Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

mickeyrat · September 23

September 22, 2025 (Monday)

Conservative writer Bill Kristol took to social media today to say: “So many coverups. Release the Epstein files. Release the Homan tapes. Release the Venezuelan fishing boats evidence.”

Kristol was referring to three stories about which members of the administration seem to be hiding things that don’t fit their narrative.

The Republican-dominated House Oversight Committee has been slow to release records related to the investigation of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein although interest in them is high—not least because reports that the records mention President Donald Trump seem confirmed by Federal Bureau of Investigation director Kash Patel’s refusal to answer questions from Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee about his appearance in them. Last week, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee voted not to subpoena the chief executive officers of JPMorgan Chase, Bank of New York Mellon, Bank of America, and Deutsche Bank for testimony and records for about $1.5 billion in transactions related to Epstein’s crimes.

Today, Dan Ruetenik, Cara Tabachnick, and Graham Kates of CBS News reported that they have obtained documents about the events of July 23, 2019, 18 days before Epstein’s death, when he was found unresponsive in his cell. Those documents add detail to the story already reported, in which upon regaining consciousness, Epstein first suggested he had been attacked by his cellmate but later said he couldn’t remember what had happened. As is the case with Epstein’s death, because of either human error or the faulty video system, there is no recording of the incident.

In the United Kingdom, seven charities have cut ties with Sarah Ferguson, Prince Andrew’s ex-wife, after newspapers yesterday published an email Ferguson sent to Epstein in 2011, several years after he had pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution with a minor, appearing to apologize for her public criticism of him.

In response to this weekend’s story that the FBI recorded a video in 2024 of Tom Homan, who is now Trump’s border czar, accepting $50,000 in exchange for promising to steer government contracts for border security toward the men offering the money, the White House now says that Homan didn’t take the cash. As Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig of MSNBC note, that’s not what they said when the reporters first asked them about it on Saturday. Dilanian and Leonnig add: “Multiple people familiar with the case say he did accept the money, as does an internal government document reviewed by MSNBC.”

National security analyst Juliette Kayyem noted that “ICE contracts are going to unknown construction companies and days old consulting firms.” Democracy Forward has filed a Freedom of Information Act request, asking the FBI and the Justice Department to release the recording of Homan accepting the $50,000.

Kristol’s reference to Venezuelan fishing boats relates to the administration’s deadly strikes against several Venezuelan boats the administration insists were smuggling drugs to the United States. The administration has shown no evidence supporting its claim to lawmakers or to the public, and legal experts warn that the strikes may be illegal.

The administration is using the power of the U.S. government to advance a right-wing project in other South American countries as well, using the economic power of the U.S. to support Trump’s allies in Brazil and Argentina. Trump has imposed a 50% tariff on goods from Brazil, claiming that Brazil engages in unfair trade practices and that the government is engaged in a “witch hunt” against Trump’s ally former president Jair Bolsonaro.

Bolsonaro was convicted this month of attempting a coup against Brazil’s government when voters turned him out of office. He has been sentenced to more than 27 years in prison. In addition to the heavy U.S. tariffs, the Treasury Department announced today that it was sanctioning the wife of the Brazilian Supreme Court justice who oversaw the prosecution of Bolsonaro. The Brazilian government called the U.S. move “a new attempt of undue interference in Brazilian internal affairs.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced on social media today, fifteen minutes before Argentina’s foreign-exchange markets opened, that the U.S. will consider “all options” for stabilizing the economy of Argentina, whose right-wing president, Javier Milei, is a Trump ally. Milei’s approach to slashing government was a model for Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, but with elections coming up next month, voters are souring on his austerity measures, inflation, and the weakening currency. Bessent wrote that “Argentina is a systemically important U.S. ally.” The Economist explained more bluntly: “Scott Bessent says Uncle Sam is underwriting Mr Milei’s laboratory.”

At home, Trump signed an executive order today designating “Antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization.” Although the director of the FBI during Trump’s first term, Christopher Wray, explained that antifa, which is short for “antifascist,” is an ideology and not an organization, the executive order says antifa is “a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law. It uses illegal means to organize and execute a campaign of violence and terrorism nationwide to accomplish these goals.”

The order goes on to say that this “campaign involves coordinated efforts to obstruct enforcement of Federal laws through armed standoffs with law enforcement, organized riots, violent assaults on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other law enforcement officers, and routine doxing of and other threats against political figures and activists.”

The order calls for all government agencies to “investigate, disrupt, and dismantle any and all illegal operations…conducted by Antifa.” Constitutional law scholar Evan Bernick noted that the point of the order was “to assert that something exists which does not exist and to make people think it (1) exists and (2) is bad.” Immigration expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick added: “It’s a directive to the Executive Branch about what to focus…resources on.”

Today, Trump announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will be notifying doctors that if pregnant women take acetaminophen, a brand name of which is Tylenol, their baby faces a “very increased risk of autism.” This statement flies in the face of decades of evidence that, used according to directions, acetaminophen is safe during pregnancy and can be important for relieving fever and pain.

In his remarks, Trump appeared to have difficulty pronouncing the word "acetaminophen," so used the brand name “Tylenol.” Although he is not a doctor, the president offered a range of medical advice. He echoed the opinions of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of the dangers of vaccines, although vaccines save lives and extensive research has shown no link between vaccines and autism. Trump said: “We understood a lot more than a lot of people who studied it.”

But there seemed to be a new tone coming from media outlets covering the president today. The Associated Press posted on social media: “BREAKING: President Trump promotes unproven ties between Tylenol, vaccines and autism without new evidence.” The New York Times posted: “Unproven Medical Advice[:] In a rambling news briefing, president Trump promoted unproven ties between vaccines, autism and Tylenol use by pregnant women and babies.”

There is another sign today that Trump and his loyalists have outkicked their coverage as they try to consolidate power.

In Strength in Numbers, G. Elliott Morris noted that as measured by internet searches for “Cancel Disney+,” the boycott against Disney, the parent company of ABC, is now four times as large as any similar search of a boycott over the past five years. Since ABC suspended comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s show—allegedly for his comments about MAGA Republicans’ search for someone to blame, although he frequently skewers Trump and the administration—Disney’s stock has dropped 2% although the market in general is up nearly 1%.

Morris observes that “a lot of powerful people just don’t realize how unpopular Trump is.” He explains that while polls show Trump is deeply unpopular, many people confuse voters with consumers. That is, while polls frequently measure how voters feel about the president, only about 64.1% of American adults eligible to vote went to the polls in 2024. Figuring that number into Trump’s popularity shows that only about 32% of American adults voted for Trump in 2024, while 53% of adults currently disapprove of his performance in the White House, with 48% strongly opposed. So businesses that decide to try to appease Trump voters are making poor business decisions.

That has shown in the backlash over the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s show, which is widely seen as an attack on the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. As Robert Reich noted in his Substack publication, “the blowback against Disney” for Kimmel’s suspension “has been hurricane level.” It was so intense that Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr, who had threatened that ABC must suspend Kimmel or lose its broadcast license, began to deny he had had anything to do with the suspension and say that ABC had removed Kimmel for business reasons.

Today Disney issued a statement saying, “Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country. It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive.” It went on: “We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”

So, after public outcry, Kimmel’s show is back on the air. But right-wing media company Sinclair, which operates more than 35 ABC stations across the country, says it will not restore Kimmel’s show to the airwaves it controls. It announced it will preempt Jimmy Kimmel Live! with news programming.

mickeyrat · September 24

September 23, 2025 (Tuesday)

In New York City this morning, the United Nations opened its General Assembly, marking the 80th anniversary of the establishment of the United Nations itself. The day began with a General Debate, the meeting in which heads of state and government outline their positions and priorities in an era of changing and complex global challenges.

Secretary-General of the United Nations António Guterres opened the debate, reminding the audience that leaders who had lived through the horrors of World War II had created the organization to prevent another such conflagration by establishing “cooperation over chaos, law over lawlessness, peace over conflict.” It was, he said, “a practical strategy for the survival of humanity.”

“Eighty years on,” he said, “we confront again the question our founders faced—only more urgent, more intertwined, more unforgiving: What kind of world do we choose to build together?”

He warned: that “we have entered an age of reckless disruption,” when “the principles of the United Nations…are under siege.” Will we choose “a world of raw power—or a world of laws? A world that is a scramble for self-interest—or a world where nations come together? A world where might makes right—or a world of rights for all?”

Guterres urged member states to choose “peace rooted in international law,” “human dignity and human rights,” “climate justice,” “to put technology at the service of humanity,” and “to strengthen the United Nations for the 21st century.”

Guterres recalled that his youth in Portugal was spent “in the darkness of dictatorship, where fear silenced voices and hope was nearly crushed. Yet, even in the bleakest hours—especially then—I discovered a truth that has never left me: power does not reside in the hands of those who dominate or divide. Real power resides from people, from our shared resolve to uphold dignity, to defend equality, to believe—fiercely—in our common humanity, and the potential of every human being.

“I learned early to persevere. To speak out. To refuse to surrender, no matter the challenge, no matter the obstacle, no matter the hour. We must—and we will—overcome.”

President Donald J. Trump also addressed the gathered world leaders, guests of the United States.

He began by complaining that the teleprompter wasn’t working, and also mentioned that an escalator on which he and First Lady Melania Trump had been riding had stopped shortly after they stepped onto it.

Trump’s speech went on to depict a fantasy world in which he had single-handedly saved the world. He claimed to have forged peace on two continents during his first term but said that “era of calm and stability gave way to one of the great crises of our time.” He then turned to the United States, claiming that “four years of weakness, lawlessness, and radicalism under the last administration delivered our nation into a repeated set of disasters. One year ago,” he said, “our country was in deep trouble, but today, just eight months into my administration, we are the hottest country anywhere in the world and there is no other country even close. America is blessed with the strongest economy, the strongest borders, the strongest military, the strongest friendships, and the strongest spirit of any nation on the face of the earth.”

And that was the frame for the next hour of rambling boasts and insults.

Trump claimed that he had reversed the “economic calamity” left by former president Joe Biden. He had brought down costs and inflation, he said, and economic growth and manufacturing were both booming. He claimed that in his four years, Biden had attracted less than $1 trillion in investment while he had secured $17 trillion. Tax cuts and deregulation had, he said, made the U.S. “the best country on earth to do business.”

“In my first term, I built the greatest economy in the history of the world,” he said. “We had the best economy ever, history of the world, and I'm doing the same thing again, but this time it's actually much bigger and even better. The numbers far surpass my record-setting first term.”

Trump claimed: “On the world stage, America is respected again like it has never been respected before. You think about two years ago, three years ago, four years ago, or one year ago, we were a laughingstock all over the world.

He claimed that his administration “has negotiated one historic trade deal after another” and that “in a period of just seven months, I have ended seven unendable wars. They said they were unendable. You're never going to get them solved…. No president or prime minister, and for that matter, no other country, has ever done anything close to that, and I did it in just seven months. It's never happened before. There's never been anything like that. Very honored to have done it.”

He went on: “It's too bad that I had to do these things instead of the United Nations doing them. And sadly, in all cases, the United Nations did not even try to help in any of them. I ended seven wars, dealt with the leaders of each and every one of these countries, and never even received a phone call from the United Nations offering to help in finalizing the deal. All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that on the way up stopped right in the middle. If the First Lady wasn't in great shape, she would've fallen. But she's in great shape. We're both in good shape, we both stood.”

He then turned back to the United Nations. “That being the case, what is the purpose of the United Nations? The U.N. is such tremendous potential. I've always said it. It has such tremendous, tremendous potential, but it's not even coming close to living up to that potential.”

