July 31, 2025 (Thursday)

On Tuesday, at a meeting with U.K. prime minister Keir Starmer at the White House, President Donald Trump boasted that he was solving all the world’s problems: “I’ve stopped six wars in the last—I’m averaging about a war a month. But the last three were very close together. India and Pakistan, and a lot of them. Congo was just and Rwanda was just done, but you probably know I won’t go into it very much, because I don’t know the final numbers yet. I don’t know. Numerous people were killed, and I was dealing with two countries that we get along with very well, very different countries from certain standpoints. They’ve been fighting for 500 years, intermittently, and we solved that war. You probably saw it just came out over the wire, so we solved it….”

Yesterday, as Jeff Tiedrich noted, he promised he would fix the United States as well. “I think we’re gonna have the richest economy you’ve ever seen. We have money coming in that we’ve never even thought about, at numbers that nobody’s ever seen before. We have a deal with Japan where they’re going to pay us $550 billion. We have a deal with Europe where they’re doing 750 billion plus 400 billion, plus 300 billion, and many other countries.”

Today the administration announced that Trump is adding a 90,000-square-foot event space to the White House. The White House itself, excluding the East Wing and the West Wing, is about 55,000 square feet. Groundbreaking for the new ballroom, which will replace the East Wing, is supposed to start in September, although it is not clear who picked the architects or the design. The administration says Trump and private donors will fund the building, which is estimated to cost around $200 million.

The announcement says that “or 150 years, Presidents, Administrations, and White House Staff have longed for a large event space on the White House complex that can hold substantially more guests than currently allowed.” Traditionally, the White House has been called “The People’s House” because it symbolizes that the government belongs not to the temporary inhabitant of the building but to the American people.

And yet it seems as if rather than representing the people’s government, Trump is trying to turn that historic building into the kind of property in which he is comfortable, something like Mar-a-Lago, where he can host parties in a big gold room.

It certainly doesn’t seem as if much governance is going on in Trump’s White House. As Josh Marshall pointed out today in Talking Points Memo, when the head of the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy resigned today, it turned out that the White House had never formally appointed him in the first place. Marshall added: “We’re six months into this administration and it wasn’t even clear whether this guy was ever in the position at all…. And now he’s gone from the position…that he may or may not have held. This is the state of things from the very top to the very bottom of this administration. And the impact of that is bleeding out into every aspect of the society and economy.”

As for Trump’s boasts that Europe and Japan are going to pay huge sums of money to the U.S.—which is not actually how trade deals work—the European Union and the U.S. have already published different versions of what was in the agreement between them, although that agreement itself was only preliminary.

Economist Paul Krugman wrote yesterday that the European Union appears to have promised private investments of $600 billion in the U.S.—an empty promise because the government cannot compel private investment—and pledged to buy $750 billion of U.S. energy, mostly from oil and gas, over three years. Krugman calls this pledge nonsense. Among other things, it would require significant increases in infrastructure capabilities, which couldn’t be built in three years even if anyone wanted to, which is unlikely given that Europe is switching to renewable energy quickly.

There also seems to be significant daylight between what Trump is claiming and what Japan says about their agreement, which was thrown together in just over an hour on Tuesday. Japan’s negotiator said the $550 billion investment was not “a target or commitment” but an upper limit, and Japanese officials said that “no written agreement with Washington” was made—“and no legally binding one would be drawn up.”

Meanwhile, Trump appears to be trying to exert his will by fiat, announcing new tariff rates tonight just hours before the self-imposed deadline of August 1. Today, after a federal appeals court heard a challenge to Trump’s tariffs on the grounds that Congress, not the president, is the only body the Constitution empowers to enact tariffs, the White House announced a base tariff rate of 10% on countries to which the U.S. exports more goods than it imports, with a 15% rate for countries that export more to the U.S. than they import. About a dozen countries—including Canada—will have even higher rates.

Before Trump started his trade war, U.S. tariff levies stood at about 2.4%.

Part of Trump’s determination to demonstrate his power is likely coming from the continuing unraveling of his involvement in the affairs of late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. On Tuesday, Trump seemed to try to cast himself as the protector of girls from Epstein, but his suggestion that he had turned on his friend after Epstein had hired 16-year-old Virginia Giuffre away from Mar-a-Lago in 2000 immediately attracted attention to the actual timeline of the friendship between the two men. It showed that their friendship lasted quite a bit longer. In fact, it was in 2002 that Trump told New York Magazine that Epstein was a “errific 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.”

Members of Giuffre’s family said in a statement yesterday: “It was shocking to hear President Trump invoke our sister and say that he was aware that Virginia had been ‘stolen’ from Mar-a-Lago. It makes us ask if he was aware of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal actions, especially given his statement two years later that his good friend Jeffrey ‘likes women on the younger side…no doubt about it.’ We and the public are asking for answers; survivors deserve this.”

Tonight Trump told reporters he doesn’t know why Epstein was taking girls from Mar-a-Lago.

August 1, 2025 (Friday)

Economists have been expressing concern about the accuracy of economic statistics coming out of the Trump administration for months. Cuts to the staff at agencies that collect data have meant that the consumer price index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, contains far more estimates of values than it did before the cuts.

With that warning, today’s jobs report packed a one-two punch.

The numbers showed that employers added only 73,000 jobs in July, way below the 115,000 economists had predicted. The numbers also showed that the jobs reports for May and June had significantly overestimated the new jobs added in those months. The department revised May’s original estimate of 144,00 down to 19,000, and June’s original estimate of 147,000 down to just 14,000. As Julien Berman of the Washington Post noted, that’s a decrease of almost 90%.

The numbers show that while the job numbers have looked good, in fact the economy has been weakening for months. Trump’s high tariffs and the chaos surrounding them appear to have slowed growth almost immediately. The only sector adding a lot of new jobs is healthcare, which is not as exposed to trade policy as other sectors. In contrast, hiring in manufacturing fell to a 9-year low in May.

Predictably, Trump lashed out.

Although U.S. statistics have been widely seen as the nonpartisan gold standard, Trump claimed that the commissioner of labor statistics, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, had manipulated the jobs report. “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” he wrote. He fired her.

Trump also insisted the head of the Federal Reserve, his own appointee Jerome Powell, should be “put ‘out to pasture.’” Powell has steadfastly refused to lower interest rates to pump money into the economy as Trump wants. Trump has no legal power to fire the Federal Reserve chair without cause, and lately has appeared to be trying to manufacture a cause by suggesting a remodeling of the agency’s headquarters has been wasteful.

“But,” he wrote, “the good news is, our Country is doing GREAT!”

That assurance sounded a little desperate. Today’s job numbers showing that Trump’s tariff war is hurting the economy arrived just hours after Trump announced the new tariff rates he will be imposing on other countries, although he pushed the start of the levies off until August 7 so Customs and Border Protection can prepare.

The jobs report, firing of the commissioner of labor statistics, and tariff announcement all worked together to drive the stock market downward. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1.23%, the S&P 500 fell 1.60% and the Nasdaq Composite fell 2.24%.

Tonight, Trump wrote that Powell “should resign.”

The jobs report seems to have come as a shock to Trump, who appears to have been absorbed by the growing scandal of his connections to convicted sexual assaulter Jeffrey Epstein. News broke today that officials from the Federal Bureau of Prisons had quietly moved Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell from the Florida prison where she was being held while she served a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking to a new minimum-security prison camp in Texas. According to Michael Kosnar and Raquel Coronell Uribe of NBC News, the Bureau of Prisons’s own designation policy makes Maxwell ineligible for transfer to a minimum-security prison camp because she is a convicted sex offender. The only person who can grant a waiver to that policy is the administrator of the Bureau of Prisons Designation and Sentence Computation Center.

It seems likely that Trump had the jobs report and the Epstein case in mind when, shortly before 1:00 Eastern Time this afternoon, he posted: “Based on the highly provocative statements of the Former President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, who is now the Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, I have ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that. Words are very important, and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols points out that Medvedev is little more than an internet troll at this point and that U.S. submarines carrying nuclear warheads routinely travel through the world’s oceans (all American submarines are nuclear powered, Nichols notes). Trump’s threat is unlikely to spark a nuclear crisis, Nichols writes, “at least not this time.” But it is reckless, he adds.

“Trump knows that a foreign-policy crisis, and anything involving nuclear weapons, is an instant distraction from other news,” Nichols writes. “The media will always zero in on such moments, because it is, in fact, news when the most powerful man on Earth starts talking about nuclear weapons…. Nuclear-missile submarines are not toys,” he points out. Previous presidents were sober and careful in how they talked about nuclear weapons. But now, Trump “has initiated a new era in which the chief executive can use threats regarding the most powerful weapons on Earth to salve his ego and improve his political fortunes.”

But if his threat against Russia was intended as a distraction, it didn’t work. “I can’t believe what I just saw,” Peter Mallouk, president and chief investment officer of Creative Planning, told Jeff Cox of CNBC. “This is not healthy,” he added. “We can’t have a set of numbers come out and fire somebody that served under numerous administrations in various roles because you don’t like the numbers.”

Trump’s attempts to draw attention away from the news might have raised awareness of another issue, though. Chris Truax, an appellate lawyer who served as Southern California chair for John McCain’s 2008 primary campaign, noted that Trump’s wild stories, inability to understand numbers, and inability to place events correctly into a timeline are key signs of dementia. Truax published an article in The Hill today, titled: “Trump’s mental decline is undeniable—so what now?”

August 2, 2025 (Saturday)

Republicans in the Texas legislature are working to redistrict the state before the 2026 midterm elections. Although state legislatures normally redraw district lines every ten years after the census required by the Constitution, President Donald J. Trump has asked Texas Republicans to redistrict now, mid-decade, in order to cut up five districts that tend to vote Democratic and create districts Republicans will almost certainly win. Five additional seats will help the Republicans hold control of the House of Representatives despite their growing unpopularity.

Trump is urging other Republican-dominated state legislatures—those in Florida, Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Ohio, for example—to do the same thing. “We’re going to get another three or four or five, in addition,” Trump said to reporters about House seats. “Texas would be the biggest one, and that’ll be five.”

Shane Goldmacher and Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times note that “oters are…reduced almost to bystanders as Republicans essentially admit to trying to determine the outcome of Texas races long before the elections are held.”

A person close to the president told Goldmacher and Corasaniti that the White House strategy is “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”

Trump and the Republicans would not be trying to rig the system if they thought they could win a majority of voters.

Carving districts to either “crack” political opponents into different districts or “pack” them into a single district is called “gerrymandering,” after Elbridge Gerry, an early governor of Massachusetts who signed off on such a scheme (even though he didn’t like it). Parties have always engaged in gerrymandering, but computers make it possible to carve up districts with surgical precision.

The extreme gerrymander Texas Republicans are attempting is coming on top of partisan gerrymanders already in place. As journalist David Daley explained in his book Ratf**cked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy, after Democrat Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, Republican operatives worked to make sure he had a hostile Congress that would keep him from passing legislation.

To push a plan they dubbed Operation REDMAP, which stood for Redistricting Majority Project, they raised $30 million, mostly from corporations, to buy ads and circulate literature that would convince voters to elect Republican state legislators in 2010. The legislatures elected in 2010 would get to redistrict their states with maps that would last for a decade.

The plan worked. After the 2010 election, Republicans controlled the key states of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other, smaller states, and they redrew congressional maps using precise computer models. In the 2012 election, Democrats won the White House decisively, the Senate easily, and a majority of 1.4 million votes for House candidates. But Republicans came away with a thirty-three-seat majority in the House of Representatives.

Gerrymandering doesn’t just weight the scales of an election toward one political party, it also depresses turnout for the opposing party: if you know your candidate is going to lose, why bother to vote? (In one heavily gerrymandered North Carolina district in 2024, Democratic candidate Kate Barr worked to call attention to gerrymandering by using the campaign slogan: “Kate Barr Can’t Win.”) Sometimes the opposing party doesn’t even bother to run a candidate.

Meanwhile, the party with a lock on the district gets more radical, as candidates have to worry about being primaried by someone more extreme than they are, rather than about attracting centrist voters that in a fair district they might lose to an opposing party’s candidate.

Trump is also confronting his unpopularity by trying to cement his power in the federal courts. Republicans began working to cement their power by stacking the courts during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Reagan’s attorney general, Edwin Meese, deliberately politicized the Department of Justice in an attempt, as he said, to “institutionalize the Reagan revolution so it can’t be set aside no matter what happens in future presidential elections.”

On July 20, Trump demanded the Senate abandon its longstanding tradition of so-called blue slips, an informal process by which a senator from the minority party can effectively block a judicial nominee proposed for their state. While this system can be abused by senators holding seats open for a president of their party—as Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) did during the Biden administration—it is designed to prevent a president from stashing unqualified or bad appointees in their states.

Benjamin S. Weiss of Courthouse News noted that Democratic New Jersey senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim used the system to prevent Trump’s lawyer and advisor Alina Habba from consideration to be the U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey.

After posting on social media that the practice means “the president of the United States will never be permitted to appoint the person of his choice,” Trump demanded that Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, end the system “IMMEDIATELY, and not let the Democrats laugh at him and the Republican Party for being weak and ineffective.” Trump then reposted other posts calling Grassley a “RINO”—or Republican In Name Only—and “sneaky” and suggesting he hates America.

Ending the practice would effectively cut senators in the minority from any influence at all on judicial appointments, and Grassley, who has gotten Trump’s many controversial appointees through Senate confirmation, has refused to agree. He said: “I was offended by what the president said, and I’m disappointed it would result in personal insults.”

In July, Trump demanded the Senate cancel its scheduled August break and long weekends to confirm his “incredible nominees.” Democrats have deployed the same techniques Republicans used to slow the confirmation of Democratic presidents’ nominations. According to Manu Raju and Victoria Stracqualursi of CNN, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said he would agree to let some nominees go through quickly in batches so the senators could go home, but only if the administration unfroze the federal funds Congress appropriated for agencies like the National Institutes of Health and programs like foreign aid, and only if Trump agreed he would not push for another rescissions package clawing back appropriations Congress passed.

Tonight, Trump posted: “Tell Schumer, who is under tremendous political pressure from within his own party, the Radical Left Lunatics, to GO TO HELL! Do not accept the offer, go home and explain to your constituents what bad people the Democrats are, and what a great job the Republicans are doing, and have done, for our Country. Have a great RECESS and, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

Schumer reposted Trump’s rant and commented: “The Art of the Deal.”

Meanwhile, Democrats say they will fight back against Republican gerrymandering. They will challenge any Republican redistricting in court, but after standing firm on democratic institutionalism in the past, they now say they are willing to fight fire with fire and redistrict their own states to create Democratic districts.

What the Republicans are doing “is so un-American, and it’s a constant threat to our democracy,” Wisconsin governor Tony Evers said. “So I’m really pissed, frankly, and we are going to do whatever we can do to stop this from happening.” Governors Kathy Hochul of New York and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois are weighing options for redrawing maps in their own states. This will be more difficult for them than for Republican states because Democratic states tend to use independent citizen-led redistricting commissions rather than partisan systems.

California governor Gavin Newsom posted on social media: “ is so scared of the American people holding him accountable for his catastrophic actions, he wants Republicans to rig the 2026 elections for him.” Newsom pointed out that it would be easy for California to eliminate its Republican-leaning districts altogether, getting rid of nine Republican seats.

He posted on social media: “Game on.”

JFC

August 3, 2025 (Sunday)

Today, Democratic lawmakers from the Texas House of Representatives left the state to deny Republican lawmakers the quorum—the number of legislators required to pass legislation—they need in order to push through a new district map that would take five seats currently held by Democrats and give them to Republicans. President Donald J. Trump has demanded this rare mid-decade redistricting in an attempt to hold control of the House of Representatives in 2026. He is urging all Republican-dominated states to make a similar change to guarantee Republican dominance regardless of the will of voters.

Republicans in the Texas legislature rushed a bill that would make the new map law through committee on Saturday morning after the one public hearing they held on it showed overwhelming opposition. Sophia Beausoleil of NBC 5 in Dallas–Fort Worth reports that the Texas House is scheduled to vote on the bill Monday.

“My Democratic colleagues and I have just left our beloved state to break quorum and stop Trump’s redistricting power grab,” Texas state representative James Talarico said in a video posted to social media. “Trump told our Republican colleagues to redraw the political maps here in Texas in the middle of the decade to get him five more seats and protect his majority in Congress. They’re turning our districts into crazy shapes to guarantee the outcome they want in the 2026 elections. If this power grab succeeds, they will hang on to power without any accountability from the voters. But Texas Democrats are fighting back. We’re leaving the state, breaking quorum and preventing Republicans from silencing our voices and rigging the next election. We are not fighting for the Democratic Party. We are fighting for the democratic process, and the stakes could not be higher. We have to take a stand.”

The Texas legislators traveled to Boston, Massachusetts, and to Albany, New York, to confer with Democratic leaders. About 30 of them, though, went to Chicago, Illinois, where Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker welcomed them at a press conference tonight.

Texas House Democratic Caucus Chair Gene Wu emphasized that the Democrats had tried to work with the Republicans, but Texas governor Greg Abbott and the Republican lawmakers were forcing the new map through against the will of the voters because Trump told them to. Wu’s explanation mirrors that of Republican state representative Cody Vasut, who told Natasha Korecki and Ryan Chandler of NBC News: “This map was politically based, and that’s totally legal, totally allowed and totally fair.”

Wu warned that the attempt to grab five new seats in Texas to maintain control of the U.S. House of Representatives against the will of voters is a threat not only to Texas, but to the entire country and to the concept of America. “If Donald Trump is allowed to do this, if he is allowed to once again cheat and get away with it, there’s no stopping this. This will spread across the country, and…will occur everywhere. Because if one person’s going to cheat and no one’s going to stop it, why doesn’t everyone just do it then? And that is not a society, that is not an America that works.”

Wu continued: “Everyone is already tired of the hyperpartisan bickering and all the fighting because we never get anything done. And they are creating a system that will reinforce that and make it even worse. And we’re telling people, please come out, stand up against it, rise up and say no more. Enough.”

Wu said the Texas Democratic representatives “did not make the decision to come here today…lightly, but we come here today with absolute moral clarity.”

Governor Pritzker has been in contact with the Texas Democrats to plan for such a moment. His staff will provide logistical support to the visiting Texans. Tonight he made it clear that the Texas Democrats’ fight against Trump’s power grab is the fight of all Americans to protect democracy. “Let’s be clear,” Pritzker said, “this is not just rigging the system in Texas. It’s about rigging the system against the rights of all Americans for years to come.”

Pritzker continued: “Texas Democrats were left no choice but to leave their home state, block a vote from taking place, and protect their constituents. This is a righteous act of courage.” Pritzker urged other Americans to “take a page from these leaders’s playbook. When you show people that you have the will to fight, well, they can muster the will to fight, too. Courage is contagious.”

“To be in public office right now is to constantly ask yourself, how do I make sure that we’re standing on the right side of history? There’s a simple answer. The wrong side of history will always tell you to be afraid. The right side of history will always expect you to be courageous. Expect courage from people around you, and it will show up. Expect fear, and fear will rule the day. Let the courage of these leaders be an example to the rest of the country. I’m proud to stand side by side with our friends from Texas today.”

Tonight U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) told an audience in Phoenix, Arizona: “My former colleagues from the Texas House—those Texas Democrats—decided to get the hell out of Texas…and breaking quorum is where they’re at right now. And they didn’t just do it by themselves—they went to Illinois, where there is a governor that gives a damn. You see, this fight is going to take all of us.”

Crockett’s comments came at tonight’s launch of the “Won’t Back Down” Tour, organized by MoveOn and MeidasTouch, to hold Republicans accountable and organize for 2026. Crockett, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), and Representative Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ) spoke tonight; Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Representative Maxwell Frost (D-FL) will take the tour to Nebraska next.

Texas governor Abbott responded to the Texas House Democrats’ quorum break by threatening to remove from office any Democrats who are not back in their seats for Monday’s vote and to replace them “swiftly” with his own appointees thanks to his power to fill vacancies. He also suggested he would consider them felons for accepting money to pay for their food and housing in Chicago and that such a designation would enable him to cross state lines to get them back. He threatened to use “my full extradition authority to demand the return to Texas of any potential out-of-state felons.”

When a reporter asked about Abbott’s threat, Pritzker responded: “They’re here in Illinois. We’re going to do everything we can to protect every single one of them…. It’s the leaders of Texas who are attempting not to follow the law. They’re the ones that need to be held accountable.”

Neophyte said:

August 3, 2025 (Sunday)

Today, Democratic lawmakers from the Texas House of Representatives left the state to deny Republican lawmakers the quorum—the number of legislators required to pass legislation—they need in order to push through a new district map that would take five seats currently held by Democrats and give them to Republicans. President Donald J. Trump has demanded this rare mid-decade redistricting in an attempt to hold control of the House of Representatives in 2026. He is urging all Republican-dominated states to make a similar change to guarantee Republican dominance regardless of the will of voters.

Republicans in the Texas legislature rushed a bill that would make the new map law through committee on Saturday morning after the one public hearing they held on it showed overwhelming opposition. Sophia Beausoleil of NBC 5 in Dallas–Fort Worth reports that the Texas House is scheduled to vote on the bill Monday.

“My Democratic colleagues and I have just left our beloved state to break quorum and stop Trump’s redistricting power grab,” Texas state representative James Talarico said in a video posted to social media. “Trump told our Republican colleagues to redraw the political maps here in Texas in the middle of the decade to get him five more seats and protect his majority in Congress. They’re turning our districts into crazy shapes to guarantee the outcome they want in the 2026 elections. If this power grab succeeds, they will hang on to power without any accountability from the voters. But Texas Democrats are fighting back. We’re leaving the state, breaking quorum and preventing Republicans from silencing our voices and rigging the next election. We are not fighting for the Democratic Party. We are fighting for the democratic process, and the stakes could not be higher. We have to take a stand.”

The Texas legislators traveled to Boston, Massachusetts, and to Albany, New York, to confer with Democratic leaders. About 30 of them, though, went to Chicago, Illinois, where Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker welcomed them at a press conference tonight.

Texas House Democratic Caucus Chair Gene Wu emphasized that the Democrats had tried to work with the Republicans, but Texas governor Greg Abbott and the Republican lawmakers were forcing the new map through against the will of the voters because Trump told them to. Wu’s explanation mirrors that of Republican state representative Cody Vasut, who told Natasha Korecki and Ryan Chandler of NBC News: “This map was politically based, and that’s totally legal, totally allowed and totally fair.”

Wu warned that the attempt to grab five new seats in Texas to maintain control of the U.S. House of Representatives against the will of voters is a threat not only to Texas, but to the entire country and to the concept of America. “If Donald Trump is allowed to do this, if he is allowed to once again cheat and get away with it, there’s no stopping this. This will spread across the country, and…will occur everywhere. Because if one person’s going to cheat and no one’s going to stop it, why doesn’t everyone just do it then? And that is not a society, that is not an America that works.”

Wu continued: “Everyone is already tired of the hyperpartisan bickering and all the fighting because we never get anything done. And they are creating a system that will reinforce that and make it even worse. And we’re telling people, please come out, stand up against it, rise up and say no more. Enough.”

Wu said the Texas Democratic representatives “did not make the decision to come here today…lightly, but we come here today with absolute moral clarity.”

Governor Pritzker has been in contact with the Texas Democrats to plan for such a moment. His staff will provide logistical support to the visiting Texans. Tonight he made it clear that the Texas Democrats’ fight against Trump’s power grab is the fight of all Americans to protect democracy. “Let’s be clear,” Pritzker said, “this is not just rigging the system in Texas. It’s about rigging the system against the rights of all Americans for years to come.”

Pritzker continued: “Texas Democrats were left no choice but to leave their home state, block a vote from taking place, and protect their constituents. This is a righteous act of courage.” Pritzker urged other Americans to “take a page from these leaders’s playbook. When you show people that you have the will to fight, well, they can muster the will to fight, too. Courage is contagious.”

“To be in public office right now is to constantly ask yourself, how do I make sure that we’re standing on the right side of history? There’s a simple answer. The wrong side of history will always tell you to be afraid. The right side of history will always expect you to be courageous. Expect courage from people around you, and it will show up. Expect fear, and fear will rule the day. Let the courage of these leaders be an example to the rest of the country. I’m proud to stand side by side with our friends from Texas today.”

Tonight U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) told an audience in Phoenix, Arizona: “My former colleagues from the Texas House—those Texas Democrats—decided to get the hell out of Texas…and breaking quorum is where they’re at right now. And they didn’t just do it by themselves—they went to Illinois, where there is a governor that gives a damn. You see, this fight is going to take all of us.”

Crockett’s comments came at tonight’s launch of the “Won’t Back Down” Tour, organized by MoveOn and MeidasTouch, to hold Republicans accountable and organize for 2026. Crockett, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), and Representative Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ) spoke tonight; Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Representative Maxwell Frost (D-FL) will take the tour to Nebraska next.

Texas governor Abbott responded to the Texas House Democrats’ quorum break by threatening to remove from office any Democrats who are not back in their seats for Monday’s vote and to replace them “swiftly” with his own appointees thanks to his power to fill vacancies. He also suggested he would consider them felons for accepting money to pay for their food and housing in Chicago and that such a designation would enable him to cross state lines to get them back. He threatened to use “my full extradition authority to demand the return to Texas of any potential out-of-state felons.”

When a reporter asked about Abbott’s threat, Pritzker responded: “They’re here in Illinois. We’re going to do everything we can to protect every single one of them…. It’s the leaders of Texas who are attempting not to follow the law. They’re the ones that need to be held accountable.”

FMD.

Electoral commissions are good.

So these redrawn maps, I’m guessing they are redrawn where the highest number of GOP voters are?

How long can the Dems hold off a vote?

“They’re the ones who need to be held accountable.”

Yeah, ok. Just like POTUS himself who keeps getting away with shit. No one’s being held accountable for anything.

Divine Angel said:

“They’re the ones who need to be held accountable.”

Yeah, ok. Just like POTUS himself who keeps getting away with shit. No one’s being held accountable for anything.

Its astonishing isn’t it
Toddlers are more accountable.
Nothing but spite and pure disgusting human being.

Cymek said:

Divine Angel said:

“They’re the ones who need to be held accountable.”

Yeah, ok. Just like POTUS himself who keeps getting away with shit. No one’s being held accountable for anything.

Its astonishing isn’t it
Toddlers are more accountable.
Nothing but spite and pure disgusting human being.

Over the weekend I read about scandals of each presidency. Usually sex scandals, adultery and the like. A few “conflicts of interest” situations. Stuff that was discovered after their deaths which affected their legacy. Watergate, of course.

Here we have a vile human doing atrocious things, and people are powerless to stop the crazy train. Who would have thought the “great country of America” would have such low standards now?

Divine Angel said:

So these redrawn maps, I’m guessing they are redrawn where the highest number of GOP voters are?

How long can the Dems hold off a vote?

There’s a few tricks to achieve different outcomes but in this case they will be making seats with very high numbers of Democrat voters like over 80% and correspondingly other seats which are only Republican leaning by about 5%. This way a state representation of 10 to the US Congress might change from 6 GOP and 4 Democrats to 8 GOP and only 2 Democrats.

And it is difficult to exaggerate the lengths that these new electrical maps are manipulated to shove the voters of your political opponents into gerrymandered seats. I’ll let the visuals speak for themselves:

Witty Rejoinder said:

Divine Angel said:

So these redrawn maps, I’m guessing they are redrawn where the highest number of GOP voters are?

How long can the Dems hold off a vote?

There’s a few tricks to achieve different outcomes but in this case they will be making seats with very high numbers of Democrat voters like over 80% and correspondingly other seats which are only Republican leaning by about 5%. This way a state representation of 10 to the US Congress might change from 6 GOP and 4 Democrats to 8 GOP and only 2 Democrats.

And it is difficult to exaggerate the lengths that these new electrical maps are manipulated to shove the voters of your political opponents into gerrymandered seats. I’ll let the visuals speak for themselves:

Thank ye.

Divine Angel said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

Divine Angel said:

So these redrawn maps, I’m guessing they are redrawn where the highest number of GOP voters are?

How long can the Dems hold off a vote?

There’s a few tricks to achieve different outcomes but in this case they will be making seats with very high numbers of Democrat voters like over 80% and correspondingly other seats which are only Republican leaning by about 5%. This way a state representation of 10 to the US Congress might change from 6 GOP and 4 Democrats to 8 GOP and only 2 Democrats.

And it is difficult to exaggerate the lengths that these new electrical maps are manipulated to shove the voters of your political opponents into gerrymandered seats. I’ll let the visuals speak for themselves:

Thank ye.

The images look like watch parts.

August 4, 2025 (Monday)

President Donald J. Trump’s firing of the commissioner of labor statistics on Friday for announcing that job growth has slowed dramatically has drawn a level of attention to Trump’s assault on democracy that other firings have not. Famously, authoritarian governments make up statistics to claim their policies are working well, even when they quite obviously are not.

Yesterday former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers told George Stephanopoulos of This Week on ABC News: “This is the stuff of democracies giving way to authoritarianism…. iring statisticians goes with threatening the heads of newspapers. It goes with launching assaults on universities. It goes with launching assaults on law firms that defend clients that the elected boss finds uncongenial. This is really scary stuff.” In The Bulwark, Bill Kristol called out the open assault “on the truth, on the rule of law, on a free society” as “part of the broader pattern of the transformation of government information into pure propaganda.”

Summers shot down Trump’s claim that the commissioner had rigged the numbers in the jobs report to make him look bad. “These numbers are put together by teams of literally hundreds of people following detailed procedures that are in manuals,” he said. “There’s no conceivable way that the head of the could have manipulated this number.”

Kathryn Anne Edwards at Bloomberg explained the implications of Trump’s determination to control economic statistics: “The peril…isn’t a potential recession; it’s losing highly reliable, accurate and transparent data on the health of the world’s largest economy.” As Ben Casselman pointed out in the New York Times, officials at the Federal Reserve, for example, need reliable statistics on inflation and unemployment to inform decisions about interest rates, which in turn affect how much Americans pay for car loans and mortgages.
Economist Paul Krugman noted that Trump lashed out against the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because most economists warned that Trump’s economic policies would hurt the economy, and the official data is starting to confirm that he was wrong and they were right. Krugman suggested that those numbers will continue to get worse as Trump’s tariffs and deportations start to show up in inflation.

