Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

July 1, 2025 (Tuesday)

Just after noon today, the Senate passed its version of the budget reconciliation bill. All Democrats and Independents voted no. Three Republicans—Susan Collins of Maine, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina—joined the Democrats in voting no. That left the bill at 50–50. Vice President J.D. Vance cast the deciding vote, pushing the measure through the Senate and sending it back to the House to vote on the changes made by the Senate.  

From the reporters’ gallery above the floor, CNN’s Sarah Ferris heard Senator Angus King (I-ME) yell to his Republican colleagues: “Shame on you guys. That was the most disgusting vote I’ve ever seen in my life.” 

The measure cuts taxes for the wealthy and corporations and offsets those cuts in part by slashing Medicaid and food security programs for low-income Americans. 

But there is at least one aspect of American life on which the bill is lavishing money. While the measure slashes public welfare programs, it pours $170.7 billion into immigration enforcement. The American Immigration Council broke out the numbers today:  The Senate bill provides $51.6 billion to build a wall on the border, more than three times what Trump spent on the wall in his first term. It provides $45 billion for detention facilities for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an increase of 265% in ICE’s annual detention budget. It provides $29.9 billion for ICE enforcement, a threefold increase in ICE’s annual budget. 

When Trump talks about undocumented migrants as being dangerous criminals, he appears to have bought into the fantasy that the U.S. is a hellscape. In fact, about 8% of arrested migrants have been convicted of violent crimes. The administration defines anyone who breaks immigration law—which is a misdemeanor, not a felony—as a criminal. One of the reasons for the push to get the bill passed before July 4 is that the Department of Homeland Security has blown through its budget and needs the bill’s additional funding to operate. 

While the Senate considered the budget reconciliation bill today, President Donald J. Trump visited the new detention facility in the Florida Everglades designed to hold 5,000 undocumented immigrants. The facility will cost $450 million a year, which will be reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The Florida attorney general who came up with the plan gave it the name “Alligator Alcatraz,” a cutesy name for tents filled with cages for undocumented immigrants. 

Standing in front of the cages with Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem laughing, Trump told reporters: “Biden wanted me in here…. It didn’t work out that way, but he wanted me in here, that son of a bitch.” 

This is nonsense, but it reveals Trump’s conviction that he is always a victim, his determination to destroy the rule of law that threatened to hold him accountable for his actions, and his own drive to imprison and destroy his political opponents. 

It was exactly a year ago today, on July 1, 2024, that the United States Supreme Court decided Donald J. Trump v. United States. The court’s majority overthrew the central premise of American democracy: that no one is above the law. 

It decided that the president of the United States, possibly the most powerful person on earth, has “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for crimes committed as part of the official acts at the core of presidential powers. The court also said it should be presumed that the president also has immunity for other official acts as well unless that prosecution would not intrude on the authority of the executive branch.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said that a president needs such immunity to make sure the president is willing to take “bold and unhesitating action” and make unpopular decisions, although no previous president ever asserted that he was above the law or that he needed such immunity to fulfill his role. Roberts’s decision didn’t focus at all on the interest of the American people in guaranteeing that presidents carry out their duties within the guardrails of the law. 

The Supreme Court had delayed issuing its decision in that case until the last possible moment, guaranteeing that Trump would not face trial in the two federal criminal cases pending against him, one charging him with willfully retaining national defense information by taking classified information with him when he left office, and the other for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. 

A year later, today provided a snapshot of what happens to a democracy when a president feels he can disregard the law.  
Trump’s Education Department announced today it is withholding $6.8 billion in funding for K–12 schools that, by law, was supposed to be disbursed starting today. By law, the executive branch must disburse appropriations Congress has passed, but Trump and his officers have simply ignored the law, saying they believe it is unconstitutional. The Constitution provides that Congress alone has the power to write laws and charges the president with taking “Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” 

Yesterday, Trump announced new Trump fragrances, perfumes and colognes for which he has licensed the use of his name. They retail for hundreds of dollars per 3.3 ounce bottle. Today, Zach Everson of Forbes reported that Trump Media & Technology Group is testing an international rollout of its streaming platform. The chief executive officer of Trump Media, former Republican congress member Devin Nunes, said in a statement: “International viewers who want to get the other side of the story will soon have an easy opportunity to do so.” 

Everson points out that Trump has slashed Voice of America, the largest international broadcaster in the U.S., raising questions about whether Trump’s business interests played a role in his decisions about the congressionally funded U.S. news source. 

But it was at a press conference in Ochopee, Florida, today that Trump showed just how profoundly the immunity conferred on him a year ago is undermining democracy.

Trump continues to say he will arrest and deport U.S. citizens to third countries. On April 14, a microphone picked up Trump’s comment to President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador that “homegrowns are next” after the undocumented immigrants Bukele was imprisoning for Trump. Today, Trump told reporters that “bad criminals” have migrated to the U.S., “but we also have a lot of bad people that have been here for a long time. People that whacked people over the head with a baseball bat from behind when they're not looking and kill them, people that knife you when you're walking down the street. They're not new to our country. They're old to our country. Many of them were born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too. You want to know the truth? So maybe that’ll be the next job that we'll work on together.”

He is also continuing to push the idea of attacking his political opponents. Today, Trump called for an investigation into Alejandro Mayorkas, homeland security secretary under President Joe Biden. He also threatened to arrest the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, if he doesn’t work with ICE agents to arrest migrants, although local and state governments have no legal obligation to work with federal immigration enforcement. Trump claimed—incorrectly—that Mamdani is a communist, and said that “a lot of people are saying he’s here illegally.” In fact, Mamdani is a naturalized citizen.

Today Alan Feuer and Adam Goldman of the New York Times reported that a former FBI agent, Jared Wise, who was charged with telling the January 6, 2021, rioters storming the Capitol to kill police officers, is working with the task force in the Justice Department set up as a way for President Trump to seek retribution against his political enemies.

Once a new system of detention facilities and ICE agents is established and the idea that a Republican president can legitimately attack his political opponents is accepted, a police state will be in place. 

In answer to the question “How many more facilities like this do you feel that the country needs in order to enact your agenda of mass deportations?” Trump said today: “Well, I think we'd like to see them in many states, really, many states. This one, I know Ron's doing a second one, at least a second one, and probably a couple of more. And, you know, at some point, they might morph into a system where you're going to keep it for a long time.”