He claimed that “[e]veryone says that I should get the Nobel Peace Prize,” and after detouring into a complaint that the United Nations had not chosen him to renovate the U.N. complex years ago, he attacked the U.N. for “not solving the problems it should,” as well as “creating new problems for us to solve.”

Then he turned to the white nationalist program of his administration. He blamed “uncontrolled migration” for ruining “your countries,” and blamed the United Nations for funding that migration. “In the United States, we reject the idea that mass numbers of people from foreign lands can be permitted to travel halfway around the world, trample our borders, violate our sovereignty, cause unmitigated crime, and deplete our social safety net,” he said. “You're destroying your countries. They're being destroyed. Europe is in serious trouble. They've been invaded by a force of illegal aliens like nobody's ever seen before. Illegal aliens are pouring into Europe, and nobody's doing anything to change it, to get them out. It's not sustainable.”

He claimed that London has “a terrible, terrible mayor”—Mayor Sadiq Khan is Muslim and is of Pakistani descent—that it is “so changed, so changed,” and that “they” want “Sharia law.” He went on at great length about how immigration is destroying Europe and how dangerous and criminal immigrants are. He told the attendees: “I'm really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell.”

Then he turned to another of his priorities: fossil fuels. “Energy is another area where the United States is now thriving like never before,” he said. “We're getting rid of the falsely named renewables.” After another long harangue about renewable energy, he said: "If you don't get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail. And I'm really good at predicting things. They actually said during the campaign, they had a hat, the best-selling hat: Trump was right about everything. And I don't say that in a braggadocious way, but it's true. I've been right about everything.”

The speech was a dark fantasy of narcissism and Christian nationalism that struck at the heart of the very concept of the United Nations. In its wake, some journalists demolished Trump’s wild claims, while others bemoaned his destruction of diplomacy by berating our friends and allies while they were guests in our country. But it was foreign affairs journalist Ishaan Tharoor who captured the larger story of Trump’s speech.

“A senior foreign diplomat posted at the U.N. texts me,” Tharoor wrote, “‘This man is stark, raving mad. Do Americans not see how embarrassing this is?’”

Trump loyalists turned tonight to the idea that someone had sabotaged the president by stopping the escalator and the teleprompter. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News Channel personality Jesse Watters that it looked like sabotage and she would personally see to it that there would be accountability, and Trump loyalist senator Mike Lee (R-UT) called for defunding the U.N. for “orchestrating escalator and teleprompter malfunctions.”

The United Nations correspondent for the Associated Press, Farnoush Amiri, reported that “[a] UN official said the UN understands that someone from the president’s party who ran ahead of him inadvertently triggered the stop mechanism on the escalator. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the White House was operating the teleprompter for Trump.”

mickeyrat · September 25

September 24, 2025 (Wednesday)

Hours after delivering his delusional and offensive speech to the United Nations yesterday, President Donald J. Trump did an about-face on his previous support for Russia in its war against Ukraine. After he met with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, his social media account posted: “I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form,” which would be before Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea. Trump noted the profound toll the war is taking on Russia’s economy and speculated that Ukraine might even be able to take Russian land. “In any event,” Trump posted, “I wish both Countries well. We will continue to supply weapons to NATO for NATO to do what they want with them. Good luck to all!”

As Nick Paton Walsh of CNN noted, this statement doesn’t actually change much on the ground in the war. What it does, though, is suggest that Trump has lost interest in the conflict and is attempting to wash his hands of it.

The president made a similar escape from a planned meeting with Democratic leaders scheduled for Thursday to talk about keeping the government open. Yesterday he canceled the meeting by posting on social media that “[a]fter reviewing the unserious and ridiculous demands being made by the Minority Radical Left Democrats in return for their Votes to keep our thriving Country open, I have decided that no meeting with their Congressional Leaders could possibly be productive.”

He went on to claim that Democrats want to shut down the government “unless they can have over $1 Trillion Dollars [sic] in new spending to continue free healthcare for Illegal Aliens,” and then detoured into unrelated attacks on Democrats over immigration and transgender athletes and claimed that his “HISTORIC LANDSLIDE” in the 2024 presidential election means the Democrats have to agree to his demands.

Ben Johansen and Meredith Lee Hill of Politico report that, in fact, Trump decided to cancel the meeting at the urging of House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD). Sources told the journalists that the Republican lawmakers were afraid meeting with Democrats would erode Republicans’ leverage in the struggle over funding the government.

That funding runs out on September 30, and Congress has not yet passed appropriations bills to keep it going. On September 19 the House passed a continuing resolution to keep the government funded at current levels through November 21 and to provide additional money for security for congress members. The 217–212 vote was largely along party lines, with one Democrat voting for the measure and two Republicans voting against it. Congress is not meeting this week, and after the measure passed, Speaker Johnson informed members that the House would not meet on the scheduled days of Monday, September 29, or Tuesday, September 30, thus jamming the Senate into accepting the House measure or shutting down the government.

The Senate failed to pass the House measure on the 19th, with two Republicans voting no and Democrats saying they would refuse to support any measure that did not extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies that Republicans cut in their budget reconciliation bill of July and roll back some of that act’s cuts to Medicaid. That budget reconciliation law, which Republicans call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, allows the enhanced premium tax credits that made ACA coverage more affordable for households between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level to lapse at the end of this year. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that this change will mean 4.2 million Americans will become uninsured in the next ten years (on top of those who are expected to lose Medicaid coverage). As healthier people opt to go without insurance, premiums on those who stay in the markets are skyrocketing.

Extending the subsidies as the Democrats want is popular even among many Republicans, who recognize how hard Americans are going to be hit by rising healthcare costs. But other Republicans who continue to oppose the Affordable Care Act refuse even to consider such a change and are pushing off such a divisive issue. Taken together, the Democrats’ demands would cost around a trillion dollars, but those benefits would not go to “Illegal Aliens.”

Unless they nuke the filibuster, Republicans will need eight Democratic votes to get to the sixty votes they need to pass a continuing resolution, but they are refusing even to talk to the Democrats. In a Fox News Channel interview on September 12, Trump said of Democrats, “There is something wrong with them.… [T]hey want to give away money to this or that and destroy the country.” “Don’t even bother dealing with them,” he advised Republican lawmakers. “We will get it through because the Republicans are sticking together for the first time in a long time.”

Despite their determination to go it alone and their control of the House, the Senate, and the presidency, Republican leaders are working hard to pin a looming shutdown on the Democrats. The Democrats want no part of that storyline: “For a guy who claims to understand ‘The Art of the Deal,’ Donald Trump is awfully scared of negotiating one,” Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker said. “Trump and Congressional Republicans control both chambers of Congress and the White House. But they’d rather shut down the government, tank the economy, and cut healthcare benefits than do their jobs.”

Rather than engaging in the hard work of negotiation, Trump appears to want to use the government for his own ends.

After the outcry over the use of the Federal Communications Commission to strongarm ABC into suspending comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s television show, many Republicans insisted that the suspension was simply a business decision. Trump torpedoed that argument today when he took to social media to complain that Kimmel is back on the air.

Trump did not mention Kimmel’s reference to Charlie Kirk’s murder—allegedly the reason for Kimmel’s suspension—when he complained: “He is yet another arm of the [Democratic National Committee] and, to the best of my knowledge, that would be a major Illegal Campaign Contribution.” He continued: “I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 million Dollars. This one sounds even more lucrative.”

Over the weekend, acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Erik Siebert, a career prosecutor, resigned after he concluded there was not enough evidence of a crime to charge New York attorney general Letitia James for alleged mortgage fraud or former FBI director James Comey for allegedly lying to Congress. Siebert’s refusal to prosecute drew Trump’s wrath. On Monday, White House aide and Trump’s former personal lawyer Lindsey Halligan—who is leading the administration’s review of exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution museums—took over the job. She has no experience as a prosecutor.

Today, Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig of MSNBC reported that three sources have said they expect Halligan to try to get a grand jury to indict Comey before the five-year statute of limitations on lying to Congress runs out in six days. Chris Strohm of Bloomberg reports that the Department of Justice is also pushing forward with the case against Attorney General James.

While Trump persecutes those he perceives as enemies, administration figures who have called for slashing spending both at home and for foreign aid are using taxpayer money to push their own priorities overseas. Daniel Flatley and Patrick Gillespie of Bloomberg reported today that the U.S. is preparing a $20 billion rescue package to bail out Argentina’s right-wing leader Javier Milei, an ally of Donald Trump, before October elections.

They are offering this financial support despite the fact Argentina recently suspended its grain export tax, undercutting the U.S. soybean farmers who have lost their huge Chinese market because of Trump’s tariff war. Within hours, China bought up Argentina’s soybeans.

Administration officials are also ignoring the laws Congress passed to fund foreign aid and are instead funding their own priorities. In August, the administration told Congress it was not going to spend almost $5 billion Congress had appropriated for foreign aid, prompting Susan Collins (R-ME), the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, to warn that “[a]ny effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law.”

Today, Noah Robertson of the Washington Post reported that the State Department has informed Congress it intends to redirect $1.8 billion of foreign aid funding toward “America First” projects like countering “Marxist, anti-American regimes” in Latin America, supporting “U.S. immigration policies” in Africa, and pursuing investments in Greenland and Ukraine, although the language of the announcement is vague enough that it is not entirely clear what these programs will do.

Robertson identifies this announcement as a dramatic change from the previous, bipartisan U.S. focus on promoting national security by promoting democracy and health and higher standards of living around the world through investments in institutions like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which the Trump administration dismantled as soon as it took office.

Top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire told Robertson said the Trump administration is “attempting to raid programs that Congress has authorized and appropriated to strengthen democracy, advance peace and support vulnerable communities and instead funnel that money into an unaccountable slush fund.”

Although Jimmy Kimmel Live! was preempted in about 23% of the homes that use television, ABC said 6.26 million people tuned in to watch. Kimmel’s usual television audience is about 1.42 million. ABC says another 26 million people watched his monologue on social media, including YouTube.

In it, Kimmel said: “This show is not important. What is important is that we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this.” He called the administration’s attempt to take him off the air “un-American.”

mickeyrat · September 26

September 25, 2025 (Thursday)

Today, with the popularity of President Donald J. Trump and his administration dropping, Trump’s disastrous performance at the United Nations, the return of comedian Jimmy Kimmel to the airwaves, and the Tuesday’s election in Arizona of Democratic representative Adelita Grijalva, who will provide the final signature on a discharge petition to demand a floor vote in the House over releasing all the government files on convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the administration appears to be making a dramatic push to seize complete control of the government.

Last night, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought tried to jam the Democrats into passing the Republicans' continuing resolution to fund the government. Officials leaked a memo to Politico, Punchbowl News, and Axios—publications that focus on events concerning Capitol Hill—saying that if the Democrats refuse to pass the Republicans’ measure, the administration will try to fire, rather than furlough, large numbers of federal employees.

Such a move would be challenged in the courts, and the government has been forced to rehire many of the people it forced out earlier this year after those firings left agencies badly understaffed. But the threat is not idle; Vought is a Christian nationalist who has called for a “radical Constitutionalism” that demolishes the modern American state and replaces it with a powerful executive.

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) responded: “Listen Russ, you are a malignant political hack. We will not be intimidated by your threat to engage in mass firings. Get lost.” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in a statement: “Donald Trump has been firing federal workers since day one—not to govern, but to scare. This is nothing new and has nothing to do with funding the government. These unnecessary firings will either be overturned in court or the administration will end up hiring the workers back, just like they did as recently as today.”

Trump appears focused on September 30, when the government funding crisis will hit, and the days after it. Although courts have ruled that he does not have the power to impose tariffs willy-nilly, today Trump announced new tariffs of 100% on pharmaceuticals, 50% on kitchen and bathroom cabinets, 30% on upholstered furniture, and 25% on “Heavy (Big!) Trucks” beginning on October 1. On social media, he claimed such tariffs were necessary “for National Security and other reasons.”

