Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

 July 11, 2023 (Tuesday)

Late last night, just before a court deadline, former president Trump’s lawyers requested that his trial for illegally keeping national security documents be postponed indefinitely. While the lawyers argued that they were interested in protecting American democracy, falsely accusing President Biden of advancing the case in hopes of weakening his “chief political rival,” in fact the desire to push off the trial suggests that Trump realizes he’s in big trouble. His advisors have told reporters that he expects to end that trouble by winning the election. In the filing, his lawyers warned that as the “likely Republican Party nominee,” he would not have enough time to manage a trial.

The Department of Justice has asked for a speedy trial to begin in December, getting it over with before the election, not afterward.

Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) is in hot water today for calling white nationalists “true Americans” and refusing to admit that white nationalism, which quite literally means a nation built on the concept of white supremacy, is racist.

But Trump’s plea for delay until after the election so he can stack the DOJ with his own appointees is a reminder that, despite the distraction about white nationalism, we should not lose sight of Tuberville’s absolute unwillingness to drop his hold on about 250 senior military appointments. Keeping those positions open echoes then-Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) refusal to hold hearings for President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court in 2016, holding the seat open for Trump to appoint someone when he took office. Tuberville was in close touch with Trump during the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Meanwhile, Gal Luft, a dual Israeli-U.S. citizen who is the key witness to what the Republican-dominated House Oversight Committee insists is President Biden’s corrupt ties to China, has been indicted by the Department of Justice for being a Chinese operative. Damian Williams, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Luft “subverted foreign agent registration laws in the United States to seek to promote Chinese policies by acting through a former high-ranking U.S. government official; he acted as a broker in deals for dangerous weapons and Iranian oil; and he told multiple lies about his crimes to law enforcement.”

On July 7, House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) called Luft “a very credible witness on Biden family corruption,” who “provided incriminating evidence to six officials from the FBI and the DOJ in a meeting in Brussels in March 2019.” Luft also allegedly worked with a former Chinese government official to plant into Trump’s 2016 campaign someone who would push pro-Chinese policies and who then, for pay, funneled information to the Chinese. That person, who is not named in the indictment, was later under consideration for Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Homeland Security, or Director of National Intelligence.

Luft was indicted in absentia because he is a fugitive after jumping bail in April (which explains why Comer said he was “missing” in May). While Luft claims the indictment is retaliation for his revelations about Biden, in fact the sealed indictment was handed down on November 1, 2022, before he became a Republican witness. So he was charged first, arrested in Cyprus in February on related charges, and then became Comer’s star witness.

Also today, the Justice Department told lawyers for Trump and writer E. Jean Carroll, who has sued the former president for defamation, that it does not believe he was acting within the scope of his employment when he said he didn’t know her, she wasn’t his type, and he did not sexually assault her. While the DOJ focused on the statements Trump made as president, it said that it took into consideration the similar comments he made last October, which suggested that he was not, in fact, trying to protect and serve the U.S. when he made the initial comments. It also considered a jury’s verdict in May finding Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation and awarding Carroll $5 million in damages.

This means that the Department of Justice will no longer defend Trump against Carroll’s lawsuit, forcing him to rely on his own lawyers. A Trump spokesperson said the DOJ’s decision showed that the department was “politically weaponizing the justice system” against Trump.

Meanwhile, the summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Vilnius, Lithuania, began with a surprise as Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan dropped his country’s opposition to Sweden’s NATO membership. His shift likely comes from U.S. assurances that the deal for F-16 jets Turkey badly wants will probably materialize. At the same time, Erdogan likely recognizes that moving away from Russia and toward Europe is a smart move as Russia’s war continues to sap that country’s strength.

In the Washington Post, Asli Aydintasbas of the Brookings Institution, formerly a journalist in Turkey, gave Biden credit for bringing Erdogan to “yes.” “The cutthroat geopolitical competition against China and Russia does not give Washington the luxury to maintain its policy of social distancing toward Erdogan,” she wrote, “despite his awful record on democracy.”

To get Erdogan permission to purchase F-16s, Biden had to work to convince congressional leaders, notably chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Robert Menendez (D-NJ), that it would be easier to work with Turkey inside NATO than outside it. Aydintasbas also suggested that Biden had worked with members of the European Union to consider expanding Turkey’s access to trade with the E.U.

“This is an important moment—and an opening to try to reverse Turkey’s drift,” Aydintasbas wrote. “But the window of opportunity for better relations with NATO and the West will not be open forever. For more thawing, Turkey will have to be willing to work on domestic issues as well.”

So Sweden has the green light, but to the dismay of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, who is also at the meeting, Ukraine does not. It is not a surprise that the 31 NATO member nations are not eager to welcome Ukraine to NATO immediately, since the terms of the alliance mean that doing so would bring the member states into open war with Russia, but Zelensky had hoped at least for a date for future admission.

A declaration from the heads of state and government participating in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s principal political decision-making body, blamed Russia for shattering peace in the Euro-Atlantic area and for violating the principles of a rules-based international order. Russia “is the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area,” it declared, and must be “held fully accountable” for its “illegal, unjustifiable, and unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine.”

“Ukraine’s future is in NATO,” it said, but for now it focused on additional security packages and the establishment of a new joint body, the NATO-Ukraine Council, “where Allies and Ukraine sit as equal members to advance political dialogue, engagement, cooperation, and Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO.”

It is not as much as Zelensky wanted, but it is a good deal more than Trump ally Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) offered today when she called for President Biden to withdraw from NATO altogether, saying bizarrely that NATO, which was formed in 1949 to stand against Soviet aggression and now stands against Russian expansion, is “entirely beholden to Russia.” Indeed, Trump recently boasted that he could end the war in 24 hours, and his former vice president Mike Pence noted that “the only way you’d solve this war in a day is if you gave Vladimir Putin what he wanted.” And even that suggestion rather neatly ignores the reality that the Ukrainians have the ultimate say about the matter.       

In contrast to Trump’s approach to U.S. foreign policy, Bo Erickson of CBS News noted today that Biden’s extensive foreign policy experience and personal appeal have enhanced U.S. credibility and moral authority, which is especially welcome after the previous administration undermined international alliances. Liana Fix, European fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Erickson: “For Europe, he represents a nostalgia for the 20th century, which was based on shared values, when the West was strong and the relations were clear with the Cold War…. President Biden is the old, great trans-Atlanticist."