An Associated Press/ NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released today shows that 86% of American adults report that the cost of groceries is a source of stress, with 53% saying it causes “major” stress. Only 14% of adults say the cost of groceries is not a source of stress for them.

On all his key issues Trump is currently underwater—meaning that more people disapprove of his handling of them than approve—and reports that he is abandoning his campaign promise to require healthcare insurance companies to pay for in vitro fertilization, or IVF, will not endear him to those voters, either. Krugman notes that as Trump’s popularity is disintegrating, he appears to be ramping up his attempts to destroy American democracy.

At the same time, the administration continues to reel under pressure over the files related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Trump’s inability to let the issue drop is keeping it very much alive. On Sunday the president railed against radio host Charlamagne Tha God for saying that the administration’s poor handling of the Epstein issue created an opportunity for traditional Republicans to take their party back.

As more information emerges about Trump’s association with Epstein, Trump and his loyalists are trying hard to push stories suggesting that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton or former president Barack Obama or other Democrats are the real criminals.
On July 24, director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard claimed that officials in the administration of Barack Obama ”manufactured” evidence in 2016 to suggest that Trump’s campaign was connected to Russian operatives. This was ridiculous on its face, but then the administration declassified documents it claimed proved their allegations. But another set of documents released on August 1 said the two emails that purportedly proved such a plan were instead, as Charlie Savage of the New York Times put it, “most likely manufactured by Russian spies.”

After Gabbard made her claims, media outlets reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi was surprised as well as annoyed by Gabbard’s explosive accusations and, already in trouble for botching the Epstein issue, scrambled to support them.

Today Sadie Gurman, Josh Dawsey, and Brett Forrest of the Wall Street Journal reported that, according to an official at the Department of Justice, Bondi has signed an order directing a U.S. attorney to present evidence concerning the matter to a grand jury. This is a major escalation in their crusade to convince voters that the real story in the news should be that Trump is a victim.

The Wall Street Journal reporters note that the administration’s claims “come as the Trump administration has faced intense bipartisan criticism over its refusal to provide more information about the FBI investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.”

Another aspect of the Epstein issue is also in the news today. After the Wall Street Journal published the story by Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo reporting that Trump contributed a bawdy birthday letter to an album Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell compiled for Epstein’s fiftieth birthday in 2003, Trump sued the Wall Street Journal’s parent company Dow Jones and owner Rupert Murdoch for $10 billion. But the lawsuit read as if it were written primarily to rile up Trump’s base. The Wall Street Journal stood firm on the accuracy of its reporting, and the defendants moved to dismiss the lawsuit.

Then Trump asked a federal judge in Miami to force Murdoch to answer questions under oath within 15 days, and that, too, sounded like an attempt to display dominance. The request stressed Murdoch’s age and ill health as a reason for the request. “Murdoch is 94 years old, has suffered from multiple health issues throughout his life, is believed to have suffered recent significant health scares, and is presumed to live in New York, New York,” all making him unlikely to be able to testify at a trial, the filing read.

Today Trump quietly backed away from his demand for Murdoch’s deposition, and both sides put off discovery—the process of disclosing information and evidence to the other party—at least until after the motion to dismiss has been decided.

Trump’s former lawyer Todd Blanche, now deputy attorney general at the Department of Justice, has met twice with Maxwell, who says she will “testify openly and honestly” before Congress about Epstein if she gets a pardon. She is currently serving a twenty-year sentence for sex trafficking and other charges. Today Alexander Bolton of The Hill said Republican senators are warning Trump and Bondi that they should consider very carefully whether it would be a good idea to grant Maxwell a pardon.

Also today, Casey Gannon of CNN reported that two of Epstein’s victims have filed letters with the court expressing outrage at the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files, suggesting that the department was protecting wealthy men at the expense of the victims.

“ two of Epstein’s victims have filed letters with the court expressing outrage at the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files, suggesting that the department was protecting wealthy men at the expense of the victims.”

Colour me shocked

Thanks.

Maxwell is pursuing a pardon to say whatever she is asked to say, it seems.

Michael V said:

Thanks.

Maxwell is pursuing a pardon to say whatever she is asked to say, it seems.

Listing all the Democrats, who may well end up in Alligator Auschwitz.

Divine Angel said:

Michael V said:

Thanks.

Maxwell is pursuing a pardon to say whatever she is asked to say, it seems.

Listing all the Democrats, who may well end up in Alligator Auschwitz.

Of course!

Divine Angel said:

So these redrawn maps, I’m guessing they are redrawn where the highest number of GOP voters are?

How long can the Dems hold off a vote?

Divine Angel said:

Divine Angel said:

So these redrawn maps, I’m guessing they are redrawn where the highest number of GOP voters are?

How long can the Dems hold off a vote?

This is the fundamental problem with representative districts.

Why not make it an aggregated area returning 5 seats to the parliament. No internal boundaries, This way the allocation of seats reflects the general split of the popular vote.

In a sense all the boundaries are arbitrary. Even the first one which returns a fair result is arbitrary.

party_pants said:

Divine Angel said:

Divine Angel said:

So these redrawn maps, I’m guessing they are redrawn where the highest number of GOP voters are?

How long can the Dems hold off a vote?

This is the fundamental problem with representative districts.

Why not make it an aggregated area returning 5 seats to the parliament. No internal boundaries, This way the allocation of seats reflects the general split of the popular vote.

In a sense all the boundaries are arbitrary. Even the first one which returns a fair result is arbitrary.

One could argue the fundamental flaw is registering one’s political affiliation with one’s address in the first place. Seems a silly system, open to all kinds of misuse.

August 5, 2025 (Tuesday)

Sixty years ago tomorrow, on August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. The need for the law was explained in its full title: “An Act to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution, and for other purposes.”

In the wake of the Civil War, Americans tried to create a new nation in which the law treated Black men and white men as equals. In 1865 they ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing enslavement except as punishment for crimes. In 1868 they adjusted the Constitution again, guaranteeing that anyone born or naturalized in the United States—except certain Indigenous Americans—was a citizen, opening up suffrage to Black men. In 1870, after Georgia legislators expelled their newly seated Black colleagues, Americans defended the right of Black men to vote by adding that right to the Constitution.

All three of those amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—gave Congress the power to enforce them. In 1870, Congress established the Department of Justice to do just that. Reactionary white southerners had been using state laws, and the unwillingness of state judges and juries to protect Black Americans from white gangs and cheating employers, to keep Black people subservient. White men organized as the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize Black men and to keep them and their white allies from voting to change that system. In 1870 the federal government stepped in to protect Black rights and prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan.

With federal power now behind the Constitutional protection of equality, threatening jail for those who violated the law, white opponents of Black voting changed their argument against it.

In 1871 they began to say that they had no problem with Black men voting on racial grounds; their objection to Black voting was that Black men, just out of enslavement, were poor and uneducated. They were voting for lawmakers who promised them public services like roads and schools, and which could only be paid for with tax levies.

The idea that Black voters were socialists—they actually used that term in 1871—meant that white northerners who had fought to replace the hierarchical society of the Old South with a society based on equality began to change their tune. They looked the other way as white men kept Black men from voting, first with terrorism and then with grandfather clauses that cut out Black men without mentioning race by permitting a man to vote if his grandfather had, literacy tests in which white registrars got to decide who passed, poll taxes, and so on. States also cut up districts unevenly to favor the Democrats, who ran an all-white, segregationist party. By 1880 the South was solidly Democratic, and it would remain so until 1964.

Southern states always held elections: it was just foreordained that Democrats would win them.

Black Americans never accepted this state of affairs, but their opposition did not gain powerful national traction until after World War II.

During that war, Americans from all walks of life had turned out to defeat fascism, a government system based on the idea that some people are better than others. Americans defended democracy and, for all that Black Americans fought in segregated units, and that race riots broke out in cities across the country during the war years, and that the government interned Japanese Americans, lawmakers began to recognize that the nation could not effectively define itself as a democracy if Black and Brown people lived in substandard housing, received substandard educations, could not advance from menial jobs, and could not vote to change any of those circumstances.

Meanwhile, Black Americans and people of color who had fought for the nation overseas brought home their determination to be treated equally, especially as the financial collapse of European nations loosened their grip on their former African and Asian colonies and launched new nations.

Those interested in advancing Black rights turned, once again, to the federal government to overrule discriminatory state laws. Spurred by lawyers Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley, judges used the due process clause and the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to argue that the protections in the Bill of Rights applied to the states, that is, the states could not deprive any American of equality. In 1954 the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Republican former governor of California, used this doctrine when it handed down the Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring segregated schools unconstitutional.

White reactionaries responded with violence, but Black Americans continued to stand up for their rights. In 1957 and 1960, under pressure from Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, Congress passed civil rights acts designed to empower the federal government to enforce the laws protecting Black voting.

In 1961 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) began intensive efforts to register voters and to organize communities to support political change. Because only 6.7% of Black Mississippians were registered, Mississippi became a focal point, and in the “Freedom Summer” of 1964, organized under Bob Moses, volunteers set out to register voters. On June 21, Ku Klux Klan members, at least one of whom was a law enforcement officer, murdered organizers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner near Philadelphia, Mississippi, and, when discovered, laughed at the idea they would be punished for the murders.

That year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which strengthened voting rights. When Black Americans still couldn’t register to vote, on March 7, 1965, in Selma, Alabama, marchers set out for Montgomery to demonstrate that they were being kept from registering. Law enforcement officers on horseback met them with clubs on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The officers beat the marchers, fracturing the skull of young John Lewis (who would go on to serve 17 terms in Congress).

On March 15, President Johnson called for Congress to pass legislation defending Americans’ right to vote. It did. And on this day in 1965, the Voting Rights Act became law. It became such a fundamental part of our legal system that Congress repeatedly reauthorized it, by large margins, as recently as 2006.

But in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts struck down the provision of the law requiring that states with histories of voter discrimination get approval from the Department of Justice before they changed their voting laws. Immediately, the legislatures of those states, now dominated by Republicans, began to pass measures to suppress the vote. In the wake of the 2020 election, Republican-dominated states increased the rate of voter suppression, and on July 1, 2021, the Supreme Court permitted such suppression with the Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee decision.

Currently, the Supreme Court is considering whether a Louisiana district map that took race into consideration to draw a district that would protect Black representation is unconstitutional. About a third of Louisiana’s residents are Black, but in 2022 its legislature carved the state up in such a way that only one of its six voting districts was majority Black. A federal court determined that the map violated the Voting Rights Act, so the legislature redrew the map to give the state two majority-Black districts.

A group of “non-African American voters” immediately challenged the law, saying the new maps violated the Fourteenth Amendment because the mapmakers prioritized race when drawing them. A divided federal court agreed with their argument. Now the Supreme Court will weigh in.

Meanwhile, on July 29, Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) led a number of his Democratic colleagues in reintroducing a measure to restore and expand the Voting Rights Act. The bill is called the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act after the man whose skull police officers fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

August 6, 2025 (Wednesday)

Members of the House of Representatives are back in their districts for August, and on Monday, Republican Mike Flood of Nebraska held a town hall in Lincoln. A woman asked what she called a fiscal question. She said: “With 450 million FEMA dollars being reallocated to open Alligator Alcatraz, and 600 million taxpayer FEMA dollars being used to now open more concentration camps, and ICE burning through $8.4 million a day to illegally detain people—How much does it cost for fascism? How much do the taxpayers have to pay for a fascist country?” The crowd cheered wildly. Nicholas Wu, Cassandra Dumay, and Mia McCarthy of Politico reported today that by the end of Flood’s town hall, “chants of ‘Vote him out!’ threatened to drown out his closing comments.”

The Politico reporters also said that Republicans maintain they aren’t worried about their angry constituents and dismiss the town hall pushback as astroturfed and not reflective of real voter sentiment.

Maybe. But with the political tide running strong against the administration, that position sounds like posturing.

Trump’s firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the same day that numbers from that bureau showed a dramatic slowdown in the economy seems to have awakened businesspeople who were willing to back Trump to the reality that he’s pulling down the economy. Today Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook expressed concern about the jobs numbers, suggesting that the big revisions in them “are somewhat typical of turning points” in the economy.

At the same time, the administration’s immigration policies are deeply unpopular and unlikely to improve as Americans learn more about them. Today a report by Hatzel Vela of NBC South Florida went national as a former corrections officer for a private contractor who worked at the detention center in the Florida Everglades, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” by supporters, said the detainees “have no sunlight. There’s no clock in there. They don’t even know what time of the day it is. They have no access to showers. They shower every other day or every four days…. The bathrooms are backed up because you got so many people using them.”

Florida is running the Everglades detention facility in expectation of reimbursement by the federal government. Immigration advocate Aaron Reichlin-Melnick pointed out that, unlike the federal government, the state of Florida “can be sued for civil rights violations and punished with monetary damages.”

Also today, the GEO Group, a private prison and services provider, reported a better than expected second quarter today, thanks in part to two ICE contracts that, together, it expects will produce $145 million annually. The company announced a $300 million stock buyback, a process that increases the value of the stock held by remaining shareholders.

The Department of Homeland Security continues to echo the language of Nazis, posting today, “Serve your country! Defend your culture.” It does not appear that people are rushing to sign up. The administration has worked hard to recruit new agents, offering a signing bonus of up to $50,000 and help repaying student loans. Today, it eased requirements for new recruits, removing age limits and posting “no undergraduate degree required!” David Dayen of The American Prospect noted today that probationary employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have been ordered to report to ICE within seven days or lose their jobs.

As concerns grow about the economy and immigration policy, which were Trump’s strongest suits, Trump’s open attempt to steal the 2026 election by a rare mid-decade redistricting in Texas to carve out five more Republican seats in Congress has given Democrats a platform to call attention to MAGA’s attempt to stay in power regardless of the will of the voters. And they have seized the opportunity, calling the Republicans out in interviews and on social media.

At least fifty Democrats have left the state to deny the Republicans a quorum—the minimum number of people necessary to hold a vote—that would let them jam through a new voting map. Yesterday Texas governor Greg Abbott asked the Texas Supreme Court to let him expel the leader of the House Democrats, Representative Gene Wu, from the legislature, saying Wu had abandoned his office. According to Eleanor Klibanoff of the Texas Tribune, legal experts disagree. She quotes Charles Rhodes, an expert on constitutional law at the University of Missouri law school. “I am aware of absolutely no authority that says breaking quorum is the same as the intent to abandon a seat,” he said. “That would require the courts extending the premise to the breaking point. It’s inconsistent with the very text of the Texas Constitution.”

Yesterday Republican senator John Cornyn of Texas asked the FBI to find and arrest the Democratic legislators—a wild overreach of federal power—and Trump told reporters the FBI might have to get involved.

David Petesch of Shaw Local, a paper in Illinois, reported that a bomb threat early this morning at the hotel where the Texas lawmakers are staying in Illinois forced them to evacuate. After the threat was cleared, the Democrats said: “We are safe, we are secure, and we are undeterred. “We are grateful for , local, and state law enforcement for their quick action to ensure our safety.” On social media, one lawmaker blamed Texas Republicans for the threat. “This is what happens when Republican state leaders publicly call for us to be ‘hunted down,’” Representative John Bucy III said. He added: “Texas Democrats won’t be intimidated.”

Nicole Lafond of Talking Points Memo reported today that the administration is now turning to a plan to redistrict Indiana, sending Vice President J.D. Vance to meet with Republican lawmakers there. But, as Lafond notes, Republicans already hold seven of the state’s nine congressional seats. Indiana state representative Matt Pierce, a Democrat, told the Indy Star that the attention to redistricting Indiana shows that the White House is worried about 2026.

Those concerns are unlikely to be relieved by the news today that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is cancelling at least $500 million worth of awards and contracts to develop mRNA vaccines. These vaccines include those that addressed covid and were being explored for protection against HIV transmission and cancer.

And then there are the Epstein files, Trump’s appearance in them, and the administration’s attempts to change the subject.

Yesterday Democrats on the House Oversight Committee used a legislative maneuver to force its chair, James Comer (R-KY), to issue subpoenas for the Department of Justice records on the Epstein investigation, along with subpoenas for former government officials connected to the case. Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) posted that the DOJ now has two weeks to release the files to the committee. She wrote: “It’s time to find out who’s been protected, who thought they were above the law, and who’s been hiding behind power.”

On Tuesday, Trump defended the fact that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, his former lawyer, had met with a lawyer representing Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted sex trafficker who obtained victims for Jeffrey Epstein, as well as with Maxwell herself. “hatever he asks would be totally appropriate,” Trump told reporters. “And I think he probably wants to make sure that, you know, people that should not be involved or aren’t involved are not hurt by something that would be very, very unfortunate, very unfair to a lot of people.”

Meanwhile, outlets reported today that top administration officials, including Vance, Blanche, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and FBI Director Kash Patel, were scheduled to meet at the vice president’s residence Wednesday to coordinate the administration’s Epstein strategy. Notably, they appear to be meeting without President Trump.

The family of Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s victims, issued a statement saying: “We understand that Vice President J.D. Vance will hold a strategy session this evening at his residence with administration officials. Missing from this group is, of course, any survivor of the vicious crimes of convicted perjurer and sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein. Their voices must be heard, above all. We also call upon the House subcommittee to invite survivors to testify.”

After news of the meeting leaked, a source told Nandita Bose of Reuters that the meeting had been canceled.

Today, reporters noticed that the online United States Constitution, maintained by the Library of Congress, was missing parts of Article I, the part of the Constitution that lays out the rights and duties of Congress. Parts of Section 8 and all of Sections 9 and 10 were gone.

Those include Congress’s control over the District of Columbia, Congress’s power to make the laws, the promise that habeas corpus would not be suspended, the stipulation that no money can be used by the government unless Congress has appropriated it, the requirement that no president can accept gifts from foreign countries, and the specification that only Congress can levy tariffs.

Officials said the deletions were “due to a coding error,” and by the end of today the missing sections were restored.

Neophyte said:

August 6, 2025 (Wednesday)

———————————-cut———————————-

Thanks.

“Unfortunate” coding error, along with all the other stuff…

August 7, 2025 (Thursday)

At 7:22 this morning, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media: “I have instructed our Department of Commerce to immediately begin work on a new and highly accurate CENSUS based on modern day facts and figures and, importantly, using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024. People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Trump has no power to change the timing of the U.S. Census, which is mandated by the Constitution to take place every ten years.

He also has no power to declare that undocumented immigrants won’t be counted: the Constitution specifies that representatives “shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State.” MAGA turns sometimes to the Fourteenth Amendment’s exclusion of “Indians not taxed” from the count for representation as proof that lawmakers recognized that some people should be excluded from the census. But, in fact, “not taxed” identified a group of people who did not come under the purview of the United States government.

Just a year after the Civil War, lawmakers looked at the crisis caused by southern enslavers who had wielded outsized political power because the Constitution had allowed them to count enslaved Americans for purposes of representation and worried that a similar system would develop in the new states in the West. When they wrote the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866 (it was ratified in 1868), they explicitly excluded “Indians not taxed” out of concern that congressmen from the new western states would exercise more power than they should by counting the large numbers of Indigenous Americans who did not participate in the modern economy or have a say in the government. By excluding “Indians not taxed” explicitly, lawmakers demonstrated that they fully intended to include everyone else.

The U.S. government has always included “all persons” when taking the census.

Taking an accurate census suddenly is also not remotely possible. Setting one up takes most of the decade between them and costs close to $15 billion. Census officials are already working on the 2030 census.

Trump’s announcement is revealing, though, in two ways.

First, it shows how aware he and administration officials are that their program is deeply unpopular and that they expect to lose control of the House of Representatives in 2026 unless they rig the system. As Lisa Needham wrote today in Public Notice, “‘We stood aside so Trump could shutter vital agencies, take away your healthcare, and spend every last dime scooping up immigrants to help get Stephen Miller his 3,000 arrests a day’ is not exactly a rallying cry that will turn out voters.”

Republicans in Texas are trying to redistrict the state; Republicans in Indiana, Florida, and Ohio are considering the same tactic. Today, Adam Wren and Andrew Howard of Politico reported that Vice President J.D. Vance brought an entourage of White House officials with him to Indiana to pressure lawmakers there to redistrict the state, indicating just how important administration officials think redistricting is to keep control of the House. Now Trump has simply blurted out that he plans to change the game altogether and rig it to win.

But there is an even darker image behind destroying our democratic system. If undocumented immigrants aren’t counted, their districts will be shortchanged on representation and whatever federal monies are still available for states, for sure. But if undocumented immigrants aren’t counted, will they be easier to dehumanize? Already the government is taking people from the streets and denying their right to due process. Observers are describing human rights abuses in detention facilities where most of those incarcerated have no criminal record. If undocumented people are not officially recognized as existing, they could simply disappear.

Yesterday Adam Taylor, Hannah Natanson, and John Hudson of the Washington Post reported that, according to leaked drafts of the annual report on human rights from the State Department, the Trump administration plans to back away from criticizing El Salvador, Israel, and Russia for their extensive human rights abuses. In 2024, the State Department reported government-sanctioned killings, torture, and “harsh and life-threatening prison conditions” in El Salvador; the new report says there are “no credible reports of significant human rights abuses” in the country. Last year’s report for Israel was more than 100 pages; this year it is 25.

The State Department has also declared support for the end to presidential term limits in El Salvador. This change enables Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele, who allowed Trump to render Venezuelan immigrants to his infamous CECOT prison, to hold office indefinitely, establishing himself as a dictator. A spokesperson for the State Department said: “El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly was democratically elected to advance the interests and policies of their constituents. Their decision to make constitutional changes is their own. It is up to them to decide how their country should be governed.”

It is a truism that democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint.

But Americans are not simply accepting the administration’s reworking of American society. People congregating in the Indiana Statehouse today to protest redistricting met the news that Vance was in the building with resounding boos.

Last night, Trey Parker and Matt Stone skewered Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and ICE on South Park, and comedian Stephen Colbert went scorched earth on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., saying, among other things, that his cuts to vaccine research are “bad news for fans of living.”

The White House continues to try to put a lid on questions about the relationship between convicted sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein and Trump but is having little luck. After vehemently denying they had plans for a meeting last night to discuss responses to the Epstein issue, White House officials met last night after all, MSNBC reported. Those officials included Attorney General Pam Bondi and Federal Bureau of Investigation director Kash Patel.

Just after 12:00 a.m. Eastern Time today, Trump’s tariffs of at least 10% on products from other countries went into effect. As Josh Boak of the Associated Press reported, while Trump and administration officials continue to insist that Trump’s economic policies will create “unprecedented” growth, “there are signs of self-inflicted wounds to the U.S. as companies and consumers brace for the impact of the new taxes.”

Economic growth is slowing, job growth is stagnant, and prices are headed upward. Chao Deng and John Keilman of the Wall Street Journal reported today that rather than increasing as Trump claimed it would under his tariff regime, manufacturing activity in the U.S. has shrunk for most of Trump’s second term.

The one thing that appears to be going according to Trump’s wishes is his remaking of the White House. Trump’s new patio where the Rose Garden lawn used to be is finished. It now has café tables with yellow striped umbrellas. Brian Glenn of right-wing media outlet Real America’s Voice noted: “Very ‘Mar-A-Lago’ ish. Nice!”

Why. Won’t. He. Just. DIE?

captain_spalding said:

Why. Won’t. He. Just. DIE?

Because there is no justice in this earthly life.

party_pants said:

captain_spalding said:

Why. Won’t. He. Just. DIE?

Because there is no justice in this earthly life.

Doesn’t seem like it does it.
The cruelty in the world is awful, makes one ashamed to be human some days

party_pants said:

captain_spalding said:

Why. Won’t. He. Just. DIE?

Because there is no justice in this earthly life.

It’s Melania that i feel sorry for.

Just like Prince/King Charles, she’s having to wait so very long for the pay-off.

captain_spalding said:

party_pants said:

captain_spalding said:

Why. Won’t. He. Just. DIE?

Because there is no justice in this earthly life.

It’s Melania that i feel sorry for.

Just like Prince/King Charles, she’s having to wait so very long for the pay-off.

Maybe she is up to her neck in all of it too.

captain_spalding said:

party_pants said:

captain_spalding said:

Why. Won’t. He. Just. DIE?

Because there is no justice in this earthly life.

It’s Melania that i feel sorry for.

Just like Prince/King Charles, she’s having to wait so very long for the pay-off.

Fuck Melania. She’s a terrible human.

Divine Angel said:

captain_spalding said:

party_pants said:

Because there is no justice in this earthly life.

It’s Melania that i feel sorry for.

Just like Prince/King Charles, she’s having to wait so very long for the pay-off.

Fuck Melania. She’s a terrible human.

I would.

Neophyte said:

August 7, 2025 (Thursday)

At 7:22 this morning, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media: “I have instructed our Department of Commerce to immediately begin work on a new and highly accurate CENSUS based on modern day facts and figures and, importantly, using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024. People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Trump has no power to change the timing of the U.S. Census, which is mandated by the Constitution to take place every ten years.

He also has no power to declare that undocumented immigrants won’t be counted: the Constitution specifies that representatives “shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State.” MAGA turns sometimes to the Fourteenth Amendment’s exclusion of “Indians not taxed” from the count for representation as proof that lawmakers recognized that some people should be excluded from the census. But, in fact, “not taxed” identified a group of people who did not come under the purview of the United States government.

——————————————CUT—————————————-

Thank you.

August 8, 2025 (Friday)

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed he could stop Russia’s war on Ukraine with a single phone call. Instead, Matt Murphy and Ned Davies of the BBC report that Russian attacks on Ukraine have doubled since Trump took office. Today was the deadline the president had announced for Russian president Vladimir Putin to agree to a ceasefire in his illegal invasion of Ukraine or face further sanctions. Instead, Trump announced this afternoon that he intends to meet with Putin on August 15 in Alaska.
Putin generally cannot travel outside Russia because he has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, including the theft of Ukrainian children. And yet Trump is welcoming him to the United States of America.

This welcome gives Putin the huge gift of letting him touch down on U.S. soil after he invaded Ukraine in defiance of the policy established after World War II to prevent another such devastating war. In 1945 the United Nations charter declared that “ll Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.” The United States was the key guarantor of this principle until Trump took office.

The U.S. has stood against Russian invasions into Ukraine not only on this general principle, but because of security guarantees the U.S., along with the United Kingdom and Russia, gave to Ukraine in 1994. After the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, Ukraine had the third-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. In exchange for Ukraine’s giving up those weapons, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia agreed to secure Ukraine’s borders. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, they agreed they would not use military force or economic coercion against Ukraine. Russia violated that agreement with its 2014 and 2022 invasions.

Now Trump will welcome Putin to the United States, to territory that once belonged to Russia, reinforcing for Russian nationalists the dream of recreating Russia’s old empire. That dream has been part of the ideology of Russia’s drive to seize Ukrainian land.
Donato Paolo Mancini, Alberto Nardelli, and Daryna Krasnolutska of Bloomberg reported this morning that U.S. and Russian officials are planning this summit to hammer out an agreement that will force Ukraine to cede to Russia its land currently occupied by Russian troops, as well as Crimea. This deal would hand Ukraine’s eastern industrial territory to Russia and bless the principle that one country can seize territory from another through force. Observers note that once this principle is established, as Putin wishes, there will be nothing stopping him from invading Ukraine again as soon as his war-weary country recovers its strength.

The plan revealed by the Bloomberg journalists is still vague, but it excludes Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky and European allies and is similar to the one Russia demanded in April 2025. That plan, in turn, rehashed almost entirely the plan Russian operatives presented to Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort, in exchange for helping Trump win the White House.

Russia had invaded Ukraine in 2014 and was looking for a way to grab the land it wanted without continuing to fight. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election explained that Manafort and his partner, Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, in summer 2016 “discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern region of Donbas, and having Yanukovych, the Ukrainian President ousted in 2014, elected to head that republic.”

The Mueller Report continued: “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.” The region that Putin wanted was the country’s industrial heartland. He was offering a “peace” plan that would carve off much of Ukraine and make it subservient to him. This was the dead opposite of U.S. policy for a free and united Ukraine, and there was no chance that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was running for the presidency against Trump, would stand for it. But if Trump were elected, the equation changed.

According to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, Kilimnik wrote: “‘ll that is required to start the process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from D T saying ‘he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine’ and a decision to be a ‘special representative’ and manage this process.’ Following that, Kilimnik suggested that Manafort ‘could start the process and within 10 days visit Russia ( guarantees your reception at the very top level, cutting through all the bullsh*t and getting down to business), Ukraine, and key EU capitals.’ The email also suggested that once then–Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko understood this ‘message’ from the United States, the process ‘will go very fast and DT could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration.’”

According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the men continued to work on what they called the “Mariupol Plan” at least until 2018.

After Russia invaded Ukraine again in 2022, Jim Rutenberg published a terrific and thorough review of this history in the New York Times Magazine. Once his troops were in Ukraine, Putin claimed he had annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, two of which were specifically named in the Mariupol Plan, and instituted martial law in them, claiming that the people there had voted to join Russia.

On June 14, 2024, as he was wrongfully imprisoning American journalist Evan Gershkovich, Putin made a “peace proposal” to Ukraine that sounded much like the Mariupol Plan. He offered a ceasefire if Ukraine would give up Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, including far more territory than Putin’s troops occupy, and abandon plans to join NATO.

On June 27, 2024, in a debate during which he insisted that he and he alone could get Gershkovich released, and then talked about Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Trump seemed to indicate he knew about the Mariupol Plan: “Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my—this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream.”

That plan reappeared in April and, once again, is back on the table.

At the same time, officials from this, the second Trump administration, are working to rewrite the history of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election that led to Trump’s first administration. Although it is well established that Russian operatives worked to elect Trump in 2016, Trump has consistently tried to undermine that history by insisting that the many findings of Russian help for his campaign in 2016 were a hoax.