Today, James LaPorta of CBS News reported that the National Archives and Records Administration improperly released Democratic representative Mikie Sherrill’s full military records to an ally of her Republican opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, in the New Jersey governor's race. The two candidates are tied, and Ciattarelli appears to be trying to link Sherrill to the 1994 Naval Academy cheating scandal involving more than 100 midshipmen.

Sherrill had an unblemished career in the Navy and as a midshipman, LaPorta notes. She did not turn in her cheating classmates, but she was never accused of cheating herself. The unredacted release of Sherrill’s records appears to violate the 1974 Privacy Act. Sherrill said: "That Jack Ciattarelli and the Trump administration are illegally weaponizing my records for political gain is a violation of anyone who has ever served our country. No veteran's record is safe.”

While the National Archives maintained the release was a mistake and apologized for it, the administration’s influence in the Department of Justice tonight could not be explained away.

Days after Trump demanded that the Department of Justice move “now” to prosecute those he perceives to be his enemies, a federal grand jury has indicted former FBI director James Comey for allegedly lying to Congress and obstructing an investigation. Comey was an early casualty of Trump’s first administration, fired after he refused to kill the FBI investigation of the ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian operatives.

Over last weekend, Trump exploded at then–acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Erik Siebert, a career prosecutor, after Siebert concluded there was not enough evidence of a crime to charge Comey for allegedly lying to Congress or New York attorney general Letitia James for alleged mortgage fraud.

On Monday Trump replaced Siebert with White House aide and Trump’s former personal lawyer Lindsey Halligan, and yesterday three sources told Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig of MSNBC that they expected Halligan to try to get a grand jury to indict Comey before the five-year statute of limitations on lying to Congress runs out next Tuesday.

Tonight the DOJ delivered an indictment against Comey.

“My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump,” Comey said tonight in a video. “But we…will not live on our knees, and you shouldn't either. Somebody that I love dearly recently said that fear is the tool of a tyrant, and she's right, but I'm not afraid, and I hope you're not either. I hope instead you are engaged, you are paying attention, and you will vote like your beloved country depends upon it, which it does. My heart is broken for the Department of Justice, but I have great confidence in the federal judicial system. I'm innocent. So let's have a trial and keep the faith.”

The DOJ was busy today. It also sued six states—California, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania—to force them to hand over their voter rolls and information identifying those voters. Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket notes that state officials from both Democratic and Republican governments have questioned why the government wants that information. This lawsuit comes after a nearly identical lawsuit the DOJ filed last week against Maine and Oregon.

Democratic secretary of state Tobias Read of Oregon called the lawsuits an attempt by President Donald Trump “to use the DOJ to go after his political opponents and undermine our elections.”

Tara Copp, Dan Lamothe, Alex Horton, Ellen Nakashima, and Noah Robertson of the Washington Post reported today that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered about 800 of the military’s top generals and admirals, along with their senior enlisted advisors, to come to the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, next week. Such a demand is highly unusual, and no one knows why Hegseth has made it.

In The Bulwark, Mark Hertling, who was commander of U.S. Army Europe from 2011 to 2012, noted that the demand “is baffling and the cost will be staggering.” Instead of using the Pentagon’s secure video teleconferencing system, the personnel will require flights and accommodations that will cost millions, while the lost focus and readiness will affect their mission.

Hertling points out that “[a]dversaries and allies are watching. This sudden, global, emergency recall of America’s top brass is a flashing red light to them: Something must be wrong inside the Pentagon.”

Both Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance tried to downplay the meeting. “Why is that such a big deal?” Trump asked reporters. Vance incorrectly said the meeting is “not particularly unusual,” and said: “I think it’s odd that you guys have made it into such a big story.”

This evening, Trump signed a memorandum targeting activists and nonprofits as part of what he called a “terror network” that he claims is fueling violence, especially against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. He and his allies claim that “radical left Democrats,” or “Radical Left Terrorists,” are behind that violence, although, as scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder notes, the majority of political violence in the U.S. comes from the right.

“Titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” the memo alleges that “common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

The document gives law enforcement wide latitude to “investigate, prosecute, and disrupt entities and individuals” engaged in behavior the administration opposes, as well as nonprofit organizations that fund them. It also orders law enforcement to “question and interrogate” people “regarding the entity or individual organizing such actions and any related financial sponsorship of those actions prior to adjudication or initiation of a plea agreement.”

Former federal prosecutor Daniel Richman, who teaches at Columbia Law School, told Robert Tait and Aram Roston of The Guardian that an executive order cannot create new crimes, and Timothy Snyder noted that the memo nonetheless “undoes the basic tradition of American liberty and law, which is…that we are individuals to be judged on the basis of what we do as such. This memo, quite to the contrary, begins from the premise that the world is governed by mysterious, invisible entities to which individuals can be arbitrarily associated by the power of the government, thereby making those individuals guilty and subject to prosecution and punishment.” It makes responsibility collective, thus enabling the government to target everybody. “The groups that will…be targeted will be groups that are concerned with things like counting the votes, human rights, freedom of speech, and the rule of law.”

All this, said Snyder, is both a “big lie” and a cliché. Authoritarians always say the country is facing an emergency and that their opponents are “terrorists.” It’s a cliché to say “there's a mysterious, bottomless, organization that we have to chase to the ends of the Earth and break all the rules to find. That's what they always say.”

Snyder noted that Congress can pass laws to rule such behavior illegal, courts can find actions illegal and protect victims, commentators can describe reality, and citizens can say they “don't want to be subject to an imagined emergency based on a big lie that does away with the essence of American liberty and law.” He concludes: “This has been done before. It can be stopped.”

mickeyrat · September 27

September 26, 2025 (Friday)

Today Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that twenty men who were awarded the Medal of Honor for their participation in the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre would keep their medals, despite more than a century of controversy over them. The defense secretary who preceded Hegseth, General Lloyd Austin, had ordered a review of the awarding of those medals to “ensure no awardees were recognized for conduct inconsistent with the nation’s highest military honor.” Hegseth today called the men “brave soldiers” and said: “We’re making it clear that [the soldiers] deserve those medals.”

It’s fitting that Hegseth, a political appointee whose tenure has been marked by incompetence, would defend the awarding of those particular Medals of Honor, because they were awarded to cover up the incompetence of political appointees that led to the deaths of at least 230 peaceful Lakotas, as well as about twenty-five soldiers who were caught in their own crossfire.

The road to Wounded Knee started in 1884, when voters angry that the Republicans had sold out to big business elected Democrat Grover Cleveland to the presidency. The first Democrat to occupy the White House since before the Civil War, he promised to lower the tariffs that squeezed ordinary Americans in order to protect big business. Horrified at the growing opposition to a government that worked for those industrialists who would soon be called “robber barons,” Republicans began to circulate pamphlets as soon as Cleveland was elected, claiming that lowering the tariff would destroy the economy and warning that voters must return Republicans to power or face economic ruin.

In 1888, Cleveland nonetheless won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes, but after an extraordinarily corrupt campaign, Republican candidate Benjamin Harrison won in the Electoral College. This is “A BUSINESS MAN’S ADMINISTRATION,” the editors of a pro-Harrison newspaper boasted. They predicted that “business men will be thoroughly well content with it.”

Knowing that the popular mood had turned against tariffs and the party that protected them, Harrison Republicans looked for ways to cement their control over the government.

Adding to the Union new states they believed would vote Republican would give them two more seats per state in the Senate, as well as a seat per state in the House of Representatives, and thus three more electors in the Electoral College, for each state has a number of electors equal to the number of senators and representatives combined. Between November 1889 and July 1890 the Republicans added five new states to the Union. They added Washington, Idaho, and Montana. They also divided the huge Dakota Territory in two, creating North Dakota and South Dakota. The new states should give the Republicans ten new seats in the Senate, Harrison’s men noted happily.

But the western half of what was supposed to become South Dakota belonged to the Lakotas. In 1889 the government forced the Lakotas to sign treaties agreeing to sell about half of their land and to move closer to six agencies on smaller reservations in what would soon be a new state. The government promised rations, health, care, education, and help with transitioning to a farming economy in exchange for the land, but that plan ran afoul of politics almost immediately.

The War Department and the Department of the Interior had fought over management of the Indigenous peoples in the U.S. for decades. Reservations were overseen by an “Indian agent,” who was in sole charge of spending the tens of thousands of dollars Congress appropriated to fund the various treaties the government had negotiated with different tribes. From that money, the agent was supposed to contract for food, clothing, tools, and supplies, as well as for the building of schools, mills, warehouses, and so on. Until 1883 this had been a plum political position, awarded to a political loyalist with the expectation that providing promised rations to Indigenous Americans was the least of his concerns: he was expected to spread that money to political allies to shore up their support.

The Army hated this system. If political appointees mismanaged their work, it was Army officers and their men who had the dangerous job of fighting angry warriors. Politicians noted that the Army all too often killed indiscriminately, and they refused to give up their power. But military men resented that political mistakes could cost soldiers their lives.

In 1883, after a disappointed office seeker assassinated President James A. Garfield, Congress had passed the Civil Service Act that was supposed to do away with awarding government jobs based on political patronage. Cleveland had taken that charge seriously and had installed agents instructed to fulfill their job description. Harrison’s men, though, knew they needed western votes to hold control of the newly admitted states, and they spun the system back to one based on patronage.

Their most unfortunate appointment was that of Daniel Royer to the Pine Ridge Reservation. Royer was a staunch Republican, but he was also a failed medical man with a budding drug addiction and little knowledge of Lakotas. After he arrived in October 1890, the Lakotas named him “Young-Man-Afraid-of-Indians.”

Since being corralled on the six smaller reservations the previous year, the Lakotas had endured a deadly influenza epidemic that swept the U.S. and much of Europe and killed a number of Lakotas who were already weak from respiratory viruses. Then, hot winds in summer 1890 had burned dry first the Lakotas’ vegetable gardens, then their crops, and finally, the native hay.

Settlers suffering in the same drought abandoned their new homesteads and went back east. Hungry and desolate, Lakotas had to stay. Then a new census count came in lower than expected, and government officials cut their rations. Destitute and in real danger of starvation, some Lakotas turned to a new religious movement, the Ghost Dance, that promised to bring back the world of game and plenty that had been theirs before the coming of easterners.

The Ghost Dancers never hurt their non-Indigenous neighbors or threatened their property, and few settlers paid them much attention. But Royer interpreted the religious enthusiasm as a sign of an approaching war. Less than a week after arriving at Pine Ridge, Royer warned his superiors in the Interior Department in Washington, D.C., that he might need troops to keep order.

General Nelson Miles of the U.S. Army, who commanded the Division of the Missouri that included Pine Ridge, went to the reservation, where the Lakotas explained their crushing circumstances and suggested that neither Royer nor his predecessor had been much help. Miles brushed off Royer’s panic and told the Lakotas they could dance as they wished. When Royer told the Lakotas the next day that they must stop participating in the Ghost Dance, they laughed at him.

Back East, President Harrison and his men were focused on the 1890 midterms. Despite popular demand for a lower tariff, in a raucous congressional session in October, Republicans actually raised tariff rates, promising voters that the McKinley Tariff would finally make the country boom.

A month later, angry voters took away the Republicans’ slim majority in the House and handed the Democrats a majority of more than two to one. Republicans hung onto power only through their lock on the Senate. There, the admission of the new states made up for losses elsewhere, and the Republicans had four more senators than their opponents did.

