Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

mickeyrat · July 18

July 17, 2025 (Thursday)

Five years ago tonight, Georgia Representative John Lewis passed away from pancreatic cancer at the age of 80.

Lewis was a “troublemaker” as a young adult, breaking the laws of his state: he broke the laws upholding racial segregation. He organized voting registration drives and in 1960 was one of the thirteen original Freedom Riders, white and black students traveling together from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans to challenge segregation. “It was very violent. I thought I was going to die. I was left lying at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery unconscious,” Lewis later recalled.

An adherent of the philosophy of nonviolence, Lewis was beaten by mobs and arrested 45 times. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC (pronounced “snick”), he helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington where the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. told more than 200,000 people gathered at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial that he had a dream. Just 23 years old, Lewis spoke at the event. Two years later, as Lewis and 600 marchers hoping to register African American voters in Alabama stopped to pray at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, mounted police troopers charged the marchers, beating them with clubs and bullwhips. They fractured Lewis’s skull.

To observers in 1965 reading the newspapers, Lewis was simply one of the lawbreaking protesters who were disrupting the “peace” of the South. But what seemed to be fruitless and dangerous protests were, in fact, changing minds. Shortly after the attack in Selma, President Lyndon Baines Johnson honored those changing ideas when he went on TV to support the marchers and call for Congress to pass a national voting rights bill. On August 6, 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act authorizing federal supervision of voter registration in districts where African Americans were historically underrepresented.

New Black voters helped to elect Lewis to Congress in 1986. He held the seat from then until his death in 2020, winning reelection 16 times.

Before Representative Lewis died, reporter Jonathan Capehart asked him “what he would say to people who feel as though they have already been giving it their all but nothing seems to change.” Lewis answered: “You must be able and prepared to give until you cannot give any more. We must use our time and our space on this little planet that we call Earth to make a lasting contribution, to leave it a little better than we found it, and now that need is greater than ever before.”

“Do not get lost in a sea of despair,” Lewis tweeted almost exactly a year before his death. “Do not become bitter or hostile. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble. We will find a way to make a way out of no way.”

Today, as the storm over the release of the Epstein files became a maelstrom, the American people rallied at more than 1,500 sites nationwide to protest the Trump administration in a day of action to honor Representative Lewis. Organizers of the “Good Trouble Lives On” day of action vowed to “take to the streets, courthouses, and community spaces to carry forward his fight for justice, voting rights, and dignity for all.”

“My philosophy is very simple,” Representative Lewis once told an audience. “When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, say something! Do something! Get in trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble."

mickeyrat · July 19

July 18, 2025 (Friday)

[There is a lot about sexual assault in tonight's letter.]

Now we know why President Donald J. Trump earlier this week began saying nonsensically that Democrats he dislikes wrote the Epstein files. Apparently, Trump was trying to get out in front of the story Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo broke last night in the Wall Street Journal, reporting that Trump contributed what the newspaper called a “bawdy” letter to a leather-bound album compiled by Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell in 2003 for Epstein’s 50th birthday.

The journalists say the letter “contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly “Donald” below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.”

The lines of text represent an imaginary conversation between Trump and Epstein:

“Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything.

“Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.

“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.”

Florida police began investigating Epstein in 2005 after allegations that he had sexually abused a minor. They identified five victims and 17 witnesses, but ultimately the U.S. attorney in Miami, Alex Acosta, negotiated a plea deal with Epstein in 2008, by which Epstein pleaded guilty only to state charges, including soliciting a minor, and avoided federal charges. Trump appointed Acosta to be the secretary of labor in his first administration; Acosta resigned in 2019 after new reporting by the Miami Herald accused Epstein of abusing about 80 girls and women and showed how Acosta had shut down an FBI investigation into Epstein’s actions.

In July 2019, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey S. Berman charged Epstein with sex trafficking of minors as young as 14. The indictment charged Epstein with sexually exploiting and abusing dozens of underage girls who engaged in sex acts for money at Epstein’s properties in New York and Florida. Arrested in New Jersey in July, Epstein died in his Manhattan prison cell in August.

In 2020, Epstein’s associate Maxwell was indicted on charges of assisting, facilitating, and contributing to Epstein’s abuse of minor girls, not only in New York and Florida, but also at his residences in New Mexico and London, “helping Epstein to recruit, groom, and ultimately abuse victims known to Maxwell and Epstein to be under the age of 18.” Epstein also owned a private 72-acre island off the coast of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, rumored to be another site of sex trafficking. In 2021 a jury found Maxwell guilty on five of six counts, including sex trafficking of a minor and transporting a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity.

When the FBI raided Epstein’s mansion in Manhattan in 2019, they seized piles of evidence, including stacks of compact disks bearing the labels “Young [Name] + [Name]," suggesting he had kept video evidence of men sexually assaulting underage girls.

Within hours of the discovery of Epstein’s body in his prison cell in 2019, Trump was retweeting a conspiracy theory alleging that former president Bill Clinton was involved in his death. Trump and his loyalists pushed the idea that Epstein was trafficking girls to powerful Democratic politicians and Hollywood actors, an accusation that dovetailed with the QAnon conspiracy theory claiming that Trump was secretly leading the fight against such a cabal. Trump fed the idea that if reelected, he would release the information he claimed was being withheld as part of a coverup.

In fact, the politician most closely associated with Epstein was Trump himself. In 2002, Trump told New York Magazine: “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

And yet Trump supporters overlooked Trump’s long friendship with Epstein until billionaire Elon Musk resurrected the story that Trump might be implicated in the records of the Epstein investigation. On June 5, in the midst of a fight with Trump, Musk posted on social media: “Time to drop the really big bomb: [Trump] is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”

On July 7, the Department of Justice announced that Epstein did not maintain a “client list,” that he died by suicide, and that it would not be releasing any more information about the investigation into his activities, although it released a video from outside Epstein’s prison cell the night he died to show that no one had entered the cell, claiming it was “raw” footage. MAGA exploded, and Trump’s attempt to downplay the Epstein files made things worse. Then he turned on his supporters, calling them “stupid” and “foolish” and saying he didn’t want their support while also insisting that Democrats had written the files.

And then Dhruv Mehrotra of Wired reported that two minutes and fifty-three seconds were missing from the “raw” video.

On Wednesday night, far-right influencer Nick Fuentes responded to Trump: “F*ck you. You suck. You are fat, you are a joke, you are stupid, you are not funny, you are not as smart as you think you are.” “[W]e are going to look back on the MAGA movement as the biggest scam in American history,” he added. “And the liberals were right. The MAGA supporters were had. They were.”

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, has been working for the past three years to trace Epstein’s finances, and yesterday, Matthew Goldstein of the New York Times reported his staff’s discovery that four big banks flagged more than $1.5 billion in financial transactions, but only after Epstein was arrested in 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges. Wyden renewed the demand for more financial information about Epstein he had called upon the administration to release in March.

Yesterday, Trump announced on social media: “Based on the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein, I have asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony, subject to Court approval. This SCAM, perpetuated by the Democrats, should end, right now!”

But the grand jury testimony was a small part of the information from the investigation, and as legal analyst Barb McQuade notes, this demand was “a meaningless trick” anyway, because courts prohibit public disclosure of such information. Legal analyst Joyce White Vance clarifies in Civil Discourse that while it is possible in rare circumstances to publish grand jury testimony, the process will be slow and difficult.

Bondi promptly assured Trump she was ready to do as he asked, but Politico’s Kyle Cheney noted that the actual document asked the court to unseal the transcripts “subject to appropriate redactions of victim-related and other personal identifying information,” a provision that has the potential to protect Trump if his name was discussed.

The story of the birthday message has thrown gasoline on this fire. The Wall Street Journal reporters said that when they contacted Trump about the story, he denied writing the letter or drawing the picture and threatened to sue them. Then, hours later, Trump told reporters that Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden had made up the story, although neither was in office when the FBI investigated Epstein. Trump was. Oliver Darcy of Status News reported that Trump personally called the editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal to try to stop her from publishing the story.

After the story dropped, Trump posted that the letter was “FAKE.” “These are not my words, not the way I talk. Also, I don’t draw pictures. I told Rupert Murdoch it was a Scam, that he shouldn’t print this Fake Story. But he did, and now I’m going to sue his ass off, and that of his third rate newspaper. Thank you for your attention to this matter! DJT”

Reporters had a field day today rebutting his claim with accounts of all the times Trump auctioned off his doodles for charities, with photos of the sketches. “The drawings, many of which appear to be done with a thick, black-marker and prominently feature his signature,” wrote Tyler Pager of the New York Times, “are not dissimilar to how The Journal describes the birthday note he sent Mr. Epstein.”

In a letter to FBI director Kash Patel today, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, revealed that his office had received information that Attorney General Pam Bondi pressured the FBI to put 1,000 personnel to work in 24-hour shifts to review approximately 100,000 Epstein records. Durbin said his office had received information that the personnel were instructed “to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned.”

