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EDWARD JACOBS

Author: Ed Jacobs

  • 9 September, 2025

    from Heather Cox Richardson:

    On Friday, September 5, Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell told Southern Baptist pastor and Newsmax host Tony Perkins that Trump may try to declare that “there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States” in order to claim “emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward,” overriding the Constitution’s clear designation that states alone have control over elections. Mitchell has long called for voting restrictions and was on the infamous January 2021 phone call Trump made to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger in which Trump pressed Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” that would give the state’s electoral votes to him rather than the victorious Democratic candidate, Joe Biden.

    Democracy Docket, the media organization founded and run by voting rights and election lawyer Marc Elias, has been tracking the administration’s assault on democracy and has repeatedly called out both such language and Trump’s attempts to monkey with the machinery of our democracy through gerrymandering, voter suppression, and now the use of the military in Democratic-led cities.

    In August, Jim Saksa of Democracy Docket explained that through intimidation, harassment, and delays, troops could keep large numbers of voters from casting ballots. The administration might even claim fraud to seize voting machines, as Trump contemplated doing in 2020. Today in Mother Jones, Ari Berman noted the administration has dismantled efforts to promote election security and is working to stack state elections boards with loyalists.

    MAGA loyalist Steve Bannon recently said: “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’re damn right.” Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, speaking of Trump’s threatened military incursion into Chicago, observed: “This is not about fighting crime. This is about the President and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities, and end elections.”

    Yesterday the administration announced a surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents into Boston, and today it announced a surge into Chicago. Although Trump has been threatening to send in federalized National Guard troops, at least so far the announcement appears to be limited to ICE agents, who are part of the country’s regular law enforcement systems. Pritzker noted that the administration had made no effort to reach out to state officials as it would have if it actually wanted to combat crime. Instead, Pritzker said, “we are learning of their operations through their social media as they attempt to produce a reality television show.”

    The apparent plan of the Trump administration reflects the strategy of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, whose writings seem lately to have captivated leaders on the American right, including billionaire Peter Thiel and the man who influenced him, Curtis Yarvin. Schmitt opposed liberal democracy, in which the state enables individuals to determine their own fate. Instead, he argued that true democracy erases individual self-determination by making the mass of people one with the state and exercising their will through state power. That uniformity requires getting rid of opposition. Schmitt theorized that politics is simply about dividing people into friends and enemies and using the power of the state to crush enemies. As J.D. Vance described Schmitt’s ideas in 2024: “There’s no law, there’s just power.”

    Much of Schmitt’s philosophy centered around the idea that the power of a nation that is based in a constitution and the rule of law belongs to the man who can exploit emergencies that create exceptions to the constitutional order, enabling him to exercise power without regard to the law. Trump—who almost certainly has not read Schmitt himself—asserted this view on August 26: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country’s in danger—and it is in danger in the cities—I can do it.”

    Although the Republicans have control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, meaning Trump should be able to get his agenda passed according to the normal constitutional order, since taking office he has operated under emergency powers. On August 22, Karen Yourish and Charlie Smart noted in the New York Times that since he took office, Trump has declared nine national emergencies and one “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C. The journalists report that since 1981, presidents have declared on average about seven national emergencies per four-year term. Trump declared that many in his first month back in office, although experts say no such emergencies exist.

    Under normal constitutional provisions and laws, Trump’s actions would have required congressional approval or long regulatory review, the journalists note. Instead, he has enacted sweeping immigration measures, deregulated energy, launched a tariff war that is crushing the U.S. economy, and now put troops in U.S. cities, all on his own hook.

    Even when Trump didn’t announce a new emergency, he has cited crises to justify new extreme actions, as when he (or someone; he told reporters he did not sign the order) invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to justify rendering undocumented Venezuelan immigrants to the notorious terrorist prison CECOT in El Salvador and when he justified the cuts billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” made to congressionally-approved funding because such cuts addressed “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

    Although the administration continues to insist voters wanted what Trump is doing, his poor job approval rating and the popular dislike of his policies across the board say the opposite. Perhaps more to the point was this weekend’s social media post from J.D. Vance, who pushed back on widespread concern that the administration’s strike against a boat in international waters last week was illegal. The administration claims that the 11 men in the boat were gang members smuggling drugs, but even if it offered evidence for such an assertion, which it has not done, the U.S. cannot legally kill civilians of a nation with whom we are not at war.

    This weekend, Vance posted on social media: “Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.” Political commentator Brian Krassenstein replied: “Killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime.” Vance replied: “I don’t give a sh*t what you call it.”

    The federal courts are working overtime to hold the administration to the rule of law. As Jay Kuo noted on September 3 in The Status Kuo, just last week saw courts invalidating most of Trump’s tariffs, stopping the administration from deporting unaccompanied children to Guatemala, and declaring his cuts to Harvard University’s funding, his use of troops in Los Angeles, and his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act illegal. Today an appeals court upheld the $83.3 million judgement a jury rendered last year against Trump in a defamation case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll.

    But the Supreme Court has been overruling lower court decisions, deciding in favor of Trump’s expansion of power. Today it allowed Trump to ignore the decision of a lower court that he could not fire the last remaining Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, Rebecca Slaughter, while her case was in the courts. Since 1935, the court had said the president does not have the power to fire members of independent agencies created by Congress.

    It also said today that the administration can use racial profiling, including personal appearance, language, or type of employment, to stop people in order to check their immigration status, even though that will necessarily mean that U.S. citizens and legal residents will be swept up. Essentially, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, Latino Americans must now keep papers on them at all times to prove they are citizens or they can find themselves incarcerated.

    The court decided these cases without hearings, briefs, or a written decision, under what is called the “shadow docket.” Traditionally, such unsigned, unexplained decisions are used for emergencies either to keep the status quo or to resolve a procedural issue, but under Trump the court’s use of them has exploded. The court, three of whose justices Trump appointed, has sided with him in shadow docket decisions more than 70% of the time.

    On September 4, Lawrence Hurley of NBC News noted that this new practice of overturning lower court rulings with no explanation is undermining faith in the judiciary. It supports the administration’s narrative that the courts are trying to subvert Trump’s presidency. As the administration has attacked the courts, violent threats against judges have dramatically increased. Hurley notes that the lower courts painstakingly research the law to reach a decision, then administration officials criticize any that doesn’t support their actions, Then Trump appeals to the Supreme Court, which rejects the judges’ decisions with little or no explanation.

    Under the control of Republicans, Congress has also declined to assert its constitutional power. Yesterday, Julian E. Barnes and Catie Edmondson of the New York Times reported how Republican leaders have accepted the administration’s unilateral cuts to programs Congress approved, launches of military strikes without informing Congress, and, last week, the Pentagon’s cancellation of a classified visit to the Virginia headquarters of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency by Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Far-right activist Laura Loomer had complained about the visit. The administration has already limited congressional oversight of immigrant detention centers; now the Pentagon says it is also imposing new limits to congressional oversight of intelligence facilities.

    “Is congressional oversight dead?” Senator Warner asked. “Where does this end? If none of my Republican colleagues raises an issue, does this mean we are ceding all oversight?”

    The administration appears to be in a rush to replace democracy with a dictatorship before the whole administration collapses. On Saturday, Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers reported that 46% of Americans—almost half of them—“strongly disapprove” of the job Trump is doing as president while only 24% “strongly approve, a 22% enthusiasm gap.

