Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

mickeyrat · September 4

September 3, 2025 (Wednesday)

[Please note that this post talks about sexual assault in the last four paragraphs.]

A Wall Street Journal–NORC poll released yesterday found that only 25% of Americans believe they have a good chance of improving their standard of living. Nearly 70% said it was no longer possible to work hard and get ahead. A majority of those polled said the generation before them had an easier time starting a business, buying a home, or staying at home to parent a child.

A different piece in the Wall Street Journal explained that there were 927 American billionaires in 2020 and 1,135 in 2024. Together, they are worth about $5.7 trillion. The 100 richest of the set control more than half of the total at about $3.86 trillion. As the number of billionaires grew, “supply side” economic policies in the U.S., designed to concentrate wealth at the top of the economy among investors rather than on the “demand side” made up of consumers, hollowed out the middle class. From 1975 to 2018, at least $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% to the top 1%.

Yet another piece in the Wall Street Journal, this one by Katherine Hamilton and Alison Sider, noted that consumer confidence is sliding. While wealthier Americans seem to be doing fine, they write, rising distress about the economy is obvious among the middle class: those making about $53,000 to $161,000 a year. Chief economist at Morning Consult John Leer told the reporters: “There was a period of time, briefly, where the middle-income consumer looked like they were being dragged up by all that was going well in the world. Then things fell off a cliff.”

In an interview with the Financial Times published yesterday, billionaire Ray Dalio, the founder of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, warned that the U.S. today looks a lot like “what happened around the world in the 1930–1940 period.” Dalio identified the policies of President Donald J. Trump as the sort of “strong autocratic leadership that sprang out of the desire to take control of the financial and economic situation” in the 1930s.

Trump’s rise in 2016 was fueled in part by his promise to defend those left behind in the supply-side economy. But he abandoned his economic promises with his 2017 tax cuts that benefited the wealthy and corporations far more than average Americans, and rallied his supporters with culture-war issues.

In 2024, Trump ran on the argument that Democrat Joe Biden had not adequately addressed inflation—although the U.S. managed the post-pandemic inflation spike better than any other developed economy—promising that he would make prices come down “immediately.” Instead, his tariffs and deportations have sent inflation upward again, and the budget reconciliation bill he forced through Congress is already pushing people off their healthcare insurance and threatening the survival of rural hospitals.

The law Trump and the Republicans dubbed the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act” is profoundly unpopular, with about two thirds of Americans opposed to it. So today, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio, and Trump political director James Blair met with Republican congress members to tell them that people will come to like the law if “they completely rebrand it and talk about it differently.”

The administration officials told the congress members, who have been hearing from constituents angry about the law’s deep spending cuts, that they should be pushing the idea that the law helps “working families.” Vice President J.D. Vance tried this last week in Wisconsin, and this afternoon, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) appeared to take that advice out for a spin, publicly referring to the law the same way Vance did: as the “working families tax cut act.”

The nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes that under the law, a family earning less than $50,000 a year would get less than $300 in tax cuts in 2027 while losing access to Medicaid and food assistance, while a filer earning more than $1 million would receive about $90,000 in tax breaks. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the 10% of Americans at the bottom of the economy will lose about $1,200 a year.

Trump’s policies are working well for his family, though. Angus Berwick of the Wall Street Journal reported that the Monday launch of their WLFI cryptocurrency netted them about $5 billion on paper. Today Eric Trump launched American Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency mining company; Kyle Khan-Mullins and Dan Alexander of Forbes reported today that he is now worth at least $3.2 billion.

Meanwhile, Trump continues to insist that he must have the powers of a dictator to make the country prosperous again. When a court found his use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to justify his sweeping tariffs was illegal, he said, “If you took away tariffs, we could end up being a third-world country,” although the U.S. was not a third-world country before Trump launched his tariff war in April. He has said he will take the case before the Supreme Court.

If he loses there, as Elisabeth Buchwald wrote for CNN, the U.S. might have to pay back more than $210 billion to the American businesses that have paid the tariffs. On Monday, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo pointed to a story Louise Matsakis and Zoë Schiffer of Wired reported in late July: Wall Street companies, including Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial services company run by the sons of billionaire commerce secretary Howard Lutnick since Lutnick joined the Trump administration, have been buying up the rights to collect tariff refunds if the tariffs are struck down.

Marshall notes that while making a bet on an uncertain outcome is a huge part of modern finance, the idea that a commerce secretary’s company is making bets on something the commerce secretary has significant authority over is a perfect symbol of the Trump era.

While the Trump family and loyalists cash in on their control of the government, Trump continues to assert that he requires authoritarian powers to “Make America Great Again.”

Trump has relied heavily on the Supreme Court’s defense of his leeway as the nation’s leader in foreign affairs, and after being stymied by the courts for its actions at home, the administration yesterday announced it had blown up a boat in international waters in the Caribbean with eleven people on it, alleging the boat was carrying illegal drugs to the United States from Venezuela. Although U.S. forces could have stopped the boat without destroying it and often do so, shooting at engines, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the boat posed an “immediate threat to the United States,” so the U.S. had the right to destroy it. Perhaps thinking it demonstrated power, the administration circulated a video of the strike.

Legal analyst Ryan Goodman wrote: “I worked at [the Department of Defense]. I literally cannot imagine lawyers coming up with a legal basis for [the] lethal strike of [a] suspected Venezuelan drug boat. Hard to see how this would not be "murder" or war crime under international law that DoD considers applicable.”

Notre Dame law professor Mary Ellen O’Connell told John Hudson, Samantha Schmidt, and Alex Horton of the Washington Post that the strike violated international law. “When the president decides this is a person who can be killed summarily, there’s no restraint on him,” she told the reporters. “It’s a very dangerous new move,” since he could decide to launch similar strikes within the United States in pursuit of those he calls drug traffickers.

Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said the strike was “deeply concerning,” noting that “[t]he administration has not identified the authority under which this action was taken, raising the question of its legality and constitutionality.” Smith added: “The lack of information and transparency from the administration is even more concerning. Does this mean Trump thinks he can use the U.S. military anywhere drugs exist, are sold, or shipped? What is the risk of dragging the United States into yet another military conflict?”

Legal analyst Joyce White Vance noted that the justification for the strike was dubious enough that even Rubio appeared to want a little distance from it, as he made a point of specifying that the U.S. acted “on the president’s orders.”

Trump has attempted to demonstrate authoritarian power with his military displays in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and yesterday he announced that “we’re going in” to Chicago, although he didn’t offer any specifics. After Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker rejected the idea the president could simply send troops, Trump appeared to back off, saying Pritzker should ask him for help. “When did we become a country where it’s OK for the U.S. president to insist on national television that a state should call him to beg for anything—especially something we don’t want?” Pritzker said. “Have we truly lost all sense of sanity in this nation, that we treat this as normal?”

A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll shows just 38% of Americans approve of Trump’s deployment of troops in Washington, D.C.

Trump has reason to be afraid of the American people for another reason, too: they want to see the files from the federal investigation of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, especially now that they know Trump is mentioned in those files. Speaker Johnson dismissed the House early for its August break this year to avoid having to deal with the demands of members for the release of the files, but now Congress is back in session and the demands are right back on the table. Trump has tried to stop Republicans from asking for the files by warning such a demand would be seen as a hostile act against the administration.

Today the administration arranged a military flyover during the visit of President Karol Nawrocki of Poland, in honor of a Polish army pilot killed in a training exercise. The flyover occurred just at the time more than 100 of the women who survived sexual grooming, assault, and rape in their association with Epstein and his associate, convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, spoke at a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol, drowning out their words.

But it did not silence the words of survivor Jess Michaels.

“For 27 years, I thought I was the only one that Jeffrey Epstein raped. I believed I was alone, and I was kept silent by the shame that was inside me and by the fear outside in the world,” she said. “But I wasn't the only one. None of us were. And what once kept us silent now fuels that fire and the power of our voices. We are not the footnotes in some infamous predator’s tabloid article. We are the experts and the subjects of this story. We are the proof that fear did not break us. And we don't just speak for ourselves, but for every survivor whose story is still unspoken…. This is what power looks like. Survivors united, voices joined, refusing to be dismissed. Know this: justice and accountability are not favors from the powerful. They are obligations, decades overdue. This moment began with Epstein's crimes, but it's going to be remembered for survivors demanding justice, demanding truth, demanding accountability, and we will not stop until survivor voices shape justice, transform culture, and define the future. We are no longer whispers. We are one powerful voice, too loud to ignore, and we will never be silenced again.”

mickeyrat · September 5

September 4, 2025 (Thursday)

Senators challenged the decisions of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. as he testified before the Senate Finance Committee for about three hours today. Kennedy has slashed through thousands of advisors and staffers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) who do not share his animosity toward vaccines and has canceled $500 million in research funding for mRNA vaccine research. Last week he fired the newly confirmed director of the CDC, Susan Monarez, when she refused to preapprove the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel Kennedy had stacked with anti-vaccine advocates.

Because of Kennedy’s history of repeating debunked lies and breaking promises he made to the Senate, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), the highest ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee, asked that the committee swear Kennedy in before he began his testimony. Committee chair Mike Crapo (R-ID) declined. Wyden said: “This committee’s unwillingness to swear this witness is basically a message that it is acceptable to lie to the Senate Finance Committee about hugely important questions like vaccines.”

During his testimony, Kennedy insisted his purges are designed to restore faith in the CDC after it “failed miserably” during the coronavirus pandemic. He called the CDC “the most corrupt agency at HHS, and maybe the government.” He denied the official tally that more than 1.2 million Americans have died from Covid-19, and denied that new government guidelines for the covid vaccine mean that people cannot get them. He was combative and seemed angry that he was being questioned. He repeatedly suggested Democratic senators were lying when they quoted facts or data that didn’t fit his narrative.

