Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

Halifax2TheMax

  * 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.

And the ‘Murikkkan people whistle past the graveyard. Too late.

mickeyrat

October 11, 2025 (Saturday)

Spent the day with family and friends as we said goodbye to yet another summer. 

I’ll be back at it tomorrow.

[Photo "Gracie (more water)" by Peter Ralston]

photo failed to upload

mickeyrat

October 12, 2025 (Sunday)

On October 9, President Donald J. Trump’s office issued an official proclamation declaring Monday, October 13, “Columbus Day.” The proclamation says that the day is one on which “our Nation honors the legendary Christopher Columbus—the original American hero, a giant of Western civilization, and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the earth.  This Columbus Day, we honor his life with reverence and gratitude, and we pledge to reclaim his extraordinary legacy of faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue from the left-wing arsonists who have sought to destroy his name and dishonor his memory.”

The proclamation goes on to present a white Christian nationalist version of American history, with much more emphasis on Christianity than Trump’s previous, similar proclamations. It claims that Columbus was guided by a “noble mission: to discover a new trade route to Asia, bring glory to Spain, and spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ to distant lands.” “Upon his arrival,” it says, “he planted a majestic cross in a mighty act of devotion, dedicating the land to God and setting in motion America’s proud birthright of faith.”

“Guided by steadfast prayer and unwavering fortitude and resolve,” it goes on, “Columbus’s journey carried thousands of years of wisdom, philosophy, reason, and culture across the Atlantic into the Americas—paving the way for the ultimate triumph of Western civilization less than three centuries later on July 4, 1776.”

Then the proclamation turns to MAGA’s complaints about modern revisions of this triumphalist history, saying: “Outrageously, in recent years, Christopher Columbus has been a prime target of a vicious and merciless campaign to erase our history, slander our heroes, and attack our heritage.” Our nation, the proclamation says, “will now abide by a simple truth: Christopher Columbus was a true American hero, and every citizen is eternally indebted to his relentless determination.”

This proclamation completely misunderstands the fifteenth-century world of expanding European maritime routes that entirely reworked world trade—including trade in human beings—and the role of Italian mariner Christopher Columbus, who worked for Spain’s monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, in that expansion. 

It also misses what historians call the “Columbian Exchange”: the transfer of plants and animals between the Americas and the “Old World”—Europe, Asia, and Africa—after Columbus’s first landfall in the Bahamas in 1492. That exchange went both ways and transformed the globe, but its effect on the Americas was devastating. When Columbus and his sailors “discovered” the “New World,” they brought with them both ideologies and germs that would decimate the peoples living there. 

Estimates of the number of Native people living in North America and South America in 1490 vary widely, but there were at least as many as 50 million, and possibly as many as 100 million. In the next 200 years, displacement, enslavement, war, and especially disease would kill about 90% of those native peoples. Most historians see the destruction of America’s Indigenous peoples as the brutal triumph of European white men over those they perceived to be inferior.

Historians are not denigrating historical actors or the nation when they uncover sordid parts of our past. Historians study how and why societies change. As we dig into the past, we see patterns that never entirely foreshadow the present but that give us ideas about how people in the past have dealt with circumstances that look similar to circumstances today. If we are going to get an accurate picture of how a society works, historians must examine it honestly, seeing the bad as well as the good. With luck, seeing those patterns will help us make better decisions about our own lives, our communities, and our nation in the present. 

History is different from commemoration. History is about what happened in the past, while commemoration is about the present. We put up statues and celebrate holidays to honor figures from the past who embody some quality we admire. 

The Columbus Day holiday began in the 1920s, when a resurgent Ku Klux Klan tried to create a lily-white country by attacking not just Black Americans, but also immigrants, Jews, and Catholics. This was an easy sell in the Twenties, since government leaders during the First World War had emphasized Americanism and demanded that immigrants reject all ties to their countries of origin. From there it was a short step for native-born white American Protestants to see anyone different from themselves as a threat to the nation.

The Klan attacked the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization. Klan members spread the rumor that one became a leader of the Knights of Columbus by vowing to exterminate Protestants and to torture and kill anyone upon orders of Catholic leaders. 

To combat the growing animosity toward Catholics and racial minorities, the Knights of Columbus began to highlight the roles those groups had played in American history. In the early 1920s they published three books in a “Knights of Columbus Racial Contributions” series, including The Gift of Black Folk by pioneering Black sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois. 

They also turned to an old American holiday. Since the late 1860s, Italian Americans in New York City had celebrated a “Columbus Day” to honor the heritage they shared with the famous Italian explorer. In the 1930s the Knights of Columbus joined with media mogul Generoso Pope, an important Italian American politician in New York City, to rally behind the idea of a national Columbus Day. In 1934, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aware of the need to solidify his new Democratic coalition by welcoming all Democratic voters, proclaimed Columbus Day, October 12, a federal holiday. In 1971 the day became unfixed from a date; it is now the second Monday in October. 

The Knights intended for Columbus Day to honor the important contributions of immigrants—and Catholics—to American society. But in the 1960s a growing focus on the lives and experiences of Indigenous Americans forced a reckoning with the choice of Columbus as a standard bearer. Currently, seventeen states and the District of Columbia use the official holiday to celebrate Indigenous history. Some Oklahoma tribal members simply use the day to honor their tribe.

As society changes, the values we want to commemorate shift. In the 1920s, Columbus mattered to Americans who opposed the Ku Klux Klan because celebrating an Italian defended a multicultural society. Now, though, he represents the devastation of America’s Indigenous people at the hands of European colonists who brought to North America and South America germs and a fever for gold and God. It is not “left-wing arson” to want to commemorate a different set of values than the country held in the 1920s.

What is arson, though, is the attempt to skew history to serve a modern-day political narrative. Rejecting an honest account of the past makes it impossible to see accurate patterns. The lessons we learn about how society changes will be false, and the decisions we make based on those false patterns will not be grounded in reality.

And a society grounded in fiction, rather than reality, cannot function.

mickeyrat

October 13, 2025 (Monday)

Last Tuesday, President Donald J. Trump showed to Canadian officials a plan for a triumphal arch that would sit on the banks of the Potomac River opposite the Lincoln Memorial in a traffic rotary at the Virginia end of the Arlington Memorial Bridge below Arlington National Cemetery. The idea, apparently, is to build the arch to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the United States in July 2026.

On Thursday, the White House press pool reported, the plan was laid out on President Donald J. Trump’s desk in the Oval Office. The massive stone arch appears to be the same height as or taller than the Lincoln Memorial. Early in the morning on Saturday, October 11, Trump posted on social media an artist’s rendering of what such an arch might look like, complete with what appears to be a gold winged victory statue at the top of the arch. 

Triumphal arches are free-standing structures consisting of one or more arches crowned with a flat top for engravings or statues. They hark back to ancient Rome, where leaders built them to commemorate military victories or significant public events. Those arches inspired others, like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France. 

Observers immediately noted that the photographed plan showed the Lincoln Memorial facing the wrong way, and compared the Trump Arch both to the Arc de Triomphe and to another arch modeled on it: the German Arch of Triumph proposed by Adolph Hitler to commemorate Germany’s victory in World War II.  

That triumphal arch was never built. 

Architect Eric Jenkins told Daniel Jonas Roche of The Architect’s Newspaper that the proposed arch would disrupt the symbolic connection between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. The two are connected not only by the Arlington Memorial Bridge, but also by the Civil War. During that war, the nation began to bury its hallowed dead on the grounds of the former home of General Robert E. Lee, who led the troops of the Confederacy. Lee’s Arlington House sits directly behind the memorial to Lincoln, who led the United States to stop the Confederates from dismantling the nation. 

The proposed construction of a triumphal arch contrasts with the expected sale and probable demolition of the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building on Independence Avenue in Washington, D.C. Completed in 1940, the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building was built to house the Social Security Board, the precursor to the Social Security Administration.

In August 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. That law established a federal system of old-age benefits; unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services. It was a sweeping reworking of the relationship between the government and its citizens, using the power of taxation to pool funds to provide a basic social safety net.

The vision of government behind the Social Security Act was very different from that of the Republicans who had run it in the 1920s. While men like President Herbert Hoover had embraced the idea of a “rugged individualism” in which men provided for their families on their own, those behind the Social Security Act recognized that the vision of a hardworking man supporting his wife and children was more myth than reality. They replaced that vision with one in which the government recognized that all Americans were equally valuable. 

Their reworking of American government came from the conditions of the United States after the rise of modern industry. Americans had always depended on community, but the harsh conditions of industrialization in the late nineteenth century had made it clear that the government must protect the people in that community. City governments like New York City’s Tammany Hall began to provide a basic system of social welfare, making sure that they had jobs, food, and shelter and that women and children had a support network if a husband or father died. 

Then, in the 1930s, the overwhelming unemployment, hunger, and suffering during the Great Depression showed that state governments alone could not adjust the conditions of the modern world to create a safe, supportive community for ordinary people. FDR’s secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, came to believe that, as she said: “The people are what matter to government, and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.”

And so Perkins pushed for the Social Security Act, the law that became the centerpiece and the symbol of the new relationship between the government and American citizens. 

Once FDR signed the law, the next step was to create a building for its administrators. To decorate a building that would be the centerpiece of the government’s new philosophy, administrators announced a competition for the creation of murals to decorate the main corridor of the new building. 

Among those who threw their hats into the ring was Lithuanian-born American artist Ben Shahn, one of the most sought-after artists in the United States, a social realist painter who designed murals to illustrate “the meaning of Social Security.” Shahn wrote: “I feel that the whole Social Security idea is one of the real fruits of democracy.” He set out to show that idea in his art.

Shahn depicted the evils of a world of economic insecurity, showing “endless waiting, men standing and waiting, men sitting and waiting, the man and boy going wearily into the long empty perspective of a railroad track.” He showed the “little girl of the mills” and “breaker boys working in a mine. The crippled boy issuing from the mine symbolizes the perils of child labor…a homeless boy is seen sleeping in the street; another child leans from a tenement window.” He showed “the insecurity of dependents—the aged and infirm woman, the helpless mother with her small child.” 

Then he illustrated the alleviation of that insecurity through government action. He showed “the building of homes…[and] tremendous public works, furnishing employment and benefitting all of society… youths of a slum area engaged in healthy sport in handball courts…the Harvest—threshing and fruit-gathering, obvious symbols of security, suggesting also security as it applies to the farm family.” 

Shahn finished the pieces in 1942, and said: “I think the Social Security mural is the best work I’ve ever done…. I felt I had everything under control—or almost under control—the big masses of color to make it decorative and the little details to make it interesting.” 