Patel pushed the idea that the Epstein files were being covered up during the Biden administration, only to change his tune once he took charge of the FBI. Durbin asked him to answer a series of questions about the information the FBI holds and how the administration is handling that information, like, for example, how the “raw” footage was modified.

This afternoon, with a complaint that misrepresents the Wall Street Journal story and reads like a Trump press release, Trump sued for defamation Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co., its parent company News Corp, owner Rupert Murdoch, chief executive Robert Thomson, and the two reporters who broke the story, asking for $10 billion in damages. A Dow Jones spokesperson responded: “We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting, and will vigorously defend against any lawsuit.”

The Epstein story is about more than the sex trafficking of girls. It is also about rich and privileged people evading accountability for breaking the law. MAGA likely jumped on the story for both of these reasons when they thought a coverup was protecting Democratic politicians and Hollywood elites.

But the story is also about a group of elite people who think they are better than the rest of us and have the right to dominate anyone that is not part of their group, particularly people of color, Black Americans, and women, no matter what the law says.

Journalist Fareed Zakaria called out that worldview today in a Washington Post story noting that for all their performative cruelty, Trump’s ICE raids have led to far fewer deportations than took place under Obama, and barely more than under Biden. ICE does not coordinate with local law enforcement, follow rules, or work with legal processing—all of which are necessary for an efficient process. The plan appears to be simply to create a spectacle that demonstrates power and dominance.

The latest step from the Justice Department in the case of Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old Louisville, Kentucky, woman killed during a botched police raid in 2020, reinforces that message. In 2024 a federal jury convicted former police officer Brett Hankison of depriving Taylor of her civil rights when he fired several shots into her home through a covered window and glass door. While his bullets were not the ones that killed Taylor, a jury decided that his blind firing constituted excessive force.

On Wednesday, assistant attorney general for the civil rights unit in the Department of Justice Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump loyalist, asked a federal judge to sentence Hankison to a single day in jail, time he has already served.

Civil rights lawyer and former president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Sherrilyn Ifill wrote: “They mean to be as insulting to Black people, as dismissive of our lives, as [resistant] to our status as full citizens in this country as they can be.”

mickeyrat · July 20

July 19, 2025 (Saturday)

On July 20, 1969, U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped from Lunar Module Eagle to the surface of the Moon. One hundred and twenty-five million Americans—63% percent of the population—were watching on live television as Armstrong and pilot Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the Moon.

Televisions showed Armstrong stepping out of the lunar module onto the Moon just before 11:00 p.m. Eastern time.

My siblings and I were among those watching. Our parents had taken us across the harbor to our aunt and uncle’s house, where there was a TV. I remember being groggy from being rousted out of bed and unimpressed by the fuzzy little black-and-white screen the adults were crowded around and kept trying to get us to look at. At six, I had no idea that it was an unusual thing for people to walk on the Moon and was much more impressed that my aunt had a big fishing net with colorful glass weights in it hanging as a decoration near her fieldstone fireplace.

My older sister says that unlike me, she was indeed impressed that night…but not with the Moon landing. Our older cousin Jeff was playing an album by The Doors, and she says she remembers being blown away both by their music, which she was hearing for the first time, and by the weighty realization that we had the coolest cousin in the world.

Clearly, it was a night to remember, even if we didn’t quite understand why. And at a time in which our elected leaders are deliberately breaking our government and institutions, it seems worthwhile to look back at a time when the U.S. government put its power behind enabling the American people to achieve something epic, leading a scientific triumph for people around the world.

So here, thanks to my wonderful team, is the story of Apollo 11. I hope you enjoy it.

And, if you are old enough to remember the Moon landing, I’d love to read your recollections in the comments. Let’s see if we can make a record of what that moment looked like.

https://youtu.be/Xh9-t8xqviM?si=kQM_9hSofxoLAsaM

mickeyrat · July 21

July 20, 2025 (Sunday)

On Friday, G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers reported that “polls show Trump’s position plummeting.” On Friday morning, the average job approval rating for Trump was 42.6% with 53.5% disapproving.

Those numbers break down by policy like this: Gallup polls show that only 35% of Americans approve of Trump’s immigration policy with 62% opposed. A new poll out from CBS News/ YouGov today shows that support for Trump’s deportations has dropped ten points from the start of his term, from 59% to 49%. Fifty-eight percent of Americans oppose the administration’s use of detention facilities. The numbers in a CNN/SSRS poll released today are even more negative for the administration: 59% of Americans oppose deporting undocumented immigrants without a criminal record while only 23% support such deportations, and 57% are opposed to building new detention facilities while only 26% support such a plan.

American approval of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is unlikely to rise as news spreads that last Monday, the government gave ICE unprecedented access to the records of nearly 80 million people on Medicaid, allegedly to enable ICE to find undocumented immigrants. Kimberly Kindy and Amanda Seitz of the Associated Press reported that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services signed an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security that enables ICE to access Medicaid recipients’ name, ethnicity and race, birthdate, home address, and social security number.

Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for Medicaid, although they may use it in an emergency to cover lifesaving services in a hospital emergency room. The release of personal information from Medicaid lists is unprecedented. Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) warned: “The massive transfer of the personal data of millions of Medicaid recipients should alarm every American…. It will harm families across the nation and only cause more citizens to forego lifesaving access to health care.”

Trump’s tariffs are not popular. An Associated Press–NORC poll on Thursday found that 49% of Americans thought Trump’s policies have made them worse off while only 27% think his policies have helped.

And then there are the Epstein files.

A YouGov poll from Tuesday showed that 79% of Americans think the government should release all the documents it has about the Epstein case while only 4% think it should not. Those numbers included 85% of Democrats, but also 76% of Independents and 75% of Republicans. And that was BEFORE the publication of the Wall Street Journal article detailing the lewd and suggestive birthday letter Trump apparently contributed to Epstein’s fiftieth birthday album.

As Morris notes, Trump is underwater on all the issues of his presidency, but he is most dramatically underwater over Epstein.

You don’t need polls to see that Trump, at least, is panicking. He is throwing red meat to his base in what appears to be an attempt to regain control of the narrative. After his July 12 threat to strip comedian and talk show host Rosie O’Donnell of her citizenship (she was born in New York, and he does not have that power), he has kept up a stream of social media posts that seem designed to distract his wavering followers from the news around them.

On Wednesday, Trump announced on social media: “I have been speaking to Coca-Cola about using REAL Cane Sugar in Coke in the United States, and they have agreed to do so. I’d like to thank all of those in authority at Coca-Cola. This will be a very good move by them—You’ll see. It’s just better!”

But Coca-Cola had apparently not gotten the memo. It uses cane sugar in a number of foreign markets but has used high-fructose corn syrup in U.S. products since 1985. On its website, it wrote: “We appreciate President Trump's enthusiasm for our iconic Coca‑Cola brand. More details on new innovative offerings within our Coca‑Cola product range will be shared soon.”

Social media users posted memes of Coke bottles emblazoned with the words “Trump is on the List” and, in small letters below, “Now with cane sugar.”

On Thursday, after observers had noted both the president’s swollen ankles and what appeared to be makeup covering up something on his hand, the White House announced that Trump has been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a condition that his physician described as a “benign” and common condition in which veins don’t move blood back to the heart efficiently.

Trump has never offered any information about his health, and his doctors have presented accounts of his physical exams that are hard to believe, making observers receive this announcement at this moment with skepticism. “Chronic venous insufficiency is a condition where the veins in the legs have difficulty drawing attention from the fact that the Epstein Files still haven’t been released,” one social media meme read.

Today, Trump posted on social media: “The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team. There is a big clamoring for this. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams, with a storied past. Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them. Times are different now than they were three or four years ago. We are a Country of passion and common sense. OWNERS, GET IT DONE!!!”

Hours later, he posted that his post “has totally blown up, but only in a very positive way.” Then he threatened to block the deal to move the Commanders back to Washington, D.C., from a Maryland suburb unless they “change the name back to the original ‘Washington Redskins.’”

At the turn of the last century, those worried that industrialization was destroying masculinity encouraged sports to give men an arena for manly combat. Sports teams dominated by Euro-Americans often took names that invoked Indigenous Americans because those names seemed to them to harness the idea of “savagery” in the safe space of a playing field. By the end of the twentieth century, the majority of Americans had come to recognize the racism inherent in those names, and colleges started to retire Native American team names and mascots. In 2020 the Washington football team retired its former name, becoming the Commanders two years later. At about the same time, the Cleveland baseball team became the Cleveland Guardians in honor of the four pairs of art deco statues installed on the city’s Hope Memorial Bridge in 1932.

Trump’s attempt to control the narrative didn’t work. “The thing about the Redskins and Indians is that Donald Trump is on the Epstein list,” one social media user wrote. The post was representative of reactions to Trump’s post.

Today marked the end of the first six months of Trump’s second term, and he marked it with a flurry of social media posts praising his performance as “6 months of winning,” and attacking those he sees as his opponents. He again went after the Wall Street Journal, which ran the story about Epstein’s birthday album. He complained the paper had run a “typically untruthful story” when it said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had had to explain to Trump that firing Fed chair Jerome Powell would be bad for markets. Trump took exception to the idea he did not understand the interplay of the Fed and markets, despite his repeated threats against Powell.