    That gap seems likely to grow. Tonight the Wall Street Journal published the 2003 birthday letter to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein bearing Trump’s signature whose existence the paper revealed in July. The image in the article by Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo was even worse than earlier reports of it: the image drawn over the words is not the outline of a woman, but of a girl. The text reads, in part, “Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything. Donald: Yes there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.” Those words from “Donald” are outlined with pubescent breasts.

    The words continue: “Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.

    Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.

    Jeffrey: Yes we do, come to think of it.

    Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?

    Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.

    Donald: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

    The signature, “Donald,” mimics human anatomy.

    After the Wall Street Journal revealed the existence of the letter in July, Trump sued the reporters, the publisher, and the Journal’s parent company for ten billion dollars, saying the letter was “nonexistent.”

    Today’s story also reported on another letter from the book that included a giant check made out for $22,500, mocked up to look like Trump wrote it to Epstein. A handwritten caption below it says: “Jeffrey showing early talents with money + women! Sells ‘fully depreciated’ [redacted] to Donald Trump for $22,500. Showed early ‘people skills’ too. Even though I handled the deal I didn’t get any of the money or the girl!”

    —

    Notes:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/books/review/carl-schmitt-jd-vance.html

    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/08/22/us/politics/trump-emergency-immigration-tariffs-crime.html

    https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/06/politics/venezuela-boat-strike-trump-legality

    https://substack.com/home/post/p-172683686

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/09/03/panel-rejects-trump-deportations-venezuela

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/09/08/trump-e-jean-carroll-defamation-appeal

    https://www.wbur.org/news/2025/09/08/september-ice-surge-massachusetts-boston-arrests

    https://www.npr.org/2025/09/08/nx-s1-5534338/ice-chicago-boston-immigration-raids

    https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court-allows-trump-fire-ftc-commissioner-rcna229385

    https://www.nprillinois.org/chicago-il/2025-09-08/president-trump-launches-long-promised-chicago-deportation-campaign-dubbed-operation-midway-blitz

    https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-unlawfully-cut-harvards-funding-us-judge-rules-2025-09-03

    https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/us/politics/senator-warner-laura-loomer.html

  • 18 July, 2025

    As a student in elementary school, I learned about our system of government. I learned about our three branches of government. I was taught about an idea of “checks and balances” among the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of our system.

    Now I think about what my grandchildren–bright, eager learners–will be taught when they’re soon in elementary school. Will they be taught about a concept that became obsolete during their lives? Will they be taught about an idea that their generation will continue to fight for? Will they watch their country fight (and vote) for the re-institution of our ideals from the 18th century?

    What is it that our 3-branched system of government is designed for?
    Why is the concept we learned about in grade school–checks and balances–embedded in our constitution?
    Can our country survive as a representative democracy if two branches of our government simply do the bidding of the third?
    Why would members of congress vote for something when they admit they don’t know what they’re voting for? Why would members of congress vote against their own constituents’ interests–local news outlets, for instance, who provide weather-emergency reports?
    Is power so important to our members of congress that the executive branch’s insistence on something insidious, on something driven by malevolence, by spite, is supported because of a fear of losing their seat?

    These past six months have been so upsetting, so hateful, so counter-productive to American’s citizens, to the national and world economy. Congress and the Supreme Court of the US are as aware of how negative these months have been, and yet they hop right on board.

    In the era of Nixon’s criminal activity, I thought things couldn’t get worse. In the era of Reagan’s “trickle down economics,” which proved to be nothing but a boon to the wealthy, and an enormous boost to the US debt obligations, many thought things couldn’t get worse. In the era of GWBush, when the Vice-President’s and Sec’y of Defense seemed more motivated by animus and power than the benefit of country, we thought things couldn’t get any worse. When a complete incompetent was propelled into the presidency by an electorate that seemed blinded by promises that just made no sense, it seemed that 2016 was a bizarre move–paralleled by Brexit and right-wing leaders in other countries–that couldn’t be worse, and couldn’t possibly last.

    And yet, here we are. It keeps getting worse. Alot worse.

    Is there any way out of this?

  • 1 July, 2025

    When, oh when, will those who hold the public trust show themselves to be trustworthy?

    From Heather Cox Richardson:

    “This is the most deeply immoral piece of legislation I have ever voted on in my entire time in Congress,” said Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT).

    “[W]e’re debating a bill that’s going to cut healthcare for 16 million people. It’s going to give a tax break to…massively wealthy people who don’t need any more money. There are going to be kids who go hungry because of this bill. This is the biggest reduction in…nutrition benefits for kids in the history of the country.” Murphy continued: “We’re obviously gonna continue to offer these amendments to try to make it better. So far not a single one of our amendments…has passed, but we’ll be here all day, probably all night, giving Republicans the chance over and over and over again to slim down the tax cuts for the corporations or to make life a little bit…less miserable for hungry kids or maybe don’t throw as many people off of healthcare. Maybe don’t close so many rural hospitals. It’s gonna be a long day and a long night.”

    “This bill is a farce,” said Senator Angus King (I-ME). “Imagine a bunch of guys sitting around a table, saying, ‘I’ve got a great idea. Let’s give $32,000 worth of tax breaks to a millionaire and we’ll pay for it by taking health insurance away from lower-income and middle-income people. And to top it off, how about we cut food stamps, we cut SNAP, we cut food aid to people?’… I’ve been in this business of public policy now for 20 years, eight years as governor, 12 years in the United States Senate. I have never seen a bill this bad. I have never seen a bill that is this irresponsible, regressive, and downright cruel.”

    “When I worked here in the 70’s,” King said, “I had insurance as a…junior staff member in this body 50 years ago. Because I had that insurance that covered a free checkup, I went in and had my first physical in eight years…and the doctors found a little mole on my back. And they took it out. And I didn’t think much of it. And I went in a week later and the doctor said, ‘You better sit down, Angus. That was malignant melanoma. You’re going to have to have serious surgery.’… And I had the surgery and here I am. If I hadn’t had insurance, I wouldn’t be here. And it’s always haunted me that some young man in America that same year had malignant melanoma, he didn’t have insurance, he didn’t get that checkup, and he died. That’s wrong. It’s immoral.”

    Senator King continued: “I don’t understand the obsession and I never have…with taking health insurance away from people. I don’t get it. Trying to take away the Affordable Care Act in 2017 or 2018 and now this. What’s driving this? What’s the cruelty to do this, to take health insurance away from people knowing that it’s going to cost them…up to and including…their lives.”

    In fact, the drive to slash health insurance is part of the Republicans’ determination to destroy the modern government.

    Grover Norquist, a lawyer for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and one of the key architects of the Republican argument that the solution to societal ills is tax cuts, in 2010 described to Rebecca Elliott of the Harvard Crimson how he sees the role of government. “Government should enforce [the] rule of law,” he said. “It should enforce contracts, it should protect people bodily from being attacked by criminals. And when the government does those things, it is facilitating liberty. When it goes beyond those things, it becomes destructive to both human happiness and human liberty.”

    Norquist vehemently opposed taxation, saying that “it’s not any of the government’s business who earns what, as long as they earn it legitimately,” and proposed cutting government spending down to 8% of gross domestic product, or GDP, the value of the final goods and services produced in the United States.