Shahn’s work stood alongside that of Philip Guston, who depicted the well-being of the family under the Social Security Act; Seymour Fogel, whose portrait of security included children learning and a table piled with food; and sisters Ethel and Jenne Magafan, who were warned their mural in the boardroom should not distract the members, so they painted mountains in snow. Gray Brechin, the founder of the Living New Deal, a nonprofit that tracks the fate of New Deal art, told Timothy Noah of The New Republic that the Cohen building is “a kind of Sistine Chapel of the New Deal.” 

But by the time Shahn and the other artists had completed their work, Noah explains, plans for the building had changed. The Social Security Administration never occupied it. First, the War Production Board, which managed the conversion of U.S. companies to wartime production, commandeered the building, and then in 1954 the Voice of America (VOA) moved in. 

Like most federal buildings, the Cohen building is owned by the General Services Administration (GSA), to which the agencies in the building pay rent. With a total budget of $300 million, the VOA’s rent could not keep the building up, and in 2020, under the first Trump administration, the GSA told the VOA that it would have to vacate the building by 2028. During the Biden administration, Noah reports, the GSA proposed renovating the building to make it “a flagship in the federal government portfolio,” but before the report was widely circulated, Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) inserted into a water resources bill a provision to sell the building. 

Now, although the market for commercial buildings is depressed, the Trump administration is proceeding with the sale. 

Since taking office in January 2025, officials in the second Trump administration have made war on the vision of government embodied by the Social Security Act, promoting in its place a return to the rugged individualism that is even less true today than it was a century ago. 

Now the administration is getting rid of the building built to house the Social Security Administration, along with the murals that champion the government’s role in protecting the equality and security of ordinary people, while Trump contemplates building a triumphal arch, carving MAGA ideology into the nation’s capital in stone.

mickeyrat

October 14, 2025 (Tuesday)

The government shutdown, which started on October 1, is entering its third week. As Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) explained this morning, the Senate is in session, and it keeps voting on two bills to reopen the government. Majority leader John Thune (R-SD) keeps having the Senate vote on the measure passed by Republicans in the House. That measure funds the government until November 21. It has failed repeatedly to get past the 60 votes necessary to avoid a filibuster. The Democrats have offered an alternative measure, which extends the healthcare premium tax credit—without which health insurance costs on the Affordable Care Act market will skyrocket—and restores nearly $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid. That measure, too, has repeatedly failed to pass.

Murphy notes that normally the two sides would negotiate. But, he says, President Donald J. Trump is telling Republican senators to “BOYCOTT NEGOTIATING,” and they are "following orders.” 

The House of Representatives is even more dysfunctional. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) pushed the continuing resolution through the chamber on September 19, the Friday before leaving town for a week. Then Johnson canceled the House sessions on Monday and Tuesday, September 29 and 30, both to jam the Senate into having to accept the House measure and to avoid swearing in Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), who was elected on September 23. Grijalva will provide the 218th signature on a discharge petition to force a vote on the release of the files collected during the federal investigation into the crimes of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Trump and his officials promised to release those files, but have tried to avoid doing so since news broke that Trump, who was a close friend of Epstein, is named in them.  

Emily Brooks of The Hill notes that jamming the Senate as Johnson tried to do was a tactic employed by the far-right Freedom Caucus, and they are cheering him on. But Democratic senators refused to vote in favor of the House measure, standing firm on extending the premium tax credits before their loss decimates the healthcare markets. Now, although Democrats are in Washington, D.C., ready to negotiate, Johnson says he will not call House members back to work until the Senate passes the House measure. 

Brooks notes that not all Republicans are keen on the optics of staying out of session during a shutdown. Mike Lillis of The Hill reported on Sunday that the cancellation of all House votes since late September has some Republicans warning that the tactic will backfire. In addition to the question of healthcare premiums, there is the issue of military pay stalled by the shutdown, and the fact that, by law, Congress was supposed to deliver its 2026 budget by September 30. 

Over the weekend, the administration tried to ratchet up the pressure on Democratic senators to cave when it announced it would fire about 4,200 federal employees. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo notes that the threat seemed at least in part to be designed to follow through on a threat Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought had made to pressure Democrats before the shutdown. When those layoffs didn’t happen, the administration then suggested it would not pay furloughed workers after the shutdown ends. After backlash, they walked that threat back. The new announcement seemed in part an attempt to prove they would do something. 

On Friday night, hundreds of workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) received notices they were being fired, only to receive a follow-up letter less than a day later saying they were not fired after all. As Tom Bartlett of The Atlantic put it: “No explanation, no apology.” 

Marshall points out that other cuts seem to have come from agencies Trump especially dislikes, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which Trump has hated since its then-director Chris Krebs said the 2020 presidential election was not hacked. The administration also gutted the office responsible for special education in the U.S. Department of Education serving about 7.4 million students with special needs. 

Today, Trump tried to pressure Democrats by telling reporters the slashing of government programs will hurt only Democrats. “We’re not closing up Republican programs because we think they work,” he said. “So the Democrats are getting killed, but they're not telling the people about that…. So we are closing up Democrat programs that we think that we disagree with, and they’re never going to open again.”

The administration continues to try to demonstrate its power. Today it announced its fifth known attack on a boat “just off the coast of Venezuela” in international waters. Once again, Trump asserted that the boat was trafficking narcotics. The U.S. has now killed 27 people in this and similar attacks, making the argument that drug smugglers are enemy combatants. This is problematic not just because the administration has never produced any evidence that those killed have been smuggling drugs but also because lawyers say these killings are illegal. Charlie Savage of the New York Times points out that the administration has not produced any legal analysis that defends its position.  

Conservative lawyer George Conway posted: “That’s twenty-seven flat-out murders.  That’s twenty-seven lives taken without even a semblance of a legal justification under domestic or international law.”

The administration’s attempt to portray itself as powerful is running not just into the law but  into popular perception. The administration insists it needs extraordinary powers to fight back against South American gang members illegally in the U.S. The attack on the boats serves the idea that drug cartels are invading the U.S. to kill Americans, a theme the administration hits when it insists that those it is rounding up in the U.S. are “the worst of the worst.” 

But as Jacob Soboroff and Kay Guerrero of MSNBC reported today, the Department of Homeland Security announced on October 3 that more than 1,000 undocumented immigrants had been arrested in and around Chicago since September, when their operation began. It said those arrested included “the worst of the worst pedophiles, child abusers, kidnappers, gang members, and armed robbers.” But it has produced little evidence for that claim, and federal data shows that more than 70% of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees as of last month had no criminal convictions.

So the administration is upping its claims. Today the Fox News Channel reported on a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) allegation that “narcoterrorists in Mexico are reportedly working in coordination with domestic extremist groups to place bounties worth thousands of dollars on the heads of federal immigration officers in Chicago.” DHS called it “an organized campaign of terror against agents just trying to do their jobs.” 

The administration is attempting to paint immigrants as violent criminals and those opposed to their raids as terrorists. They are producing slick videos to make that point. But protesters have deprived them of photo opportunities by dressing in animal costumes. ICE agents staring down a giant frog and Mr. Potato Head don’t look very dominant.

Cracks are showing elsewhere in the administration’s picture of strength. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth demanded that media outlets agree they would not publish any material about the Defense Department—even if it were unclassified—unless it was explicitly authorized by department officials. He set a deadline of 5:00 tonight for them to sign an agreement or hand over their press badges.

Every major press outlet, including the Fox News Channel, refused, saying such a demand is an assault on the freedom of the press guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  

Airports around the country are refusing to air the video Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem recorded to be shown at Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checkpoints, which blames Democrats for the shutdown. Some have noted it violates the Hatch Act that prohibits the use of government assets for partisan purposes.

As the administration faces resistance, Republican lawmakers seem worried about the upcoming No Kings rally scheduled for Saturday, October 18. Joe Perticone of The Bulwark notes that Republican lawmakers are scrambling to get in front of a potentially large protest event with a prebuttal. House majority whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) has alleged that those protesting are “the terrorist wing” of the Democratic Party, “playing to the most radical, small, and violent base in the country…. They just do not love this country.” 

While Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) retorted that the No Kings event is about loving America, not hating it. “It’s a rally of millions of people all over this country who believe in our Constitution, who believe in American freedom and are not going to let you and Donald Trump turn this country into an authoritarian society.”

Today, Jason Beeferman and Emily Ngo of Politico reported on 2,900 pages of messages exchanged on the messaging app Telegram between leaders of the hardline pro-Trump factions of Young Republican groups in New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont. In the edgy messages, the leaders used racist themes and epithets freely and cheered slavery, rape, gas chambers, and torturing their opponents. They expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler.

One of them wrote to the others, “If we ever had a leak of this chat we would be cooked [for real for real].”

Indifference

https://www.piratewires.com/p/heather-cox-richardson-revisionist-history

mickeyrat

Indifference said:

https://www.piratewires.com/p/heather-cox-richardson-revisionist-history

thats certainly one take.

are you a regular reader of this website?

Halifax2TheMax

mickeyrat said:

Indifference said:

https://www.piratewires.com/p/heather-cox-richardson-revisionist-history

thats certainly one take.

are you a regular reader of this website?

  * 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.

Tech bros, bro.

THE MOST OPINIONATED MAN IN AMERICA

Mike Solana, a Peter Thiel protégé, has made his Pirate Wiresnewsletter a must-read among the anti-woke investor class—and a window into what the most powerful people in tech really think.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/mike-solana-pirate-wires/680355/

mickeyrat

October 15, 2025 (Wednesday)

Today the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of Louisiana v. Callais and Robinson v. Callais, which together challenge a federal court decision outlawing a racial gerrymander in the state of Louisiana. At stake is Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which declares: “No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”

About a third of the people who live in Louisiana are Black, and when Republicans in the Louisiana state legislature redrew the state’s congressional districts after the 2020 census, they gerrymandered through “packing” and “cracking.” They packed as many Black voters as they could into one district and then cracked the rest across five others. This meant that out of the state’s six districts, only one is majority Black. Because voting patterns map onto racial patterns in Louisiana, this means that Black voters cannot elect representatives of their choice. As Madiba K. Dennie of Talking Points Memo notes, Louisiana has never had a Black senator, and no congressional district other than the majority-Black district has elected a Black representative. The state hasn’t had a Black governor since Reconstruction. 

So Black voters sued over the new map, and federal courts agreed that the map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. They told the legislature to draw new maps that created a second majority-Black district. To stop that change, a group of people who described themselves as “non–African American voters” sued, saying that drawing a map to create a majority-Black district is itself an illegal racial gerrymander. 

In the past, the Supreme Court has upheld the principle that if a state has used race to determine districts, it must show that it has a compelling reason to do so. In 2017 it said: “This Court has long assumed that one compelling interest is compliance with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.” In the past, the court saw that interest as served by guaranteeing the creation of majority-minority districts to guarantee that Black, Brown, and Asian-American voters can elect the lawmakers they prefer. 

