had “no recollection” of saying “f*ck you” to the court and said he had never advised the Department of Justice to violate a court order. Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on social media that Reuveni was a “leaker asserting false claims.”

Today, Senate Democrats released a trove of documents Reuveni had provided the committee, backing up his complaint. Texts and emails confirm that Department of Justice lawyers misled Judge James Boasberg, one telling him that he did not know when the Trump administration intended to deport the men when, as one of Reuveni’s colleagues said, “I can’t believe he said he doesn’t know. He knows there are plans for AEA removals within the next 24 hours.”

Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement Thursday that Bove “belongs nowhere near the federal bench.” “This is about more than a random f-bomb,” he said. “This is a declaration of defiance of our courts at the highest level of our government by a man who now seeks a lifetime appointment to one of the highest courts in our land.”

Today a federal judge appointed by Republican George W. Bush granted class action status to a lawsuit challenging Trump’s executive order attacking birthright citizenship. With that status in place, U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante barred the administration from denying citizenship to U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. Judge Laplante paused his ruling for a week to give the administration time to appeal.

Trump himself lost his appeal of a New York jury’s verdict that he must pay writer E. Jean Carroll $5 million for sexually abusing and defaming her. Trump now has 90 days to appeal to the Supreme Court to take the case.

Tonight the White House posted on X an image of “SUPERMAN TRUMP”—a much younger Trump dressed as the famous superhero, fists clenched, against a gauzy background—with the caption “TRUTH. JUSTICE. THE AMERICAN WAY.”

July 12, 2025 (Saturday)

On July 5, the day after the Texas floods hit, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) received 3,027 calls from survivors and answered 3,018 of them, about 99.7%, according to Maxine Joselow of the New York Times. But that day, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem did not renew the contracts for four call center companies that answered those calls. The staff at the centers were fired. The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or about 35.8%. On Monday, July 7, FEMA received 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, around 15.9%.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said: “When a natural disaster strikes, phone calls surge, and wait times can subsequently increase. Despite this expected influx, FEMA’s disaster call center responded to every caller swiftly and efficiently, ensuring no one was left without assistance.”

Marcy Wheeler of EmptyWheel notes that one reason Noem has been cutting so ferociously at FEMA is because she has run through the money Congress allocated for HHS with her single-minded focus on immigration.

In May, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) called out Noem’s expenditure of $200 million on an ad campaign pushing Trump’s agenda and $21 million to transport about 400 migrants to Guantanamo Bay only to have many of them transferred back out. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) told Noem: “You are spending like you don’t have a budget…. You’re on track to trigger the Anti-Deficiency Act. That means you are going to spend more money than you have been allocated by Congress. This is a rare occurrence, and it is wildly illegal. Your agency will be broke by July, over two months before the end of the fiscal year. You may not think that Congress has provided enough money to ICE , but the Constitution and the federal law does not allow you to spend more money than you’ve been given, or to invent money. And this obsession with spending at the border…has left the country unprotected elsewhere.

Noem responded to Blumenthal that she was fulfilling a mandate. She told him: “The American people overwhelmingly in the last election said, ‘We want a secure border, we want to make sure no longer are the scales of justice tipped in the favor of criminals….’” A recent video posted to Facebook Reels by the Department of Homeland Security makes it clear Noem’s justification was cover for a violent Christian nationalist vision in which ICE and the Border Patrol are enforcing God’s commandments. A dark film invokes Isaiah 6:8, the Bible verse in which God asks, “Whom shall I send?” and Isaiah answers, “Here am I! Send me.” The exchange is widely interpreted to show volunteers willing to do God’s work.

A poll released Friday makes it clear that the American people do not support such a vision and did not, in fact, expect a Trump administration to deport undocumented immigrants who have no criminal record and have lived in the U.S. for years. A Gallup poll released yesterday shows that the administration’s draconian policies toward immigrants have created a backlash. A record 79% of adults say immigration is good for the country, with only 17% seeing it as bad. That change has been driven primarily by a shift in Republicans, 64% of whom now agree that immigrants are good for the country, up from their low of under 40%. The percentage of American adults who say immigration should be reduced has dropped to 30%, down from 55% in 2024.

The Gallup poll shows that U.S. opposition to immigration rose from 2021 to 2024, the years in which the booming economy in the U.S. attracted immigrants pushed out of South American countries whose economies were foundering. Trump falsely tagged that surge as proof that former president Joe Biden was permitting immigrant criminals to flood the country. Sentiments now look like they did in 2021, before that campaign.

The poll shows that only 35% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, while 62% disapprove. There is a strong enthusiasm gap in those numbers: 21% strongly approve while 45% strongly disapprove. Among Independents, 14% strongly approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, while 45% strongly disapprove.

Those numbers are unlikely to improve for the administration in light of yesterday’s ICE raids at two licensed cannabis farms in Southern California. Agents used less-lethal ammunition and tear gas in the raids. A number of people were injured, one critically. Agents arrested 200 people, including George Retes, a 25-year-old disabled veteran and U.S. citizen who worked at one of the farms as a security guard. Agents claimed Retes was a protester. His family has been unable to locate him, telling Josh Haskell of the local ABC affiliate that the local sheriff’s office and local police departments all said they do not know where he is.