  July 13, 2023 (Thursday)

Yesterday, Trump supporter James Ray Epps, Sr., sued the Fox News Network for having “destroyed” the lives of Epps and his wife. The suit blames the network for lying to its viewers that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, a lie that inspired Epps to travel from his home in Arizona to Washington, D.C., to protest on January 6, 2021.

In the aftermath of the riot, the suit says, “[h]aving promoted the lie that Joe Biden stole the election, having urged people to come to Washington, DC, and having helped light and then pour gasoline on a fire that resulted in an insurrection that interfered with the peaceful transition of power, Fox needed to mask its culpability. It also needed a narrative that did not alienate its viewers, who had grown distrustful of Fox because of its perceived lack of fealty to Trump.” And so, the suit says, the network—especially personality Tucker Carlson—turned on Epps, “promoting the lie that Epps was a federal agent who incited the attack on the Capitol” even after federal officials had cleared him.  

Epps is requesting compensatory and punitive damages, as well as court costs.

In April the Fox Corporation settled a lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems for defamation after Fox News personalities falsely claimed the voting machine system had switched votes meant for Trump. Fox paid $787.5 million. Fox and several of its on-air personalities are still facing a $2.7 billion lawsuit from another voting company, Smartmatic, for their disinformation campaign involving that company.

Both Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic are also suing MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, who used his fortune to promote the idea that the election was stolen. Lindell vowed, “I’ll spend everything I have to save the country I love.” Tuesday, James Bickerton of Newsweek reported that Lindell claims he has lost $100 million and is selling off equipment after major retailers stopped carrying his products.

In Reliable Sources, CNN journalist Oliver Darcy reported today that three men associated with Rupert Murdoch in the early days of creating the Fox Corporation expressed their “deep disappointment for helping to give birth to Fox Broadcasting Company.” Preston Padden, Ken Solomon, and Bill Reyner wrote that they “never envisioned, and would not knowingly have enabled, the disinformation machine that, in our opinion, Fox has become.”

In emails, Murdoch made it “very clear” to Padden “that he understood that the 2020 election had not been stolen,” but “Fox continued to perpetuate the ‘Big Lie’ and promote the Jan 6 ‘Stop the Steal’ rally in D.C.” The men claimed that others who worked with them to establish Fox “share our resentment that the reputation of the Fox brand we helped to build has been ruined by false news.”

Padden told Darcy that he sees an "obvious connection between January 6 and Fox News.”

Despite the costs of their past false allegations, the Fox News Channel continues to be a conduit for Trump’s misinformation. As Judd Legum wrote today in Popular Information, some of the same figures who pushed the Big Lie are continuing to push the story that President Biden took money from China, despite the fact the “informant” who provided that story has now been indicted as a Chinese spy and is on the run from U.S. authorities.

“A responsible news organization would respond to the indictment of a key source with self-reflection and incorporate new facts into their reporting,” Legum writes. “But not Fox News. When facts arise that cut against their narrative, Fox News simply enlarges their conspiracy theory to accommodate them.” Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have called for an investigation into whether the Republicans on the committee have been duped by Chinese operatives.

The upcoming election is in the news not only because of the role of disinformation in our elections, but also because of voting challenges. Today, Sam Levine and Andrew Witherspoon of The Guardian reported that Florida Republicans are cracking down on voter registration groups that focus on people of color, levying more than $100,000 in fines since September 2022 on 26 groups for errors like submitting an application to the wrong county. Voter registrations have dropped compared to 2019, the most recent year preceding a presidential election.

A study by Doug Bock Clark today in ProPublica showed that about 89,000 of close to 100,000 challenges to voter registrations in Georgia were filed by just six right-wing activists. Most of the rest of the challenges came from just twelve more people. Those making the challenges were helped by right-wing organizations, and they appeared to target those believed to vote for Democrats.

House Republicans traveled to Georgia on Monday to reveal what they call the “most conservative election integrity bill to be seriously considered in the House in over 20 years.” Four of the five Republicans on the House Administration Committee pushing the bill voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Committee markup on the bill began today.

Also today, in New York, the appellate division of the state Supreme Court has ordered the state to draw new congressional maps. In 2022 an independent redistricting commission deadlocked, and the state legislature, controlled by Democrats, drew districts that were so favorable to their party that Republican challenges won and the courts turned to a neutral expert to draw the districts. The resulting lines created highly competitive districts in which a number of Republicans won.

Now the court says that map was temporary and the commission should take another crack at redistricting. If it deadlocks again, Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo explained, the Democrat-dominated legislature can draw its own map and, so long as it stays within the court’s rules, might enable Democrats to pick up additional seats in New York to offset Republican gerrymanders elsewhere.

A rare bellwether for the election came from Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in a Washington Post op-ed on July 10, arguing that the Supreme Court is not, in fact, radical; it is, just as always, “a politically unpredictable center.” McConnell claims the Democrats want the court to “advance their party’s priorities” while instead it “weighs each case on its merits.”  

Washington Post legal columnist Ruth Marcus sees McConnell’s attempt to minimize his own transformation of a center-right Supreme Court into a hard-right body as a sign that he recognizes the extremism of the court might well cost him the chance to regain the position of Senate majority leader. It was McConnell, after all, who blocked President Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court in March 2016, arguing against all precedent that an appointment in March was too close to the 2016 presidential election. That stonewalling gave Trump the opportunity to nominate Neil Gorsuch. Then, in 2020, McConnell rushed through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett in late October when voting in the presidential election was already underway.

“Two seats that should have gone to Democratic presidents were instead handed to Trump,” Marcus notes. “Thank you, Senator McConnell.” She continued: “And the new justices delivered. Abortion rights, gone. Affirmative action, gone. Gun rights, dramatically expanded. The administrative state, deconstruction underway. Religious liberties, triumphant; separation of church and state, not so much. Does this sound 'ideologically unpredictable' to you?”

Marcus notes that these decisions, particularly the overturning of abortion rights, are unpopular, perhaps sparking McConnell’s eagerness to downplay the significance of his remaking of the court. Indeed, in Iowa, the first state to hold a Republican caucus, the state legislature just rushed through a ban on abortions after six weeks, before most people know they’re pregnant.