But of those four, three had voted against the McKinley Tariff. So the survival of the tariff hung on just one vote: that of a senator from South Dakota. In the nineteenth century, senators were chosen by the state legislature, and it looked at first as if the Republicans had won South Dakota’s. But then news broke that ballot boxes had been tampered with. Suddenly, the legislature was in play for all parties. Whoever won would control South Dakota’s Senate seat and the fate of the McKinley Tariff.

The Ghost Dance had continued to spread across the South Dakota reservations, and Royer was growing increasingly frightened. Some of the other agents were also agitated, sending back to their superiors letters full of exaggerated rumors. But Miles and officers stationed at the forts in South Dakota, all of whom had first-hand experience with the Lakotas, denied that the Lakotas were planning a war. Instead, the officers blamed the Lakotas’ anger on the mismanagement of food and supplies by the political appointees at the Interior Department. As soon as the agents addressed the Lakotas’ very real suffering, they said, the Ghost Dance movement would fade.

But with control of the South Dakota legislature hanging in the balance, Harrison was leaning toward sending in troops. Settlers liked the military, which brought contracts and government money into the chronically poor West. On November 20, 1890, troops marched into Pine Ridge.

Alarmed, Ghost Dancers rushed to the Badlands, where they could defend themselves.

For the next month, Army officers worked to bring the Ghost Dancers in the Badlands back to Pine Ridge. Then, on December 15, just as it seemed they had convinced them to return, a police officer murdered the famous leader Sitting Bull at Standing Rock Reservation on the northern edge of the state, and his panicked kinfolk fled south to Pine Ridge to take shelter with the renowned negotiator Red Cloud. Army officers were afraid the band would take news of Sitting Bull’s death to the Lakotas in the Badlands, derailing the negotiations, and set out to intercept them.

On December 28, on the southern side of the state, two members of the Lakota band from the north overtook two Army scouts watering their horses and told the scouts they were on their way to Pine Ridge. The scouts informed their commander, who intercepted the Lakotas with guns and demanded an unconditional surrender. The Lakotas agreed, and the troops and the tired and hungry Lakotas set off for Pine Ridge. That night, they all camped inside the reservation, at Wounded Knee Creek.

During the night, a new commander, James Forsyth, took over. Dead set on a show of force, he insisted on disarming the Lakotas before they set off for the agency. Many of the young men refused to give up their guns, which were the only way they could feed their families through the winter. As soldiers tried to wrench a gun from a man’s hands, it went off into the sky. “Fire! Fire on them!” Forsyth screamed.

The soldiers did. The first volley brought down the men who were being disarmed, as well as about twenty-five of the soldiers themselves, who had moved into a circle around the Lakota men and boys during the course of the morning. In the haze from the gun smoke, Lakota men grabbed weapons from nearby soldiers and dove for the dry creek bed that ran behind the camp, hoping to hike along it and get away. The women and children had been separated from the men during the morning. When the firing began, women ran for the wagons and horses.

But they could not escape. Over the next two hours, frenzied soldiers hunted down and killed every Lakota they could find. Soldiers trained artillery on the fleeing wagons as troops on horseback combed the hills for fugitives. Some of the escaping women were ridden down three miles from the encampment. When the wagons stopped moving, the soldiers moved the guns to the creek bed and shot everyone who moved. Within a few hours, at least 230 Lakotas, mostly women and children, were dead.

The outcry against this butchery started in the Army itself. Miles was incensed that the simple surrender of a peaceful band of Lakotas had become what he called a “criminal military blunder and a horrible massacre of women and children.” He demanded an inquiry into Forsyth’s actions. Miles’s report was so damning his own secretary asked him to soften it.

But President Harrison’s administration was in terrible electoral trouble, and his men wanted no part of an attack on soldiers that would imply that Harrison’s agents had first created a war and then mismanaged it. They dismissed Miles’s report with their own, which blamed the Lakotas for the massacre and concluded that the soldiers had acted the part of heroes. In spring 1891, President Harrison awarded the first of twenty Medals of Honor that would go to soldiers for their actions at Wounded Knee.

In the end, though, all of the political maneuvering by Harrison’s men came to naught. After months of squabbling, the South Dakota legislature rejected the Republican candidate and chose an Independent senator who caucused with the Democrats. And in 1892, Harrison lost the presidency to Grover Cleveland, who promised lower tariffs and a return to civil service reform.

mickeyrat · September 28

September 27, 2025 (Saturday)

Yesterday, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released items from a third batch of documents associated with the criminal investigation of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The Republicans have been slow-walking the release of those files since news broke that they mention President Donald J. Trump, a close friend of Epstein during the years of his sex trafficking. The batch of documents includes phone message logs, flight logs and manifests, and Epstein’s daily schedule.

Those documents show that billionaire Peter Thiel, who financially supported Vice President J.D. Vance’s Senate campaign, and Trump ally Steve Bannon had scheduled meetings with Epstein. And they show that Elon Musk had a pending trip to Epstein’s private island.

Trump responded hours later by ordering his administration to declassify and release all government records related to…Amelia Earhart. Earhart was an early American aviator, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. On July 2, 1937, she disappeared over the Pacific Ocean. Her disappearance and presumed death have fascinated people ever since.

But these are not the files most Americans are seeking right now.

Since yesterday, Trump has been active on social media. He has warned pregnant women in all caps: “DON'T USE TYLENOL UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY, DON'T GIVE TYLENOL TO YOUR YOUNG CHILD FOR VIRTUALLY ANY REASON, BREAK UP THE MMR SHOT INTO THREE TOTALLY SEPARATE SHOTS (NOT MIXED!), TAKE CHICKEN P SHOT SEPARATELY, TAKE HEPATITAS [sic] B SHOT AT 12 YEARS OLD, OR OLDER, AND, IMPORTANTLY, TAKE VACCINE IN 5 SEPARATE MEDICAL VISITS!”

Trump is not a doctor. His recommendations appear to come from the secretary of health and human services he appointed, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is neither a doctor nor a scientist. The danger of giving medical advice without expertise shows: among other things, the MMR—measles, mumps, and rubella—vaccine is not available in three separate shots.

Trump has demanded that Microsoft fire its global affairs president, Lisa Monaco, who as deputy attorney general in the Biden administration helped coordinate the response of the Department of Justice to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters. Trump posted on social media that Monaco is “a menace to U.S. National Security, especially given the major contracts that Microsoft has with the United States Government.”

Trump has claimed the FBI placed “274 FBI Agents into the Crowd just prior to, and during, the January 6th Hoax,” “probably acting as Agitators and Insurrectionists,” noting that this “is different from what Director Christopher Wray stated, over and over again!” He went on: “Christopher Wray, the then Director of the FBI, has some major explaining to do. That’s two in a row, Comey and Wray, who got caught LYING.”

In fact, a report from the Department of Justice inspector general shows that there were no undercover FBI agents at the January 6 riots. There were 26 confidential human sources who worked with the FBI during the events, but the inspector general found that none were “authorized by the FBI to enter the Capitol or a restricted area or to otherwise break the law on January 6, nor was any CHS directed by the FBI to encourage others to commit illegal acts on January 6.”

When people pointed out that Trump himself appointed Wray, he posted: “For those who are interested, and there aren’t many of you, Christopher Wray was recommended to me by Sloppy Chris Christie when Chris was in my “good graces”—which was a very long time ago!”

Trump posted a cartoon today of an angry version of himself telling a sad version of Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell—yet another Trump appointee—“YOU’RE FIRED!” Trump is eager to get rid of Powell, who is not lowering interest rates to pump up the economy as fast as Trump wants.

Trump also posted: “At the request of Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists. I am also authorizing Full Force, if necessary. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Zane Sparling, Fedor Zarkhin, and Zaeem Shaikh of The Oregonian/OregonLive compiled a timeline of protests against the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Portland. They noted that the last arrest of protesters by Portland police was on June 19, bringing the total to 25, and the last arrest by federal officers was on July 4, bringing the total to 22.

After a Labor Day protest downtown, more than 100 people marched to the ICE building and set up a makeshift guillotine. Federal officers responded with tear gas and pepper balls. On September 4 the Fox News Channel aired a story about the Labor Day protests, but mixed in clips from 2020 showing protesters burning the base of the Thompson Elk Fountain and a federal officer pepper-spraying a protester. The next day, Trump said he was considering federal intervention. “They’ve ruined that city,” he said. “It’s like living in hell.”

On September 17, Portland officials said ICE had violated its land use agreement by holding detainees for longer than 12 hours, opening the door for the city to force ICE to move. Two days later, The Oregonian/OregonLive published a video of federal agents hitting nonviolent protesters and using chemical spray on them. Portland mayor Keith Wilson called for a full investigation; Trump said people in Portland are “out of control and crazy,” and vowed to “stop that pretty soon.”

On September 22 the president signed an executive order designating “Antifa” as “a major terrorist organization,” and three days later he called demonstrators in Portland “professional agitators and anarchists.” The day after that, September 26—yesterday—Democratic members of Oregon’s congressional delegation, including Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley and representatives Suzanne Bonamici, Maxine Dexter, and Andrea Salinas, visited the ICE facility. They called out the violence against protesters and said they were “not at all satisfied with the answers and the evasion” they got from ICE agents about their treatment of detainees.

In response to Trump’s announcement that he was directing Secretary Hegeseth to send troops, authorized to use full force, to Portland, Senator Wyden—who has led the push to force the Treasury to turn over Epstein-related Treasury records of at least $1.5 billion in suspicious transactions to Senate investigators—posted a video of the ICE facility Trump claims is under siege. There were no people there at all.

“My message to Donald Trump is this,” Wyden posted: “we don’t need you here. Stay the hell out of our city.”

mickeyrat · September 29

September 28, 2025 (Sunday)

Late last night, President Donald J. Trump shared on social media a deep fake video that appeared to be a clip from his daughter-in-law Lara Trump’s Fox News talk show My View. In the video’s split screen, Lara Trump, on the left, says: “President Donald J. Trump has announced a historic new healthcare system, the launch of America's first MedBed hospitals and a national MedBed card for every citizen.” As she speaks, the video shows a building with the caption: “MEDBED HOSPITALS: THE NEW ERA IN HEALTHCARE.”

Then the video shows a clip of Trump saying: “Every American will soon receive their own MedBed card.” As the video shows what looks like a futuristic hospital, complete with what appear to be podlike beds, he continues: “With it, you'll have guaranteed access to our new hospitals led by the top doctors in the nation, equipped with the most advanced technology in the world.”

The camera then goes back to Trump saying, “These facilities are safe”—the camera switches back to a hospital scene—“modern, and designed to restore every citizen to full health and strength.” The video then switches back to Trump, who says: “This is the beginning of a new era in American healthcare.”

Lara Trump takes over as a scene of people applauding Trump runs beside her. She says: “In this first phase, only a limited number of MedBed cards will be released. Registration details will be announced very soon.”

MedBeds are imaginary magical beds, sort of like a tanning bed, that diagnose or cure health problems instantly and painlessly. The idea is popular in QAnon forums, and believers claim that Trump is already secretly installing the beds in hospitals.

It is unclear why Trump posted an obviously fake video, touting an obviously fake product, although healthcare is uppermost in politics these days. The Democrats say they will not agree to the Republicans’ continuing resolution to keep the government open unless the Republicans agree to extend the premium tax credit that subsidizes health care insurance for people making between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty limit. Without that extension, millions of Americans will lose their health insurance, and healthcare premiums for everyone in the Affordable Health Care market will go up, often dramatically.

If MedBeds were real and “every citizen” could use them, as the deep fake video suggests, no one would need to worry about losing their healthcare insurance.

Someone took the video down from Trump’s timeline this morning.