More information coming about about the conditions of immigrant detention are also unlikely to increase support for the administration’s policies. Today, at least five members of Congress and about 20 state legislators toured the new ICE detention center in the Everglades. The tour was planned rather than unexpected, enabling staff to prepare for it. Nonetheless, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) said: “These detainees are living in cages. The pictures you’ve seen don’t do it justice. They are essentially packed into cages. Wall to wall humans. Thirty-two detainees per cage…. There are three tiny toilets that…have a sink attached to it, so…they get their drinking water and they brush their teeth where they poop, in the same unit.” Nine hundred men are currently in the facility.

And yet, even as the public sours on its policies, the administration is continuing its attacks on immigration. After the Supreme Court said it could implement mass layoffs while a lawsuit against them proceeds through the courts, it fired more than 1,300 employees from the State Department on Friday. It closed the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, which was created in 1977 “to help advance individual liberty and democratic freedoms around the world” and has stood against cooperation with dictators who, as Michael Crowley of the New York Times writes, “grossly abuse human rights.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio is also shuttering the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, which he claims enabled mass immigration to the United States. By Saturday afternoon the websites for both bureaus had been taken down.

Astonishingly, the crisis in Texas and growing opposition to his immigration policies are not the biggest problem for the administration today. That pride of place goes to MAGA fury over the Justice Department’s statement that accused sex trafficker of young girls Jeffrey Epstein, who died in his prison cell in 2019, did not keep an “incriminating ‘client list.’” It also said it would not release additional evidence the department’s investigators have accumulated, evidence that includes photographs and more than 10,000 videos.

MAGA influencers, egged on by media figures like Dan Bongino, insisted that the Justice Department under Biden was hiding information about Epstein’s clients to cover up for Democratic leaders they insisted it would implicate. In February 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi told the Fox News Channel that the list was sitting on her desk awaiting review. Now, though, the department has done a 180.

MAGA is furious. Bongino, who fed the frenzy, is now the deputy director of the FBI, and reports say he has turned on Bondi over the change, threatening to quit. Philip Rotner at The Bulwark makes the astute observation that wording of the announcement from Department of Justice is “deliberately opaque”—as many of their obfuscating documents are—and leaves open the possibility that there is, in fact, incriminating evidence, just not in the form of a specific document with the words “INCRIMINATING ‘CLIENT LIST’” at its top.

Bondi is a ferocious Trump loyalist, and for all that MAGA is pinning the blame for the cover-up on her, she is almost certainly following Trump’s instructions. The fight has put back into the news that one of Epstein’s closest companions was none other than President Donald J. Trump, a relationship documented in pictures, videos, and interviews. In 2002, according to New York magazine, Trump said: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy…. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
Last night, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top-ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said he will “be asking Chairman Jordan to call for a hearing where we subpoena the Attorney General and Dan Bongino and Kash Patel to come in and tell us everything that we know” about the Jeffrey Epstein files, “because this thing is really spinning out of control at this point and there’s one way to put it to rest, which is to come clean, as President Trump promised he would during the campaign.”

Just before 10:00 this morning, Trump lashed out in what seemed to be an attempt to regain control of the narrative, hitting as many MAGA talking points as he could with an attack on comedian and talk show host Rosie O’Donnell, who has relocated from her native U.S.—she was born in New York—to Ireland out of concern for her family in Trump’s America. “Because of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship. She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her. GOD BLESS AMERICA!”

The president’s suggestion that he has the power to revoke the citizenship of a natural-born American—he does not—escalates his authoritarian claims. It comes after a federal judge on Thursday barred the administration from denying citizenship to U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants, giving the administration time to appeal.

O’Donnell responded on Instagram:

hey donald—
you’re rattled again?
18 years later and I still live rent-free in that collapsing brain of yours.
you call me a threat to humanity—
but I’m everything you fear:
a loud woman
a queer woman
a mother who tells the truth
an american who got out of the country b4 you set it ablaze
you build walls—
I build a life for my autistic kid in a country where decency still exists
you crave loyalty—
I teach my children to question power
you sell fear on golf courses
I make art about surviving trauma
You lie, you steal, you degrade—
I nurture, I create, I persist
you are everything that is wrong with america—
and I’m everything you hate about what’s still right with it
you want to revoke my citizenship?
go ahead and try, king joffrey* with a tangerine spray tan
i’m not yours to silence
i never was
— *Joffrey is a monstrous, stupid, vicious king in Game of Thrones.

Carrick Ryan

If Trump was named in the “Epstein Files”, why didn’t President Biden release it?

Here’s my take as a former Federal Agent.

As I’ve stated before, I don’t think there is a simple “client list”, and it’s also unlikely that evidence exists that Trump has engaged in criminal conduct with Epstein, otherwise the Justice Department under Biden would have almost certainly launched an investigation, even if just to announce that an investigation existed.

But the investigation into Epstein would have contained an enormous amount of phone downloads, chat logs, bank records, flight logs, CCTV, and of course whatever evidence Epstein himself kept for any number of purposes.