“Nobody had to explain that to me,” he wrote. “I know better than anybody what’s good for the Market, and what’s good for the U.S.A. if it weren’t for me, the Market wouldn’t be at Record Highs right now, it probably would have CRASHED! So, get your information CORRECT. People don’t explain to me, I explain to them!”

Tonight, Trump’s social media posts seemed to project his own fears on Democrats he perceives as enemies. He once again claimed Senator Schiff, who managed one of the impeachment cases against Trump when he was a representative, had falsified loan documents in 2011 and should go to prison. In 2023, a judge determined that the Trump Organization had falsified loan documents. Trump posted: “Adam Schiff is a THIEF! He should be prosecuted, just like they tried to prosecute me, and everyone else—the only difference is, WE WERE TOTALLY INNOCENT, IT WAS ALL A GIANT HOAX!”

On Late Night with Stephen Colbert last Thursday, Schiff said: “Donald, piss off…. But Donald, before you piss off, would you release the Epstein files?”

Trump also posted an image of intelligence agents and politicians in prison garb as if in mug shots, and reposted both an image of what appears to be lawmakers in handcuffs and an AI-generated video showing former president Barack Obama being arrested by FBI agents and then being held in a jail cell.

Meidas Touch posted: “The crazy thing about Donald Trump posting an AI video of Obama getting arrested is that Trump once had someone organize a party for him and invite a bunch of ‘young women’ and it turned out Jeffrey Epstein was his only other guest.” Alan Feuer and Matthew Goldstein broke the story of that party in Saturday’s New York Times.

mickeyrat · July 22

July 21, 2025 (Monday)

After a long, productive day, I thought I'd just hop out on the water for an hour or so before I started writing tonight's letter. But that hour stretched on into a magical and expansive evening when I went much farther than I had planned. As I paddled under a bright blue sky with the sun setting beside me, it became clear to me that I needed a break from the cramped confines of our daily news.

I did think to take a picture for you all while I was out there so that you could have a break, too. This is an odd sunset picture because it is facing east in the last light of the sun setting in the west. The whole sky was worth leaving the desk for.

Let's enjoy a night off. I'll be back at it tomorrow.

mickeyrat · July 23

July 22, 2025 (Tuesday)

First thing this morning, Attorney General Pam Bondi posted on X a statement from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche saying that under Bondi’s direction, he had talked to the lawyers for Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of grooming victims for convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Blanche wrote that he anticipated meeting with Maxwell in the coming days.

“President Trump has told us to release all credible evidence,” he wrote. “If Ghislane [sic] Maxwell has information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims, the FBI and the DOJ will hear what she has to say.” This offering appeared designed to show that the White House wants to release information that might be in the Epstein files, but as observers note, the president could just release the files themselves if he wanted to.

In fact, yesterday, the administration did just that. Over the objections of his family, the Trump administration released records compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) about the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The files contain more than 240,000 pages of records and have been sealed since 1977, when the FBI turned them over to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

The acting archivist of the United States is Marco Rubio (who is also secretary of state, interim national security advisor, and acting administrator of what’s left of the U.S. Agency for International Development).

While this document dump appears to have been announced in order to distract from the Epstein files, it seems unlikely to do so. MAGA and other Americans are interested in the Epstein files because they expect the files will show that the government has been covering up for powerful men who have been able to rape children without facing legal accountability. In contrast, the King files will likely show the government harassing a citizen to pin illegal activity on him, a different side of the same coin that suggests the government is working for rich and powerful white men.

The King files were compiled by the FBI in projects associated with its COINTELPRO, short for Counter Intelligence Program, that operated between 1956 and 1971. These projects illegally surveilled and worked to discredit Americans that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover thought were a danger to American society. Hoover singled out King as a target, bugging his home and hotel rooms and urging him to take his own life.

Attorney General Bondi also announced that the Department of Justice has released additional documents from the FBI’s investigation into former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s email server. In 2016, after then-candidate Donald Trump insisted that her use of a private server had been criminal and made “Lock her up!” a chant at his rallies, the FBI concluded that while Clinton had been “extremely careless,” she did not act with criminal intent. She was never charged.

Last night, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) sent members of the House of Representatives home early for their summer break rather than take a vote on whether to release the Epstein files. The House will not reconvene until September 2.

Last night at 9:03 p.m., the White House account posted on X an image of Trump in front of American flags, eagles, and fireworks with the caption: “I was the hunted—NOW I’M THE HUNTER. President Donald J. Trump.”

Things seem a little unstable at the White House.

That panic continued today. When a reporter asked about Blanche’s meeting with Maxwell, Trump exploded, attacking former president Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Trump claimed they "tried to rig the [2016] election, and they got caught. And there should be very severe consequences for that.”

Trump was referring to the allegations Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard made on Friday, when she called for the prosecution of former president Barack Obama and former senior national security officials for participating in a “treasonous conspiracy” against Trump that indicated Russian operatives had worked on his behalf during the 2016 presidential election.

Gabbard told Congress last March that the U.S. Intelligence Community assessed that Iran was not working on a nuclear weapon, putting her at odds with Trump, who justified his attack on Iran with the insistence that the country was close to achieving nuclear capabilities. Her defense of Trump now seems likely to help her restore her favor with the White House.

“We caught Hillary Clinton,” Trump said. ”We caught Barack Hussein Obama. They're the ones, and then you have many, many people under them…. And it's the most unbelievable thing I think I've ever read. So you ought to take a look at that and stop talking about nonsense, because this is big stuff, never has a thing like this happened in the history of our country. And by the way, it morphed into the 2020 race, and the 2020 race was rigged, and it was, it was a rigged election. And because it was rigged, we have millions of people in our country, we have—we had inflation, we solved the inflation problem. But millions and millions of people came into our country because of that, and people that shouldn't have been, people from gangs and from jails and from mental institutions.”

Trump continued: "This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody's ever even imagined, even in other countries.”

Trump appears to be touching all his greatest hits in an attempt to regain control of the narrative. But the more he protests that he is not connected to the Epstein files, the more he reinforces the idea that he is. That nervousness showed in the attempt this weekend, uncovered by Slate’s Ben Mathis-Lilley, to reassure major media outlets that the White House had neutralized the Epstein story. Mathis-Lilley noted that the stories making that argument in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN all had the same source: Trump ally Steve Bannon.

After Trump’s outburst today, President Obama’s spokesperson Patrick Rodenbush issued a statement saying: “Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response. But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.

“Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes. These findings were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio.”

Today CNN published more newly discovered photos of Trump and Epstein together.

And as of yesterday, there is a billboard in New York City’s Times Square asking: “TRUMP, WHY WON’T YOU RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES?”

mickeyrat · July 24

July 23, 2025 (Wednesday)

This morning, President Donald J. Trump told Republican members of Congress that his popularity is rising and that talk about the Epstein files is a distraction from what he insists is the real story: that former president Barack Obama cheated in the 2016 election. Trump insisted the cameramen cut their cameras when he made that accusation, although there was no break in the recording. He told the congressmembers: “[Y]ou should mention that every time they give you a question that's not appropriate, just say, ‘Oh, by the way, Obama cheated on the election.’”

At a press briefing today, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed this story, insisting that Democrats led by Obama had tried to sabotage Trump’s first administration and had done “grave material harm to our republic.” She called it “one of the greatest political scandals in American history.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard followed Leavitt to talk about today’s release of a report drafted in 2020 by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee to push back on the idea that Russia preferred for Trump, rather than Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, to win the 2016 election.

Despite her claims that it is a damning bombshell, the material in the newly released report in fact does not challenge the conclusion of the U.S. intelligence agencies, the Mueller report, and the Senate Intelligence Committee that Russia preferred a Trump presidency to a Clinton presidency and worked to get Trump elected in part by attacking Clinton and spreading lies about her health.

What the report did do was deliver red meat to the MAGA base by spreading the same sorts of rumors about Clinton the Russians spread in 2016.

Gabbard compounded that effort at the White House press conference by reading material in the report as if it were fact, saying that Russia had “high-level [Democratic National Committee] e-mails that detailed evidence of Hillary's ‘psycho emotional problems, uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness.’ And that then-secretary Clinton was allegedly on a daily regimen of heavy tranquilizers,” along with a number of other charges that Clinton had broken the law. Gabbard did not mention that these allegations were in fact identified in the report as material prepared by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Services.

Just to be clear: The director of national intelligence for the United States of America is making allegations against a former U.S. president based on material from Russia’s intelligence services.

This seems to be another unforced error, reminding Americans of another story the administration would prefer they forget, since opponents of Gabbard’s nomination for her post noted that she has a long history of repeating Russian propaganda. While Trump seems determined to reach back to the rhetoric that got him elected in 2016, it’s hard to see that as a powerful distraction from the Epstein story, since Americans have now had eight years to contemplate the many times Trump has deferred to Russian president Vladimir Putin and weakened Ukraine’s ability to fight back against Russia’s incursions. And claims about the health of a losing presidential candidate from nine years ago seem pretty weak sauce, especially since today she seems far more stable than Trump.