On Friday, Republicans took the stand that Democrats would pay for shutting down the government. A White House official told Dasha Burns of Politico that Trump would not negotiate. “He read all the sh*t they’re asking for, and he said, ‘on second thought, go f*ck yourself,’” the White House official told Burns. Yesterday, though, Punchbowl reported that Trump will meet with Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY). House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) are expected to be there as well.

The government is funded through Tuesday, September 30.

Also taking place Tuesday is the meeting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth abruptly called last week for hundreds of the nation’s top military officers at the Quantico, Virginia, Marine Corps base. When Trump talked to reporters on Thursday, he did not appear to understand that Hegseth had called U.S. military officers to Quantico, appearing to think he had invited military leaders from other countries. “I love it, I mean I think it’s great,” Trump said. “Let him be friendly with the generals and admirals from all over the world. You act like this is a bad thing. Isn’t it nice that people are coming from all over the world to be with us?”

Today Tara Copp, Dan Lamothe, Noah Robertson, and Alex Horton of the Washington Post reported that Trump has decided that he will go to the gathering himself.

Trump told Yamiche Alcindor and Alexandra Marquez of NBC News: “It’s really just a very nice meeting talking about how well we’re doing militarily, talking about being in great shape, talking about a lot of good, positive things. It’s just a good message,” Trump said. “We have some great people coming in and it’s just an ‘esprit de corps.’ You know the expression ‘esprit de corps’? That’s all it’s about. We’re talking about what we’re doing, what they’re doing, and how we’re doing.”

In a phone interview with NBC White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor today, Trump suggested he was backing off from the threat he posted on social media to send troops to Portland to handle “domestic terrorists.” The Democratic governor of Oregon, Tina Kotek, has told Trump and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem that there is no need for troops and they do not have the authority to deploy the military there. "We can manage our own local public safety needs," Kotek said. "There is no insurrection, there is no threat to national security."

Evan Watson of KGW8 in Portland, Oregon, reported that Trump told Alcindor they were “looking at” sending troops. "I spoke to the governor, she was very nice," Trump added. "But I said, 'Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what's happening? My people tell me different.' They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place...it looks like terrible."

In fact, Zane Sparling, Fedor Zarkhin, and Zaeem Shaikh of The Oregonian/OregonLive noted yesterday that Trump’s first threat to send federal troops to Portland came on September 5, a day after the Fox News Channel aired a “special report” about a protest that had taken place four days before, on Labor Day. The report about the Labor Day protest misleadingly mixed in clips from 2020 showing protesters burning the base of the Thompson Elk fountain and a federal officer pepper-spraying a person.

This afternoon Hegseth called 200 members of the Oregon National Guard into federal service for 60 days. Less than six hours later, Oregon attorney general Dan Rayfield sued President Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, Secretary of Homeland Security Noem, and their respective departments, saying the National Guard has been unlawfully deployed for law enforcement duties.

Late this afternoon, Trump praised his remodeling of the Oval Office to include copious gold fixtures, some of which match polyurethane appliqué available from the home improvement store Home Depot. On social media, Trump posted: “Some of the highest quality 24 Karat Gold used in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room of the White House. Foreign Leaders, and everyone else, ‘freak out’ when they see the quality and beauty. Best Oval Office ever, in terms of success and look!!! President DJT”

mickeyrat · September 30

September 29, 2025 (Monday)

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) left a meeting with President Donald J. Trump this afternoon without a deal to keep the government open past the last day of the fiscal year, which is tomorrow: Tuesday. The president and Vice President J.D. Vance appeared to consider opening up negotiations over extending the premium tax subsidies for healthcare insurance that will expire at the end of 2025 because of the budget reconciliation bill the Republicans passed in July, but they insisted the Democrats must fund the government before talks begin.

“We think when they say ‘later,’ they mean ‘never,” Schumer told reporters. He noted that Democrats had asked repeatedly for meetings about the measure and the Republicans refused, so Democrats had no input on the continuing resolution. Jeffries pointed out that far from being willing to work with Democrats, House Republicans have left town. “House Democrats are here,” he said. “Senate Democrats are here. The Senate is ready to act. House Republicans [are] on vacation right now…. They're not serious about actually reaching a bipartisan agreement that meets the needs of the American people. If House Republicans were serious, they'd be here right now.”

Schumer told reporters that in their discussions, Trump did not appear to be aware that Americans are facing huge increases in their healthcare insurance payments because of the budget reconciliation bill.

Tonight, Trump’s social media account posted a deepfake video of Schumer and Jeffries speaking to reporters. In the doctored video, Schumer talks with Mexican music playing in the background, while Jeffries stands beside him wearing what appears to be a colorful Mexican sombrero and sporting a mustache with the ends waxed and turned up.

In the video, Schumer’s image is made to say: “There's no way to sugarcoat it. Nobody likes Democrats anymore. We have no voters left because of all of our woke, trans bullsh*t. Not even Black people want to vote for us anymore, even Latinos hate us. So we need new voters. And if we give all these illegal aliens free healthcare, we might be able to get them on our side so they can vote for us. They can't even speak English, so they won't realize we're just a bunch of woke pieces of sh*t, you know? At least for a while, until they learn English and they realize they hate us too.”

When Lawrence O’Donnell asked Jeffries to comment on the video, he responded: “It's a disgusting video and we're going to continue to make clear: bigotry will get you nowhere.”

Jeffries continued: “We are fighting to protect the healthcare of the American people in the face of an unprecedented Republican assault. On all the things, Medicaid, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, Republicans are closing our hospitals, nursing homes, and community-based health clinics, and have effectively shut down medical research in the United States of America. Clearly, Donald Trump and Republicans know that they have a very weak position, because they are hurting everyday Americans while continuing to reward their billionaire donors, just like they did in that one big, ugly bill with massive tax breaks. Democrats are united in the House and the Senate, and the point that we've made will continue to be clear. We are fighting to lower the high cost of healthcare, prevent these dramatically increased premiums, copays, and deductibles that will take place in a matter of days unless Republicans are willing to act in terms of renewing the Affordable Care Act tax credits.”

Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported today that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has been leading the administration’s strikes on boats that the White House claims were smuggling drugs to the U.S., although it has offered no evidence of that claim either to lawmakers or to the public. Julie Turkewitz of the New York Times reported that “[i]n an interview, one woman who identified herself as the wife of one of the dead men said that her husband was a fisherman with four children who left one day for work and never came back.”

Tomorrow is not only the last day of the fiscal year, it is also the date Defense Secretary Pete Hegeseth set for what was to be his own highly unusual meeting with more than 800 military leaders and their senior enlisted advisors. Hegseth did not specify the purpose of the meeting. Since he called it hastily last week, news reports have suggested that he intended to talk to the generals and admirals about “soldier ethos.” Now Trump says he intends to go to the meeting himself and give the military leaders a pep talk.

We’ll see.

Noah Robertson, Tara Copp, Alex Horton, and Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post reported today that eight current and former officials have told them there is a deep rift between the political appointees at the Pentagon and the military leaders there.

The journalists report that in a reordering of U.S. military priorities, Hegseth is withdrawing forces from Europe, reducing the concentration of power and consolidating commands abroad while focusing on using the military in the U.S. and neighboring countries. According to the reporters, General Dan Caine, Trump’s hand-picked chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, shares others’ concerns about the reworking of U.S. priorities.

Also tomorrow, as Michael Sainato of The Guardian reports, the resignations of more than 100,000 federal workers will take effect as part of the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal workforce. Those leaving say they were forced out through fear and pressure from administration officials, reminding Sainato of the comment from Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, who wants to destroy the modern government. Last October he said of federal workers: “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down.… We want to put them in trauma.”

This year’s cuts to the government workforce will mean the loss of at least 275,000 workers, the largest decline in civilian federal employment in a single year since World War II.

mickeyrat · October 1

September 30. 2025 (Tuesday)

Last Thursday, September 25, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suddenly announced he was calling about 800 of the nation’s top military generals and admirals, along with their top enlisted advisors, to meet at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia, today. Such a meeting was unprecedented, and its suddenness meant military leaders across the world had to drop everything to run to Washington, D.C., at enormous financial cost for the country. Under those extraordinary circumstances, speculation about what Hegseth intended to say or do at the meeting has been widespread.

Now we know. This morning, in front of a giant flag backdrop that echoed the opening scene from the movie Patton, Hegseth harangued the career military leaders, pacing as if he were giving a TED talk. The event was streamed live to the public, making it clear that the hurry to get everyone to Washington, D.C., in person was not about secrecy.

In his speech, Hegseth reiterated his vision of a military based in what he calls the “warrior ethos.” Ignoring the military’s mission of preventing wars through deterrence, its professional and highly educated officer corps, and its modern structure as a triumph of logistics, he told the military leaders that today was “the liberation of America's warriors, in name, in deed and in authorities. You kill people and break things for a living. You are not politically correct and don't necessarily belong always in polite society.”

He claimed that “we have the strongest, most powerful, most lethal, and most prepared military on the planet. That is true, full stop. Nobody can touch us. It's not even close.” But then Hegseth, who became defense secretary from his position as a weekend host on the Fox News Channel, complained that “our warriors” are not “led by the most capable and qualified combat leaders.”

He claimed that “foolish and reckless politicians” had forced the military “to focus on the wrong things” and that it had promoted too many leaders “based on their race, based on gender quotas.” “We became the woke department,” he said. “We are done with that sh*t.” He is loosening rules about hazing and bullying, changing physical fitness reforms with the idea that they will get women out of combat roles, and prohibiting beards, which will force Black men out of the service, for Black men suffer at a much higher rate than white men do from a chronic skin condition that makes shaving painful and can cause scarring.

He also said he was tired of seeing “fat troops” and “fat generals and admirals,” and that he would institute a second physical fitness test every year.

“[I]f the words I'm speaking today are making your heart sink,” Hegseth said, “then you should do the honorable thing and resign.”

The military leaders listened to Hegseth without expression, in keeping with the military’s longstanding tradition of rejecting partisanship. While Hegseth paused for applause that did not materialize, he seemed to be playing to the cameras rather than his live audience.

In contrast, when President Donald J. Trump took the stage, he seemed uncomfortable at the lack of audience participation in what was essentially a rally speech. “I’ve never walked into a room so silent before,” he began. “This is very interesting. Don’t laugh, don’t laugh. You’re not allowed to do that. You know what? Just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if you want to do anything you want, you can do anything you want. And if you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room.”

The president who received five draft deferments—four for college, one for bad feet—continued to a room full of career officers: “Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future. But you just feel nice and loose, okay, because we’re all on the same team. And I was told that, sir, you won’t hear a murmur in the room.”

For the next 70 minutes, he spoke slowly, slurring words, delivering to the hundreds of professionals who had rushed from around the world to attend this meeting a rambling, incoherent stream of words that jumped from what appeared to be prepared remarks to his own improvisation. He covered the “Gulf of America,” the seven or eight wars he claims to have ended, the “millions and millions of lives” he has saved, nuclear weapons (one of the two “n-words” he informed the military leaders you can’t say), his demanding “beautiful paper, the gorgeous paper” with “the real gold writing” when he signs things (“I love my signature. I really do. Everyone loves my signature," he said), finding $31 billion on “the tariff shelf,” making Canada the 51st state, his dislike of the "aesthetics" of certain Navy ships, wild claims about his 2024 electoral victory, the press, America First, immigrants from prisons and mental institutions, and Venezuelans not daring to go out in boats for fear the U.S. will “blow [them] out of existence.”

The speech was highly partisan, attacking former president Joe Biden by name eleven times, calling him “the auto pen” and claiming his administration was really run by “radical left lunatics.” “We were not respected with Biden,” Trump said.