Once that system is in place, it will not matter if Trump is able to do the work of the presidency. Today, a reporter from the Fox News Channel asked Trump about the new detention facility in the Everglades: “Mr. President, is there an expected time frame that detainees will spend here? Days, weeks, months?”

Trump answered: “In Florida? I'm going to spend a lot. Look, this is my home state. I love it, I love your government, I love all the people around. These are all friends of mine. They know very well. I mean, I'm not surprised that they do so well. They're great people. Ron has been a friend of mine for a long time. I feel very comfortable in the state. I'll spend a lot of time here. I want to, you know, for four years, I've got to be in Washington, and I'm okay with it because I love the White House. I even fixed up the little Oval Office, I make it—it's like a diamond, it's beautiful. It's so beautiful. It wasn't maintained properly, I will tell you that. But even when it wasn't, it was still the Oval Office, so it meant a lot. But I'll spend as much time as I can here. You know, my vacation is generally here, because it's convenient. I live in Palm Beach. It's my home. And I have a very nice little place, nice little cottage to stay at, right? But we have a lot of fun, and I'm a big contributor to Florida, you know, pay a lot of tax, and a lot of people moved from New York, and I don't know what New York is going to do. A lot of people moved to Florida from New York, and it was for a lot of reasons, but one of them was taxes. The taxes are so high in New York, they're leaving. I don't know what New York's going to do about that, because some of the biggest, wealthiest people, and some of the people that pay the most taxes of any people anywhere in the world, for that matter, they're moving to Florida and other places. So we're going to have to help some of these states out, I think. But thank you very much. I'll be here as much as I can. Very nice question.”

July 2, 2025 (Wednesday)

The Senate’s passage of its version of the budget reconciliation bill yesterday sent House members rushing back to Washington today to debate passing what the Senate had sent them. The bill is hugely unpopular. It cuts taxes for the wealthiest Americans and corporations and slashes Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, energy credits, and other programs that help the American people, while also pouring money into Immigration and Customs Enforcement and detention facilities for migrants. 

While Democratic representatives are united against the measure, people from across the country are flooding lawmakers with calls and demonstrations against the bill in hopes of swaying Republicans. At the office of Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), hundreds of his constituents held a die-in to demonstrate how cuts to healthcare in the bill would affect them. 

Far-right Republicans think the bill doesn’t make steep enough cuts; Republicans from swing districts recognize that supporting it will badly hurt both their constituents and their hopes of reelection. But Trump has demanded Congress pass the measure before July 4, an arbitrary date he seems to have chosen because of its historical significance. 

A new element in the Republicans’ calculation emerged a few days ago as billionaire Elon Musk reentered the fight over the measure, warning he would start a new political party over it. He has threatened to run primary challengers against lawmakers who vote yes, a threat that is a counterweight to Trump’s threat to run primary challengers against lawmakers who vote no. Already Musk has claimed to be donating to the reelection campaign of Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), an outspoken opponent of the bill. 

Representative Sean Casten (D-IL) wrote today about the dysfunction on the House floor. “A functioning House leadership team would work the members, make changes as necessary and bring this bill to the floor once they knew they could pass it. But [speaker] Mike Johnson does not run a functional House leadership team. He does what Daddy says and Daddy said pass it before July 4.” This morning, the House took a procedural vote, but recognizing that they did not have the votes to pass the bill itself, Republican leadership refused to close the vote. 

Later, House leadership held another vote open for more than two hours when they could not win it. When Representative Joe Neguse (D-CO) challenged this trick, the chair told him that the rules established a minimum time for votes, but no maximum. 

To find the votes Republicans need to pass the bill, Trump met today with those expected to vote no. Riley Rogerson and Reese Gorman of NOTUS reported that at a meeting with some of the swing-state Republican holdouts, Trump seemed to believe the lie that the bill doesn’t cut Medicaid. Three sources told the reporters Trump told Republicans they shouldn’t touch Medicaid, Medicare, or Social Security if they want to win elections. “But we’re touching Medicaid in this bill,” one of the members at the meeting answered. 

Trump also met with far-right members, but because the Senate measure must pass the House unchanged, he can offer them little except to promise they will fix the bill after it passes. While that appeared to work on at least one representative, Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN) told the NOTUS reporters: “Now we’re having to once again hear the line, ‘Let’s pass this and then we’ll fix it later,’ And we never fix it later, and America knows that.” 

Political journalist Judd Legum of Popular Information posted: “To review: Trump spent all day rounding up votes for his mega bill[.] Trump did not round up enough votes[.] So the ‘plan’ was just to start voting and bully anyone who votes no until they switch their vote[.] (It could work.)"

Democrats called out Republicans from swing districts, listing the numbers of their constituents who will lose healthcare insurance if the measure passes. They urged Republicans to stand up to Donald Trump, and to stand up for their constituents. 

Pennsylvania representative Fitzpatrick faced the die-in at his office and was also so angry at today’s news Trump is withholding weapons already pledged to Ukraine that he wrote to Trump today warning that Ukraine is “holding the line for the entire democratic world” and asking for an emergency briefing on the decision to withhold aid. He voted no on a key procedural vote tonight. 

Just after 10:00 tonight, NBC News Capitol Hill correspondent Melanie Zanona reported: “Republicans are trying [to] locate Rep[resentative] Brian Fitzpatrick, who delivered a surprising NO vote on the mega bill rule. Likely to try to flip him. I told a member I saw him bolt out of the chamber & leave the area. ‘Smart,’ the member said.” 

As of midnight, the Republicans did not have the votes to advance the measure. 

Representative Maxwell Frost (D-FL) posted: “Speaker Johnson should just take the L on this vote. Most of America doesn’t want this bill to pass anyways. It’s…both the worst and most unpopular piece of legislation in modern history.”

On Bluesky, user shauna wrote: “say what you will about [former Democratic House speaker] nancy pelosi (as one of her constituents believe me i have) she'd have impaled herself with a gavel live on the house floor before she'd have allowed this sh*tshow of a vote on her watch as speaker.”

July 4, 2025 (Friday)

An American flag in the rigging of "Old Ironsides," the U.S.S. Constitution.

July 7, 2025 (Monday)

At about 10:30 this morning local time,  heavily armed masked agents in trucks, armored vehicles, a helicopter, on foot, and on horseback, accompanied by a gun mounted on a truck raided the MacArthur Park area of Los Angeles. Journalist Mel Buer reported that agents from Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), the National Guard, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) brought what he called a “massive federal presence.”  