In today’s hearings, the right-wing majority indicated it opposes the use of race in redistricting, suggesting the previous understanding of this issue is unconstitutional. Overturning the decision of the lower court would finish the gutting of the Voting Rights Act the Roberts Court began with the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision. 

This shift shows the willingness of the right-wing majority on the court to gather the power of the U.S. government into its own hands. 

The actual name of what we know as the Voting Rights Act is “AN ACT To enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and for other purposes.” Congress passed it after more than 80 years in which state legislatures refused to acknowledge the Fifteenth Amendment, which reads: 

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

When it passed the Voting Rights Act, Congress did what the Fifteenth Amendment required it to do to protect the right of racial minorities to vote. As political scientist Jonathan Ladd notes, now, though, the Supreme Court is on the cusp of saying that it, rather than Congress, can determine how to enforce the right of citizens to vote. 

That the Supreme Court appears to be taking aim at a constitutional amendment added to the Constitution during Reconstruction is a little too on-the-nose. When the federal government stopped enforcing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, former Confederates took control of their states and instituted a one-party region that lasted until the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Today, Nate Cohn of the New York Times explained that striking down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act could eliminate more than a dozen districts in the South currently held by Democrats. Republicans could win virtually uncontested control of the South and so could control the House of Representatives even if they lost the popular vote by a significant margin. Cohn writes that Democrats would need to win the popular vote by between five to six points in order to win the House if the court strikes down Section 2. 

But, since gerrymandering depresses turnout of the losing party’s voters, Republicans would appear to hold the country even more firmly, making the United States as a whole reflect the American South from about 1874 to 1965.

Such a one-party state would give the leader of that party whatever power party officials permitted. We are already seeing what that could look like.

Julian E. Barnes and Tyler Pager of the New York Times reported today that the Trump administration is stepping up its effort to remove Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro from power. This effort has been spearheaded by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director John Ratcliffe. Last month the administration told Congress that it considered Venezuelan drug cartels “nonstate armed groups” whose actions “constitute an armed attack on the United States,” meaning that the U.S. is at war. This declaration covered for the strikes on Venezuelan boats, which the administration claims were importing drugs to the U.S., although it has offered no proof of that assertion. 

Sources in the administration told the journalists that a presidential finding authorizes the CIA to conduct operations in the Caribbean and to take covert action against Maduro and his government. A presidential finding, also called a memorandum of notification, is a classified directive issued by the president to authorize the CIA to conduct a covert operation the president claims is necessary for national security. Findings are supposed to be transmitted to key congressional committees to keep Congress informed of the actions of the U.S. government, but lawmakers cannot make the information in them public.  

That “multiple U.S. officials” were willing to discuss the presidential finding with the New York Times journalists suggests the administration wanted to leak this information—perhaps, as legal analyst Asha Rangappa suggests, to make it sound like there is legal cover for what they are already doing or, as legal analyst Allison Gill suggests, to do an end run around Congress.

Trump promised during the 2024 campaign that he was “not going to start a war,” and promised “to stop the wars.” He has campaigned heavily to win a Nobel Peace Prize, nonsensically claiming to have stopped at least seven or eight wars. But the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have gotten hotter during his administration, and Barnes and Pager note that the U.S. military is also building up its resources in the region near Venezuela. The Pentagon has deployed 10,000 troops to the area, stationing most of them on bases in Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Navy has sent eight warships and a submarine. 

This buildup comes as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has demanded that media outlets report only information authorized by department officials or lose their press credentials. All but a single far-right opinion network refused, leaving the department’s actions unscrutinized by the excellent journalists who had been covering the Pentagon. The Pentagon Press Association today said its members were “still committed to reporting on the U.S. military. But make no mistake,” it said, “today, Oct. 15, 2025 is a dark day for press freedom that raises concerns about a weakening U.S. commitment to transparency in governance, to public accountability at the Pentagon and to free speech for all.”

Natasha Bertrand and Zachary Cohen of CNN reported today that at least one of the U.S. strikes in the Caribbean—the one on September 19—targeted a boat that had left Colombia and was manned by Colombian nationals. The journalists note that “[t]he deliberate targeting of Colombians…suggests that the U.S. military’s campaign against suspected narcotics trafficking groups in the Caribbean is wider than previously believed.”

Last week, the deputy director of the CIA, Michael Ellis, made himself the CIA’s general counsel. 

Yesterday Trump compared the strikes on “drug boats” with public executions Hamas supporters have carried out in Gaza in the wake of the ceasefire deal there. “They killed a number of gang members,” Trump said. “And that didn’t bother me much, to be honest with you. That’s ok, it’s a couple of very bad gangs. You know it’s no different than other countries—like Venezuela sent their gangs into us and we took care of those gangs.”

Today Trump announced that he has the power to pay furloughed troops by taking any unused funds Congress appropriated for fiscal year 2026 and using that money to pay the troops. 

As budget and tax specialist Bobby Kogan notes, this is wildly illegal: only Congress can appropriate money and determine how it is spent, a constitutional requirement reinforced by the Antideficiency Act clarifying that it is illegal for the government to spend money that was not appropriated for that purpose. The military is funded on an annual basis, so when funding ran out on September 30, so did money to pay the troops. 

Kogan explains that Trump is turning to the account for research, development, testing, and evaluation (RDTE), which was funded for two years and still has money. But, as Kogan points out, that shift creates another problem: as soon as the money is taken to pay the troops, it becomes unusable because that money ceased to be available on September 30. 

Kogan notes Trump’s order should also be unnecessary: Congress would pass a measure to pay the troops easily if only House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) would call the House into session. Democrats have been begging Johnson to bring such a measure to the floor. 

Trump says that because he is commander in chief, he has the right to this power.

mickeyrat

Yeah this part in her Daily Posts at least on on Facebook  were not mentioned in the above article

Notes:

https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/voting-rights-act

https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/15th-amendment

https://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/03/31/libya.presidential.finding/index.html#:~:text=STORY HIGHLIGHTS,on the Central Intelligence Agency.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/us/politics/trump-drug-cartels-war.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/us/politics/venezuela-trump-qatar.html

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/13/defense-department-media-news-rules

https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/15/politics/military-strike-drug-boat-colombia

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-public-executions-hamas-gang-members-b2845846.html#comments-area

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-promised-antiwar-presidency-hes-delivered-opposite-opinion-2120951

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/15-1262_db8e.pdf

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/15/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-argument-00609187

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/15/upshot/supreme-court-voting-rights-gerrymander.html

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/10/national-security-presidential-memorandum-nspm-8/

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/louisiana-v-callais-the-republicans-justices-are-getting-ready-to-finish-off-the-voting-rights-act

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/us/politics/michael-ellis-cia-trump.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/15/us/politics/trump-covert-cia-action-venezuela.html

Bluesky:

bbkogan.bsky.social/post/3m3awg2fx2k2b

brianstelter.bsky.social/post/3m3awko3xi225

asharangappa.bsky.social/post/3m3bba76w422u

thetnholler.bsky.social/post/3m3baejal622g

jonmladd.bsky.social/post/3m3am5z7cgk2w

asharangappa.bsky.social/post/3m3badafc5s2u

muellershewrote.com/post/3m2zhp6hrfk22

mickeyrat

October 16, 2025 (Thursday)

Yesterday the Trump administration announced it would pay furloughed troops by using funds Congress appropriated for research, development, testing, and evaluation (RDTE) for fiscal year 2026. Today White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump had “found a creative solution to keep the troops paid. And rather than congratulate the president for doing that, this unprecedented action to get our troops paid, the Democrats want to sue him for it. They’re saying that it’s illegal.”

Democrats are saying it’s illegal because it is illegal. The Antideficiency Act, a law that has evolved over time since 1870, prohibits the government from spending money that Congress has not appropriated for that purpose, or agreeing to contracts that spend money Congress has not appropriated for that purpose. 

This summer, Democratic senators charged Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem with triggering the Antideficiency Act by overspending her department’s budget, but Trump’s claim that he can move government money around as he wishes is an even greater threat to the country than Noem’s overspending. 

There is more at stake here than a broken law. 

Trump’s assumption of power over the government’s purse is a profound attack on the principles on which the Founders justified independence from King George III in 1776. The Founders stood firm on the principle articulated all the way back to the Magna Carta in 1215 that the government could not spend money without consulting those putting up that money by paying taxes.

That principle was at the heart of the American Revolution. The 1773 Tea Act that sparked Sons of Liberty in Boston, Massachusetts, to throw chests of tea into Boston Harbor did not raise the price of tea in the colonies; the law lowered those prices. To pay for the cost of what colonists knew as the French and Indian War, Parliament in 1767 had taxed glass, lead, oil, paint, paper, and tea, but boycotts and protests had forced Parliament to repeal all the taxes except the one on tea. It kept that tax to maintain the principle that it could tax the colonies despite the fact they were unrepresented in that body.

Then, in 1773, Parliament gave a monopoly on colonial tea sales to the foundering British East India Tea Company. That monopoly would have the effect of lowering the price of tea. Lower prices should persuade colonists to buy the tea despite the tax, thus cementing the principle that Parliament could tax the colonies without their consent. But colonists protested the maneuver. In December 1773, the Sons of Liberty held what became known as the Boston Tea Party, ruining newly arrived chests of tea by throwing them into the harbor, thus paving the route to the American Revolution. 

When leaders from the former colonies wrote the U.S. Constitution in 1787, they made sure the people retained control over the nation’s finances in order to guarantee that a demagogue could not use tax money to concentrate power in his own hands. They gave the power to write the laws to the legislative branch—the House of Representatives and the Senate—alone, giving the president power only to agree to or veto those measures. Once the laws were enacted, the president’s role was to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”  

To make sure that the power of the purse remained in the hands of the people, the Framers wrote into the Constitution that “[a]ll Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.” 

Trump’s declaration that he will ignore the laws Congress passed and take it upon himself to spend money as he wishes undermines not just the Antideficiency Act but also the fundamental principle that the American people must have control over their own finances. That Leavitt suggests giving up that principle to pay the troops, which lawmakers agree is imperative but cannot write into law because Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) will not recall the House of Representatives, echoes the Tea Act that would have thrown away the principle of having a say in government for cheaper tea.

Since Trump took office, his administration has undermined the principle that Congress controls funding. It had withheld funds Congress appropriated, a practice that violates the 1974 Impoundment Act and the Constitution. The cost of such impoundment became evident on Sunday, when catastrophic flooding hit the village of Kipnuk, Alaska, a disaster Andrew Freedman of CNN notes was exacerbated by the lack of weather data after cuts left a critical shortage in weather balloon coverage in the area. 

Earlier this year the administration cancelled a $20 million Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grant awarded to the community to prevent flooding. Maxine Joselow and Lisa Friedman of the New York Times noted that when EPA administrator Lee Zeldin cut grants this year, he boasted that he was eliminating “wasteful [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and Environmental Justice grants.” 