Republican senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a doctor who was instrumental in securing Kennedy’s confirmation, noted that pharmacies might not offer covid vaccines after Kennedy said the shots are no longer recommended for healthy adults under 65 or for children. Cassidy said “Effectively, we’re denying people vaccines.” Kennedy retorted: “You’re wrong.”

On Monday, nine former directors of the CDC wrote an op-ed in the New York Times warning that Kennedy is “endangering every American’s health,” and yesterday more than 1,000 current and former employees of the Department of Health and Human Services wrote a public letter saying that Kennedy is endangering the health of the nation by spreading inaccurate information. They called for Kennedy to resign or be fired.

Former CDC director Monarez published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today warning that Kennedy and his anti-vaccine colleagues “use a familiar playbook: discredit research, weaken advisory committees, and use manipulated outcomes to unravel protections that generations of families have relied on to keep deadly diseases at bay. Once trusted experts are removed and advisory bodies are stacked, the results are predetermined. That isn’t reform. It is sabotage.”

Egged on by President Donald J. Trump in summer 2020, people involved in the MAGA movement zeroed in on government attempts to combat the coronavirus pandemic as an assault on their freedom. Now Kennedy and adherents of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) branch of MAGA are attacking vaccines in general as a government assault on freedom.

In a letter issued to the states today, the Department of Health and Human Services reiterated that states “must respect state religious and conscience exemptions from vaccine mandates.” It reiterated Kennedy’s position that American freedom dictates the removal of the government’s power to require Americans to get vaccines. “States have the authority to balance public health goals with individual freedom,” the letter quotes Kennedy as saying. “Protecting both public health and personal liberty is how we restore faith in our institutions and Make America Healthy Again.”

Yesterday, Florida became the first state to move to eliminate all vaccine requirements for public school students. If the state legislature agrees, the move would end Florida’s previously required vaccinations for polio, tetanus, chicken pox, hepatitis B, and measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR). No state mandates the covid vaccine.

Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo said that every government vaccine mandate “is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.” He added: “People have a right to make their own decisions, informed decisions. What you put into your body is because of your relationship with your body and your god. I don’t have that right. Government does not have that right.” After Florida’s announcement, CNN’s Aaron Blake noted, top Trump health advisor Mehmet Oz appeared to agree with it, saying on the Fox News Channel: “I would definitely not have mandates for vaccinations.”

For decades, the Republican Party has called for the dismantling of government regulations with the argument that such regulations were destroying American freedom. As Ronald Reagan put it in 1964 in his speech supporting Barry Goldwater for president, on the one hand there was “individual freedom consistent with law and order,” and on the other hand was “the ant heap of totalitarianism.”

But the fight over vaccines illustrates the difference between freedom from government overreach and freedom to build a life that is not cramped by preventable obstacles. The CDC estimates that between 1994 and 2003, childhood vaccinations prevented 32 million hospitalizations and 1,129,000 deaths among children, and saved at least $540 billion. Removing those vaccines removes the individual freedom to determine one’s future.

While they might not articulate these two very different forms of freedom, Americans certainly seem aware of them and appear eager to preserve the concept that the government has a role to play in protecting individuals’ freedom to build a life free of preventable obstacles. A KFF poll released today shows that 81% of American parents support public school requirements that students be vaccinated for measles and polio. In Florida, that number is 82%.

Even as Kennedy and Florida reject vaccines as government overreach that restricts freedom, Democratic states are embracing them as protecting Americans’ freedom to live without the threat of illness or death from preventable diseases. Yesterday, California, Oregon, and Washington announced a “West Coast Health Alliance” to coordinate information about vaccines and public health based in science rather than ideology. Nine states in the Northeast are forming a similar “Northeast Public Health Collaboration.”

Today Massachusetts governor Maura Healey announced measures to make sure vaccines continue to be available to all Massachusetts residents, despite the restrictions set out by Trump and Kennedy. “We won’t let Donald Trump and Robert Kennedy get between patients and their doctors,” Healey said. “When the federal government fails to protect public health, Massachusetts will step up. The actions we are announcing today will make sure people can continue to get the vaccines they need and want in Massachusetts.”

At the turn of the last century, when wealthy industrialists controlled Congress and the Supreme Court and prevented federal laws from addressing the abuses of industrialization and the concentration of wealth, certain state governments stepped in to figure out how to use government power to protect their citizens. Under Governor Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, Wisconsin led the way, bringing together researchers, lawmakers, and state officials to craft policies that would end corruption, promote education and social welfare, and create a strong and fair economy.

The “Wisconsin Idea” made that state “literally a laboratory for wise experimental legislation aiming to secure the social and political betterment of the people as a whole,” Republican president Theodore Roosevelt wrote. “All through the Union we need to learn the Wisconsin lesson.” His presidency launched the idea that the government must defend Americans’ right to live free of economic coercion, industrial pollution, and laws that privilege corporations.

Aside from using the idea of freedom from government overreach to get rid of vaccine mandates, the Trump administration appears generally to have jettisoned that Republican position. Instead, it is using the power of the government to attack those it perceives as political enemies, the same charge made by the House of Representatives against President Richard M. Nixon as it considered impeachment proceedings in 1974.

Today the Department of Justice launched a criminal investigation into Lisa Cook, a governor of the U.S. Federal Reserve, for allegedly committing mortgage fraud by claiming two separate properties as her primary residence. Robert Faturechi, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski of Pro Publica reported today that three of Trump’s own Cabinet members—Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and EPA administrator Lee Zeldin—have all done the same.

A video released today by right-wing activist James O’Keefe—who often edits his material to mislead viewers—showed the Department of Justice’s acting deputy chief of special operations, Joseph Schnitt, saying that Jeffrey Epstein associate and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell was moved to a minimum security prison camp because the government is “offering her something to keep her mouth shut.” He also told an undercover journalist that both that the Epstein files exist and that before their release, the government will “redact every Republican and conservative person in those files and leave all the liberal, Democratic people.”

Tonight the Department of Justice published what appears to be an apology of sorts that confirms the material in the video. In an apparent screenshot of an email, Schnitt says he was talking to a woman he had met on a dating app and that his comments were “my own personal comments on what I’ve learned in the media and not from anything I’ve done or learned via work.”

Even more dramatic a government assault on freedom is the administration’s deployment of troops in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and its threat to deploy troops in Chicago and other cities. Now it has gone so far as to assert the government’s power to order the military to kill individuals Trump declares are gang members smuggling drugs, as it did by apparently killing 11 people on what they claimed was a drug boat.

With Trump and his loyalists abandoning the avowed Republican commitment to freedom from government overreach except when it serves their political interests—by attacking vaccines, for example—Americans determined to prevent the dismantling of our modern government are beginning to speak up to defend government protection of our freedom to live without unwarranted outside interference.

Recently, the 18 universities that make up the Big Ten Conference announced they will be running an ad during sporting events that “focuses on how Big Ten universities make America healthier, safer and more prosperous through everything from discovering new medical treatments to developing healthier foods to driving economic growth.”

Pushing back on the Trump administration’s attacks against universities and scientific research, they intend to highlight the importance of their work for the public good.

mickeyrat · September 6

September 5, 2025 (Friday)

Today President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order to rename the Department of Defense as the Department of War, although the 1947 abandonment of the Department of War name was not simply a matter of substituting a new name for the original one. In 1947, to bring order and efficiency to U.S. military forces, Congress renamed the Department of War as the Department of the Army, then brought it, together with the Department of the Navy and a new Department of the Air Force, into a newly established “National Military Establishment” overseen by the secretary of defense.

In 1949, Congress replaced the National Military Establishment name, whose initials sounded unfortunately like “enemy,” with Department of Defense. The new name emphasized that the Allied Powers of World War II would join together to focus on deterring wars by standing against offensive wars launched by big countries against their smaller neighbors. Although Trump told West Point graduates this year that “[t]he military's job is to dominate any foe and annihilate any threat to America, anywhere, anytime, and any place,” in fact, the stated mission of the Department of Defense is “to provide the military forces needed to deter war and ensure our nation’s security.”

As Amanda Castro and Hannah Parry of Newsweek note, in August, Trump said he wanted the change because “Defense is too defensive...we want to be offensive too if we have to be.” By law, Congress must approve the change, which Politico estimates will cost billions of dollars, although Trump said: “I'm sure Congress will go along if we need that. I don't think we even need that.” By this evening, nameplates and signage bearing the new name had gone up in government offices and the URL for the Defense Department website had been changed to war [dot] gov.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has pushed the change because he sees it as part of his campaign to spread a “warrior ethos” at the Pentagon. Today he said the name change was part of “restoring intentionality to the use of force…. We're going to go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality, violent effect, not politically correct. We're going to raise up warriors, not just defenders. So this War Department, Mr. President, just like America, is back.”

In 1947, when the country dropped the “War Department” name, the chief of staff of the U.S. Army—the highest-ranking officer on active duty—was five-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower. It is unusual for anyone to suggest that Eisenhower, who led the Allied troops in World War II, was insufficiently committed to military strength. Indeed, the men who changed the name to “Defense Department” and tried to create a rules-based international order did so precisely because war was not a game to them. Having seen the carnage of war not just on the battlefield but among civilians who faced firebombing, death camps, homelessness, starvation, and the obscenity of atomic weapons, they hoped to find a way to make sure insecure, power-hungry men could not start another war easily.

The Movement Conservatives who took over the Republican Party in the 1980s leaned heavily on a mythologized image of the American cowboy as a strong, independent individual who wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone. That image supported decades of attacks on the modern government as “socialism,” and it has now metastasized in the MAGA movement to suggest that the men in charge of the government should be able to do whatever they want.

Just what that looks like was made clear on Wednesday when the Trump administration launched a strike on a boat carrying 11 civilians it claimed were smuggling drugs. Covering the story, the New York Times reported that “Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.”

Today, David Philipps and Matthew Cole reported another military strike approved by Trump in his first term that was previously undisclosed. In the New York Times, they reported that in early 2019, Trump okayed a Navy SEAL mission to plant an electronic device in North Korea. The plan went awry when their activity near the shore attracted a civilian fishing boat with two or three men diving for shellfish. The SEALs killed the men on the boat, punctured their lungs with knives so the bodies would sink, abandoned the mission, and returned to base.