    The last time the level of government spending was at that 8% of GDP was 1933, before the New Deal. In that year, after years of extraordinary corporate profits, the banking system had collapsed, the unemployment rate was nearly 25%, prices and productivity were plummeting, wages were cratering, factories had shut down, farmers were losing their land to foreclosure. Children worked in the fields and factories, elderly and disabled people ate from garbage cans, unregulated banks gambled away people’s money, and business owners treated their workers as they wished. Within a year the Great Plains would be blowing away as extensive deep plowing had damaged the land, making it vulnerable to drought. Republican leaders insisted the primary solution to the crisis was individual enterprise and private charity.

    When he accepted the Democratic nomination for president in July 1932, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt vowed to steer between the radical extremes of fascism and communism to deliver a “New Deal” to the American people.

    The so-called alphabet soup of the New Deal gave us the regulation of banks and businesses, protections for workers, an end to child labor in factories, repair of the damage to the Great Plains, new municipal buildings and roads and airports, rural electrification, investment in artists and writers, and Social Security for workers who were injured or unemployed. Government outlays as a percentage of GDP began to rise. World War II shot them off the charts, to more than 40% of GDP, as the United States helped the world fight fascism.

    That number dropped again after the war, and in 1975, federal expenditures settled in at about 20% of GDP. Except for short-term spikes after financial crises (spending shot up to 24% after the 2008 crash, for example, and to 31% during the 2020 pandemic), the spending-to-GDP ratio has remained at about that set point.

    The national debt is growing because tax revenues have plummeted. Tax cuts under the George W. Bush and Trump administrations are responsible for 57% of the increase in the ratio of the debt to the economy, 90% if you exclude the emergency expenditures of the pandemic, and have left the United States with a tax burden nowhere close to the average of the 38 other nations in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), all of which are market-oriented democracies. And those cuts have gone primarily to the wealthy and corporations.

    Republicans who backed those tax cuts now want more. They are trying to force through a measure that will dramatically cut the nation’s social safety net while at the same time increasing the national debt by $3.3 trillion over the next ten years.

    “There are two ways of viewing the government’s duty in matters affecting economic and social life,” FDR said in his speech accepting the 1932 Democratic nomination for president. “The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small business man.” The other “is based upon the simple moral principle: the welfare and the soundness of a Nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need; and second, whether or not they are getting it.”

    The Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill takes wealth from the American people to give it to the very wealthy and corporations, and Democrats are calling their colleagues out.

    “This place feels to me, today, like a crime scene,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said on the floor of the Senate. “Get some of that yellow tape and put it around this chamber. This piece of legislation is corrupt. This piece of legislation is crooked. This piece of legislation is a rotten racket. This bill cooked up in back rooms, dropped at midnight, cloaked in fake numbers with huge handouts to big Republican donors. It loots our country for some of the least deserving people you could imagine. When I first got here, this chamber filled me with awe and wonderment. Today, I feel disgust.”

  • 12 June, 2025

    Robert Reich, this morning’s Substack, “Solidarity Now”:

    Friends,

    We are relearning the meaning of “solidarity.”

    This week, across America, people have been coming together. 

    We may disagree on immigration policy, but we don’t want a president deploying federal troops in our cities when governors and mayors say they’re not needed. 

    We may disagree on how laws should be enforced, but we don’t want federal agents to arbitrarily abduct people off our streets or at places of business or in courthouses and detain them without any process to determine if such detention is justified. 

    Or target hardworking members of our community. Or arrest judges. Or ship people off to brutal prisons in foreign lands. 

    We may disagree on freedom of speech, but we don’t think people should be penalized for peacefully expressing their views.

    We may disagree on the federal budget, but we don’t believe a president should spend tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on a giant military parade designed in part to celebrate himself. 

    As we resist Trump’s tyranny, America gains in solidarity. As we gain solidarity, we feel more courageous. As we feel courageous and stand up to Trump, we weaken him and his regime. As we weaken Trump and his regime, we have less to fear.

    In downtown Kansas City, Missouri, this week, protesters holding signs reading “solidarity” marched from the underpass toward the north lawn of Kansas City’s World War I Museum and Memorial. The demonstration was peaceful. “I felt it was my right and my duty to come here as what I had to go through to come here and yell,” one of them told KSHB. 

    In Denver, a peaceful crowd gathered outside the Colorado state capitol to speak out against Trump’s immigration policies and march in solidarity with Los Angeles protesters. They carried flags and signs with slogans like “Abolish ICE,” “No human is illegal,” and “Keep the immigrants. Deport the fascists!”

    In downtown Tucson, hundreds gathered at the Garces Footbridge, over Congress and Broadway, to show their solidarity. Later, reminders of the protest remained written in chalk on sidewalks: “No one is illegal on stolen land,” “Love over Hate,” and “Free Our Families.”

    In Boston, many gathered outside of the Massachusetts State House to express solidarity, saying it’s time to speak up against what they call Trump’s “reign of terror over the immigrant community.” Protesters cited the cases of two local students whom they said ICE abducted and detained for no reason, Rümeysa Öztürk and Marcelo Gomes de Silva.

    In Sioux City, Iowa, protesters marched along Singing Hills Boulevard, outside the ICE office, to peacefully protest. One of them, Zayden Reffitt, said, “We’re showing people that we’re not going to be silent and we’re not just going to let all this go through without us saying something about it.”

    In Chicago, thousands marched through the Loop, shutting down CTA bus service and creating a standstill on DuSable Lake Shore Drive near Grant Park. When police tried to detain a man in a bicycle helmet, protesters could be heard yelling “no violence” and “let him go.” As Ivanna Vidal explained, “I’m a first-generation citizen, my parents were born in Mexico. It’s something I’m super-passionate about. My family is safe, but there are many who aren’t. This is impacting our community, and we need to stand up for those who can’t speak up for themselves.”

    In Des Moines, protesters at Cowles Commons rallied against Trump and in solidarity with others. “We’re here to stand up for members of our community. For immigrants. For migrants. For refugees. For people with disabilities. For people on Medicaid. For seniors. For all the working class, because we are all under attack right now,” said Jake Grobe. “And Trump is trying to scapegoat immigrants and make them the enemy, calling them criminals.”

    In Austin, Texas, some five hundred people gathered in front of the Texas Capitol and began marching down Congress Avenue and advancing down 7th and 8th Streets before stopping in front of the J.J. Pickle Federal Building. Demonstrators held flags and signs while chanting, “Whose streets? Our streets.” Local and state law enforcement deployed pepper spray and flash bang grenades against the protesters, arresting more than a dozen people, according to Gov. Greg Abbott.

    In San Antonio, hundreds gathered outside City Hall, chanting, “People united will never be divided!” and holding signs that read, “No human is illegal” and “I’m speaking for those who can’t.”

    In Sacramento, they gathered in Cesar Chavez Plaza before marching to the ICE federal building on Capitol Mall. “The country is going in the wrong direction,” one named Chris (who would go only by her first name) said. “We need people to get out there. It’s all about the numbers, getting people on the streets peacefully.”

    It was much the same in Raleigh, N.C., in St. Louis, and in hundreds of other cities. 

    ***

    All across America, people who have never before participated in a demonstration are feeling compelled to show their solidarity — with immigrants who are being targeted by Trump, with people who are determined to preserve due process and the rule of law, with Americans who don’t want to live in a dictatorship. 