Lately, MAGA loyalists have worked to claim that the real story of the 2016 campaign was not Russian support for the Trump campaign, but rather a Democratic conspiracy to push the story of the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia. On Wednesday, Warren P. Strobel of the Washington Post reported that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard last month overrode the advice of the Intelligence Community when she declassified and released a highly classified report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The document made reference to sensitive sources and methods, but Trump supported Gabbard’s release of the report.

White House officials appear to be revisiting the story of Russian interference in the 2016 election to try to distract voters from the story of Trump’s relationship to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Their pivot to this position has tied the two stories together in a way that had not previously been suggested. The surprising association has led Democratic political strategist Simon Rosenberg of Hopium Chronicles to speculate that Putin might possess “some form of the Epstein files” that Trump would prefer to keep from seeing the light of day.

Certainly, Putin is behaving like someone who is holding a strong hand of cards. Today Jennifer Jacobs, Margaret Brennan, and Olivia Gazis of CBS News reported that Putin “needle” Trump this week by giving his special envoy Steve Witkoff the Order of Lenin, a Soviet-era award that commended outstanding service to the state, to pass on to the mother of 21-year-old American Michael Gloss, who was killed in 2024 fighting in Ukraine on behalf of Russia.

The journalists report that Gloss struggled with his mental health and did not appear to have been recruited by Russia. His family did not know he had enlisted in the Russian army or that he was in Ukraine.

Apparently, after he was killed, Russian officials learned that his mother, Juliane Gallina, serves at the CIA. By giving Witkoff an award named for the first head of the Soviet state to pass on to a CIA employee, Putin appeared to suggest that the Soviet Union had won the Cold War after all.

buffy said:

August 8, 2025 (Friday)

..

Ta. From what Trump’s been saying about maybe swapping bits of land, is he considering givinig Alaska back to Putin while Trump takes Canada and Greenland?

August 9, 2025 (Saturday)

Last Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reposted a video in which Christian nationalist pastors express their opposition to the idea of women voting. “I would like to see this nation being a Christian nation, and I would like this world to be a Christian world,” said Christian nationalist Doug Wilson. In his repost of the video, Hegseth wrote “All of Christ for All of Life.”

But the government of the United States of America is not, and never has been, based in Christianity. In his 1785 “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” framer of the Constitution James Madison explained that what was at stake in the separation of church and state was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental, unalienable human right—that of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants.

The United States of America is based not on religion but on the law. The country’s founding documents are the Declaration of Independence, which established the principle that all people are created equal, and the U.S. Constitution, which has gradually expanded since it was first written, increasingly recognizing the equal rights of all Americans.

The Constitution didn’t expand on its own. Since the time colonists first began to contemplate creating their own country, individuals have worked, step by step, to create an inclusive democracy. The Declaration of Independence gave them the language to claim those rights, and using it, along with logic, art, organization, and humor, they challenged the nation to turn the principles of the Declaration of Independence into reality.

At a time when political leaders like Hegseth are using their crabbed understanding of religion to take away rights, it seems worth remembering those who expanded rights by standing firm on the Declaration of Independence. The linked videos are a window into how ten people led the way.

So tonight is a night off from the firehose of the news and a reminder of what it has meant throughout our history to stand for American values.
I’ll be back at it tomorrow.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2dS6uX1RkUzIhvfzi1zPwdgTDv9NNnJK

Neophyte said:

August 9, 2025 (Saturday)

Last Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reposted a video in which Christian nationalist pastors express their opposition to the idea of women voting. “I would like to see this nation being a Christian nation, and I would like this world to be a Christian world,” said Christian nationalist Doug Wilson. In his repost of the video, Hegseth wrote “All of Christ for All of Life.”

But the government of the United States of America is not, and never has been, based in Christianity. In his 1785 “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” framer of the Constitution James Madison explained that what was at stake in the separation of church and state was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental, unalienable human right—that of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants.

The United States of America is based not on religion but on the law. The country’s founding documents are the Declaration of Independence, which established the principle that all people are created equal, and the U.S. Constitution, which has gradually expanded since it was first written, increasingly recognizing the equal rights of all Americans.

The Constitution didn’t expand on its own. Since the time colonists first began to contemplate creating their own country, individuals have worked, step by step, to create an inclusive democracy. The Declaration of Independence gave them the language to claim those rights, and using it, along with logic, art, organization, and humor, they challenged the nation to turn the principles of the Declaration of Independence into reality.

At a time when political leaders like Hegseth are using their crabbed understanding of religion to take away rights, it seems worth remembering those who expanded rights by standing firm on the Declaration of Independence. The linked videos are a window into how ten people led the way.

So tonight is a night off from the firehose of the news and a reminder of what it has meant throughout our history to stand for American values.
I’ll be back at it tomorrow.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2dS6uX1RkUzIhvfzi1zPwdgTDv9NNnJK

LOL

they keep telling

themselves that

wait

SCIENCE said:

Neophyte said:

August 9, 2025 (Saturday)

Last Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reposted a video in which Christian nationalist pastors express their opposition to the idea of women voting. “I would like to see this nation being a Christian nation, and I would like this world to be a Christian world,” said Christian nationalist Doug Wilson. In his repost of the video, Hegseth wrote “All of Christ for All of Life.”

But the government of the United States of America is not, and never has been, based in Christianity. In his 1785 “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” framer of the Constitution James Madison explained that what was at stake in the separation of church and state was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental, unalienable human right—that of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants.

The United States of America is based not on religion but on the law. The country’s founding documents are the Declaration of Independence, which established the principle that all people are created equal, and the U.S. Constitution, which has gradually expanded since it was first written, increasingly recognizing the equal rights of all Americans.

The Constitution didn’t expand on its own. Since the time colonists first began to contemplate creating their own country, individuals have worked, step by step, to create an inclusive democracy. The Declaration of Independence gave them the language to claim those rights, and using it, along with logic, art, organization, and humor, they challenged the nation to turn the principles of the Declaration of Independence into reality.

At a time when political leaders like Hegseth are using their crabbed understanding of religion to take away rights, it seems worth remembering those who expanded rights by standing firm on the Declaration of Independence. The linked videos are a window into how ten people led the way.

So tonight is a night off from the firehose of the news and a reminder of what it has meant throughout our history to stand for American values.
I’ll be back at it tomorrow.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2dS6uX1RkUzIhvfzi1zPwdgTDv9NNnJK

LOL

they keep telling

themselves that

wait

‘In God We Trust’ was only made the official national motto of the US in 1956. And they’re not taking about some logical Allah here: we’re taking about some crazy triumvirate zombie God who fucks his own mother and has on at least one occasion drowned all his creation because there was too much consanguinity.

August 10, 2025 (Sunday)

On Friday, Democracy Forward Foundation sued the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to make it respond to its request for the release of the Epstein files, as well as all communications the administration has exchanged over the files and President Donald Trump’s inclusion in them, as required under the Freedom of Information Act. The Democracy Forward Foundation filed Freedom of Information Act requests on July 28, asking for expedited processing in light of public interest in the files, but the DOJ and the FBI have not responded.

The case has been assigned to Judge Tanya Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who presided over Trump’s criminal trial for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Drawing Chutkan for an Epstein case means decisions will not be weighted in Trump’s favor.

On Saturday, Trump posted a screed against former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) accusing her of insider trading and calling her “a disgusting degenerate, who Impeached me twice, on NO GROUNDS, and LOST! How are you feeling now, Nancy???”

Since Attorney General Pam Bondi announced on July 7 that the administration would not be releasing any more information about the Epstein investigation and especially since July 23, when the Wall Street Journal reported that Bondi had told Trump in May that his name appears in those files, the president has thrown up one distraction after another. The attack on Pelosi fits that mold.

But it is interesting that the president appears to have impeachment on his mind.

Also on Saturday, Trump launched new action against Washington, D.C. He has threatened to to “federalize” the nation’s capital since the 2024 presidential campaign, and now has found a trigger in the alleged carjacking attempt by two unarmed 15-year-olds—one girl and one boy—on August 6 against 19-year-old former “Department of Government Efficiency” staffer Edward Coristine, also known as “Big Balls.” Law enforcement officers apparently stopped the alleged attempt while it was in progress and arrested the two youths, but Trump posted on social media a picture that he claimed was Coristine, covered in blood, and wrote that the incident showed that “crime in Washington, D.C. is totally out of control.”

Although violent crime in Washington, D.C., has reached its lowest level in 30 years, Trump announced that he will hold a press conference Monday “which will, essentially, stop violent crime in Washington, D.C. It has become one of the most dangerous cities anywhere in the World. It will soon be one of the safest!!! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Today, he plugged his news conference again on social media and wrote: I’m going to make our Capital safer and more beautiful than it ever was before. The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY. We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital. The Criminals, you don’t have to move out. We’re going to put you in jail where you belong. It’s all going to happen very fast, just like the Border. We went from millions pouring in, to ZERO in the last few months. This will be easier—Be prepared! There will be no ‘MR. NICE GUY.’ We want our Capital BACK. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Two hours later, he posted again, appearing to refer to his false claim that Washington, D.C., is beset by crime and also appearing to refer to his new plan to replace the East Wing of the White House with a 90,000-square-foot event space. And then he pivoted to an attack on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, whom he appears to be trying to hound out of office with complaints about the cost of renovating two buildings the Fed uses. Then he turned back to crime in Washington, saying, “The Mayor of D.C., Muriel Bowser, is a good person who has tried, but she has been given many chances, and the Crime Numbers get worse, and the City only gets dirtier and less attractive. The American Public is not going to put up with it any longer.”

Then he turned to his immigration sweeps, saying: “Just like I took care of the Border, where you had ZERO Illegals coming across last month, from millions the year before, I will take care of our cherished Capital, and we will make it, truly, GREAT AGAIN! Before the tents, squalor, filth, and Crime, it was the most beautiful Capital in the World. It will soon be that again.”
Trump seems to be suggesting that he wants to take control over Washington, D.C., the seat of the United States government. That will not be easy, as the U.S. Constitution gives control of the federal district to Congress, and a 1973 law permitted the inhabitants of the district to elect a mayor and a city council.

Trump’s fascination with Washington, D.C., might also be a reflection of a turn toward a focus on real estate, the sector in which he is most comfortable, as his administration is flailing and his own cognitive abilities are slipping. In The Atlantic today, Peter Wehner and Robert P. Beschel Jr. noted that people were willing to vote for Trump despite his corruption because they believed he would be an effective leader who would make their lives better.

Now, though, the public’s faith in his governing ability has plummeted. A recent Gallup poll found his approval rating at 37%, and more people disapprove than approve of his handling of the economy, immigration, and government efficiency.

The crumbling presidency might be behind the rush to cement the land grab Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has wanted since at least 2016. Bojan Pancevski and Yaroslav Trofimov reported in the Wall Street Journal that Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, who is not a trained diplomat and does not speak Russian, appears to have misunderstood the terms Putin was offering for a ceasefire. After saying at first that Putin would withdraw his troops from parts of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in exchange for complete control of Donetsk, Witkoff later clarified that the only offer Putin had made was for Ukraine to withdraw from Donetsk.

“This is deeply damaging incompetence,” former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul posted on social media. “Witkoff should finally start taking a notetaker from the U.S. embassy for future meetings. That’s how professional diplomacy works.”

Trump is scheduled to meet with Putin in Alaska on August 15.

If Trump’s hope is to chum the news with stories about Washington, D.C., and his relationship with Putin so people forget about the Epstein files, he’s not getting much help from Vice President J.D. Vance. On Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo on the Fox News Channel this morning, Vance said: “We know that Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of connections with left-wing politicians and left-wing billionaires…. Democrat billionaires and Democrat political leaders went to Epstein Island all the time. Who knows what they did.”

Vance’s suggestion that keeping the files under wraps protects Democrats is unlikely to convince the MAGA Republicans clamoring for their release to let the issue go. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine any other angle Vance could have chosen that would have poured more fuel on that particular dumpster fire.

Neophyte said:

August 10, 2025 (Sunday)

On Friday, Democracy Forward Foundation sued the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to make it respond to its request for the release of the Epstein files, as well as all communications the administration has exchanged over the files and President Donald Trump’s inclusion in them, as required under the Freedom of Information Act. The Democracy Forward Foundation filed Freedom of Information Act requests on July 28, asking for expedited processing in light of public interest in the files, but the DOJ and the FBI have not responded.

The case has been assigned to Judge Tanya Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who presided over Trump’s criminal trial for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Drawing Chutkan for an Epstein case means decisions will not be weighted in Trump’s favor.

On Saturday, Trump posted a screed against former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) accusing her of insider trading and calling her “a disgusting degenerate, who Impeached me twice, on NO GROUNDS, and LOST! How are you feeling now, Nancy???”

Since Attorney General Pam Bondi announced on July 7 that the administration would not be releasing any more information about the Epstein investigation and especially since July 23, when the Wall Street Journal reported that Bondi had told Trump in May that his name appears in those files, the president has thrown up one distraction after another. The attack on Pelosi fits that mold.

But it is interesting that the president appears to have impeachment on his mind.

Also on Saturday, Trump launched new action against Washington, D.C. He has threatened to to “federalize” the nation’s capital since the 2024 presidential campaign, and now has found a trigger in the alleged carjacking attempt by two unarmed 15-year-olds—one girl and one boy—on August 6 against 19-year-old former “Department of Government Efficiency” staffer Edward Coristine, also known as “Big Balls.” Law enforcement officers apparently stopped the alleged attempt while it was in progress and arrested the two youths, but Trump posted on social media a picture that he claimed was Coristine, covered in blood, and wrote that the incident showed that “crime in Washington, D.C. is totally out of control.”

Although violent crime in Washington, D.C., has reached its lowest level in 30 years, Trump announced that he will hold a press conference Monday “which will, essentially, stop violent crime in Washington, D.C. It has become one of the most dangerous cities anywhere in the World. It will soon be one of the safest!!! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Today, he plugged his news conference again on social media and wrote: I’m going to make our Capital safer and more beautiful than it ever was before. The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY. We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital. The Criminals, you don’t have to move out. We’re going to put you in jail where you belong. It’s all going to happen very fast, just like the Border. We went from millions pouring in, to ZERO in the last few months. This will be easier—Be prepared! There will be no ‘MR. NICE GUY.’ We want our Capital BACK. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Two hours later, he posted again, appearing to refer to his false claim that Washington, D.C., is beset by crime and also appearing to refer to his new plan to replace the East Wing of the White House with a 90,000-square-foot event space. And then he pivoted to an attack on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, whom he appears to be trying to hound out of office with complaints about the cost of renovating two buildings the Fed uses. Then he turned back to crime in Washington, saying, “The Mayor of D.C., Muriel Bowser, is a good person who has tried, but she has been given many chances, and the Crime Numbers get worse, and the City only gets dirtier and less attractive. The American Public is not going to put up with it any longer.”

Then he turned to his immigration sweeps, saying: “Just like I took care of the Border, where you had ZERO Illegals coming across last month, from millions the year before, I will take care of our cherished Capital, and we will make it, truly, GREAT AGAIN! Before the tents, squalor, filth, and Crime, it was the most beautiful Capital in the World. It will soon be that again.”
Trump seems to be suggesting that he wants to take control over Washington, D.C., the seat of the United States government. That will not be easy, as the U.S. Constitution gives control of the federal district to Congress, and a 1973 law permitted the inhabitants of the district to elect a mayor and a city council.

Trump’s fascination with Washington, D.C., might also be a reflection of a turn toward a focus on real estate, the sector in which he is most comfortable, as his administration is flailing and his own cognitive abilities are slipping. In The Atlantic today, Peter Wehner and Robert P. Beschel Jr. noted that people were willing to vote for Trump despite his corruption because they believed he would be an effective leader who would make their lives better.

Now, though, the public’s faith in his governing ability has plummeted. A recent Gallup poll found his approval rating at 37%, and more people disapprove than approve of his handling of the economy, immigration, and government efficiency.

The crumbling presidency might be behind the rush to cement the land grab Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has wanted since at least 2016. Bojan Pancevski and Yaroslav Trofimov reported in the Wall Street Journal that Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, who is not a trained diplomat and does not speak Russian, appears to have misunderstood the terms Putin was offering for a ceasefire. After saying at first that Putin would withdraw his troops from parts of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in exchange for complete control of Donetsk, Witkoff later clarified that the only offer Putin had made was for Ukraine to withdraw from Donetsk.

“This is deeply damaging incompetence,” former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul posted on social media. “Witkoff should finally start taking a notetaker from the U.S. embassy for future meetings. That’s how professional diplomacy works.”

Trump is scheduled to meet with Putin in Alaska on August 15.

If Trump’s hope is to chum the news with stories about Washington, D.C., and his relationship with Putin so people forget about the Epstein files, he’s not getting much help from Vice President J.D. Vance. On Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo on the Fox News Channel this morning, Vance said: “We know that Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of connections with left-wing politicians and left-wing billionaires…. Democrat billionaires and Democrat political leaders went to Epstein Island all the time. Who knows what they did.”

Vance’s suggestion that keeping the files under wraps protects Democrats is unlikely to convince the MAGA Republicans clamoring for their release to let the issue go. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine any other angle Vance could have chosen that would have poured more fuel on that particular dumpster fire.

Thanks.

August 11, 2025 (Monday)

President Donald J. Trump’s big announcement today at his press conference—to which he showed up late—was that he is assuming control over the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department and deploying more than 100 agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and about 40 from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, along with officers from the Secret Service and the U.S. Marshals Service and members of the District of Columbia National Guard, “to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor, and worse.” He reiterated that officers would clear homeless encampments from the city.

In fact, statistics from the Department of Justice show that violent crime in the nation’s capital was at a 30-year low in 2024 and, according to Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), is down 26% this year compared to the same period last year. Former undersecretary of state and editor of Time magazine Richard Stengel noted that Washington is “not even in top 10 dangerous cities in U.S.” Meanwhile, legal analyst Asha Rangappa notes that FBI agents are not trained to patrol the streets, and that every one of them assigned to do that is not investigating foreign spies, foreign and domestic terrorists, or crimes like fraud, murder, corruption, and human trafficking.

If that was Trump’s big announcement, the big story seems to have been something different.

Trump’s performance at the press conference—an event for which his handlers would have made sure he was at the top of his game—made it clear that his mental deterioration is moving rapidly. He let Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and FBI director Kash Patel explain the actual plan, taking the microphone himself to describe a fake world in which he plays the role of hero, solving five wars, creating a booming economy, solving the border security others couldn’t, protecting Americans from a hellscape that exists only in his rhetoric.

The administration’s seizure of power is anything but imaginary. As Stengel noted, “Throughout history, autocrats use a false pretext to impose government control over local law enforcement as a prelude to a more national takeover. That’s far more dangerous than the situation he says he is fixing.” While Trump is mobilizing the National Guard under a pretext now, he memorably refused to mobilize it on January 6, 2021, to protect the lawmakers under siege in the U.S. Capitol as his supporters tried to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president.

Some clues to what the administration is attempting showed up today in a court in California, where Governor Gavin Newsom and California Attorney General Rob Bonta are suing the Department of Justice, saying it broke the law by deploying about 4,000 troops from the National Guard and 700 U.S. Marines to Los Angeles in June without authorization. A federal law known as the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits federal troops from acting as law enforcement officers.

Anna Bower of Lawfare Media was following the events in court today. She posted that the government agreed the troops in Los Angeles were subject to the Posse Comitatus Act and that they were put in place simply to guard federal buildings and law enforcement officials. But witnesses said that troops accompanied ICE when they made arrests and one of the documents introduced that related to the massive troop presence in MacArthur Park on July 7 said the purpose of the mission was to “protect the execution of joint federal law enforcement missions…while preserving public safety and demonstrating federal reach and presence.”

The words “demonstrating federal reach and presence” seem to get to the heart of the administration’s object, for it is showing federal troops exercising power over civilians even while telling the court they are not. Making people fear the government is key to the rise of an authoritarian.

This mobilization echoes Trump’s attempt to take over Washington, D.C., in June 2020 when he was angry about the protests over the death of George Floyd, murdered in May 2020 by white police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. In 2020, members of Trump’s first administration stopped him from using the military against U.S. citizens, and, dramatically, members of the military stepped up to declare their support not for a president but for the United States Constitution.

This time around, Trump has installed loyalist Pete Hegseth at the head of the military. Hegseth made his support for the president’s plan clear today as he stood with Trump at the press conference. Ominously for civil liberties, observers note that no one from the administration is specifying where the administration intends to send people from the homeless encampments, although Trump wrote Sunday, “We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital.”

The administration is also consolidating power over the economy. Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal noted today that the U.S. is marching toward a form of state capitalism in which Trump looks much like the Chinese Communist Party, exercising political control not just over government agencies but over companies themselves. “A generation ago conventional wisdom held that as China liberalized, its economy would come to resemble America’s,” Ip wrote. “Instead, capitalism in America is starting to look like China.”

Ip points to the government’s partial control over U.S. Steel that it took as a condition for Nippon Steel’s takeover, the $1.5 trillion of promised investment from trading partners that Trump has claimed the right to direct personally, the 15% of certain chip sales of Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices to China that will go to the administration (although who or what entity will get that money I can’t figure out), and Trump’s demand that the chief executive of Intel resign.

Ip calls this system of state capitalism “a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.” He notes that it is a “sea change from the free market ethos the U.S. once embodied.”

Ip also notes that state capitalism is a means of political control, using the power of the state to crush political challenges. “In Trump’s first term, CEOs routinely spoke out when they disagreed with his policies such as on immigration and trade,” Ip writes. “Now, they shower him with donations and praise, or are mostly silent.” Ip pointed out that Trump is deploying financial power and regulatory power to cow media companies, banks, law firms, and government agencies he thinks are not sufficiently supportive.

But Trump’s press conference did not show a president in control of these dramatic changes. His words echoed the rhetoric he used to win office in 2016, rhetoric he summed up in his inaugural address that turned a speech usually designed to be uplifting into a description of what he called American carnage: “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our Nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.”

But in the context of the president’s rambling nonsense, that apocalyptic rhetoric, along with Trump’s focus on renovating and redecorating the White House to look like one of his gold-splattered properties, seems like an attempt to return to a past in which he felt powerful.

Meanwhile, Trump’s second presidency has been following the plan outlined in Project 2025 closely, even though Trump denied any association with Project 2025 when he ran for office. Russell Vought, now director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote the section of the plan that called for an extraordinarily strong executive in order to put in place Christian nationalism. Increasingly, it looks like members of his administration are using Trump in order to create a system that will respond to whoever is in charge, making it possible for today’s leaders to retain control over the country even without Trump there to mobilize MAGA voters.

Trump’s press conference today showed a badly weakened president. His apparent connections to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have already weakened him with his base. That story is not going away, and Trump has made it clear he is frantic over it. Then today he indicated even he is worried about his mental deterioration. At 7:36 this morning, he posted on social media that Representatives Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) are “morons.” He wrote: “Each of these political hacks should be forced to take a Cognitive Exam, much like the one I recently took while getting my ‘physical’ at our GREAT Washington, D.C., Military Hospital (W R!). As the doctors said, ‘President Trump ACED it, something that is rarely seen!’ These Radical Left Lunatics would all fail this test in a spectacular show of stupidity and incompetence. TAKE THE TEST!!!”

Vice President J.D. Vance appears to have been distancing himself from Trump and the administration by taking repeated vacations. As Bill Kristol noted today in The Bulwark, Vance also appears to be undercutting Trump over the Epstein files, twisting the knife while also seeming to make overtures to Trump’s MAGA voters, who have never warmed to Vance. As Kristol notes, Vance set up what Kristol calls a “very unusual” meeting at his residence to discuss Epstein, a meeting that just happened to leak to the press. Then yesterday, Vance brought up the issue again in an interview with Maria Bartiromo on the Fox News Channel, parroting MAGA beliefs that the files name prominent Democrats.

“ lot of Americans want answers. I certainly want answers,” Vance told Bartiromo. As Kristol notes: “With this bland statement, Vance succeeded—inadvertently, needless to say!—in reminding us that we don’t yet have the answers we want and deserve,” thus ginning up the Epstein story again.

Those people cheering on Trump’s drive for autocratic power because they still somehow think he will use that power to make their lives better might want to consider how their lives may change if that power is in the hands of J.D. Vance.

And so we have come full circle: the arbitrary nature of autocrats was, after all, what made our nation’s founders base a government not on men, but on impartial laws that defended the rights and liberties of the people.

Neophyte said:

August 11, 2025 (Monday)

President Donald J. Trump’s big announcement today at his press conference—to which he showed up late—was that he is assuming control over the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department and deploying more than 100 agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and about 40 from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, along with officers from the Secret Service and the U.S. Marshals Service and members of the District of Columbia National Guard, “to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor, and worse.” He reiterated that officers would clear homeless encampments from the city.

In fact, statistics from the Department of Justice show that violent crime in the nation’s capital was at a 30-year low in 2024 and, according to Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), is down 26% this year compared to the same period last year. Former undersecretary of state and editor of Time magazine Richard Stengel noted that Washington is “not even in top 10 dangerous cities in U.S.” Meanwhile, legal analyst Asha Rangappa notes that FBI agents are not trained to patrol the streets, and that every one of them assigned to do that is not investigating foreign spies, foreign and domestic terrorists, or crimes like fraud, murder, corruption, and human trafficking.

If that was Trump’s big announcement, the big story seems to have been something different.

Trump’s performance at the press conference—an event for which his handlers would have made sure he was at the top of his game—made it clear that his mental deterioration is moving rapidly. He let Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and FBI director Kash Patel explain the actual plan, taking the microphone himself to describe a fake world in which he plays the role of hero, solving five wars, creating a booming economy, solving the border security others couldn’t, protecting Americans from a hellscape that exists only in his rhetoric.

The administration’s seizure of power is anything but imaginary. As Stengel noted, “Throughout history, autocrats use a false pretext to impose government control over local law enforcement as a prelude to a more national takeover. That’s far more dangerous than the situation he says he is fixing.” While Trump is mobilizing the National Guard under a pretext now, he memorably refused to mobilize it on January 6, 2021, to protect the lawmakers under siege in the U.S. Capitol as his supporters tried to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president.

Some clues to what the administration is attempting showed up today in a court in California, where Governor Gavin Newsom and California Attorney General Rob Bonta are suing the Department of Justice, saying it broke the law by deploying about 4,000 troops from the National Guard and 700 U.S. Marines to Los Angeles in June without authorization. A federal law known as the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits federal troops from acting as law enforcement officers.

Anna Bower of Lawfare Media was following the events in court today. She posted that the government agreed the troops in Los Angeles were subject to the Posse Comitatus Act and that they were put in place simply to guard federal buildings and law enforcement officials. But witnesses said that troops accompanied ICE when they made arrests and one of the documents introduced that related to the massive troop presence in MacArthur Park on July 7 said the purpose of the mission was to “protect the execution of joint federal law enforcement missions…while preserving public safety and demonstrating federal reach and presence.”

The words “demonstrating federal reach and presence” seem to get to the heart of the administration’s object, for it is showing federal troops exercising power over civilians even while telling the court they are not. Making people fear the government is key to the rise of an authoritarian.

This mobilization echoes Trump’s attempt to take over Washington, D.C., in June 2020 when he was angry about the protests over the death of George Floyd, murdered in May 2020 by white police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. In 2020, members of Trump’s first administration stopped him from using the military against U.S. citizens, and, dramatically, members of the military stepped up to declare their support not for a president but for the United States Constitution.

This time around, Trump has installed loyalist Pete Hegseth at the head of the military. Hegseth made his support for the president’s plan clear today as he stood with Trump at the press conference. Ominously for civil liberties, observers note that no one from the administration is specifying where the administration intends to send people from the homeless encampments, although Trump wrote Sunday, “We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital.”

The administration is also consolidating power over the economy. Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal noted today that the U.S. is marching toward a form of state capitalism in which Trump looks much like the Chinese Communist Party, exercising political control not just over government agencies but over companies themselves. “A generation ago conventional wisdom held that as China liberalized, its economy would come to resemble America’s,” Ip wrote. “Instead, capitalism in America is starting to look like China.”

Ip points to the government’s partial control over U.S. Steel that it took as a condition for Nippon Steel’s takeover, the $1.5 trillion of promised investment from trading partners that Trump has claimed the right to direct personally, the 15% of certain chip sales of Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices to China that will go to the administration (although who or what entity will get that money I can’t figure out), and Trump’s demand that the chief executive of Intel resign.

Ip calls this system of state capitalism “a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.” He notes that it is a “sea change from the free market ethos the U.S. once embodied.”

Ip also notes that state capitalism is a means of political control, using the power of the state to crush political challenges. “In Trump’s first term, CEOs routinely spoke out when they disagreed with his policies such as on immigration and trade,” Ip writes. “Now, they shower him with donations and praise, or are mostly silent.” Ip pointed out that Trump is deploying financial power and regulatory power to cow media companies, banks, law firms, and government agencies he thinks are not sufficiently supportive.

But Trump’s press conference did not show a president in control of these dramatic changes. His words echoed the rhetoric he used to win office in 2016, rhetoric he summed up in his inaugural address that turned a speech usually designed to be uplifting into a description of what he called American carnage: “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our Nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.”

But in the context of the president’s rambling nonsense, that apocalyptic rhetoric, along with Trump’s focus on renovating and redecorating the White House to look like one of his gold-splattered properties, seems like an attempt to return to a past in which he felt powerful.

Meanwhile, Trump’s second presidency has been following the plan outlined in Project 2025 closely, even though Trump denied any association with Project 2025 when he ran for office. Russell Vought, now director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote the section of the plan that called for an extraordinarily strong executive in order to put in place Christian nationalism. Increasingly, it looks like members of his administration are using Trump in order to create a system that will respond to whoever is in charge, making it possible for today’s leaders to retain control over the country even without Trump there to mobilize MAGA voters.