The administration never notified the Gang of Eight, the eight leaders of Congress who must be briefed on intelligence activities unless the president thinks it is essential to limit access to information about a covert operation. The Gang of Eight is made up of the leaders of both parties in each chamber of Congress, as well as the chairs and ranking minority members of the intelligence committee of each chamber.

Military officials appear concerned that Trump might continue to send personnel into precarious missions. Those who were involved in or knew about the North Korea mission said they were speaking up now because they are worried that such failures are often hidden and that if the public only hears about successful operations, “they may underestimate the extreme risks American forces undertake.”

Trump’s promise that his demonstrations of strength would make the U.S. a leader on the international stage is also falling apart. Barak Ravid and Dave Lawler of Axios reported that in a conversation yesterday with European Union leaders, Trump backed away from his promises to increase pressure on Russia to stop its war against Ukraine and instead told the leaders they must do it themselves.

Also yesterday, the Financial Times reported that the administration will no longer help to fund military training and infrastructure in Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, Baltic nations vulnerable to Russian incursions. National security scholar Tom Nichols commented: “I am adamant about people not falling prey to conspiracy theories about Trump and the Russians, but this is a classic moment where it's understandable to ask: If the Russians owned him, how would his actions be any different?”

The administration has not briefed Congress on the change.

Earlier this week, on September 3, leaders Xi Jinping of China, Vladimir Putin of Russia, Kim Jong Un of North Korea, and Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus met in Beijing to celebrate the anniversary of the formal surrender of Japan and the end of World War II. The day before, Putin described Xi as a dear friend and said the ties between the two leaders are at an “unprecedented level.”

Trump did not appear to take the meeting well. He posted at Xi, reminding him of “the massive amount of support and ‘blood’ that the United States of America gave to China in order to help it to secure its FREEDOM from a very unfriendly foreign invader” and adding: “Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against the United States of America. PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”

India’s president, Narendra Modi, also met with Xi this week as Beijing continued to push the idea that it is now the head of a new world order. Trump responded: "Looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China. May they have a long and prosperous future together!"

Reality is also intruding on the Republicans’ insistence that only they know how to run the economy.

Although Trump inherited a booming economy, he insisted that it was actually in terrible shape and that his tariffs would bring back manufacturing and make life better for those left behind by 40 years of economic policy that concentrated wealth at the top of society.

In fact, data released Tuesday show that U.S. manufacturing has contracted for six straight months. Economic journalist Catherine Rampell noted that the U.S. has fewer manufacturing jobs today than it had before the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. The country has lost 78,000 manufacturing jobs this year. Seventy-two percent of Texas manufacturers say the tariffs are hurting their businesses. Only 3.7% think the tariffs are helping them.

Yesterday’s immigration raid on a Hyundai Motor battery plant in Georgia is unlikely to send a reassuring message to manufacturers. U.S. agents arrested 475 individuals, more than 300 of whom were South Korean nationals. Included in the sweep were business travelers. In August, Hyundai said it would invest $26 billion in the U.S. through 2028.

Today’s new jobs report, the first since Trump fired the previous director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) after accusing her of rigging the numbers for political reasons, was poor. It showed that the U.S. added just 22,000 jobs in August, far below the expected 75,000, while the jobs numbers for June and July were revised downward by 21,000 jobs. The numbers show that the economy is faltering.

Just before the report was due to be released, the BLS website went down, an unfortunate reminder that the bureau is in turmoil. Today Em Steck and Andrew Kaczynski of CNN confirmed and expanded an August story by David Gilbert of Wired revealing what appears to be an old Twitter account belonging to E.J. Antoni, Trump’s pick to run the BLS. The account posted conspiracy theories and sexist, racist, and homophobic attacks, and parrotted Trump’s talking points.,

Last night, when asked if he would trust today’s job numbers, Trump answered: "Well, we're going to have to see what the numbers, I don't know, they come out tomorrow. But the real numbers that I'm talking about are going to be whatever it is. But, uh, will be in a year from now when these monstrous huge beautiful places they’re palaces of genius and when they start opening up. You’re seeing, I think you’ll see job numbers that are absolutely incredible. Right now it’s a lot of construction numbers, but you’re going to see job numbers like our country has never seen before.”

mickeyrat · September 7

September 6, 2025 (Saturday)

Today the social media account of President Donald J. Trump posted an AI-generated image of Trump as if he were Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore from the 1979 film Apocalypse Now in front of the Chicago skyline with military helicopters and flames and the caption “Chipocalypse Now.” Kilgore loved the war in Vietnam in which he was engaged; his most famous line was “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

Over the image, Trump’s social media post read: “‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning…’ Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” The words were followed by three helicopter emojis, symbols the right wing uses to represent former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s goons’ disappearing political opponents by pushing them out of helicopters.

Although it has become trite to speculate about what Republicans would say if a Democratic president engaged in the behavior Trump exhibits daily, this open attack of the president on an American city is a new level of unhinged. Mehdi Hasan of Zeteo wrote: “The president of the United States just declared war, actual military war, not a metaphorical one, on a major American city, and one governed by his political opponents.” He added, accurately: “In any other period, this would be impeachment-worthy.”

Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker called attention to the gravity of Trump’s post: “The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal. Donald Trump isn’t a strongman, he’s a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.” Under the words “Know your rights, Illinois,” and “Stay safe and stay informed,” the governor’s social media account posted information about Americans’ rights in both English and Spanish.

Trump’s threats against American citizens are outrageous, but they also feel desperate. Trump’s popularity is tanking, the economy is faltering, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is facing a chorus of calls to resign or be fired, and the American people are taking to the streets. Thousands of people turned out today in Washington, D.C., for the “We Are All D.C.” march to protest the presence of troops in the city, and in Chicago for the “Chicago Says No Trump No Troops” protest. The protests are notable for the seas of signs the peaceful protesters carry.

And then, with Congress back in session, there is the resurgence of the issue of Trump’s appearance in the Epstein files. Last week, the White House warned Republicans that voting to release the Epstein files “would be viewed as a very hostile act to the administration.” Yesterday, Trump reiterated his claim that the agitation for the release of the files is a “Democrat HOAX…in order to deflect and distract from the great success of a Republican President.”

Also yesterday, lawyers for the Justice Department asked a federal judge to keep the names of two associates who received large payments from Epstein in 2018 secret. Days before the payments, the Miami Herald had started to examine the sweetheart deal Epstein got in 2008. One associate received a payment of $100,000, and the second received $250,000. As part of his plea deal, Tom Winter of NBC News reports, Epstein got a guarantee that the associates would not be prosecuted.

Last night, Trump hosted the inaugural dinner of what the White House is calling the “Rose Garden Club” in the newly-paved White House Rose Garden, telling those assembled that they were there because they are loyal to the president. “You’re the ones that I never had to call at 4:00 in the morning,” Trump told them. “You are the ones that have been my friends, and you know what I’m talking about."

Yesterday, talking to reporters about the Epstein files, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said that Trump was “an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down.” The idea that Trump was secretly working to bring Epstein down is common fare among conspiracy theorists, but as Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo suggests, Johnson’s embrace of it might well be an attempt to spin material in the files before it becomes public.

Marshall notes that journalist Michael Wolff, who interviewed Epstein at length during Trump’s first presidency, says that Epstein suspected it was Trump who told the authorities about his systemic sexual assault of girls. But if so, Marshall explains, this is damning rather than exonerating.

It’s pretty well known that Trump and Epstein had a falling out in 2004 after Trump went behind Epstein’s back to buy an estate in South Florida that Epstein wanted. But at the time, Trump was headed toward bankruptcy, and it was not clear where he was getting the money to buy the estate.

Marshall calls attention to a recent interview in which Wolff said that Epstein suspected Trump was laundering money for a Russian oligarch—and indeed, Trump did flip the property to a Russian oligarch for a profit of more than $50 million a few years after buying it—and threatened to sue Trump, bringing the money laundering to light. At that point, the Epstein investigation began.

According to Wolff, Epstein believed Trump had notified the police about what was going on at Epstein’s house, which he knew because he was a frequent visitor. Marshall speculates that Johnson mentioned that Trump was an informant because that information could well be in the files the Department of Justice has, and they’re trying to spin it ahead of time to make it sound like Trump was a hero.

But both Wolff and Marshall note that if indeed Trump turned the FBI onto Epstein, it shows he knew what was taking place at Epstein’s properties.

Johnson’s claim that Trump was an FBI informant suggests Trump’s team is worried that as more and more people get access to the files, it will be increasingly difficult to hide what’s in them. Trump's demand for Republicans’ loyalty suggests that at least some of them are starting to recalculate it. And that, in turn, might have something to do with why he is putting troops in the streets.

mickeyrat · September 8

September 7, 2025 (Sunday)

Tonight is a picture night, but one a little bit different than usual.

Cartoonist and writer Liza Donnelly and I have been experimenting with different ways to integrate art, politics, and history, and since tomorrow is the anniversary of President Gerald Ford’s pardon of President Richard Nixon, we took that event out for a spin.

You can find Liza at her Substack Seeing Things; I'll link it in the comments. It's an illustrated review of the day’s news including people or scenes Liza sees in her travels.

I’ll be back on my regular beat tomorrow.

And if you have ideas for historical events you’d like to see us cover this way, please drop them below.

https://youtu.be/xqPrJJivR7I?si=vx-dKz6MVGKzzw4b

mickeyrat · September 9

September 8, 2025 (Monday)

On Friday, September 5, Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell told Southern Baptist pastor and Newsmax host Tony Perkins that Trump may try to declare that “there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States" in order to claim “emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward,” overriding the Constitution’s clear designation that states alone have control over elections. Mitchell has long called for voting restrictions and was on the infamous January 2021 phone call Trump made to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger in which Trump pressed Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” that would give the state’s electoral votes to him rather than the victorious Democratic candidate, Joe Biden.