    Peaceful protests don’t get covered by the national media. Most of the people who come together in places like Des Moines and Kansas City to express their outrage at what Trump is doing aren’t heard or seen.

    Yet such solidarity is to be celebrated. It is the foundation of the common good. And although the number of people expressing it is still relatively small, it is growing across the land. 

    This is the silver lining on the dark Trumpian cloud.

  • 8 June, 2025

    From Robert Reich’s Substack post this morning:

    What is our moral responsibility as citizens of the United States when the President of the United States moves to deploy thousands of American soldiers against us? 

    Trump signed a memo late yesterday ordering 2,000 members of the National Guard to be deployed in Los Angeles County after federal immigration agents in riot gear squared off with hundreds of protesters for a second consecutive day.

    Trump’s action is extreme although technically legal. Title 10 of the United States Code allows a president to federalize the National Guard units of states to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.” In a presidential memo, Trump said, “To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”

    Why is he doing it, and why now? 

    Because Trump can’t stand to be humiliated — as he has been in the last two weeks. By senate Republicans refusal to quickly enact his so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. By Xi Jinping’s refusal to back down on trade (and restrict shipments of China’s rare earths, which American industry depends on). By Putin’s refusal to end the war in Ukraine. By the federal courts pushing back against his immigration policy. And, now, by insults and smears from the richest person in the world, who has a larger social media following than does Trump. 

    So what does Trump do when he’s humiliated? He deflects public attention. Like any bully, he tries to find another way to display his power — especially over people whom he doesn’t consider “his” people. 

    He has despised California since the 2016 election when the state overwhelmingly voted against him. 

    And what better Ground Zero for him to try out his police state than Los Angeles — a city teaming with immigrants, with Hollywood celebrities who demonize him, and wealthy moguls who despise him? 

    He is calling out the National Guard to provoke violence. As California governor Gavin Newsom said, “that move is purposefully inflammatory and will only escalate tensions.” 

    Exactly. Trump wants to escalate tensions. He wants a replay of the violence that occurred in the wake of the George Floyd murder — riots, mayhem, and destruction that allow him to escalate his police state further — imposing curfews, closing down parts of Los Angeles, perhaps seeking to subdue the entire state. And beyond. 

    Please do not give him this. Don’t fall into his trap.

    We cannot be silent in the face of Trump’s dictatorial move. But we must not succumb to violence. 

    What is needed is peaceful civil disobedience. Americans locking arms to protect those who need protection. Americans sitting in the way of armored cars. Americans singing and chanting in the face of the Americans whom Trump is drafting into his handmade civil war. 

    Americans who do not attempt to strike back, but who do what many of us did during the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements — peacefully but unambiguously reject tyranny. 

    A humiliated Trump is the most dangerous Trump. But he will overreach. He already has. And this overreach will ultimately be his undoing. 

    As long as we keep our heads.

    May we look back on this hellish time and feel proud of what we did. 

    Be strong. Be safe. Hug your loved ones.

  • 1 June, 2025

    Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American:

    “I would like to speak briefly and simply about a serious national condition,” Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine told her colleagues on June 1, 1950. “It is a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear…. I speak as a Republican, I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States senator. I speak as an American.”

    “Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism,” she pointed out. Americans have the right to criticize, to hold unpopular beliefs, to protest, and to think for themselves. But attacks that cost people their reputations and jobs were stifling these basic American principles, and the ones making those attacks were in her own party.

    Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy, who was sitting two rows behind her, led a faction that had cowed almost all of the Republican Party into silence by accusing their opponents of “communism.” Smith recognized the damage McCarthy and his ilk were doing to the nation. She had seen the effects of his behavior up close in Maine, where the faction of the Republican Party that supported McCarthy had supported the state’s Ku Klux Klan.

    “Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America,” Senator Smith said. “It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others.”

    Senator Smith wanted a Republican administration, she explained, but to replace President Harry Truman’s Democratic administration—for which she had plenty of harsh words—with a Republican regime “that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to this nation.”

    “I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”

    “I doubt if the Republican party could do so,” she added, “simply because I do not believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest. Surely we Republicans are not that desperate for victory.”

    “I do not want to see the Republican party win that way,” she said. “While it might be a fleeting victory for the Republican party, it would be a more lasting defeat for the American people. Surely it would ultimately be suicide for the Republican party and the two-party system that has protected our American liberties from the dictatorship of a one-party system.”

    “As an American, I condemn a Republican Fascist just as much as I condemn a Democrat Communist,” she said. “They are equally dangerous to you and me and to our country. As an American, I want to see our nation recapture the strength and unity it once had when we fought the enemy instead of ourselves.”

    Smith presented a “Declaration of Conscience,” listing five principles she hoped her party would adopt. It ended with a warning: “It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques—techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.”

    In 1950, six other Republican senators signed onto Senator Smith’s declaration, leading McCarthy to sneer at “Snow White and the Six Dwarves.” Other Republicans quietly applauded Smith’s courage but refused to show similar courage themselves with public support.

    In a statement in honor of the 75th anniversary of Smith’s Declaration of Conscience, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) noted that our time resembles hers, and decried the “character assassination, baldfaced lies, petty insults, and round-the-clock disinformation” of MAGA Republicans.

    “[T]he hollowing out of American political language…tracks the corruption of American government and the disappearance of serious policy debate,” he wrote. “These movements of thought are not just part of one politician’s campaign for power. They are in service of a ruling public philosophy, which treats the government as an instrument for class plunder and private self-enrichment, a get-even-filthier-rich-quick scheme for the president and his family and friends.”

    But for those who believe “that the government should be an instrument for the common good of all and the defense of our freedoms and civil rights, the state of politics in the country is a…serious threat to the survival of democratic institutions and the possibility of democratic progress.”

    “The essential work of democracy is being trashed by the rule-or-ruin politics of the MAGA party,” Raskin wrote. “This is not a partisan exercise we are engaged in today to save and strengthen democracy in America…. MAGA and [the Department of Government Efficiency] are engaged in a hostile takeover of all the political institutions and programmatic achievements of American democracy.”

    “Here in America we have a supreme Constitution, not a supreme leader,” Raskin wrote. “Democracy is not just a static collection of rules and practices. It is an unfinished project in motion, a constant work in progress. And we must never forget that democracy is the political system in service of human freedom.”

    A month ago, another Maine senator, Independent Angus King, recalled Smith’s Declaration of Conscience in a speech to his colleagues in the Senate. “I fear that we are at a similar moment in history,” he said. “And…today’s ‘serious national condition’ [involves] the President of the United States. Echoing Senator Smith, today’s crisis should not be viewed as a partisan issue; this is not about Democrats or Republicans, or immigration or tax policy, or even the next set of elections; today’s crisis threatens the idea of America and the system of government that has sustained us for more than two centuries.”

    “What’s at stake,” he said, is “the driving force behind the basic design of our Constitution—the grave danger to any society is the concentration of power in one set of hands.” King quoted framer of the Constitution James Madison, who warned: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands…may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

    And yet, King said, “this ‘accumulation of all powers’ is exactly what is happening today, before our very eyes. Although many in this body unfortunately seem determined to ignore it, deliberately ignore it, the evidence is everywhere: from the elimination of Congressionally-established agencies to the withholding of appropriated funds…to issuing executive orders purporting to be law in place of legislation to sidestepping if not ignoring court orders: This President is engaged in the most direct assault on the Constitution in our history, and we in this body, at least thus far, are inert—and therefore complicit…. [T]his President is attempting to govern as a monarch, unbound by law or Constitutional restraint, not as a President subject to the constraints of the Constitution and the rule of law.”