It’s fairly evident that amongst this evidence could be any number of artefacts that would be damaging to Trump.
Imagine personal text message exchanges between the men, images of Trump with women on Epstein’s Island, or maybe even CCTV of Trump that was kept by Epstein as leverage. Obviously this is speculative, but it’s certainly not difficult to conceive of something that would be politically damaging to Trump, without being proof that a crime was committed.

If this evidence was not relevant to the prosecution of Epstein, and was not relevant to proving or disproving another crime, then this evidence would be classified, just as it would be for any other investigation.

The Courts only needs to see evidence that can prove or disprove a fact relevant to the case, the rest is kept secret to protect the privacy of those involved. This is an important feature, as it ensures the public knows that the evidence police seize through search warrants, as well as intercept and recording device warrants, will only ever be released if it’s absolutely necessary to prosecute a crime or prove someone’s innocence.

It makes us a little bit more comfortable handing Police these extraordinary powers if we know that so long as we’re not committing a crime, our private conversations and actions will never be exposed just to humiliate us.

Now under President Biden, the Attorney-General was Merrick Garland, who was an esteemed Federal Judge who had previously been nominated for the Supreme Court by Obama (with Mitch McConnell refusing to even hold a hearing). Garland was a fervent believer in judicial process, especially after witnessing Trump’s open political interference with his Justice Department during his first term.

As a result, Garland never used his authority to release ANY evidence associated with ANY of the investigations with his Justice Department, even though several involved Trump and his political allies. If evidence was to be unsealed, it should be done through a judicial process, meaning a court order from a judge based on a legal finding – not for politics.

Both he and Biden would have recognised that abusing their power to release information purely to embarrass their political opponent (rather than definitively prove he had committed a crime) would have been the exact kind of abuse of power and indifference for the rule of law and judicial process that they said disqualified Trump from the White House.

Garland’s critics will point to the fact the DOJ had two investigations into Trump (for the holding of classified documents and for his election interference in 2020). But in both instances, Garland appointed a Special Counsel to ensure those investigation were conducted independent of his authority.

It’s also possible they didn’t even know if there was any evidence that was damaging to Trump. The mere act of asking for the case be reviewed to identify embarrassing evidence that could be used against your political opponent would have been incredibly improper, and possibly even grounds for impeachment.

But equally, it must be acknowledged, that Biden or Garland using their authority to declassify this kind of evidence would have set an incredibly dangerous precedent that could have exposed Democrats, as well as Biden’s own son, to future politically motivated exposures. Effectively abusing the investigative power of law enforcement to obtain and publish “dirt” on political opponents.

It’s also entirely possible that they knew that the evidence in this case would be problematic for important Democrats, such as Bill Clinton. Again, it wouldn’t have to be proof of a crime, but something they would not enjoy seeing published.

So it’s really not difficult to see why Trump’s name was safe during Biden’s presidency. But it was Trump himself that leant into the campaign to declassify everything the FBI had.

Trump’s Attorney-General, Pam Bondi, was a former Florida Attorney-General (an elected position), before becoming Trump’s personal lawyer and regular Fox News pundit.

In the lead up to the 2024 election, she made multiple appearances on Fox News declaring that there was no legal reasons not to declassify ALL the evidence associated with the Epstein case, earning her significant support among the MAGA base who had become convinced the entire case had been covered up by Democrats.

It became a Trump election promise, and as I’ve explained in previous posts, it became an obsession of MAGA, who believed this evidence would prove once and for all the moral depravity of the liberal elites that would be named.
So what do I think changed?

As I said before, investigations like this would likely hold terabytes of evidence, and there’s a good chance Trump didn’t actually know what kind of evidence existed in these files. It’s possible that Bondi, herself, has only just found out.

Again, I highly doubt it would be evidence of criminal conduct, otherwise Garland’s DOJ would have absolutely established an investigation. But it’s really not difficult to imagine what kind of material an investigation like this would have captured that could implicate Trump in Epstein’s activities, even if not the criminal ones.

The difficulty for Bondi and Trump is they spent a year promising they would release everything, and clearly there is a reason why they now think this can’t be done without causing substantial political damage to Trump… because refusing to release it is turning into an existential crisis for his base.

Whatever is in those files is somehow worse…

July 13, 2025 (Sunday)
This weekend saw the development of an extraordinary rift in MAGA world.

The conflict began last Monday when the Department of Justice (DOJ) released a memo saying that it had conducted a thorough review of all the evidence the department had collected about convicted sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein, who died in his prison cell in 2019 awaiting trial on additional sex-trafficking charges. The memo said that the department’s “systematic review revealed no incriminating ‘client list’” and that there was “no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.” It said the DOJ and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which operates within the DOJ, had determined “that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.”