Democracy Docket, the media organization founded and run by voting rights and election lawyer Marc Elias, has been tracking the administration’s assault on democracy and has repeatedly called out both such language and Trump’s attempts to monkey with the machinery of our democracy through gerrymandering, voter suppression, and now the use of the military in Democratic-led cities.

In August, Jim Saksa of Democracy Docket explained that through intimidation, harassment, and delays, troops could keep large numbers of voters from casting ballots. The administration might even claim fraud to seize voting machines, as Trump contemplated doing in 2020. Today in Mother Jones, Ari Berman noted the administration has dismantled efforts to promote election security and is working to stack state elections boards with loyalists.

MAGA loyalist Steve Bannon recently said: “They’re petrified over at MSNBC and CNN that, hey, since we’re taking control of the cities, there’s going to be ICE officers near polling places. You’re damn right.” Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, speaking of Trump’s threatened military incursion into Chicago, observed: “This is not about fighting crime. This is about the President and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities, and end elections.”

Yesterday the administration announced a surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents into Boston, and today it announced a surge into Chicago. Although Trump has been threatening to send in federalized National Guard troops, at least so far the announcement appears to be limited to ICE agents, who are part of the country’s regular law enforcement systems. Pritzker noted that the administration had made no effort to reach out to state officials as it would have if it actually wanted to combat crime. Instead, Pritzker said, “we are learning of their operations through their social media as they attempt to produce a reality television show.”

The apparent plan of the Trump administration reflects the strategy of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, whose writings seem lately to have captivated leaders on the American right, including billionaire Peter Thiel and the man who influenced him, Curtis Yarvin. Schmitt opposed liberal democracy, in which the state enables individuals to determine their own fate. Instead, he argued that true democracy erases individual self-determination by making the mass of people one with the state and exercising their will through state power. That uniformity requires getting rid of opposition. Schmitt theorized that politics is simply about dividing people into friends and enemies and using the power of the state to crush enemies. As J.D. Vance described Schmitt’s ideas in 2024: “There’s no law, there's just power.”

Much of Schmitt’s philosophy centered around the idea that the power of a nation that is based in a constitution and the rule of law belongs to the man who can exploit emergencies that create exceptions to the constitutional order, enabling him to exercise power without regard to the law. Trump—who almost certainly has not read Schmitt himself—asserted this view on August 26: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country’s in danger—and it is in danger in the cities—I can do it.”

Although the Republicans have control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, meaning Trump should be able to get his agenda passed according to the normal constitutional order, since taking office he has operated under emergency powers. On August 22, Karen Yourish and Charlie Smart noted in the New York Times that since he took office, Trump has declared nine national emergencies and one “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C. The journalists report that since 1981, presidents have declared on average about seven national emergencies per four-year term. Trump declared that many in his first month back in office, although experts say no such emergencies exist.

Under normal constitutional provisions and laws, Trump’s actions would have required congressional approval or long regulatory review, the journalists note. Instead, he has enacted sweeping immigration measures, deregulated energy, launched a tariff war that is crushing the U.S. economy, and now put troops in U.S. cities, all on his own hook.

Even when Trump didn’t announce a new emergency, he has cited crises to justify new extreme actions, as when he (or someone; he told reporters he did not sign the order) invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to justify rendering undocumented Venezuelan immigrants to the notorious terrorist prison CECOT in El Salvador and when he justified the cuts billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” made to congressionally-approved funding because such cuts addressed “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

Although the administration continues to insist voters wanted what Trump is doing, his poor job approval rating and the popular dislike of his policies across the board say the opposite. Perhaps more to the point was this weekend’s social media post from J.D. Vance, who pushed back on widespread concern that the administration’s strike against a boat in international waters last week was illegal. The administration claims that the 11 men in the boat were gang members smuggling drugs, but even if it offered evidence for such an assertion, which it has not done, the U.S. cannot legally kill civilians of a nation with whom we are not at war.

This weekend, Vance posted on social media: “Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.” Political commentator Brian Krassenstein replied: “Killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime.” Vance replied: “I don’t give a sh*t what you call it.”

The federal courts are working overtime to hold the administration to the rule of law. As Jay Kuo noted on September 3 in The Status Kuo, just last week saw courts invalidating most of Trump’s tariffs, stopping the administration from deporting unaccompanied children to Guatemala, and declaring his cuts to Harvard University’s funding, his use of troops in Los Angeles, and his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act illegal. Today an appeals court upheld the $83.3 million judgement a jury rendered last year against Trump in a defamation case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll.

But the Supreme Court has been overruling lower court decisions, deciding in favor of Trump’s expansion of power. Today it allowed Trump to ignore the decision of a lower court that he could not fire the last remaining Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, Rebecca Slaughter, while her case was in the courts. Since 1935, the court had said the president does not have the power to fire members of independent agencies created by Congress.

It also said today that the administration can use racial profiling, including personal appearance, language, or type of employment, to stop people in order to check their immigration status, even though that will necessarily mean that U.S. citizens and legal residents will be swept up. Essentially, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, Latino Americans must now keep papers on them at all times to prove they are citizens or they can find themselves incarcerated.

The court decided these cases without hearings, briefs, or a written decision, under what is called the “shadow docket.” Traditionally, such unsigned, unexplained decisions are used for emergencies either to keep the status quo or to resolve a procedural issue, but under Trump the court’s use of them has exploded. The court, three of whose justices Trump appointed, has sided with him in shadow docket decisions more than 70% of the time.

On September 4, Lawrence Hurley of NBC News noted that this new practice of overturning lower court rulings with no explanation is undermining faith in the judiciary. It supports the administration’s narrative that the courts are trying to subvert Trump’s presidency. As the administration has attacked the courts, violent threats against judges have dramatically increased. Hurley notes that the lower courts painstakingly research the law to reach a decision, then administration officials criticize any that doesn’t support their actions, Then Trump appeals to the Supreme Court, which rejects the judges’ decisions with little or no explanation.

Under the control of Republicans, Congress has also declined to assert its constitutional power. Yesterday, Julian E. Barnes and Catie Edmondson of the New York Times reported how Republican leaders have accepted the administration’s unilateral cuts to programs Congress approved, launches of military strikes without informing Congress, and, last week, the Pentagon’s cancellation of a classified visit to the Virginia headquarters of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency by Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Far-right activist Laura Loomer had complained about the visit. The administration has already limited congressional oversight of immigrant detention centers; now the Pentagon says it is also imposing new limits to congressional oversight of intelligence facilities.

“Is congressional oversight dead?” Senator Warner asked. “Where does this end? If none of my Republican colleagues raises an issue, does this mean we are ceding all oversight?”

The administration appears to be in a rush to replace democracy with a dictatorship before the whole administration collapses. On Saturday, Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers reported that 46% of Americans—almost half of them—“strongly disapprove” of the job Trump is doing as president while only 24% “strongly approve, a 22% enthusiasm gap.

That gap seems likely to grow. Tonight the Wall Street Journal published the 2003 birthday letter to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein bearing Trump’s signature whose existence the paper revealed in July. The image in the article by Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo was even worse than earlier reports of it: the image drawn over the words is not the outline of a woman, but of a girl. The text reads, in part, “Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything. Donald: Yes there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.” Those words from “Donald” are outlined with pubescent breasts.

The words continue: “Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.
Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey: Yes we do, come to think of it.
Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?
Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.
Donald: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.

The signature, “Donald,” mimics public hair.

After the Wall Street Journal revealed the existence of the letter in July, Trump sued the reporters, the publisher, and the Journal’s parent company for ten billion dollars, saying the letter was “nonexistent.”

Today’s story also reported on another letter from the book that included a giant check made out for $22,500, mocked up to look like Trump wrote it to Epstein. A handwritten caption below it says: “Jeffrey showing early talents with money + women! Sells ‘fully depreciated’ [redacted] to Donald Trump for $22,500. Showed early ‘people skills’ too. Even though I handled the deal I didn’t get any of the money or the girl!”

mickeyrat · September 10

September 9, 2025 (Tuesday)

As Joe Perticone outlines in The Bulwark today, Republican lawmakers are greeting the release of the lewd letter in Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book depicting the outline of a child and apparently signed by Donald Trump either by saying they don’t care or by denying the signature is Trump’s. For this to be true, someone would have had to have slipped the letter into the book when it was bound in leather in 2003, a story that makes no sense at all. But, as J.V. Last of The Bulwark notes, Trump and his loyalists, including White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, are insisting the letter is a hoax.

Last speculates this is the route they’re taking because claiming proof that Russian operatives worked to elect Trump in 2016 was a “hoax” mostly worked, because claiming the letter is a hoax is a loyalty test, or because Trump knows what else is out there and is setting a marker to declare any more revelations a lie.

Or, perhaps, all three.

As Last writes, the material in the 238-page book reveals that the friends of the convicted sex offender described him as a “super-rich” man who liked “having sex with very young girls.” But rather than recoiling from his predatory habits, they celebrated those crimes. As Last writes: “Everyone in Jeffrey Epstein’s circle knew. They knew that Epstein was a predator. They believed that his pathology defined him. And they joked about it, encouraged it, and egged him on.”

An in-depth article in the New York Times Magazine yesterday by David Enrich, Matthew Goldstein, and Jessica Silver-Greenberg detailed how top bankers at JPMorgan Chase ignored the many red flags around Epstein’s financial activities to keep the wealthy and well-connected man as a treasured client. It was only after Epstein was arrested the second time, federal prosecutors charged him with sex trafficking, and he died in his jail cell that JPMorgan filed a report retroactively flagging 4,700 transactions totaling more than $1.1 billion as suspicious.

According to Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), that money included hundreds of millions of dollars of transactions involving women in Belarus, Russia, and Turkmenistan, and two Russian banks.

Epstein’s story personifies a cultural system in which wealthy white men can laugh about the horrific and illegal abuse of children—female children—comfortable in the knowledge the system will never hold them to account.