    King implored his colleagues to “reclaim our power…. You know, do our job.” He reminded them: “Each of us swore—swore, mind you—to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic’; [and that we would] ‘bear true faith and allegiance to [the Constitution].’ Clearly,” he said, “the Framers knew there might someday be ‘domestic’ enemies of the Constitution and made it our sacred obligation to defend the Constitution from them,” and he called for his colleagues to stand alongside him to do so.

    Last night, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) told host Jimmy Kimmel that Republican senators are indeed unnerved by Trump’s behavior and the actions of the administration. The problem, Booker said, is what Thomas Jefferson said: “‘When the public fears their government, there is tyranny. When the government fears its people, there is liberty.’”

    Republicans in office “are so afraid of Donald Trump that they are letting things go,” Booker said “We the people have to make our politicians fear the consequences of…doing wrong more than the year that Donald Trump will run a primary against them, or put $100 million, or troll them on the internet. This is…one of those moments when we are not going to see change in Washington unless more of us have said enough.”

    Recalling the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Booker said that “the problem today we have to repent for is not just the vitriolic words and violent actions of the bad people, but also the appalling silence and inaction of the good people. This is the time Americans have to step up and let their voices be heard.”

    Seventy-five years ago, Senator Smith’s voice was largely ignored in the public arena. But she was right. Four years later, the Senate condemned McCarthy, and after his death in 1957, Wisconsin voters elected Democrat William Proxmire, who held the seat for the next 32 years. And while Senator Smith was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, McCarthy has gone down in history as a disgrace to his state and to the United States of America.

    —

    Notes:

    https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/SmithDeclaration.pdf

    This Maine governor never publicly embraced the Klan, but he never disavowed its support

    https://www.king.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/king-delivers-his-own-declaration-of-conscience-nearly-75-years-after-former-maine-senator-margaret-chase-smith

    Representative Jamie Raskin, “Statement of Congressman Jamie Raskin on the 75th Anniversary of Senator Margaret Chase Smith’s Declaration of Conscience,” June 1, 2025.

  • 27 May, 2025

    A summary of the current idiocracy and, of course, the most recent outbursts from the idiot-in-chief. God help us.

    From Heather Cox Richardson’s May 26 Letters from an American:

    President Donald J. Trump’s erratic behavior was on display this weekend in two public speeches: one to this year’s graduates at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, and the other at Arlington National Cemetery. While both speeches are traditionally nonpartisan, Trump indicated he would make them partisan when he wore a red MAGA hat at West Point.

    The president began both speeches by sticking to a script but then veered off course. At West Point on Saturday, his speech went on for over an hour. He attacked diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and said: “The job of the U.S. Armed Forces is not to host drag shows to transform foreign cultures, or to spread democracy to everybody around the world at the point of a gun,” he said. “The military’s job is to dominate any foe and annihilate any threat to America, anywhere, anytime, and any place.” (In fact, the mission of the Department of Defense is “to provide the military forces needed to deter war and ensure our nation’s security.”)

    Trump veered off into immigration and a chat about golf, then repeated a story about William Levitt, a real estate developer whose post–World War II housing developments became synonymous with suburbia, that he had told at a 2017 Boy Scout jamboree. On Saturday, Trump talked about Levitt becoming “very rich, a very rich man, and then he decided to sell. And he sold his company, and he had nothing to do. He ended up getting a divorce, found a new wife. Could you say a trophy wife? I guess we can say a trophy wife. It didn’t work out too well, but it doesn’t—that doesn’t work out too well, I must tell you. A lot of trophy wives. It doesn’t work out. But it made him happy for a little while, at least, but he found a new wife. He sold his little boat, and he got a big yacht, he had one of the biggest yachts anywhere in the world. He moved for a time to Monte Carlo, and he led the good life, and time went by, and he got bored and 15 years later, the company that he sold to called him, and they said, ‘The housing business is not for us.’ You have to understand when Bill Levitt was hot. When he had momentum, he’d go to the job sites every night, he’d pick up every loose nail, he’d pick up every scrap of wood, if there was a bolt or a screw laying on the ground, he’d pick it up, and he’d use it the next day and putting together a house.”

    After his speech, Trump skipped the traditional shaking of each graduate’s hand, left the ceremony, and flew to the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

    At Arlington National Cemetery on Monday, the president veered off into a dig at his predecessor, President Joe Biden, then noted that he, Trump, will be president for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And, he added, “Most important of all, in addition, we have the World Cup and we have the Olympics. Can you imagine [if] I missed that four years? And now look what I have. I have everything—amazing the way things work out. God did that, I believe that too.”

    Trump’s social media account was similarly inappropriate. His message on Memorial Day—a solemn day to honor those American military personnel who died in service to the country—began: “HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY TO ALL, INCLUDING THE SCUM THAT SPENT THE LAST FOUR YEARS TRYING TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY THROUGH WARPED RADICAL LEFT MINDS….”

    But that message quickly took a turn toward his recurring attacks on judges. Trump claimed that “CRIMINALS AND THE MENTALLY INSANE” are entering the United States “THROUGH JUDGES WHO ARE ON A MISSION TO KEEP MURDERERS, DRUG DEALERS, RAPISTS, GANG MEMBERS, AND RELEASED PRISONERS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD, IN OUR COUNTRY SO THEY CAN ROB, MURDER AND RAPE AGAIN—ALL PROTECTED BY THESE USA HATING JUDGES WHO SUFFER FROM AN IDEOLOGY THAT IS SICK, AND VERY DANGEROUS FOR OUR COUNTRY. HOPEFULLY THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT, AND OTHER GOOD AND COMPASSIONATE JUDGES THROUGHOUT THE LAND, WILL SAVE US FROM THE DECISIONS OF THE MONSTERS WHO WANT OUR COUNTRY TO GO TO HELL.”

    In February 2024, almost a year before Trump took office the second time, the country’s 23 Democratic state attorneys general began preparing for a second Trump term. They listened to what he was saying on the campaign trail and read the plans in Project 2025, then wrote potential lawsuits against what he might try to put in place. Once he took office, they hit the ground running, banding together when they could to file lawsuits to bring the president’s unconstitutional and illegal actions before courts.

    And they are not the only ones. On Friday, Alex Lemonides, Seamus Hughes, Mattathias Schwartz, Lazaro Gamio, and Camille Baker of the New York Times listed the many lawsuits against the Trump administration and noted that as of May 23, at least 177 rulings “have at least temporarily paused some of the administration’s initiatives.”

    Those include cases involving the administration’s attempt to fire large numbers of federal employees unlawfully, freeze federal funding required by Congress, refuse to recognize birthright citizenship, hand power to the “Department of Government Efficiency,” dismantle government agencies, take away civil rights from transgender Americans, revoke environmental policies, and use the federal government to punish individuals or organizations.