The memo also said FBI investigators had concluded that Epstein died by suicide, releasing footage from a camera from the unit in which Epstein was being held at the time of his death.
For years now, Trump and his loyalists have claimed Epstein was murdered to protect the rich and powerful men who were preying on children. This theory dovetailed with the QAnon conspiracy theory that Trump was combating a secret ring of cannibalistic child molesters who included Democratic politicians, government officials, film stars, and businessmen. MAGA influencers, including Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, pushed the Epstein theories, and MAGA followers believed them, hoping to bring down Democratic politicians like the Clintons.

Once in power, they vowed, they would release the client list and provide the truth about Epstein’s death. In February, Attorney General Pam Bondi told the Fox News Channel that the client list was “sitting on my desk right now.” Patel is now director of the FBI—in part because MAGA senators like Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) believed he would release more information on Epstein and child sex trafficking rings—and Bongino is the FBI’s deputy director. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) called for Americans to vote for Trump in 2024 because “Americans deserve to know why Epstein didn’t kill himself.”

The announcement that the DOJ would not provide further information and that Epstein had died by suicide set off a firestorm among MAGA. Far-right influencer Jack Posobiec wrote: “We were all told more was coming. That answers were out there and would be provided.”

On Tuesday, when a reporter asked about Epstein during a press opportunity at a cabinet meeting, Trump responded: “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years. Are people still talking about this guy? This creep? That is unbelievable.”

Trump’s attempt to turn attention away from the story only drew attention to it. While MAGA focused on the idea that the people on an Epstein client list would be Democrats, in fact the person most closely associated with Epstein in popular culture was Trump himself. The two men were photographed and filmed together a number of times. In 2002, according to New York magazine, Trump said: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy…. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

On June 5, after a falling-out with Trump, billionaire Elon Musk posted on social media: “Time to drop the really big bomb: is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!” He followed that post up with another saying: “Mark this post for the future. The truth will come out.” He later deleted the posts and said they had gone too far.

After Trump tried to downplay the story last week, it gained momentum. MAGA influencers began to call for Bondi to be fired, and Bongino began to talk of resigning from the FBI over Bondi’s memo and handling of the issue.

Then, at 5:21 Saturday evening, Eastern Daylight Time, Trump posted a long, incoherent screed on social media. In it, he defended Attorney General Pam Bondi—who is, of course, doing his bidding concerning the files—and tried to bring MAGA together again, warning that “selfish people” were trying to hurt his “PERFECT administration” by focusing on Epstein. In apparent contradiction to the story Bondi had told, he suggested the Epstein files existed, but then nonsensically said they were “written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration, who conned the World with the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 ‘Intelligence’ Agents, ‘THE LAPTOP FROM HELL,’ and more? They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called “friends” are playing right into their hands. Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files? If there was ANYTHING in there that could have hurt the MAGA Movement, why didn’t they use it? They haven’t even given up on the John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr. Files,” he wrote.

“No matter how much success we have had, securing the Border, deporting Criminals, fixing the Economy, Energy Dominance, a Safer World where Iran will not have Nuclear Weapons, it’s never enough for some people. We are about to achieve more in 6 months than any other Administration has achieved in over 100 years, and we have so much more to do. We are saving our Country and, MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, which will continue to be our complete PRIORITY,” Trump wrote.

“The Left is imploding! Kash Patel, and the FBI, must be focused on investigating Voter Fraud, Political Corruption, ActBlue, The Rigged and Stolen Election of 2020, and arresting Thugs and Criminals, instead of spending month after month looking at nothing but the same old, Radical Left inspired Documents on Jeffrey Epstein. LET PAM BONDI DO HER JOB—SHE’S GREAT! The 2020 Election was Rigged and Stolen, and they tried to do the same thing in 2024—That’s what she is looking into as AG, and much more.
“One year ago our Country was DEAD, now it’s the ‘HOTTEST’ Country anywhere in the World. Let’s keep it that way, and not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

For the first time ever, Trump got ratioed on his own platform, meaning that there were more comments on his post than likes or shares, showing disapproval of his message. According to Jordan King of Newsweek, by 10:45 this morning (Eastern Time) it had more than 36,000 replies but only 11,000 reposts and 32,000 likes.

Trump sounds panicked, not only over the Epstein issue itself, but also because he cannot control the narrative his followers are embracing. After stoking the fire of his followers’ anger against what they seemed to see as powerful men getting away with crimes against children, he is now being burned by it. His reflex is to return to his greatest hits, accusing Democrats of writing the Epstein files and then, as he always, always, always does, snapping back to the Russia scandal and calling it a hoax.

Over the weekend, attendees at a conference held by the right-wing Turning Point USA booed the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein case. MAGA influencers kept up the drumbeat; Matt Walsh called the administration’s about-face on releasing information “obvious bullsh*t.” Natalie Allison of the Washington Post reported that even the Fox News Channel warned this morning that “here has to be some explanation” and that questions about the way the administration is handling the Epstein files were “very valid.”

Musk, who controls the X social media platform preferred by the right wing, is amplifying the story. After Trump’s Saturday post, Musk wrote to his 222 million followers: “Seriously. He said ‘Epstein’ half a dozen times while telling everyone to stop talking about Epstein. Just release the files as promised.”
Trump appears to be planning to regain control of the narrative by persecuting his political opponents.