Now that the government is shut down, Trump has told reporters that his administration is using the shutdown to take funds Congress appropriated away from Democratic districts. Tony Romm and Lazaro Gamio of the New York Times estimate that the administration has cancelled more than $27.24 billion in funds for Democratic districts and states while cutting $738.7 million from Republican districts and states. Speaker Johnson told reporters he thought such withholding was both lawful and constitutional but did not explain his reasoning. 

Today Annie Grayer and Adam Cancryn of CNN reported that not just Democratic representatives but also Republicans are out of the loop of presidential funding cuts, finding out about cuts to their districts through press releases. Even Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said “we are really not consulted.” 

Speaker Johnson told CNN that he hasn’t received details about the administration’s offer of $20 billion in public money and another $20 billion in private-sector financing to Argentina to prop up the government of Trump’s right-wing ally Javier Milei before upcoming elections there. 

Trump is also taking control of the previously nonpartisan Department of Justice (DOJ). Yesterday, in the Oval Office, Trump stood in front of three top officials from the DOJ and called for investigations into former deputy attorney general in the Biden administration Lisa Monaco; former FBI official Andrew Weissman, who led the team investigating the ties  between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian operatives; former special counsel Jack Smith, who investigated and indicted Trump for the events of January 6 and for retaining classified documents; and Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), who led the House impeachment team in Trump’s first impeachment trial.  

Glenn Thrush of the New York Times noted the DOJ officials “smiled, nodded and shuffled in place as he spoke.”

Today a federal grand jury in Maryland indicted John Bolton, who served as national security advisor in Trump’s first term, alleging that he shared classified information in the form of a diary with two of his relatives. That material later informed his book The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, which covered his time in the first Trump administration and so infuriated Trump that he tried to stop its publication. 

The grand jury charged Bolton with eight counts of communicating secret information with those not entitled to receive it, and ten counts of having unauthorized possession of documents containing secret information. These charges are similar to those Jack Smith brought against Trump himself, although Trump’s election to a second term stopped that prosecution.

The indictment references Bolton’s criticism of the Trump administration's handling of secret information, in particular Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of the Signal messaging app to plan a military strike on the Houthis in Yemen, especially after a journalist had been added to the call, and Hegseth’s additional Signal chat about the strike with family and friends. 

A court will determine the merits of the case against Bolton, but there is no doubt it is intended to send a signal to others in government that Trump will persecute those whom he perceives as disloyal. 

Today, Steady State, a group made up of more than 340 former U.S. intelligence officers from the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the State Department, and other intelligence agencies, released a report assessing the state of American democracy. Applying the tools of their craft to the U.S., they assess that the nation is “on a trajectory toward competitive authoritarianism: a system in which elections, courts, and other democratic institutions persist in form but are systematically manipulated to entrench executive control.”  

The report, titled Accelerating Authoritarian Dynamics: Assessment of Democratic Decline, finds that American democracy is weakening as the Executive Branch is consolidating power and “actively weaponizing state institutions to punish perceived opponents and shield allies,” and that Congress is refusing to check the president, “creating openings for authoritarian exploitation.” 

“We judge that the primary driver of the U.S.’s increasing authoritarianism is the increased frequency of Executive Branch overreach,” the report says, noting that “President Donald J. Trump has leveraged emergency powers, executive orders, federalized military forces, and bureaucratic politicization to consolidate control and weaken checks and balances.”

But the Trump administration is increasingly unpopular. Trump loyalists are working overtime to portray those who oppose the administration as anti-American criminals and terrorists. Today White House press secretary Leavitt told the Fox News Channel that “[t]he Democrat Party's main constituency are [sic] made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals,” and administration loyalists have spent the week claiming that the No Kings rally scheduled for Saturday, October 18, is a “hate America rally.” 

Joe Perticone of The Bulwark noted that Indivisible, the organization sponsoring the No Kings protests, “has an extensive track record that shows a longstanding emphasis on safety and nonviolence.” Perticone spoke to Ezra Levin, co–executive director of Indivisible, who said: “Go to a No Kings rally. What do you see? You see moms and grandmas and kids and dogs and funny signs and dancing and happy displays of opposition to the regime that are foundationally nonviolent. And on the other end, you’ve got a regime that’s led by a guy who cheered the January 6th insurrection.” 

Levin noted that authoritarian regimes fear mass organizing and peaceful protest because they reveal a regime’s unpopularity and show that it is losing its grip on power. 

Much as tossing chests of tea into Boston Harbor did about 250 years ago.

mickeyrat

October 17, 2025 (Friday)

On the morning of October 18, 1775, a small fleet of Royal Navy vessels opened fire on the seaport town that is now known as Portland, Maine. Under the direction of Captain Henry Mowat, the ships fired incendiary shot into the trading port’s wooden buildings, which caught fire. A landing party followed to complete the destruction of 400 buildings in the town. By the time the sun went down, almost all of the town was smouldering ruins. 

The burning of the town then known as Falmouth, Massachusetts—not the same town as today’s Falmouth, Maine, or Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod—was retaliation for raids local mariners had made against British ships along the coast of New England. Since 1765, with the arrival of news of the Stamp Act to raise revenue to pay for the French and Indian War, residents of Falmouth had joined other colonists in protesting British policies.

In spring 1775, the colonies agreed to boycott British goods in order to pressure Parliament into addressing their grievances. In March a shipload of sails, rope, and rigging arrived in Falmouth for a loyalist shipbuilder. Patriots demanded the ship carrying the supplies leave port, but they agreed to let it undergo repairs before heading back across the Atlantic Ocean. While shipbuilders worked on the vessel, the British man-of-war Canceaux arrived from Boston under the command of Captain Henry Mowat. Under the Canceaux’s protection, the loyalist unloaded the ship’s cargo. 

While the Canceaux lay at anchor, news arrived of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, where British regulars had opened fire on the colony’s militiamen. When they heard of the battles, militia from Brunswick, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) north of Falmouth, decided to capture the Canceaux. Led by tavern owner Samuel Thompson, they traveled to Falmouth in small boats in May and captured Mowat while he was on shore. The sailors on the Canceaux threatened to shell the town if the militia didn’t release Mowat. Eventually, the militiamen released him but refused to turn Thompson over for punishment, and locals forced the Canceaux to leave the harbor. 

In June, when news of the Brunswick militia’s escapade reached militiamen in Machias, near the Canadian border, they decided to capture the Margaretta, a British armed schooner that was protecting two merchant ships carrying supplies to the troops hunkered down in Boston after the Battles of Lexington and Concord. 

Heartened by these successes, during the summer of 1775, American privateers raided British ships. Coming after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, their harassment helped to convince the king’s Cabinet that they must use military and naval force to put down the rebellion in the colonies. 

On October 6, 1775, Vice-Admiral Samuel Graves, who commanded the British North Atlantic fleet, decided he would regain control of the coastal townspeople by terrorizing them. He ordered Captain Mowat to retaliate against the colonists, directing him to take four ships and “lay waste burn and destroy such Seaport Towns as are accessible to his Majesty's Ships.” “My Design is to chastize Marblehead, Salem, Newbury Port, Cape Anne Harbour, Portsmouth, Ipswich, Saco, Falmouth in Casco Bay, and particularly Mechias where the Margueritta was taken,” Graves wrote. “You are to go to all or to as many of the above named Places as you can, and make the most vigorous Efforts to burn the Towns, and destroy the Shipping in the Harbours.” 

Mowat decided against attacking the towns near Boston, recognizing that they were close enough together to mount a spirited defense. Instead, he headed for Falmouth, dropping anchor there on October 16. The next day, Mowat accused the townspeople of “the most unpardonable Rebellion” and informed them that he had “orders to execute a just Punishment on the Town of Falmouth.” He warned them “to remove without delay the Human Species out of the said town” and gave them two hours to clear out. 

The townspeople were shocked. An eyewitness recalled that a committee of three men asked Mowat what was going on, and he answered “that his Orders were to set fire on all the Sea Port Towns between Boston and Halifax & that he expected New York was then Burnt to Ashes.” The committee negotiated to put off the attack for the night, but they would not agree to Mowat's promise to spare the town if they would relinquish all their weapons and hand over “Four Gentlemen of the Town as Hostages.” 

Throughout the night, the townspeople hurried to save their possessions and move out of danger. 

The next morning was clear and calm, and at 9:40 the Canceaux and the other ships opened fire. “In a few minutes the whole town was involved in smoak [sic] and combustion,” an eyewitness recalled. “The crackling of the flames, the falling of the houses, the bursting of the shells, the heavy thunder of the cannon, threw the elements into frightful noise and commotion, and occasioned the very foundations of surrounding nature to quake and tremble.” When a lack of wind kept the fires contained, Mowat sent sailors ashore to spread them. 

Although Admiral Graves was pleased with Mowat’s assault on Falmouth, the attack backfired spectacularly.

Rather than terrorizing the colonists into submission, the burning of Falmouth steeled their resolve. From his position at the head of the brand new Continental Army in Cambridge, Massachusetts, George Washington wrote to revolutionary leader John Hancock that the burning of Falmouth was “an Outrage exceeding in Barbarity & Cruelty every hostile Act practised among civilized Nations.” 

Washington noted that Mowat had warned that he would make similar attacks on port towns all along the coastline, prompting the Continental Congress on November 25 to authorize American ships to capture British armed vessels, transports, and supply ships. Meanwhile, the people in the coastal towns fortified their defenses and prepared to fire back at any attacking British ships. 

Colonists saw the burning of Falmouth as proof that their government had turned against them, and began to suggest they must declare independence. About a month after Falmouth burned, William Whipple, a prominent resident of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, wrote to a friend that the destruction and threat to visit such ruin on other towns caused “everyone to risque his all in Support of his Liberties & privileges…the unheard of cruelties of the enemy have so effectually unified us that I believe there are not four persons now in Portsmouth who do not [oppose] the Tyranny of Great Britain.”

mickeyrat

October 18, 2025 (Saturday)

Today, millions of Americans and their allies turned out across the United States and around the globe to demonstrate their commitment to American democracy and their opposition to a president and an administration apparently bent on replacing that democracy with a dictatorship. 

Administration loyalists tried to claim the No Kings protests would be “hate America” rallies of “the pro-Hamas wing and Antifa people.” Texas governor Greg Abbott deployed the Texas National Guard ahead of the No Kings Day protests, warning that “[v]iolence and destruction will never be tolerated in Texas.”  

In fact, protesters turned out waving American flags and wearing frog and unicorn and banana costumes and carrying homemade signs that demanded the release of the Epstein files and defended Lady Liberty. They laughed and danced and took selfies and sang. City police departments, including those of New York City, San Diego, and Washington, D.C., said they had made no protest-related arrests. 