Retired Navy captain Jon Duffy encapsulated where this kind of thinking leads in an op-ed published today in Defense One, which covers issues of national security. Examining the administration's strike against a small vessel in the Caribbean last week, Duffy warned that “[t]he United States has crossed a dangerous line” into “lawless power,” operating without regard to the law.

Duffy reminded readers of the Supreme Court’s July 2024 ruling in Donald J. Trump v. United States that the president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed while exercising official duties. At the time, he notes, experts warned that the decision would “give the commander-in-chief license to commit murder,” but a majority of the court waved those concerns away. “Now,” he writes, “the president has ordered killings in international waters. Eleven people are dead, not through due process but by fiat. The defense secretary boasts about it on television. And the president will face no consequences.”

“This is no longer abstract,” Duffy writes. “The law has been rewritten in real time: a president can kill, and there is no recourse. That is not strength. That is authoritarianism.”

Duffy notes that Trump has already used the exact same logic when he sent National Guard troops into U.S. cities: “redefine the threat, erase legal distinctions, and justify force as the first tool.” He warned that “the commander-in-chief of the most destructive military power in history has been placed beyond the reach of law.”

Duffy urged military leaders to stand firm. “A republic that allows its leaders to kill without law, to wage war without strategy, and to deploy troops without limit is a republic in deep peril. Congress will not stop it. The courts will not stop it. That leaves those sworn not to a man, but to the Constitution. The oath is clear,” he wrote. “[U]nlawful orders—foreign or domestic—must be disobeyed. To stand silent as the military is misused is not restraint. It is betrayal.”

A world in which a few rich men run the federal government for their own benefit and according to their own whims looks much like the late nineteenth century.

Already, the cost of such a system to the American people is ramping up. Yesterday, Yasmeen Abutaleb and Maeve Reston of the Washington Post reported that states are facing cuts because of the Republicans’ sweeping tax and spending plan, which forces many of the responsibilities the federal government used to assume onto the states. The sudden shift of financial weight means states are cancelling infrastructure projects and scaling back benefits, even as new requirements in the law will mean increased staffing to oversee work requirements, for example.

In Maryland, Governor Wes Moore said the legislature has cut its budget by the largest margin in 16 years. He told the Washington Post journalists: “And now the federal government continues to lay off federal workers in historic numbers, slash rural health care, slash food assistance and then say to our states: ‘Now you all have to be the ones to pick up the pieces.’”

In North Carolina, Republican senator Ted Budd says that the policy of Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem that she must sign off on all expenditures over $100,000 has badly delayed recovery aid to the state after Hurricane Helene that Congress approved back in December. He says he will place holds on all Department of Homeland Security nominees until the process speeds up.

In Ellabell, Georgia, an immigration raid by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security on an electric vehicle battery plant has destabilized the project altogether. The plant was under construction by the South Korean carmaker Hyundai and the battery supplier LG Energy Solution. Federal agents swept through last week and arrested 475 people, 300 of whom were South Korean nationals. South Korean leaders are angry, and LG Energy has pulled most of its employees out of the United States. The detained workers are supposed to be repatriated tomorrow.

As Farah Stockman and Rebecca Elliott of the New York Times note, the plan was billed as the biggest economic development project in Georgia’s history. Electrive reported today that LG Energy Solution is suspending construction of the factory.

But as the Trump administration’s authoritarianism hurts Americans, state governments led by Democrats are stepping up work for their people. Today is the anniversary of the day in 1850 when California became a state, and this evening, Governor Gavin Newsom noted on social media that “[t]he Trump Administration is once again failing to do its job—and California is cleaning up their mess.”

“We're deploying state resources to protect the 2,000-year old sequoias on FEDERAL LANDS from the wildfires the federal administration are supposed to handle.”

Democratic-led states are also joining forces to address the health issues the federal government is now dropping. In the western U.S., Oregon, California, Washington, and Hawaii are coming together in a new West Coast Health Alliance to coordinate vaccine guidelines; on the East Coast a similar joint effort is underway with representatives from every New England state except New Hampshire, along with New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. New Hampshire governor Kelly Ayotte, a Republican, declined to participate, saying she doesn't want to politicize health care.

In New Mexico, one of the poorest states in the Union, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham announced that the state will be the first in the nation to offer universal free child care, expanding a program that lifted 120,000 of the state’s residents out of poverty by enabling them to stay in school and to work. The program also raised wages for childcare workers.

“Child care is essential to family stability, workforce participation, and New Mexico’s future prosperity,” Lujan Grisham said in a statement. “By investing in universal child care, we are giving families financial relief, supporting our economy, and ensuring that every child has the opportunity to grow and thrive.”

In Massachusetts, Governor Maura Healey announced today that she would tackle the high cost of housing in the state by cutting environmental review for certain new housing construction projects down from more than a year to 30 days. Katie Lannan of GBH News notes that this plan is designed to deliver the 222,000 new housing units Massachusetts will need in the next ten years.

Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll said: “The bottom line is we can maintain our strong environmental standards and build housing and also have nature-based solutions to address…rising climate needs and mitigation.”

In Illinois, Governor J.B. Pritzker visited with immigrant community leaders who focus on protecting constitutional rights as Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan warns of more of the ICE raids that have been sweeping in citizens and legal residents. “Many families who have lived in Illinois for years are fearful to pick up their kids from school, go to work, and live their lives freely,” the governor said. “At such an uncertain moment for our immigrant communities, it is more important than ever that people know their rights and have someone looking out for them.”

Tonight, Democrat James Walkinshaw easily won the special election to replace the late Representative Gerry Connolly (D-VA). According to Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers, the district has swung 16 percentage points toward the Democrats since the 2024 election.

mickeyrat · September 11

September 10, 2025 (Wednesday)

Last night, Polish forces shot down 19 Russian drones that invaded Poland’s airspace during a massive Russian air attack on Ukraine. Poland is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the Polish operation was backed by NATO member forces. Today, Poland officially activated Article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which triggers a consultation whenever “the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened.”

German chancellor Friedrich Merz called the Russian breach of Polish airspace a “reckless and aggressive act” that fit a broader pattern of Russian provocations against NATO’s eastern edge.

Although the United States under President Donald J. Trump has pulled back from its steadfast commitment to NATO, the U.S. was instrumental in the creation of the organization in 1949. Leaders wanted to establish a defensive alliance that could stand against Soviet aggression and that would reinforce rules to prevent countries from using violence against other countries. Such an order, based in rules rather than violence, would make it harder to start wars.

NATO guaranteed collective security because all of the member states agreed to defend each other against an attack by a third party. In 1949, when he signed the treaty, President Harry Truman called the pact a positive influence for peace. With NATO, he said, “we hope to create a shield against aggression and the fear of aggression—a bulwark which will permit us to get on with the real business of government and society, the business of achieving a fuller and happier life for all our citizens.”

The experience of the United States “in creating one nation out of…the peoples of many lands” proved that this idea could work, Truman said. “This method of organizing diverse peoples and cultures is in direct contrast to the method of the police state, which attempts to achieve unity by imposing the same beliefs and the same rule of force on everyone.”

The NATO countries did not believe that war was inevitable, Truman said. “Men with courage and vision can still determine their own destiny. They can choose slavery or freedom—war or peace. I have no doubt which they will choose…. If there is anything certain today, if there is anything inevitable in the future, it is the will of the people of the world for freedom and for peace.”

The drone incursions into a NATO country are just the latest escalation from Russia’s president Vladimir Putin after his meeting with Trump in Alaska on August 15. Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk told the Polish parliament: “I have no reason to claim we’re on the brink of war, but a line has been crossed. This situation brings us the closest we have been to open conflict since World War II.”

At 11:09 this morning, Trump responded to the attack by posting on social media: “What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace with drones? Here we go!”

This afternoon at an outdoor event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, a gunman shot and killed 31-year-old Charlie Kirk, a right-wing activist and founder of Turning Point USA, which pushes for right-wing politics on high school, college, and university campuses. The killing appears to have been targeted. A manhunt is underway for the killer.

Although nothing more is currently known about the event, President Trump in an address from the Oval Office blamed “the radical left” for the shooting and vowed that his administration “will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials and everyone else who brings order to our country.”

Trump listed incidents of what he called “radical left political violence.” As The Guardian noted, absent from his list was violence against Democrats, including the murder in June of a Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband by a man who had a hit list of 45 Democratic elected officials.

Less than an hour after the Kirk shooting, during the third week of school, a shooter at Evergreen High School in Colorado wounded two students—one critically—before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Gun violence had impacted the life of the grandfather of two boys at the school. In 2021, Mike Webb’s ex-wife Xiaojie Tan was killed in the spa shootings in the Atlanta area and today he told CNN’s Emma Tucker that a school shooting was his “greatest fear realized.” Webb said he had spoken with one of the boys, who was shaken by the events at his school. “I told him none of us should have to go through this. I said this is the world we live in and thank God you guys are OK.”

mickeyrat · September 12

September 11, 2025 (Thursday)

Twenty-four years ago today, terrorists from the al-Qaeda network used four civilian airplanes as weapons against the United States, crashing two of them into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in New York City and a third into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia.

Four years ago, George W. Bush, who was president on that horrific day, spoke in Pennsylvania at a memorial for the passengers of the fourth flight, United Airlines Flight 93, who on September 11, 2001, stormed the cockpit and brought their airplane down in a field, killing everyone on board but denying the terrorists a fourth American trophy.

Former president Bush said: “Twenty years ago, terrorists chose a random group of Americans, on a routine flight, to be collateral damage in a spectacular act of terror. The 33 passengers and 7 crew of Flight 93 could have been any group of citizens selected by fate. In a sense, they stood in for us all.” And, Bush continued, “The terrorists soon discovered that a random group of Americans is an exceptional group of people. Facing an impossible circumstance, they comforted their loved ones by phone, braced each other for action, and defeated the designs of evil.”