    But it is the judicial orders and decisions concerning immigration that Trump and his administration are most vocally attacking. Their primary focus is on Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was rendered to the notorious CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador on March 15 in what the administration at first called an “administrative error.” Nick Miroff of The Atlantic recorded that when Abrego Garcia’s family filed a lawsuit to get him returned, lawyers at the Departments of State, Justice, and Homeland Security quietly tried to secure his safety and bring him back to the United States.

    But White House officials saw the case as a way to challenge the ability of the judicial branch to restrain presidential power. As Miroff writes, “Abrego Garcia’s deportation…developed into a measure of whether Donald Trump’s administration can send people—citizens or not—to foreign prisons without due process.”

    They began to insist—without evidence—that Abrego Garcia was a gang member, a drug dealer, a terrorist, and a human trafficker. Despite orders from courts right up to the Supreme Court to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States, they have publicly insisted that Abrego Garcia will never return to the United States. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, a white-nationalist nativist, has said that the administration is thinking about suspending the writ of habeas corpus, which would permit the government to throw people in jail without charge or trial. The Constitution specifies that Congress alone can suspend that writ.

    Their attacks seemed designed to convince Americans that judges insisting on the rule of law are backing violent criminals. That, in turn, seems designed to encourage MAGA loyalists to threaten judges. And they are. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that a security committee at the judicial conference, the body that makes policy for federal judges, has floated the idea of creating an armed security force apart from the current U.S. Marshals Service that operates under the Department of Justice. Judges have expressed concern that Trump and loyalist Attorney General Pam Bondi might withdraw protections from judges who have ruled against the administration.

    Conservative judge J. Michael Luttig noted: “It is an extraordinary and unprecedented development in American history that the Nation’s Federal Judiciary would have to consider having its own security force because federal judges cannot trust the U.S. Marshal’s Service under this President and his Attorney General. They cannot trust this president and this Attorney General to ensure their protection.”

    He continued: “I had to admit that, given the continuing unprecedented and vicious personal attacks and threats on the federal courts and federal judges by the President, Vice President Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Donald Trump’s Cabinet and senior White House advisors, I would never rely upon the U.S. Marshal’s Service for my protection, were I still a sitting federal judge. How could anyone?”

  • 25 May, 2025

    I couldn’t agree more with this, from Robert Reich’s substack this morning:

    “I thought I couldn’t be more shocked and sickened than I already was, but what’s happened this week is truly horrifying. 

    In the Oval Office, before cameras and journalists, Trump openly lied to the president of South Africa about alleged violence against white South Africans. The Trump regime has also granted refuge to white South Africans while continuing to bar or deport people of color who desperately need refuge. 

    The regime told Harvard it can no longer enroll foreign students and that its existing foreign students must transfer to another university or lose their legal status in the United States.

    Trump auctioned off a personal dinner to foreigners who poured money into his own crypto business. He has also accepted Qatar’s gift of a $400 million “flying palace” (it’s also just for him — no other president in future years can use it). 

    At Trump’s insistence, House Republicans have passed a giant bill that would, if enacted, be the largest redistribution of income and wealth in American history — from the poor and working class to the rich and super-rich. The bill includes a poison pill that eliminates the power of courts to hold officials in contempt for disregarding court orders. 

    In recent days, according to Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent of The New York Times, Trump or his team have charged, investigated, or threatened with investigation New York Attorney General Letitia James, Andrew Cuomo, Kamala Harris, Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce, Bono, Oprah Winfrey, James Comey, unnamed “treasonous” Biden aides, the city of Chicago, and the Kennedy Center.

    Trump seems to have entered into a new and wilder stage of authoritarian neofascism. No holds barred. Nothing out of bounds. Rapacious, racist, nativist, vindictive, corrupt. 

    If you’re also horrified by all this, know that most other Americans are, too (if polls are to be believed).

    Resistance is more important than ever.

    I feel enormous gratitude to the judges who are trying to stop this. Most have shown themselves to be principled, steadfast, and courageous. 

    We should also be grateful to the public servants still in their jobs who are standing up to this. 

    And to everyone else who is pushing back. 

    Grateful to all communities that are protecting their residents and neighbors from Trump’s vicious dragnet. 

    Thankful to all the people fighting his attacks on Medicare and Medicaid. Teachers, public employees, workers, and grassroots groups fighting his attacks on the poor. 

    To the professors, administrators, and students joining together to fight his attacks on higher education. 

    Appreciative of all who are planning to protest on June 14. It’s Trump’s birthday, on which he’s trying to justify a huge military parade using the pretext of the 250th anniversary of the start of the Continental Army that fought against King George III.

    On that day we will join together to tell the world and affirm for ourselves that we do not abide kings. 

    The more Trump’s tyranny is exposed, the stronger the resistance. The worse it gets, the larger the backlash. The crueler and more vicious his regime becomes, the more powerful the alliances being formed at every level of society to stop him. 

    We will sweep vulnerable Republican lawmakers out of office in 2026 or before. 

    We will support groups like the ACLU that are taking Trump to court. 

    We will spread the truth. 

    Tyrants cannot succeed where people refuse to submit to them. We will not submit. We will emerge from this stronger than we were before, and more committed to the common good.”

  • 14 May, 2025

    Graft, corruption, and lining their own pockets. It just doesn’t stop, and Republicans just don’t seem to care.

    From May 13, 2025 Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson:

    While President Donald Trump’s billionaire sidekick Elon Musk has said he is pulling back from his work with the “Department of Government Efficiency,” he is with Trump today in Saudi Arabia, along with representatives from leaders from some of the biggest companies in the United States. The business executives are looking for Saudi investments.

    Jason Karaian of the New York Times notes that the Saudis are looking to diversify their oil-dependent economy and are now the world’s largest investors in artificial intelligence, or AI. In addition to Musk, the AI entrepreneurs in today’s entourage include, as Karaian reports, “Sam Altman, the chief executive of ChatGPT parent OpenAI; Jensen Huang, the leader of the advanced chipmaker Nvidia; Ruth Porat, the chief investment officer of Alphabet, Google’s parent company; and Andy Jassy, the chief of Amazon, which is a major provider of cloud-computing services.” Cyber experts note that DOGE’s mining of Americans’ personal data under Musk has given him access to a treasure trove of verified information for his own company xAI. Karaian notes that xAI is in the process of raising money that could bring the value of the firm to $120 billion.

    After the promise of $600 billion in Saudi investment in the U.S., including a $20 billion investment in AI and energy infrastructure to support it, Trump today promised Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, $142 billion in state-of-the-art defense and security equipment from dozens of U.S. defense firms.

    Musk’s turn from DOGE back to AI is revealing not just in providing evidence that his primary interest all along was not in “waste, fraud, and abuse” but in collecting government data about the American people. It is not likely a coincidence that the administration fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden last Thursday and Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter on Saturday. Both Hayden and Perlmutter have questioned the unauthorized use of copyrighted material to train AI.

    White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt explained Hayden’s firing by saying “[t]here were quite concerning things that she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and putting inappropriate books in the library for children,” but the Library of Congress collects according to a list of principles to enable it to perform research for members of Congress and to keep a record of the American people. It is not a lending library. In order to conduct research at the Library of Congress, researchers must be at least 16 years old.