But it is not clear that will silence MAGA voters who backed Trump in part because they thought he would lead the fight against an elite group of pedophiles controlling the country. As Trump’s policies on the economy, immigration, tax cuts, firing of government employees, and gutting of disaster relief have soured Americans on his administration, loyalists stayed behind him. Now he has turned against their chief cause, giving them an off-ramp from a presidency that seems increasingly off the rails.

Mike Flynn, who served as Trump’s first national security advisor until forced to resign for lying about his contact with Russian operatives, posted on social media: “ please understand the EPSTEIN AFFAIR is not going away. If the administration doesn’t address the massive number of unanswered questions about Epstein, especially the ABUSE OF CHILDREN BY ELITES (it is very clear that abuse occurred), then moving forward on so many other monumental challenges our nation is facing becomes much harder.”

Flynn concluded: “We cannot allow pedophiles to get away. I don’t personally care who they are or what elite or powerful position they hold. They must be exposed and held accountable!!!”

As an aside, today I rewatched the film White Squall, a largely forgotten Ridley Scott film starring a bunch of next-big-thing-in-Hollywood actors in the mid 90s.

Anyhoo, turns out some taglines from the movie have become slogans QAnon have adopted, such as “where we go one, we go all”.

>>Thank you for your attention to this matter!<<

He’s got a really odd sign off for his posts.

Its quite believable that Trump could be on that list or something similar and compromising photos exist.
Wonder if the Russians have been coercing him to side with them.

July 14, 2025 (Monday)

Trump appointees insist they have a “mandate” to drive undocumented immigrants out of the U.S. and prevent new immigrants from coming in, and are launching a massive increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and detention facilities to do so. But a poll released Friday shows that only 35% of American adults approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, while 62% disapprove.

The poll shows a record 79% of adults saying immigration is good for the country, with only 17% seeing it as bad. Only 30% of American adults say immigration should be reduced.

The poll shows that 85% of American adults want laws to allow “immigrants, who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, the chance to become U.S. citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time.” Seventy-eight percent of American adults want the law to allow “immigrants living in the U.S. illegally the chance to become U.S. citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time.” Only 38% want the government to deport “all immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home country.”

The poll shows Americans eager to fix a problem that stems from a bipartisan 1965 law that reworked America’s immigration laws.

In 1924, during a period of opposition to immigration that fueled the second rise of the Ku Klux Klan, Congress had passed the nation’s first comprehensive immigration law. That law, known as the Johnson-Reed Act, limited immigration according to quotas assigned to each country. Those quotas were heavily weighted toward western Europe, virtually prohibiting immigration from Asia and Africa and dramatically curtailing it from southern Europe.

The Johnson-Reed Act simply taxed workers coming to the U.S. from Mexico, because from the time the current border was set in 1848 until the 1930s, people moved back and forth across it. Laborers in particular came from Mexico to work for the huge American agribusinesses that dominate the agricultural sector, especially after 1907 when the Japanese workers who had been taking over those jobs were unofficially kept out of the country by the so-called “Gentlemen’s Agreement.” Later, during World War I, the government encouraged immigration to help increase production.

The Depression, when the bottom fell out of the economy, coupled with the Dust Bowl, when the bottom fell out of the western plains, made destitute white Americans turn on Mexican migrants (as well as on their poor white neighbors, as John Steinbeck wrote about in The Grapes of Wrath). The government rounded up Mexicans and shipped them back over the border.

World War II created another shortage of laborers, and to regularize the system of migrant labor, the U.S. government in 1942 started a guest worker policy called the Bracero Program that ultimately brought more than 4 million Mexican workers to the U.S. The program was supposed to guarantee that migrant workers were well treated and adequately paid and housed. But it didn’t work out that way. Employers hired illegal as well as legal workers and treated them poorly. American workers complained about competition.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower returned about a million illegal workers in 1954 under “Operation Wetback,” only to have officials readmit most of them as braceros. Under pressure both from labor and from reformers who recognized that the system was exploitative at the same time that mechanization began replacing workers, President John F. Kennedy initiated the process that ended the Bracero Program in 1964. In 1965 the government tried to replace migrant labor with American high school students, but the “A-TEAM” project—“Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower”—failed.

The end of the Bracero program coincided with congressional reworking of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act. In the midst of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, Congress wanted to end the racial quota system of immigration and replace it with one that did not so obviously discriminate against Asia and Africa. In 1965, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, or the Hart-Celler Act. It opened immigration to all nations, setting a general cap on total immigration levels.

But southern congressmen, appalled at the idea of Black immigration, introduced a provision that privileged family migration, arguing that “family unification” should be the nation’s top priority. They expected that old-stock immigrants from western Europe would use the provision to bring over their relatives, which would keep the effect of the 1924 law without the statute. But their provision had the opposite effect. It was new immigrants who wanted to bring their families, not old ones. So immigration began to skew heavily toward Asia and Latin America.

At the same time, Hart-Celler put a cap on immigrants from Mexico just as the guest worker program ended. The cap was low: 20,000, although 50,000 workers were coming annually at that point, and American agribusiness depended on migrant labor. Workers continued to come as they always had, and to be employed, as always. But now their presence was illegal.