Fox News Channel personnel were embedded with the raiders and broadcast throughout the operation, suggesting that it was designed for the media as a show of force to intimidate opponents. CBP brought its own press team, and its people were also taking photos of bystanders. After Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass arrived and spoke with Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino,  the agents left. It is not clear that there was a specific target for the raid, or that anyone was arrested.

Later, Bovino told Bill Melugin of the Fox News Channel, “I don’t work for Karen Bass. Better get used to us now, cause this is going to be normal very soon. We will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles.”

Immigrants rights groups sued Bovino last week to block what they call an “ongoing pattern and practice of flouting the Constitution and federal law” during immigration raids. 

Steve Beynon of Military dot com reports that about 70 National Guard troops have been deployed to the new detention facility in the Florida Everglades as the administration “leans harder on the military to enforce its nationwide immigration crackdown.” Unlike the National Guard troops Trump federalized in Los Angeles, these troops are operating as state troops under Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Another 8,500 active-duty and National Guard troops are stationed along the border between the U.S. and Mexico. 

The Trump administration is also sending 200 Marines to Florida to aid ICE, part of a push to increase deportations by using active-duty troops. 

The U.S. Marine Corps has launched a pilot program to station ICE agents at Camp Pendleton in California, Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, and Marine Corps Base Hawaii. Sarah Rumpf-Whitten of Fox News writes that the plan is to strengthen security at those bases, although University of Tampa defense professor Abby Hall Blanco pointed out: "It gives kind of an odd impression that the Marine Corps is not handling its own security sufficiently. Having known quite a few Marines in my time, I can't imagine that they would find that to be a particularly flattering interpretation.”

As Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol pointed out in Talking Points Memo, it appears that officials in the Trump administration are using immigration as a way to establish a police state. Indeed, they are using the concept that presidents have control of foreign affairs as a way to work around the laws in place to prevent a dictatorship. 

In its 2024 Donald J. Trump v. United States decision, the Supreme Court majority held that a former president has “absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority,” as well as “presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.” In April 2025 the court specified that it considered foreign affairs to fall within a president’s constitutional authority, writing in Noem v. Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia that the executive branch was owed “deference…in the conduct of foreign affairs.” 

Although the Framers of the Constitution put the power to make laws in the hands of Congress, they divided power in foreign affairs between Congress and the president. Almost immediately, presidents began to assert their authority over foreign affairs, noting that the Constitution gave them power to appoint ambassadors and negotiate treaties and pointing to the president’s role as commander-in-chief of the Army. The branches have tussled over this power ever since, but as James Goldgeiger and  Elizabeth N. Saunders wrote in Foreign Affairs, presidential power over foreign affairs has grown dramatically since 2000.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, members of Congress were unwilling to appear soft on terror and so allowed President George W. Bush great leeway in the nation’s “war on terror,” even after it became clear that Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 was failing. In Foreign Affairs last month, Saunders wrote that a lack of accountability for either the failures of the Iraq War or the 2008 international financial crisis fed the idea that the president could make sweeping decisions about both foreign intervention and the international economy without check by Congress.

On February 12, 2025, the Trump administration made clear that its members intended to expand Trump’s power by pushing the boundaries of what foreign affairs entails. In an executive order, Trump claimed the Constitution “vests the power to conduct foreign policy in the President of the United States.” 

Trump’s actual work in foreign affairs has been different from what he promised during his presidential campaign. His vow that he could end Russia’s war against Ukraine with one phone call has resulted only in Russian president Vladimir Putin’s accelerating his attacks on Ukraine. As foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum wrote on July 4 in The Atlantic, it is clear that Putin believes he can conquer all of Ukraine because Trump is abandoning the longstanding U.S. bipartisan support for Ukraine and pivoting the U.S. to back Russia. 

Last week the administration said it would not send Ukraine a large shipment of weapons already funded under President Joe Biden. It claimed that U.S. stockpiles of weapons are insufficient, a claim former Biden officials and independent analysts contradict. Applebaum notes that Russia has interpreted the change as a sign that the U.S. is ending its support for Ukraine. 

The U.S. is also essentially lifting the economic sanctions that have hamstrung Russia’s economy. By not adjusting sanctions to combat developing Russian workarounds, the administration is allowing Russia to rebuild its economy. In addition, the Trump administration has stopped countering Russian disinformation around the world, while Trump appointees, including Trump’s main negotiator with Russia, Steve Witkoff, regularly parrot Russian propaganda. 

Trump’s launching of strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapon production sites without input from Congress earned pushback from congress members who noted that the president’s authority to launch emergency operations depends on an actual emergency. Trump’s own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told Congress in March that the Intelligence Community assessed Iran was not, in fact, building a nuclear weapon. 

Then Trump’s claim he had “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program turned out to be exaggerated, although as journalists questioned his statement, the administration doubled down on it. Today, Barak Ravid of Axios reported that Israeli officials believe Trump will green-light further Israeli attacks on Iran. Trump has said twice since the U.S. strikes that the U.S. could attack Iran again if Iran renews its nuclear program.

But the claim to domestic power based in the president’s alleged right to control over foreign affairs has fueled much of the administration's domestic agenda. The administration claimed the power to render undocumented Venezuelans to the notorious terrorist CECOT prison in El Salvador by arguing that the Venezuelan government was sending members of the MS-13 gang to invade the U.S. After wrongfully delivering Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador in violation of a court order, the administration claimed courts could not order him returned to the U.S. because that order would interfere with Trump’s ability to conduct foreign affairs.

Documents filed in court today said Salvadoran officials told the United Nations that the U.S. retained jurisdiction over the migrants it sent to El Salvador, undermining the administration’s insistence that it has no control over migrants once they are out of U.S. territory. El Salvador simply had an agreement with the U.S. to use the Salvadoran prison system to detain U.S. prisoners, they said. “In this context, the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons lie exclusively with the competent foreign authorities, by virtue of international agreements signed and in accordance with the principles of sovereignty and international cooperation in criminal matters.” 

In a lawsuit against the administration, Abrego Garcia says he was tortured in El Salvador, severely beaten, deprived of sleep, inadequately fed, denied bathroom facilities, and tortured psychologically. He says he lost 31 pounds in two weeks. 