In Iowa, more than 60% of adults say abortion should be legal, while just 35% say it should be illegal. Nationally, an AP/NORC poll conducted in late June showed that only about 23% of Americans support a full ban on abortions.

Today, in a move that should significantly expand access to contraception, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved over-the-counter birth control pills for the first time. Seventeen FDA advisors from different scientific disciplines voted unanimously in May to expand access, saying that this type of pill, which contains the hormone progestin, has been used safely in the U.S. for 50 years and that its 93% success rate offers the significant public health benefit of preventing unintended pregnancies. The pills are expected to become available sometime in 2024.

  July 15, 2023 (Saturday)

[Warning: the 13th paragraph of this piece, beginning “They did,” graphically describes racial violence.]

July 16 marks the 160th anniversary of the most destructive riot in U.S. history. On July 13, 1863, certain Democrats in New York City rose up against the Lincoln administration. Four days later, at least 119 people were dead, another 2,000 wounded. Rioters destroyed between $1 and $5 million in property including about fifty buildings, two churches, and an asylum for orphaned Black children. In today’s dollars, that would be between $20 million and about $96 million in damage.

While the Republican and Democratic parties swapped ideologies almost exactly 100 years after the New York City draft riots, the questions of state and federal power, race, and political narratives, and how those things came together in the United States are still with us.

The story of the draft riots began years before 1863. As soon as South Carolina’s leaders announced in late December 1860 that the state was seceding from the Union, New York City’s Democratic leaders made it clear they sympathized with those white southerners who opposed the idea that the federal government had the power to stop the spread of enslavement. In early January 1861, just days after South Carolina announced it was leaving the Union, before any other state joined it, and months before Republican Abraham Lincoln took office, New York City Democratic Mayor Fernando Wood proposed that New York City should secede from the Union, too.

By 1858 the city was at the center of the cotton trade (the roots of the Lehman Brothers financial services firm, which collapsed spectacularly in 2008, were in pre–Civil War cotton trading), its harbor full of ships carrying cotton and the products it enabled enslavers to buy from Europe. Democrats, organized as Tammany Hall, controlled New York City thanks to the votes of workingmen, especially Irish immigrants.

By 1860, Democrats were losing ground to the Republicans, who rose rapidly to national power after 1854. Republicans believed that the Constitution protected slavery in the South but that Congress could stop the institution from moving to newly acquired lands in the West. Republicans controlled New York state.

In his address to the Common Council of the city calling for it to create a “Free City” of New York, Wood declared that “a dissolution of the Federal Union is inevitable” and claimed the city had “friendly relations and a common sympathy” with the “Slave States.” But his call was not only about the South. He complained bitterly about the government of New York state. He opposed the taxes the Republican legislature had levied, claiming it was plundering the city to “enrich their speculators, lobby agents, and Abolition politicians.” Wood claimed that New York City had lost the right of self-government. If it broke off from the United States, he argued, the city could “live free from taxes, and have cheap goods….”

Wood’s call didn’t get much traction on its own, but for the next two or three months it did prompt New Yorkers to argue about how much the federal government should offer to the southern states to induce them to return. That all changed when Confederate forces under General P.G.T. Beauregard fired on federal Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. New Yorkers rushed to support the United States. In the largest public meeting held until that point in U.S. history, more than 100,000 people rallied in Union Square, a spot historian of Union Square Michael Shapiro notes they chose in part because of its name.

Growing Republican strength created a problem for Democrats. Republicans were attracting workingmen by promising to keep the West free for folks like them rather than hand it over to a few wealthy enslavers. And now the city was rallying behind the Republican war effort.

To hold on to their voters and thus to their power in New York City, Democratic leaders hammered on the idea that the Republicans intended to set Black Americans up over white men. In September 1862, Lincoln’s preliminary emancipation proclamation, issued at a time when Black men were prohibited from service in the army, enabled Democrats to argue that the Republicans were sending white men to their deaths for Black people.

Their racist argument worked: Lincoln’s Republicans got shellacked in the 1862 midterm elections, in part because of the Union’s terrible losses on the battlefields that year, but also because of the relentless racist campaign of the Democrats. Nonetheless, Lincoln went forward with the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Furious, Democrats harped on the devastating news from the battlefields, where men were dying in firefights and of disease.

Then, in March, Congress passed a federal draft that took enrollment of soldiers away from the states and included all male citizens from ages 20 to 35 and all unmarried men between 35 and 45 in a lottery for military service. Because the Supreme Court had decided in 1857 that Black men were not citizens, they were not included in the draft. New York City’s Democratic leaders, led now by Mayor George Opdyke, railed against the federal government and its willingness to slaughter white men for Black people.

The Republican New York Times, in contrast, called the draft a “national blessing” that would settle, once and for all, whether the government was strong enough to compel men to fight for it. As for the Democrats threatening to stop the government’s enrollment of soldiers, the editor of the New York Times scoffed: “Let them do their worst.”

They did. The first lottery was held on July 11, and on the morning of July 13, Democrats attacked federal draft officers with rocks and clubs. Rioters then spread through the city, burning the homes and businesses of prominent Republicans. Storm clouds rolled up in the afternoon, mingling with the smoke to turn everything dark. Late in the day, the rioters turned their wrath onto the city’s Black residents. After burning the Orphan Asylum for Colored Children, they hunted down individual Black men, beating 12 to death before attacking a cart driver who stumbled into their path after putting up his horses. Symbolically killing him three times, several hundred men and boys beat him to death, then hanged him, then set fire to the body.  

The rioters had thought they represented the will of the American people, only to find themselves confronted by U.S soldiers, including a number from New York. The soldiers had come straight from the battlefields to help put down the riots.

In fact, the tide of the war had abruptly turned just before the draft riots. At the Battle of Gettysburg in early July, U.S. soldiers wiped out a third of Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s fighting force. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg, Mississippi, surrendered to General U.S. Grant, giving the Union control of the Mississippi River and cutting the Confederacy in half, making it difficult for the Confederacy to move food, goods, and troops. The rioters seemed to be attacking the government just as it started to win.

And then, just two days after the draft riots ended, on July 18 the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment took heavy losses in an assault against Battery Wagner protecting Charleston Harbor. The Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts was one of the nation’s first Black regiments, raised after the Emancipation Proclamation permitted Black men to join the army. It suffered 42% casualties in the battle, losing more than 270 of the 650 soldiers who fought there. “The splendid 54th is cut to pieces,” wrote Frederick Douglass’s son Lewis, a soldier of the regiment. “The grape and canister shell and Minnie swept us down like chaff…but still our men went on and on.”