Recalling his experience that day, Bush talked of “the America I know.”

“On America's day of trial and grief, I saw millions of people instinctively grab for a neighbor's hand and rally to the cause of one another…. At a time when religious bigotry might have flowed freely, I saw Americans reject prejudice and embrace people of Muslim faith…. At a time when nativism could have stirred hatred and violence against people perceived as outsiders, I saw Americans reaffirm their welcome to immigrants and refugees…. At a time when some viewed the rising generation as individualistic and decadent, I saw young people embrace an ethic of service and rise to selfless action.”

Bush celebrated the selfless heroism and care for others shown by those like Welles Crowther, the man in the red bandana, who helped others out of danger before succumbing himself; the airplane passengers who called their loved ones to say goodbye; neighbors; firefighters; law enforcement officers; the men and women who volunteered for military service after the attack.

That day, and our memories of it, show American democracy at its best: ordinary Americans putting in the work, even at its dirtiest and most dangerous, to take care of each other.

But even in 2001, that America was under siege by those who distrusted the same democracy the terrorists attacked. America had seemed to drift since the end of the Cold War twelve years before, but now the country was in a new death struggle, they thought, against an even more implacable foe. To defeat the nation’s enemies, America must defend free enterprise and Christianity at all costs.

In the wake of the attacks, Bush’s popularity, which had been dropping, soared to 90 percent. He and his advisers saw that popularity as a mandate to change America, and the world, according to their own ideology. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” he announced. He and his loyalists attacked any opposition to their measures as an attack on “the homeland.”

They tarred those who questioned the administration's economic or foreign policies as un-American—either socialists or traitors making the nation vulnerable to terrorist attacks—and set out to make sure such people could not have a voice at the polls. Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression began to shut Democratic voices out of our government, aided by a series of Supreme Court decisions. In 2010 the court opened the floodgates of corporate money into our elections to sway voters; in 2013 it gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act; in 2021 it said that election laws that affected different groups of voters unevenly were not unconstitutional. In that year, a former Republican president claimed he won the 2020 election because, all evidence to the contrary, Democratic votes were fraudulent.

Four years ago, former president Bush mused that "[a] malign force seems at work in our common life that turns every disagreement into an argument, and every argument into a clash of cultures. So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear, and resentment." He said: "There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.”

In doing so, we can take guidance from the passengers on Flight 93, who demonstrated as profoundly as it is possible to do what confronting such a mentality means. While we cannot know for certain what happened on that plane on that fateful day, investigators believe that before the passengers of Flight 93 stormed the cockpit, throwing themselves between the terrorists and our government, and downed the plane, they took a vote.

mickeyrat · September 13

September 12, 2025 (Friday)

Since a gunman murdered right-wing activist Charlie Kirk at an outdoor event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, both social media circles and the political sphere have been alight with accusations that “the Left” was responsible for the shooting. Prominent right-wing social media accounts called the Democratic Party “a domestic terror organization” and declared “WAR.” Billionaire Elon Musk posted: “The Left is the party of murder.”

From the Oval Office, President Donald J. Trump blamed the shooting on “the radical left” and vowed to “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”

Without any information about the shooter, the media got in on the game, with the Wall Street Journal reporting yesterday that “[a]mmunition engraved with transgender and antifascist ideology was found inside the rifle authorities believe was used in Kirk’s shooting.” Bomb threats targeted Democratic politicians—primarily Black politicians—and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

Condemnation of the shooting was widespread. Perhaps eager to distance themselves from accusations that anyone who does not support MAGA endorses political violence, commenters portrayed Kirk as someone embracing the reasoned debate central to democracy, although he became famous by establishing a database designed to dox professors who expressed opinions he disliked so they would be silenced (I am included on this list).

Meanwhile, it was not clear the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was up to the task of finding the killer. FBI director Kash Patel and deputy director Dan Bongino were both MAGA influencers without law enforcement experience when Trump put them in charge of the agency. Once there, they focused on purging the agency of those they considered insufficiently loyal to Trump or “DEI hires.” In early August, they forced out the leader of the Salt Lake City, Utah, field office, Mehtab Syed, a decorated female Pakistani American counterterrorism agent.

Meanwhile, David J. Bier of the Cato Institute reported that one in five FBI agents have been diverted from their jobs to conduct immigration raids with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and just hours before the shooting, three former top officials at the FBI filed a lawsuit against Patel, the FBI, Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Department of Justice, and the president accusing them of unlawfully politicizing the FBI, purging it of anyone who had ever worked on a criminal investigation of Trump. The lawsuit suggests Bongino had an “intense focus on [using] his social media profiles to change his followers’ perceptions of the FBI.”

As Quinta Jurecic reported today in The Atlantic, hours after the shooting, Patel’s personal social media account posted a picture of himself and Kirk; minutes later, Patel’s official FBI account posted that the shooter was already in custody and then, an hour and a half later, said the suspect had been released. Both Patel and Bongino appeared to be focused more on posting than on doing the work to find the shooter.

This morning, Trump announced on the Fox News Channel’s Fox & Friends that he had just heard “they have the person that they wanted.” That person turned out to be 22-year-old Utah native Tyler Robinson, who turned himself in to authorities after his father urged him to. Robinson's parents are registered Republicans; he was not affiliated with a political party and was an inactive voter. Over the past years, Robinson’s mother posted a number of pictures of him and his brothers posing with guns.

Robinson had recently had a conversation with a family member about why they didn’t like Kirk’s viewpoints. Robinson appears to have admired the “Groypers,” led by Nick Fuentes, who complain that more mainstream organizations like Kirk’s Turning Point USA are not “pro-white” enough and have publicly harassed Kirk in the past.

Allison Gill of The Breakdown explained that the rumors the shooter had engraved anti-fascist rhetoric on some of the bullet casings found at the scene turned out to be a misunderstanding of terms from the video game Helldivers2. The claim that he had used “transgender ideology” was apparently a misreading of the headstamp “TRN” that marks ammunition as the product of Turkish manufacturer Turan.

Almost as soon as Robinson was identified, the tone of MAGA leader’s conversation about the shooting changed. Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC), who had used a slur to refer to the shooter as pro-transgender, posted on social media: “We know Charlie Kirk would want us to pray for such an evil, and lost individual like Tyler Robinson to find Jesus Christ. We will try to do the same.”

For his part, Trump seemed to have lost interest in Kirk even earlier. Yesterday evening, a reporter offered the president his condolences on the loss of his friend Kirk and asked Trump how he was holding up. The president answered, in full: “I think very good. And by the way, right there, you see all the trucks, they just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years, and it's going to be a beauty. It’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure. And I just see all the trucks. We just started so it'll get done very nicely and it'll be one of the best anywhere in the world, actually. Thank you very much.”

The day of Kirk’s murder, Russia sent 19 drones into Poland—some armed and some unarmed—testing the strength of the neighboring country. With the help of allies, Poland shot down four of them. Poland belongs to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), with whom the U.S. shares a mutual defense agreement meaning that if it is attacked, we will come to its aid. After the attack, Poland called an emergency meeting of the North Atlantic Council, the primary political decision-making body within NATO. U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker apparently did not attend.

Although Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, called the violation “intentional, not accidental,” Trump told reporters that Russia’s sending of drones into Poland “could’ve been a mistake.” Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo reported on Tuesday that on August 27, the Trump administration returned a plane full of Russian dissidents seeking asylum in the U.S. to Moscow, where at least some of them went directly from the plane into custody.

Today, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and Supreme Allied Commander Europe General Alexus G. Grynkewich announced that NATO is launching “Eastern Sentry,” an operation to bolster NATO’s defense against Russian incursions along NATO’s eastern flank. In what appeared to be an attempt to calm NATO allies’ concerns about Trump’s "mistake" comment, acting U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Dorothy Shea told the United Nations Security Council today the U.S. will “defend every inch of NATO territory.” “The United States stands by our NATO allies in the face of these alarming airspace violations,” she said.

If the U.S. is weakening ties to traditional defensive alliances, it is attempting to flex its muscles by going after alleged drug dealers with a newly dubbed “Department of War.” On September 2, Trump announced the U.S. had struck a boat he claimed was carrying drugs to the U.S., killing 11 civilians he claimed were “Tren de Aragua Narco terrorists.” The administration posted a video of the operation online.

From the start, legal specialists noted that the U.S. made the strike without legal authority. Trump simply claimed the power to kill men he claimed were a danger to the U.S., advancing the argument that drug smuggling is the same thing as an imminent military attack on the U.S. and thus the laws of war are in force. Yesterday, that argument got even weaker when Charlie Savage and Helene Cooper of the New York Times reported that the men on the boat appeared to have been spooked by the military hardware over them and turned back to shore. “If someone is retreating, where’s the ‘imminent threat’ then?” Rear Admiral Donald J. Guter, a retired top judge advocate general for the Navy from 2000 to 2002, said to the reporters.

Today, Trump announced he was sending the National Guard not into Chicago, Illinois, where Mayor Brandon Johnson and Governor J.B. Pritzker have mounted strong opposition, but to Memphis, Tennessee. The Memphis Police Department noted: “Overall crime is at a 25-year low, with robbery, burglary, and larceny also reaching 25-year lows. Murder is at a six-year low, aggravated assault at a five-year low, and sexual assault at a twenty-year low" in the city.

Although Trump said he had the support of the mayor and the governor, Shelby County mayor Lee Harris asked Republican governor Bill Lee to “please reconsider, if this is on the table.” He said local government would welcome more state troopers to help fight crime, but “to have individuals with military fatigues, semi-automatic weapons and armored vehicles patrolling our streets is way too far, anti-democratic and anti-American.”

Lee released a statement saying he was set to speak with Trump about a “strategic mission” to use state law enforcement more effectively with an already established FBI mission in Memphis.