Trump’s press conference today showed a badly weakened president. His apparent connections to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have already weakened him with his base. That story is not going away, and Trump has made it clear he is frantic over it. Then today he indicated even he is worried about his mental deterioration. At 7:36 this morning, he posted on social media that Representatives Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) are “morons.” He wrote: “Each of these political hacks should be forced to take a Cognitive Exam, much like the one I recently took while getting my ‘physical’ at our GREAT Washington, D.C., Military Hospital (W R!). As the doctors said, ‘President Trump ACED it, something that is rarely seen!’ These Radical Left Lunatics would all fail this test in a spectacular show of stupidity and incompetence. TAKE THE TEST!!!”

Vice President J.D. Vance appears to have been distancing himself from Trump and the administration by taking repeated vacations. As Bill Kristol noted today in The Bulwark, Vance also appears to be undercutting Trump over the Epstein files, twisting the knife while also seeming to make overtures to Trump’s MAGA voters, who have never warmed to Vance. As Kristol notes, Vance set up what Kristol calls a “very unusual” meeting at his residence to discuss Epstein, a meeting that just happened to leak to the press. Then yesterday, Vance brought up the issue again in an interview with Maria Bartiromo on the Fox News Channel, parroting MAGA beliefs that the files name prominent Democrats.

“ lot of Americans want answers. I certainly want answers,” Vance told Bartiromo. As Kristol notes: “With this bland statement, Vance succeeded—inadvertently, needless to say!—in reminding us that we don’t yet have the answers we want and deserve,” thus ginning up the Epstein story again.

Those people cheering on Trump’s drive for autocratic power because they still somehow think he will use that power to make their lives better might want to consider how their lives may change if that power is in the hands of J.D. Vance.

And so we have come full circle: the arbitrary nature of autocrats was, after all, what made our nation’s founders base a government not on men, but on impartial laws that defended the rights and liberties of the people.

Thanks Neo.

“ taking the microphone himself to describe a fake world in which he plays the role of hero, solving five wars, creating a booming economy, solving the border security others couldn’t, protecting Americans from a hellscape”

This would be hilarious if it wasn’t so… Trump. Just imagine Sleepy Joe saying this shit.

Divine Angel said:

“ taking the microphone himself to describe a fake world in which he plays the role of hero, solving five wars, creating a booming economy, solving the border security others couldn’t, protecting Americans from a hellscape”

This would be hilarious if it wasn’t so… Trump. Just imagine Sleepy Joe saying this shit.

The Republicans would have torn Biden to pieces, citing the nonsense and lies as evidence of his mental incapacity, his dishonesty, and his total unfitness for the role of President, and they would have been eagerly aided by almost all of the media.

But, none of that happens to Trump.

August 12, 2025 (Tuesday)

Liberal commentator Jessica Tarlov nailed it this morning when she wrote: “He’s doing everything EXCEPT releasing the Epstein files.” Her comment was in reference to President Donald Trump’s social media post of 7:30 this morning, when he chummed the water by suggesting that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, more commonly known as the Kennedy Center, would soon be called the “TRUMP/KENNEDY CENTER.” He made the comment as he said this year’s Kennedy Center Honors recipients would be announced tomorrow.

Trump has been frantically trying to change the subject away from his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein since July 7, when Attorney General Pam Bondi stirred up fury from Trump’s MAGA base by saying the Department of Justice will not release any more information from the Epstein investigation.

On July 23, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s name is in the Epstein files “multiple times.”

But even Trump’s attack on Washington, D.C., yesterday has not managed to distract attention from the possibility that the president of the United States sexually assaulted children. Epstein’s associate, convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, has been in the news because of the administration’s sudden transfer of her from a low-security prison in Florida to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas. In 2021, Maxwell was convicted of conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse children and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Allison Gill, who goes by the name Mueller She Wrote on social media and who writes at The Breakdown, reported yesterday on Ghislaine Maxwell’s electronic file from the Bureau of Prisons, to which she got exclusive access. Sex offenders are not eligible to serve their sentences in minimum security prisons, but the file shows that someone waived that status to permit her transfer. Gill’s information also shows that the terms of her custody permit her “to leave the minimum security campus for work assignments; much like Jeffrey Epstein was allowed to leave prison as part of the sweetheart deal he got from Alex Acosta.”

Writing in The Hill today, former deputy U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York James Zirin wrote: “You may ask whether Trump approved the transfer. You can bet on it. This Justice Department doesn’t make a move without Trump’s thumb on the scale.”

Also yesterday, Judge Paul Engelmayer of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York refused to grant the Trump administration’s request that grand jury files from Maxwell’s sex trafficking case be unsealed. As Zirin noted, that request was always a red herring: grand jury minutes do not include evidence or witness statements and are “largely uniformative.”

Judge Engelmayer was even clearer. As Casey Gannon noted at CNN, the judge called out the Department of Justice for misleading the public about what the files would reveal. “Its entire premise—that the Maxwell grand jury materials would bring to light meaningful new information about Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes, or the Government’s investigation into them—is demonstrably false,” he wrote, and pointed out that the material is already almost all public.

Engelmayer continued with an observation about why Bondi might have made the request: “A member of the public, appreciating that the Maxwell grand jury materials do not contribute anything to public knowledge, might conclude that the Government’s motion for their unsealing was aimed not at ‘transparency’ but at diversion—aimed not at full disclosure but at the illusion of such,” he wrote.

The administration also has an interest in getting people to look away from the rising inflation numbers. A report released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that consumer prices rose again in July, an indication that businesses are beginning to pass on the cost of tariffs to consumers. As economist Justin Wolfers noted, after declining for two years, inflation is on its way back up and is now at 3.1% for the year. Those numbers do not include the tariffs that went into effect on August 7.

Meanwhile, as Aliss Higham of Newsweek reported today, layoffs in the U.S. “surged in July to their highest level since the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.” After the July jobs report showed that hiring has stalled and that hiring in May and June had been dramatically overestimated, Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, claiming that the numbers in the report were rigged.

Yesterday Trump nominated E.J. Antoni, a 37-year-old economist from the right-wing Heritage Foundation, to replace McEntarfer. Heritage was the driving force behind Project 2025, and in keeping with that institution’s drive toward Christian nationalism, Antoni’s doctoral dissertation from Northern Illinois University thanks his “spiritual patrons: Our Lady of Victory, St. Joseph, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Jude, St. Joseph of Cupertino, and Sts. Peter and Paul. Thank you, most especially, to Our Lord, with whom anything is possible.” Antoni is known primarily for media work, including appearances on the Fox News Channel, where he has relentlessly cheered on Trump’s policies.

Dominic Pino of the conservative National Review wrote today that Antoni is “nowhere near qualified to be BLS commissioner,” noting that “he has demonstrated time and again that he does not understand economic statistics.” As J.V. Last of The Bulwark notes, destroying faith in statistics by cooking the books is actually Trump’s plan, illustrated in his announcement of Antoni’s nomination when he wrote: “Our Economy is booming, and E.J. will ensure that the Numbers released are Honest and Accurate.”

Last notes that if Trump wanted to reassure people that government statistics are trustworthy, there are plenty of conservative economists he could have chosen to take the job of commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Instead, he picked “a hack he sees on Fox” to show that he is imposing his will even on the numbers that businesses, banks, and people need to make good decisions about investments.

In an interview on Fox Business News that appeared yesterday, before his nomination was announced, Antoni suggested that the government should stop issuing the monthly job reports, focusing instead on quarterly reports.

Last points out in his Bulwark article that Project 2025 called for consolidating the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Census Bureau, and Bureau of Labor Statistics into a single office and aligning their “mission with conservative principles,” as well as putting as many loyalists into statistical positions as possible.

Today the administration advanced Project 2025 ‘s determination to reshape American culture from a right-wing perspective when it sent a letter to Dr. Lonnie Bunch, the historian who serves as the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, informing him they intend to review museum exhibitions, curatorial processes, planning, the use of collections, and artists grants in order to make sure they align “with the president’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.”

Meredith McGraw and Jasmine Li of the Wall Street Journal, who reported the letter, say that the review will focus on the “National Museum of American History, the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Air and Space Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.”

Legal analyst Anna Bower notes that the woman in charge of reviewing the Smithsonian is his Florida criminal defense attorney, who joined his team from the field of property law and who, as Bower writes, “didn’t like some of the museum’s exhibits when she visited after the inauguration so she convinced Trump to sign an executive order putting her in charge.” Also on the three-person team is Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget and a key author of Project 2025.

Trump’s assumption of control over the Washington, D.C., police force and his calling out of the D.C. National Guard are definitely ways for him to divert attention from the Epstein files and the stalling economy. But they are also an attempt to create a dictatorship as Project 2025 prescribed. Both can be true at the same time.

Today Alex Horton and David Ovalle of the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration is looking at putting 600 National Guard troops on standby at all times as a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” to deploy into American cities to combat protest or civil unrest. The troops would be split into two groups of 300, stationed at military bases in Alabama and Arizona to cover the regions east and west of the Mississippi River. The cost would run into hundreds of millions of dollars, and funding could not start before fiscal year 2027.

National security affairs scholar Lindsay P. Cohn told the reporters that while National Guard units are commonly deployed for emergencies within their own states, this “is really strange because essentially nothing is happening. Crime is going down. We don’t have major protests or civil disturbances. There is no significant resistance from states” to federal immigration policies. “There is very little evidence anything big is likely to happen soon,” she said. But the proposal could take resources that states will need to respond to national disasters or other emergencies.
This morning, about 800 National Guard troops arrived at the D.C. Armory to report for duty. They have been deployed until September 25.

But the power grab underway among MAGA leaders is not going unchallenged.

Yesterday MSNBC ran a column of statistics fact-checking Trump live during his press conference, showing that crime in Washington, D.C.—and across the country—is falling significantly, despite Trump’s claim that we are in a crime wave. It appears at least some in the media are catching on to the idea that his lies must be challenged as they happen, rather than hours later when public attention has moved on.

Also yesterday, California governor Gavin Newsom issued a public letter telling Trump that if he doesn’t back off on his attempts to redistrict Republican-dominated states in order to rig the 2026 elections, Newsom will be forced to work to redistrict California. “You are playing with fire, risking the destabilization of our democracy,” Newsom wrote, “while knowing that California can neutralize any gains you hope to make…. I do not do this lightly, as I believe legislative district maps should be drawn by independent, citizen-led efforts,” he wrote. But “California cannot stand idly by as this power grab unfolds.”

Newsom’s press office followed the letter up this morning with a post on social media: “DONALD TRUMP, THE LOWEST POLLING PRESIDENT IN RECENT HISTORY, THIS IS YOUR SECOND-TO-LAST WARNING!!! (THE NEXT ONE IS THE LAST ONE!). STAND DOWN NOW OR CALIFORNIA WILL COUNTER-STRIKE (LEGALLY!) TO DESTROY YOUR ILLEGAL CROOKED MAPS IN RED STATES. PRESS CONFERENCE COMING—HOSTED BY AMERICA’S FAVORITE GOVERNOR, GAVIN NEWSOM. FINAL WARNING NEXT. YOU WON’T LIKE IT!!! THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.”

Then the account posted: “FINAL WARNING DONALD TRUMP—MAYBE THE MOST IMPORTANT WARNING IN HISTORY! STOP CHEATING OR CALIFORNIA WILL REDRAW THE MAPS. AND GUESS WHO WILL ANNOUNCE IT THIS WEEK? GAVIN NEWSOM (MANY SAY THE MOST LOVED & HANDSOME GOVERNOR) AND A VERY POWERFUL TEAM. DON’T MAKE US DO IT!!! THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.”

A follow-up post tonight read: “DONALD ‘TACO’ TRUMP, AS MANY CALL HIM, ‘MISSED’ THE DEADLINE!!! CALIFORNIA WILL NOW DRAW NEW, MORE ‘BEAUTIFUL MAPS,’ THEY WILL BE HISTORIC AS THEY WILL END THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY (DEMS TAKE BACK THE HOUSE!). BIG PRESS CONFERENCE THIS WEEK WITH POWERFUL DEMS AND GAVIN NEWSOM—YOUR FAVORITE GOVERNOR—THAT WILL BE DEVASTATING FOR ‘MAGA.’ THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! —GN”

Tonight, Elizabeth Blair of NPR reported that Trump’s announcement this morning that Kennedy Center Honors recipients would be named tomorrow caught the staff of the Kennedy Center entirely off guard.

August 13, 2025 (Wednesday)

On August 14, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. While he had already put in place new measures to regulate business and banking and had provided temporary work relief to combat the Depression, this law permanently changed the nature of the American government.

The Social Security Act established a federal system of old-age benefits; unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services. It was a sweeping reworking of the relationship between the government and its citizens, using the power of taxation to pool funds to provide a basic social safety net.

The driving force behind the law was FDR’s secretary of labor, Frances Perkins. She was the first woman to hold a position in the U.S. Cabinet and still holds the record for having the longest tenure in that job: she served from 1933 to 1945.

Perkins brought to the position a vision of government very different from that of the Republicans who had run it in the 1920s. While men like President Herbert Hoover had embraced the idea of a “rugged individualism” in which men provided for their families on their own, Perkins recognized that the vision of a hardworking man supporting his wife and children was more myth than reality: her own husband suffered from bipolar disorder, making her the family’s primary support. She understood that Americans had always supported each other.

As a child, Perkins spent summers with her grandmother, with whom she was very close, in the small town of Newcastle, Maine, surrounded by a supportive community. In college, at Mount Holyoke, she majored in chemistry and physics, but after a professor required students to tour a factory to observe working conditions, Perkins became committed to improving the lives of those trapped in industrial jobs. After college, Perkins became a social worker and, in 1910, earned a masters degree in economics and sociology from Columbia University. She became the head of the New York office of the National Consumers League, urging consumers to use their buying power to demand better conditions and wages for the workers who made the products they were buying.

The next year, in 1911, she witnessed a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in which 146 workers, mostly women and girls, died. They were trapped in the building when the fire broke out because the factory owner had ordered the doors to the stairwells and exits locked to make sure no one slipped outside for a break. Unable to escape the smoke and fire in the factory, the workers—some of them on fire—leaped from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the building, dying on the pavement.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire proved to Perkins that voluntary organizations would never be enough to improve workers’ lives. She turned toward using the government to adjust the harsh conditions of industrialization. She began to work with the Democratic politicians at Tammany Hall, who presided over communities in the city that mirrored rural towns and who exercised a form of social welfare for their voters, making sure they had jobs, food, and shelter and that wives and children had a support network if a husband and father died. In that system the voices of women like Perkins were valuable, for their work in the immigrant wards of the city meant that they were the ones who knew what working families needed to survive.

The overwhelming unemployment, hunger, and suffering during the Great Depression convinced Perkins that state governments alone could not adjust the conditions of the modern world to create a safe, supportive community for ordinary people. She came to believe that, as she said: “The people are what matter to government, and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.”

Perkins met FDR through her Tammany connections, and when he asked her to be his secretary of labor, she told him that she wanted the federal government to provide unemployment insurance, health insurance, and old-age insurance. She later recalled: “I remember he looked so startled, and he said, ‘Well, do you think it can be done?’”

Creating federal unemployment insurance became her primary concern. Congressmen had little interest in passing such legislation, claiming that unemployment insurance and federal aid to dependent families would undermine a man’s willingness to work. But Perkins recognized that the Depression had added pressure to the idea of social insurance by emphasizing the needs of older Americans. In Long Beach, California, Dr. Francis Townsend had looked out of his window one day to see elderly women rooting through garbage cans for food.

Appalled, he came up with a plan to help the elderly and stimulate the economy at the same time. Townsend proposed that the government provide every retired person over 60 years old with $200 a month, on the condition that they spend it within 30 days, a condition designed to stimulate the economy.

Townsend’s plan was wildly popular. More than that, though, it sparked people across the country to start coming up with their own plans for protecting the elderly and the nation’s social fabric.

It also spurred Congress to action. Perkins recalled that Townsend “startled the Congress of the United States because the aged have votes. The wandering boys didn’t have any votes; the evicted women and their children had very few votes. If the unemployed didn’t stay long enough in any one place, they didn’t have a vote. But the aged people lived in one place and they had votes, so every Congressman had heard from the Townsend Plan people.”

FDR put together a committee to come up with a plan, but committee members could not make up their minds how to move forward. Perkins continued to hammer on the idea they must come up with something, and finally locked the members of the committee in a room. As she recalled: “Well, we locked the door and we had a lot of talk. I laid out a couple of bottles of something or other to cheer their lagging spirits. Anyhow, we stayed in session until about 2 a.m. We then voted finally, having taken our solemn oath that this was the end; we were never going to review it again.”

By the time the bill came to a vote, it was hugely popular. The vote was 371 to 33 in the House and 77 to 6 in the Senate.

When asked to describe the origins of the Social Security Act, Perkins mused that its roots came from the very beginnings of the nation. When Alexis de Toqueville wrote Democracy in America in 1835, she noted, he thought Americans were uniquely “so generous, so kind, so charitably disposed.” “Well, I don’t know anything about the times in which De Tocqueville visited America,” she said, but “I do know that at the time I came into the field of social work, these feelings were real.”

With the Social Security Act, Perkins helped to write into our laws a longstanding political impulse in America that stood in dramatic contrast to the 1920s philosophy of rugged individualism. She recognized that the ideas of community values and pooling resources to keep the economic playing field level and take care of everyone are at least as deeply seated in our political philosophy as the idea of every man for himself.

In a 1962 speech recalling the origins of the Social Security Act, Perkins reflected: “Of course, the Act had to be amended, and has been amended, and amended, and amended, and amended, until it has now grown into a large and important project, for which, by the way, I think the people of the United States are deeply thankful. One thing I know: Social Security is so firmly embedded in the American psychology today that no politician, no political party, no political group could possibly destroy this Act and still maintain our democratic system. It is safe. It is safe forever, and for the everlasting benefit of the people of the United States.”

August 14, 2025 (Thursday)

Today, flanked by California’s Democratic elected officials and union leaders, California governor Gavin Newsom responded to Trump’s attempt to strongarm the Texas legislature into redistricting the state to give Trump the five additional congressional representatives to which he feels “entitled.” Newsom announced that California will hold a special election on November 4 for voters to consider redistricting their state temporarily if Texas redistricts, so that California can neutralize Trump’s rigging of the state of Texas. The plan would only go into effect if Texas—or any of the other states pressured by Trump to redistrict to get more votes—launches its mid-decade redistricting that is transparently designed to help resurrect the Republicans’ prospects for 2026 and 2028.

After years of criticism that Democrats have not fought hard enough against Republicans’ manipulation of the system to amass power, the California plan, along with Newsom’s announcement of it, flips the script. The plan leverages Democrats’ control of the most populous state in the Union to warn Republicans to back away from their attempt to rig the 2026 election.

At the same time, the plan’s authors protected against claims that they were themselves trying to rig the game: the plan goes into effect only if Republicans push through their new maps, and it declares that the state still supports the use of fair, nonpartisan redistricting commissions nationwide, a system Republicans oppose.

Newsom’s announcement of the plan continued a shift in Democratic rhetoric from defense to offense. After years of Trump and Republicans attacking California, Newsom celebrated his state and the principles it reflects. “We are in Los Angeles, the most diverse city, in the most diverse county, in the most diverse state, in the world’s most diverse democracy,” he said. “And I’ve long believed that the world looks to us…to see…it’s possible to live together and advance together and prosper together across every conceivable and imaginable difference. What makes L.A. great, what makes California great, and what makes the United States of America great—is that…we don’t tolerate our diversity, we celebrate our diversity, and it’s a point of pride, because we’re all in this together,” he said.

California has the population of 21 smaller states combined, he pointed out, and the fourth largest economy in the world. Pushing back on the trope that says, “Don’t mess with Texas,” Newsom warned: “Don’t mess with the great Golden State.” In a reference to the 1846 California Republic, also known as the “Bear Flag Republic”—a history captured by the California grizzly bear on the state’s flag—Newsom echoed the words of Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) when he added: “Donald Trump, you have poked the bear, and we will punch back.”

Newsom emphasized that democracy is under siege by Trump and his MAGA loyalists, a point illustrated by the fact that officials had sent more than a dozen masked and armed Border Patrol agents to the Japanese American National Museum in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles, where Newsom was speaking. Some of the agents were carrying rifles. A Border Patrol chief, Gregory Bovino, made it clear the agents were there to intimidate state officials, saying: ““We’re here making Los Angeles a safer place, since we don’t have politicians who can do that. We do that ourselves.”

Trump “doesn’t play by a different set of rules,” Newsom said. “He doesn’t believe in the rules. And as a consequence, we need to disabuse ourselves of the way things have been done…. We have got to meet fire with fire…. So that’s what this is about. It’s not complicated. We’re doing this in reaction to a president of the United States that called a sitting governor of the state of Texas and said, find me five seats…. We can’t stand back and watch this democracy disappear, district by district all across this country…. We need to be firm in our resolve. We need to push back.” He called this moment “a break the glass moment for our democracy, for our nation.”

Newsom called for Americans to “ake up to what Donald Trump is doing…. Wake up to the assault on institutions and knowledge and history. Wake up to his war on science, public health, his war against the American people. This is a guy who lays claim to want to get a Nobel Prize sitting there and bending his knee to Mr. Putin.”

“We do have agency,” Newsom reminded his audience. “We’re not bystanders in this world. We can shape the future.” Noting that “this time requires us to act anew, not just think anew,” Newsom nodded to President Abraham Lincoln’s famous call from 1862: “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise—with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

Newsom’s team has been garnering attention lately by trolling Trump on social media, taunting the president with grandiose, jerky, all-caps posts that mimic Trump’s own. Today, Newsom continued that taunting by pointing out that Trump wants to rig the district maps because he knows his party is going to lose the midterms. Newsom called Trump “a failed president” and pointed to Trump’s dispatch of the Border Patrol to intimidate the people in attendance at the event as proof Trump is “weak…broken, someone whose weakness is masquerading as his strength…. The most unpopular president in modern history.”

On a day in which a new report this morning from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed flashing red lights over inflation caused by Trump’s tariffs, Newsom trolled Trump by echoing the president’s triumphant promise that April 2, when he announced those tariffs, was “Liberation Day. Newsom called today’s announcement “Liberation Day in the State of California.”

When a reporter asked Newsom whether his mimicry of Trump’s social media posts is a strategy, he replied: “I hope it’s a wake up call…. If you’ve got issues with what I’m putting out. You sure as hell should have concerns about what he’s putting out as president…. But I think the deeper question is, how have we allowed the normalization of his tweets through social posts over the course of the last many years to go without similar scrutiny and notice.”

In a press release about the event, Newsom’s office emphasized that Democratic leaders from across the country have been launching similar broadsides against Trump’s push for redistricting, quoting Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego, Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, New York governor Kathy Hochul, New Jersey governor Phil Murphy, and Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker.

After the events, Newsom’s press office posted on social media: “DONALD IS FINISHED—HE IS NO LONGER “HOT.” FIRST THE HANDS (SO TINY) AND NOW ME—GAVIN C. NEWSOM—HAVE TAKEN AWAY HIS “STEP.” MANY ARE SAYING HE CAN’T EVEN DO THE “BIG STAIRS” ON AIR FORCE ONE ANYMORE—USES THE LITTLE BABY STAIRS NOW. SAD! TOMORROW HE’S GOT HIS “MEETING” WITH PUTIN IN “RUSSIA.” NOBODY CARES. ALL THE TELEVISION CAMERAS ARE ON ME, AMERICA’S FAVORITE GOVERNOR. EVEN LOW-RATINGS LAURA INGRAM (EDITS THE TAPES!) CAN’T STOP TALKING ABOUT MY BEAUTIFUL MAPS. YOU’RE WELCOME FOR LIBERATION DAY, AMERICA! DONNIE J MISSED “THE DEADLINE” (WHOOPS!) AND NOW I RUN THE SHOW. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! —GCN”

The office followed that post up with one that recalled Trump’s February 2025 reference to himself as a king, a reference that likely referred to a decades-old puff piece that called Trump “the king of New York.” After a popular outcry at Trump’s apparent claim to a throne, the White House followed up with an AI-generated image of the cover of what appeared to be Time magazine showing Trump wearing a crown in front of the New York City skyline with the legend “Long live the king.”

Newsom’s version replaced Trump’s image with his own, symbolically taking over turf that at the height of his popularity Trump considered his own. It declared: “A SUCCESSFUL LIBERATION DAY! THANK YOU!”

buffy said:

August 14, 2025 (Thursday)
…

Thanks. I’m glad I’m not trying to live over there.

August 16, 2025 (Saturday)

Yesterday, military personnel from the United States of America literally rolled out a red carpet for a dictator who invaded a sovereign country and is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes including the stealing of children. Apparently coached by his team, Trump stood to let Russia’s president Vladimir Putin walk toward him after Putin arrived at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, putting Trump in a dominant position, but he clapped as Putin walked toward him. The two men greeted each other warmly.

This summit between the president of the United States and the president of Russia came together fast, in the midst of the outcry in the U.S. over Trump’s inclusion in the Epstein files and the administration’s refusal to release those files.

U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff had been visiting Moscow for months to talk about a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine when he heard through a back channel that Putin might be willing to talk to Trump in person to offer a deal. On August 6, after a meeting in Moscow, Witkoff announced that Russia was ready to retreat from some of the land it occupies in Ukraine. This apparent concession came just two days before the August 8 deadline Trump had set for severe sanctions against Russia unless it agreed to a ceasefire.

Quickly, though, it became clear that Witkoff’s description of Putin’s offer was wrong, either because Putin had misled him or because he had misunderstood: Witkoff does not speak Russian and, according to former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, does not use a notetaker from the U.S. embassy. Nonetheless, on Friday, August 8, Trump announced on social media that he would meet personally with Putin in Alaska, without Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky.

That the president of the United States offered a meeting to Putin on U.S. soil, ground that once belonged to Russia and that Russian nationalists fantasize about taking back, was itself a win for Putin.

As Jonathan Lemire noted yesterday in The Atlantic, in the week before the meeting, leaders in Ukraine and Europe worried that Trump would agree to Putin’s demand that Ukraine hand over Crimea and most of its four eastern oblasts, a demand that Russian operatives made initially in 2016 when they offered to help Trump win the White House—the so-called Mariupol Plan— and then pressure Ukraine to accept the deal.

In the end, that did not happen. The summit appears to have produced nothing but a favorable photo op for Putin.

That is no small thing, for Russia, which is weak and struggling, managed to break the political isolation it’s lived in since invading Ukraine again in 2022. Further, the choreography of the summit suggested that Russia is equal to the United States. But those important optics were less than Russia wanted.

It appeared that Russia was trying to set the scene for a major powers summit of the past, one in which the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), also known as the Soviet Union, were the dominant players, with the USSR dominating the U.S. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov showed up to Alaska in a sweatshirt with the Russian initials for USSR, a sign that Russia intends to absorb Ukraine as well as other former Soviet republics and recreate itself as a dominant world power.

As Lemire notes, Putin indicated he was interested in broadening the conversation to reach beyond Ukraine into economic relations between the two countries, including a discussion of the Arctic, and a nuclear arms agreement. The U.S. seemed to be following suit. It sent a high-ranking delegation that included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Special Envoy Witkoff, press secretary Karoline Leavitt, Central Intelligence Agency director John Ratcliffe, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, deputy White House chief of staff Dan Scavino, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Exactly what the White House expected from the summit was unclear. Trump warned that if Putin didn’t agree to a ceasefire there would be “very severe consequences,” but the White House also had seemed to be walking back any expectations of a deal at the summit, downgrading the meeting to a “listening exercise.”

After Trump and Putin met on the tarmac, Trump ushered the Russian president to the presidential limousine, known as The Beast, giving them time to speak privately despite the apparent efforts of the U.S. delegation to keep that from happening. When the summit began, Rubio and Witkoff joined Trump to make up the U.S. delegation, while Putin, his longtime foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov, and Lavrov made up the Russian delegation. The principals emerged after a three-hour meeting with little to say.

At the news conference after their meeting, Putin took the podium first—an odd development, since he was on U.S. soil—and spoke for about eight minutes. Then Trump spoke for three minutes, telling reporters the parties had not agreed to a ceasefire but that he and Putin had made “great progress” in their talks. Both men appeared subdued. They declined to take reporters’ questions.

A Fox News Channel reporter said: “The way it felt in the room was not good. It did not seem like things went well. It seemed like Putin came in and steamrolled, got right into what he wanted to say and got his photo next to the president, then left.” But while Putin got his photo op, he did not get the larger superpower dialogue he evidently wanted. Neither did he get the open support of the United States to end the war on his terms, something he needs as his war against Ukraine drags on.

The two and a half hour working lunch that was scheduled did not take place. Both men left Alaska within an hour.

Speaking with European leaders in a phone call from Air Force One on his way home from the summit, Trump said that Putin rejected the idea of a ceasefire and insisted that Ukraine cede territory to Russia. He also suggested that a coalition of the willing, including the U.S., would be required to provide security guarantees to Ukraine. But within hours, Trump had dropped his demand for a ceasefire and instead echoed Putin’s position that negotiations for a peace agreement should begin without one.

In an interview with Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity after the meeting, Trump said he would not impose further sanctions on Russia because the meeting with Putin had gone “very well.” “Because of what happened today, I think I don’t have to think about that now,” Trump told Hannity. “I may have to think about it in two weeks or three weeks or something, but we don’t have to think about that right now.”

Trump also suggested he was backing away from trying to end the war and instead dumping the burden on Ukraine’s president. He told Hannity that “it’s really up to President Zelensky to get it done.”

Today Chiara Eisner of NPR reported that officials from the Trump administration left eight pages of information produced by the U.S. State Department in a public printer at the business center of an Alaskan hotel. The pages revealed potentially sensitive information about the August 15 meetings, including the names and phone numbers of three U.S. staff members and thirteen U.S. and Russian state leaders.

The pages also contained the information that Trump intended to give Putin an “American Bald Eagle Desk Statue,” and the menu for the cancelled lunch, which specified that the luncheon was “in honor of his excellency, Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation.”

well look fair enough fascists of all corners need to band together to counter the threat of CHINA with their ASIANS and renewables and efficient mass produced economies of scale

>>officials from the Trump administration left eight pages of information produced by the U.S. State Department in a public printer at the business center of an Alaskan hotel. <<

Hmm…..