“They looked at him falling downstairs every day. Every day, the guy is falling downstairs. He said, It’s not our President. We can’t have it. I’m very careful. You know, when I walk downstairs for, like, a month, stairs, like these stairs, I’m very—I walk very slowly. Nobody has to set a record. Just try not to fall, because it doesn’t work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen and it became a part of their legacy. We don’t want that. You walk nice and easy. You’re not having—you don’t have to set any record. Be cool. Be cool when you walk down, but don’t—don’t pop down the stairs. So one thing with Obama, I had zero respect for him as a President, but he would bop down those stairs. I’ve never seen it. Da-da, da-da, da-da, bop, bop, bop. He’d go down the stairs. Wouldn’t hold on. I said, It’s great. I don’t want to do it. I guess I could do it. But eventually, bad things are going to happen, and it only takes once. But he did a lousy job as president. A year ago, we were a dead country. We were dead. This country was going to hell.”

Like Hegseth’s, Trump’s speech seemed to have been designed to announce a new mission for the military. He claimed the U.S. has domestic enemies, “insurrectionists” “paid by the radical left,” and said that cities “that are run by the radical-left Democrats…they’re very unsafe places, and we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war, too. It’s a war from within…. And I told Pete [Hegseth] we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military—National Guard, but military—because we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city with an incompetent governor. Stupid governor.” Trump told the audience that “our inner cities” are “a big part of war now.”

A former defense official told Jack Detsch and Leo Shane III of Politico the meeting was “a waste of time for a lot of people who emphatically had better things they could and should be doing. It’s also an inexcusable strategic risk to concentrate so many leaders in the operational chain of command in the same publicly known time and place, to convey an inane message of little merit.”

Either one of those speeches, in full view of the American public and foreign governments, would be enough to torpedo an administration before Trump. But the day was not over.

The Senate adjourned today without agreeing to the continuing resolution the House passed to fund the government until November 21. The Republicans refused to include the Democrats in any of their negotiations, and the Democrats, whose votes the Senate needed to pass the measure, said they would not agree to a continuing resolution unless it included a fix to extend the premium tax credits that support healthcare insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act. While Republicans extended the 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, they let the premium tax credits run out at the end of this year. Without that support, healthcare insurance premiums will skyrocket.

“We are shutting down,” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) said tonight, “because Donald Trump thinks he’s a king. This was totally avoidable, but Donald Trump told Republicans, ‘Don't negotiate with Democrats.’... We didn't shut down when Joe Biden was president. Why? Because Democrats, when they were in the majority, took their responsibility to govern seriously, reached out across the aisle, and built bipartisan funding agreements with the Republicans…. We aren't asking for the moon. We are simply saying, we don't want health insurance premiums to go up by 75% on the American public. That's what Republicans have engineered as a means to pay for their giant tax cut for billionaires and corporations. We aren’t asking for some big new healthcare program. We're simply saying, if we're gonna vote for a budget, we want that budget to not increase premiums on families across this country by 75%, bankrupting American families. You know what else we want? We want this president to start acting… lawfully.”

House Democrats have been running a 24-hour live stream in which they and guests are talking about the shutdown and the importance of protecting health care.

Republicans seem aware that shutting down the government at the same time many Americans see their healthcare premiums jump dramatically will not be popular. Although the Hatch Act prohibits the use of government resources for partisan gain, the White House ignored the act to blame Democrats for the shutdown. This afternoon, Emine Yücel of Talking Points Memo reported that federal employees at the Social Security Administration, Small Business Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Commerce—and as well as other agencies—received an email blaming Democrats for the looming shutdown. It said Trump “opposes a government shutdown,” but Democrats were “blocking this Continuing Resolution in the U.S. Senate due to unrelated policy demands.”

The website for the Department of Housing and Urban Development showed a banner reading: “The Radical Left are going to shut down the government and inflict massive pain on the American people unless they get their $1.5 trillion wish lists of demands. The Trump administration wants to keep the government open for the American people.” Melody Schreiber of The Guardian reported that the Department of Veterans’ Affairs said in a statement that “Radical liberals in Congress” were attempting to shut down the government “to achieve their crazy fantasy of open borders, ‘transgender’ for everybody and men competing in women’s sports.”

This evening, Trump posted on social media three pictures of Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) in the Oval Office with bright red caps placed on the Resolute Desk in front of them bearing the words “Trump 2028.”

But Trump’s ability to project dominance is weakening, and today’s performance didn’t help.

In Boston today, Judge William G. Young answered an anonymous correspondent who trolled the judge on June 19 by writing a postcard that said: “TRUMP HAS PARDONS AND TANKS…. WHAT DO YOU HAVE?” Young reproduced the writing at the top of his decision finding that Trump’s attempted deportations of legal residents for their pro-Palestinian speech violated the First Amendment. Then the judge answered: “Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous, Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People of the United States—you and me—have our magnificent Constitution.”

Judge Young explained how Trump’s officers are using fear—through masked ICE agents, for example—“to terrorize Americans” so they stop resisting the president’s attempts to silence opposition. But, the judge went on, “The United States is a great nation, not because any of us say so. It is great because we still practice our frontier tradition of selflessness for the good of us all. Strangers go out of their way to help strangers when they see a need. In times of fire, flood, and national disaster, everyone pitches in to help people we've never met and first responders selflessly risk their lives for others. Hundreds of firefighters rushed into the Twin Towers on 9/11 without hesitation desperate to find and save survivors. That's who we are. And on distant battlefields our military ‘fought and died for the men [they] marched among.’ Each day, I recognize (to paraphrase Lincoln again) that the brave men and women, living and dead, who have struggled in our Nation's service have hallowed our Constitutional freedom far above my (or anyone’s) poor power to add or detract. The only Constitutional rights upon which we can depend are those we extend to the weakest and most reviled among us.”

The judge concluded: “I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected.

“Is he correct?”

mickeyrat · October 2

October 1, 2025 (Wednesday)

Last night, as the government barreled toward a shutdown, President Donald J. Trump posted yet another doctored video on social media. This one showed House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) reacting to Trump’s deepfake video of September 29 that faked Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) attacking Democrats and racial minorities and showed Jeffries sporting a Mexican sombrero and waxed mustache while Mexican music played.

On September 29, Jeffries told MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell: “It's a disgusting video and we're going to continue to make clear: bigotry will get you nowhere. We are fighting to protect the healthcare of the American people in the face of an unprecedented Republican assault.”

Trump’s video from last night replayed Jeffries’s statement up to “bigotry will get you nowhere.” Then four images of Trump, each wearing a sombrero and playing an instrument in a mariachi band, popped up behind Jeffries, whose image suddenly had a sombrero and a mustache again.

The president does not appear to be taking the government shutdown very seriously.

Republicans are, though: not to resolve it, but to use it to attack Democrats. Republicans control the Senate and could end the filibuster for the continuing resolution that would fund the government, thus enabling them to pass it through the Senate with a simple majority if they wanted to. Instead, they want Democratic votes for it, evidently wanting to make sure Republicans alone do not take the blame for their budget reconciliation bill of July as its deeply unpopular measures are becoming clear.

That measure cut Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits as well as a slew of other programs. While it extended tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, Republicans permitted the premium tax credit for purchasing health insurance under the Affordable Healthcare Act to lapse at the end of this year. The end of that program is already sending healthcare insurance premiums skyrocketing.

Democrats say they will not agree to a continuing resolution to fund the government until the premium tax credits are extended past their end date of 2025. Republicans want to force Democrats to abandon this demand, thus getting at least a semblance of a buy-in to the dramatic cuts that are already hitting Americans hard.

Administration officials are making sure the shutdown doesn’t affect their own priorities. They have prioritized the $20 billion bailout of Argentina’s failing economy as essential, so it will proceed. The bailout will help right-wing leader Javier Milei, a Trump ally. Judd Legum of Popular Information reported Monday that the bailout will also help billionaire hedge fund manager Rob Citrone, an associate of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent who has invested heavily in Argentine companies and in Argentine debt.

The White House says construction of Trump’s ballroom in place of the East Wing of the White House will also continue during the shutdown.

Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought has weaponized the shutdown by continuing his illegal impoundments of congressionally approved funding, but this time using them solely against states with Democratic senators. Today he said he is canceling $8 billion in funding for programs that he claims "fuel the Left's climate agenda." "The projects are in the following states: CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA," Vought posted on social media. Amelia Benavides-Colón of NOTUS reports that states have not yet been notified of the plan.

Vought also announced on social media: “Roughly $18 billion in New York City infrastructure projects have been put on hold to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles.” He said he was referring to funding for the Hudson River Tunnel Project known as Gateway, and the Second Avenue Subway project.

The publication of a new document today shows that the administration has launched another power grab, this one in foreign affairs. On September 29, Trump signed an executive order giving to Qatar security guarantees that are much like those guaranteed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

The order says: “The United States shall regard any armed attack on the territory, sovereignty, or critical infrastructure of the State of Qatar as a threat to the peace and security of the United States. In the event of such an attack, the United States shall take all lawful and appropriate measures—including diplomatic, economic, and, if necessary, military—to defend the interests of the United States and of the State of Qatar and to restore peace and stability.”

An executive order is not a treaty and can be overturned by another president, but the declaration of a military commitment to a foreign nation without ratification by the Senate as the Constitution requires shows the belief of administration officials that they can act as they wish without consulting Congress.

The agreement appeared to come to pass during the Monday visit of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House, and likely reflects Qatar’s demand for a guarantee that Israel’s recent strike on Qatar would not be repeated. But the deal shows just how ill advised Trump’s illegal demand for, and then receipt of, a $400 million luxury 747-8 from Qatar turned out to be, for now it certainly looks as if Qatar received U.S. military commitments in exchange for a used plane.

Usually, administrations asserting authoritarian power make gains because they are popular. The Trump administration, though, is neither popular nor likely to become more popular as its policies hurt ordinary Americans.

Today the National Employment Report of the payroll processing company ADP said that the U.S. lost 32,000 jobs in the private sector in September. The ADP National Employment Report measures the labor market based on weekly payroll data of more than 26 million private-sector employees. ADP also revised August's employment growth, which had been recorded as 54,000 jobs, down to a loss of 3,000.

The independent ADP report has taken on additional significance since Trump has undermined the U.S. government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In August he fired the commissioner of the BLS Erika McEntarfer, complaining that she had "RIGGED" jobs figures "to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” To replace her, he nominated right-wing economist E.J. Antoni, whose scholarship was not nearly as strong as his support for Trump. Then Em Steck and Andrew Kaczynski of CNN uncovered a racist, sexist, and anti-LGBTQ Twitter account of Antoni’s.

Today Trump withdrew Antoni’s nomination after Republican senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska refused to meet with him, suggesting he could not be confirmed.

Also today, Leonardo Garcia Venegas, an American citizen born in Florida but currently living in Baldwin, Alabama, and working in construction, filed a lawsuit against the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice and officials including Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and Attorney General Pam Bondi. The complaint says that “[t]wice in the past few months, federal immigration officers have raided…private construction sites…without a warrant, and detained Leo simply for being at work. Both times, Leo told the officers he was a citizen and showed them his REAL ID, an identification card issued only to citizens and lawful residents. But the officers still wouldn’t let him go.”

“Once immigration officers are on a site,” the suit alleges, “they preemptively seize everybody they think looks undocumented. And they detain these workers indefinitely—even those who have a REAL ID—until the officers eventually check the legal status of the people they’ve detained. Sometimes it takes 20 minutes; sometimes it takes days.”

On September 8, in a case that permits Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to use racial profiling, Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that such profiling is acceptable because “[i]f the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go.” In practice, though, reports of abuses have become so commonplace that such encounters have been dubbed “Kavanaugh stops.”