    Musk powers his AI from a massive supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee. As Dara Kerr of The Guardian reported last month, the Southern Environmental Law Center discovered that Musk had quietly moved at least 35 methane-powered generators—enough to power a city—to the plant to help power the supercomputer he calls “Colossus,” which powers his chatbot “Grok.” Those generators are unpermitted and are major producers of carcinogens and other toxins. After the company assured Memphis mayor Paul Young that only 15 of the generators were on, thermal imaging showed at least 33 running.

    The supercomputer is in a historically Black neighborhood with a history of industrial pollution and higher rates of cancer and asthma than other Memphis neighborhoods. When residents spoke out against the supercomputer, a group calling itself “Facts Over Fiction” but without any other identifying information spread flyers claiming the turbines are “specially designed to protect the air we all breathe.” They also claimed that the Environmental Protection Agency and the county health department regulate the generators, but both agencies told Kerr that they had not issued permits for their use at the Memphis plant.

    In March, Musk bought another property in Memphis to expand the plant by a million square feet.

    With Musk turning back to his business interests, the task of cementing DOGE’s cuts into law is falling to Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought. Vought is a Christian nationalist who was a key author of Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump presidency. Project 2025 called for slashing the federal government that Christian nationalists think is undermining Christianity.

    It said the federal government must “decentralize and privatize as much as possible” and leave “the great majority of domestic activities to state, local, and private governance.” That destruction could be accomplished by an extraordinarily strong president, who would refuse to accept the law that Congress had the final say in appropriations and programs and would “impound” congressionally appropriated funds in order to slash programs he didn’t want.

    This plan was so unpopular that only four percent of Americans who had heard of Project 2025 before the 2024 presidential election wanted to see it enacted. Opposition to it was so strong that, as a candidate, Trump ran away from it, claiming he had nothing to do with it. But Ken Thomas, Scott Patterson, and Lindsay Wise of the Wall Street Journal report that Vought “has served as Musk’s lower-profile partner on DOGE” and has been putting the plans in Project 2025 into place. The sweeping cuts to public services and to government agencies are straight out of the Project 2025 playbook.

    If anything, those plans are even less popular now than they were last summer when they were only hypothetical. In the past three months, Americans have discovered that cuts to the government invariably affect programs they like as well as those they think are superfluous.

    And yet cuts are on the menu in the House, where Republicans have been pulling together a measure to enact Trump’s agenda in what he calls “one big, beautiful bill.” Lisa Mascaro of the Associated Press reported that at least 11 committees have been working on their pieces of the bill, but the pieces produced by the Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce, and Agriculture committees have been the most closely watched.

    Those committees released their plans over the past few days, beginning with the Committee on Energy and Commerce late Sunday night. Together, they call for extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts that benefit primarily the wealthy and corporations. This has been Trump’s top priority. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, extending those cuts will add at least 4.6 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years. Such increased spending makes it imperative to increase the debt ceiling, which caps how much money the Treasury can borrow. The Committee on Ways and Means calls for raising that ceiling by $4 trillion.

    At the same time that it funnels money upward, the proposed bill also cuts programs that benefit ordinary Americans. It cuts funding for climate initiatives passed by Congress in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. It cuts the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that 42 million Americans rely on. And, despite Trump’s repeated promises not to touch Medicaid, the program that provides healthcare for poorer Americans, the plan calls for cuts to Medicaid. The CBO estimates that the cuts will take away healthcare from at least 10.3 million Americans over the next decade.

    As Mike Lillis and Emily Brooks of The Hill note, Republicans are taking a mighty gamble by pairing tax cuts for the richest Americans with cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, and clean-energy tax credits. Each of those programs is popular among Republican voters, Lillis and Brooks note; a KFF poll from March found that 77% of Americans, including 64% of Republicans, have a positive view of Medicaid. Ninety-seven percent of Americans believe that Medicaid is important in their community. Republican lawmakers are gambling that voters will be willing to lose services in exchange for putting Trump’s agenda into law.

    But it will not be an easy sell. When the House Energy and Commerce Committee began the process of debating and amending their section of the bill today—the section of the bill that outlines the cuts to Medicaid—committee chair Brett Guthrie (R-KY) explained that the proposed cuts were designed to “stop the billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse in the Medicaid program” and are “all commonsense policies that will return taxpayer dollars to middle-class families.”

    Attendees who hoped to protect Medicaid, many of them in wheelchairs, disagreed. They began to chant “no cuts to Medicaid” and “waste, fraud, and abuse, my ass.” Activist Julie Farrar told Ben Leonard and Hailey Fuchs of Politico that there were about 90 people there from the disability rights organization ADAPT. They were, she said, “fighting literally for our survival right now.”

    It is against the law to protest inside congressional buildings. U.S. Capitol Police arrested 25 people and removed others.

    —

    Notes:

    https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5297426-trump-saudi-investment-deal

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/apr/24/elon-musk-xai-memphis

    https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2025/05/12/trump-fired-librarian-congress-carla-hayden-why/83576711007

    https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/10/trump-u-s-copyright-official-00340306

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-s-budget-hawk-takes-over-the-doge-agenda-first-up-the-military/ar-AA1Ez59f

    https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/poll-project-2025-broadly-known-severely-unpopular-voters-rcna172660

    https://www.loc.gov/acq/devpol/cps.html

    https://guides.loc.gov/local-history-genealogy-research-guides/using-the-library

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/christian-nationalism-is-the-driving-force-behind-the-trump-administration-s-actions/ar-AA1EbI0v

    https://apnews.com/article/trump-big-bill-tax-cuts-medicaid-1c893945b416419d806dacb6d24b895a

    https://www.budget.senate.gov/chairman/newsroom/press/extending-trump-tax-cuts-would-add-46-trillion-to-the-deficit-cbo-finds#:~:text=The%20report%2C%20written%20at%20the,trillion%20more%20than%20previously%20estimated.

    https://thehill.com/business/budget/5296087-house-gop-debt-limit-increase

    https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/house-republicans-unveil-medicaid-cuts-democrats-warn-leave-121701684

    https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-medicaid-republican-bill-cut-benefits/story?id=121756481

    https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5295623-house-republicans-budget-bill-green-funds-fossil-fuels-epa

    https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5297278-house-republicans-agriculture-snap

    https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5298712-republicans-risk-political-backlash-over-medicaid-cuts

    https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/05/13/congress/medicaid-cut-protestors-disrupt-gop-megabill-markup-00345841

    https://energycommerce.house.gov/posts/chairman-guthrie-delivers-opening-statement-at-full-committee-markup-of-budget-reconciliation-text

    7 Charts About Public Opinion on Medicaid

  • 13 May, 2025

    From Heather Cox Richardson’s May 12 Letter from an American:

    The biggest news over the weekend was silence: the silence of Republicans. They refused to disavow White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s statement that the administration is looking at suspending the writ of habeas corpus, that is, essentially declaring martial law. They have also stayed quiet after the administration announced it was planning to accept a gift of a $400 million luxury Boeing 747-8 plane from the Qatari royal family. President Donald J. Trump would use the plane as Air Force One during the rest of his presidency and take it with him when he leaves office.

    This is in keeping with the refusal of 53 Republican senators to answer questions from Rolling Stone’s Ryan Bort after NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Trump, “Don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States, as president?” and he answered: “I don’t know.” Only Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) went on the record, posting on social media: ​​“Following the Constitution is not a suggestion. It is a guiding force for all of us who work on behalf of the American people. Do you agree?”