In any case, the distractions seemed to be for naught, since Sadie Gurman, Annie Linskey, Josh Dawsey, and Alex Leary of the Wall Street Journal dropped a story just after 3:00 this afternoon, reporting that Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy informed Trump in May that his name appeared “multiple times” in the Epstein files. They told him they did not plan to release any more documents from the investigation because the files contained both the personal information of victims and child pornography.

Ohio’s David Pepper noted that this timing checks out with the feud between Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, who tweeted on June 5: “Time to drop the really big bomb: [Trump] is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!” Musk followed that tweet with another: “Mark this post for the future. The truth will come out.”

While that “sort of felt like old news,” Pepper wrote, “for the White House, that was Musk revealing something that had only recently been confirmed (and that clearly had hopes to bury). So it was a far more brutal tweet than we realized at the time. And the reason why Musk took it down two days later.”

The Department of Justice set off the current firestorm on July 7 when it announced it would not release any more information from the Epstein files. When an ABC News reporter asked Trump on July 15 what Bondi had told Trump about the review, he denied any knowledge that he was in the files. The reporter asked, "specifically, did she tell you at all that your name appeared in the files?" and he responded, “No, no, she's—she's given us just a very quick briefing." Then he claimed the files were created by Democrats.

House speaker Mike Johnson told reporters today that the House didn’t need to do anything to release the Epstein files because the administration was “already doing everything within their power to release them,” and indeed, the Trump administration made a show of saying it would ask the courts to unseal the transcripts of the Epstein grand jury. But legal analysts say those records would cover only Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of grooming victims for Epstein. In any case, a federal judge denied that request today after the government attorneys did not submit an argument that met the requirements for unsealing the evidence.

Today, under pressure from Democrats, the House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Maxwell. The Department of Justice also wants to talk to Maxwell, sending Trump’s former personal lawyer Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, to talk with Maxwell’s lawyer, who appears to be his personal friend. Alan Feuer of the New York Times notes the job fell to Blanche after the department fired Maurene Comey, the prosecutor of both the Epstein and Maxwell cases, last week. Maxwell is appealing her conviction, giving her incentive to say what the president wants to hear.

The Democrats on a subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee, supported by three Republicans, also voted to subpoena the Justice Department for its files on Epstein, although writing the subpoena will take negotiation. “If the Republican Party, if our colleagues on this committee don’t join us in this vote, then what they’re essentially doing is joining President Donald Trump in complicity,” Representative Summer Lee (D-PA), who introduced the subpoena motion, told reporters.

It does not seem likely the Epstein story is going away anytime soon.

Halifax2TheMax · July 24

mickeyrat said:

July 23, 2025 (Wednesday)

This morning, President Donald J. Trump told Republican members of Congress that his popularity is rising and that talk about the Epstein files is a distraction from what he insists is the real story: that former president Barack Obama cheated in the 2016 election. Trump insisted the cameramen cut their cameras when he made that accusation, although there was no break in the recording. He told the congressmembers: “[Y]ou should mention that every time they give you a question that's not appropriate, just say, ‘Oh, by the way, Obama cheated on the election.’”

At a press briefing today, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed this story, insisting that Democrats led by Obama had tried to sabotage Trump’s first administration and had done “grave material harm to our republic.” She called it “one of the greatest political scandals in American history.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard followed Leavitt to talk about today’s release of a report drafted in 2020 by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee to push back on the idea that Russia preferred for Trump, rather than Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, to win the 2016 election.

Despite her claims that it is a damning bombshell, the material in the newly released report in fact does not challenge the conclusion of the U.S. intelligence agencies, the Mueller report, and the Senate Intelligence Committee that Russia preferred a Trump presidency to a Clinton presidency and worked to get Trump elected in part by attacking Clinton and spreading lies about her health.

What the report did do was deliver red meat to the MAGA base by spreading the same sorts of rumors about Clinton the Russians spread in 2016.

Gabbard compounded that effort at the White House press conference by reading material in the report as if it were fact, saying that Russia had “high-level [Democratic National Committee] e-mails that detailed evidence of Hillary's ‘psycho emotional problems, uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness.’ And that then-secretary Clinton was allegedly on a daily regimen of heavy tranquilizers,” along with a number of other charges that Clinton had broken the law. Gabbard did not mention that these allegations were in fact identified in the report as material prepared by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Services.

Just to be clear: The director of national intelligence for the United States of America is making allegations against a former U.S. president based on material from Russia’s intelligence services.

This seems to be another unforced error, reminding Americans of another story the administration would prefer they forget, since opponents of Gabbard’s nomination for her post noted that she has a long history of repeating Russian propaganda. While Trump seems determined to reach back to the rhetoric that got him elected in 2016, it’s hard to see that as a powerful distraction from the Epstein story, since Americans have now had eight years to contemplate the many times Trump has deferred to Russian president Vladimir Putin and weakened Ukraine’s ability to fight back against Russia’s incursions. And claims about the health of a losing presidential candidate from nine years ago seem pretty weak sauce, especially since today she seems far more stable than Trump.

In any case, the distractions seemed to be for naught, since Sadie Gurman, Annie Linskey, Josh Dawsey, and Alex Leary of the Wall Street Journal dropped a story just after 3:00 this afternoon, reporting that Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy informed Trump in May that his name appeared “multiple times” in the Epstein files. They told him they did not plan to release any more documents from the investigation because the files contained both the personal information of victims and child pornography.

Ohio’s David Pepper noted that this timing checks out with the feud between Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, who tweeted on June 5: “Time to drop the really big bomb: [Trump] is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!” Musk followed that tweet with another: “Mark this post for the future. The truth will come out.”

While that “sort of felt like old news,” Pepper wrote, “for the White House, that was Musk revealing something that had only recently been confirmed (and that clearly had hopes to bury). So it was a far more brutal tweet than we realized at the time. And the reason why Musk took it down two days later.”

The Department of Justice set off the current firestorm on July 7 when it announced it would not release any more information from the Epstein files. When an ABC News reporter asked Trump on July 15 what Bondi had told Trump about the review, he denied any knowledge that he was in the files. The reporter asked, "specifically, did she tell you at all that your name appeared in the files?" and he responded, “No, no, she's—she's given us just a very quick briefing." Then he claimed the files were created by Democrats.

House speaker Mike Johnson told reporters today that the House didn’t need to do anything to release the Epstein files because the administration was “already doing everything within their power to release them,” and indeed, the Trump administration made a show of saying it would ask the courts to unseal the transcripts of the Epstein grand jury. But legal analysts say those records would cover only Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of grooming victims for Epstein. In any case, a federal judge denied that request today after the government attorneys did not submit an argument that met the requirements for unsealing the evidence.

Today, under pressure from Democrats, the House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Maxwell. The Department of Justice also wants to talk to Maxwell, sending Trump’s former personal lawyer Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, to talk with Maxwell’s lawyer, who appears to be his personal friend. Alan Feuer of the New York Times notes the job fell to Blanche after the department fired Maurene Comey, the prosecutor of both the Epstein and Maxwell cases, last week. Maxwell is appealing her conviction, giving her incentive to say what the president wants to hear.

The Democrats on a subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee, supported by three Republicans, also voted to subpoena the Justice Department for its files on Epstein, although writing the subpoena will take negotiation. “If the Republican Party, if our colleagues on this committee don’t join us in this vote, then what they’re essentially doing is joining President Donald Trump in complicity,” Representative Summer Lee (D-PA), who introduced the subpoena motion, told reporters.

It does not seem likely the Epstein story is going away anytime soon.

August is going to be an interesting month, many people are saying.

mickeyrat · July 25

July 24, 2025 (Thursday)

The Epstein list made it into last night’s premiere of the twenty-seventh season of the television series South Park when Satan, in bed with Trump, commented, “It’s weird that whenever it comes up, you just tell everyone to relax.”

The episode hit the president’s lawsuit against the parent company of CBS News, Paramount Global, which paid Trump $16 million to settle his complaint that it had edited an interview with then–Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris misleadingly. Paramount also said it would not renew comedian Stephen Colbert’s contract just days after the deal was announced. Paramount and Skydance Media are in the midst of an $8 billion merger, and they needed the approval of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to complete the deal. Today, Skydance Media promised to eliminate Paramount’s diversity, equity, and inclusion practices and to root out the “bias” at CBS News in order to win the administration's support for the merger. This afternoon, the FCC approved the deal.

Charlotte Clymer of Charlotte’s Web Thoughts notes that on Monday, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone signed a $1.5 billion, five-year deal with Paramount for global streaming rights to the show. This new episode skewered Paramount’s cozying up to Trump.

Clymer points out that the South Park writers go on to portray Trump exactly as they once did Saddam Hussein, not only putting him in bed with Satan as they did Saddam, but also giving Trump the ‘“[s]ame mannerisms. Same voice inflections. Same love affair with Satan. Same dictatorial chaos. In fact, Satan references this by telling Trump he reminds him of a guy he used to date.” Clymer notes that the writers of one of the country’s hottest shows are “communicating that they think Trump is a bullsh*t, two-bit dictator.”