The suit lists similar detentions of U.S. citizens, for example:

“Jorge Luis Hernández Viramontes, a U.S. citizen, was arrested while working at a carwash. Immigration agents took him to a nearby warehouse for questioning even though he had shown them his state-issued identification.”

“Javier Ramirez, a U.S. citizen, was handcuffed during a workplace raid at a tow yard where he worked despite screaming, ‘I have my passport! I have my ID! I’m a U.S. citizen!’”

“Jonathan Guerrero, a U.S. citizen, was handcuffed at gunpoint by immigration officers while working at a car wash in his hometown.”

“Julio Noriega, a U.S. citizen, was detained after he handed out his resume at a Jiffy Lube and put in the back of a van without the chance to tell the officers he’s a citizen. The officers drove Mr. Noriega around for four hours and then held him at a detention center for six more hours before someone checked his wallet and realized he was a citizen.”

“Andrea Velez, a U.S. citizen, was tackled by immigration officers on the sidewalk between her mom’s car and her office door.”

“Hediberto Ramirez Perez was arrested during a workplace raid at a nutrition-bar factory despite carrying his employment-verification ID card; immigration officers told him, ‘We don’t care about that for the moment.’”

Such detentions, the lawsuit alleges, violate the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. Venegas hopes to make this a class action suit to stop the government from continuing its abusive policies.

mickeyrat · October 3

October 2, 2025 (Thursday)

At about 1:00 on Tuesday morning, federal agents from Border Patrol, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) raided an apartment building on Chicago’s South Shore Drive. Using helicopters and large vehicles, as well as flash-bang grenades, and dressed in military fatigues, agents broke down the doors of the residents of the five-story building and pulled them from their homes in zip ties, some of them naked. Agents left the people tied up outside for hours before letting all but 37 of them go. The apartments residents returned to were trashed.

Border Patrol, the FBI, and ATF are all part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), overseen by Secretary Kristi Noem. Cindy Hernandez of the Chicago Sun-Times reported on the raid, noting that DHS said some of those arrested ““are believed to be involved in drug trafficking and distribution, weapons crimes and immigration violators.” It also said the neighborhood was “a location known to be frequented by Tren de Aragua members and their associates.”

But, as Hernandez reports, DHS did not offer any evidence to support its assertions. Some of the people detained during the raid are U.S. citizens.

Eyewitness Eboni Watson told Cate Cauguiran, Craig Wall, Tre Ward, and Lissette Nuñez of ABC News 7 that the people “was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other. That's all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where’s the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, ‘f*ck them kids.’”

Eyewitness Darrell Ballard told the reporters: "We're under siege. We're being invaded by our own military."

Today, Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported that the Trump administration informed congressional committees that the president has decided the U.S. is in a formal “armed conflict” with the drug cartels the administration has labeled terrorist organizations. If the U.S. is engaged in such an armed conflict, the administration said, those suspected of smuggling drugs for the cartels are “unlawful combatants.”

This declaration backfills the administration’s justification for striking three boats in the Caribbean in September, killing 17. According to international law, Savage and Schmitt explain, in an armed conflict it’s lawful for a country to kill enemy fighters even when they don’t pose a direct threat.

This redefinition is problematic not just because most overdose deaths in the U.S. come from fentanyl from Mexico, not drugs from Venezuela, the home base of the boats the administration struck. Legal experts say that trafficking an illicit consumer product is not the same as armed conflict. It is problematic also because the administration did not identify any of the drug cartels it claims it is engaging in armed conflict, who must be engaged in organized armed combat to be part of an armed conflict.

Even more problematic, as retired judge advocate general (JAG) lawyer Geoffrey S. Corn, who was the Army’s senior advisor for interpreting the laws of war, told Savage and Schmitt, the administration's declaration is an “abuse” that crosses a major legal line. “This is not stretching the envelope,” he said. “This is shredding it. This is tearing it apart.”

Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, posted: “Every American should be alarmed that Pres[ident] Trump has decided he can wage secret wars against anyone he labels an enemy. Drug cartels must be stopped, but declaring war & ordering lethal military force without Congress or public knowledge—nor legal justification—is unacceptable.”

The declaration means that the administration is laying claim that the U.S. is in an active armed conflict, which would give the president extraordinary wartime powers. This dovetails with the September 17 demand of DHS that the “media and the far left” must stop “the demonization of President Trump, his supporters, and DHS law enforcement.” It also supports Trump’s warning to military leaders on Tuesday that “[w]e’re under invasion from within, no different than a foreign enemy,” followed by complaints that “Venezuela emptied its prison population into our country” and a vow to “straighten…out” the cities “run by the radical left Democrats.”

That assault is underway now, not only through raids like the one in Chicago on Tuesday, but also by administration figures who are using the government shutdown to hurt Democrats and their constituencies. Independent journalist Marisa Kabas reported this morning that the Department of Education changed out-of-office email replies for furloughed employees from generic messages to ones blaming Democrats for the government shutdown. Leah Feiger and Vittoria Elliott of Wired reported that when employees changed their out-of-office responses back to neutral language, the message changed back to blaming the Democrats.

Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought has vowed to cut $26 billion from projects in New York City that Congress approved, despite the illegality of such impoundments, and has vowed to slash the federal government, again without a lawful basis for such cuts. A shutdown gives Vought no more legal authority than he ever had.

Jordain Carney of Politico reports that even Republicans are concerned about the damage Vought is doing to their own constituents as he attempts to weaponize the government against Democrats. But, as Carney reports, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) says the Republicans have no control over what Vought might do.

The nation’s rapid advance toward authoritarianism is one story right now, but there is another: the administration is rotting from inside.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo reports that the groundwork required for the mass layoffs Vought has threatened is not apparent, suggesting the administration is trying to project power it does not have.

The Republicans are trying to pin the blame for the shutdown on the Democrats, but Trump is apparently so unstable he is hurting their cause. The Democrats are insisting they will not be complicit in slashing through Americans’ healthcare. The law the Republicans passed in July—the one they call the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act”—extended tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations but permitted the premium tax credits that subsidized the Affordable Care Act (ACA or Obamacare) to expire at the end of 2025, and people are already seeing dramatic increases in their healthcare premiums.

On Tuesday, after his 70-minute incoherent speech to the nation’s top military leaders, Trump proved Democrats’ point when he told White House reporters that the administration intends to use the shutdown to cut programs the American people want, including ones that give them access to medical care.

Trump said: “We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for [Democrats] and irreversible by them. Like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like. And you all know Russell Vought, he’s become very popular recently because he can trim the budget to a level that you couldn’t do any other way. So they’re taking a risk by having a shutdown because because of the shutdown, we can do things medically, and other ways, including benefits. We can cut large numbers of people out.” Then, as if recognizing that he had just proved the Democrats’ point, he added a non sequitur: “We don’t want to do that, but we don’t want fraud, waste, and abuse, and you know we’re cutting that.”

Trump reiterated his support for Vought’s program today, posting: “I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent. I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.”

This is another unforced error, with Trump tying himself to Project 2025 after assuring voters before the 2024 election that he had nothing to do with it and knew nothing about it. An NBC News poll from late September 2024 showed that voters who knew about Project 2025 hated it. Only 4% of voters said they liked the plan. It was unpopular even among voters identifying as MAGA Republicans; only 9% of them liked it. As the administration has put Project 2025 into place, it’s unlikely people like it more than they did before. Government agencies are not “Democrat Agencies”; they are agencies that provide services and protections for all Americans. Cuts to them have been widely unpopular.

Yesterday, the day after Trump’s 70-minute rambling talk in front of the nation’s top military leaders, Representative Madeleine Dean (D-PA) confronted House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). A camera caught the exchange:

Dean: “The president is unhinged. He is unwell.”

Johnson: “A lot of folks on your side are, too. I don’t control him.”

Dean: “Oh my God, please. That performance in front of the generals?”

Johnson: “I didn’t see it.”

Dean: “That is so dangerous! You know I serve on Foreign Affairs and Appropriations, this is a collision of those two things. Our allies are looking elsewhere. Our enemies are laughing. You have a president who is unwell.”

Johnson: “I just left the Speaker’s apartment.”

Trump has been posting on social media often since Tuesday but has not appeared in public. Vice President J.D. Vance took the White House press briefing today to answer questions about the government shutdown.

mickeyrat · October 4

October 3, 2025 (Friday)

Although President Donald J. Trump has not appeared in public since Tuesday, his social media account has been posting up a storm. Just three weeks ago, administration officials were insisting that Democrats were responsible for hateful political speech. Trump’s account last night posted images of prominent Democrats, including former President Joe Biden, with the heading “THE PARTY OF HATE, EVIL, AND SATAN.” It went on to say: “The Democratic Party is Dead! They have no leadership! [N]o message! [N]o hope! [T]heir only message for America is to hate Trump!”

The Trump account posted another AI video last night, as well. Set to the music of Blue Öyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” the video shows Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance as band members—Trump on cowbell and Vance on drums—and features Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought as the Grim Reaper.

As the video shows the U.S. Capitol, changed song lyrics say: “Here the power’s gone.” Under Vought, they say: “Russ Vought is the reaper. He wields the pen, the funds, and the brain… Dems you babies… gonna tie your hands… won’t be able to fly… cry baby end your plan.” The video shows people as zombies walking past an unemployment office, then shows Democratic leaders behind a chorus of “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah” before ending with a Halloween-nightmare image of AI ghouls trick-or-treating in MAGA garb.

Veterans of the U.S. national security community posting as The Steady State noted that “a president posting a video depicting his opponents as prey for the Grim Reaper and zombies outside the ‘unemployment office’ is the opposite of what we expect in a healthy democracy.”

Russell Vought is not an elected official. He is best known for his contributions to Project 2025, a plan for gutting the U.S. government and installing a theocratic dictatorship. Project 2025 was so unpopular when it came to light last summer—only 4% of voters who knew about it wanted to see it enacted—that Trump insisted he had nothing to do with it. Trolling the American people with the idea that Congress has no power and Russell Vought is running the government to destroy it is an odd choice for a president who is already deeply unpopular.

But turning the government over to unelected individuals who ignore the law is a theme for this presidency. First, billionaire Elon Musk, who ran the “Department of Government Efficiency,” (DOGE) apparently with the help of Vought, impounded congressionally appropriated funds and fired government workers. Then reports surfaced that deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller was in charge of deportations, detentions, and the attempt to get rid of diversity programs, while also exercising influence over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Now Trump appears to be turning the reins of the government over to Russell Vought.

Turning the powers of the government over to unelected bureaucrats has not been going terribly well. On September 25, from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (HSGAC), top-ranking Democrat Gary Peters (D-MI) and his staff issued a report on the actions of DOGE, which slashed through government funding and fired employees on a crusade to combat what they called “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

The hurried actions of those working for DOGE collapsed vital services, leaving government officials backpedaling. On September 24 the Associated Press examined the effect of DOGE on the General Services Administration (GSA), an agency established in the 1940s to manage the thousands of workplaces used by federal employees. DOGE employees targeted the GSA as a prime example of waste, fraud, and abuse. They abruptly canceled almost half of the leases for government space—without telling the tenants—and called for generating savings by selling off federally owned buildings. They also cut staff at headquarters by 79%, portfolio managers by 65%, and facilities managers by 35%.

The Associated Press reports that 131 leases expired without the government actually leaving the office space, costing the agencies steep fees. Now officials are asking hundreds of GSA workers to come back after what the Associated Press says “amounts to a seven-month paid vacation.” Chad Becker, a former real estate official with the GSA, told the Associated Press: “Ultimately, the outcome was the agency was left broken and understaffed. They didn’t have the people they needed to carry out basic functions.”