Today the administration ended temporary protection from deportation for about 72,000 migrants from Honduras and another 4,000 from Nicaragua. The decision strips them of their legal status and echoes similar decisions made about migrants from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Haiti, Nepal, and Venezuela. A federal court has blocked the early termination of protected status for Haitians.

July 10, 2025 (Thursday)

Just a week ago, Republicans in the House of Representatives passed the nearly 1,000-page budget reconciliation bill President Donald Trump demanded, and at the signing ceremony for the bill the next day, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced Republicans were “laying a key cornerstone of America’s new golden age.”

But the past week has shown a nation—and an administration—in turmoil.

On July 4, the day Trump signed the bill, flash floods devastated central Texas, leaving more than 100 people dead and about 160 still missing. Local officials immediately blamed cuts to the National Weather Service (NWS) for the disaster, but reviews showed that NWS meteorologists had predicted the storm accurately and had sent out three increasingly urgent warnings at 1:14 a.m., 4:03 a.m., and 6:06 a.m. 

But four hours passed before the police department in the City of Kerrville issued a warning. It wasn’t until 7:32 that the city urged people along the Guadalupe River to move to higher ground immediately. The missing link between the NWS and public safety personnel appears to have been the weather service employee in charge of coordinating between them. He took an unplanned early retirement under pressure from the “Department of Government Efficiency” and has not been replaced.

Then, as Gabe Cohen and Michael Williams of CNN reported, search and rescue teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) could not respond to the disaster because Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose department is in charge of FEMA, had recently tried to cut spending by requiring her personal sign-off on any expenditure over $100,000. That order meant FEMA couldn’t put crews in place ahead of the storm, or respond immediately. Noem didn’t sign off on the deployment of FEMA teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding started. 

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, told Cohen and Williams that Noem did not authorize FEMA deployment because DHS used other search and rescue teams. “FEMA is shifting from bloated, DC-centric dead weight to a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers state actors to provide relief for their citizens,” McLaughlin told CNN in a statement. “The old processes are being replaced because they failed Americans in real emergencies for decades.”

“DHS is rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and is reprioritizing appropriated dollars. Secretary Noem is delivering accountability to the U.S. taxpayer, which Washington bureaucrats have ignored for decades at the expense of American citizens,” McLaughlin said. Noem has called for the elimination of FEMA. 

Meanwhile, FEMA’s acting director, David Richardson, has been nowhere to be found, making no public appearances, statements, or postings on social media since the disaster, and not visiting the site. Former FEMA officials told Thomas Frank of Politico that Richardson’s absence suggests Noem is controlling the FEMA response. Trump appointed Richardson after his team fired his first appointee, Cameron Hamilton, for telling Congress he did not think FEMA should be scrapped.   

The day after he took office in May, Richardson, who has no experience with emergency management, told staff: “Don’t get in my way…because I will run right over you. I will achieve the president’s intent…. I, and I alone in FEMA, speak for FEMA,” he said. 

Even as rescuers were still at work today in Texas, DHS cancelled a $3 million grant that had been awarded in New York to make sure the NWS can communicate effectively with local officials.

Tariffs are back in the news as Trump’s postponement for his high tariff has ended. They are as chaotic and as problematic as ever. 

On April 2, Trump announced tariffs on countries around the world. He said that, beginning on April 9, he would impose a baseline tariff of 10%—a significant increase from the 2.5% rate then in effect—and additional tariffs of up to 50% on countries using a bizarre formula apparently cooked up by his trade advisor, Peter Navarro. 

Immediately the stock market lost more than $5 trillion. So rather than let the tariffs go into effect on April 9, Trump pushed the start of the tariffs off until Wednesday, July 9 (yesterday), vowing to negotiate trade deals with individual countries rapidly: 90 deals in 90 days, Navarro said. But only two deals have been forthcoming—one with the United Kingdom and one with Vietnam—meaning that on July 9 the high tariffs of April 2 would take effect. 

Then, on Tuesday, Trump announced on social media the real date for the start of the tariffs would be August 1. Somewhat bizarrely, he told reporters he had not changed the date  the tariffs would go into effect, although  on Monday he signed an executive order changing the date of the start of the levies from July 9 to August 1.

Throughout the week, Trump has been sending letters to world leaders informing them that he intended to impose high tariffs on their countries unless they negotiated with him. At a press opportunity at a cabinet meeting, as Danielle Kurtzleben of NPR noted, he tried to rebrand his letters as deals. “A letter means a deal,” he told reporters. “We can't meet with 200 countries. We have a few trusted people that know what they're doing, that are doing a good job, but you can't do it. You have to do it in a more general way. But it's a very good way. It's a better way. It's a more powerful way.”  

On Tuesday, Trump also announced a 50% tariff on copper. Copper is vital to the defense industry, batteries, electric wires, plumbing, and so on, and the U.S. imports more than half of what it uses. Trump claims to want to see the U.S. produce the copper it needs, but getting the industry to that point will take years. He also announced a 35% tariff on goods from Canada.

Paul Wiseman of the Associated Press notes that the 10% tariffs are apparently here to stay because the administration needs that money to cover some of the hole the new tax cuts from the budget reconciliation bill will blast in the deficit. 

While Trump continues to insist—incorrectly—that foreign countries pay tariffs, his former vice president Mike Pence reiterated the truth today. On Bloomberg “Surveillance,” he said of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s boast that tariffs will bring in $300 billion this year: “Well, tariffs are a tax, and American importers and businesses and, ultimately, consumers pay almost all of that. And so literally a week after we managed to extend the Trump-Pence tax cuts and prevent a $2,000 tax increase on working families, the administration is right now boasting of the fact that the average American household is going to see about $3,000 increase in the cost of goods.”

Last month, Trump nominated Department of Justice prosecutor Emil Bove to be a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, covering Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and the Virgin Islands. Bove is a Trump loyalist who defended Trump in his criminal indictments and participated in firing officials who investigated Trump and the January 6 rioters. He was also a central player in the dropping of corruption charges against New York mayor Eric Adams and the rendition of Venezuelan migrants to the CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador.

On June 24, Erez Reuveni, a former Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyer, filed an official whistleblower complaint about abuses in the department. Reuveni was fired after telling a court that the administration had made an error when it rendered Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia to CECOT  despite a court order not to do so. In the whistleblower complaint, Reuveni alleged that the leaders at the Department of Justice and the White House had deliberately defied court orders and “engaged in unlawful activity, abused their authority, created substantial and specific threat to health and safety.”