Meanwhile, yesterday four out of five justices on a panel of the Brazilian Supreme Court found former president Jair Bolsonaro, a close ally of Donald Trump, guilty of plotting a coup, attempting to overturn the country’s 2022 election, and committing violent acts against state institutions. They sentenced him to 27 years and three months in prison.

mickeyrat · September 14

September 13, 2025 (Saturday)

President Donald J. Trump has been trying to remove Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook from the board of governors, alleging she lied on a mortgage application by claiming two homes as primary residences, which could garner a lower interest rate. Yesterday Chris Prentice and Marisa Taylor of Reuters reported that documents show that, in fact, Cook told the lender who provided a mortgage that a property in Georgia for which she was obtaining a loan would be a “vacation home.”

It appears the documents that director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency Bill Pulte used to accuse her of mortgage fraud were standardized forms that her personal application specifying the house was a second home overrode. It also appears that Cook never applied for a primary residence tax exemption for the Georgia home and that she referred to the home on official documents as a “2nd home.”

In contrast, Reuters reported last week that unlike Cook, Pulte’s own father and stepmother claimed primary residence tax exemptions for two homes in different states. When that news broke, one of the towns in which they reside removed their primary residence exemption and charged them for back taxes.

Trump hoped to use the allegations against Cook to advance his control of the Federal Reserve. Now the revelation that those allegations appear to be false highlights the degree to which this administration is attempting to achieve control of the country by pushing a false narrative and getting what its officers want before reality catches up. Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI) pioneered this technique in the 1950s when he would grab media attention with outrageous statements and outright lies that destroyed lives, then flit to the next target, leaving fact checkers panting in his wake. By the time they proved he was lying, the news cycle had leaped far ahead, and the corrections got nowhere near the attention the lies had.

While McCarthy eventually went down in disgrace, the right wing adopted his techniques of controlling politics by creating a narrative. Spin turned into a narrative that denigrated opponents as anti-American, and then into the attempt to construct a fictional world that they could make real so long as they could convince voters to believe in it. In 2004, a senior advisor to President George W. Bush told journalist Ron Suskind that people like him—Suskind—lived in “the reality-based community”: they believed people could find solutions based on their observations and careful study of discernable reality. But, the aide continued, such a worldview was obsolete.

“That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” the aide said. “We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

But once you have untethered the political narrative from reality, you are at the mercy of anyone who can commandeer that narrative.

In the wake of the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in Utah on Wednesday, the radical right is working to distort the country’s understanding of what happened. Long before any information emerged about who the shooter was, the president and prominent right-wing figures claimed that “the Left,” or Democrats, or just “THEY,” had assassinated Kirk.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller posted an attack on his political opponents on social media: “There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved. It is an ideology at war with family and nature. It is envious, malicious, and soulless. It is an ideology that looks upon the perfect family with bitter rage while embracing the serial criminal with tender warmth. Its adherents organize constantly to tear down and destroy every mark of grace and beauty while lifting up everything monstrous and foul. It is an ideology that leads, always, inevitably and willfully, to violence—violence against those [who] uphold order, who uphold faith, who uphold family, who uphold all that is noble and virtuous in this world. It is an ideology whose one unifying thread is the insatiable thirst for destruction.”

But in fact, the alleged shooter was not someone on the left. The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, is a young white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family, who appears to have embraced the far right, disliking Kirk for being insufficiently radical.

Rather than grappling with reality, right-wing figures are using Kirk’s murder to prop up their fictional world. Briefly, they claimed Robinson had been “radicalized” in college. Then, when it turned out he had spent only a single semester at a liberal arts college before going to trade school, MAGA pivoted to attack those who allegedly had celebrated Kirk’s death on social media.

This morning, Miller posted: “In recent days we have learned just how many Americans in positions of authority—child services, law clerks, hospital nurses, teachers, gov[ernmen]t workers, even [Department of Defense] employees—have been deeply and violently radicalized. The consequence of a vast, organized ecosystem of indoctrination.”

Today, billionaire Elon Musk, who just months ago was a key figure in the White House, reposted a spreadsheet of “people who’ve said vile things” about Kirk’s murder. Over the list, he wrote: “They are the ones poisoning the minds of our children.” “So far, teachers and professors are by far the most represented,” the author of the list wrote.

Across the country, educators have been suspended or fired for posting opinions on social media that commented on Kirk’s death in ways officials deemed inappropriate. Legal analyst Asha Rangappa noted that “Americans are being conditioned to be snitches on their fellow citizens who don’t toe a party line on what is ‘allowed’ to be expressed. And employers are going along. It’s the new secret police.”

The deliberate attempt to create a narrative centering around “us” and “them” and to mobilize violence against that other was on display today when Musk told a giant anti-immigrant rally in the United Kingdom: “You're in a fundamental situation here…where whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die. You either fight back or you die. And that's the truth.”

Of course, that is not the truth. It is a classic case of dividing the world into friends and enemies—a tactic suggested by Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt—and inciting violence against newly identified enemies by claiming it is imperative to preempt them from using violence against your friends. Miller has vowed to use the power of the government not against the far right, where the violence that killed Kirk appears to have originated, but against MAGA’s political enemies. Flipping victims and offenders, he called his political opponents “domestic terrorists” and warned: “[T]he power of law enforcement under President Trump's leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and, if you've broken the law, to take away your freedom.”

Where that kind of rhetoric takes a society showed on the Fox News Channel’s Fox & Friends Friday, when host Brian Kilmeade suggested the way to address homelessness was through “involuntary lethal injection. Or something. Just kill them.” When asked “why did we have to get to this point,” he answered: “we’re not voting for the right people.”

And that’s the heart of it. The radical right is frustrated because a majority continues to oppose them. According to Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers, Trump’s job approval rating is just 42.3% with 53.6% disapproving, and more people disapprove of all of his policies than approve of them. Unable to control the country through the machinery of democracy when it operates fairly and afraid voters will turn them out in 2026, Republicans are working to make the system even more rigged than it already is: just yesterday, Missouri lawmakers approved a mid-decade gerrymander to turn one of the state’s two Democratic seats into a Republican one.

Right now, Trump and his loyalists control all three branches of government, but Trump is not delivering what his supporters believe his fictional vision of his presidency promised. Trump telegraphed great strength and vowed he could end Russia’s war against Ukraine with a single phone call, for example. When he failed to get any buy-in at all from Russia’s president Vladimir Putin for his proposals, Trump threatened to impose strong new sanctions against Russia. This afternoon he backed away from that altogether, saying he would issue sanctions on Russia only after all NATO nations stopped buying oil from Russia and placed 50% to 100% tariffs on China. “This is not TRUMP’S WAR (it would never have started if I was President!), it is Biden’s and Zelenskyy’s WAR,” he posted.

This latest retreat from his threats against Russia after all his previous empty threats makes Trump’s claims of strength ring hollow. Russia is increasing its attacks on Ukraine, and today NATO member Romania scrambled jets when a Russian drone breached its airspace. Polish and NATO aircraft were deployed today to protect Polish airspace as well.

As Trump’s narrative falters on this and so many other fronts, MAGA is moving to the violence of the far right to achieve what he cannot. In that, they are fueled by the right-wing disinformation machine that is whitewashing Kirk’s racism, sexism, and attacks on those he disagreed with and instead portraying Kirk simply as a Christian motivational speaker attacked by a rabid left wing. Trump’s vow to award Kirk the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, posthumously reinforces that image.

The refusal of Republican lawmakers to challenge MAGA’s creation of its own reality has opened the way for believers to try to put that world into place through violence. Their victory would end the rule of law on which the United States was founded and base the government on the whims of an authoritarian cabal.

It would make the United States a country in which people who stand in the way of the regime—people like Lisa Cook—would be at the mercy of hostile officials who allege they are committing crimes in order to get rid of them.

mickeyrat · September 15

September 14, 2025 (Sunday)

At 10:22 on the morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, a bomb ripped through the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. It was Youth Day in the historic brick church, and five young girls dressed in their Sunday best were in the ladies’ lounge getting ready for their part in the Sunday service that was about to start. As Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins were chatting and adjusting their dresses, a charge of dynamite stashed under the steps that led to the church sanctuary blasted into the ladies’ lounge. It killed the four girls instantly. Standing at the sink in the back of the room, Addie’s sister Sarah survived with serious injuries.

Just five days before, Black children had entered formerly all-white schools after an August court order required an end to segregation in Birmingham’s public schools. This decision capped a fight over integration that had begun just after the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision in which the Supreme Court declared segregation unconstitutional.

In that same year, in the wake of the successful 381-day Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott to protest that city’s segregated bus system, Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, along with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, and strategist and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, started the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to challenge segregation through nonviolent protest, rather than trusting the work to the courts alone.

On September 9, 1957, Shuttlesworth and his wife, Ruby, along with other Black parents, tried to enroll their children in the city’s all-white flagship John Herbert Phillips High School. A mob of white Ku Klux Klansmen met them at the school, attacking them with chains and bats; someone stabbed Ruby Shuttlesworth in the hip with a pocketknife, and an amateur videographer captured a man named Bobby Frank Cherry on video reaching for brass knuckles before diving back into the attack on Shuttlesworth.

Cherry had no children at the school.

Over the next several years, the Ku Klux Klan lost the political struggle over civil rights, and its members increasingly turned to public violence. There were so many bombings of civil rights leaders’ homes and churches that the city became known as “Bombingham.” When the Freedom Riders, civil rights workers who rode interstate buses in mixed-race groups to challenge segregation, came through Birmingham, police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor looked the other way as KKK members beat the riders with baseball bats, chains, rocks, and lead pipes.

Connor was a perfect foil for civil rights organizers, who began a campaign of nonviolent direct action to challenge segregation in Birmingham. Shuttlesworth invited King to Birmingham to help. One of the organizers’ tactics was to attract national attention by provoking Connor, and participants in the movement began sit-ins at libraries, kneel-ins at white churches, and voter registration drives.