The Bulwark’s Joe Perticone reported today that in a decade of reporting on Congress, he has never seen such a level of panic among Republican lawmakers. In the past, he notes, Trump could weather crises because Republicans closed ranks around him. The Epstein issue, though, has driven a wedge through the Republicans themselves, some of whom are turning against Trump just as the House of Representatives is headed back home. There, Republican members will hear directly from constituents who are angry over the administration’s about-face on releasing more information about Epstein and his associates.

Trump boasted to the House Republicans on Tuesday that his poll numbers are the best he’s ever had, but in fact a Gallup poll out today shows his approval rating at its lowest in his second term: just 37% of American adults approve of his performance in office. Journalist Bill Grueskin notes that this puts Trump six points below where Biden was after the final U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. The biggest shift has been among Independents. Only 29% of them say they approve of his job performance, down from 46% at the beginning of his term.

Gallup reports that 60% of American adults disapprove of how Trump is handling immigration, with only 38% approving. That is unlikely to change as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), newly flush with funding from the budget reconciliation bill, ramps up both immigration sweeps and detention. Neither is popular with Americans as they hear stories of overcrowding at ICE facilities and inhumane and unsanitary conditions.

On Tuesday, Nicole Acevedo of NBC News reported that detainees at the detention center in the Florida Everglades spoke of “torturous conditions in cage-like units full of mosquitoes,” with lights on at all times, lack of food and medical treatment, and unsanitary conditions. On June 20, she reported, the U.S. was holding more than 56,000 people in detention centers, the highest number in U.S. history. Nearly 72% of those held had no criminal history.

Just two days after the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Urban Search and Rescue branch, Ken Pagurek, resigned out of frustration with the administration’s work to destroy the agency, and the same day FEMA acting director David Richardson would not commit to the agency’s continued existence, Colleen DeGuzman of the Texas Tribune reported that the U.S. Department of Defense had awarded a $1.26 billion contract to build the largest detention facility in the U.S. at Fort Bliss, an army base in El Paso, Texas. The facility will be designed to hold 5,000 people in tents, and it is expected to open in September 2027. DeGuzman notes that the company that was awarded the contract, Acquisition Logistics, appears not to have experience running detention centers.

On Friday, July 18, the government of El Salvador repatriated more than 250 Venezuelan men who had been held at the notorious CECOT prison after being sent there by the Trump administration. The administration maintained it was not responsible for the men after they left U.S. territory, a claim the government of El Salvador repeatedly refuted. But with the repatriation of the men in exchange for the release of ten U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents held as political prisoners in Venezuela, the State Department claimed the exchange was “thanks to President Trump’s leadership and commitment to the American people.”

The former CECOT prisoners are telling the story of their four-month incarceration, detailing human rights abuses: beatings, being shot with pellets, deprivation of due process, torture.

Today Neiyerver Adrián Leon Rengel filed an administrative claim against Homeland Security for wrongful detention when it sent him to the terrorist CECOT prison in El Salvador. The filing is the first step in a lawsuit. “I want to clear my name,” he told Jazmine Ulloa of the New York Times. “I am not a bad person.”

The Trump administration received a rebuke yesterday in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man wrongly deported to CECOT. The administration brought Abrego back to the U.S. only after it indicted him on charges of human smuggling. Once back, he was imprisoned in Tennessee, and the administration threatened to deport him again if he were released from custody pending trial.

Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland prohibited officials from taking Abrego into custody and said the administration must give him at least three days’ notice if it intends to deport him.

Shortly afterward, U.S. District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. ordered that Abrego be released from criminal detention, saying the government had not shown that he is a threat. While the administration insists that Abrego is a gang member, Crenshaw wrote that he had seen no evidence that Abrego “has markings or tattoos showing gang affiliation; has working relationships with known MS-13 members; ever told any of the witnesses that he is [an] MS-13 member; or has ever been affiliated with any sort of gang activity.” Jacob Knutson of Democracy Docket noted that Abrego requested to stay his release for 30 days, and a magistrate judge issued that stay yesterday.

The administration is facing rough waters elsewhere, too. On Monday the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its final score for the budget reconciliation bill that poured money into border security. Although Republicans insisted it would not add to the deficit, the CBO predicts it will in fact increase the federal deficit by $3.4 trillion and push 10 million people off health insurance. Most of the cost for the bill will come from the Republicans' extension of tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy.

In the Washington Post today, Gene Sperling, who served as director of the National Economic Council under presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, noted that while the Republicans insisted that extending the tax cuts should not be counted toward raising the deficit because they were part of “current policy,” they “entirely rejected” the current policy argument when it came to extending the increase in the Affordable Care Act’s premium tax credit (PTC) established under Biden. Unlike the tax cuts for the wealthy, Republicans are letting that tax credit die, a change that will mean a tax increase of $335 billion for working families over the next ten years.

The loss of the PTC will not only drive healthcare up more than $18,000 a year for a typical 60-year-old couple making $82,000 a year, Sperling writes, but will also drive healthier Americans out of the market, making healthcare coverage more expensive for those who remain in it. Sperling notes that unlike many of the cuts in the budget reconciliation bill, the PTC will expire this year, making voters aware of what the Republicans have done before the midterms—a reality that might have been behind the recent calls from some Republican lawmakers to extend the PTC.

Yesterday, Dan Lamothe and John Hudson of the Washington Post reported that the messages Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sent in a Signal chat came from an email with “SECRET” classification, meaning that disclosing that information could cause serious damage to national security. Senior members of the administration have repeatedly denied that classified information was shared in the chat.

Finally today, cryptocurrency reporter Molly White noted that a memecoin by cryptocurrency billionaire Justin Sun, who has invested about $213 million in cryptocurrency projects connected to Trump, posted a meme showing its mascot, sporting an evil grin, manipulating the White House with the mechanical system of a puppeteer. Over the image, the meme read: “You never truly know who’s pulling the strings.”

mickeyrat · July 26

July 25, 2025 (Friday)

“We’re going to end up shooting some of them.”

At 9:00 on the morning of May 2, 2025, a Florida Highway Patrol officer pulled over a van with 18-year-old U.S. citizen Kenny Laynez-Ambrosio and two undocumented men in it. Laynez-Ambrosio’s mother was driving the men to their landscaping job. The patrol officer called U.S. Border Patrol agents. Laynez-Ambrosio recorded what happened next. The Guardian’s Clare Considine reported the story today.

The video shows a female officer asking if anyone in the van is in the U.S. illegally. One man said he was undocumented. “OK, let’s go,” Laynez-Ambrosio heard one of the officers say. An officer popped the door of the van open and grabbed the man by the neck in a chokehold. In the video, several officers pull the man from the van and tell him to “put your f*cking head down.” While Laynez-Ambrosio can be heard telling his friend in Spanish not to resist, the officers drop the man to the ground with a stun gun.

“You’re funny, bro,” one officer says to another, apparently the one who used the stun gun. The officers laugh.

Another says, “They’re starting to resist more now,” to which an officer replies: “We’re going to end up shooting some of them.”

Later the officers say: “Goddamn! Woo! Nice!” adding: “Just remember, you can smell that [inaudible] $30,000 bonus.”

Diamond Walker and Valentina Palm of the Palm Beach Post added that an officer explained the stun gun: “He was being a d***. “That’s the one we tased.”

The officers arrested Laynez-Ambrosio, a U.S. citizen, and held him for six hours in a cell at a Customs and Border Patrol station, then charged him with obstruction without violence. He was sentenced to 10 hours of community service and a four-hour anger management course.

Eighty-four years ago today, on July 25, 1941, Emmet Till was born in Chicago, Illinois.

In August 1955, when he was fourteen years old, Till went to visit relatives in a small Mississippi town. After the wife of a white man named Roy Bryant accused the Black boy of flirting with her, Bryant and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, kidnapped Till, brutally beat him, mutilated him, shot him in the back of the head, and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River.

In September 1955 an all-white jury took just over an hour to find Bryant and Milam not guilty. A member of the jury said, “We wouldn’t have taken so long if we hadn’t stopped to drink pop.”

Immune from further prosecution, Bryant and Milam told their story to Look magazine for $4,000. They said they had kidnapped and beaten Till to frighten him, but when he refused to beg for mercy, they drove him to the river. Milam asked, “You still as good as I am?” and when Till answered, “Yeah,” they shot him, tied a 75-pound cotton gin fan around his neck with barbed wire, and threw him in.

“What else could we do?” Milam said. “He was hopeless. I’m no bully. I never hurt a n*gger in my life. I like n*ggers, in their place. I know how to work ’em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, n*ggers are gonna stay in their place.”

After Till’s body had been recovered from the Tallahatchie, the county sheriff directed that the body be buried quickly, but Till’s mother insisted that her son’s body be returned to Chicago.

There, she insisted on an open-casket funeral.