In Oakland, California, Mother Jones senior editor Michael Mechanic interviewed a man named Justin, asking him if, as a Black man, he had particular concerns about the actions of the Trump administration. 

Justin answered: “You know…a lot of times I have a hopeless feeling, but…being out here today just reminds me about the beauty of America and American protests. And, you know, the fact that they tried to…stomp on this, step on this, you know, say it’s non-American, because that’s what I've been reading a lot about. No, this is the point of America right here: to be able to have this opportunity to protest…. [This] does not look like Antifa, Hamas, none of this stuff that they’re talking about…. [Y]ou know, this is the beauty of America.”

The No Kings demonstrations ran the gamut from hundreds of thousands of protesters in large, blue cities, to smaller crowds in small towns in Republican-dominated states. Together, they demonstrate that the administration’s claims to popularity are a lie. Such a high turnout means businesses and institutions that thought they must cater to the administration to appeal to a majority of Americans will be forced to recalculate. 

And the protests showed that Americans care fervently about democracy.

Today, millions of Americans and their allies turned out across the United States and around the globe to demonstrate their commitment to American democracy and their opposition to a president and an administration apparently bent on replacing democracy with a dictatorship.

[Photo, “History has its eyes on U.S.” anonymous photographer, Boston, Massachusetts, October 18, 2025]

mickeyrat

October 19, 2025 (Sunday)

All last week, Republican leaders tried to portray the No Kings protests scheduled for Saturday, October 18, as “Hate America” rallies. G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers partnered with Atlanta-based science newsroom The Xylom to estimate that as many as 8.2 million people turned out yesterday to oppose the Trump administration. The mood at the protests was joyful and peaceful, with protesters holding signs that championed American principles of democracy, free speech, equality, and the rule of law. As the Grand Junction, Colorado, Daily Sentinel put it in a front-page headline: “‘This is America’ ‘No Kings’ protests against Trump bring a street party vibe to cities nationwide.” 

Then last night, after the protests, the president’s social media account posted an AI-generated video showing Trump in a fighter jet with “KING TRUMP” painted on the side. The president sits in the airplane in front of something round that could be seen as a halo. He is wearing a gold crown; weirdly, the oxygen mask is over his mouth and chin, rather than mouth and nose.  

Once in the air, the plane drops excrement on American cities, including what seems to be New York City. The excrement drenches protesters, one of whom is 23-year-old liberal political commentator and influencer Harry Sisson. Journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who shares media clips that reflect politics, commented: “Trump posts AI video showing him literally dumping sh*t on America.” Historian Larry Glickman noted that media outlets make much of alleged Democratic disdain for ordinary Americans, but have had little to say about the disdain for Americans embodied by Trump’s video.

Several administration videos and images have responded to Americans saying “No Kings” by taking the position “Yes, We Want Kings,” an open embrace of the end of democracy. But they are more than simple trolling. Led by Trump, MAGA Republicans have abandoned the idea of politics, which is the process of engaging in debate and negotiation to attract support and win power. What is left when a system loses the give and take of politics is force.

The idea that leaders must attract voters with reasoned arguments to win power and must concede power when their opponents win has been the central premise of American government since 1800. In that year, after a charged election in which each side accused the other of trying to destroy the country, Federalist John Adams turned the reins of government over to the leader of the opposition, Thomas Jefferson. That peaceful transfer of power not only protected the people, it protected leaders who had lost the support of voters, giving them a way to leave office safely and either retire or regroup to make another run at power. 

The peaceful transfer of power symbolized the nation’s political system and became the hallmark of the United States of America. It lasted until January 6, 2021, when sitting president Trump refused to accept the voters’ election of Democrat Joe Biden, the leader of the opposition.

Now back in power, Trump and his loyalists are continuing to undermine the idea of politics, policies, and debate, trying instead to delegitimize the Democratic opposition altogether. Yesterday, during the protests, President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D Vance, and the official White House social media account posted a video of Trump placing a royal crown on his head, draping a royal robe around his shoulders, and unsheathing and brandishing a sword (an image that raises questions about why Trump wanted one of General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s swords so badly that he had the museum director who refused to hand it over fired). In the video, Democratic leaders including former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and what appears to be Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) first kneel and then bow to Trump.  

Administration imagery doesn’t simply insult opposition leaders; it undermines the idea of politics by suggesting that Democrats are un-American. Last night the White House continued its racist crusade against Democratic leaders by posted an AI-generated image of Trump and Vance wearing jewel-encrusted crowns positioned above an image of House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) wearing Mexican sombreros. The caption reads: “We’re built different.” 

The administration’s hostility to loyal opposition is translating into direct assaults on our government. House speaker Mike Johnson is refusing to seat a member of the opposition. Voters chose representative-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) on September 23 to fill a vacant House seat, but Johnson has come up with one reason after another not to seat her. Until she is sworn in, she has no access to government resources and cannot represent her constituents. She also cannot be the 218th signature on a discharge petition that would force a vote on whether to demand the release of the Epstein files, the final signature needed.

Grijalva recorded a video reinforcing the political system, saying: “We need to get to work, get on the floor, and negotiate so we can reopen the government.” 

But Republican congressional leaders are refusing even to talk with Democrats to reopen the government, let alone to negotiate with them. They are trying to force Democrats simply to do as they say, despite the fact that 78% of Americans, including 59% of Republicans, support the Democrats’ demand for an extension of the tax credit that lowers the cost of healthcare premiums on the Affordable Care Act markets. Lindsay Wise, Anna Wilde Mathews, and Katy Stech Ferek of the Wall Street Journal reported today that more than three quarters of those who are insured through the ACA markets live in states that voted for Trump. 

A video of Trump in a bomber attacking American cities carries an implied threat that the disdain of throwing excrement doesn’t erase. This morning, Trump reinforced that threat when he reminded Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo: “Don't forget I can use the Insurrection Act. Fifty percent of the presidents almost have used that. And that’s unquestioned power. I choose not to, I’d rather do this, but I’m met constantly by fake politicians, politicians that think that, that you know they it’s not like a part of the radical left movement to have safety. These cities have to be safe.”

That “safety” apparently involves detaining U.S. citizens without due process. On Thursday, Nicole Foy of ProPublica reported that more than 170 U.S. citizens have been detained by immigration agents. She reports they “have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched.” 

On Friday, the Trump administration pushed its attempt to use the military in Democratic-led cities, asking the Supreme Court to let it deploy troops in Chicago immediately. Chris Geidner of Law Dork notes that four judges, two appointed by Democrats and two appointed by Republicans, have rejected the administration’s arguments for why they must send in troops. Now the Department of Justice has appealed to the Supreme Court, asking for a decision on the so-called shadow docket, which would provide a fast response, but one without any hearings or explanation. 

The administration's appeal to the Supreme Court warned that there was “pressing risk of violence” in Chicago—a premise the judges rejected—and said preventing Trump from going into the city “improperly impinges on the President’s authority.” 

How much difference will the No Kings Day protests, even as big as they were, make in the face of the administration’s attempt to get rid of our democratic political system and replace it with authoritarianism? What good is an inflatable frog against federal agents?

Scholar of social movements Lisa Corrigan noted that large, fun marches full of art and music expand connections and make people more willing to take risks against growing state power. They build larger communities by creating new images that bring together recognizable images from the past in new ways, helping more people see themselves in such an opposition. The community and good feelings those gatherings develop help carry opposition through hard moments. Corrigan notes, too, that yesterday “every single rally (including in the small towns) was bigger than the surrounding police force available. That kind of image event is VERY IMPORTANT if you’re…demonstrating social coherence AGAINST a fascist government and its makeshift gestapo.” 

Such rallies “bring together multigenerational groups and the playfulness can help create enthusiasm for big tent politics against the monoculture of fascism,” Corrigan writes. “The frogs (and unicorns and dinosaurs) will be defining ideographs of this period of struggle.”

mickeyrat

October 20, 2025 (Monday)

Over the weekend, as millions of Americans attended “No Kings” protests, President Donald J. Trump’s social media accounts responded by posting images not just of Trump as a king—defecating on Americans, even—but also of Vice President J.D. Vance in a royal crown, suggesting that American democracy has been supplanted by tyranny that will last past Trump into the future.

In the United States, no man is a monarch: the law is supposed to be king. In January 1776, newly arrived immigrant Thomas Paine published Common Sense, explaining to his new countrymen why they should declare independence from the King of England. He called for a new government based not in heritage or tradition, but in the law. “[I]n America the law is king,” Paine wrote. “For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”

But under Trump, the law is under attack. 

Last night, on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Scott Pelley, Aaron Weisz, Aliza Chasan, and Ian Flickinger presented the story of Erez Reuveni, a former lawyer for the Department of Justice (DOJ) who alleges that the Trump administration is destroying the rule of law in America.

Reuveni was part of the first administration of President Donald J. Trump, where he defended Trump’s travel ban order, prohibiting travelers from Muslim majority countries from coming to the United States. He was so effective, the journalists note, he quickly took on a prominent role in Trump’s second term. 

On March 14, the same day he was promoted to become the acting deputy director of the DOJ’s immigration section, Reuveni and others in his section met with Emil Bove, who had once been Trump’s criminal defense attorney and was then the third-highest official at the DOJ. Bove told the lawyers that Trump would invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport more than 100 Venezuelan migrants the administration claimed were terrorists. They would not receive due process. 

According to Reuveni, “Bove emphasized, those planes need to take off, no matter what. Then after a pause, he also told all in attendance, and if some court should issue an order preventing that, we may have to consider telling that court, ‘f*** you.’”

“I felt like a bomb had gone off,” Reuveni told “60 Minutes.” “Here is the number three official using expletives to tell career attorneys that we might just have to consider disregarding federal court orders.”

The next day, some of the prisoners sued, and U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg called a hearing. Boasberg asked Drew Ensign, representing the DOJ, whether the planes would be leaving that weekend. Ensign said he didn’t know, even though, according to Reuveni, Ensign was at the same meeting with Bove he was. Reuveni called that moment in court “stunning.” 

“It is the highest, most egregious violation of a lawyer’s code of ethics to mislead a court with intent,” Reuveni told “60 Minutes.”

Boasberg ordered the planes not to leave and ordered the government to return any planes in the air. But instead, more than five hours after Boasberg’s order, the planes carrying the migrants arrived at the notorious terrorist prison CECOT in El Salvador.

“And then it really hit me. It’s like, we really did tell the court, screw you. We really did just tell the courts, we don’t care about your order. You can’t tell us what to do,” Reuveni told “60 Minutes.” “That was just a real gut punch.”

Then it turned out that Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador whose deportation to El Salvador a U.S. court had prohibited, had been rendered to CECOT. Reuveni told CNN that one of his superiors called him and ordered him to say that Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang and a terrorist. Reuveni said he couldn’t say such a thing because it was a lie.