Reuveni alleged that Bove insisted the planes carrying the men to El Salvador must take off and that he said DOJ “would need to consider telling the courts ‘f*ck you’ and ignore any such court order.” Reuveni then laid out the events of the March days in which the men were deported, along with the determination of the Department of Justice to violate the orders of the court. 

Bove told the Senate Judiciary Committee last month he had “no recollection” of saying “f*ck you” to the court and said he had never advised the Department of Justice to violate a court order. Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on social media that Reuveni was a “leaker asserting false claims.” 

Today, Senate Democrats released a trove of documents Reuveni had provided the committee, backing up his complaint. Texts and emails confirm that Department of Justice lawyers misled Judge James Boasberg, one telling him that he did not know when the Trump administration intended to deport the men when, as one of Reuveni’s colleagues said, “I can’t believe he said he doesn’t know. He knows there are plans for AEA removals within the next 24 hours.” 

Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement Thursday that Bove “belongs nowhere near the federal bench.” “This is about more than a random f-bomb,” he said. “This is a declaration of defiance of our courts at the highest level of our government by a man who now seeks a lifetime appointment to one of the highest courts in our land.”

Today a federal judge appointed by Republican George W. Bush granted class action status to a lawsuit challenging Trump’s executive order attacking birthright citizenship. With that status in place, U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante barred the administration from denying citizenship to U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. Judge Laplante paused his ruling for a week to give the administration time to appeal.

Trump himself lost his appeal of a New York jury’s verdict that he must pay writer E. Jean Carroll $5 million for sexually abusing and defaming her. Trump now has 90 days to appeal to the Supreme Court to take the case. 

Tonight the White House posted on X an image of “SUPERMAN TRUMP”—a much younger Trump dressed as the famous superhero, fists clenched, against a gauzy background—with the caption “TRUTH. JUSTICE. THE AMERICAN WAY.”

July 12, 2025 (Saturday)

On July 5, the day after the Texas floods hit, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) received 3,027 calls from survivors and answered 3,018 of them, about 99.7%, according to Maxine Joselow of the New York Times. But that day, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem did not renew the contracts for four call center companies that answered those calls. The staff at the centers were fired. The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or about 35.8%. On Monday, July 7, FEMA received 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, around 15.9%.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said: “When a natural disaster strikes, phone calls surge, and wait times can subsequently increase. Despite this expected influx, FEMA’s disaster call center responded to every caller swiftly and efficiently, ensuring no one was left without assistance.”

Marcy Wheeler of EmptyWheel notes that one reason Noem has been cutting so ferociously at FEMA is because she has run through the money Congress allocated for HHS with her single-minded focus on immigration. 

In May, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) called out Noem’s expenditure of $200 million on an ad campaign pushing Trump’s agenda and $21 million to transport about 400 migrants to Guantanamo Bay only to have many of them transferred back out. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) told Noem: “You are spending like you don’t have a budget…. You're on track to trigger the Anti-Deficiency Act. That means you are going to spend more money than you have been allocated by Congress. This is a rare occurrence, and it is wildly illegal. Your agency will be broke by July, over two months before the end of the fiscal year. You may not think that Congress has provided enough money to ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], but the Constitution and the federal law does not allow you to spend more money than you've been given, or to invent money. And this obsession with spending at the border…has left the country unprotected elsewhere. 

Noem responded to Blumenthal that she was fulfilling a mandate. She told him: “The American people overwhelmingly in the last election said, ‘We want a secure border, we want to make sure no longer are the scales of justice tipped in the favor of criminals….’” A recent video posted to Facebook Reels by the Department of Homeland Security makes it clear Noem’s justification was cover for a violent Christian nationalist vision in which ICE and the Border Patrol are enforcing God’s commandments. A dark film invokes Isaiah 6:8, the Bible verse in which God asks, “Whom shall I send?” and Isaiah answers, “Here am I! Send me.” The exchange is widely interpreted to show volunteers willing to do God’s work. 

A poll released Friday makes it clear that the American people do not support such a vision and did not, in fact, expect a Trump administration to deport undocumented immigrants who have no criminal record and have lived in the U.S. for years. A Gallup poll released yesterday shows that the administration’s draconian policies toward immigrants have created a backlash. A record 79% of adults say immigration is good for the country, with only 17% seeing it as bad. That change has been driven primarily by a shift in Republicans, 64% of whom now agree that immigrants are good for the country, up from their low of under 40%. The percentage of American adults who say immigration should be reduced has dropped to 30%, down from 55% in 2024. 

The Gallup poll shows that U.S. opposition to immigration rose from 2021 to 2024, the years in which the booming economy in the U.S. attracted immigrants pushed out of South American countries whose economies were foundering. Trump falsely tagged that surge as proof that former president Joe Biden was permitting immigrant criminals to flood the country. Sentiments now look like they did in 2021, before that campaign.

The poll shows that only 35% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, while 62% disapprove. There is a strong enthusiasm gap in those numbers: 21% strongly approve while 45% strongly disapprove. Among Independents, 14% strongly approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, while 45% strongly disapprove. 

Those numbers are unlikely to improve for the administration in light of yesterday’s ICE raids at two licensed cannabis farms in Southern California. Agents used less-lethal ammunition and tear gas in the raids. A number of people were injured, one critically. Agents arrested 200 people, including George Retes, a 25-year-old disabled veteran and U.S. citizen who worked at one of the farms as a security guard. Agents claimed Retes was a protester. His family has been unable to locate him, telling Josh Haskell of the local ABC affiliate that the local sheriff’s office and local police departments all said they do not know where he is.

More information coming about the conditions of immigrant detention are also unlikely to increase support for the administration's policies. Today, at least five members of Congress and about 20 state legislators toured the new ICE detention center in the Everglades. The tour was planned rather than unexpected, enabling staff to prepare for it. Nonetheless, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) said: “These detainees are living in cages. The pictures you've seen don't do it justice. They are essentially packed into cages. Wall to wall humans. Thirty-two detainees per cage…. There are three tiny toilets that…have a sink attached to it, so…they get their drinking water and they brush their teeth where they poop, in the same unit." Nine hundred men are currently in the facility.