The report from Senator Peters suggests that DOGE was efficient in at least one way: individuals associated with DOGE created databases that “contain highly sensitive personally identifiable information on every American” and that “can be manipulated with little to no oversight.” The report found even more concerning that administration officials “were unable or unwilling” to say who was “functionally in charge of significant policy changes at these agencies.”

Some agencies couldn’t say what data DOGE had accessed or what the DOGE teams were doing. Some agency officials would not directly acknowledge they had DOGE teams, although Executive Order 14158 required each agency to have at least four DOGE people. And agency officials refused to show investigators offices or the infrastructure of Starlink, the satellite internet service controlled by Elon Musk.

The report concluded that DOGE has violated the law and created unprecedented privacy and cybersecurity risks, while the secrecy surrounding DOGE prevented congressional oversight and public accountability. The report called for shutting down the accessible database DOGE created, revoking DOGE access to private information, reasserting agency control, identifying DOGE employees, and conducting a comprehensive audit of what sensitive data DOGE compiled.

The escalating raids on undocumented immigrants are also running afoul of the law. Tuesday’s raid on an apartment building in Chicago, in which residents, including U.S. citizens, were detained, has galvanized opposition. Today, after reports that children were zip tied, separated from their parents, and detained for several hours, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker directed state agencies to evaluate the treatment of children during the raid and to “determine any formal steps or investigations that the state should initiate to hold federal agents accountable."

Today in Nashville, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw rebuked the Justice Department and its top officials for prosecuting Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an undocumented immigrant, on federal charges in what appears to be a vindictive prosecution. Crenshaw said officials from the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security might have prosecuted Abrego for filing a successful lawsuit challenging his unlawful deportation to El Salvador. Alan Feuer of the New York Times notes that vindictive prosecution motions are very hard to win, and the fact that the court is even considering it is “a hugely embarrassing blow to the Trump administration."

A second federal court today rejected the administration’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, saying it is unconstitutional.

On Monday, Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported that Stephen Miller has directed the administration’s strikes on Venezuelan boats, taking precedence over secretary of state and national security advisor Marco Rubio.

Today, Defense Secretary Hegseth announced he had ordered a strike on another boat off the coast of Venezuela, killing four people Hegseth called “narcoterrorists.” Both Hegseth and Trump posted a video in which a small speedboat was blown to fragments by a strike. Trump declared that the boat was “loaded with enough drugs to kill 25 TO 50 THOUSAND PEOPLE.” The administration declared yesterday that such strikes are justified because it considers the U.S. in an armed conflict with drug cartels. Legal experts reject this assertion.

If Trump’s reliance on unelected bureaucrats to run his administration has led officials astray, another video posted by the Department of Homeland Security today seemed to offer a different window onto what the president is trying to accomplish. The video shows a bar with words in a font that mimics that of early video games, saying: “LIFE AFTER ALL CRIMINAL ALIENS ARE DEPORTED.” Behind the bar runs a series of images of the United States in the late 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. It shows Trump himself as a young man and what appears to be the Trump Tower in New York City in the early 1980s.

The nostalgic hope for reclaiming Trump’s glory days has tucked within it the McDonalds Mac Tonight moon image, an image used by white supremacists.

The world depicted in that video reflects the period before Trump met convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, but that story is not going away. The House of Representatives was supposed to be back in session on Monday, but House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has sent members home until October 14. Representative Chellie Pingree (D-ME) noted today that Johnson appears to be delaying the swearing-in of newly elected Arizona representative Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat.

Grijalva says she will sign the discharge petition that will require the speaker to bring to the House floor a vote on instructing the Department of Justice to release the files from the investigation into Epstein’s actions, which needs only one more signature to force the vote.

Regarding Johnson’s declaration that the House will take another week away from the Capitol rather than coming back to negotiate a way to end the government shutdown and preserve Americans’ access to healthcare, Pingree asked: “Is this about the shutdown, or is this about the Epstein files?”

Halifax2TheMax · October 4

mickeyrat said:

October 3, 2025 (Friday)

Although President Donald J. Trump has not appeared in public since Tuesday, his social media account has been posting up a storm. Just three weeks ago, administration officials were insisting that Democrats were responsible for hateful political speech. Trump’s account last night posted images of prominent Democrats, including former President Joe Biden, with the heading “THE PARTY OF HATE, EVIL, AND SATAN.” It went on to say: “The Democratic Party is Dead! They have no leadership! [N]o message! [N]o hope! [T]heir only message for America is to hate Trump!”

The Trump account posted another AI video last night, as well. Set to the music of Blue Öyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” the video shows Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance as band members—Trump on cowbell and Vance on drums—and features Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought as the Grim Reaper.

As the video shows the U.S. Capitol, changed song lyrics say: “Here the power’s gone.” Under Vought, they say: “Russ Vought is the reaper. He wields the pen, the funds, and the brain… Dems you babies… gonna tie your hands… won’t be able to fly… cry baby end your plan.” The video shows people as zombies walking past an unemployment office, then shows Democratic leaders behind a chorus of “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah” before ending with a Halloween-nightmare image of AI ghouls trick-or-treating in MAGA garb.

Veterans of the U.S. national security community posting as The Steady State noted that “a president posting a video depicting his opponents as prey for the Grim Reaper and zombies outside the ‘unemployment office’ is the opposite of what we expect in a healthy democracy.”

Russell Vought is not an elected official. He is best known for his contributions to Project 2025, a plan for gutting the U.S. government and installing a theocratic dictatorship. Project 2025 was so unpopular when it came to light last summer—only 4% of voters who knew about it wanted to see it enacted—that Trump insisted he had nothing to do with it. Trolling the American people with the idea that Congress has no power and Russell Vought is running the government to destroy it is an odd choice for a president who is already deeply unpopular.

But turning the government over to unelected individuals who ignore the law is a theme for this presidency. First, billionaire Elon Musk, who ran the “Department of Government Efficiency,” (DOGE) apparently with the help of Vought, impounded congressionally appropriated funds and fired government workers. Then reports surfaced that deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller was in charge of deportations, detentions, and the attempt to get rid of diversity programs, while also exercising influence over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Now Trump appears to be turning the reins of the government over to Russell Vought.

Turning the powers of the government over to unelected bureaucrats has not been going terribly well. On September 25, from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (HSGAC), top-ranking Democrat Gary Peters (D-MI) and his staff issued a report on the actions of DOGE, which slashed through government funding and fired employees on a crusade to combat what they called “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

The hurried actions of those working for DOGE collapsed vital services, leaving government officials backpedaling. On September 24 the Associated Press examined the effect of DOGE on the General Services Administration (GSA), an agency established in the 1940s to manage the thousands of workplaces used by federal employees. DOGE employees targeted the GSA as a prime example of waste, fraud, and abuse. They abruptly canceled almost half of the leases for government space—without telling the tenants—and called for generating savings by selling off federally owned buildings. They also cut staff at headquarters by 79%, portfolio managers by 65%, and facilities managers by 35%.

The Associated Press reports that 131 leases expired without the government actually leaving the office space, costing the agencies steep fees. Now officials are asking hundreds of GSA workers to come back after what the Associated Press says “amounts to a seven-month paid vacation.” Chad Becker, a former real estate official with the GSA, told the Associated Press: “Ultimately, the outcome was the agency was left broken and understaffed. They didn’t have the people they needed to carry out basic functions.”

The report from Senator Peters suggests that DOGE was efficient in at least one way: individuals associated with DOGE created databases that “contain highly sensitive personally identifiable information on every American” and that “can be manipulated with little to no oversight.” The report found even more concerning that administration officials “were unable or unwilling” to say who was “functionally in charge of significant policy changes at these agencies.”

Some agencies couldn’t say what data DOGE had accessed or what the DOGE teams were doing. Some agency officials would not directly acknowledge they had DOGE teams, although Executive Order 14158 required each agency to have at least four DOGE people. And agency officials refused to show investigators offices or the infrastructure of Starlink, the satellite internet service controlled by Elon Musk.

The report concluded that DOGE has violated the law and created unprecedented privacy and cybersecurity risks, while the secrecy surrounding DOGE prevented congressional oversight and public accountability. The report called for shutting down the accessible database DOGE created, revoking DOGE access to private information, reasserting agency control, identifying DOGE employees, and conducting a comprehensive audit of what sensitive data DOGE compiled.

The escalating raids on undocumented immigrants are also running afoul of the law. Tuesday’s raid on an apartment building in Chicago, in which residents, including U.S. citizens, were detained, has galvanized opposition. Today, after reports that children were zip tied, separated from their parents, and detained for several hours, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker directed state agencies to evaluate the treatment of children during the raid and to “determine any formal steps or investigations that the state should initiate to hold federal agents accountable."

Today in Nashville, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw rebuked the Justice Department and its top officials for prosecuting Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an undocumented immigrant, on federal charges in what appears to be a vindictive prosecution. Crenshaw said officials from the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security might have prosecuted Abrego for filing a successful lawsuit challenging his unlawful deportation to El Salvador. Alan Feuer of the New York Times notes that vindictive prosecution motions are very hard to win, and the fact that the court is even considering it is “a hugely embarrassing blow to the Trump administration."

A second federal court today rejected the administration’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, saying it is unconstitutional.

On Monday, Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported that Stephen Miller has directed the administration’s strikes on Venezuelan boats, taking precedence over secretary of state and national security advisor Marco Rubio.

Today, Defense Secretary Hegseth announced he had ordered a strike on another boat off the coast of Venezuela, killing four people Hegseth called “narcoterrorists.” Both Hegseth and Trump posted a video in which a small speedboat was blown to fragments by a strike. Trump declared that the boat was “loaded with enough drugs to kill 25 TO 50 THOUSAND PEOPLE.” The administration declared yesterday that such strikes are justified because it considers the U.S. in an armed conflict with drug cartels. Legal experts reject this assertion.

If Trump’s reliance on unelected bureaucrats to run his administration has led officials astray, another video posted by the Department of Homeland Security today seemed to offer a different window onto what the president is trying to accomplish. The video shows a bar with words in a font that mimics that of early video games, saying: “LIFE AFTER ALL CRIMINAL ALIENS ARE DEPORTED.” Behind the bar runs a series of images of the United States in the late 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. It shows Trump himself as a young man and what appears to be the Trump Tower in New York City in the early 1980s.

The nostalgic hope for reclaiming Trump’s glory days has tucked within it the McDonalds Mac Tonight moon image, an image used by white supremacists.

The world depicted in that video reflects the period before Trump met convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, but that story is not going away. The House of Representatives was supposed to be back in session on Monday, but House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has sent members home until October 14. Representative Chellie Pingree (D-ME) noted today that Johnson appears to be delaying the swearing-in of newly elected Arizona representative Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat.

Grijalva says she will sign the discharge petition that will require the speaker to bring to the House floor a vote on instructing the Department of Justice to release the files from the investigation into Epstein’s actions, which needs only one more signature to force the vote.

Regarding Johnson’s declaration that the House will take another week away from the Capitol rather than coming back to negotiate a way to end the government shutdown and preserve Americans’ access to healthcare, Pingree asked: “Is this about the shutdown, or is this about the Epstein files?”

* The following opinion is mine and mine alone and does not represent the views of my family, friends, government and/or my past, present or future employer. US Department of State: 1-888-407-4747.

Example 1,000,987,988,200 of the subject matter of 5 posts in a row on page 74 of the following link. The country is run by toddlers. Thoughts and prayers.

https://community.pearljam.com/discussion/307412/trump-admin-policies/p74

mickeyrat · October 5

October 4, 2025 (Saturday)

Today was unseasonably warm and I spent the day on the water. It was a much needed and most welcome respite, but now I’m too tired to start writing.

I’ll be back at it tomorrow.

Here’s a picture I took today from my kayak. There is nothing like the low light of an October afternoon in Maine.

Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

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