In 1986, Congress tried to fix the problem of border security between the U.S. and Mexico by offering amnesty to 2.3 million Mexicans who were living in the United States and by cracking down on employers who hired undocumented workers. But rather than ending the problem of undocumented workers, the new law exacerbated it by beginning the process of guarding and militarizing the border. Until then, migrants into the United States had been offset by an equal number leaving at the end of the season. Once the border became heavily guarded, Mexican migrants refused to take the chance of leaving.

Since 1986, U.S. politicians have refused to deal with this disconnect, which grew in the 1990s when the North American Free Trade Agreement flooded Mexico with U.S. corn and drove Mexican farmers to find work, largely in the American Southeast. But by 2007, as Mexico’s economy stabilized and after U.S. border enforcement tightened significantly under President Bill Clinton, more Mexican immigrants were leaving the U.S. than coming.

Between 2007 and 2017, the U.S. saw a net loss of about 2 million Mexican immigrants. In 2017 about 5 million undocumented Mexicans lived in the United States; most of them—83%—were long-term residents, here more than ten years. Only 8% had lived in the U.S. for less than five years. Increasingly, undocumented immigrants were people from around the world who overstayed legal visas, making up more than 40% of the country’s undocumented population by 2024.

In 2013 the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration reform measure by a bipartisan vote of 68 to 32. The measure provided a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and increased border security. It also proposed to increase visas for immigrant workers. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the measure would reduce the federal deficit by $197 billion over 10 years and $700 billion over 20 years.

The measure had passed the Senate by a wide margin and was popular with the public. It was expected to pass the House. But then–House speaker John Boehner (R-OH) refused to bring the measure up before the chamber, saying it did not have the support of a majority of Republicans.

About that time, undocumented migration across the southern border was changing. By 2014, people were arriving at the U.S. border from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, where violence that approached warfare—much of it caused by gangs whose members had been socialized into gang culture in the U.S.—and economic stress from that violence created refugees. These migrants were not coming over the border for economic opportunity; they were refugees applying for asylum—a legal process in the United States.

Before the 2014 midterm elections, Republicans highlighted the new migrants at the southern border, although immigration numbers remained relatively stable. They also highlighted the death from the Ebola virus of a Liberian visitor to the U.S. and the infection of two of his nurses. They attacked the Democratic administration of President Barack Obama for downplaying the danger of the disease to the U.S. public and suggested foreigners should be kept out of the U.S. (In fact, the only Americans who contracted the virus in the U.S. were the two nurses who treated the Liberian visitor.)

Despite his own history of using undocumented workers at his properties, Trump followed this practice of using immigration against the Democratic administration for political points, launching his presidential campaign in 2015 by claiming Mexico was sending “people that have lots of problems…. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” He promised mass deportation and to build a wall across the southern border and make Mexico pay for it.

In fact, Trump’s administration deported significantly fewer undocumented immigrants than Obama’s had, at least in part because Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Obama focused on deporting those who had been convicted of crimes, a much easier deportation process than that for immigrants without convictions. But it was still legal to apply for asylum in the U.S., a fact MAGA Republicans opposed as they embraced the “Great Replacement” theory: the idea that immigration destroys a nation’s culture and identity.

The covid pandemic enabled the Trump administration in March 2020 to close the border and turn back asylum seekers under an emergency health authority known as Title 42, which can be invoked to keep out illness. Title 42 overrode the right to request asylum. But it also took away the legal consequences for trying to cross the border illegally, meaning migrants tried repeatedly, driving up the numbers of border encounters between U.S. agents and migrants and increasing the number of successful attempts from about 10,000–15,000 per month to a peak of more than 85,000.

Title 42 was still in effect in January 2021, when President Joe Biden took office. Immediately, Biden sent an immigration bill to Congress to modernize and fund immigration processes, including border enforcement and immigration courts—which had backlogs of more than 1.6 million people whose cases took an average of five years to get decided—and provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

His request got nowhere as MAGA Republicans demanded the continuation of Title 42 as a general immigration measure to keep out migrants and accused Biden of wanting “open borders.” But Title 42 is an emergency public health authority, and when the administration declared the covid emergency over in May 2023, the rule no longer applied.

In the meantime, migrants had surged to the border, driven from their home countries or countries to which they had previously moved by the slow economic recoveries of those countries after the worst of the pandemic. The booming U.S. economy pulled them north. To move desperately needed migrants into the U.S. workforce, Biden extended temporary protected status to about 472,000 Venezuelans who were in the U.S. before July 31, 2023. The Biden administration also expanded temporary humanitarian admissions for people from Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua.

Then, in October 2023, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) injected the idea of an immigration bill back into the political discussion when he tried to stop the passage of a national security measure that would provide aid to Ukraine. He said the House would not consider the Senate’s measure unless it contained a border security package. Eager to pass a measure to aid Ukraine, the Senate took him at his word, and a bipartisan group of senators spent the next several months hammering out an immigration bill that was similar to Title 42.