“What's to stop them if they decide they don’t like you anymore, to say you’re a criminal, you’re a member of MS-13, you’re a terrorist,” Reuveni told “60 Minutes.” “What's to stop them from sending in some DOJ attorney at the direction of DOJ leadership to delay, to filibuster, and if necessary, to lie? And now that’s you gone and your liberties changed.”

When Reuveni refused to sign a brief calling Abrego Garcia a terrorist, the administration fired him.

John Hudson, Jeremy Roebuck, and Samantha Schmidt of the Washington Post reported yesterday that the day before Reuveni was promoted and Bove called a meeting with him and other DOJ lawyers to tell them “the planes need to take off, no matter what,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio had a phone conversation with Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele. The Trump administration wanted to send hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to CECOT, but Bukele had a price. 

Bukele wanted nine leaders of the MS-13 gang returned to El Salvador with the other prisoners. The individuals he wanted had threatened to expose the relationship between Bukele and MS-13. Bukele’s government has allegedly cut deals with MS-13 leaders to reduce the number of “public murders” to make it look as if homicide rates are falling, a development that boosts Bukele’s popularity.

The Washington Post journalists report that Rubio promised to return the MS-13 leaders. But some of those leaders were informants who were under the protection of the U.S. government. For years, U.S. law enforcement had worked first to capture high-ranking members of the deadly MS-13 gang and then to secure their cooperation with the promise of protection by the U.S. government. Rubio told Bukele the U.S. would renege on those agreements and turn the informants over to the government whose corruption they were exposing.

“The deal is a deep betrayal of U.S. law enforcement, whose agents risked their lives to apprehend the gang members,” said Douglas Farah, a contractor who had investigated and helped U.S. officials to dismantle MS-13. “Who would ever trust the word of U.S. law enforcement or prosecutors again?” 

The “60 Minutes” story noted that the nonpartisan law journal Just Security has discovered more than 35 cases in which judges have said the government is lying to them. One judge warned that “trust that had been earned over generations has been lost in weeks.”

Republicans in the U.S. Senate confirmed Bove as a U.S. appeals court judge in July, although Republican senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska joined all Democrats in voting no. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, said of Bove: “He has a strong legal background and has served his country honorably. I believe he will be diligent, capable and a fair jurist.” 

At the same time the administration undermines the rule of law that the Founders expected would rule the nation, it is illustrating the destruction of the people’s government with a symbolism that is hard to miss. 

Although the U.S. government has been shut down now for 20 days, leaving vital public servants without pay, work on Trump’s 90,000-square-foot ballroom has continued. In July, when he announced the project, Trump said: “It won’t interfere with the current building. It won’t be. It’ll be near it but not touching it—and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of. It’s my favorite. It’s my favorite place. I love it.”

Trump’s promise notwithstanding, demolition crews have begun to tear down the East Wing of the White House, the “People’s House.” Jonathan Edward and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post noted that today a backhoe began ripping through the structure. The National Capital Planning Commission, which approves construction of federal buildings, has not signed off on the destruction, but in September, Will Weissert of the Associated Press reported that the Trump-appointed head of the commission, Will Scharf, who is also the White House staff secretary, said the board has no jurisdiction over demolition or site preparation. “What we deal with is essentially construction, vertical build,” Sharf said during the only public meeting about the ballroom. 

But White House officials do not appear to want to advertise their destruction of part of the historic building. Natalie Andrews and Alex Leary of the Wall Street Journal reported that officials at the Treasury Department, which has a front-row seat to the demolition, have told employees not to share photos of the grounds. According to Trump, funding for his ballroom has been provided by dozens of companies, including Apple, Amazon, Lockheed Martin, and Coinbase. As of September, the White House had not yet submitted building plans to the National Capital Planning Commission.

The first president to live in the White House after its construction was a contemporary of Thomas Paine, John Adams. When he moved into the house in 1800, Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail: “I Pray Heaven To Bestow The Best Of Blessings On This House And All that shall hereafter Inhabit it. May none but Honest and Wise Men ever rule under This Roof.”

Halifax2TheMax

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

* 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.

Welcome to the Banana Republic.

mickeyrat

October 21, 2025 (Tuesday)

On this, the twenty-first day of the government shutdown, President Donald J. Trump invited all but one Republican senator to lunch today at what he calls the “Rose Garden Club,” a patio where the White House Rose Garden used to be. The missing senator was Rand Paul (R-KY), whose determination to cut the national debt has led him to vote consistently against measures that will increase it, including the Republican continuing resolution to fund the government. 

Trump boasted that the shutdown was enabling the administration to cut funding for what he continues to say are Democratic priorities, although the executive branch has no legal power to stop appropriations for congressionally approved projects, and Republican voters will also be hurt by the administration’s attempts to cut public programs and infrastructure projects. Trump called out director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, calling him “Darth Vader” as he slashes through funding and fires government workers. 

Jay O’Brien of ABC News reported this afternoon that a number of states are warning that they will not be able to continue to provide Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits after November 1 unless the shutdown ends. SNAP serves about 42 million Americans and was already under pressure because the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill of July—the one they call the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act—cut about $186 billion out of the program over ten years. Now, Texas, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and New York have warned they cannot fund the program if the shutdown continues. 

Meanwhile, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is refusing to call the House into session, keeping its members out of Washington, D.C., and thus continuing to jam the Senate into passing the House continuing resolution. As Mychael Schnell of MSNBC noted, keeping the House out of session also keeps members away from the congressional press corps, where the divisions in the Republican conference could go public. 

Johnson also insists that keeping the House out of session is preventing him from swearing in representative-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), who was chosen by voters on September 23, although speakers have sworn in representatives during pro forma sessions in the past. Grijalva has said she will be the 218th signature on a discharge petition that would force a vote on whether to demand the release of the Epstein files, the final signature needed.

Today the state of Arizona and Grijalva sued the House of Representatives over Johnson’s refusal to swear Grijalva in, thus depriving her Arizona constituents of representation. Arizona Attorney General Kristin Mayes wrote: "This case is about whether someone duly elected to the House—who indisputably meets the constitutional qualifications of the office—may be denied her rightful office simply because the Speaker has decided to keep the House out of ‘regular session.’” Mayes has asked the court to authorize someone else to swear Grijalva into office. 

Kate Riga and Emine Yücel of Talking Points Memo note that the lawsuit addresses Johnson’s excuse for delaying Grijalva’s swearing-in by saying that then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) delayed the swearing-in of Representative Julia Letlow (R-LA) until about a month after her election. In fact, Pelosi contacted Letlow to see when she would like to be sworn in. “Ms. Grijalva would be delighted if Speaker Johnson would contact her to commit to a mutually agreeable time, as Speaker Pelosi did for Dr. Letlow,” the lawsuit notes. 

Johnson called the lawsuit “absurd” and said it was “a publicity stunt.” 

Meanwhile, Michael Stratford of Politico reported today that the United States has signed an “economic stabilization agreement” with Argentina’s central bank, offering extraordinary assistance to Argentina as its economy under Trump ally Javier Milei plummets. The agreement commits the U.S. to swapping $20 billion in currency to prop up the Argentine peso, in addition to at least two previous direct purchases of pesos. 

Treasury secretary Scott Bessent has also said the government is arranging for private lenders or sovereign wealth funds to put another $20 billion into the Argentine economy. But, as Alexander Saeedy and Santiago Pérez of the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, banks want security from the United States that they will get their money back if the Argentine economy continues to sink.

On Sunday, Trump suggested to reporters that the U.S. might also buy Argentine beef, saying such a purchase would help bring down prices in the U.S. But with Argentina having undercut U.S. soybean farmers in the Chinese market, U.S. cattle farmers met this suggestion with anger. As Lori Ann LaRocco of CNBC reported today, they say that their own herds are dwindling because of drought and the parasitic screwworm and that the government isn’t doing enough to address those problems.

Bessent claims that Argentina is a “systematically important ally” of the U.S., but as economist Paul Krugman noted in his newsletter last week, that importance is not economic. Unlike Mexico, which borders the U.S. and which accounted for 10% of U.S. exports when the U.S. stepped in to help stabilize its economy in 1994, Argentina is not geographically close and accounts for less than 0.5% of U.S. exports. 

Argentina’s systematic importance to the administration is, as Krugman notes, both that the administration wants a Trump-like politician to succeed and apparently that some of Bessent’s hedge-fund billionaire associates invested heavily in Argentine bonds in a bet on Milei. Bailing out the government even for a short while will let them get their money out. 

In contrast to the administration’s approach to Argentina, with its right-wing government, Trump announced on Sunday that the U.S. would raise tariffs on Colombia and end funding to the country, although Jeff Mason, Andy Sullivan, and David Ljunggren of Reuters note that funding in the past primarily came from the U.S. Agency for International Development, which the Trump administration has already shut down. Trump claimed that leftist Colombian president Gustavo Petro is “an illegal drug leader,” calling him “low rated and very unpopular.” He added that Petro “better close up” drug operations “or the United States will close them up for him, and it won’t be done nicely.” Trump complained that Petro has shown “a fresh mouth toward America.” 

For his part, Petro posted on social media that “U.S. government officials have committed murder and violated our sovereignty in territorial waters.” He was referring to a September 16 strike by U.S. forces on a boat in the Caribbean that killed at least one Colombian national. “The United States has invaded our national territory, fired a missile to kill a humble fisherman, and destroyed his family, his children,” Petro wrote. Yesterday, Colombia recalled its ambassador to the U.S.

Catie Edmondson of the New York Times reports that despite the shutdown, the administration has found $172 million to buy two Gulfstream private jets for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and other Homeland Security officials. The initial request of the department was for $50 million for a single new plane. The Department of Homeland Security called the new purchase “a matter of safety.” 

Devlin Barrett and Tyler Pager of the New York Times reported today that Trump is demanding that the Department of Justice hand over about $230 million to compensate him for investigating the ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives and for violating his privacy by searching Mar-a-Lago for classified documents in 2022. Trump filed the claims in 2023 and 2024. Now his own appointees will decide whether the American taxpayers should pay the compensation Trump wants. 

When Kaitlan Collins asked Trump about the demand tonight, Trump answered that media outlets had paid him settlements because “what they did was wrong. And, you know, when somebody does what’s wrong—now, with the country, it's interesting, because I'm the one that makes a decision, right? And, you know, that decision would have to go across my desk, and it's awfully strange to make a decision where I'm paying myself. In other words, did you ever have one of those cases where you have to decide how much you're paying yourself in damages? But I was damaged very greatly, and any money that I would get, I would give to charity.”

The demolition of the East Wing of the White House continued today. 