August 17, 2025 (Sunday)

On the heels of President Donald J. Trump’s Friday meeting with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, Trump will meet with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky Monday afternoon at the White House. According to Barak Ravid of Axios, Trump called Zelensky from Air Force One on the way home from Alaska. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House special envoy Steve Witkoff were also on the hour-long call. The leaders of the European Commission, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the United Kingdom then joined the call for another half hour.

In the call, Trump embraced Putin’s view of the conflict, telling Zelensky and European leaders that Putin does not want a ceasefire. Trump indicated that he is abandoning his own demand for a ceasefire and adopting Putin’s position that negotiations should take place without one. Zelensky insists on a ceasefire before negotiations. After the call, Trump posted on social media that “it was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement, which often times do not hold up.” “All” is doing a lot of work in that sentence: it appears to mean Putin, with the possible agreement now of Trump.

Key unanswered questions from Friday’s summit were why it ended so abruptly, with the cancellation of a planned luncheon and more discussions, and why Trump immediately told Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity, “Because of what happened today, I think I don’t have to think about now. I may have to think about it in two weeks or three weeks or something, but we don’t have to think about that right now.”

The abrupt cancellation could mean that U.S. officials sent Putin packing without lunch because he would not agree to a ceasefire. But it seems worth keeping on the table that Trump has recently exhibited both an inability to focus on any topic, and a need to live in a carefully constructed world that ignores reality and assures him he is the best and the brightest. A high-stakes meeting with principals about a very real situation might have been too much for him to manage for a full day.

At the press conference following the summit, NBC News White House correspondent Peter Alexander reported that what struck him was “the looks on the faces of a lot of the American delegation here. Karoline Leavitt…, Steve Witkoff, who came into the room, then left quickly, then came back in. Leavitt appeared to be a bit stressed out, anxious. Their eyes were wide, almost ashen at times.”

At 8:31 this morning, Trump posted one word, “bela,” on his social media account. California governor Gavin Newsom’s social media account, which has been trolling Trump by imitating his boastful, insulting, all-caps posts, wrote: “We broke Donald Trump.”

As of midday Sunday, there appeared to be no mention of the Alaska meeting on the State Department’s website, although it has been updated since Friday to acknowledge Indonesia Independence Day and the Gabonese Republic National Day.

What is clear from the summit, though, is that Trump and Putin badly miscalculated the nature of power in democracies.

It has seemed since 2016 that Putin believed that if he could drive a wedge between the U.S., NATO countries, and other allies, which together have defended a rules-based international order since 1949, he could break that order. Then, absent the system that worked to keep big countries from invading smaller ones, he could take over parts of Ukraine and possibly other countries around Russia. Together, Putin and Trump have gone a long way toward aligning the U.S. government with Putin and other authoritarians. In his first term, Trump talked of leaving NATO, but those in his administration who understood the nature of power prevented him. Now he is operating without those professionals and has shifted the U.S. to a foreign policy that is fraying our relationships with other countries.

But U.S. strength in international relations has always been its relationships, and with the U.S. withdrawing from its traditional democratic alliances, others are strengthening their relationships without the U.S. Today, at a meeting with Zelensky in Brussels, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen stressed that international borders cannot be changed by force. She called for Ukraine to become “a steel porcupine, indigestible for potential invaders.” French president Emmanuel Macron said that Ukraine’s borders must be honored and that “if we show weakness today in front of Russia, we are laying the ground for future conflict.”

These allies are standing together against Putin and, if necessary, against Trump. Von der Leyen will accompany Zelensky to a meeting at the White House on Monday. So will French president Emmanuel Macron, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, German chancellor Friedrich Merz, NATO secretary general Mark Rutte, United Kingdom prime minister Keir Starmer, and Finnish president Alexander Stubb.

National security scholar Tom Nichols noted on social media that it “suggests something went very wrong in Alaska if this many European leaders are coming to Washington on short notice.”
Trump has misunderstood the nature of power in a democracy at home, too. Rather than building domestic coalitions to support the government, he is overseeing the takeover of the government by a radical minority that seems to think the way to build power is for the government to attack its own people.

The administration’s defunding of scientific research, medical care, environmental protection, food safety and security, and emergency management all threaten Americans’ health, safety, and security. Its attacks on history and education, as well as its firing of women and racial and gender minorities, seem designed to drive wedges among Americans. Its incarceration and disappearing of undocumented migrants both creates an “other” for Trump loyalists to hate and provides a warning of what could happen to the regime’s opponents.

Now, under the guise of fighting crime, the administration has quite literally turned guns on the American people.

On June 7, Trump deployed 700 Marines to Los Angeles and federalized 4,100 California National Guard personnel after scattered protests of immigration raids. Administration officials argue that the troops were not engaged in law enforcement but were simply protecting federal agents. California governor Gavin Newsom sued the administration to limit the use of the military in Los Angeles. In the trial, held last week, lawyers for the federal government said troops can protect federal agents wherever they go, effectively asserting that there are no limits to how a president can use troops domestically despite the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act saying the opposite.

That deployment was so deeply unpopular that, as Shawn Hubler of the New York Times reported in July, of the 72 soldiers whose enlistment was set to expire during the deployment, two had already left and 55 said they would not extend their service: a 21% retention rate when the normal retention rate is 60%. One told Hubler: “This is not what the military of our country was designed to do, at all.”

But if Trump’s deployments of troops in states can be challenged under the Posse Comitatus Act, that’s a harder call in Washington, D.C., which is overseen by Congress. There, the president controls the National Guard—in contrast to what Trump claimed in 2021—and so did not need additional authority. In addition, the 1973 Home Rule Act that established limited self-government in the city provided that the president could take control of the police department there. Trump is the first to do so.

On Monday, August 11, Trump announced he was placing the Washington, D.C., police department under federal control and deploying National Guard troops there. He asserted that violent crime in the city is “getting worse” and in an executive order claimed that “crime is out of control” in the city.

This is a transparently manufactured excuse to enable the administration to take over a Democratic city with troops they control. In fact, crime in Washington, D.C., has been trending downward for decades and violent crime is now, according to the Department of Justice’s own statistics, at a 30-year low. There is also the sticky little problem of the fact that Trump pardoned about 1,500 of those convicted of crimes for their participation in the riot of January 6, 2021, and that under his direction, the Department of Justice dismissed all pending cases against the remaining January 6 defendants. Many of those defendants attacked police officers.

More generally, the administration seems to be encouraging violence rather than shunning it. As Anna Merlan of Mother Jones reported on Friday, the White House, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Department of Homeland Security joke on social media about cruelty and torture, suggesting it’s fun to hurt people. They are sanitizing and popularizing state violence. Trump’s pardoning of drug trafficker Ross Ulbricht, sentenced to life in prison, and his welcome to the U.S. of a man convicted of killing three people in Spain suggest the president’s support for “law and order” is coverage for his own political ends.

MAGA’s violent rhetoric is bearing fruit in the shooting of two prominent Minnesota state lawmakers and their spouses in early June, killing two. Then, on August 8, a Georgia man who blamed the covid-19 vaccine for making him depressed and suicidal fired more than 180 shots into the Atlanta headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, killing police officer David Rose, a 33-year-old former Marine.

Yesterday the Republican governors of West Virginia, South Carolina, and Ohio all said they would send National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., to support Trump’s takeover of the city. They will be funded by the federal government—that is, our tax dollars. Journalist Philip Bump illustrated that the true goal of the forces in the city has little to do with actual crime rates by running the numbers. He showed that 43 cities in the states sending troops to Washington, D.C., have higher rates of violent crime than the capital does.

The Trump administration is launching a classic authoritarian project, attempting to take over a country through division and fear. But they badly misunderstand the nature of power. If they succeed, they will control a badly diminished United States of America, one that has fallen to the level of a country like Russia, far from the powerhouse it was when we recognized that the extraordinary strength of our nation always came not from force, but from alliances.

There is one thing Trump’s military deployments against the American people have accomplished though: media mentions of the Epstein files have plummeted.

It’s all very strange the MAGA ideal

Empires decline and others take over and realistically nothing much you can do.
The USA weakened itself by sending manufacturing elsewhere
Got involved in wars that went nowhere and cost them dearly

By the time you recognise the signs its already too late.

Something mentioned was the lack of self pride were repairs and maintenance nation wide fall behind.
I wonder if this is something that happens in China

Two things:

1. I cannot imagine the immense stress Zelenskyy must be under on a daily basis.

2. “ Trump has recently exhibited an inability to focus on any topic” is ringing all sorts of alarm bells for me. One would hope there’s someone cognitively stable enough with him at all times to prevent complete disaster.

Divine Angel said:

Two things:

1. I cannot imagine the immense stress Zelenskyy must be under on a daily basis.

2. “ Trump has recently exhibited an inability to focus on any topic” is ringing all sorts of alarm bells for me. One would hope there’s someone cognitively stable enough with him at all times to prevent complete disaster.

The couch companion duh.

Cymek said:

It’s all very strange the MAGA ideal

Empires decline and others take over and realistically nothing much you can do.
The USA weakened itself by sending manufacturing elsewhere
Got involved in wars that went nowhere and cost them dearly

By the time you recognise the signs its already too late.

Something mentioned was the lack of self pride were repairs and maintenance nation wide fall behind.
I wonder if this is something that happens in China

see CHINA exports sovereign citizenship too

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-12/charges-dropped-for-us-influencer-ethan-guo-stranded-antarctica/105641404
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-18/pilot-ethan-guo-stuck-in-antarctica/105666202

Chile wants Ethan Guo out of Antarctica.

wait that dirty ASIAN is squeaky clean American, best of all worlds

Neophyte said:

August 17, 2025 (Sunday)

—————————————cut————————————-

There is one thing Trump’s military deployments against the American people have accomplished though: media mentions of the Epstein files have plummeted.

Thanks.

>>Today, at a meeting with Zelensky in Brussels, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen stressed that international borders cannot be changed by force. She called for Ukraine to become “a steel porcupine, indigestible for potential invaders.” French president Emmanuel Macron said that Ukraine’s borders must be honored and that “if we show weakness today in front of Russia, we are laying the ground for future conflict.”

These allies are standing together against Putin and, if necessary, against Trump. Von der Leyen will accompany Zelensky to a meeting at the White House on Monday. So will French president Emmanuel Macron, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, German chancellor Friedrich Merz, NATO secretary general Mark Rutte, United Kingdom prime minister Keir Starmer, and Finnish president Alexander Stubb.<<

I wonder how Trump will face up to a crowd like that. He’s not happy in the company of people who don’t bow and scrape.

buffy said:

>>Today, at a meeting with Zelensky in Brussels, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen stressed that international borders cannot be changed by force. She called for Ukraine to become “a steel porcupine, indigestible for potential invaders.” French president Emmanuel Macron said that Ukraine’s borders must be honored and that “if we show weakness today in front of Russia, we are laying the ground for future conflict.”

These allies are standing together against Putin and, if necessary, against Trump. Von der Leyen will accompany Zelensky to a meeting at the White House on Monday. So will French president Emmanuel Macron, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, German chancellor Friedrich Merz, NATO secretary general Mark Rutte, United Kingdom prime minister Keir Starmer, and Finnish president Alexander Stubb.<<

I wonder how Trump will face up to a crowd like that. He’s not happy in the company of people who don’t bow and scrape.

It will be interesting no doubt.

August 18, 2025 (Monday)

This morning, J.D. Wolf of Meidas News pulled together all of Trump’s self-congratulatory posts from Sunday morning, when the president evidently was boosting his ego after Friday’s disastrous meeting with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin in Alaska. Trump shared an AI-generated meme of himself with a large male lion standing next to him and the words “Peace through Strength. Anyone can make war, but only most courageous can make peace.” He posted memes claiming he is the “best president…in American history” and the “G O A T, a “legend.”

Trump also reposted material from two QAnon-related accounts and pushed the QAnon belief that the Democratic Party is “the party of hate, evil, and Satan.” Trump has faced a rebellion among his QAnon supporters as he and administration officials have refused to release information from the federal investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and have moved Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted of sex trafficking children, to a minimum-security prison camp and given her work-release privileges. It appears he’s working to make QAnon supporters forget that he was named in those files and to lure them back to his support.

For their part, Russia Today trolled Trump’s “peace through strength” boast this morning by posting a video of an armored vehicle first going slowly on a road and then dramatically speeding up. The vehicle was flying both Russian and U.S. flags.
Trump’s social media account this morning posted a long screed saying the president is “going to lead a movement to get rid of” mail-in ballots and voting machines, and lying that the U.S. is the only country that uses mail-in voting because it is rife with fraud. As usual, the post claimed that Democrats “CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE” and claimed they “are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM.” The post said he would sign an executive order “to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections.”

Then the post claimed that “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”

This is bonkers across the board. Dozens of countries use mail-in voting, and there is zero evidence of widespread voter fraud in the U.S. Just today, news broke that right-wing channel Newsmax will pay $67 million to Dominion Voting Systems for spreading false claims that the company’s voting technology had been rigged to give the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden.

Combining that sum with the $787 million Fox News paid for spreading the same lies means, as Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) wrote today, that media entities have paid out nearly $900 million “for publishing lies about the 2020 presidential election. Yet Donald Trump, who lost by more than seven million votes, keeps repeating the Big Lie and makes it compulsory dogma for his employees.”

Certainly, if Democratic leaders were so unelectable, the Republicans would not go to such lengths to rig district voting maps and keep Democratic voters from the polls. Indeed, while voter fraud is vanishingly rare, the Republicans are using the specter of it to engage in election fraud: manipulating the mechanics of an election to favor one side over another.

This manipulation is happening dramatically right now in Texas, where Trump pressured Governor Greg Abbott to redistrict the state in a highly unusual mid-decade map change in order to set Republicans up to gain five more seats in Congress in the next election. Abbott dutifully called a special session of the legislature to change the maps. Texas Democrats tried to stop the redistricting by leaving the state to deprive the Republicans of a quorum, that is, the minimum number of lawmakers necessary to conduct business. They stayed away until the special session expired. Abbott immediately called another one.

Today, with it clear Abbott would simply call special sessions until they returned, the Democratic legislators went back to Texas fifteen days after they left. “We killed the corrupt special session, withstood unprecedented surveillance and intimidation, and rallied Democrats nationwide to join this existential fight for fair representation—reshaping the entire 2026 landscape,” said the leader of the Texas House Democrats Gene Wu, acknowledging the protests across Texas at the legislative steal. “We’re returning to Texas more dangerous to Republicans’ plans than when we left. Our return allows us to build the legal record necessary to defeat this racist map in court, take our message to communities across the state and country, and inspire legislators across the country how to fight these undemocratic redistricting schemes in their own statehouses.”

Finally, the U.S. Constitution is very clear that no president has the power to dictate election rules. The framers were determined to prevent that power from falling into the hands of a potential dictator and so gave it to the states and Congress, establishing that “he Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”

These obvious lies make it seem crystal clear that Trump and his loyalists are preparing to reject any election results that they don’t like.

Trump’s panic about facing voters is increasingly evident. His job approval ratings are already abysmal, and the fallout from his tariffs and deportations is only now beginning to show. Last Thursday, a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the Producer Price Index—wholesale costs that will likely show up later in consumer costs—jumped 0.9% in July, the largest jump since June 2022, when the U.S. was mired in post-pandemic inflation. The wholesale price of vegetables jumped 38.9% in July.

On Friday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that the budget reconciliation bill (called by Republicans the OBBBA, for “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act”) that adds $3.4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade will trigger cuts of up to $491 billion in Medicare (not a typo) from 2027 to 2034 in addition to its cuts of almost a trillion dollars to Medicaid over the next ten years. The 2010 Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act (S-PAYGO) automatically triggers cuts to government programs if the budget deficit increases as it is expected to under the new law, and Medicare spending would be on the chopping block.

Although Democrats called attention to this threat to Medicare during debates over the measure, Republicans promised their cuts to Medicaid would target only “waste, fraud, and abuse” and promised they would not touch Medicare.
Today Marty Schladen of the Ohio Capital Journal showed what those cuts actually look like in one state. Schladen reported that the cuts to Medicaid will take insurance from 310,000 people. Schladen also noted that the law ended the “enhanced premium tax credit” that made health insurance purchased on the Affordable Care Act’s insurance markets more affordable for those who make between 100% and 400% of federal poverty guidelines. More than 530,000 people in Ohio have benefited from the program. Their premiums will go up dramatically when it expires at the end of this year, and experts warn that more than 100,000 healthier people will drop their coverage. That loss, in turn, will drive up costs for those remaining in the market.

Scott Horsley of NPR reported on Saturday that electricity prices in the country have “jumped more than twice as fast as the overall cost of living in the last year.” Prices are going up as producers export liquid natural gas and as data centers swallow energy to fuel the AI boom.

Elected on his promises to lower prices, Trump is in trouble with those who believed those promises. Today, former Ohio senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, formally announced his candidacy for the Senate seat vacated when J.D. Vance became vice president. Brown noted that in Ohio, which has a population of about 12 million people, “half a million are going to lose their insurance. These are mostly working families that are working for an employer that doesn’t provide insurance, or they’re kids, or they’re seniors, or they’re disabled people. Those are the people who are losing their health insurance. People didn’t vote for that. They didn’t vote for drug prices to go up. They didn’t vote for higher grocery bills. They didn’t vote for veterans’ benefits being slashed. They didn’t vote for any of this.”

On Thursday, the Pew Research Center reported that only 38% of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance, with 61% disapproving of it.

And then there is the increasing evidence that Trump is unable to manage the presidency. Today Trump met with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, French president Emmanuel Macron, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, German chancellor Friedrich Merz, NATO secretary general Mark Rutte, United Kingdom prime minister Keir Starmer, and Finnish president Alexander Stubb. That so many foreign leaders dropped everything to rush to Washington, D.C., after Trump’s meeting with Putin on Friday indicated their alarm. The leaders reiterated that Putin started the war and could stop it at any time, and pressed Trump to back a ceasefire.

At today’s meetings, Trump repeated Russian talking points, complained about how poorly he is treated, said he had ended six wars, insisted that voting in the U.S. is full of fraud, and suggested he would cancel the 2028 elections. By the late afternoon, the president was unable to recognize President Stubb, who was sitting directly across the table from him. “President Stubb of Finland,” Trump said. Looking around, Trump continued: “And he’s uh, he’s somebody that, where are we here? Huh? Where? Where?” Stubb said, “I’m right here.” Trump focused on him and answered: “Oh. You look better than I’ve ever seen you look.”

This evening, CNN senior White House correspondent Kristen Holmes reported that Trump paused his negotiation with European leaders to call Vladimir Putin. Her source said that European leaders were not present for the conversation. Ivan Nechepurenko of the New York Times reported that the call was forty minutes long.

apparently those democratic senators are now under police guard

The Tide Looks to Be Turning Against Trump as His Decline Becomes More Obvious

August 20, 2025 (Wednesday)

President Donald J. Trump created a firestorm yesterday when he said that the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex, located mostly in Washington, D.C., focuses too much on “how bad slavery was.” But his objection to recognizing the horrors of human enslavement is not simply white supremacy. It is the logical outcome of the political ideology that created MAGA. It is the same ideology that leads him and his loyalists to try to rig the nation’s voting system to create a one-party state.

That ideology took shape in the years immediately after the Civil War, when Black men and poor white men in the South voted for leaders who promised to rebuild their shattered region, provide schools and hospitals (as well as desperately needed prosthetics for veterans), and develop the economy with railroads to provide an equal opportunity for all men to work hard and rise.

Former Confederates, committed to the idea of both their racial superiority and their right to control the government, loathed the idea of Black men voting. But their opposition to Black voting on racial grounds ran headlong into the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which, after it was ratified in 1870, gave the U.S. government the power to make sure that no state denied any man the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” When white former Confederates nonetheless tried to force their Black neighbors from the polls, Congress in 1870 created the Department of Justice, which began to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan members who had been terrorizing the South.

With racial discrimination now a federal offense, elite white southerners changed their approach. They insisted that they objected to Black voting not on racial grounds, but because Black men were voting for programs that redistributed wealth from hardworking white people to Black people, since hospitals and roads would cost tax dollars and white people were the only ones with taxable property in the Reconstruction South. Poor Black voters were instituting, one popular magazine wrote, “Socialism in South Carolina.”

In contrast to what they insisted was the federal government’s turn toward socialism, former Confederates celebrated the American cowboys who were moving cattle from Texas to railheads first in Missouri and then northward across the plains, mythologizing them as true Americans. Although the American West depended on the federal government more than any other region of the country, southern Democrats claimed the cowboy wanted nothing but for the government to leave him alone so he could earn prosperity through his own hard work with other men in a land where they dominated Indigenous Americans, Mexicans, and women.

That image faded during the Great Depression and World War II as southerners turned with relief to federal aid and investment. Like them, the vast majority of Americans—Democrats, Independents, and Republicans—turned to the federal government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and support a rules-based international order. This way of thinking became known as the “liberal consensus.”

But some businessmen, furious at the idea of regulation and taxes, set out to destroy the liberal consensus that they believed stopped them from accumulating as much money as they deserved. They made little headway until the Supreme Court in 1954 unanimously decided that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Three years later, Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and mobilized the 101st Airborne Division to protect the Black students at Little Rock Central High School. The use of tax dollars to protect Black rights gave those determined to destroy the liberal consensus an opening to reach back and rally supporters with the racism of Reconstruction.

Federal protection of equal rights was a form of socialism, they insisted, and just as their predecessors had done in the 1870s, they turned to the image of the cowboy as the true American. When Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, who boasted of his western roots and wore a white cowboy hat, won the Republican nomination for president in 1964, convention organizers chose to make sure that it was the delegation from South Carolina—the heart of the Confederacy—that put his candidacy over the top.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act protected Black and Brown voting, giving the political parties the choice of courting either those voters or their reactionary opponents. President Richard Nixon cast the die for the Republicans when he chose to court the same southern white supremacists that backed Goldwater to give him the win in 1968.

As his popularity slid because of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and Cambodia and the May 1970 Kent State shooting, Nixon began to demonize “women’s libbers” as well as Black Americans and people of color. With his determination to roll back the New Deal, Ronald Reagan doubled down on the idea that racial minorities and women were turning the U.S. into a socialist country: his “welfare queen” was a Black woman who lived large by scamming government services.

After 1980, women and racial minorities voted for Democrats over Republicans, and as they did so, talk radio and, later, personalities on the Fox News Channel hammered on the idea that these voters were ushering socialism into the United States. After the Democrats passed the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, often called the “Motor Voter Act,” to make registering to vote in federal elections easier, Republicans began to insist that Democrats could win elections only through voter fraud.

Increasingly, Republicans treated Democratic victories as illegitimate and worked to prevent them. In 2000, Republican operatives rioted to shut down a recount in Florida that might have given Democrat Al Gore the presidency. Then, when voters elected Democratic president Barack Obama in 2008, Republican operatives launched Operation REDMAP—Republican Redistricting Majority Project—to take control of statehouses before the 2010 census and gerrymander states to keep control of the House of Representatives and prevent the Democrats from passing legislation.

In that same year, the Republican-dominated Supreme Court reversed a century of campaign finance restrictions to permit corporations and other groups from outside the electoral region to spend unlimited money on elections. Three years after the Citizens United decision, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act that protected minority voting.

Despite the Republican thumb on the scale of American elections by the time he ran in 2016, Trump made his political career on the idea that Democrats were trying to cheat him of victory. Before the 2016 election, Trump’s associate Roger Stone launched a “Stop the Steal” website asking for donations of $10,000 because, he said, “If this election is close, THEY WILL STEAL IT.” “Donald Trump thinks Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are going to steal the next election,” the website said. A federal judge had to bar Stone and his Stop the Steal colleagues from intimidating voters at the polls in what they claimed was their search for election fraud.

In 2020, of course, Trump turned that rhetoric into a weapon designed to overturn the results of a presidential election. Just today, newly unredacted filings in the lawsuit Smartmatic brought against Fox News included text messages showing that Fox News Channel personalities knew the election wasn’t stolen. But Jesse Watters mused to Greg Gutfield, “Think about how incredible our ratings would be if Fox went ALL in on STOP THE STEAL.” Jeanine Pirro, now the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, boasted of how hard she was working for Trump and the Republicans.

In forty years, Republicans went from opposing Democrats’ policies, to insisting that Democrats were socialists who had no right to govern, to the idea that Republicans have a right to rig the system to keep voters from being able to elect Democrats to office. Now they appear to have gone to the next logical step: that democracy itself must be destroyed to create permanent Republican rule in order to make sure the government cannot be used for the government programs Americans want.

Trump is working to erase women and minorities from the public sphere while openly calling for a system that makes it impossible for voters to elect his opponents. The new Texas maps show how these two plans work together: people of color make up 60% of the population of Texas, but the new maps would put white voters in charge of at least 26 of the state’s 38 districts. According to Texas state representative Vince Perez, it will take about 445,000 white residents to secure a member of Congress, but about 1.4 million Latino residents or 2 million Black residents to elect one.
In order to put those maps in place, the Republican Texas House speaker has assigned state troopers to police the Democratic members to make sure they show up and give the Republicans enough lawmakers present to conduct business. Today that police custody translated to Texas representative Nicole Collier being threatened with felony charges for talking on the phone, from a bathroom, to Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Democratic California governor Gavin Newsom.

Republicans have taken away the liberty, and now the voice, of a Black woman elected by voters to represent them in the government. This is a crisis far bigger than Texas.

When Trump says that our history focuses too much on how bad slavery was, he is not simply downplaying the realities of human enslavement: he is advocating a world in which Black people, people of color, poor people, and women should let elite white men lead, and be grateful for that paternalism. It is the same argument elite enslavers made before the Civil War to defend their destruction of the idea of democracy to create an oligarchy. When Trump urges Republicans to slash voting rights to stop socialism and keep him in power, he makes the same argument former Confederates made after the war to keep those who would use the government for the public good from voting.

Led by Donald Trump, MAGA Republicans are trying to take the country back to the past, rewriting history by imposing the ideology of the Confederacy on the United States of America.

But that effort depends on Republicans buying into the idea that only women and minorities want government programs. That narrative is falling apart as cuts to the government slash programs on which all Americans depend and older white Americans take to the streets. Today, with the chants of those protesting Trump’s takeover of Washington, D.C., echoing in the background, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told reporters: “We’re not going to let the communists destroy a great American city…. hese stupid white hippies…all need to go home and take a nap because they’re all over 90 years old, and we’re gonna get back to the business of protecting the American people and the citizens of Washington, D.C.”

You know if someone assassinated Stephen Miller it would really make my day.

Witty Rejoinder said:

You know if someone assassinated Stephen Miller it would really make my day.

Hey, I’ve got a long list too.

Witty Rejoinder said:

You know if someone assassinated Stephen Miller it would really make my day.

You can’t kill the undead.

August 21, 2025 (Thursday)

Yesterday, Republicans in the Texas House of Representatives approved a new map redrawing congressional districts to switch five seats from Democratic control to Republican. Now the Texas Senate will take it up. President Donald Trump demanded the new map because with popular support for his administration plummeting, he is worried about facing voters in the 2026 midterm elections. Texas Republicans are quite open that they launched a rare mid-decade redistricting simply to maximize their partisan gain. Although people of color are driving Texas’s population growth, the new maps put the vast majority of electoral power in the hands of white Texans.

Last night, just before midnight, Trump cheered on the Texas Republicans and called for Florida, Indiana, and other states to do the same thing. He also called for Republicans in the state legislatures to “STOP MAIL-IN VOTING” and “go to PAPER BALLOTS before it is too late.” “If we do these TWO things,” he wrote, “we will pick up 100 more seats, and the CROOKED game of politics is over. God Bless America!!!”

The president of the United States is openly admitting that his party cannot win a free and fair election.

Instead of appealing to voters with popular policies, he is calling for rigging our elections so that his party cannot lose. This appears to have been the plan all along. In July 2024, Trump told an audience of evangelical Christians that if they voted for him in November, “in four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”

Republicans have put their thumb on the scales of the nation’s election machinery for years, suppressing Democratic voting and gerrymandering the states to make it harder to elect Democrats than to elect Republicans. Now Trump has come right out and admitted that leaders understand they cannot win without jiggering the system to create what political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way call “competitive authoritarianism,” in which elections are held because leaders want the legitimacy of an election, but the competition is so unfair the outcome is pretty much preordained.

But after decades of trying to protect democracy by reinforcing democratic norms, Democrats and their allies appear to be willing to fight fire with fire. Democratic lawmakers in California responded to the Texans’ power grab by redrawing their own congressional districts to act as a counterweight to the Texas plan.

Today the California legislature passed two measures to send to voters the question of whether to redistrict the state temporarily to offset the new Texas map. The urgent measures received the required two-thirds majority to pass, and Governor Gavin Newsom signed them into law this evening. He also declared that the state will hold a special election on November 4 for voters to weigh in on whether to adopt the new maps temporarily to neutralize the Texas Republicans’ power grab.

Republicans are now openly rigging the system—itself a profound attack on our democracy— for a leader whose mental acuity is slipping and whose association with convicted sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein has weakened his support even among his base.

On the right-wing Todd Starnes Show today, Trump upped the number of wars he claims to have solved to ten, three more than the seven he has been claiming. “We ended seven wars,” he said. “Probably more than that. You know, I will, they wrote an article that they gave me three additional ones that I ended without even knowing it, but you know I saw things were going bad and it looked like it was going to go bad and it could’ve been, it could’ve been ten.”

For all that the president calls himself the peace president and seems so desperate to win a Nobel Peace Prize that he brought it up with Norway’s finance minister in a cold call about tariffs in July, he is increasingly turning to the use of the military.

In February, Trump designated certain Latin American drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, a designation normally applied to groups that use violence for political ends, like al-Qaeda. On August 8, in the midst of the deep furor after the Wall Street Journal reported that he was named in the Epstein files, Trump secretly signed a directive to use military force against those cartels. Now it appears the U.S. is moving military personnel toward Mexico and Venezuela.

Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum has been working with the U.S. to combat drug trafficking and has rejected the use of the U.S. military in Mexico. Scholar of military law Geoffrey Corn told Kevin Maurer and Asawin Suebsaeng of Rolling Stone that the government’s designation of cartels as foreign terrorist organizations does not authorize the use of force. For that, he said, “ou have to make a credible argument that the U.S. faces an armed attack.”

Corn, who directs the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech School of Law, told Dan Gooding and Jesus Mesa of Newsweek: “Absent Mexican consent, any military action in Mexico will be condemned, I believe justifiably, as an act of aggression in violation of the most basic provision of the UN Charter and customary international law.” Experts add that strikes on Mexico would do little to stop the flow of drugs over the border and would increase violence in the region, intensifying pressure for the U.S. to provide asylum for migrants fleeing the country.

On Monday, August 18, Steve Holland of Reuters reported that three U.S. destroyers, the USS Gravely, the USS Jason Dunham, and the USS Sampson, were being deployed to Venezuela as part of the effort to combat cartels. On Tuesday, when a reporter asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt about those ships, with 4,000 Marines on board, she said that Trump “is prepared to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into our country and to bring those responsible to justice. The Maduro regime is not the legitimate government of Venezuela. It is a narco-terror cartel and Maduro, it is the view of this administration, is not a legitimate president. He is the fugitive head of this cartel who has been indicted in the United States for trafficking drugs into the country.” She did not take any further questions.

Trump could just release the Epstein files.
That issue is not going away. Social media users continue to hammer on it, and on Monday the House Oversight Committee began to hear testimony from those it subpoenaed after Democrats used a parliamentary maneuver to force chair James Comer (R-KY) to do so. Former attorney general William Barr, who was in office when convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein died in his cell in 2019, testified behind closed doors. The Department of Justice was supposed to begin handing over documents from the Epstein investigation on Tuesday but missed that deadline. Now it says it will hand them over beginning tomorrow.

According to Jeremy Roebuck of the Washington Post, Comer said that Barr had been “very transparent” and that he had never seen any evidence that Trump was involved in Epstein’s crimes. Of the document release, he said: “I appreciate the Trump Administration’s commitment to transparency and efforts to provide the American people with information about this matter.”

Meanwhile, U.S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams of the Southern District of Florida today prohibited Florida officials from incarcerating any more detainees at the immigrant detention center in the Everglades that supporters have called “Alligator Alcatraz.” The government’s lawyers said the facility housed people only temporarily, so stopping the arrival of new inmates should empty the center. The judge ordered that after 60 days, officials must begin to dismantle parts of the facility because of the damage it was inflicting on an environment that has been protected since 1947.

“ince that time,” she wrote, “every Florida governor, every Florida senator, and countless local and national political figures, including presidents, have publicly pledged their unequivocal support for the restoration, conservation, and protection of the Everglades. This Order does nothing more than uphold the basic requirements of legislation designed to fulfill those promises.”

RIP democracy

Divine Angel said:

RIP democracy

I said, last year, that a high-priority goal for the Republicans would be to cement themselves into power, to set things up so that they simply can’t lose an election.

I may have missed it, but i didn’t see that Heather made any mention of California Gavin Newsom’s moves to negate the dodgy work in Texas, by redrawing California’s electoral maps.

Divine Angel said:

RIP democracy

Yes. They’ll need to burn the place down and start again.

party_pants said:

Divine Angel said:

RIP democracy

Yes. They’ll need to burn the place down and start again.

The odds against that seem to shorten by the day.

captain_spalding said:

party_pants said:

Divine Angel said:

RIP democracy

Yes. They’ll need to burn the place down and start again.

The odds against that seem to shorten by the day.

If they succeed in rigging the electorates, it will take a civil war to change the government.

captain_spalding said:

Divine Angel said:

RIP democracy

I said, last year, that a high-priority goal for the Republicans would be to cement themselves into power, to set things up so that they simply can’t lose an election.

I may have missed it, but i didn’t see that Heather made any mention of California Gavin Newsom’s moves to negate the dodgy work in Texas, by redrawing California’s electoral maps.

“Democratic lawmakers in California responded to the Texans’ power grab by redrawing their own congressional districts to act as a counterweight to the Texas plan.

Today the California legislature passed two measures to send to voters the question of whether to redistrict the state temporarily to offset the new Texas map. The urgent measures received the required two-thirds majority to pass, and Governor Gavin Newsom signed them into law this evening. He also declared that the state will hold a special election on November 4 for voters to weigh in on whether to adopt the new maps temporarily to neutralize the Texas Republicans’ power grab.”

party_pants said:

captain_spalding said:

party_pants said:

Yes. They’ll need to burn the place down and start again.

The odds against that seem to shorten by the day.

If they succeed in rigging the electorates, it will take a civil war to change the government.

A good deal might depend on the armed forces, and where they feel that their duty lies.

They all swear to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; (to) bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and (to) obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (So help me God)’.

So, there’s a potential conflict of loyalties there. It may come to where they must ask themselves , do we ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States’, or do we ‘obey the orders of the President of the United States’?

Because someone like Trump could present them with a situation where they can’t do both.

Sif Trump is interested in upholding the Constitution.

Divine Angel said:

Sif Trump is interested in upholding the Constitution.

You’re right, he wouldn’t give a damn about the Constitution, beyond what protections if might offer to him, personally.

The dilemma is for those whove simultaneously sworn/affirmed that they will act to defend to Constitution, and to obey the person who is presently the greatest threat to the Constitution.

It’s all very easy when they’re conducting military operations outside of the US. The Constitution is safely in place, back in the US of A, no problems, we can concentrate on ‘obey(ing) the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over (us)’.

But, when it’s happening at home, andf it’s President vs. Constitution…

holding up the constitution

captain_spalding said:

party_pants said:

captain_spalding said:

The odds against that seem to shorten by the day.

If they succeed in rigging the electorates, it will take a civil war to change the government.

A good deal might depend on the armed forces, and where they feel that their duty lies.

They all swear to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; (to) bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and (to) obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (So help me God)’.

So, there’s a potential conflict of loyalties there. It may come to where they must ask themselves , do we ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States’, or do we ‘obey the orders of the President of the United States’?

Because someone like Trump could present them with a situation where they can’t do both.

Well the Supreme Court and the Congress are too weak to do anything about Troup flouting the big C. It will really be down to which way the military jump.

party_pants said:

captain_spalding said:

party_pants said:

If they succeed in rigging the electorates, it will take a civil war to change the government.

A good deal might depend on the armed forces, and where they feel that their duty lies.

They all swear to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; (to) bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and (to) obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (So help me God)’.

So, there’s a potential conflict of loyalties there. It may come to where they must ask themselves , do we ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States’, or do we ‘obey the orders of the President of the United States’?

Because someone like Trump could present them with a situation where they can’t do both.

Well the Supreme Court and the Congress are too weak to do anything about Troup flouting the big C. It will really be down to which way the military jump.

Trump

>>Meanwhile, U.S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams of the Southern District of Florida today prohibited Florida officials from incarcerating any more detainees at the immigrant detention center in the Everglades that supporters have called “Alligator Alcatraz.” The government’s lawyers said the facility housed people only temporarily, so stopping the arrival of new inmates should empty the center. The judge ordered that after 60 days, officials must begin to dismantle parts of the facility because of the damage it was inflicting on an environment that has been protected since 1947.

“ince that time,” she wrote, “every Florida governor, every Florida senator, and countless local and national political figures, including presidents, have publicly pledged their unequivocal support for the restoration, conservation, and protection of the Everglades. This Order does nothing more than uphold the basic requirements of legislation designed to fulfill those promises.”<<

Interesting use of environmental laws.

party_pants said:

captain_spalding said:

party_pants said:

Yes. They’ll need to burn the place down and start again.

The odds against that seem to shorten by the day.

If they succeed in rigging the electorates, it will take a civil war to change the government.

and that appears to be iin the offing.

party_pants said:

captain_spalding said:

party_pants said:

If they succeed in rigging the electorates, it will take a civil war to change the government.

A good deal might depend on the armed forces, and where they feel that their duty lies.

They all swear to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; (to) bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and (to) obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (So help me God)’.

So, there’s a potential conflict of loyalties there. It may come to where they must ask themselves , do we ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States’, or do we ‘obey the orders of the President of the United States’?

Because someone like Trump could present them with a situation where they can’t do both.

Well the Supreme Court and the Congress are too weak to do anything about Troup flouting the big C. It will really be down to which way the military jump.

Scotus and Congress aren’t weak. The problem is they’re not doing their job as separate and equal branches of the US government because the they’re sycophantic cowards who care more for their careers than their duty to their constituents, their country and the principles on which the US was founded.

Witty Rejoinder said:

party_pants said:

captain_spalding said:

A good deal might depend on the armed forces, and where they feel that their duty lies.

They all swear to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; (to) bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and (to) obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (So help me God)’.

So, there’s a potential conflict of loyalties there. It may come to where they must ask themselves , do we ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States’, or do we ‘obey the orders of the President of the United States’?

Because someone like Trump could present them with a situation where they can’t do both.

Well the Supreme Court and the Congress are too weak to do anything about Troup flouting the big C. It will really be down to which way the military jump.

Scotus and Congress aren’t weak. The problem is they’re not doing their job as separate and equal branches of the US government because the they’re sycophantic cowards who care more for their careers than their duty to their constituents, their country and the principles on which the US was founded.

That fits my general description of ‘‘weak”.

A couple of hours ago, party pants appeared to state that, having to choose between Trump and the Constitution, the US military would opt for Trump.

I’m not so sure about that.

Whatever their other failings, senior officers in the US military are not stupid. Sometimes blinkered, sometimes biased, but not stupid. The vast majority of them have been schooled, to a greater or lesser degree, in history.

I suggest that, in a Trump/Constitution choice, the very senior brass in the US military might well take the view that Presidents come and go, but the Constitution represents the basis on which the entire nation was founded. It was, and almost certainly is, their understanding that the Constitution existed and guided the country from long before they, or anyone else alive today, was born, and theiir expectation that it would be doing that long after everyone today is gone.

They’ll consider the judgement of history, and ask themselves if they want to be known hereafter as the people who abandoned the principles on which the country was founded and developed, for the sake of fealty to a ‘man’ who’s offered more than sufficient evidence that he shouldn’t be sitting at that desk.

captain_spalding said:

A couple of hours ago, party pants appeared to state that, having to choose between Trump and the Constitution, the US military would opt for Trump.

I’m not so sure about that.

Whatever their other failings, senior officers in the US military are not stupid. Sometimes blinkered, sometimes biased, but not stupid. The vast majority of them have been schooled, to a greater or lesser degree, in history.

I suggest that, in a Trump/Constitution choice, the very senior brass in the US military might well take the view that Presidents come and go, but the Constitution represents the basis on which the entire nation was founded. It was, and almost certainly is, their understanding that the Constitution existed and guided the country from long before they, or anyone else alive today, was born, and theiir expectation that it would be doing that long after everyone today is gone.

They’ll consider the judgement of history, and ask themselves if they want to be known hereafter as the people who abandoned the principles on which the country was founded and developed, for the sake of fealty to a ‘man’ who’s offered more than sufficient evidence that he shouldn’t be sitting at that desk.

From a positivity point of view, America will one day be rid of Trumpism.
For now it is a reality that most of us hope will end soon.

captain_spalding said:

A couple of hours ago, party pants appeared to state that, having to choose between Trump and the Constitution, the US military would opt for Trump.

I’m not so sure about that.

Whatever their other failings, senior officers in the US military are not stupid. Sometimes blinkered, sometimes biased, but not stupid. The vast majority of them have been schooled, to a greater or lesser degree, in history.

I suggest that, in a Trump/Constitution choice, the very senior brass in the US military might well take the view that Presidents come and go, but the Constitution represents the basis on which the entire nation was founded. It was, and almost certainly is, their understanding that the Constitution existed and guided the country from long before they, or anyone else alive today, was born, and theiir expectation that it would be doing that long after everyone today is gone.

They’ll consider the judgement of history, and ask themselves if they want to be known hereafter as the people who abandoned the principles on which the country was founded and developed, for the sake of fealty to a ‘man’ who’s offered more than sufficient evidence that he shouldn’t be sitting at that desk.

pretty sure getting rich now is much more attractive to most people there than getting a dedicated footnote in some history book

SCIENCE said:

captain_spalding said:

A couple of hours ago, party pants appeared to state that, having to choose between Trump and the Constitution, the US military would opt for Trump.

I’m not so sure about that.

Whatever their other failings, senior officers in the US military are not stupid. Sometimes blinkered, sometimes biased, but not stupid. The vast majority of them have been schooled, to a greater or lesser degree, in history.

I suggest that, in a Trump/Constitution choice, the very senior brass in the US military might well take the view that Presidents come and go, but the Constitution represents the basis on which the entire nation was founded. It was, and almost certainly is, their understanding that the Constitution existed and guided the country from long before they, or anyone else alive today, was born, and theiir expectation that it would be doing that long after everyone today is gone.

They’ll consider the judgement of history, and ask themselves if they want to be known hereafter as the people who abandoned the principles on which the country was founded and developed, for the sake of fealty to a ‘man’ who’s offered more than sufficient evidence that he shouldn’t be sitting at that desk.

pretty sure getting rich now is much more attractive to most people there than getting a dedicated footnote in some history book

You don’t join the services to get rich.

SCIENCE said:

captain_spalding said:

A couple of hours ago, party pants appeared to state that, having to choose between Trump and the Constitution, the US military would opt for Trump.

I’m not so sure about that.

Whatever their other failings, senior officers in the US military are not stupid. Sometimes blinkered, sometimes biased, but not stupid. The vast majority of them have been schooled, to a greater or lesser degree, in history.

I suggest that, in a Trump/Constitution choice, the very senior brass in the US military might well take the view that Presidents come and go, but the Constitution represents the basis on which the entire nation was founded. It was, and almost certainly is, their understanding that the Constitution existed and guided the country from long before they, or anyone else alive today, was born, and theiir expectation that it would be doing that long after everyone today is gone.

They’ll consider the judgement of history, and ask themselves if they want to be known hereafter as the people who abandoned the principles on which the country was founded and developed, for the sake of fealty to a ‘man’ who’s offered more than sufficient evidence that he shouldn’t be sitting at that desk.

pretty sure getting rich now is much more attractive to most people there than getting a dedicated footnote in some history book

Money money money, it’s a rich man’s world.

captain_spalding said:

SCIENCE said:

captain_spalding said:

A couple of hours ago, party pants appeared to state that, having to choose between Trump and the Constitution, the US military would opt for Trump.

I’m not so sure about that.

Whatever their other failings, senior officers in the US military are not stupid. Sometimes blinkered, sometimes biased, but not stupid. The vast majority of them have been schooled, to a greater or lesser degree, in history.

I suggest that, in a Trump/Constitution choice, the very senior brass in the US military might well take the view that Presidents come and go, but the Constitution represents the basis on which the entire nation was founded. It was, and almost certainly is, their understanding that the Constitution existed and guided the country from long before they, or anyone else alive today, was born, and theiir expectation that it would be doing that long after everyone today is gone.

They’ll consider the judgement of history, and ask themselves if they want to be known hereafter as the people who abandoned the principles on which the country was founded and developed, for the sake of fealty to a ‘man’ who’s offered more than sufficient evidence that he shouldn’t be sitting at that desk.

pretty sure getting rich now is much more attractive to most people there than getting a dedicated footnote in some history book

You don’t join the services to get rich.

Though you might join to get a job.

roughbarked said:

roughbarked said:

captain_spalding said:

SCIENCE said:

captain_spalding said:

A couple of hours ago, party pants appeared to state that, having to choose between Trump and the Constitution, the US military would opt for Trump.

I’m not so sure about that.

Whatever their other failings, senior officers in the US military are not stupid. Sometimes blinkered, sometimes biased, but not stupid. The vast majority of them have been schooled, to a greater or lesser degree, in history.

I suggest that, in a Trump/Constitution choice, the very senior brass in the US military might well take the view that Presidents come and go, but the Constitution represents the basis on which the entire nation was founded. It was, and almost certainly is, their understanding that the Constitution existed and guided the country from long before they, or anyone else alive today, was born, and theiir expectation that it would be doing that long after everyone today is gone.

They’ll consider the judgement of history, and ask themselves if they want to be known hereafter as the people who abandoned the principles on which the country was founded and developed, for the sake of fealty to a ‘man’ who’s offered more than sufficient evidence that he shouldn’t be sitting at that desk.

pretty sure getting rich now is much more attractive to most people there than getting a dedicated footnote in some history book

You don’t join the services to get rich.

Money money money, it’s a rich man’s world.

Though you might join to get a job.

right so if doing the pledged duty to uphold the constitution doesn’t pay jack, that’s even more incentive to find an alternative allegiance to earn a lifestyle

roughbarked said:

captain_spalding said:

SCIENCE said:

pretty sure getting rich now is much more attractive to most people there than getting a dedicated footnote in some history book

You don’t join the services to get rich.

Though you might join to get a job.

You might join to get a job, but you stay in because, for whatever reason, you think that you’re doing something worthwhile. And, you have to stay in for a long time to get to where you’re one of the people who decide what stance the forces take.

captain_spalding said:

roughbarked said:

captain_spalding said:

You don’t join the services to get rich.

Though you might join to get a job.

You might join to get a job, but you stay in because, for whatever reason, you think that you’re doing something worthwhile. And, you have to stay in for a long time to get to where you’re one of the people who decide what stance the forces take.

Yes.

A Conversation, Heather Cox Richardson with Katie Couric

August 22, 2025 (Friday)

In these last days of August, with Congress on hiatus and the Epstein files looming, the Trump White House appears to be making a big move to consolidate power over the federal government, weaponize it against Trump’s opponents, and keep him in power indefinitely.

At around 7:00 this morning, FBI agents searched the home and office of Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton, who has been a fierce critic of Trump since leaving his first administration. Officials told reporters the search was part of an investigation into whether Bolton illegally retained classified information or leaked it to news media. But as J.V. Last of The Bulwark noted, an investigation into classified documents from several years ago—as opposed to a search of, say, a drug dealer—would normally mean the government officials would have a conversation with Bolton’s lawyers and arrange for a routine search to which Bolton agreed. Instead, agents stormed his house and office in an early morning raid.

The raid seems a pretty clear warning to those Trump perceives as enemies that he will bring the full weight of the United States government to harass them. Bolton has been a thorn in Trump’s side for years because he is a well-known right-wing figure who has not been shy about speaking out against Trump. As recently as last week, Bolton told CNN that Trump had “achieved very little” by meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Alaska, and that “Putin clearly won.” He also noted that Trump “looked tired.”

Earlier this month, when ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked Bolton if he was worried Trump would come after him as part of the president’s “retribution campaign” being waged through the FBI and the Department of Justice. Bolton pointed out that Trump had already come after him by removing his Secret Service protection despite specific Iranian threats against his life. Bolton added: “I think it is a retribution presidency.”

Targeting Bolton has been a goal of FBI director Kash Patel, whom Trump appointed after Patel made it clear he intended to use the power of government against Trump’s opponents. “We’re going to come after you whether it’s criminally or civilly,” Patel said in 2023 on Trump associate Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.

Indeed, Trump loyalist Attorney General Pam Bondi has launched criminal investigations into Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA), who led the House Intelligence Committee that broke the story of Trump’s phone call to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky asking him to smear Trump’s 2020 political opponent Joe Biden; New York Attorney General Letitia James, who successfully sued Trump and the Trump Organization for fraud; and now Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, who suggested on August 6 that the revision of the last few months’ jobs numbers might signal a turning point in the economy.

Those investigations come after another Trump loyalist, William Pulte, who heads the Federal Housing Finance Agency, alleged that the three committed mortgage fraud years ago. All three have denied the allegations, and Allan Smith, Steve Kopack, and Dareh Gregorian of NBC News note that accusation of mortgage fraud “has long been a common tactic in opposition research on political campaigns. James’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, pointed out that the administration does not appear to be investigating Trump loyalist Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who, divorce filings released this July show, claimed three different properties as his primary residence, thus securing lower-interest mortgages on them.

Earlier this week, bodycam footage released from a court filing by Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), whom the administration has charged with assaulting federal agents during the chaotic arrest of Newark, New Jersey, mayor Ras Baraka on May 9, shows that the Justice Department’s deputy attorney general Todd Blanche personally ordered Baraka’s arrest. The case was later dismissed.

And yet Trump loyalists are not just targeting people in order to intimidate opponents. They seem determined to rewrite history to suit Trump.

In July the Department of Justice launched investigations of former FBI director James Comey and former CIA director John Brennan, alleging they had made false statements to Congress about the investigation into the attempt by Russian operatives to help Trump’s 2016 candidacy. After all these years, Trump continues to come back to the scandal that he calls “Russia, Russia, Russia.”

Yesterday, Russia bombed a U.S. factory in Ukraine, wounding at least 15 people, and today, Russian officials made it clear they would not even entertain the bilateral summit with Ukraine Trump called for. Nonetheless, today in a bizarre session in the Oval Office, at what was supposed to be an announcement about next year’s FIFA World Cup, wearing a cap with the words “Trump Was Right About Everything,” Trump showed reporters a photograph of himself and Putin that Putin had sent him from their meeting in Alaska last week, and expressed sadness that Putin, who has murdered more than a million people and is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, can’t attend the FIFA games. Trump said he planned to sign the photograph as a gift for Putin.

The administration’s crusade against the U.S. intelligence agencies that uncovered the relationship between Russian operatives and Trump’s 2016 campaign is continuing as part of the administration’s power grab. On Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced she will cut 40% of her office, with cuts coming from the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which, as Maggie Miller and Dana Nickel of Politico note, “collects and analyzes data on foreign influence operations seeking to undermine U.S. democracy.”

Today Hegseth fired the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, U.S. Air Force Lt. General Jeffrey Kruse. The Defense Intelligence Agency provides intelligence to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and to U.S. military personnel in the field.

The crackdown in Washington, D.C., seems to have far less to do with combating crime in a city where crime rates are at a 30-year low than it does with demonstrating that the administration controls the capital, the seat of the U.S. government. As conservative lawyer George Conway, who helpfully videoed the FBI raid on John Bolton’s house this morning, put it: “If you want to have a coup against the constitutional order, you want to control the capital city. And if he has control of the policing in the city of Washington,… how do you stop him? Who’s gonna tell him to leave the White House?”

Trump has rewarded those who fought to steal the 2020 election for him, pardoning or commuting the sentences of more than 1,500 people convicted or charged in connection with the January 6, 2021 riot designed to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Biden president, and yesterday he demanded that Colorado officials release former election officer Tina Peters, whom a jury found guilty of four felonies for breaching election equipment to supporte Trump’s lies about election fraud after that election. Trump posted on social media: “She did nothing wrong, except catching the Democrats cheat in the Election …. If she is not released, I am going to take harsh measures!!!”

Now Trump and his allies appear to be cementing control of the capital. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said in a statement today from the Pentagon that the 2,000 National Guard members stationed in Washington, D.C., will begin to carry weapons. More National Guard personnel are on the way. At the same time, FBI Director Patel and deputy director Dan Bongino appear to be turning the FBI into a national police force: dropping the requirement for a college degree, reducing training hours, and focusing on street crime rather than the bureau’s traditional expertise in white collar crime, corruption, and so on.

Trump said yesterday he wants to extend the deployment for more than the 30-day limit the law allows, and today he warned that he would take over the city “with the federal government.” Today, in the Oval Office, Trump told reporters that his administration would invade Chicago, which he called a “mess,” next. He said that “African American ladies, beautiful ladies, are saying, ‘Please, President Trump, come to Chicago, please.’”

On August 18, Democracy Docket’s Marc Elias warned that Trump is “stationing the military and other federal law enforcement in blue areas so—when the time comes—he can pivot their mission to suppressing voting rights and undermining free and fair elections.” On Tuesday, Trump ally Steve Bannon said on his webcast War Room: “They’re petrified over at MSNBC and CNN that, hey, since we’re taking control of the cities, there’s going to be ICE officers near polling places. You damn right.”

Last March, scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder wrote that those who fantasize about a strongman make the terrible mistake of thinking “that a strongman will be your strongman. He won’t,” Snyder wrote. “In a democracy, elected representatives listen to constituents. We take this for granted, and imagine that a dictator would owe us something.” But he doesn’t, Snyder explains: your support makes you irrelevant.

Those who supported Trump from a belief that he would protect American business from state interference received yet another example of Snyder’s point today when Trump boasted that the government has taken a 10% stake in Intel, which builds semiconductors and chips. Trump says he intends to take similar stakes in other companies.

In the midst of the day’s firestorm of news, the administration released several pieces of the transcripts of Todd Blanche’s interview with Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell. In them, she is recorded as saying, among other things: “s far as I’m concerned, President Trump was always very cordial and very kind to me. And I just want to say that I…admire his extraordinary achievement in becoming the president now. And I like him, and I’ve always liked him.”

Trump apologist lawyer Jonathan Turley suggested the Maxwell interviews would lay the story of the Epstein files to rest. But the interviews were always a distraction from the Epstein files themselves. Prosecutors at the Department of Justice itself called Maxwell a serial liar, and as Erica Orden, Josh Gerstein, and Kyle Cheney of Politico note, she is now angling for a pardon after her conviction on sex trafficking charges.

In Illinois today, Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson called Trump’s threat to take over the city an illegal abuse of power.

On X, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker posted: “Things People are Begging for: 1. Cheaper groceries 2. No Medicaid and SNAP cuts 3. Release of the Epstein Files.” He added: “Things People are NOT begging for: 1. An authoritarian power grab of major cities.”

August 23, 2025 (Saturday)

“It is my Great Honor to report that the United States of America now fully owns and controls 10% of INTEL, a Great American Company that has an even more incredible future,” President Donald Trump wrote yesterday afternoon on social media. He took the stake in the company after calling on August 7 for its chief executive officer, Lip-Bu Tan, to step down. When Tan met with Trump on August 11, the president says, he told Tan the U.S. “should be given 10% of Intel.” Tan agreed. Announcing the deal, Trump referred to Tan as “the Highly Respected Chief Executive Officer of the Company.”

It is wild to see Republicans cheering on a president who publicly threatened a CEO and stated openly that he shook the man down for a major share in his company.

It is even wilder to see Republicans, who since 1980 have held so fervently to the idea of free markets that they have denounced even the most basic regulations as socialism, celebrate the government takeover of a private company.

The story of that shift is a larger story about how the Republicans came to put party over country and, now, how they have put power over everything.

It was not always this way.

After World War II, leaders of both major political parties agreed that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, protect civil rights, and shore up a rules-based international order to try to prevent another world war. Republicans and Democrats contended, sometimes bitterly, over policies, but members of both parties recognized that they shared with the other a loyalty to the country and a general set of beliefs about what was best for it that encouraged them to seek common ground.

As recently as 1974, Republican senators went to the White House to tell a member of their own party that the House of Representatives would vote to impeach him for covering up a break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic Party and that they would vote to convict him. After their visit, President Richard M. Nixon resigned.

But 1980 saw the takeover of the Republican Party by an extremist faction known as the “Movement Conservatives.” Their roots lay in 1937, when men who hated the New Deal legislation being put in place by the Democrats came together to destroy it. Businessmen who hated business regulations and taxes joined with southern racists who hated Black rights and with religious traditionalists who hated women’s rights and wanted the churches to control welfare programs so they could police behavior.

Calling themselves “conservatives” because they wanted to dismantle the laws and recreate the 1920s, the Movement Conservatives produced a list of demands. They called for deregulation, tax cuts, an end to social welfare spending, and an end to government support for workers, maintaining that those principles would protect the bedrock of the economy: private enterprise. They also called for states’ rights, home rule, and local self-government, by which they meant that southern states could maintain discriminatory laws against their citizens, no matter what the Fourteenth Amendment said.

Their goal was not to compromise with Democrats or Republicans who believed in an active government; their goal was to destroy that government. They insisted that government regulations and taxes were creeping socialism; they said that social welfare sapped American individualism; they said that civil rights laws destroyed democracy by overruling state voters. Most Americans wanted little to do with this faction until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that protected Black and Brown voting enabled the businessmen who hated regulation and taxes to mobilize racists.

Ronald Reagan tapped into the Movement Conservatives in 1964, when he backed Arizona senator Barry Goldwater for the presidency. When he ran for the presidency in 1980, his promises focused on economic freedom, but the racism and sexism in the radical faction was always present; he deliberately appealed to racists with a promise to defend states’ rights and to the sexists trying to combat the women’s liberation movement with an appeal to religious traditionalists. Reagan promised to put businessmen in the driver’s seat, but he depended on the votes of racists and sexists to win the White House.

Reagan’s tax cuts tripled the federal debt and left his successor, George H.W. Bush, facing a $171 billion deficit in 1990, along with the threat of automatic cuts of 40% across the board if the deficit wasn’t reduced. Bush reneged on his promise not to raise taxes. Movement Conservatives signed on in private, but in public they attacked the deal as a betrayal of Reaganism and common people. Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich used the opportunity to purge the Republican Party of its traditional base: those who believed in an active government. He accused anyone who stood against him of being a “Republican In Name Only,” or “RINO.”

In 1994, Gingrich managed to flip the House of Representatives to the Republicans for the first time since 1954, and he set out to reshape the Republican Party into an instrument for destroying the modern government. That effort would require destroying the Democratic Party by referring to its members as “corrupt,” “intolerant,” “sick,” “traitors”; by launching investigations of what he insisted—without evidence—was “voter fraud,” and by investigating and then impeaching Democratic president Bill Clinton.

By the end of the 1990s, leading Republicans no longer saw party differences as differences of policy. Party trumped country because they believed they were in a fight for the soul of America, and they were on the side of the angels.

If keeping Democrats out of power meant it was necessary to skew the system, surely that was justified. Republicans began to talk of purifying the voter rolls in the 1990s, and in 1998 the Florida legislature passed a law that purged from the system as many as 100,000 Black voters presumed to be Democrats. This purge paid off in 2000, when Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore won the popular vote by more than half a million votes but was four votes short of a win in the Electoral College. The contest came down to Florida, where a confusing ballot had siphoned about 10,000 votes intended for Gore off to far-right candidate Pat Buchanan.