The Senate passed the measure with a bipartisan vote, but under pressure from Trump, who wanted to preserve the issue of immigration for his 2024 campaign, Johnson declared it “dead on arrival” when it reached the House in February 2024. “Only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Bill,” Trump posted about the measure.
And then Trump hammered hard on the demonization of immigrants. He lied that Aurora, Colorado, was a “war zone” that had been taken over by Venezuelan gangs—Aurora’s Republican mayor and police chief said this wasn’t true—and that Haitian immigrants to Springfield, Ohio, were “eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating—they are eating the pets of the people that live there.” A Gallup poll released Friday shows the MAGA attacks on immigration worked: in 2024, 55% of American adults wanted fewer immigrants in the country.

Trump was reelected in part because of his promise to strengthen border security, but now his administration is using attacks on immigrants to impose a police state. As Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng reported Saturday in Rolling Stone, the administration is fighting to impose its will on wrongly-deported Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom it rendered to a terrorist prison in El Salvador, because if they are forced to back down, “it could set a precedent that opens the floodgates to other legal challenges” to Trump’s other executive power grabs.

“The last thing you want to do here is contribute to a domino effect of decisions where suddenly you’re admitting you’re wrong about everything,” a close Trump advisor told the reporters. “That is why you gotta stand your ground on everything against the left, including on the situation.”

But it appears the American people simply want to fix a sixty-year-old mistake in the nation’s immigration laws.

July 15, 2025 (Tuesday)
Without any explanation, the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court yesterday granted a stay on a lower court’s order that the Trump administration could not gut the Department of Education while the issue is in the courts. The majority thus throws the weight of the Supreme Court behind the ability of the Trump administration to get rid of departments established by Congress—a power the Supreme Court denied when President Richard M. Nixon tried it in 1973.

This is a major expansion of presidential power, permitting the president to disregard laws Congress has passed, despite the Constitution’s clear assignment of lawmaking power to Congress alone.

President Donald J. Trump has vowed to eliminate the Department of Education because he claims it pushes “woke” ideology on America’s schoolchildren and that its employees “hate our children.” Running for office, he promised to “return” education to the states. In fact, the Education Department has never set curriculum; it disburses funds for high-poverty schools and educating students with disabilities. It’s also in charge of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and sex in schools that get federal funding.

Trump’s secretary of education, professional wrestling promoter Linda McMahon, supports Trump’s plan to dismantle the department. In March the department announced it would lay off 1,378 employees—about half the department. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia sued to stop the layoffs, and Massachusetts federal judge Myong Joun ordered the department to reinstate the fired workers. The Supreme Court has now put that order on hold, permitting the layoffs to go forward.

Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan concurred in a dissent written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, noting that Trump has claimed power to destroy the congressionally established department “by executive fiat” and chastising the right-wing majority for enabling him. “When the Executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the Judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it,” they say.

“The President must take care that the laws are faithfully executed, not set out to dismantle them. That basic rule undergirds our Constitution’s separation of powers. Yet today, the majority rewards clear defiance of that core principle with emergency relief.”

Another Trump power grab is before Congress today as the Senate considers what are called “rescissions.” These are a request from the White House for Congress to approve $9.4 billion in cuts it has made in spending that Congress approved. By law, the president cannot decide not to spend money Congress has appropriated, although officials in the Trump administration did so as soon as they took office. Passing this rescission package would put Congress’s stamp of approval on those cuts, even though they change what Congress originally agreed to.

Those cuts include ending federal support for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helps to fund National Public Radio (NPR), the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and local stations. The Trump administration says NPR and PBS “fuel…partisanship and left-wing propaganda.”

Congress must approve the request by Friday, or the monies will be spent as the laws originally established. The House has already passed the package, but senators are unhappy that the White House has not actually specified what will be cut. Senators will be talking to the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought—a key architect of Project 2025—today in a closed-door session in hopes of getting more information.

In June, Vought told CNN that this package is just “the first of many rescissions bills” and that if Congress won’t pass them, the administration will hold back funds under what’s called “impoundment,” although Congress explicitly outlawed that process in the 1974 Impoundment Control Act.

“We still are lacking the level of detail that is needed to make the right decisions,” Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said. “It’s extremely unusual for any senator to not be able to get that kind of detailed information.”

Andrew Goudsward of Reuters reported yesterday that nearly two thirds of the lawyers in the unit of the Department of Justice whose job was to defend Trump administration policies have quit. “Many of these people came to work at Federal Programs to defend aspects of our constitutional system,” one lawyer who left the unit told Goudsward. “How could they participate in the project of tearing it down?”

As the Supreme Court strengthens the office of the presidency without explaining the constitutional basis for its decisions, who is actually running the government is a very real question.

A week ago, Jason Zengerle of the New York Times suggested that the real power in the Oval Office is deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, who is driving the administration’s focus on attacking immigrants. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem defers to Miller, a Trump advisor told Zengerle. Attorney General Pam Bondi is focused on appearing on the Fox News Channel and so has essentially given Miller control over the Department of Justice. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles is “producing a reality TV show every day” and doesn’t care about policy.