And yet, even as the public sours on its policies, the administration is continuing its attacks on immigration. After the Supreme Court said it could implement mass layoffs while a lawsuit against them proceeds through the courts, it fired more than 1,300 employees from the State Department on Friday. It closed the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, which was created in 1977 “to help advance individual liberty and democratic freedoms around the world” and has stood against cooperation with dictators who, as Michael Crowley of the New York Times writes, “grossly abuse human rights.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio is also shuttering the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, which he claims enabled mass immigration to the United States. By Saturday afternoon the websites for both bureaus had been taken down.

Astonishingly, the crisis in Texas and growing opposition to his immigration policies are not the biggest problem for the administration today. That pride of place goes to MAGA fury over the Justice Department’s statement that accused sex trafficker of young girls Jeffrey Epstein, who died in his prison cell in 2019, did not keep an “incriminating ‘client list.’” It also said it would not release additional evidence the department’s investigators have accumulated, evidence that includes photographs and more than 10,000 videos. 

MAGA influencers, egged on by media figures like Dan Bongino, insisted that the Justice Department under Biden was hiding information about Epstein’s clients to cover up for Democratic leaders they insisted it would implicate. In February 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi told the Fox News Channel that the list was sitting on her desk awaiting review. Now, though, the department has done a 180. 

MAGA is furious. Bongino, who fed the frenzy, is now the deputy director of the FBI, and reports say he has turned on Bondi over the change, threatening to quit. Philip Rotner at The Bulwark makes the astute observation that wording of the announcement from Department of Justice is “deliberately opaque”—as many of their obfuscating documents are—and leaves open the possibility that there is, in fact, incriminating evidence, just not in the form of a specific document with the words “INCRIMINATING ‘CLIENT LIST’” at its top. 

Bondi is a ferocious Trump loyalist, and for all that MAGA is pinning the blame for the cover-up on her, she is almost certainly following Trump’s instructions. The fight has put back into the news that one of Epstein’s closest companions  was none other than President Donald J. Trump, a relationship documented in pictures, videos, and interviews. In 2002, according to New York magazine, Trump said: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy…. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Last night, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top-ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said he will "be asking Chairman [Jim] Jordan [R-OH] to call for a hearing where we subpoena the Attorney General and Dan Bongino and [FBI Director] Kash Patel to come in and tell us everything that we know" about the Jeffrey Epstein files, “because this thing is really spinning out of control at this point and there’s one way to put it to rest, which is to come clean, as President Trump promised he would during the campaign.” 

Just before 10:00 this morning, Trump lashed out in what seemed to be an attempt to regain control of the narrative, hitting as many MAGA talking points as he could with an attack on comedian and talk show host Rosie O’Donnell, who has relocated from her native U.S.—she was born in New York—to Ireland out of concern for her family in Trump's America. “Because of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship. She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her. GOD BLESS AMERICA!”

The president’s suggestion that he has the power to revoke the citizenship of a natural-born American—he does not—escalates his authoritarian claims. It comes after a federal judge on Thursday barred the administration from denying citizenship to U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants, giving the administration time to appeal.

O’Donnell responded on Instagram:

hey donald—
you’re rattled again?
18 years later and I still live rent-free in that collapsing brain of yours.
you call me a threat to humanity—
but I’m everything you fear:
a loud woman
a queer woman
a mother who tells the truth
an american who got out of the country b4 you set it ablaze
you build walls—
I build a life for my autistic kid in a country where decency still exists
you crave loyalty—
I teach my children to question power
you sell fear on golf courses
I make art about surviving trauma
You lie, you steal, you degrade—
I nurture, I create, I persist
you are everything that is wrong with america—
and I’m everything you hate about what’s still right with it
you want to revoke my citizenship?
go ahead and try, king joffrey* with a tangerine spray tan
i’m not yours to silence
i never was

--

*Joffrey is a monstrous, stupid, vicious king in Game of Thrones.

July 14, 2025 (Monday)

Trump appointees insist they have a “mandate” to drive undocumented immigrants out of the U.S. and prevent new immigrants from coming in, and are launching a massive increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and detention facilities to do so. But a poll released Friday shows that only 35% of American adults approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, while 62% disapprove.

The poll shows a record 79% of adults saying immigration is good for the country, with only 17% seeing it as bad. Only 30% of American adults say immigration should be reduced. 

The poll shows that 85% of American adults want laws to allow “immigrants, who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, the chance to become U.S. citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time.” Seventy-eight percent of American adults want the law to allow “immigrants living in the U.S. illegally the chance to become U.S. citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time.” Only 38% want the government to deport “all immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home country.” 

The poll shows Americans eager to fix a problem that stems from a bipartisan 1965 law that reworked America's immigration laws. 

In 1924, during a period of opposition to immigration that fueled the second rise of the Ku Klux Klan, Congress had passed the nation's first comprehensive immigration law. That law, known as the Johnson-Reed Act, limited immigration according to quotas assigned to each country. Those quotas were heavily weighted toward western Europe, virtually prohibiting immigration from Asia and Africa and dramatically curtailing it from southern Europe.

The Johnson-Reed Act simply taxed workers coming to the U.S. from Mexico, because from the time the current border was set in 1848 until the 1930s, people moved back and forth across it. Laborers in particular came from Mexico to work for the huge American agribusinesses that dominate the agricultural sector, especially after 1907 when the Japanese workers who had been taking over those jobs were unofficially kept out of the country by the so-called “Gentlemen’s Agreement.” Later, during World War I, the government encouraged immigration to help increase production.

The Depression, when the bottom fell out of the economy, coupled with the Dust Bowl, when the bottom fell out of the western plains, made destitute white Americans turn on Mexican migrants (as well as on their poor white neighbors, as John Steinbeck wrote about in The Grapes of Wrath). The government rounded up Mexicans and shipped them back over the border.

World War II created another shortage of laborers, and to regularize the system of migrant labor, the U.S. government in 1942 started a guest worker policy called the Bracero Program that ultimately brought more than 4 million Mexican workers to the U.S. The program was supposed to guarantee that migrant workers were well treated and adequately paid and housed. But it didn’t work out that way. Employers hired illegal as well as legal workers and treated them poorly. American workers complained about competition. 