A hand recount had reduced Republican candidate George W. Bush’s lead from 1,784 to 537 when Republican operatives attacked the recount venue in Miami-Dade County to stop the recount, claiming there was “voter fraud.” The Supreme Court—led by five Republican-appointed justices—stepped in to give the victory to Bush.

When voters elected Democrat Barack Obama in 2008, Republicans declared war. On the night of Obama’s inauguration, Republican senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and other Republican leaders agreed over dinner to oppose anything that the new president proposed, regardless of whether they agreed with it. “For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,” Republican senators told incoming vice president Joe Biden.

They also worked to make it easier for Republicans to win. In 2010 the Supreme Court overturned a century of campaign finance laws to permit unlimited corporate and other outside money to flow into elections.

At the same time, Republican operatives launched Operation REDMAP, or Redistricting Majority Project, to take over statehouses before the redistricting after the 2010 census. They won the statehouses of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other, smaller states, and they redrew congressional maps using precise computer models. In the 2012 election, Democrats won the White House decisively, the Senate easily, and a majority of 1.4 million votes for House candidates. And yet Republicans came away with a 33-seat majority in the House of Representatives.

Three years later, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act by ending the requirement that states with a history of racial discrimination in voting preclear changes to their voting rules with the Department of Justice. Republican-dominated state legislatures immediately began to restrict voting rights.

But the Republican economic program of slashing regulations and taxes was never popular, and the Republicans stayed in power by doubling down on the racism and sexism of their voting base. After 1987, talk radio fed the rhetoric that racial minorities and women were ushering socialism into the United States, and after 1994 the Fox News Channel amplified it.

In 2016, Donald Trump rode to the White House by playing directly to that racism and sexism and asserting that white men should dominate women and people of color. Establishment leaders backed him for the tax cuts he promised, but they no longer called the shots. The racist and sexist MAGA base did. Trump and his loyalists took the idea that they had a right to rule to its logical extreme. When voters elected Democrat Joe Biden to the presidency, they tried to overturn that election with violence.

Now, back in office, Trump is dismantling the government as Movement Conservatives have wanted for decades. But he has abandoned the small-government principles Movement Conservatives claimed to champion and is using state power to terrorize citizens. He has abandoned the due process of the law and states’ rights and is working to rig the system permanently in his favor. And now he has abandoned the free-market principles around which the Movement Conservatives organized in the first place.

From the beginning, “Movement Conservatism” was anything but conservative. Its supporters embraced the radical goal of dismantling a practical system that stabilized the country after the Great Depression and a devastating world war, a system that was based in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But now they are embracing something altogether different.

Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo explained yesterday on social media that “a new conservatism has emerged. We are leading a rebellion against the establishment and dismantling the elements of the left-wing ideological regime—not for the purpose of nihilism, but for the purpose of rebirth, or restoration, of our republic.”

Rufo’s statement is, as one commenter noted, “just textbook 1930s fascism.”

Katie Couric with Heather Cox Richardson.

The Future of Democracy

August 24, 2025 (Sunday)

As the administration of President Donald Trump is using loopholes in the nation’s laws to claim the right to use the military against American citizens, Democratic governors are pushing back.
The administration has taken control of the Washington, D.C., police under the 1973 Home Rule Act, which permits that takeover if “special conditions of an emergency nature exist.” Although the Department of Justice itself reported that crime in the city is at a 30-year low, Trump declared a crime emergency in the District of Columbia on August 11 to take control of the police.

The Home Rule Act limits the president’s takeover to 30 days unless the House and Senate pass a joint resolution to extend that time. On Friday, Representative Andy Biggs (R-AZ) introduced a bill to extend the takeover for about six months and to make that time the default for all future “emergencies.”

Tonight, California governor Gavin Newsom’s social media account posted: “Trump’s militarization of Los Angeles seems to have been just the start of an authoritarian takeover of American cities. This is not leadership. This is a scary, unlawful grab for power, and we should all be deeply concerned.”

Newsom has been calling attention to Trump’s erratic behavior and mental incapacity by imitating the president’s disjointed all-caps social media posts and mimicking the president’s merchandise. He recently replaced Trump’s name with his own on ball caps, for example, to say “Newsom was right about everything” after Trump appeared Friday with a cap saying “Trump was right about everything,” and has offered flags that say “Make America GAVIN Again” to troll Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. Right-wing media complaints about Newsom’s unprofessional behavior highlight Trump’s instability, for Newsom is simply imitating Trump.

On Saturday, Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post reported that for weeks the Pentagon has been planning a military deployment of National Guard members and possibly active-duty troops to Chicago. The president cannot send National Guard troops unless a governor requests them, but Trump deployed troops in Los Angeles with the argument that the soldiers were protecting federal buildings and personnel, an argument that could apply almost anywhere he sends Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker responded: “The State of Illinois at this time has received no requests or outreach from the federal government asking if we need assistance, and we have made no requests for federal intervention. The safety of the people of Illinois is always my top priority. There is no emergency that warrants the President of the United States federalizing the , deploying the National Guard from other states, or sending active duty military within our own borders. Donald Trump is attempting to manufacture a crisis, politicize Americans who serve in uniform, and continue abusing his power to distract from the pain he’s causing families. We’ll continue to follow the law, stand up for the sovereignty of our state, and protect Illinoisans.”

This morning, Trump threatened to send troops to Baltimore, Maryland, after Maryland governor Wes Moore invited him in what Trump called “a rather nasty and provocative tone,” to join him on a walk through the streets of Baltimore. Trump wrote that “I gave Wes Moore a lot of money to fix his demolished bridge. I will now have to rethink this decision???” Trump appeared to be referring not to his own money, but to federal funds supporting the rebuilding of Baltimore’s Key Bridge, which collapsed after a container ship hit it on March 26, 2024. The collapse stopped operations at one of the busiest ports in the nation.

In another post, Trump suggested that Moore, who served in Afghanistan and received a Bronze Star, awarded for acts of valor in combat, had lied about getting a Bronze Star.

Moore responded: “President Bone Spurs will do anything to get out of walking—even if that means spouting off more lies about the progress we’re making on public safety in Maryland. Hey Donald, we can get you a golf cart if that makes things easier. Just let my team know.” He added: “Did Donald Trump, the President of the United States, lie about an injury to dodge the Vietnam draft?”

The AI feature of X, called “Grok,” helpfully added: “Trump received four student deferments during the Vietnam era, followed by a 1968 medical deferment for bone spurs in his heels, per official records. The diagnosing doctor’s daughters later claimed it was a favor to Trump’s father, with no actual spurs. Michael Cohen testified Trump admitted faking it. Trump denies this, saying it was legitimate but temporary. No medical records confirm or refute.”

On Face the Nation today, Moore said he was actively looking at redistricting in Maryland to offset the Republican mid-decade redistricting in Republican-dominated states Trump is demanding. Moore said: “e…need to make sure that if the president of the United States is putting his finger on the scale to try to manipulate elections because he knows that his policies cannot win in a ballot box, then it behooves each and every one of us to be able to keep all options on the table to ensure that the voters’ voices can actually be heard. “
The National Guard troops deployed to Washington, D.C., will begin carrying firearms tonight.

But Trump appears angry that he is not being given enough scope for his desires. Tonight he posted on social media that the tradition of blue slips, which enables senators to stop the appointment of objectionable federal judges in their own states, has made it impossible for him to appoint the judges he wants. He wrote: “I have a Consultational Right to appoint Judges and U.S. Attorneys, but that RIGHT has been completely taken away from me…. he only candidates that I can get confirmed for these most important positions are, believe it or not, Democrats! Chuck Grassley should allow strong Republican candidates to ascend to these very vital and powerful roles, and tell the Democrats, as they often tell us, to go to HELL!”

Trump is likely reacting to his inability to keep his attorney Alina Habba in the position of U.S. attorney for New Jersey after New Jersey senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim used blue slips to keep her from getting a Senate vote for confirmation. Trump appointed Habba acting U.S. attorney but after her 120-day interim period expired, a panel of judges skipped over her to appoint her assistant, Desiree Leigh Grace, to the job. Attorney general Pam Bondi then fired Grace, and Trump reappointed Habba. Last week, U.S. district judge Matthew Brann ruled that Habba was not holding the post lawfully.

There seems to be some tension in the White House tonight. As Trump’s poll numbers are in the low 40s on his job performance and underwater on every one of his policies, tonight he wrote: “Except what is written and broadcast in the Fake News, I now have the highest poll numbers I’ve ever had, some in the 60’s and even 70’s. Thank you. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

Trump followed that post up with another. “Despite a very high popularity and, according to many, among the greatest 8 months in Presidential History, ABC & NBC FAKE NEWS, two of the worst and most biased networks in history, give me 97% BAD STORIES. IF THAT IS THE CASE, THEY ARE SIMPLY AN ARM OF THE DEMOCRAT PARTY AND SHOULD, ACCORDING TO MANY, HAVE THEIR LICENSES REVOKED BY THE FCC. I would be totally in favor of that because they are so biased and untruthful, an actual threat to our Democracy!!! MAGA”

“ Right-wing media complaints about Newsom’s unprofessional behavior highlight Trump’s instability, for Newsom is simply imitating Trump.”

It’s astounding what they turn a blind eye to as long as it’s Trump doing it.

Neophyte said:

August 24, 2025 (Sunday)

As the administration of President Donald Trump is using loopholes in the nation’s laws to claim the right to use the military against American citizens, Democratic governors are pushing back.
The administration has taken control of the Washington, D.C., police under the 1973 Home Rule Act, which permits that takeover if “special conditions of an emergency nature exist.” Although the Department of Justice itself reported that crime in the city is at a 30-year low, Trump declared a crime emergency in the District of Columbia on August 11 to take control of the police.

The Home Rule Act limits the president’s takeover to 30 days unless the House and Senate pass a joint resolution to extend that time. On Friday, Representative Andy Biggs (R-AZ) introduced a bill to extend the takeover for about six months and to make that time the default for all future “emergencies.”

Tonight, California governor Gavin Newsom’s social media account posted: “Trump’s militarization of Los Angeles seems to have been just the start of an authoritarian takeover of American cities. This is not leadership. This is a scary, unlawful grab for power, and we should all be deeply concerned.”

Newsom has been calling attention to Trump’s erratic behavior and mental incapacity by imitating the president’s disjointed all-caps social media posts and mimicking the president’s merchandise. He recently replaced Trump’s name with his own on ball caps, for example, to say “Newsom was right about everything” after Trump appeared Friday with a cap saying “Trump was right about everything,” and has offered flags that say “Make America GAVIN Again” to troll Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. Right-wing media complaints about Newsom’s unprofessional behavior highlight Trump’s instability, for Newsom is simply imitating Trump.

On Saturday, Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post reported that for weeks the Pentagon has been planning a military deployment of National Guard members and possibly active-duty troops to Chicago. The president cannot send National Guard troops unless a governor requests them, but Trump deployed troops in Los Angeles with the argument that the soldiers were protecting federal buildings and personnel, an argument that could apply almost anywhere he sends Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker responded: “The State of Illinois at this time has received no requests or outreach from the federal government asking if we need assistance, and we have made no requests for federal intervention. The safety of the people of Illinois is always my top priority. There is no emergency that warrants the President of the United States federalizing the , deploying the National Guard from other states, or sending active duty military within our own borders. Donald Trump is attempting to manufacture a crisis, politicize Americans who serve in uniform, and continue abusing his power to distract from the pain he’s causing families. We’ll continue to follow the law, stand up for the sovereignty of our state, and protect Illinoisans.”

This morning, Trump threatened to send troops to Baltimore, Maryland, after Maryland governor Wes Moore invited him in what Trump called “a rather nasty and provocative tone,” to join him on a walk through the streets of Baltimore. Trump wrote that “I gave Wes Moore a lot of money to fix his demolished bridge. I will now have to rethink this decision???” Trump appeared to be referring not to his own money, but to federal funds supporting the rebuilding of Baltimore’s Key Bridge, which collapsed after a container ship hit it on March 26, 2024. The collapse stopped operations at one of the busiest ports in the nation.

In another post, Trump suggested that Moore, who served in Afghanistan and received a Bronze Star, awarded for acts of valor in combat, had lied about getting a Bronze Star.

Moore responded: “President Bone Spurs will do anything to get out of walking—even if that means spouting off more lies about the progress we’re making on public safety in Maryland. Hey Donald, we can get you a golf cart if that makes things easier. Just let my team know.” He added: “Did Donald Trump, the President of the United States, lie about an injury to dodge the Vietnam draft?”

The AI feature of X, called “Grok,” helpfully added: “Trump received four student deferments during the Vietnam era, followed by a 1968 medical deferment for bone spurs in his heels, per official records. The diagnosing doctor’s daughters later claimed it was a favor to Trump’s father, with no actual spurs. Michael Cohen testified Trump admitted faking it. Trump denies this, saying it was legitimate but temporary. No medical records confirm or refute.”

On Face the Nation today, Moore said he was actively looking at redistricting in Maryland to offset the Republican mid-decade redistricting in Republican-dominated states Trump is demanding. Moore said: “e…need to make sure that if the president of the United States is putting his finger on the scale to try to manipulate elections because he knows that his policies cannot win in a ballot box, then it behooves each and every one of us to be able to keep all options on the table to ensure that the voters’ voices can actually be heard. “
The National Guard troops deployed to Washington, D.C., will begin carrying firearms tonight.

But Trump appears angry that he is not being given enough scope for his desires. Tonight he posted on social media that the tradition of blue slips, which enables senators to stop the appointment of objectionable federal judges in their own states, has made it impossible for him to appoint the judges he wants. He wrote: “I have a Consultational Right to appoint Judges and U.S. Attorneys, but that RIGHT has been completely taken away from me…. he only candidates that I can get confirmed for these most important positions are, believe it or not, Democrats! Chuck Grassley should allow strong Republican candidates to ascend to these very vital and powerful roles, and tell the Democrats, as they often tell us, to go to HELL!”

Trump is likely reacting to his inability to keep his attorney Alina Habba in the position of U.S. attorney for New Jersey after New Jersey senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim used blue slips to keep her from getting a Senate vote for confirmation. Trump appointed Habba acting U.S. attorney but after her 120-day interim period expired, a panel of judges skipped over her to appoint her assistant, Desiree Leigh Grace, to the job. Attorney general Pam Bondi then fired Grace, and Trump reappointed Habba. Last week, U.S. district judge Matthew Brann ruled that Habba was not holding the post lawfully.

There seems to be some tension in the White House tonight. As Trump’s poll numbers are in the low 40s on his job performance and underwater on every one of his policies, tonight he wrote: “Except what is written and broadcast in the Fake News, I now have the highest poll numbers I’ve ever had, some in the 60’s and even 70’s. Thank you. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

Trump followed that post up with another. “Despite a very high popularity and, according to many, among the greatest 8 months in Presidential History, ABC & NBC FAKE NEWS, two of the worst and most biased networks in history, give me 97% BAD STORIES. IF THAT IS THE CASE, THEY ARE SIMPLY AN ARM OF THE DEMOCRAT PARTY AND SHOULD, ACCORDING TO MANY, HAVE THEIR LICENSES REVOKED BY THE FCC. I would be totally in favor of that because they are so biased and untruthful, an actual threat to our Democracy!!! MAGA”

Brain explodes.

Divine Angel said:

“ Right-wing media complaints about Newsom’s unprofessional behavior highlight Trump’s instability, for Newsom is simply imitating Trump.”

It’s astounding what they turn a blind eye to as long as it’s Trump doing it.

^

it’s fucking ridiculous

but also more than just turning a blind eye

Divine Angel said:

“ Right-wing media complaints about Newsom’s unprofessional behavior highlight Trump’s instability, for Newsom is simply imitating Trump.”

It’s astounding what they turn a blind eye to as long as it’s Trump doing it.

Merkin Mass Mesmerisation?

SCIENCE said:

Divine Angel said:

“ Right-wing media complaints about Newsom’s unprofessional behavior highlight Trump’s instability, for Newsom is simply imitating Trump.”

It’s astounding what they turn a blind eye to as long as it’s Trump doing it.

^

it’s fucking ridiculous

but also more than just turning a blind eye

I am sure some people have a reality filter where they minimise everything they do that is disruptive or inappropriate.

August 25, 2025 (Monday)

This morning, President Donald J. Trump talked to reporters as he signed several executive orders in the Oval Office. Trump sat behind the Resolute Desk as he has been doing lately, seeming to put its bulk between him and the reporters. Also as he has been doing lately, he kept his left hand over the right, seemingly to hide a large bruise.

Trump was there to announce an executive order charging Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth with creating “specialized units” in the National Guard that will be “specifically trained and equipped to deal with public order issues,” apparently setting them up to take on domestic law enforcement as part of Trump’s attempt to take control of Democratic-run cities.

At the press opportunity, Trump claimed that he saved Washington, D.C.—where crime was at a 30-year low before he took control of the Metropolitan Police Department and mobilized the National Guard—from such rampant crime that no one dared to wear jewelry or carry purses. “People,” he said, “are free for the first time ever.”

Although in 1989 the Supreme Court ruled that burning a flag is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment, Trump ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute anyone who burns a flag, claiming they would automatically go to prison for a year (he has no authority to make such an order). After seven European leaders rushed to the White House to stabilize the U.S. approach to Russia after Trump’s disastrous meeting with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, in Alaska on August 15, Trump claimed that the seven leaders actually represented 38 countries and that they refer to Trump as “the president of Europe.”

Calling Chicago, Illinois, a “a disaster” and “a killing field,” Trump referred to Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker as “a slob.” Trump complained that Pritzker had said Trump was infringing on American freedom and called Trump a dictator. Trump went on: “A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator. I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator. I’m a man with great common sense and a smart person. And when I see what’s happening to our cities, and then you send in troops instead of being praised, they’re saying you’re trying to take over the Republic. These people are sick.”

This afternoon, standing flanked by leaders from business, law enforcement, faith communities, education, local communities, and politics at the Chicago waterfront near the Trump Tower there, Governor Pritzker responded to the news that Trump is planning to send troops to Chicago.

He began by saying: “I want to speak plainly about the moment that we are in and the actual crisis, not the manufactured one, that we are facing in the city and as a state and as a country. If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.”

He acknowledged that “ver the weekend, we learned from the media that Donald Trump has been planning for quite a while now to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago. This is exactly the type of overreach that our country’s founders warned against. And it’s the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances. What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal, it is unconstitutional. It is un-American.”

Pritzker noted that neither his office nor that of Chicago’s mayor had received any communications from the White House. “We found out what Donald Trump was planning the same way that all of you did. We read a story in the Washington Post. If this was really about fighting crime and making the streets safe, what possible justification could the White House have for planning such an exceptional action without any conversations or consultations with the governor, the mayor or the police?”

“Let me answer that question,” he said. “This is not about fighting crime. This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city in a blue state to try and intimidate his political rivals. This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey Stephen Miller searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities, and end elections. There is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention. There is no insurrection.”

Pritzker noted that every major American city deals with crime, but that the rate of violent crime is actually higher in Republican-dominated states and cities than in those run by Democrats. Illinois, he said, had “hired more police and given them more funding. We banned assault weapons, ghost guns, bump stocks, and high-capacity magazines” and “invested historic amounts into community violence intervention programs.” Those actions have cut violent crime down dramatically. Pritzker pointed out that “thirteen of the top twenty cities in homicide rates have Republican governors. None of these cities is Chicago. Eight of the top ten states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states is Illinois.”

If Trump were serious about combatting crime, Pritzker asked, why did he, along with congressional Republicans, cut more than $800 million in public safety and crime prevention grants? “Trump,” Pritzker said, “is defunding the police.”

Then Pritzker turned to the larger national story. “To the members of the press who are assembled here today and listening across the country,” he said, “I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is. This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story. This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored in favor of some horse race piece on who will be helped politically by the president’s actions. Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city, punish his dissidents, and score political points. If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab.”

Pritzker continued: “Earlier today in the Oval Office, Donald Trump looked at the assembled cameras and asked for me personally to say, ‘Mr. President, can you do us the honor of protecting our city?’ Instead, I say, ‘Mr. President, do not come to Chicago. You are neither wanted here nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy.’”

The governor called out the president for his willingness to drag National Guard personnel from their homes and communities to be used as political props. They are not trained to serve as law enforcement, he said, and did not “sign up for the National Guard to fight crime.” “It is insulting to their integrity and to the extraordinary sacrifices that they make to serve in the guard, to use them as a political prop, where they could be put in situations where they will be at odds with their local communities, the ones that they seek to serve.”

Pritzker said he hoped that Trump would “reconsider this dangerous and misguided encroachment upon our state and our city’s sovereignty” and that “rational voices, if there are any left inside the White House or the Pentagon, will prevail in the coming days.”

But if not, he urged Chicagoans to protest peacefully and to remember that most members of the military and the National Guard stationed in Chicago would be there unwillingly. He asked protesters to “remember that they can be court martialed, and their lives ruined, if they resist deployment.” He suggested protesters should look to members of the faith community for guidance on how to mobilize.

Then Pritzker turned to a warning. “To my fellow governors across the nation who would consider pulling your national guards from their duties at home to come into my state against the wishes of its elected representatives and its people,” he said, “cooperation and coordination between our states is vital to the fabric of our nation, and it benefits us all. Any action undercutting that and violating the sacred sovereignty of our state to cater to the ego of a dictator will be responded to.”

He went on: “The state of Illinois is ready to stand against this military deployment with every peaceful tool we have. We will see the Trump administration in court. We will use every lever in our disposal to protect the people of Illinois and their rights.”

“Finally,” he said, “to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous, we are watching, and we are taking names. This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now. And eventually, the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year. Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf. You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually.

“If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law. As Dr. King once said, the arc of the moral Universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Humbly, I would add, it doesn’t bend on its own. History tells us we often have to apply force needed to make sure that the arc gets where it needs to go. This is one of those times.”

National guard, easier to manipulate than soldiers ?

Perhaps they are good old boys, and Trump offers them people to kill if they obey him

August 26, 2025 (Tuesday)

Today, for the second time in as many days, President Donald J. Trump suggested that Americans want a dictator. In a meeting in the Cabinet Room that lasted more than three hours, during which he listened to the fulsome praise of his cabinet officers and kept his hands below the table, seemingly to hide the bad bruising on his right hand, Trump said: “The line is that I’m a dictator, but I stop crime. So a lot of people say, ‘You know, if that’s the case, I’d rather have a dictator.’”

With Trump underwater on all his key issues and his job approval rating dismal, the administration appears to be trying to create support for Trump by insisting that the U.S. is mired in crime and he alone can solve the problem. The administration’s solution is not to fund violence prevention programs and local law enforcement—two methods proven to work—but instead to use the power of the government to terrorize communities.

There is a frantic feel to that effort, as if they feel they must convince Americans to fear crime more than they fear rising grocery prices or having to take their children past police checkpoints on their way to school.

Last night, speaking with personality Sean Hannity on the Fox News Channel, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, widely believed to be the person behind the draconian immigration raids in the country, seemed to be angry that Washingtonians weren’t sufficiently grateful for Trump’s takeover of the streets. But Miller indicated that the administration is really focused on splitting Republicans and Democrats who disapprove of the administration’s policies, demonizing the Democrats.

Miller asserted to Hannity that the “Democrat Party does not fight for, care about, or represent American citizens. It is an entity devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gangbangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization…. The Democrat Party, Sean, that exists today,” he said, “it disgusts me.”

Now, with Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker taking a stand against the deployment of troops in Chicago, Trump appears to be nervous about sending troops on his own hook and instead trying to pressure Pritzker to ask for them. In the Oval Office today, he complained that Pritzker wasn’t asking for troops, and on social media tonight he called Pritzker “an incompetent Governor who should call me for HELP.”

And yet, for all their talk of dispatching soldiers to combat crime, National Guard troops today were picking up trash in Washington, D.C., and working on dozens of “beautification and restoration” projects.

The administration’s focus on crime to win back support for the president is going to have to overcome increasing uneasiness with Trump’s attempt to take control of the nation’s monetary policy.

In a letter posted to social media last night at 8:02 Eastern Time, President Donald J. Trump announced that he was removing Federal Reserve Board governor Lisa Cook from her position “for cause.” That cause, he claimed, was the allegation from Trump loyalist William Pulte, who heads the Federal Housing Finance Agency, that Cook had made false statements on a mortgage years ago. With Pulte’s help, the administration has gone after a number of Democrats with such allegations. Cook has not been charged with any crime. Historically, “for cause” has meant corruption or dereliction of duty.

Trump has been at war with the Federal Reserve for months. The Fed is an independent institution that oversees the nation’s economy and manages the nation’s monetary policy, which means the Federal Reserve sets interest rates for the country. Trump wants it to lower interest rates to make it easier to borrow money. Cheaper money will goose the economy, but it is also likely to spur inflation, which is already on the rise thanks to Trump’s tariff war and massive deportations of migrant workers. Trump has been pressuring Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell to lower interest rates or, failing that, to resign.

Trump has mused about taking control of the Fed himself, but the politicization of the nation’s monetary policy so it responds to the whims of Trump rather than actual economic conditions makes economists and most elected officials recoil. Today in his newsletter, economist Paul Krugman wrote that if Trump’s illegal firing of Cook is allowed to stand, “the implications will be profound and disastrous. The United States will be well on its way to becoming Turkey, where an authoritarian ruler imposed his crackpot economics on the central bank, sending inflation soaring to 80 percent. And,” he added, “the damage will be felt far beyond the Fed. This will mark the destruction of professionalism and independent thinking throughout the federal government.”

In May the Supreme Court suggested it would overturn an almost century-old precedent saying that the president cannot remove the heads of independent agencies created by Congress. But even then, it protected the independence of the Fed, writing: “The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”

Trump administration officials appear to be trying to find a way around that ruling by going after Cook on trumped-up charges. After serving as a professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University and on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Cook has been on the board of governors since 2022. She is the first Black woman to sit on the board and might have drawn Trump’s ire as well when she noted publicly that the jobs report earlier this month could signal an economic turning point.

Cook responded to Trump’s letter in a statement saying: “President Trump purported to fire me ‘for cause’ when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so. I will not resign. I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy as I have been doing since 2022.”

The administration’s apparent persecution of undocumented immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom it unlawfully deported to the notorious terrorist CECOT prison in El Salvador in March and then refused to return despite court orders to do so, is a more immediate illustration of the lawlessness of authoritarian rule.

The government finally returned Abrego to the U.S., only to announce that it had secured an indictment against him in Tennessee for allegedly conspiring to transport undocumented immigrants for financial gain, charges stemming from a 2022 traffic stop for which Abrego was not charged with anything. He was jailed in Tennessee, and a judge ordered that he remain in jail to protect him from the government, which threatened to deport him again if he were released. He was finally released on August 22 and went home to his family in Maryland, but when he attended a mandatory check-in at the ICE facility in Baltimore, Maryland, on Monday, August 25, he was arrested.

Members of the administration routinely describe Abrego, who has no criminal convictions, as a gang member, a human trafficker, a domestic abuser, and child predator who is terrorizing the United States. Trump referred to him yesterday as “an animal.”

Now, as Jeremy Roebuck, Maria Sacchetti, and Dana Munro of the Washington Post explained yesterday, Abrego’s lawyers say the government is trying to coerce him into pleading guilty of human trafficking, offering to send him to the Spanish-speaking Latin American country of Costa Rica if he does, but threatening to deport him to Uganda if he does not. As legal analyst Harry Litman notes, deportation would enable the government to avoid “having to show their hand on what seems to be a very threadbare case.”

The official social media account of the Department of Homeland Security—a cabinet-level department of the United States government—trolled Abrego, whom the media often identifies as a “Maryland man,” by posting: “Uganda Man.”

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, whose order to return Abrego to the U.S. the government ignored for months, indicated she had no faith that the government would obey the law. She temporarily barred the administration from deporting Abrego until she can make sure the government follows the law, making Department of Justice lawyer confirm he understood that “our clients are absolutely forbidden at this juncture to remove Mr. Abrego Garcia from the continental United States.”

Tonight, Democrat Catelin Drey won a special election for the Iowa state senate, breaking a Republican supermajority and flipping a seat in a district Trump won by 11.5 points in 2024. Drey won the seat by 10.4%, showing a swing of more than 20 points to the Democrats. And in a seven-way race in Georgia for the state Senate in a deep red district, the lone Democrat, Debra Shigley, came in first with 40% of the vote. Since no candidate won 50% of the vote, Shigley will face whichever Republican candidate comes out on top—the top two are currently hovering around 17%—in a runoff on September 23.

stop crime what the fuck

SCIENCE said:

stop crime what the fuck

The whole bloody country was founded on crime.

Prime example: the ‘Boston Tea Party’.

(Of course, Australia was ‘founded’ as a prison, so…)

August 27, 2025 (Wednesday)

The image of National Guard troops, some of them from as far away as Louisiana and Mississippi, in Washington, D.C., spreading mulch around the cherry trees at the Tidal Basin and picking up trash, illustrates that President Donald J. Trump’s insistence that he needed troops to crack down on violent crime in the nation’s capital was always a cover for an authoritarian takeover.

As Kate Riga and Emine Yücel noted in Talking Points Memo today, earlier this spring Trump and congressional Republicans did all they could to weaken Washington, D.C. In March, Congress passed a resolution to fund the government temporarily while also freezing all federal spending. That included the District of Columbia, whose budget has to be approved by Congress although the monies involved come from local taxes, not federal funds.

Because those budget monies are local and not federal, according to Campbell Robertson of the New York Times, the Washington, D.C., budget is routinely exempted from federal spending freezes. But the House did not carve it out this time, leaving the city with a shortfall of $1.1 billion. The Senate unanimously approved a bill to fix the error, letting the city continue to operate under its current budget, but the House never took it up. Washington, D.C., mayor Muriel Bowser and local officials found a workaround to restore some funding but have had to freeze hiring and cut contracts, grants, and expenditures across the city’s agencies.