This afternoon, Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) took the floor of the Senate to hold it through the night “to protest Trump’s grave threats to democracy.” He said: “We cannot pretend this is normal.”

mickeyrat

October 22, 2025 (Wednesday)

“It’s not his house. It’s your house. And he’s destroying it.”

Yesterday, former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton cut to the heart of President Donald J. Trump’s destruction of the East Wing of the White House. 

Indeed, that might have been the whole point. After saying in July that the ballroom he planned to build would not touch the East Wing, the president tore into the building on Monday, the first workday after about seven million people turned out for the No Kings protests to demonstrate their opposition to his administration. 

There are currently no approved plans to rebuild, no permits, no signs of weatherproofing for a construction project begun just before winter, no indication that the history or the paintings or the artifacts in the East Wing were preserved. There is only the destruction of the People’s House. 

Today, Luke Broadwater of the New York Times reported that Trump will demolish the entire East Wing. According to a senior administration official, the demolition should be finished by this weekend.

Today the U.S. military struck another vessel the administration claims was smuggling drugs into the U.S., killing two people on board. This is the eighth strike that has been made public; the U.S. strikes have killed at least 34 people. According to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, this strike was operating in the eastern Pacific, widening the zone the administration is patrolling for those it claims are enemy combatants, a legal claim that experts widely reject.  

Eleanor Watson of CBS News noted that on Sunday, Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) told Margaret Brennan of “Face the Nation” that when administration officials briefed Congress about the strikes, they "had a very hard time explaining to us the rationale, the legal rationale for doing this and the constitutionality of doing it.” The officials informed Congress that they have "a secret list of over 20 narco organizations, drug trafficking cartels," but they did not share the list with lawmakers.

National security scholar Tom Nichols commented on today’s strike: “The president is establishing the principle that he can order the murder of anyone he deems a threat. And Congress is letting it happen.”

Today the Pentagon announced a new press corps to cover Hegseth and the Defense Department after the traditional pool turned in their press badges rather than agree to publish only material approved by Defense Department officials. Among those who walked out were Hegseth’s former colleagues at the Fox News Channel. The new press corps—all of whom accepted the Pentagon’s censorship—consists of right-wing outlets, including LindellTV, run by “MyPillow” chief executive officer and key election denier Mike Lindell, and podcaster Tim Pool, who was funded by Russia before the 2024 election. 

Yesterday, Devlin Barrett and Tyler Pager of the New York Times reported that Trump is demanding the Department of Justice hand over about $230 million to compensate him for investigating the ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives and for violating his privacy by searching Mar-a-Lago for classified documents in 2022. Trump filed the claims in 2023 and 2024. His own appointees will decide whether to approve the claims. 

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo wrote today: “[H]ow do you top ordering your appointees to cut you a check for $230 million taxpayer dollars…. What thing can be more unimaginable and beyond belief than the president just saying, Cut me a check for a quarter billion dollars? What can be weirder than his bulldozing a big chunk of the White House?”

“The real story here is that Trump has been operating as king or dictator for going on a year,” Marshall wrote. “There’s no accountability for anything. No limits, no penalties. So the demands keep spiraling.” 
 
Speaking with Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), Chris Hayes of “All In with Chris Hayes” admitted that the destruction of the East Wing hit him hard. “There was really something visceral about those images that landed,” he told the senator. “I wonder if you or other colleagues or other people you're talking to have had that same reaction.”

Murphy answered: “[T]here's a lot of history that has taken place in the East Wing, and it was just destroyed without any conversation in the American public, without any consent of Congress. It was absolutely illegal…. [T]hat visual is powerful because you are essentially watching the destruction of the rule of law happen as those walls come down. It is just a symbol about how cavalier he is, about every single day acting in new and illegal ways. 

“That's the story with the killings in the Caribbean, as well. The president just doesn't believe that any law applies to him, that he can destroy federal property, that he can steal from American citizens, that he can kill with impunity, that he can throw anyone in jail. 

“We are not living in a functional democracy any longer. It’s not too late to save it, but it is just important to acknowledge that we aren’t on the precipice of losing our democracy. We are losing it every single day. We are not a functional nation with a rule of law any longer, and those toppled walls in the East Wing are a pretty stark reminder of that.”

Marshall, though, noted that Trump’s behavior “opens up opportunities the political opposition can and must exploit.” The president is “increasingly reckless, acting like someone who is free from any consequences or the need for support from anyone beyond his admirers.” But “[t]he reality is that Trump is deeply unpopular.” 

Some evidence for that unpopularity today came in the form of Treasury Department sanctions against Russia’s two largest oil companies, which suggest the administration feels it can no longer entirely ignore Republican senators. As Hans Nichols and Stef W. Kight of Axios recalled yesterday, bipartisan majorities in the Senate have been demanding sanctions since July, when Trump put them off by saying he would impose sanctions in 50 days if Russia’s president Vladimir Putin didn’t end his war in Ukraine. Then, in August, Trump invited Putin to Alaska, and Senate Republicans backed off to give the president room to negotiate. 

Last week, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) signaled he was ready to move forward, and lawmakers and aides told the press the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would pass three bills to increase pressure on Russia. One would label Russia a state sponsor of terrorism, one would impose economic penalties on China for its support of Russia, and the third would transfer Russian assets frozen in the U.S. to Ukraine. 

Today the administration announced its own, much more limited, sanctions.

On Monday the White House was forced to withdraw Trump’s nomination for Paul Ingrassia to head the Office of Special Counsel, a watchdog agency. Republican senators said they would not confirm him after the publication of texts in which Ingrassia said he has “a Nazi streak in me.” Ingrassia still works for the administration but will not move to the head of the Office of Special Counsel.

Former Trump fixer Michael Cohen wrote on Meidas+, “The Senate—this 119th Congress, which has spent nine months acting like an annex of the West Wing—finally pushed back. This is the same chamber that greenlit Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Health and Human Services and Pete Hegseth at Defense, both appointments that made career staffers consider early retirement.” 

But, he continued, “some line was finally crossed. Maybe it was the word ‘Nazi.’ Maybe it was the timing,” coming as it did just days after the exposure of another group of young Republicans texting Nazi talk. “Maybe Thune—a man who’s built his career on calculated restraint—decided he wasn’t going to be remembered as the Senate leader who confirmed the guy with the Nazi jokes,” Cohen wrote. “Whatever the reason, the…rubber stamp hesitated.”

mickeyrat

October 23, 2025 (Thursday)

Julia Ainsley and Didi Martinez of NBC News reported today that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s rush to get new recruits onto the street has meant they have pushed into their training program more than 200 people who have disqualifying criminal backgrounds, fail drug testing, or don’t meet the academic or physical requirements. 

The budget reconciliation measure the Republicans passed in July—the one they call the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act”—included more than $170 billion over four years for immigration and border security. The law tripled ICE’s annual budget, giving it “more than the annual expenditures on police by state and local governments in all 50 states and the District of Columbia combined,” according to Margy O’Herron of the Brennan Center, a nonpartisan pro-democracy law and policy institute. 

Part of that money was to hire about 10,000 deportation officers. As O’Herron notes, a 2017 report by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General found that to hire 10,000 officers would require vetting 500,000 applicants. Currently, law enforcement agencies have been having trouble finding enough applicants. O’Herron notes that ICE can bypass the usual requirements for federal employees, but in the past, when the government tried to hire 5,000 Customs and Border Patrol officers quickly, the result was dramatically higher corruption rates, including for bribery by trafficking and smuggling operations. 

In August, ICE began to offer a $50,000 signing bonus and got rid of its age limits. To fill the ranks, Ainsley and Martinez note, ICE has already shortened its training program from 13 weeks to 6. They report that nearly half of those dismissed from ICE over the past three months could not pass an open-book exam. Others could not run 1.5 miles in less than 14 minutes, 25 seconds, or do 15 push-ups and 32 sit-ups. 

Sociologist Ian Carillo called attention to a 2020 article by political scientists Adam Scharpf and Christian Glässel looking into why secret police agents are often “surprisingly mediocre in skill and intellect.” By examining the 4,287 officers who served in autocratic Argentina from 1975 to 1983, they discovered that the ranks of secret police are filled by those who perform poorly in merit-based systems. Facing firing for their poor performance, they turn to more burdensome secret police work.

Today Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker established the “Illinois Accountability Commission” to compile evidence against federal agents who have harassed, intimidated, brutalized, and detained American citizens and legal residents in Illinois. “None of this is about crime or safety,” Pritzker said. “If it were, there would be coordination with local law enforcement and judicial warrants…. Under normal circumstances,” he said, “federal agency supervisors and inspectors general would enforce proper legal procedures and protocols and hold accountable those who violate them.” But Trump has fired 17 inspectors general and installed cronies at the Department of Justice, while MAGA congress members refuse to hold hearings or conduct oversight. Administration officials are acting as if they are “immune from investigation or accountability,” Pritzker said “They are not.”

The commission will create an official public record of “[e]very instance of abuse, or law-breaking, or…violations of rights.” While “states have limited abilities against federal immunity,” Pritzker said, “we must remind everyone that…[t]here will come a time where people of good faith are empowered to uphold the law. When the time comes, Illinois will have the testimony and the records needed to pursue justice to its fullest extent.”

Dictators also enforce loyalty by protecting those who have been found guilty of crimes in the nation’s nonpartisan justice system. Last week Trump commuted the sentence of former representative George Santos (R-NY), ending his seven-year sentence for fraud with just three months served and removing his obligation to pay $373,749.97 to the victims of his crimes. Trump has pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 1,600 people, far more than most presidents do in four years. 

Those convicted of crimes related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol received most of the president’s clemency, but former assistant U.S. attorney Jeffrey Toobin notes in an essay for the New York Times that Trump has been free with pardons or commutations for criminal supporters. Toobin notes Trump’s social media post after commuting Santos’s sentence: “Santos had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!”

Today, Trump announced a pardon for Changpeng Zhao, the founder of the Binance cryptocurrency exchange, who pleaded guilty in 2023 to money laundering, paid a $50 million fine, and served nearly four months in prison. His company paid a $4.3 billion penalty. Gram Slattery and Chris Prentice of Reuters note that in May, Binance accepted the stablecoin USD1, put out by the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial crypto venture, as payment for an investment in Binance made by an investment firm from Abu Dhabi. The deal enables World Liberty Financial to keep any profits from the $2 billion investment, likely worth tens of millions of dollars a year, and it significantly boosted the venture.

Trump’s full and unconditional pardon enables Zhao to return to the business. On social media, Zhao posted that he was "deeply grateful for today’s pardon and to President Trump for upholding America’s commitment to fairness, innovation, and justice." He added: "Will do everything we can to help make America the Capital of Crypto.”

This afternoon, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked Trump about the pardon and whether it had anything to do with Zhao’s involvement in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture. 