President Dwight D. Eisenhower returned about a million illegal workers in 1954 under "Operation Wetback," only to have officials readmit most of them as braceros. Under pressure both from labor and from reformers who recognized that the system was exploitative at the same time that mechanization began replacing workers, President John F. Kennedy initiated the process that ended the Bracero Program in 1964. In 1965 the government tried to replace migrant labor with American high school students, but the “A-TEAM” project—“Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower”—failed.

The end of the Bracero program coincided with congressional reworking of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act. In the midst of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, Congress wanted to end the racial quota system of immigration and replace it with one that did not so obviously discriminate against Asia and Africa. In 1965, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, or the Hart-Celler Act. It opened immigration to all nations, setting a general cap on total immigration levels. 

But southern congressmen, appalled at the idea of Black immigration, introduced a provision that privileged family migration, arguing that “family unification” should be the nation's top priority. They expected that old-stock immigrants from western Europe would use the provision to bring over their relatives, which would keep the effect of the 1924 law without the statute. But their provision had the opposite effect. It was new immigrants who wanted to bring their families, not old ones. So immigration began to skew heavily toward Asia and Latin America.

At the same time, Hart-Celler put a cap on immigrants from Mexico just as the guest worker program ended. The cap was low: 20,000, although 50,000 workers were coming annually at that point, and American agribusiness depended on migrant labor. Workers continued to come as they always had, and to be employed, as always. But now their presence was illegal. 

In 1986, Congress tried to fix the problem of border security between the U.S. and Mexico by offering amnesty to 2.3 million Mexicans who were living in the United States and by cracking down on employers who hired undocumented workers. But rather than ending the problem of undocumented workers, the new law exacerbated it by beginning the process of guarding and militarizing the border. Until then, migrants into the United States had been offset by an equal number leaving at the end of the season. Once the border became heavily guarded, Mexican migrants refused to take the chance of leaving.

Since 1986, U.S. politicians have refused to deal with this disconnect, which grew in the 1990s when the North American Free Trade Agreement flooded Mexico with U.S. corn and drove Mexican farmers to find work, largely in the American Southeast. But by 2007, as Mexico’s economy stabilized and after U.S. border enforcement tightened significantly under President Bill Clinton, more Mexican immigrants were leaving the U.S. than coming. 

Between 2007 and 2017, the U.S. saw a net loss of about 2 million Mexican immigrants. In 2017 about 5 million undocumented Mexicans lived in the United States; most of them—83%—were long-term residents, here more than ten years. Only 8% had lived in the U.S. for less than five years. Increasingly, undocumented immigrants were people from around the world who overstayed legal visas, making up more than 40% of the country's undocumented population by 2024.

In 2013 the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration reform measure by a bipartisan vote of 68 to 32. The measure provided a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and increased border security. It also proposed to increase visas for immigrant workers. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the measure would reduce the federal deficit by $197 billion over 10 years and $700 billion over 20 years. 

The measure had passed the Senate by a wide margin and was popular with the public. It was expected to pass the House. But then–House speaker John Boehner (R-OH) refused to bring the measure up before the chamber, saying it did not have the support of a majority of Republicans.

About that time, undocumented migration across the southern border was changing. By 2014, people were arriving at the U.S. border from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, where violence that approached warfare—much of it caused by gangs whose members had been socialized into gang culture in the U.S.—and economic stress from that violence created refugees. These migrants were not coming over the border for economic opportunity; they were refugees applying for asylum—a legal process in the United States.

Before the 2014 midterm elections, Republicans highlighted the new migrants at the southern border, although immigration numbers remained relatively stable. They also highlighted the death from the Ebola virus of a Liberian visitor to the U.S. and the infection of two of his nurses. They attacked the Democratic administration of President Barack Obama for downplaying the danger of the disease to the U.S. public and suggested foreigners should be kept out of the U.S. (In fact, the only Americans who contracted the virus in the U.S. were the two nurses who treated the Liberian visitor.)

Despite his own history of using undocumented workers at his properties, Trump followed this practice of using immigration against the Democratic administration for political points, launching his presidential campaign in 2015 by claiming Mexico was sending “people that have lots of problems…. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” He promised mass deportation and to build a wall across the southern border and make Mexico pay for it. 

In fact, Trump’s administration deported significantly fewer undocumented immigrants than Obama’s had, at least in part because Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Obama focused on deporting those who had been convicted of crimes, a much easier deportation process than that for immigrants without convictions. But it was still legal to apply for asylum in the U.S., a fact MAGA Republicans opposed as they embraced the “Great Replacement” theory: the idea that immigration destroys a nation’s culture and identity.

The covid pandemic enabled the Trump administration in March 2020 to close the border and turn back asylum seekers under an emergency health authority known as Title 42, which can be invoked to keep out illness. Title 42 overrode the right to request asylum. But it also took away the legal consequences for trying to cross the border illegally, meaning migrants tried repeatedly, driving up the numbers of border encounters between U.S. agents and migrants and increasing the number of successful attempts from about 10,000–15,000 per month to a peak of more than 85,000.

Title 42 was still in effect in January 2021, when President Joe Biden took office. Immediately, Biden sent an immigration bill to Congress to modernize and fund immigration processes, including border enforcement and immigration courts—which had backlogs of more than 1.6 million people whose cases took an average of five years to get decided—and provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

His request got nowhere as MAGA Republicans demanded the continuation of Title 42 as a general immigration measure to keep out migrants and accused Biden of wanting “open borders.” But Title 42 is an emergency public health authority, and when the administration declared the covid emergency over in May 2023, the rule no longer applied. 

In the meantime, migrants had surged to the border, driven from their home countries or countries to which they had previously moved by the slow economic recoveries of those countries after the worst of the pandemic. The booming U.S. economy pulled them north. To move desperately needed migrants into the U.S. workforce, Biden extended temporary protected status to about 472,000 Venezuelans who were in the U.S. before July 31, 2023. The Biden administration also expanded temporary humanitarian admissions for people from Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua. 

Then, in October 2023, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) injected the idea of an immigration bill back into the political discussion when he tried to stop the passage of a national security measure that would provide aid to Ukraine. He said the House would not consider the Senate’s measure unless it contained a border security package. Eager to pass a measure to aid Ukraine, the Senate took him at his word, and a bipartisan group of senators spent the next several months hammering out an immigration bill that was similar to Title 42. 