On the same day Zengerle was writing about domestic policy decisions, Tom Nichols of The Atlantic was making a similar observation about international policy. He notes that Trump has only a fleeting interest in foreign policy, abandoning issues he thinks are losing ones for others to handle. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth keeps talking about “lethality” and trans people but doesn’t seem to know policy at all. Secretary of State Marco Rubio—who is also the national security advisor—appears to have little power in the White House.

Apparently, Nichols writes, American defense policy is in the hands of Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy, who made the decision to withhold weapons from Ukraine and who ordered a review of the U.S. defense pact with the United Kingdom and Australia in an attempt to put pressure on Australia to spend more on defense.

“In this administration,” Nichols writes, “the principals are either incompetent or detached from most of the policy making, and so decisions are being made at lower levels without much guidance from above.” This is a common system in authoritarian regimes, Nichols notes, “where the top levels of government tackle the one or two big things the leader wants done and everything else tumbles down to other functionaries, who can then drive certain issues according to their own preferences (which seems to be what Colby is doing), or who will do just enough to stay under the boss’s radar and out of trouble (which seems to be what most other Trump appointees are doing). In such a system, no one is really in charge except Trump—which means that on most days, and regarding many issues, no one is in charge.”

Either that chaos or deliberate evil is behind the Trump administration’s recent order to burn nearly 500 metric tons of emergency high-nutrition biscuits that could feed about 1.5 million children for a week. As Hana Kiros reported in The Atlantic, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) spent about $800,000 on the food during the Biden administration for distribution to children in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was in storage in the United Arab Emirates when the Trump administration gutted USAID. Still, Secretary of State Marco Rubio assured the House Appropriations Committee that the food would get to the children before it spoiled.

But the order to burn the biscuits had already been sent out because, the State Department said, providing food to Afghanistan might benefit terrorists (there was no stated reason for destroying food destined for Pakistan, or suggestion that the food could go to another country). Now the food has passed its safe use date and cannot even be repurposed as animal feed. Destroying it will cost the U.S. taxpayers $130,000.

What the administration does appear to be focused on is regaining control of the political narrative that has slipped away from it. Today, after news broke that inflation is creeping back up as Trump’s tariffs take effect, Trump posted on social media alleging that Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA), who managed one of the impeachment cases against Trump, had committed mortgage fraud and must be brought to justice.

But so far, nothing appears to be working to distract MAGA from the Epstein files. As David Gilbert of Wired noted today, MAGA supporters were angry over a number of things already. Former Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson hated the bombing of Iran; others hated Trump’s accepting a luxury plane from Qatar. Podcaster Ben Shapiro objected to Trump’s tariffs, and podcaster Joe Rogan has turned against Trump over the targeting of migrants who have not been even accused of crimes. Billionaire Elon Musk turned against Trump over the debt incurred under the new budget reconciliation law Trump called the One Big, Beautiful Bill.

The Epstein files appear to be one bridge too many for MAGA to cross. The administration tried to stop discussion of Epstein, and for a while the effort seemed to catch: by noon yesterday, the Fox News Channel had mentioned Epstein zero times but had mentioned former president Joe Biden 46 times. Today all but one Republican House member voted against a Democratic measure to require the release of the Epstein files. But Chicago journalist Marc Jacob noticed this afternoon that while the Fox News website didn’t mention Epstein in its top 100 stories today, “he top 3 stories on the New York Times website, the top 2 stories on the Washington Post site and the top story on the CNN site are about Jeffrey Epstein.”

And then, this afternoon, Dhruv Mehrotra of Wired noted that the video from a camera near Epstein’s prison cell that the Department of Justice released as “raw” footage had approximately 2 minutes and 53 seconds cut out of it.

Journalist Garrett M. Graff, a former editor of Politico, commented: “Okay, I am not generally a conspiracist, but c’mon DOJ, you are making it really hard to believe that you’re releasing the real full evidence on Epstein….”

“Destroying it (the food) will cost taxpayers $130,000”

DOGE really saving money by not feeding “terrorists” or animals hey.

This word woke

It’s an excuse to be a prick it seems and use this word to legitimise it as protecting tradition.

The world really needs to separate being an arsehole and whomever you identify as (be that race, gender, religion, etc)

People are damn precious about nonsense.

Cymek said:

This word woke

It’s an excuse to be a prick it seems and use this word to legitimise it as protecting tradition.

The world really needs to separate being an arsehole and whomever you identify as (be that race, gender, religion, etc)

People are damn precious about nonsense.

“‘Woke’ just means you give a damn about other people” – Jane Fonda.

Suicide in prison to me always seems dubious.

It happens of course but it seems most must be inadequate supervision or deliberate murder made to look like suicide.

Someone with a list of high profile child sex offenders in prison is dead already

Divine Angel said:

Cymek said:

This word woke

It’s an excuse to be a prick it seems and use this word to legitimise it as protecting tradition.

The world really needs to separate being an arsehole and whomever you identify as (be that race, gender, religion, etc)

People are damn precious about nonsense.

“‘Woke’ just means you give a damn about other people” – Jane Fonda.

That is how I think of it.