“Let the world see what I have seen,” she said.

brianlux · July 26

As a friend of mine used to say, shitfuckdamnpisshell. What a world. SMH.

mickeyrat · July 27

July 26, 2025 (Saturday)

Ten days ago, ten Republican senators wrote to Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, asking him to release the funds Congress appropriated in March to support education. Vought was a key author of Project 2025, which claims the federal government has been taken over by a radical left cabal and calls for the decimation of that government in favor of state power, enabling the construction of a religious government.

Vought was central to the cuts made by the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) and has recently pushed Congress to put its stamp of approval on $9.4 billion of those cuts. Over the objections of Democrats, Republicans agreed earlier this month to approve cuts the administration made to laws passed by Congress, known as "rescissions,” for the first time in decades. Trump signed that measure into law on Thursday.

The Constitution charges the president with making sure the laws passed by Congress are “faithfully executed,” and the 1974 Impoundment Control Act prohibits the executive branch from withholding funds appropriated by Congress, leading lawmakers to object that the Trump administration is breaking the law and trying to take over Congress’s job of writing laws. Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) said of the rescission package: “Let's not make a habit of this. Let’s not consider this a precedent.” But Vought says those cuts are just the beginning.

In March, Congress approved nearly $7 billion in education funding that was supposed to be released by July 1, but the administration announced on June 30 it would not do so, saying officials were conducting a “review.” The funds included money to recruit and train teachers and to support arts and music education in low-income areas, as well as funds for children learning English and for the children of migrant farm workers. New York Times education reporter Sarah Mervosh noted that the Office of Management and Budget said federal dollars were being “grossly misused to subsidize a radical left-wing agenda.”

“We share your concern about taxpayer money going to fund radical left-wing programs,” the senators wrote to Vought, but “we do not believe that is happening with these funds.”

Also yesterday, Senator Katie Britt (R-AL), who chairs the Senate Appropriations homeland subcommittee, and thirteen of her Republican colleagues wrote a letter to Vought urging him to “fully implement” the government funding measure Congress passed in March, releasing money for programs funded by the National Institutes of Health. The letter clarified that its authors shared Vought’s “commitment to ensuring NIH funds are used responsibly and not diverted to ideological or unaccountable programs.” But, it warned, “Suspension of these appropriated funds—whether formally withheld or functionally delayed—could threaten Americans’ ability to access better treatments and limit our nation’s leadership in biomedical science.”

As Trump’s popularity falls, Republican lawmakers are having to confront the reality that the Project 2025 program the administration is putting into place is deeply unpopular not just with Democrats and Independents but also with Republicans. They appear to be trying desperately to shore up some of the damage the administration has done. And the White House seems to be concerned enough about the 2026 midterms that it’s listening. Yesterday the Trump administration announced it would release more than $5 billion in funding it had withheld from public schools.

The release of money before the start of the school year will help to hide from voters how the administration’s decisions are affecting their everyday lives, a helpful reprieve as the administration continues to stonewall over the files of late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Still refusing to entertain the idea of releasing the files themselves, administration officials have now met twice with Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse children. Trump’s former attorney Todd Blanche is representing the Department of Justice (DOJ). He wrote: “President Trump has told us to release all credible evidence. If Ghislane [sic] Maxwell has information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims, the FBI and the DOJ will hear what she has to say.”

Interviewing Maxwell, who is fishing for a reduction in her 20-year sentence, is unlikely to be a convincing substitute for the files themselves, especially since we now know Trump is mentioned in the files and lied that Attorney General Pam Bondi had not given him that information.

The circumstances around the talks also seem fishy. Alan Feuer of the New York Times reports that Blanche is a personal friend of Maxwell’s lawyer David O. Markus. Feuer also noted that Blanche has taken the lead in the discussions since the department fired Maurene Comey, who prosecuted the cases of both Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

Maxwell herself is a problematic witness: in 2020, during Trump’s first administration, the Justice Department charged her with two counts of perjury in addition to the charges of sexually grooming children and sex trafficking. As CNN’s Aaron Blake pointed out today, in filing the charges, the Justice Department said that her lies “should give the Court serious pause” about trusting her and that her “willingness to brazenly lie under oath about her conduct…strongly suggests her true motive has been and remains to avoid being held accountable for her crimes.”

Yesterday Trump appeared to dangle a pardon over Maxwell when he pointed out to reporters that he’s “allowed” to pardon her.

As Republicans note Trump’s weakening power, elected officials appear to be pushing for rollbacks of his policies. At the same time, his appointees are pushing to put as much of their agenda into operation as they can, while they can.

Liz Essley Whyte reported yesterday in the Wall Street Journal that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to remove all sixteen members of a task force that advises the federal government on what preventative health care measures—things like cancer screenings—health insurers must cover. Whyte explains that the people currently on the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force have medical expertise, are vetted to make sure they don’t have conflicts of interest, and use the latest scientific evidence to determine which interventions work.

In June, Kennedy replaced all seventeen of the members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) with seven people who share Kennedy’s distrust of vaccines. They announced that they would reexamine the CDC’s recommended vaccine schedule for children and adults.

Hannah Natanson, Jeff Stein, Dan Diamond, and Rachel Siegel of the Washington Post reported today that staff associated with the “Department of Government Efficiency” are using artificial intelligence to eliminate half of the government’s regulations by next January. James Burnham, former chief attorney for DOGE, told the reporters: “Creative deployment of artificial intelligence to advance the president’s regulatory agenda is one logical strategy to make significant progress” during Trump’s term.

Officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which operates under the Department of Homeland Security, announced yesterday that it is starting a “detention support grant program” to fund temporary detention facilities. States have until August 8 to apply for grants from a pot of $608 million. FEMA and U.S. Customs and Border Protection will distribute the funds.

There appears to be pushback against some of the extremes of the administration’s appointees. Greg Jaffe, Eric Schmitt, and Helene Cooper of the New York Times reported today that senior military officers are increasingly at odds with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon has been rocky, as most of his staff have either resigned or been fired and have not been replaced, and as he uploaded classified information about military strikes to a private Signal chat on which a reporter had been included.

Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), whose support for Hegseth earned him Senate confirmation, recently told CNN: “With the passing of time, I think it’s clear he’s out of his depth as a manager of a large, complex organization.”

mickeyrat · July 28

July 27, 2025 (Sunday)

On July 23 the X account of the Department of Homeland Security posted an image of an 1872 oil painting by John Gast, titled “American Progress.” Gast represented the American East on the right side of the painting with light skies, a rising sun, and the bustling port of New York City, full of ships. He painted the American West in darkness, through which bison and Indigenous Americans flee the people in the middle of the painting: white hunters, farmers, settlers, and stagecoach riders. Over the scene floats a giant, blonde Lady Liberty, evidently moving west, carrying a schoolbook and a telegraph wire being laced on poles along a train track behind her.

Over the reproduced image, the Department of Homeland Security account wrote: “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.”

From the time Gast painted it, American Progress has been interpreted as a representation of the concept of manifest destiny: the mid-nineteenth-century notion that God had destined the people of the United States of America to spread democracy to the rest of at least the North American continent, and possibly South America as well. A number of people who saw the Homeland Security post saw it as the Trump administration’s embrace of that ideology.

Magazine editor John O’Sullivan coined the term “manifest destiny” in the July 1845 issue of Democratic Review, a magazine dedicated to defining what it meant to live in a democratic republic. O’Sullivan’s concept of manifest destiny was different from the constant expansionism of Euro-Americans before his time, in part because he was defending a specific partisan policy: Congress’s annexation of Texas in March 1845 and the apparent determination of Democratic president James K. Polk to seize more territory from Mexico. The Democrats’ political opponents, the Whigs, opposed the land grab, and Democrats justified their position on the grounds that they were simply honoring God’s plan.

The spread of democracy—and, with it, American greatness—was both the right and the duty of Americans, they claimed, overriding the despotisms of monarchs. Along with that democratic system would travel an economic system that developed resources for private owners, the Protestant religion, and a cultural system that privileged white people. Such a system was best for everyone, even those people whose land, lives, and culture would be absorbed by the movement. Democrats constructed a strong sense of U.S. nationalism around this idea and its corollary: the extension of human enslavement.

Manifest destiny both reflected and fed the era’s greed and racism. But there was a key political element in it that adherents to today’s right-wing political movement appear to reject. At the heart of manifest destiny, beneath the language of “civilizing” other peoples and the embrace of human enslavement, was the concept that the lands the U.S. acquired would become states equal to the older states in the Union and that the people in the lands the U.S. absorbed would eventually become Americans equal to those who had been in the United States for a generation or more.

“New territory is spread out for us to subdue and fertilize,” Daniel S. Dickinson of New York told the Senate; “new races are presented for us to civilize, educate and absorb; new triumphs for us to achieve for the cause of freedom.”

In the 1840s—indeed until the last few years—Americans accepted that the United States was based on an idea. Even in that era of crabbed racism that excluded Black Americans and women and circumscribed others, lawmakers embraced the idea that the U.S. could expand to include new people. In the immigration boom of the 1840s and 1850s, that was no small thing.

Rather than advancing the concept of manifest destiny—as deeply problematic as that would be—the Trump administration’s reposting of American Progress seems designed instead to harness American traditional symbols in order to advance the idea of “blood and soil” citizenship popularized in 1930s Germany.