    It seems as if Republicans who are not on board the MAGA train are hoping the courts or reality will stop Trump’s authoritarian overreach. As Steve Vladeck noted on Friday in One First, there is “near-universal consensus…that only Congress can suspend habeas corpus—and that unilateral suspensions by the President are per se unconstitutional.” In addition, Miller’s insistence that it would be appropriate to suspend the writ of habeas corpus because the United States is under attack—a position Trump echoed yesterday when he posted, “Our Country has been INVADED by 21,000,000 Illegal Aliens, many of whom are Murderers and Criminals of the Highest Order”—has failed repeatedly in court.

    Reality will trip up Trump’s plan to take possession of the Qatari gift. As David Kurtz noted this morning in Talking Points Memo, retrofitting the luxury plane with the defense capabilities and security protections necessary for Air Force One will take years, not months. (Air Force One is not a specific airplane; it is the call sign given to any Air Force aircraft carrying the president of the United States).

    Still, the Republicans’ silence matters. Whether Trump’s plans are all possible is not the point: he and the members of his administration are deliberately attacking the fundamental principles of our democratic republic. That lawmakers who swore an oath to uphold those principles are choosing to remain silent makes them complicit in that attack.

    The framers of the U.S. Constitution recognized that democratic government was a new departure from a world in which the world’s monarchs made deals amongst themselves. They placed strong guardrails around the behavior of future chief executives to make sure they would not sell the American people out to foreign leaders. “[N]o Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State,” they wrote in the Constitution. An emolument is a payment.

    Until the Trump administration, the expectation was that presidents would not accept foreign gifts, let alone bribes. As Jonathan Yerushalmy of The Guardian explained today, U.S. law prohibits presidents from accepting gifts worth more than $480. Gifts worth more than that are considered a gift to the American people and are transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the same agency that oversees presidential libraries. President George W. Bush gave up a puppy that was a gift from the leader of Bulgaria. When he left office after his first term, experts estimate, Trump retained more than $250,000 worth of gifts.

    Trump loyalist Attorney General Pam Bondi and Trump’s top White House lawyer, David Warrington, signed off on Trump’s acceptance of the Qatari jet. They concluded it was an acceptable gift because while it will be exclusively for Trump’s use, the “flying palace” will be transferred from the Qataris to the U.S. Air Force and then to Trump’s presidential library, and that it is not tied to a specific presidential act. In 2019, Bondi was a registered lobbyist for Qatar, earning $115,000 a month.

    In defending his planned acceptance of the plane, Trump turned the emoluments clause on its head. That, in turn, turned on its head the idea of a democratic republic in which the government rejects the idea of foreign leaders colluding for their own profit and reached back to that world the framers of the U.S. Constitution rejected.

    He posted: “So the fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE, of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane. Anybody can do that! The Dems are World Class Losers!!! MAGA”

    In The Bulwark, William Kristol observed: This is the voice of old-world autocracy…. Those who care that our republican government not be dependent on foreign states, that our elected leaders not take favors from foreign princes, they are losers.”

    This is corruption, and not just in the sense that a government official is getting a payoff. It is corruption in the old-fashioned meaning of the term, that the body politic is being corrupted—poisoned—by a sickness that must be cured or it will be fatal. That corruption is the old-world system the framers tried to safeguard against, and it is visible anew in the relationship of the Trumps with Qatar.

    The Trump family’s connections to Qatar are longstanding. In 2022 the chair of the Senate Committee on Finance, Ron Wyden (D-OR), and the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY), wrote to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III, asking for information in their “ongoing investigations into whether former Senior White House Adviser Jared Kushner’s financial conflicts of interest may have led him to improperly influence U.S. tax, trade, and national security policies for his own financial gain.”

    Kushner is married to Trump’s daughter and was a key presidential advisor in Trump’s first term. The letter explained that Qatar had repeatedly refused to bail out the badly leveraged Kushner property at 666 Fifth Avenue (now known as 660 Fifth Avenue) in 2018. But after Kushner talked to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and the two states imposed a blockade on Qatar, Qatar suddenly threw in the necessary cash. Shortly after, the Saudi and UAE governments lifted the blockade, with Kushner taking credit for brokering the agreement.

    Wyden and Maloney noted that “[t]he economic blockade of Qatar may have been used as leverage for the 666 Fifth Avenue bailout and was not supported by other officials, including the Secretaries of State and Defense.” They warned that Kushner “may have prioritized his own financial interests over the national interest. The pursuit of personal financial gain should not dictate U.S. tax, trade, and national security policies.”

    In this administration the corruption is even more direct. On May 1, 2025, the Trump Organization cut a deal with Qatari Diar, a company established by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund in 2005 to “coordinate the country’s real estate development priorities.” Together with Saudi Arabian company Dar Global, which has close ties to the Saudi government, the Qatari company will build a $5.5 billion Trump International Golf Club in Qatar.

    Trump heads to the Middle East tomorrow to visit Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—three of the world’s wealthiest nations—in search of business deals.

    Republicans spent the four years of Democratic president Joe Biden’s term calling to impeach him for allegedly accepting a $5 million payment from Ukraine. The source for that story later admitted to making it up and pleaded guilty of lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And yet the Republicans are silent now.

    After the weekend, Monday started with the administration’s announcement that it has agreed to a 90-day pause in the 145% tariffs Trump imposed on Chinese goods and on the 125% tariffs China imposed in retaliation. Both nations will cut tariffs 115% during that period, bringing the U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods to 30% and the Chinese counter tariffs to 10%. The stock market rose at the news.

    While the administration hailed this as a breakthrough agreement, as economist Paul Krugman pointed out, this wasn’t a case of China backing down. China’s tariffs were a response to Trump’s, which threw the U.S. economy into a tailspin. When Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent indicated Trump wanted a way out, China agreed. Quietly scraped into the memory hole is Trump’s insistence that his high tariffs would bring old-fashioned manufacturing back to the United States.

    Still, Krugman notes, a tariff of 30% on goods from China is still “really, really high.” Combined with the 10% across-the-board tariffs Trump has imposed on goods from other countries, Krugman estimates that the average tariff is up about 10% since Trump took office, from about 3% to about 13%. Krugman also notes that the tariffs have only been paused, making economic uncertainty worse. Trump appears to relish uncertainty because it keeps attention glued on him. Such uncertainty is good for television ratings but terrible for the economy, as executives cannot plan for the future.

    Today Helene Cooper, Greg Jaffe, Jonathan Swan, Eric Schmitt, and Maggie Haberman of the New York Timesreported that Trump followed a similar pattern in his bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen. He thought he could stop Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea by bombing the Houthis, and he expected results within 30 days.

    After 31 days, the journalists report, the U.S. didn’t even have air superiority over the Houthis, who shot down seven U.S. drones—each of which cost about $30 million—and continued to fire at U.S. ships. In the first month, the U.S. campaign cost about $1 billion and lost two $67 million aircraft. Eager to get out, Trump agreed to stop the bombing campaign in return for the Houthis’ leaving U.S. ships alone, but without any promises from the Houthis to stop the more general attacks that had led Trump to start the U.S. strikes in the first place. On May 5, Trump ended the operations and declared victory.

    For their part, the Houthis posted on social media: “Yemen defeats America.”