The contrast between white mobs railing against the government and murdering their Black neighbors while Black soldiers fought and died to defend the United States was stark. No fair-minded person could miss it.

  July 17, 2023 (Monday)

A story in the New York Times today by Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, and Maggie Haberman outlined how former president Donald Trump and his allies are planning to create a dictatorship if voters return him to power in 2024. The article talks about how Trump and his loyalists plan to “centralize more power in the Oval Office” by “increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.”

They plan to take control over independent government agencies and get rid of the nonpartisan civil service, purging all but Trump loyalists from the U.S. intelligence agencies, the State Department, and the Defense Department. They plan to start “impounding funds,” that is, ignoring programs Congress has funded if those programs aren’t in line with Trump’s policies.

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” said Russell T. Vought, who ran Trump’s Office of Management and Budget and who now advises the right-wing House Freedom Caucus. They envision a “president” who cannot be checked by the Congress or the courts.

Trump’s desire to grab the mechanics of our government and become a dictator is not new; both scholars and journalists have called it out since the early years of his administration. What is new here is the willingness of so-called establishment Republicans to support this authoritarian power grab.

Behind this initiative is “Project 2025,” a coalition of more than 65 right-wing organizations putting in place personnel and policies to recommend not just to Trump, but to any Republican who may win in 2024. Project 2025 is led by the Heritage Foundation, once considered a conservative think tank, that helped to lead the Reagan revolution.

A piece by Alexander Bolton in The Hill today said that Republican senators are “worried” by the MAGAs, but they have been notably silent in public at a time when every elected leader should be speaking out against this plot. Their silence suggests they are on board with it, as Trump apparently hoped to establish.

The party appears to have fully embraced the antidemocratic ideology advanced by authoritarian leaders like Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán, who argue that the post–World War II era, in which democracy seemed to triumph, is over. They claim that the tenets of democracy—equality before the law, free speech, academic freedom, a market-based economy, immigration, and so on—weaken a nation by destroying a “traditional” society based in patriarchy and Christianity.

Instead of democracy, they have called for “illiberal” or “Christian” democracy, which uses the government to enforce their beliefs in a Christian, patriarchal order. What that looks like has a clear blueprint in the actions of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who has gathered extraordinary power into his own hands in the state and used that power to mirror Orbán’s destruction of democracy.

DeSantis has pushed through laws that ban abortion after six weeks, before most people know they’re pregnant; banned classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity (the “Don’t Say Gay” law); prevented recognition of transgender individuals; made it easier to sentence someone to death; allowed people to carry guns without training or permits; banned colleges and businesses from conversations about race; exerted control over state universities; made it harder for his opponents to vote, and tried to punish Disney World for speaking out against the Don’t Say Gay law. After rounding up migrants and sending them to other states, DeSantis recently has called for using “deadly force” on migrants crossing unlawfully.

Because all the institutions of our democracy are designed to support the tenets of democracy, right-wingers claim those institutions are weaponized against them. House Republicans are running hearings designed to prove that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice are both “weaponized” against Republicans. It doesn’t matter that they don’t seem to have any evidence of bias: the very fact that those institutions support democracy mean they support a system that right-wing Republicans see as hostile.

“Our current executive branch,” Trump loyalist John McEntee, who is in charge of planning to pack the government with Trump loyalists, told the New York Times reporters, “was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”

It has taken decades for the modern-day Republican Party to get to a place where it rejects democracy. The roots of that rejection lie all the way back in the 1930s, when Democrats under Franklin Delano Roosevelt embraced a government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and promoted infrastructure. That system ushered in a period from 1933 to 1981 that economists call the “Great Compression,” when disparities of income and wealth were significantly reduced, especially after the government also began to protect civil rights.

Members of both parties embraced this modern government in this period, and Americans still like what it accomplished. But businessmen who hated regulation joined with racists who hated federal protection of civil rights and traditionalists who opposed women’s rights and set out to destroy that government.

In West Palm Beach, Florida, last weekend, at the Turning Points Action Conference, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) compared President Biden’s Build Back Better plan to President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society programs, which invested in “education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and welfare, the Office of Economic Opportunity, and big labor and labor unions.” She noted that under Biden, the U.S. has made “the largest public investment in social infrastructure and environmental programs, that is actually finishing what FDR started, that LBJ expanded on, and Joe Biden is attempting to complete.”

Well, yeah.

Greene incorrectly called this program “socialism,” which in fact means government ownership of production, as opposed to the government’s provision of benefits people cannot provide individually, a concept first put into practice in the United States by Abraham Lincoln and later expanded by leadership in both parties. The administration has stood firmly behind the idea—shared by LBJ and FDR, and also by Republicans Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower, among others—that investing in programs that enable working people to prosper is the best way to strengthen the economy.

Certainly, Greene’s speech didn’t seem to be the “gotcha” that she apparently hoped. A March 2023 poll by independent health policy pollster KFF, for example, found that 80% of Americans like Social Security, 81% like Medicare, and 76% like Medicaid, a large majority of members of all political parties.  

The White House Twitter account retweeted a clip of Greene’s speech, writing: “Caught us. President Biden is working to make life easier for hardworking families.”

   July 18, 2023 (Tuesday)

“I approve this message.”

Joe Biden’s Twitter account put that line over an ad using the words of Georgia Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Turning Points Action Conference speech from last weekend, in which she set out to tear down the president’s policies but ended up making him sound terrific.

The description she intended to be derogatory—that Biden “had the largest public investment in social infrastructure and environmental programs that is actually finishing what FDR started, that LBJ expanded on”—was such an argument in Biden’s favor that the Biden-Harris campaign used it to advertise what the Democratic administration stands for: “[p]rograms to address education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid, labor unions.”

Generally, Biden and Harris have so far made the case for their reelection by meeting with voters in their home districts, emphasizing job growth and infrastructure investment in those districts, seemingly trying to demonstrate—without fanfare—that a well-run Democratic government can help ordinary Americans. But Greene’s misfire was just too good not to highlight. The programs she was denigrating are, in fact, enormously popular.

Biden has generally stayed out of the headlines that involve the 2024 election, giving Republicans free rein to define themselves for the American people.