“Blood and soil” ideology claimed true Germans were defined by race within a specific land. Nazi propagandist Richard Walther Darré reflected those ideas when he celebrated agricultural life and what he claimed were rural values. Elevating those who had lived in Germany for generations, he suggested that German blood was mystically connected to German soil. “[T]he German soul with its warmth is rooted in its agriculture and in a real sense always grew out of it,” Darré wrote. To maintain that soul, he wrote, Germany needed to preserve racial purity and reject foreign blood. To that end, it needed to protect pure marriages and encourage the right people to have lots of children: the main job of a wife was to produce children. Unless the country took drastic measures, he wrote, the German “race” might become extinct.

The details of the “blood and soil” ideology might not be clear to MAGA today, but its adherents definitely get the concept: at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, white nationalists shouted, “Blood and soil.”

Those ideas are now advanced by MAGA leadership. On July 5, 2025, Vice President J.D. Vance told an audience at the Claremont Institute he rejected the idea that being an American simply meant agreeing with the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence. He complained not only that such a definition would include too many people, but also that it would exclude those who disagreed with it, even if their ancestors had fought in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. “I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” he said.

He continued: “I believe one of the most pressing problems for us to face as statesmen is to redefine the meaning of American citizenship in the 21st century.” America, he said, “is not just an idea, we’re a particular place with a particular people and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.”

Vance claimed that “Democrat politicians” and “corporate oligarchs” want to import “millions and millions of low-wage serfs,” and he hailed Trump’s immigration policies as “the most important part” of Trump’s first six months. He said “citizenship must mean recognizing the unique relationship, but also the obligations that we all share with our fellow Americans. You cannot swap 10 million people from anywhere else in the world and expect for America to remain unchanged…. “[T]his is a distinctive moment in time with a distinctive place and a distinctive people.”

Attacking “the left” as driven by hatred, Vance rejected the statement of Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor: “America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better.” Vance said Mamdani’s statement shows “no gratitude” and “no sense of owing something to this land.” “I wonder,” Vance said, “has he ever read the letters from boy soldiers in the Union Army to parents and sweethearts that they’d never see again?... Who the hell does he think that he is?”

The use of American iconography to push blood and soil showed in another post by the Homeland Security account from earlier this month. On July 14 it posted a painting of a white man with a white woman holding a baby in a covered wagon, an image the artist, Morgan Weistling, titled “A Prayer for a New Life.” The HHS account posted the image without Weistling’s permission, retitling it “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage: New Life in a New Land.”

The new name and capitalization are significant. Just as in the words in the post about John Gast’s painting, the two Hs are capitalized, evoking “HH,” accepted in right-wing circles as a way to write “Heil Hitler.”

On his web page, Weistling posted: “Attention: The recent DHS post on social media using a painting of mine that I painted a few years ago was used without my permission.”

mickeyrat · July 29

July 28, 2025 (Monday)

Today’s theme seems to be Republican leadership digging into positions that are directly contradicted by facts.

On Sunday, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported that the price tag for renovating the “free” Boeing 747-8 President Donald J. Trump accepted from Qatar appears to be close to a billion dollars of taxpayer money. The reporters explored a “mysterious, $934 million transfer of funds” from a program to modernize the country’s ground-based nuclear missiles to an unnamed classified project. Air Force officials told them privately that the transfer is for upgrading the plane for use as Air Force One.

Yale historian Joanne Freeman posted: “He’s using our money to buy himself a gift. A billion dollar gift.”

Over the weekend, Trump called for musician Beyoncé to be prosecuted for breaking the law by taking $11 million for endorsing Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris in October 2024, and for Harris to be prosecuted for paying that sum. But this simply never happened.

CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale explained yesterday that this is a made-up story Trump apparently got from social media. The Harris campaign covered $165,000 of the costs connected to Beyoncé’s appearance, as required by law, but a spokesperson said they did not pay celebrity endorsers (although there is no federal law prohibiting such payments). Dale says there is no evidence for Trump’s $11 million claim.

And then there is the case of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

On Sunday, Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) appeared on CNN’s State of the Union and repeatedly insisted that it was the Obama administration in 2009 that allowed sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to avoid serious federal charges by agreeing to a “sweetheart plea deal.” But it wasn’t.

As CNN’s Jake Tapper reminded him, the agreement was drafted in 2007 and signed in 2008, under President George W. Bush. Mullin continued to try to rope the Democrats into the story of the deal, but Tapper reiterated: “the point is, the ‘sweetheart deal,’ which was completed in 2008, was under the Bush administration.” Tapper also reminded Mullin that Trump made Alex Acosta, the U.S. attorney who backed the extraordinary leniency for Epstein, his secretary of labor during Trump’s first term.

Today, at a press opportunity in Scotland, where Trump is opening a new golf course on one of his properties, Trump told a reporter that he hasn’t “been overly interested” in the case…it's a hoax that's been built up way beyond proportion. I can say this, those files were run by the worst scum on Earth. They were run by [former FBI director James] Comey, they were run by [former attorney general Merrick] Garland. They were run by [former president Joe] Biden, and all of the people that actually ran the government, including the autopen. Those files were run for four years by those people.” Then he suggested that Democrats have doctored the Epstein files with fake information to smear him.

Far from quieting questions about his involvement with Epstein, this line of argument seems to confirm that he knows there is something bad in the files and is trying to spin it before it might come to light.

Today, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, demanded that the Department of Justice produce all the recordings and transcripts of the July 24 and 25 meetings between DOJ officials and convicted sex trafficker and Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell. He also demanded that the DOJ commit that it would not offer either a pardon or to commute Maxwell’s sentence of 20 years in exchange for information she offered.

Today, Vice President J.D. Vance assured an Ohio audience that the Congressional Budget Office was wrong in predicting that the cuts in the budget reconciliation measure the Republicans passed and Trump signed into law on July 4 would push 10 million people off health insurance. “Don’t believe every false media report that you’ve heard,” he said, “because our explicit goal in the Trump administration is to protect people’s healthcare.”

On July 18, health policy tracker KFF reported that health insurers have asked state regulators to approve the highest premium increases in more than five years. Just as Gene Sperling, who directed the National Economic Council under presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, noted in the Washington Post four days ago, insurers point to the end of the enhanced premium tax credits that provided financial assistance for people enrolled in healthcare through the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) as the main culprit in higher prices. The insurers predict that healthcare costs for those who took advantage of the tax credits will go up by more than 75% starting in January 2026. This will drive healthier enrollees out of the market, causing prices to rise for those left in the risk pool.

As Sperling pointed out, while Republicans claimed that the tax cuts that primarily benefited the wealthy and corporations was “current policy” whose extension didn’t count as a tax increase, they did not apply the current policy standard to the enhanced premium tax credits.

Insurers also point to Trump’s tariffs as a cause for higher premiums. They expect those tariffs to send drug prices higher.

Since the 1980s, Republicans have relied on their voters believing the worldview leaders projected, even when the facts told a different story. It is not clear they can continue to rely on that blind loyalty.

Jason Hancock of the Missouri Independent reported today that Missouri Republican lawmakers have inspired a backlash by resisting or overturning measures approved by voters to end puppy mills, expand Medicaid, legalize marijuana, create nonpartisan redistricting, expand paid sick leave, and amend the state constitution to protect abortion rights. Now a bipartisan group of organizations is trying to stop the Republican supermajority from ignoring or overturning the will of voters.

In response, some Republican lawmakers have claimed that out-of-state money swayed the votes on the measures they dislike, and are trying to change the process of initiating voter-led petitions, further silencing the voters. Others disagree. Veteran Republican consultant James Harris, who is from the state, told Hancock: “The legislature doesn’t really seem to understand, they’ve kicked the hornet’s nest. We may be about to cross the Rubicon…where the legislature loses a lot of its power.”

In North Carolina today, popular former governor Roy Cooper announced he is running for the North Carolina Senate seat currently held by Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican who announced his retirement after Trump turned on him for opposing the budget reconciliation measure that threatened healthcare in his state. When he was governor, Cooper expanded Medicaid to more than 650,000 North Carolinians.

Cooper’s announcement message focused on shoring up the middle class, meeting today’s moment by calling out billionaires. “[F]or too many Americans, the middle class feels like a distant dream,” he said, while “the biggest corporations and the richest Americans have grabbed unimaginable wealth at your expense. It's time for that to change.”

Cooper told of growing up in North Carolina, raising his family, teaching Sunday school, and helping small businesses as a lawyer. “When you made me your attorney general, I prosecuted criminals and took on scammers, big banks, and drug companies,” he said. “When you made me your governor, we balanced the state budget every year and worked with Republicans to raise teacher pay, recruit thousands of better paying jobs, and expand Medicaid…. I never really wanted to go to Washington,” he said. “I just wanted to serve the people of North Carolina right here, where I've lived all my life.”

“But,” he continued, “these are not ordinary times. Politicians in D.C. are running up our debt, ripping away our health care, disrespecting our veterans, cutting help for the poor and even putting Medicare and Social Security at risk just to give tax breaks to billionaires. That's wrong, and I've had enough. I've thought on it and prayed about it, and I've decided, I want to serve as your next United States Senator.”