The Senate passed the measure with a bipartisan vote, but under pressure from Trump, who wanted to preserve the issue of immigration for his 2024 campaign, Johnson declared it “dead on arrival” when it reached the House in February 2024. “Only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Bill,” Trump posted about the measure. 

And then Trump hammered hard on the demonization of immigrants. He lied that Aurora, Colorado, was a “war zone” that had been taken over by Venezuelan gangs—Aurora’s Republican mayor and police chief said this wasn’t true—and that Haitian immigrants to Springfield, Ohio, were “eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating—they are eating the pets of the people that live there.” A Gallup poll released Friday shows the MAGA attacks on immigration worked: in 2024, 55% of American adults wanted fewer immigrants in the country. 

Trump was reelected in part because of his promise to strengthen border security, but now his administration is using attacks on immigrants to impose a police state. As Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng reported Saturday in Rolling Stone, the administration is fighting to impose its will on wrongly-deported Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom it rendered to a terrorist prison in El Salvador, because if they are forced to back down, “it could set a precedent that opens the floodgates to other legal challenges” to Trump’s other executive power grabs. 

“The last thing you want to do here is contribute to a domino effect of decisions where suddenly you’re admitting you’re wrong about everything,” a close Trump advisor told the reporters. “That is why you gotta stand your ground on everything against the left, including on the [Abrego Garcia] situation.”   

But it appears the American people simply want to fix a sixty-year-old mistake in the nation’s immigration laws.

July 16, 2025 (Wednesday)

After years of covering Donald J. Trump, I am used to seeing stories that would have sunk any other president simply fade away as he hammers on to some new unprecedented action that dominates the news. So I am surprised by what appears to be the staying power of the recent Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

That Trump is panicked by the threat of the release of material concerning convicted sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein seems very clear. After the backlash against the Department of Justice’s decision not to release any more information and to reiterate that Epstein died by suicide, Trump tried first to downplay Epstein’s importance and convince people to move on. When that blew up, he posted a long screed on social media last Saturday saying the files were written by Democrats and other supposed enemies of his.

This morning, Trump posted another long message on social media blaming “Radical Left Democrats” for creating the story of the Epstein files. “Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax,” he wrote, and then he turned on his own supporters for demanding the administration release the files. “[M]y PAST supporters have bought into this ’bullsh*t,’ hook, line, and sinker. They haven’t learned their lesson, and probably never will, even after being conned by the Lunatic Left for 8 long years. I have had more success in 6 months than perhaps any President in our Country’s history, and all these people want to talk about, with strong prodding by the Fake News and the success starved Dems, is the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax. Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore! Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” 

Tellingly, Trump compared “the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax” to “the Russia, Russia, Russia Scam itself, a totally fake and made up story used in order to hide Crooked Hillary Clinton’s big loss in the 2016 Presidential Election.” But of course, the ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives and Russian interference in the 2016 election were not a hoax: they were well established both by Special Counsel Robert Mueller—a Republican—and by the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee. 

Ever since his campaign’s ties to Russia first came to light, Trump has hammered on the idea that the investigation was a hoax, not just to distance himself from potentially illegal behavior but also because if he could get his followers to reject the truth and accept his lies about what had happened, they would be psychologically committed to him. Although thirty-four people and three companies were indicted or pleaded guilty in the attack on the 2016 election or its cover-up, Trump loyalists believed Trump was a victim of a “deep state” run by Democrats.

Trump had successfully marketed his own narrative over the truth, and his supporters would continue to believe him rather than those calling him out. From then on, whenever in danger of being called out, he harked back to “Russia, Russia, Russia” and “the Russian hoax” to rally supporters to him. 

Once again, he is reaching back to “Russia, Russia, Russia” to reinforce his ability to control the narrative. But this time it does not appear to be working. 

As Jay Kuo outlined in The Status Kuo today, Trump owes his 2024 victory to QAnon followers, who believe a cabal of Democratic lawmakers, rich elites, and Hollywood film stars are sex trafficking—and even eating—children. PRRI, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that researches religion, culture, and politics, estimated that in 2024, about 19% of Americans believed in QAnon. CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten noted yesterday that QAnon supporters preferred Trump to Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 by 61 points. 

More broadly, Enten noted that Trump’s political career has depended on conspiracy theorists, from his 2016 support from those who believed Trump’s “birther” charges that President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States, to his 2024 primary support from those who believed President Joe Biden did not win the 2020 presidential election legitimately. 

Those supporters followed Trump because they believed he was leading a secret charge against those child sex traffickers. Now that his administration says it will not release any more information about Epstein’s files, they appear to feel betrayed.

Trump seems to be in full panic mode over the idea that information from the Epstein investigation might come to light. He and Epstein were friends, frequently photographed together in the years of Epstein’s operation. After turning on his former supporters on social media, Trump continued his attacks in an Oval Office meeting today, reiterating his claims that the Epstein files were written by Democrats.

But then he continued to attack his own supporters, saying that “stupid Republicans,” “foolish Republicans,” and “stupid people” had fallen for the Democrats’ Epstein hoax and were demanding the release of the files.   

Billionaire Elon Musk, Trump’s sidekick in the White House before the two fell out, has been hammering on the issue to his 222 million followers on his social media platform X. “He should just release the files and point out which part is the hoax,” Musk wrote.  

Trump’s political success has stemmed in large part from his projection of dominance, and perhaps part of supporters’ willingness to cut ties to him comes from his recent behavior, which projects confusion. On Saturday, at the FIFA Club World Cup trophy ceremony, Trump seemed to miss the signal that he should leave the stage as the winning team celebrated, and had to be maneuvered behind the players. 

Yesterday he fell asleep on stage at the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit. At the same event, Trump told what CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale called “an especially odd imaginary tale,” claiming that his uncle, a MIT professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had taught Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber. Trump recounted a conversation with his uncle about Kaczynski, but in fact Kaczynski didn’t go to MIT, and Trump’s uncle John died more than a decade before Kaczynski became famous, so Trump and his uncle could not have identified him as the Unabomber. Today, Trump called chair of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell a “terrible Fed chair” and added: “I was surprised he was appointed.” 

Trump was the president who appointed him. 

Finally, today Trump’s Department of Justice fired longtime employee Maurene Comey, who had prosecuted Jeffrey Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell. To bring things full circle, Maurene Comey is the daughter of James Comey, the Republican former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whom Trump fired for refusing to drop the FBI investigation into ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian operatives.