That definition became clearer this morning, when former president Trump wrote on the right-wing Truth Social network that the Department of Justice’s special counsel Jack Smith has issued him a target letter associated with the investigation into the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. A target letter usually means that prosecutors have enough evidence to charge someone with a crime. It offered Trump four days to appear before the grand jury to tell his side of the story, an offer Trump is expected to refuse.

Then, it is likely that he will be indicted.

Trump reacted exactly as one would expect, called Smith “deranged,” and claiming his own legal troubles were political: an attempt on the part of President Biden to eliminate his chief 2024 rival. (There is no sign that Biden has touched the investigation, but of course Trump tried to eliminate Biden in 2020 by pushing Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden’s work with Ukrainian company Burisma.)

Trump harped on the idea that the investigation into his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election is “A COMPLETE AND TOTAL WEAPONIZATION OF LAW ENFORCEMENT,” an accusation echoed by Trump loyalists Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Marjorie Taylor Greene, both of whom were also involved in the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) also echoed the accusation that the target letter is a sign of political “weaponization” of government, prompting Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) to respond: “As Speaker, you are expected to uphold the rule of law. A target letter does not reveal what evidence the grand jury saw, nor what all the charges might be. Attacking a potential indictment before seeing the evidence and charges is irresponsible.”

But if Trump received the target letter on Sunday, why did he complain about it only today?

That delay might have had something to do with another legal issue: today’s hearing about the national security documents case, overseen by Judge Aileen Cannon. One of the issues to be discussed at that hearing was setting a date for the trial. The Department of Justice wants to go to trial in December; Trump wants to delay it until after the 2024 election.

MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin noted that today’s target letter changes the calculations for the documents trial because no matter what Cannon decides, it seems likely that Trump will face another federal trial in Washington, D.C., over the events surrounding January 6, 2021. The Washington, D.C., trials for those involved in the events of January 6, 2021, have moved forward with few delays.

This week’s bad legal news for Trump did not end there.

On Friday of last week, Trump’s lawyers tried to stop Georgia’s probe into his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in that state. They asked the court to disqualify Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis, who has been investigating that attempt, and to stop Willis from using any of the material gathered by the grand jury investigating the case. Yesterday, the Georgia Supreme Court unanimously rejected his petition, allowing the probe to go forward.

Then, today, Michigan’s attorney general Dana Nessel charged sixteen fake electors who signed fake certificates claiming that Trump had won Michigan’s electoral votes in 2020 with felonies: forgery, conspiracy to commit forgery, election law forgery, conspiracy to commit election law forgery, publishing a counterfeit record, and conspiring to publish a counterfeit record.

The sixteen Republicans met in the basement of the state Republican Party’s headquarters and signed fake documents claiming that they were the state’s legitimate electors and that Trump had won the state. Their actions were part of a plan to claim that the electoral votes of certain states were “contested,” allowing then–vice president Mike Pence to reject the votes of those states and throw the election to Trump.

The fake electors attested they were “the duly elected and qualified electors for president and vice president of the United States of America for the state of Michigan,” Nessel said. “That was a lie. They weren’t the duly elected and qualified electors, and each of the defendants knew it.” "The false electors' actions undermine the public's faith in the integrity of our elections and not only violated the spirit of the laws enshrining and defending our democracy, but we believe also plainly violated the laws by which we administer our elections in Michigan and peaceably transfer power in America,” Nessel said. “This plan, to reject the will of the voters and undermine democracy, was fraudulent and legally baseless.”

Text messages at the time show that the sixteen were “all asked to keep silent [so] as to not draw attention to what the other states were doing similar to ours!” One of those charged was former co-chair of the state Republican committee, Meshawn Maddock, who called the charges “political persecution.”   

Legal analyst Renato Mariotti noted that the charges against the sixteen fake electors send a powerful message for those at the state level who might consider abetting Trump in the future. Those fake electors aren’t part of Trump’s inner circle who might get some kind of a reward for their trouble. They are just party operatives who are facing an expensive, stressful, and humiliating experience that could lead to hefty fines or imprisonment. Their example might well make others think carefully before they sign on to similar plans.

Josh Marshall pointed out in Talking Points Memo today that the lines of the 2024 election are coming clearer. Trump’s many legal troubles simply strengthen the loyalty of his base, making his nomination for the Republican presidential candidacy even more likely. But voters in the general election are unlikely to rally to someone facing multiple indictments in several different cases, especially ones related to the attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, which horrified most Americans.

The Republican Party is now “handcuffed to Donald Trump,” Marshall writes.

President Biden’s policy of focusing on his job while letting the Republicans define themselves might be a smart strategy.

  July 20, 2023 (Thursday)

Russian president Vladimir Putin’s decision not to attend the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, illustrates how fully his 2022 invasion of Ukraine has made him an international pariah. BRICS is an organization made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, all considered fast-growing economies that would dominate the global economy by 2050 at the time it began to organize in 2006.

A lot has changed since then.

Because the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued an arrest warrant for Putin for war crimes, specifically his regime’s deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia, he was at risk of arrest and extradition if he went to South Africa. Although that country has maintained neutrality in the war, it signed on to the treaty governing the ICC and thus has an obligation to arrest and surrender those under indictment by the ICC.

After much speculation about whether he would attend the summit while he pressured South African president Cyril Ramaphosa to agree not to arrest him, yesterday Putin announced that by “mutual agreement” with Ramaphosa, he will not attend and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov will go in his place. Alexandra Sharp of Foreign Policy noted that his inability to attend the summit shows how his position as an accused war criminal has isolated Putin and “highlights just how much the Russian leader’s global standing has changed thanks to his war on Ukraine.”

Also yesterday, the U.S. Department of Defense announced another security assistance package for Ukraine, worth $1.3 billion and including surface to air missile systems, mine-clearing equipment, fuel trucks, and tactical vehicles to tow, haul, and recover equipment. That matériel will take time to provide, but much of it signals an army retaking territory.

As if to demonstrate what power he has left, Putin’s forces attacked the key Ukrainian shipping ports of Mykolaiv and Odesa, destroying 60,000 tons of grain that Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said was destined for Africa and Asia, including China. Then Putin announced that he was ending Russian participation in the Black Sea Grain Initiative as of July 20 and would consider any ships that sailed to or from Ukraine’s ports on the Black Sea a “Hostile Military Transport.” Putin’s declaration that he might target the civilian ships of foreign powers threatened to escalate the war, but he quickly backed down on that threat today. Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. said Russia is not preparing to attack civilian ships.