The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which works to elect Republicans to the Senate, called Cooper “far-left.”

Meanwhile, in South Carolina, a key architect of Project 2025 will challenge Senator Lindsey Graham for the Republican nomination for Graham’s Senate seat. “This is a battle for the future of MAGA,” Paul Dans said. “This is really the turning point election that asks whether MAGA will sink back into the swamp and be subsumed, or whether this great movement will continue to grow, and the waters of the swamp retreat in Washington, and swamp critters like Lindsey are left to bake in the Palmetto sun.”

mickeyrat · July 30

July 29, 2025 (Tuesday)

Trying to take some time off this summer, and after a bunch of work calls this morning, decided that today was too good a day to stay on the land. Found these boats on the back side of the island.

I'm going to head to bed early tonight. Will see you tomorrow.

mickeyrat · July 31

July 30, 2025 (Wednesday)

On July 2, 2024, just about a year ago, president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation Kevin Roberts told the listeners of Steve Bannon’s War Room webcast: “[W]e are going to win. We’re in the process of taking this country back.” Roberts pointed to the Supreme Court’s decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States the day before giving the president absolute immunity for committing crimes while engaging in official acts.

“That Supreme Court ruling yesterday on immunity is vital, and it's vital for a lot of reasons,” Roberts said, adding that the nation needs a strong leader because “the left has taken over our institutions.” “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution,” he said, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Roberts was the man who organized Project 2025, the blueprint for a new kind of government dictated by a right-wing strongman. Creating that new government would require a president willing to act illegally, stripping the secular language of civil rights from public life, packing the government with loyalists, ending the social safety net, killing business regulations, and purging American institutions of all but right-wing ideologues.

When Americans learned about Project 2025, they hated it. An NBC News poll from September 2024 showed that only 4% of Americans saw the project favorably. Even among Republicans, that number climbed only to 7%. For those identifying as MAGA Republicans, the number rose to just 9%.

So Trump and his campaign advisors denied that he had anything to do with the plan. “I know nothing about Project 2025,” he wrote on social media in July. “I have no idea who is behind it.”

And yet six months into the second Trump administration, on the sixtieth anniversary of the law that symbolized the modern American state by establishing Medicare and Medicaid, it’s clear we are indeed in a revolution designed to destroy the government we have known in favor of the radical right-wing government envisioned by those who wrote Project 2025.

From the beginning, the administration declared war on the words that protected equal rights for all Americans, fired women and racial minorities from leadership positions, and attacked transgender Americans. It worked to replace civil servants with loyalists who embraced the tenets of Project 2025, putting people like former Fox News host Pete Hegseth at the head of government agencies. Yesterday Greg Jaffe and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that in a break with past practices, Hegseth, now secretary of defense, is requiring nominees for four-star general positions in the U.S. military to meet personally with Trump.

It worked to dismantle the government by refusing to release the money Congress had appropriated to fund the existing government. Thanks to billionaire Elon Musk at the “Department of Government Efficiency” and Russell Vought—another author of Project 2025—at the Office of Management and Budget, the administration illegally impounded funds, slashing through funding for foreign aid, cancer research, veterans’ benefits, air traffic control staffing, and so on, claiming to be eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” That fight is ongoing.
But while it shrank government programs that helped ordinary people—programs like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—as part of their claim to be returning power to the states, the administration did not shrink the government itself. Instead, it dramatically expanded the government’s capacity to arrest and detain undocumented migrants.

The administration set out to purge the country of what extremists claimed was “leftist” influence in law firms, media, and universities. It illegally blocked lawyers from law firms that represented Democrats from access to federal buildings, making it impossible for them to represent their clients. It sued media outlets for alleged bias, and it withheld congressionally appropriated funds for universities for alleged antisemitism.

Last week, in order to obtain the Federal Communications Commission's approval of an $8 billion merger between CBS parent company Paramount and Skydance Media, Skydance agreed not to set up programs related to civil rights, or “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and to produce “unbiased” journalism. Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr approved the merger, then bragged on right-wing media shows that CBS has agreed to put in place an internal political “bias monitor” who will report to the president of Paramount to make sure the channel’s news coverage is favorable to Trump and the right wing.

Last week, after Columbia University agreed to pay $221 million and to promise it will not use “race, color, sex, or national origin” in hiring decisions in exchange for the government’s restoring the $1.3 billion in funding the administration had withheld over charges of antisemitism, Trump’s education secretary Linda McMahon told Maria Bartiromo of the Fox News Channel: “[T]his is a monumental victory for conservatives who’ve wanted to do things on these elite campuses for a long time because we had such far left leaning professors.”

On Monday the Office of Personnel Management issued a memo allowing federal employees to pray publicly at work, as well as to try to “persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views.”

The administration has worked to dismantle the regulations that protect Americans by using artificial intelligence to slash regulations in half by next January. With the blessing of the Supreme Court, Trump has claimed the power to fire the heads of independent agencies, effectively giving him power over agencies created by Congress.

Yesterday the administration took its fight against public protections a leap further when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a new rule that would get rid of a rule in place since 2009 establishing, on the basis of scientific evidence, that the emission of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane warms the planet and thus endangers human life. Most of the vehicle, factory, and power plant emissions standards currently in place come from this “endangerment finding.”

EPA officials told Lisa Friedman of the New York Times they intend to argue that it is climate regulations, rather than greenhouse gas emissions, that cause the real harm to human health because they lead to higher prices and less consumer choice.

As Roberts said, the Supreme Court’s decision giving Trump immunity was important because destroying the country’s institutions would require lawbreaking. In nothing has that been so clear as in the administration’s handling of the rendering of undocumented migrants to third countries. Whistleblowers from the Department of Justice claim that DOJ official Emil Bove told DOJ attorneys they could ignore court orders stopping migrant flights, saying they should consider telling the courts “f*ck you.”

Last night, the Senate confirmed Bove to a federal judgeship, with 50 Republicans voting in favor. Forty-seven Democrats voted no. They were joined by Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who said: “I don’t think that somebody who has counseled other attorneys that you should ignore the law, you should reject the law, I don’t think that that individual should be placed in a lifetime seat on the bench.”

But Thom Tillis (R-NC) voted in favor of Bove’s confirmation, illustrating that even those Republicans who have put distance between themselves and Trump are enabling the revolution in our government.

Republicans in Congress have enabled the dismantling of the country’s social safety net with dramatic cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program while also extending significant tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and pouring money into purges of undocumented migrants. Today Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told an audience at an event for the right-wing media outlet Breitbart that the new “Trump accounts” established by the budget reconciliation bill are “a backdoor for privatizing Social Security.”

Congress’s unwillingness to stand against Trump shows most dramatically in its reluctance to reassert the power the Constitution gives to it—and only to it—over tariffs. Trump has fought his tariff war only by asserting emergency power, but he has used that power to change world trade and to punish countries like Brazil for its prosecution of Trump’s political ally, former president Jair Bolsonaro. Tomorrow, the day before the August 1 deadline on which most of Trump’s tariffs will go into effect, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit will weigh in on whether those tariffs are legal.

When Kevin Roberts announced a year ago that the radical right was launching a second American revolution, he was telling the truth. But the new world they want to bring to life seems no more popular now than it was then.

And now the growing scandal around President Donald J. Trump’s connections to late convicted sex predator Jeffrey Epstein shows that the MAGA movement is apparently willing to accept the sexual abuse of children in order to cement their worldview.

Yesterday Trump tried to cast himself as a sort of protector when he claimed that he turned against Epstein because Epstein “stole people that worked for me.” When asked if those employees were young women, Trump answered “yes” and that they were hired “out of the spa” he ran. He said one of those girls was Virginia Giuffre, who was sex trafficked as a teenager by Ghislaine Maxwell and died by suicide earlier this year. Although Trump’s timeline did not add up—Guiffre left her job at Mar-a-Lago in 2000 and the friendship between the two men continued for several more years—the story itself suggests what’s on his mind. Today, a reporter asked Trump about those girls: “What did you think Epstein was stealing those women for?”

Today Dan Ruetenik of CBS News issued a detailed report on the video from outside Epstein’s jail cell that the DOJ has released as proof he died by suicide. A government source told Ruetenik that the released video is not raw footage—confirming a report by Dhruv Mehrotra of Wired on July 15—and that it is two videos stitched together. Ruetenik reported that the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, and the DOJ inspector general all possess the longer video.

And perhaps there is also a story about Project 2025’s staying power in the fact that this damning report dropped less than a week after Trump officials celebrated their control over CBS.

josevolution · July 31

Fucking disgusting POS president off course the video is doctored and I’m sure he signed off on it! Epstein was murdered by Bill Barr DOJ you’ll never convince me he put a noose around his neck!

mickeyrat · 6:00AM

July 31, 2025 (Thursday)

On Monday, at a meeting with U.K. prime minister Keir Starmer in Scotland, 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 “[f]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."

Trump’s claim that he has ended six wars is pure fantasy, and as for his 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 “[t]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.

Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

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