“Which one? Who is that?.... The recent one? Yes, the? I believe we’re talking about the same person because I do pardon a lot of people. I don't know, he was recommended by a lot of people. A lot of people say that—are you talking about the crypto person?—A lot of people say that he wasn't guilty of anything. He served four months in jail, and they say that he was not guilty of anything, that what he did, well, you don't know much about crypto. You know nothing about, you know nothing about nothing. You’re fake news. But let me just tell you that he was somebody that, as I was told, I don't know him, I don't believe I've ever met him. But I've been told a lot of support. He had a lot of support, and they said that what he did is not even a crime. It wasn't a crime, that he was persecuted by the Biden administration, uh, and so, I gave him a pardon at the request of a lot of very good people.”

The White House today released a list of those donating to Trump’s ballroom that he intends will replace the now-demolished East Wing of the White House. The list includes the Altria Group Inc., Amazon, Apple, Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., Caterpillar Inc., Coinbase, Comcast Corporation, J. Pepe and Emilia Fanjul, Hard Rock International, Google, HP Inc., Lockheed Martin, Meta Platforms, Micron Technology, Microsoft, NextEra Energy Inc., Palantir Technologies Inc., Ripple, Reynolds American, T-Mobile, Tether America, Union Pacific Railroad, Adelson Family Foundation, Stefan E. Brodie, Betty Wold Johnson Foundation, Charles and Marissa Cascarilla, Edward and Shari Glazer, Harold Hamm, Benjamin Leon Jr., The Lutnick Family, The Laura & Isaac Perlmutter Foundation, Stephen A. Schwarzman, Konstantin Sokolov, Kelly Loeffler and Jeff Sprecher, Paolo Tiramani, Cameron Winklevoss, and Tyler Winklevoss.

Economist Robert Reich notes that the list includes “Google, whose CEO thanked Trump for [the] ‘resolution’ of an antitrust case[;] Palantir, which has lucrative contracts with ICE[; and] Blackstone's Stephen Schwarzman, who would profit from Trump's regulatory rollbacks for private equity.” Reich commented: “Pay-to-play.”

By definition, those who could not make it in a merit-based system and who are dependent on the good will of an authoritarian leader have neither the skill nor the priorities to deliver good government for the country. 

Today economist Paul Krugman noted that the administration’s $20 billion gambit to save Trump ally Javier Milei’s government in Argentina, with another $20 billion in the works, is a visceral wake-up call for parts of rural America in a way that cuts to social welfare programs have not been, despite the fact that rural areas depend on those programs more than urban areas do. Now Trump is talking about importing beef from Argentina. Farmers were already upset that Trump’s tariff war ended Chinese imports of U.S. soybeans; now ranchers are outraged at Trump’s focus on Argentina rather than on Americans. 

Trump responded by insulting them: “The Cattle Ranchers, who I love, don’t understand that the only reason they are doing so well, for the first time in decades, is because I put Tariffs on cattle coming into the United States, including a 50% Tariff on Brazil. If it weren’t for me, they would be doing just as they’ve done for the past 20 years—Terrible! It would be nice if they would understand that….” 

But someone in the White House must have paid attention to yesterday’s news that a survey from the Public Religion Research Institute (PPRI), a nonpartisan independent research organization, found that 56% of Americans agree that “President Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy,” while only 41% see him as “a strong leader who should be given the power he needs to restore America’s greatness.” 

Today, after threats to send what he called a “surge”—a military term—of agents to San Francisco, Trump announced he had changed his mind. Trump attributed his change of course to “friends of mine who live in the area.” 

On November 4, 2025, California voters will go to the polls to vote on Proposition 50, which would redraw the state’s congressional map to create more Democratic-dominated districts until 2030 in response to Texas’s new Republican-skewed maps. 

ICE agents storming the streets of San Francisco two weeks before the vote would likely have added votes in favor of Prop 50.

mickeyrat

October 24, 2025 (Friday)

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has canceled House business again next week, meaning that over the last 17 weeks, the House of Representatives will have worked on Capitol Hill for just 20 days. It also means that the House will not be back at work before November 1, when at least twenty-five states have said they will not be able to provide the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits more than 42 million Americans rely on to put food on the table. 

Jennifer Ludden of NPR notes that about one of every eight Americans gets an average of $187 a month in food assistance. Most of those who use SNAP are children, older Americans, veterans, people with disabilities, and working people, chief executive officer Joel Berg of Hunger Free America told Ludden. “If the SNAP program shuts down, we will have the most mass hunger suffering we’ve had in America since the Great Depression.”

Republicans are trying to convince Americans that the Democrats are responsible for the pain of the shutdown. At the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service website, a banner reads: “Due to the Radical Left Democrat shutdown, this government website will not be updated during the funding lapse. President Trump has made it clear he wants to keep the government open and support those who feed, fuel, and clothe the American people.”

In addition to being an open violation of the Hatch Act, a law that prohibits the use of government resources for partisan purposes, this statement badly misrepresents what’s going on in Washington, D.C. President Donald J. Trump is refusing even to talk with Democrats, let alone negotiate to reopen the government, and Republican lawmakers are following his lead. He and MAGA Republicans are trying to muscle Senate Democrats into passing the continuing resolution the House passed on September 19 before they left town. 

For their part, the Democrats are refusing to agree to fund the government until the Republicans work with them to extend the premium tax credits that support access to the Affordable Care Act marketplace for healthcare insurance. In their “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” of July, Republicans extended tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations but permitted the premium tax credits to expire. Democrats have also asked for Congress to put back into Medicaid the $1 trillion the Republicans took out of it in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

According to the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit healthcare research foundation, the loss of the premium tax credits will cause nearly 5 million people to lose their health insurance in 2026. The cost of premiums will force healthy Americans out of the pool as they decide to drop their coverage, sending premium prices skyrocketing for millions more. The Commonwealth Fund also projects that the loss of the premium tax credits will cost almost 340,000 jobs, including about 154,000 in healthcare-related industries and 185,000 in other sectors. Those losses will cause a $2.5 billion decline in local and state tax revenues. 

Trump is trying to make the impasse between the parties about the shutdown, but that obscures the actual fight at hand. What is at stake is the theory behind the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act: the destruction of the modern American government that was put in place in the 1930s by Democrats under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and expanded from then until 1981 under both Democratic and Republican presidents. Today’s fight is about the cuts made by billionaire Elon Musk as head of the “Department of Government Efficiency,” and cuts made after Musk left the administration by Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought. 

Republicans have embraced the destruction of the modern government, slashing SNAP benefits, Medicaid, cancer research, the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), and so on. The Democrats are defending the government that has been in place since the 1930s, focused on leveling the playing field between the very wealthy and ordinary Americans. 

Trump is determined to resurrect the pre–New Deal system in the United States and refuses to entertain any notion that his vision will not work. That refusal to be crossed showed over the past twenty-four hours when he exploded over a Canadian advertisement aired last night that quoted an April 25, 1987, speech in which Republican president Ronald Reagan criticized tariffs as “trade barriers” that “hurt every American worker and consumer.”

“High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars,’' Reagan said in both the speech and the advertisement. “The result is more and more tariffs, higher and higher trade barriers, and less and less competition. So, soon, because of the prices made artificially high by tariffs that subsidize inefficiency and poor management, people stop buying. Then the worst happens: Markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industries shut down, and millions of people lose their jobs.”

During the 2024 campaign, Trump insisted that tariffs like those imposed in the late nineteenth century would nurture the economy and fund the government alone, permitting tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. He rejected economists’ assessment that tariffs are paid by consumers and that they would slow economic growth. 

Last night, apparently furious at the implied criticism of his tariffs with the words of a Republican icon, as well as the fact that Canadians bypassed him by appealing directly to the American people, Trump announced on social media that “TARIFFS ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY, AND ECONOMY, OF THE U.S.A.” He continued: “ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED.” Today he continued to post pro-tariff messages, saying, for example: “THE UNITED STATES IS WEALTHY, POWERFUL, AND NATIONALLY SECURE AGAIN, ALL BECAUSE OF TARIFFS!” and “THE STOCK MARKET IS STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE BECAUSE OF TARIFFS!”

In fact, the government’s inflation report, released today, shows that inflation has climbed to 3%, and the White House says it will likely not release October inflation report because of the government shutdown. At the same time, the administration's cuts to the government have not created the savings promised: yesterday the U.S. debt passed $38 trillion. This was the fastest accumulation of a trillion dollars of debt outside of the Covid-19 pandemic, with the U.S. hitting $37 trillion in August and $38 trillion just two months later. 

Distrust of Trump’s economic vision is showing in polls. As G. Elliot Morris noted today in Strength in Numbers, an Economist/YouGov poll shows that 53% of Americans think the economy is getting worse. The latest Gallup poll shows that Americans now think Democrats, rather than Republicans, are the better party to keep the country prosperous, by a margin of 47% to 43%. This is a shift of 18 points in just over two years.

Trump appears to want the world to conform to his ideology in foreign affairs as well as in the domestic sphere, claiming the ultimate power over life and death without regard to the rule of law. When a reporter asked him yesterday why he didn’t ask Congress for a declaration of war against those South American drug cartels he claims are at war with the United States, Trump answered: “Well, I don’t think we’re gonna necessarily ask for a declaration of war, I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. OK? We're going to kill them. You know? They're going to be, like dead. OK?"

Today Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the military has struck yet another boat in the Caribbean, for a total of ten so far. Six people on the boat died in the strike. 

Trump talks about the administration’s strikes on boats in the region as an attempt to stop the importation of drugs into the U.S., but observers suggest the administration is really attempting to encourage Venezuelans to rise up against Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Hegseth announced today he was sending the aircraft carrier USS Gerald Ford and its strike group of five destroyers to the waters off South America. The group will join the growing military buildup in the region. Alayna Treene, Kylie Atwood, and Katie Bo Lillis of CNN reported today that the Trump administration is considering targeting drug routes and cocaine facilities in Venezuela itself.

Today the administration also imposed sanctions on leftist President Gustavo Petro of Colombia, as well as his family and a member of his government, claiming they are participants in the global drug trade. 

And yet, for all the administration's insistence that it can shape the world as it wants, it seems worried about the American people. Yesterday Trump dismissed the No Kings protests of last Saturday, saying the “crowds were not big at all” and claiming the signs were “all made professionally in a printing shop. Looks like on Madison Avenue someplace.” He said: “Some guy is paying for all that stuff…. These people are going crazy, they're going crazy ‘cause they're getting paid. 'Cause there's no reason for them to be going crazy, but you watch some of them, and they're professional agitators, and we are finding out who's paying them. Yeah. We have a lot of information about who they are. You're gonna be very surprised when you find out.”

And, today the Department of Justice announced it will monitor polling sites in six jurisdictions in the upcoming November 4 elections. The observers will go to California and New Jersey, two Democratic-dominated states that will be holding elections with national consequences.