The Black Sea grain deal, which facilitates the export of Ukrainian grain to the world market so long as the ships travel in certain channels, already gave Russia more influence over international shipping than its 10% of the Black Sea coastline warranted. And, to maintain that control, Russia planted sea mines in the waters around Ukrainian ports outside the safe channels.

Now the White House has warned that U.S. officials have information that Russia has added more mines in those waters with the intention of blaming Ukraine if those mines cause damage to foreign ships.

There are (at least) three key aspects of this announcement. First, Putin is threatening vulnerable countries with starvation and trying to jack up grain prices around the world, which will hit all countries but primarily poorer ones. The United Kingdom’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Barbara Woodward, pointed out that 33 million tons of grain have been exported under the grain deal, and that the primary beneficiaries have been Ethiopia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Turkey, Sudan, Kenya, and Somalia.

Second, he was daring the other countries on the Black Sea, three of which belong to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), to call his bluff.

Third, he is trying to destroy Ukrainian shipping infrastructure to hamstring its post-war future. Odesa is a historic and fabled city; it is also the key to shipping grain out of Ukraine. Capturing it, with its symbolic and practical value, was likely Putin’s primary goal in the first place. His willingness to destroy the city seems to indicate that he has given up on claiming it.

In response, Ukrainian forces began to use the so-called cluster munitions the U.S. provided earlier this month, firing the weapons at the Russian troops in Ukraine. Cluster munitions explode over a target, blanketing a large area with deadly smaller munitions. They are banned in more than 120 countries because those smaller munitions often hit the ground unexploded and lie there until civilians run across them, with deadly results.

Ukraine, Russia, and the U.S. have not banned the weapons, and Ukraine asked the U.S. to provide them for use within Ukraine, against Russian troops. Biden did so, after months of debate within the White House and strong disagreement from those who want the weapons banned altogether. President Biden eventually decided to send the cluster munitions, apparently in part because the areas of Ukraine where they would be deployed are already uninhabitable because of Russian mines and in part because Ukrainians themselves requested the weapons to throw out the Russian invaders, who have been using cluster munitions against Ukrainian civilians.

“Of course it’s a tragedy, but everything right now is a tragedy,” former defense minister of Ukraine Andriy Zagorodnyuk told Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo about using the munitions. “So the question is how to end the tragedy and, unfortunately, the only way so far to get peace is to win the peace.”

The U.S. Treasury and the U.S. State Department today announced additional sanctions on companies that have given Russia access to products that feed the war, provide revenue from minerals and mining, give it access to the international financial system, or provide military technology.

  July 22, 2023 (Saturday)

The Florida Board of Education approved new state social studies standards on Wednesday, including standards for African American history, civics and government, American history, and economics. Critics immediately called out the middle school instruction in African American history that includes “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” (p. 6). They noted that describing enslavement as offering personal benefits to enslaved people is outrageous.

But that specific piece of instruction in the 216-page document is only a part of a much larger political project.

Taken as a whole, the Florida social studies curriculum describes a world in which the white male Founders of the United States embraced ideals of liberty and equality—ideals it falsely attributes primarily to Christianity rather than the Enlightenment—and indicates the country’s leaders never faltered from those ideals. Students will, the guidelines say, learn “how the principles contained in foundational documents contributed to the expansion of civil rights and liberties over time” (p. 148) and “analyze how liberty and economic freedom generate broad-based opportunity and prosperity in the United States” (p.154).

The new guidelines reject the idea that human enslavement belied American principles; to the contrary, they note, enslavement was common around the globe, and they credit white abolitionists in the United States with ending it (although in reality the U.S. was actually a late holdout). Florida students should learn to base the history of U.S. enslavement in “Afro-Eurasian trade routes” and should be instructed in “how slavery was utilized in Asian, European, and African cultures,” as well as how European explorers discovered “systematic slave trading in Africa.” Then the students move on to compare “indentured servants of European and African extraction” (p. 70) before learning about overwhelmingly white abolitionist movements to end the system.

In this account, once slavery arrived in the U.S., it was much like any other kind of service work: slaves performed “various duties and trades…(agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).” (p. 6) (This is where the sentence about personal benefit comes in.) And in the end, it was white reformers who ended it.

This information lies by omission and lack of context. The idea of Black Americans who “developed skills” thanks to enslavement, for example, erases at the most basic level that the history of cattle farming, river navigation, rice and indigo cultivation, southern architecture, music, and so on in this country depended on the skills and traditions of African people.

Lack of context papers over that while African tribes did practice enslavement, for example, it was an entirely different system from the hereditary and unequal one that developed in the U.S. Black enslavement was not the same as indentured servitude except perhaps in the earliest years of the Chesapeake settlements when both were brutal—historians argue about this— and Indigenous enslavement was distinct from servitude from the very beginning of European contact. Some enslaved Americans did in fact work in the trades, but far more worked in the fields (and suggesting that enslavement was a sort of training program is, indeed, outrageous). And not just white abolitionists but also Black abolitionists and revolutionaries helped to end enslavement.

Taken together, this curriculum presents human enslavement as simply one of a number of labor systems, a system that does not, in this telling, involve racism or violence.

Indeed, racism is presented only as “the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on individual freedoms.” This is the language of right-wing protesters who say acknowledging white violence against others hurts their children, and racial violence is presented here as coming from both Black and white Americans, a trope straight out of accounts of white supremacists during Reconstruction (p. 17). To the degree Black Americans faced racial restrictions in that era, Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans did, too (pp. 117–118).
 
It’s hard to see how the extraordinary violence of Reconstruction, especially, fits into this whitewashed version of U.S. history, but the answer is that it doesn’t. In a single entry an instructor is called to: “Explain and evaluate the policies, practices, and consequences of Reconstruction (presidential and congressional reconstruction, Johnson's impeachment, Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, opposition of Southern whites to Reconstruction, accomplishments and failures of Radical Reconstruction, presidential election of 1876, end of Reconstruction, rise of Jim Crow laws, rise of Ku Klux Klan)” (p.104).

That’s quite a tall order.