Cuts to city services have made it easier for Trump and his loyalists to insist the city is being poorly taken care of, although violent crime is dropping there, not rising, and the Department of Justice’s own numbers show it is at a 30-year low. Now, with troops stationed in the city, Trump and his MAGA loyalists are demonstrating that they control the federal capital.

Today, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that the administration will also take over Union Station in Washington, D.C., from which Amtrak and the city’s commuter rail lines run, saying such a takeover was part of Trump’s “beautification” program.

Amtrak took control of the station in July 2024, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of the Biden era provided $22 billion to Amtrak to modernize trains and stations. The administration cut a $120 million federal grant to Amtrak in April. Taking control of Union Station will put the administration in charge of key transportation lines into and out of the city. It also will create a federal presence in an area where veterans have been protesting.

The freezing of D.C.’s budget is a different process from the dramatic cuts the Trump administration has made across the federal government, although the effects of the two are similar. As Tara Copp of the Washington Post noted today, custodial work like that being done by the National Guard troops normally would have been performed by National Park Service employees. But that service was already short staffed when the administration slashed through the federal workforce. The park service used to have 200 people assigned to the thousands of acres of gardens and trees in the capital. Now it has 20.

A park service official told Copp: “It’s everybody—the masons, the maintenance workers, the groundskeepers, the plumbers. Every shop is short.”

The Trump administration inherited decades of Republican rhetoric insisting the federal government was bloated and inefficient. It set out immediately to gut the civil service through hiring freezes, reductions in force, and impoundment of funds.

In an interview with Eileen Sullivan of the New York Times on Thursday, August 21, Office of Personnel Management director Scott Kupor said that by the end of December 2025 there will be 300,000 fewer federal workers than there were in January. Sullivan notes that this is the largest single-year reduction in civilian federal employment since World War II.

But even before these cuts, the federal workforce had not kept pace with the growth of the nation. The workforce when Trump took office in 2025 was about 2.4 million people, roughly the same number of government workers the nation had in 1969. As Bill Chappell of NPR reported in March, in 1969 the U.S. population was about 202.5 million. Now it is about 341.1 million.

The U.S. public workforce was about 14.9% of overall employment, significantly lower than our 37 peer nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, where public sector employment averages at 18.1%. In Canada, that number is 19.4%. Chappell also noted that an OECD report showed more than 90% of U.S. civil servants believed it was important for their work to serve the public good.

The old Republican argument for getting rid of civil servants was that private contractors would be more efficient, and so in place of civil servants, the U.S. has relied on private contractors since the 1990s. While the U.S. spent about $270 billion on federal workers’ salaries before the 2025 cuts, it spent $478 billion on government contractors. Public policy scholar Elizabeth Linos explained that even before the recent cuts, the U.S. had “something like three times as many delivering the work of government” as it had civil servants.

The Trump administration’s drastic cuts were almost certainly designed to speed up the shift to private contractors. Under the direction of billionaire Elon Musk, the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) cut jobs willy-nilly, apparently under the impression that replacing people with AI contracts and consolidating databases would make civil servants redundant. But like the D.C. budget freeze, the cuts have weakened the nation and make it more susceptible to an authoritarian takeover.

Yesterday news broke that a whistleblower, identified as Social Security Administration chief data officer Charles Borges, claims that a former senior DOGE official put a copy of a key Social Security database on a server that was vulnerable to hacking. The DOGE employee copied the names, birthdays, and Social Security numbers of more than 300 million Americans to an unsecure cloud server accessible to other former DOGE employees.

Borges alleges that the copy “constitute violations of laws, rules, and regulations, abuse of authority, gross mismanagement, and creation of a substantial and specific threat to public health and safety.” He also said that as of late June, there were no verified audit or oversight mechanisms in place to oversee where DOGE was sharing that data or what it was using the data for. The agency assessed that a breach of the database would be “catastrophic” for Social Security beneficiaries, making them susceptible to identity theft, the loss of health care and nutrition benefits, and so on.

Last week, as the Trump administration prepared to fire nearly 90% of the workforce of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, virtually all pending matters flagged by bank examiners were simply closed without action.

Layla A. Jones reported last week that while the administration insisted it was targeting “bias” at NPR and PBS when it defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the $1.1 billion in cuts means that the CPB can no longer provide public broadcasting stations with severe weather alerts. CPB administered the Next Generation Warning System in partnership with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to issue alerts and information over radio and television stations, many of which are in rural America, and can continue to operate when other systems fail.

Yesterday, 182 employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) wrote to Congress to warn that one third of FEMA’s full-time staff have separated from the agency this year, eroding institutional knowledge and relationships, even as FEMA employees have been reassigned to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The administration has cut funds for FEMA, has removed both public and internal information related to climate change, and has not appointed a qualified FEMA administrator as the law requires.

In this document, which they called the Katrina Declaration in memory of the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Gulf Coast almost exactly 20 years ago, they warned that the administration was making it impossible for FEMA to help Americans survive hurricanes, floods, fires, and other disasters. “FEMA’s mission to provide critical support obstructed by leadership who not only question the agency’s existence but place uninformed cost-cutting above serving the American people and the communities our oath compels us to serve.”

Thirty-six people signed their names to the document; 155 did not put their names down out of concern the administration would target them in retaliation for speaking out. They were right. All of those who used their names received emails Tuesday night saying they had been placed on administrative leave.

Tonight, Lena H. Sun, Dan Diamond, and Lauren Weber of the Washington Post reported a battle at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). When recently-confirmed director Susan Monarez refused to agree to change coronavirus vaccine guidelines without consulting advisors, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. urged her to resign. Monarez refused and called Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who was instrumental in securing Kennedy’s confirmation and who pushed back against him. Her involvement of the senator apparently infuriated Kennedy, and the department simply announced on social media that Monarez was no longer the CDC director.

Hours later, Monarez’s lawyers responded that she had neither resigned nor been fired, accused Kennedy of “weaponizing public health for political gain,” and said that his purge of health officials put “millions of American lives at risk.” “This is not about one official,” they wrote. “It is about the systematic dismantling of public health institutions, the silencing of experts, and the dangerous politicization of science. The attack on Dr. Monarez is a warning to every American: our evidence-based systems are being undermined from within.”

The White House then formally fired Monarez, saying she was “not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again.” The attacks on Monarez came as administration firings, budget cuts, and policies prompted the resignations this week of the CDC’s chief medical officer, the director of its infectious disease center, the head of its center for immunization and infectious diseases, and the director of the office of public health data. One described Monarez as “hamstrung and sidelined by an authoritarian leader.”

On August 20, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and former deputy secretary of state William Burns thanked America’s fired public servants for serving their country with honor and told them they deserved better than the “gleeful indignity” inflicted on them by this administration. The current process of cutting the government is “not about reform,” he wrote, but about “retribution. It is about breaking people and breaking institutions by sowing fear and mistrust throughout our government. It is about paralyzing public servants—making them apprehensive about what they say, how it might be interpreted, and who might report on them. It is about deterring anyone from daring to speak truth to power.”

Deploying National Guard soldiers away from their families and sending them to Washington, D.C., in the heat of August to respond to an “emergency” only to put them to work spreading mulch and picking up trash certainly seems to fit the idea of inflicting indignity to break the nobility of public service for the nation.

The firefighters at work combating a wildfire in the state of Washington likely also felt the indignity inflicted by the government today when ICE agents showed up and made them line up so the agents could check their IDs. The agents arrested two firefighters, and when the a member of the crew asked for the chance to say goodbye, the agents responded: “ou need to get the f*ck out of here. I’m going to make you leave.” One firefighter said: “You risked your life out here to save the community. This is how they treat us.”

In his resignation letter today, Director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Demetre Daskalakis set an example for those refusing to be cowed. “The recent shooting at CDC is not why I am resigning,” he wrote. “My grandfather, who I am named after, stood up to fascist forces in Greece and lost his life doing so. I am resigning to make him and his legacy proud.”

Thanks.

August 28, 2025 (Thursday)

On August 29, 1970, journalist Rubén Salazar died instantly when Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy Thomas Wilson fired an 8-inch bullet-shaped tear gas projectile into the back of his head. Salazar and his colleague Guillermo Restrepo had ducked into the Silver Dollar bar after fighting had broken out between marchers and police officers during the massive National Chicano Moratorium March against the Vietnam War that drew more than 20,000 people into the streets of East Los Angeles.

Restrepo later recalled that Salazar told him they were being followed, so they slipped into the bar to lose their trackers and use the restroom. The bar had a curtain over the door. An eyewitness recalled that when two sheriffs came to the door, one held back the curtain and the other—Wilson—shot the projectile. Restrepo recalled the gun was aimed directly at their heads.

When homicide detectives from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department interviewed Wilson hours later, he said a bystander had thought he saw armed men enter the bar and had fired his weapon to get the men to come out. Witnesses told the detectives there had been no gunmen at the bar. A coroner’s inquest determined Salazar’s death was accidental. Wilson resigned from the Sheriff’s Department and left Los Angeles. The county admitted no wrongdoing but paid Salazar’s widow and three young children at least $700,000, worth close to $6 million today.

At the time of his death, Salazar was the most famous and influential Latino journalist in the United States. Born in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, in 1928, Salazar grew up in El Paso, Texas. After graduating from high school, he served in the U.S. Army and became a U.S. citizen after his service. He graduated from Texas Western College in 1954 with a degree in journalism and went to work at the El Paso Herald-Post, where his deep investigative work caught the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation almost immediately as Salazar exposed corruption and violence in the El Paso City Jail.

By 1959, Salazar was working at the Los Angeles Times where, among other assignments, he covered the Vietnam War. Back in the United States in 1968, he began to focus on the lives of Mexican-Americans, especially those in East Los Angeles. The media largely ignored the Latino community there except when it covered crimes.

In those years, the Mexican American community in the United States was building an exciting new intellectual and social movement: the Chicano Movement. In the introduction to his 2015 book The Chicano Generation: Testimonios of the Movement, historian Mario T. Garza explained that an earlier generation of Mexican Americans had focused on assimilating to Anglo culture, working to break down barriers to jobs, housing, education, the legal system, and voting, and fighting cultural stereotyping.

But in the 1960s, young Mexican Americans, most of whom had been born in the U.S., began to reimagine their community and its position in the United States. Calling themselves “Chicanos,” they called for a new identity based in the understanding that they were not outsiders at all, but rather natives of the northern region of old Mexico, a region that did not become part of the United States until long after the Chicano people—Indigenous Americans mixed with the descendents of Spanish invaders—had settled there.

Chicanos noted that they had not moved into the United States, but rather the United States border had moved over them. The U.S. had taken over the land on which they lived in 1848 after the U.S.-Mexico War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which had established the new boundary between the two countries far to the south of where it had been before, was supposed to guarantee the land titles of those Mexican landowners over whom the border had moved. But U.S. courts had disregarded the terms of the treaty and refused to recognize the rights of Mexicans, most of whom lost their land.

The Chicanos saw parallels between their own history and that of colonized peoples around the world. And in the 1960s, as new nations rebelled against the colonial powers that had sought to erase their culture, Chicanos worked to address poverty and racism by recovering their cultural identity and determining their own future.

This cultural autonomy manifested itself in the public schools. Los Angeles County had the biggest Latino community in the United States and sent more than 130,000 students to the public schools. But officials expected the students to become manual laborers and made little effort to steer them toward college, while they denigrated Mexican American history and forbade the students to speak Spanish. Graduation rates were abysmal: at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, the dropout rate was 57.5%. Those who did make it to college despite their lack of college preparatory classes fared little better. Mexican American students had a college graduation rate of about 0.1%.

Social studies teacher Salvador Castro at Lincoln High School urged Mexican American students to see themselves as central to the development of the state and the nation. In 1963, he and other teachers organized the Chicano Youth Leadership Conference to inspire students to address the failures of the educational system for Mexican American students and to urge those students to graduate from high school and college, as well as to demand better from their local schools.

Filmmaker Moctesuma Esparza, who attended the Youth Leadership Conference in 1965, recalled how life was changing in the late 1960s. “This is 1967, while the Vietnam War is in full bore, and protests are growing, and the Civil Rights Movement is flourishing. And throughout the world, young people are looking to change the world. And this was not lost on the kids in East L.A.

They were able to see what their own circumstances were and how they were being oppressed, how they were being denied an opportunity for an education, an opportunity to fulfill their lives. And so, it was not difficult to organize them. They wanted to be organized. They wanted to do something.”

The students decided to launch walkouts, or “blowouts,” from school in March 1968. In the first week of the month, an estimated 15,000 students walked out of Woodrow Wilson, Garfield, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Belmont, Venice, and Jefferson High Schools. Administrators barred the doors of the schools, and police officers beat the students with nightsticks, but still they walked out.

On March 28 they produced a list of demands, asking that teachers who showed bias toward Mexican American students be removed and that curriculum center Mexican American history and experience in schools where a majority of the students shared that heritage. They demanded that curriculum in the schools acknowledge Mexican American history as American history.

The Los Angeles Board of Education rejected their demands, and three days later the police arrested thirteen of the walkout organizers for “conspiracy to disturb the peace.” Esparza later recalled that the press portrayed the protesters as “un-American. That we were outside agitators in our own community. That we were ungrateful, and that ‘they’ were doing the best they could for a population that really didn’t have (what it took) to succeed.”

Salazar covered the blowouts for the Los Angeles Times and, in February 1970, wrote a column titled “Who Is a Chicano? And What Is It the Chicanos Want?” “A Chicano is a Mexican-American with a non-Anglo image of himself,” Salazar began. “He resents being told Columbus ‘discovered’ America when the Chicano’s ancestors, the Mayans and the Aztecs, founded highly sophisticated civilizations centuries before Spain financed the Italian explorer’s trip to the ‘New World.’” Salazar noted that “Mexican-Americans, though indigenous to the Southwest, are on the lowest rung scholastically, economically, socially and politically. Chicanos feel cheated. They want to effect change. Now.” “Chicanos,” he wrote, “are merely fighting to become ‘Americans’…but with a Chicano outlook.”

In April 1970, Salazar left the Times to become the news director for the Spanish-language television station in Los Angeles, KMEX. Salazar said in an interview that he “wanted to try my hand at communicating with the Mexican American community directly and in their language.”

But relations between Mexican American journalists and the police were deteriorating as police cracked down on the movement and on Chicano protesters increasingly frustrated by their exclusion from political power. Salazar collected information on police abuse, and in June he captured the paranoia and harassment of the Nixon administration toward protesters when he wrote that the “mood is not being helped by our political and law-and-order leaders who are trying to discredit militants in the barrios as subversive or criminal.”

Meanwhile, the escalation of the war in Vietnam dovetailed with the high school blowouts to push Chicano organizers toward anti-war protests. Because the public schools did not encourage them to go on to college, Mexican Americans did not qualify for the draft deferments that kept middle-class white Americans out of the war. This meant the government drafted them in disproportionately high numbers.

Chicano activists organized demonstrations against the war beginning in December 1969. They planned a large march for August 29, 1970, where they could illustrate that the Chicano Movement was not confined to students. As many as 20,000 Mexican Americans—entire families—turned out for the Chicano Moratorium in a festive spirit that celebrated their history and culture at the same time they spoke out against discrimination and the war.

But, as historian Garza records, county sheriffs and the Los Angeles Police Department refused to let Chicanos control the streets of East Los Angeles and attacked the participants at the end of the march. Police violence sparked a riot that led to injuries, more than 150 arrests, and the deaths of three people: two Chicano activists and journalist Rubén Salazar.

In the aftermath of Salazar’s death, organizers shifted from demonstrations to political mobilization, building the Raza Unida Party to achieve economic gains, social justice, and political self-determination for Mexican Americans.

When reporter Bob Navarro asked Salazar in May 1970 if he thought the Vietnam War had put the country in danger of a revolution, Salazar answered: “I think we are in a revolution. I think the United States is traditionally a revolutionary country.”

Navarro countered: “But I’m talking about it in the more sinister sense, an attempt to overthrow our more established institutions.” “I think that’s nonsense,” Salazar replied. “We are going to overthrow some of our institutions, but in the way that Americans have always done it: through the ballot, through public consensus. That’s a revolution. That is a real revolution.”

August 29, 2025 (Friday)

Chaos continues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where President Donald J. Trump stepped in on Wednesday night to support Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his crusade to fire recently-confirmed Susan Monarez when she refused to rubber stamp his attack on vaccines.

With her ouster, three top scientists at the CDC resigned: Chief Medical Officer Debra Houry, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases director Demetre Daskalakis, and National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases director Daniel Jernigan. “The CDC you knew is over,” Daskalakis said. “Unless someone takes radical action, there is nothing there that can be salvaged.”

On Thursday, CDC staff and supporters rallied outside the agency’s Atlanta headquarters, whose windows are still pocked with bullet holes from a terrorist who had become convinced the coronavirus vaccine had injured him, to honor the resigning leaders.

In place of Monarez, the White House has appointed as acting CDC director Jim O’Neill, a biotech investor close to billionaire Peter Thiel and a former speechwriter at the Department of Health and Human Services during the presidential term of George W. Bush. O’Neill has no training in either medicine or the science of infectious diseases. As Maanvi Singh and Robert Mackey of The Guardian reported, O’Neill supported the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to treat covid despite no evidence that they worked. He also has embraced conspiracy theories about covid online.

The administration’s chaos extends to the Social Security Administration (SSA), where the administration forced Chief Data Officer Charles Borges to resign today. Borges had acted as a whistleblower for the agency when he identified serious data breaches that leave more than 300 million Americans at risk of identity theft and loss of benefits. In his resignation letter, Borges noted that he was leaving involuntarily after the administration had made it impossible to perform his duties legally and ethically and had caused him “serious attendant mental, physical, and emotional distress.”

In his letter, Borges noted that he has “served this Country for almost my entire adult life, first as an Active-Duty Naval Officer for over 22 years, and now as a civil servant. I was deployed during 9/11, decorated for valor in combat during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and graduated from US Naval Test Pilot School. As a civil servant, I have served as a Presidential Innovation Fellow, in the Centers for Disease Control during COVID, within on the Federal Data Team, and now serve as the SSA Chief Data Officer. I have served in each of these roles with honor and integrity.”

Makena Kelly and David Gilbert of Wired reported that less than 30 minutes after Borges’s resignation hit the in-boxes of SSA staff, it disappeared.

The removal of dedicated civil servants for trying to protect the public extends to the Environmental Protection Agency, where tonight the Trump administration fired at least seven employees for signing a letter criticizing the agency’s leadership for undermining “the EPA mission of protecting human health and the environment.” The firings are, Amudalat Ajasa of the Washington Post noted, “an escalation of the administration’s effort to clamp down on dissent within the federal bureaucracy.”

“The Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career officials using their agency position and title to unlawfully undermine, sabotage, and undercut the will of the American public that was clearly expressed at the ballot box last November,” an EPA spokesperson said. But, increasingly, it seems obvious that the administration is claiming a mandate for policies that voters did not intend to endorse.

That includes the outing last week of an undercover intelligence officer, which has in the past been enough to lead to an indictment of an administration official. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released the name of a senior undercover Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer when she published a list of 37 current and former officials from whom she was stripping security clearances. Brett Forrest of the Wall Street Journal reported that Gabbard did not consult with the CIA before posting the list on X. At the time, Gabbard said she was acting on Trump’s orders.

Andrew Egger of The Bulwark took a step back today to look at the general operating system of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) part of the Trump administration and noted that it has always operated by throwing out wild conspiracies while actual scientists try to do the work of protecting America’s public health. Now, he notes, Kennedy and MAHA are the dog that caught the car. Faced with creating the new system that they promised voters would keep them healthier, they are flailing. Their key public-health report relied on fake studies concocted by AI, and Kennedy has slashed through advisory bodies and is currently limiting access to covid vaccines, all while the administration’s budget reconciliation bill is forcing people off health care insurance. Kennedy recently mused wildly about watching children in airports and realizing they have mitochondrial challenges.

Egger’s observation about MAHA fits MAGA as a whole. Trump and his ilk have spent years carping about how poorly the government is working and how much better they would be doing if they were the ones in charge. Voters gave them what they asked for, and now they appear to be unwilling or unable to do the actual work of governing. Instead, Trump and his cronies are simply declaring emergencies and then announcing policies they claim will address those emergencies. When their policies backfire or raise opposition, they claim they are being sabotaged by the deep state or that statistics are wrong.

This morning, the White House budget office announced it was unilaterally cancelling $4.9 billion in foreign aid funding passed by Congress. The Office of Management and Budget is overseen by director Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025, the plan from right-wing institutions led by the Heritage Foundation designed to decimate the modern U.S. government and replace it with Christian nationalism.

The Constitution gives to Congress alone the power of spending money, and the executive branch has no authority to refuse to spend that money. Vought has argued that because the law permits the president to send to Congress a request to stop spending on certain items and gives Congress 45 days to consider the request, Trump can send a request with fewer than 45 days left before the end of the fiscal year and consider the request rubber stamped.

Both Republican Susan Collins of Maine and Democratic Patty Murray of Washington, who are the top two lawmakers on the Senate Appropriations Committee, reject the move. Collins called it “a clear violation of the law.” Murray called it a “brazen attempt to usurp” the power of Congress.

Another major area in which Trump has simply done as he wished without regard for the law or economic reality is tariffs. The U.S. Constitution gives exclusively to Congress the power to impose tariffs, but in 1977, Congress passed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, often abbreviated as IEEPA, delegating to the president the power to adjust tariffs in times of national emergency. On February 1, Trump declared such a national emergency to impose tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico, and on April 2 he again invoked it for new blanket tariffs.

Congress could have ended Trump’s power over tariffs by cancelling the national emergency, a step Democrats were willing to take. But Republicans in the House used a procedural rule to make sure that Democrats could not cancel that emergency. A challenge to the president’s declaration of a national emergency must come to the floor for a vote within 18 days of the challenge. The House defanged that rule by declaring that each day for the rest of the congressional session will not “constitute a day for purposes…of the National Emergencies Act.”

Importers hit by the tariffs sued, along with Democratic-led states, and in May a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that President Donald J. Trump’s sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs were illegal. The IEEPA has “meaningful limits,” it wrote, and “an unlimited delegation of tariff authority would be unconstitutional.” “Congress manifestly is not permitted to abdicate or to transfer to other the essential legislative functions with which it is thus vested,” the court wrote. It blocked the tariffs Trump imposed under the IEEPA. The administration appealed.

Today, by a 7–4 majority, a federal appeals court upheld the decision, striking down Trump’s use of emergency powers to impose tariffs. “e conclude Congress, in enacting IEEPA, did not give the President wide-ranging authority to impose” sweeping tariffs, noting that such an authorization would mean “Congress had bestowed on a federal agency the taxing power.” Such an authorization would be “a sharp break with our traditions.”

The decision will not take effect until October 14 to allow the administration to appeal to the Supreme Court. For his part, Trump seemed to think the court would bend to his will, which is, in turn, based on an ideology that the last few months have proven demonstrably wrong. Shortly after the decision came down, Trump posted on social media:

“ALL TARIFFS ARE STILL IN EFFECT! Today a Highly Partisan Appeals Court incorrectly said that our Tariffs should be removed, but they know the United States of America will win in the end. If these Tariffs ever went away, it would be a total disaster for the Country. It would make us financially weak, and we have to be strong. The U.S.A. will no longer tolerate enormous Trade Deficits and unfair Tariffs and Non Tariff Trade Barriers imposed by other Countries, friend or foe, that undermine our Manufacturers, Farmers, and everyone else. If allowed to stand, this Decision would literally destroy the United States of America. At the start of this Labor Day weekend, we should all remember that TARIFFS are the best tool to help our Workers, and support Companies that produce great MADE IN AMERICA products. For many years, Tariffs were allowed to be used against us by our uncaring and unwise Politicians. Now, with the help of the United States Supreme Court, we will use them to the benefit of our Nation, and Make America Rich, Strong, and Powerful Again! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

August 30, 2025 (Saturday)

Just days before Labor Day, a holiday designed to celebrate the importance and power of American workers in the United States, the Transportation Department cancelled $679 million in funding for offshore wind projects, and the Department of Energy announced it is withdrawing a $716 million loan guarantee to complete infrastructure for an offshore wind project in New Jersey.

These cancellations reflect President Donald J. Trump’s apparent determination to kill off wind and solar power initiatives and to force the United States to depend on fossil fuels. He refers to climate change as a “hoax,” says that windmills cause cancer, and falsely claims that renewable energy is more expensive than other ways to generate power. Former president Joe Biden made investing in clean energy a central pillar of his administration; Trump often seems to construct policies mostly to erase the legacies of his predecessors.

Reversing the shift toward renewable energy not only attacks attempts to address the crisis of climate change and boosts the fossil fuel industry on which some of Trump’s apparent allies depend, but also undermines a society based on the independence of American workers. In 2023, about 3.5 million Americans worked in jobs related to the renewable energy sector, and jobs in that sector grew at more than twice the rate of those in other sectors in what was a strong U.S. labor market. The production of coal, which Trump often points to as an ideal for American jobs, peaked in 2008. Between then and 2021, employment in coal mining fell by almost 60% in the East and almost 40% in the West, leaving a total of about 40,000 employees.

Another cut last week sums up the repercussions of the administration’s attack on renewable energy. On August 22 the Interior Department suddenly and without explanation stopped construction of a wind farm off the coast of Connecticut and Rhode Island that was 80% complete and was set to be finished early next year. As Matthew Daly of the Associated Press noted yesterday, Revolution Wind was the region’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm. It was designed to power more than 350,000 homes, provide jobs in Connecticut and Rhode Island, and enable Rhode Island to meet its goal of 100% renewable energy by 2033.

The Board of Directors of the Chamber of Commerce of Eastern Connecticut expressed their dismay at the decision, noting that Revolution Wind employed more than 1,000 local union workers and is part of a $20 billion investment in “American energy generation, port infrastructure, supply chain, and domestic shipbuilding and manufacturing across over 40 states” by Ørsted, a Danish multinational company.

“Stopping this fully permitted, important project without a clear stated reason not only seriously undermines the state’s efforts to work towards a carbon neutral energy supply but equally important it sends a message to investors from all over the world that they may want to rethink investing in America. The message resulting from the President’s action is a lack of trust, uncertainty, and lack of predictability,” they wrote.

Connecticut governor Ned Lamont and Rhode Island governor Dan McKee, both Democrats, are working together to save the project. In a statement, Lamont said: “We are working closely with Rhode Island to save this project because it represents exactly the kind of investment that reduces energy costs, strengthens regional production, and builds a more secure energy future—the very goals President Trump claims to support but undermines with this decision.”

“It’s an attack on our jobs,” McKee said. “It’s an attack on our energy. It’s an attack on our families and their ability to pay the bills.”

The Trump administration launched this attack on renewable energy at a time when electricity prices are bouncing upward. According to Ari Natter and Naureen S. Malik of Bloomberg, electricity prices jumped about 10% between January and May and are projected to rise another 5.8% next year. Trump has tried to blame those rising costs on renewable energy, but in the country’s largest grid, which stretches from Virginia to Illinois, nearly all the electricity comes from natural gas, coal, and nuclear reactors.

More to the point is that the region also has the world’s highest concentration of AI data centers, driving power demand—and costs—upward. At the same time, according to Natter and Malik, the infrastructure for transmission is too outdated to handle the amounts of electricity the data centers will need.

Trump’s cuts are adding stress to this already overburdened system. Over the next decade, they are projected to reduce additions to the electric grid by half compared to projections from before his cuts. In July, Ella Nilsen of CNN reported that cuts to renewable power generation, as well as to the tax credits that encouraged the development of more renewable power projects, are exacerbating the electrical shortage and driving prices up.

The Trump administration claims that relying on fossil fuels will jump-start the economy, but higher costs for electricity are already fueling inflation, and in the longer term, more expensive power will slow economic growth. In contrast, China has leaped ahead to dominate the global clean energy industry. Cheaper electricity there is expected to make it more attractive for future investment.

Renewable energy is crucial to addressing the existential crisis of climate change, but as former president Joe Biden emphasized, developing the sector was also key for building a strong middle class. Well-paying jobs, in turn, help to protect democracy.

Historically, a system in which local economies support small businesses and entrepreneurs promotes a wide distribution of political power. In contrast, extractive industries support a system that concentrates wealth and power in the hands of a few individuals. The extractive systems in the pre–Civil War American South, where cotton concentrated power and wealth, and later in the American West, where mining, cattle, and agribusiness did the same, nurtured political systems in which a few men controlled their regions.

As president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO Chrissy Lynch said in July after the Republicans passed the budget reconciliation bill cutting clean energy tax credits: “Working families shouldn’t have to purchase energy from billionaire oil tycoons and foreign governments or let them set the price of our energy bills.”

Her observation hit home earlier this week, when Joe Wallace, Costas Paris, Alex Leary, and Collin Eaton of the Wall Street Journal reported that the comments of Russian president Vladimir Putin and Trump at their meeting in Alaska on August 15 in which they talked about doing more business together were not vague goodwill. ExxonMobil and Russia’s biggest energy company, Rosneft, have been in secret talks to resume a partnership to extract Russian oil, including in the Arctic, that had been severed by Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022.

Lou Antonellis, the business manager of the Massachusetts International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 103, added that the cuts to renewable energy projects in the U.S. were not just cuts to funding. “ou’re pulling paychecks from working families, you’re pulling apprentices out of training facilities, you’re pulling opportunity straight out of our communities. Every solar panel installed, every wind turbine wired, every EV charger connected, that’s a job with wages, healthcare, and a pension that stands for dignity for the American worker. You don’t kill that kind of progress: you build on it.”

Neophyte said:

August 30, 2025 (Saturday)

Just days before Labor Day, a holiday designed to celebrate the importance and power of American workers in the United States, the Transportation Department cancelled $679 million in funding for offshore wind projects, and the Department of Energy announced it is withdrawing a $716 million loan guarantee to complete infrastructure for an offshore wind project in New Jersey.

Trump is an environmental criminal.