But that’s not the end of Reconstruction in the curriculum. Another unit calls for students to “distinguish the freedoms guaranteed to African Americans and other groups with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution…. Assess how Jim Crow Laws influenced life for African Americans and other racial/ethnic minority groups…. Compare the effects of the Black Codes…on freed people, and analyze the sharecropping system and debt peonage as practiced in the United States…. Review the Native American experience” (pp.116–117).

Apparently, Reconstruction was not a period that singled out the Black population, and in any case, Reconstruction was quick and successful. White Floridians promptly extend rights to Black people: another learning outcome calls for students to “explain how the 1868 Florida Constitution conformed with the Reconstruction Era amendments to the U.S. Constitution (e.g., citizenship, equal protection, suffrage)” (p.109).

All in all, racism didn’t matter to U.S. history, apparently, because “different groups of people ([for example] African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, women) had their civil rights expanded through legislative action…executive action…and the courts.”

The use of passive voice in that passage identifies how the standards replace our dynamic and powerful history with political fantasy. In this telling, centuries of civil rights demands and ceaseless activism of committed people disappear. Marginalized Americans did not work to expand their own rights; those rights “were expanded.” The actors, presumably the white men who changed oppressive laws, are offstage.

And that is the fundamental story of this curriculum: nonwhite Americans and women “contribute” to a country established and controlled by white men, but they do not shape it themselves.

  July 25, 2023 (Tuesday)

President Biden’s determination to “build the economy from the middle out and the bottom up,” appears to be paying off. Last Friday the global financial services company Morgan Stanley credited Biden’s policies with driving a boom in large-scale infrastructure and manufacturing, a boom large enough that Morgan Stanley revised its gross domestic product growth projections upward to 1.9%, a projection almost four times higher than its original projection.

Analysts doubled their projections for the fourth quarter, and raised forecasts for next year, as well. “The economy in the first half of the year is growing much stronger than we had anticipated,” Morgan Stanley’s chief U.S. economist Ellen Zentner wrote.

Part of their reasoning comes from a surge in manufacturing construction across the country thanks to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which invests in roads, bridges, and other “hard” infrastructure projects; the Inflation Reduction Act, which invests in addressing climate change; and the CHIPS and Science Act, which invests in science and semiconductor chip manufacturing. During the 2010s, manufacturing construction generally held at about $50–80 billion a year. Now it is at $189 billion, with private investment following the government investment.

In half of the U.S. states, job creation is strong and unemployment is at or near 50-year lows, while lowering inflation rates has helped U.S. consumer confidence to rise to its highest level in two years (an important marker because consumer spending makes up about 70% of U.S. economic activity).

Today, the Teamsters union announced it has reached an agreement with United Parcel Service to avoid a major strike of as many as 340,000 workers. The tentative five-year agreement increases wages, including those for part-time employees, which was a sticking point in negotiations. Teamsters members still need to approve this deal, but Biden applauded the two sides for reaching an agreement by negotiating in good faith.

The agreement, Biden said, is “a testament to the power of employers and employees coming together to work out their differences at the bargaining table in a manner that helps businesses succeed while helping workers secure pay and benefits they can raise a family on and retire with dignity and respect.”

At the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan organization devoted to building a more dynamic U.S. economy, Daniel Newman reported yesterday that “[i]ndividuals filed nearly 2.7 million applications to start a business between January and June of this year, a 5 percent increase over 2022 and a staggering 52 percent increase over the same period in 2019.” He noted that “[t]he durability and growth of the startup surge is quite striking” and that nearly every major industry sector is participating in it.

Historically, Newman notes, “there is a tight correlation between the number of applications and true business formation.” “The sustained boost to entrepreneurship observed across much of the country since 2020 should produce a sense of optimism for a healthier, more dynamic economy in the coming years.”

Biden has always emphasized the importance of a healthy economy that gives workers breathing room and the ability to live with dignity.

But the administration’s reworking of the nation has not stopped there. Vice President Kamala Harris has stood firm on visibly honoring the nation’s commitment to equality before the law, and Biden has followed suit. Together, they have recalled the multicultural vision of the years from World War II to 1980, when the nation celebrated the power of its diversity.

On July 16, Harris spoke in Chicago at the retirement of the Reverend Jesse Jackson from the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, a civil rights organization he founded in 1971. Celebrating Jackson’s storied career, from his years as a protege of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., to creating Rainbow/PUSH, to running for president and critiquing the policies of the Republican Party, Harris noted that Jackson’s work rested on “the belief that the diversity of our nation is not a weakness or an afterthought, but instead, our greatest strength.”

“In his life’s work,” she said, Jackson “has reinforced that no matter who we are or where we come from, we have so much more in common than what separates us.” Jackson “has [brought] and continues to bring together people of all backgrounds: Black Americans, Asian Americans, Latino Americans, farmers, LGBTQ+ Americans, Native Americans, women, labor union members, people with disabilities, our young leaders, and people around the world.”

He created “[a] coalition to push the values of democracy and liberty and equality and justice not from the top down, but from the bottom up and the outside in…. He has built coalitions that expanded who has a voice and a seat at the table. And in so doing, he has expanded our democracy—the democracy of our nation.”

But, Harris warned, extremists are threatening that expansion of democracy, seeking “to divide us as a nation,… to attack the importance of diversity and equity and inclusion.” “[I]n these dark moments,” she said, “history shines a light on our path.” “[O]ur ability to stand together is our strength. Our ability to unify as many peoples is our strength.  And the heroes of this moment will be those who bring us together in coalition; those who know that one’s strength is not measured based on who you beat down, but who you lift up.”  

Vice President Harris today opened an event to mark Biden’s designation of a national monument in honor of Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, in a searing reminder of what those determined to make the United States a country defined by white supremacy can do. “We gather to remember an act of astonishing violence and hate and to honor the courage of those who called upon…our nation to look with open eyes at that horror and to act,” Harris said.

In August 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, a Black boy from Chicago, was visiting relatives in a small Mississippi town. After the wife of a white man named Roy Bryant accused the boy of flirting with her, Bryant and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, kidnapped Till, brutally beat him, mutilated him, shot him in the back of the head, and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River. The county sheriff directed that the body be buried quickly, but his mother insisted that her son’s body be returned to Chicago.

There, she insisted on an open-casket funeral. “Let the world see what I have seen,” she said.

Till’s murder became a symbol of what would happen if men were not called to account for their actions and a rallying cry to make sure such a society of white supremacists could not survive.

In March 2022, President Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, making lynching a federal hate crime. And he warned that “those who seek to ban books, bury history,” would not succeed. “[W]hile darkness and denialism can hide much,” he said, “they erase nothing.” And, he added, “only with truth comes healing, justice, repair, and another step forward toward forming a more perfect union.”  

Today, on what would have been Emmett Till’s eighty-second birthday, Biden established the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument. It covers three historic sites in Mississippi and Chicago: the site in Graball Landing, Mississippi, where Till’s body is believed to have been pulled from the Tallahatchie River; the Chicago church where mourners held Till’s funeral; and the courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where an all-white jury acquitted Bryant and Milam.

“We can’t just choose to learn what we want to know” about our history, Biden said. “We have to learn what we should know.  We should know about our country.  We should know everything: the good, the bad, the truth of who we are as a nation.  That’s what great nations do, and we are a great nation.”

  July 27, 2023 (Thursday)

More good news today for Bidenomics, as the gross domestic product report for the second quarter showed annualized growth of 2.4%, higher than projected, and inflation rose at a slower pace of 2.6%, down from last quarter and well below projections. Economic analyst Steven Rattner noted that as of the second quarter, “the US economy is over 6% larger than it was before COVID (after adjusting for inflation). At this point in the recovery from the Great Recession, 2011, the economy was just 0.7% larger than it had been in 2007.”

Both consumer spending and business investment, which is up 7.7% in real annualized terms, drove this growth. Business spending makes up a much smaller share of gross domestic product, but it drives future jobs and growth, and much of this growth is in manufacturing facilities. In keeping with that trend, the nation’s largest solar panel manufacturer, First Solar, announced today that it will build a fifth factory in the U.S. as alternative energy technology takes off. This commitment brings to more than $2.8 billion the amount First Solar has invested in the U.S. to ramp up production.

While so-called Bidenomics is designed to rebuild the middle class, the administration is also trying to reestablish fair ground rules for corporate behavior. Yesterday, the Departments of Justice, Commerce, and Treasury invited American businesses to come forward voluntarily if they think they might have violated U.S. sanctions, export controls, or other national security laws by sharing sensitive technology or helping sanctioned individuals launder money. Coming forward “can provide significant mitigation of civil or criminal liability,” the note says.

It highlighted the anti–money laundering and sanctions whistleblower program in the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN.

While many of us were watching the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., to see if an indictment was forthcoming against former president Trump for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, a different set of charges appeared tonight. Special counsel Jack Smith brought additional charges against Trump in connection with his retention of classified documents.

The new indictment alleges that Trump plotted to delete video from security cameras near the storage room where he had stored boxes containing classified documents, and did so after the Department of Justice subpoenaed that footage. That effort to delete the video involved a third co-conspirator, Carlos De Oliveira, who has been added to the case.

De Oliveira is a former valet at the Trump Organization’s Mar-a-Lago property who became property manager there in January 2022. Allegedly, he told another Trump employee that “the boss” wanted the server deleted and that the conversation should stay between the two of them.

In the Washington Post, legal columnist Ruth Marcus wrote, “The alleged conduct—yes, even after all these years of watching Trump flagrantly flout norms—is nothing short of jaw-dropping: Trump allegedly conspired with others to destroy evidence.” If the allegations hold up, “the former president is a common criminal—and an uncommonly stupid one.”

This superseding indictment reiterates the material from the original indictment, and as I reread it, it still blows my mind that Trump allegedly compromised national security documents from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (surveillance imagery), the National Reconnaissance Office (surveillance and maps), the Department of Energy (nuclear weapons), and the Department of State and Bureau of Intelligence and Research (diplomatic intelligence).

It sounds like he was a one-man wrecking ball, aimed at our national security.

The Justice Department has asked again for a protective order to protect the classified information at the heart of this case. In their request, they explained that, among other things, Trump wanted to be able to discuss that classified information with his lawyers outside a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, a room protected against electronic surveillance and data leakage.

Former deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division Peter Strzok noted that there is “[n]o better demonstration of Trump’s abject lack of understanding of—and disregard for—classified info and national security. He is *asking the Court* to waive the requirements for classified info that EVERY OTHER SINGLE CLEARANCE HOLDER IN THE UNITED STATES must follow.”  

The Senate today passed the $886 billion annual defense bill by a strong bipartisan margin of 86 to 11 after refusing to load it up with all the partisan measures Republican extremists added to the House bill. Now negotiators from the House and the Senate will try to hash out a compromise measure, but the bills are so far apart it is not clear they will be able to create a bipartisan compromise. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has passed on a bipartisan basis for more than 60 years.

The extremists in the House Republican conference continue to revolt against House speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) deal with the administration to raise the debt ceiling. They insist the future cuts to which McCarthy agreed are not steep enough, and demand more. This has sparked fighting among House Republicans; Emine Yücel of Talking Points Memo suggests that McCarthy’s new willingness to consider impeaching President Biden might be an attempt to cut a deal with the extremists.  

As the Senate is controlled by Democrats, the fight among the House Republicans threatens a much larger fight between the chambers because Democratic senators will not accept the demands of the extremist Republican representatives.

The House left for its August recess today without passing 11 of the 12 appropriations bills necessary to fund the government after September, setting up the conditions for a government shutdown this fall if they cannot pass the bills and negotiate with the Senate in the short time frame they’ve left. Far-right Republicans don’t much care, apparently. Representative Bob Good (R-VA) told reporters this week, “We should not fear a government shutdown… Most of what we do up here is bad anyway.”   

Representative Katherine Clark (D-MA), the second ranking Democrat in the House, disagreed. “The Republican conference is saying they are sending us home for six weeks without funding the government? That we have one bill…out of 12 completed because extremists are holding your conference hostage, and that’s not the full story: the extremists are holding the American people hostage. We will have twelve days…when we return to fund the government, to live up to the job the American people sent us here to do. This is a reckless march to a MAGA shutdown, and for what? In pursuit of a national abortion ban? Is that what we are doing here?

“The American people see through this. They know who is fighting for them, fighting for solutions…. Your time is coming. The American people are watching. They are going to demand accountability. We should be staying here, completing these appropriations bills, stripping out the toxic, divisive, bigoted riders that have been put on these bills and get[ting] back to work for freedom and for our economy and the American family.”