In April 1963, Connor got an injunction barring the protests and promised to fill the jails. He did. King’s famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail was a product of Connor’s vow, smuggled out of jail on bits of paper given to him by a sympathetic inmate. In the letter, King responded to those who opposed the civil rights protests and, claiming to support civil rights, said that the courts were the proper venue to address social injustice. King agreed that the protests created tension, but he explained that such tension was constructive: it would force the city’s leaders to negotiate. “‘Wait,’” he reminded them, “has almost always meant ‘never.’”

But Connor’s tactics had the chilling effect he intended, as demonstrators shied away from being arrested out of fear of losing their jobs and being unable to provide for their families. So organizers decided to invite children to join a march to the downtown area. When the children agreed, the SCLC held workshops on the techniques of nonviolence and warned them of the danger they would be facing.

On May 2, 1963, they gathered at the 16th Street Baptist Church, just blocks away from Birmingham’s City Hall. As students moved toward City Hall in waves, singing “We Shall Overcome,” police officers arrested more than 600 of them and blocked the streets with fire trucks. The national news covered the story.

The next day, Bull Connor tried another tactic to keep the young protesters out of the downtown: fire hoses set to the highest pressure. When observers started to throw rocks and bottles at the police with the fire hoses, Connor told police officers to use German shepherd dogs to stop them. Images from the day made the national news and began to galvanize support for the protesters.

By May 6, Connor had turned the state fairgrounds into a makeshift jail to hold the overflow of protesters he was arresting, and national media figures, musicians, and civil rights activists were arriving in Birmingham. By May 7 the downtown was shut down while Connor arrested more people and used fire hoses again. The events in Birmingham were headline news.

By May 10, local politicians under pressure from businessmen had agreed to release the people who had been arrested; to desegregate lunch counters, drinking fountains, and bathrooms; and to hire Black people in a few staff jobs.

After Connor’s insistence that he would never permit desegregation, white supremacists in Birmingham felt betrayed by the new deal, basic though it was. Violence escalated over the summer, even as King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail was widely published and praised and as civil rights activists, fresh from the Birmingham campaign, on August 28 held the March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, D.C., where King delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech.

For white supremacists in Birmingham, the children and the 16th Street Baptist Church where they had organized were the symbols of the movement that had beaten them.

Their fury escalated in summer 1963 when a lawsuit the Reverend Shuttlesworth had filed to challenge segregation in public schools ended in August with a judge ordering Birmingham public schools to desegregate.

Five days after the first Black children entered a white school as students, four members of the Cahaba River Group, which had splintered off from another Ku Klux Klan group because they didn’t think it was aggressive enough, took action. Thomas Blanton, Robert Chambliss, Herman Cash, and Bobby Frank Cherry—the same man who in 1957 had beaten the Reverend Shuttlesworth with brass knuckles for trying to enroll his children in school—bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church. "Just wait until Sunday morning and they'll beg us to let them segregate,” Chambliss had told his niece.

The death of innocent children—on a Sunday morning, in a house of God—at the hands of white supremacists drew national attention. It woke up white people who had previously been leery of civil rights protests, making them confront the horror of racial violence in the South. Support for civil rights legislation grew, and in 1964 that support helped legislators to pass the Civil Rights Act.

Still, it seemed as if the individual bombers would get away with their crimes. In 1968, the FBI investigation ended without indictments,

But it turned out the story wasn’t over. Bill Baxley, a young law student at the University of Alabama in 1963, was so profoundly outraged by the bombing that he vowed someday he would do something about it. In 1970, voters elected Baxley to be Alabama’s attorney general. He reopened the case, famously responding to a Ku Klux Klan threat by responding on official state letterhead: “kiss my *ss.”

The reluctance of the FBI to share its evidence meant that Baxley charged and convicted only Robert Chambliss—whose nickname in 1963 was “Dynamite Bob”—for the murder of Denise McNair.

But still the story wasn’t over. Another young lawyer named Doug Jones was in the courtroom during that trial, and in 1997, President Bill Clinton appointed Jones as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. Jones pursued the case, uncovering old evidence that had been sealed and finding new witnesses. Herman Cash had died, but in 2001 and 2002, representing the state of Alabama, Jones successfully prosecuted Thomas Edwin Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry for first-degree murder.

Chambliss, Cherry, and Blanton all died in prison: Chambliss in 1985, Cherry in 2004, and Blanton in 2020.

Doug Jones went on to serve as a Senator from Alabama from 2018 to 2021. On this anniversary of the bombing, Senator Jones talked about the events of that day, justice, healing, and what lessons today’s Americans can take from the bombing and its aftermath.

https://youtu.be/bccqUo0mZvQ?si=57qSFGHlh5NhsEQy

mickeyrat · September 16

September 15, 2025 (Monday)

Six years ago, on September 15, 2019, after about a six-week hiatus during the summer, I wrote a Facebook post that started:

“Many thanks to all of you who have reached out to see if I'm okay. I am, indeed (aside from having been on the losing end of an encounter with a yellow jacket this afternoon!). I've been moving, setting up house, and finishing the new book. Am back and ready to write, but now everything seems like such a dumpster fire it's very hard to know where to start. So how about a general overview of how things at the White House look to me, today....”

I wrote a review of Trump’s apparent mental decline amidst his faltering presidency, stonewalling of investigations of potential criminal activity by him or his associates, stacking of the courts, and attempting to use the power of the government to help his 2020 reelection.

Then I noted that the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), had written a letter to the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, on Friday, September 13, telling Maguire he knew that a whistleblower had filed a complaint with the inspector general of the intelligence community, who had deemed the complaint “credible” and "urgent.” This meant that the complaint was supposed to be sent on to the House Intelligence Committee. But, rather than sending it to the House as the law required, Maguire had withheld it. Schiff’s letter told Maguire that he’d better hand it over. Schiff speculated that Maguire was covering up evidence of crimes by the president or his closest advisors.

And I added: “None of this would fly in America if the Senate, controlled by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, were not aiding and abetting him.”

“This is the story of a dictator on the rise,” I wrote, “taking control of formerly independent branches of government, and using the power of his office to amass power.”

Readers swamped me with questions. So I wrote another post answering them and trying to explain the news, which began breaking at a breathtaking pace.

And so these Letters from an American were born.

Six years later, we are in the midst of Trump’s second term, and the patterns I saw six years ago are slicing to the heart of both the mechanics and the soul of the United States.

In that first letter where I warned of rising authoritarianism, I wrote: “So what do those of us who love American democracy do? Make noise. Take up oxygen…. Defend what is great about this nation: its people, and their willingness to innovate, work, and protect each other. Making America great has never been about hatred or destruction or the aggregation of wealth at the very top; it has always been about building good lives for everyone on the principle of self-determination. While we have never been perfect, our democracy is a far better option than the autocratic oligarchy Trump is imposing on us.”

And we have made noise, and we have taken up oxygen. All across the country, people have stepped up to defend our democracy from those who are open about their plans to destroy it and install a dictator. Democrats and Republicans as well as people previously unaligned, we have reiterated why democracy matters.

If you are tired from the last six years, you have earned the right to be.

And yet you are still here, reading, commenting, protesting, articulating a new future for the nation. And I am proud to be among you.

I write these letters because I love America. I am staunchly committed to the principle of human self-determination for people of all races, genders, abilities, and ethnicities: the idea that we all have the right to work to become whatever we wish. I believe that American democracy has the potential to be the form of government that comes closest to bringing that principle to reality. And I know that achieving that equality depends on a government shaped by fact-based debate rather than by extremist ideology and false narratives.

And so I write.

I have come to understand that I am simply the translator for the sentiments shared by millions of people who are finding each other and giving voice to the principles of democracy. Your steadfast interest, curiosity, critical thinking, and especially your kindness—to me and to one another—illustrate that we have not only the power, but also the passion, to reinvent our nation.

To those who read these letters, send tips, proofread, criticize, comment, argue, worry, cheer, award medals, and support me and one another: I thank you for bringing me along on this wild, unexpected, exhausting, and exhilarating journey.

mickeyrat · September 17

September 16, 2025 (Tuesday)

The phrase that kept coming up over the last several days was “make fetch happen.” It’s a reference to the film Mean Girls, when one of the characters tries to make the word “fetch” trendy, using it to mean “cool” or “awesome.” Another character eventually slaps back: “Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen. It’s NOT going to happen!”

Over the weekend, it appeared MAGA leaders were trying to make fetch happen, hoping to distract attention from Trump’s and popular anger about the economy, corruption, the administration's disregard for the law, and the Epstein files by trying to gin up the idea that the United States is being torn apart by political violence coming from what MAGA figures called “the left,” or “Democrats,” or just “THEM.”

Their evidence was the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last Wednesday in Utah, although the motive of the alleged shooter, Tyler Robinson, remains unclear. Today the state of Utah indicted Robinson on seven counts, including aggravated murder. But a 2024 report from a research arm of the Department of Justice itself noted that “[s]ince 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists.” Julia Ornedo of The Daily Beast reported that the Department of Justice removed the report from its website after the shooting.

But as G. Elliott Morris explains in Strength in Numbers, “[m]ost Americans reject political violence in all circumstances, especially when you measure it carefully.” Morris notes that only a small fraction of Americans genuinely support political violence: about 9% approve of threats against political opponents, 8% approve of harassment, 6% support nonviolent felonies, and about 4% support using violence. Morris notes that both Democrats and Republicans significantly overestimate their political opponents’ willingness to use violence and that social media elevates extremists, making them appear more numerous than they are.

Morris explains that violent acts associated with politics happen because members of that small minority respond to rhetoric coming from political leaders. Violent metaphors polarize audiences and attract “high-aggression followers.” Reducing violence requires political elites to tone down their rhetoric.

It also helps for leaders to reinforce democratic norms.

On that, President Donald Trump is in some trouble. Olivier Knox of U.S. News & World Report reported yesterday that U.S. farmers “are not OK.” Droughts and flooding from climate change as well as higher costs for fertilizer and equipment were cutting into operations even before Trump’s tariffs hit. The U.S. used to be China’s top source for soybeans, but in retaliation for the new tariffs, China has replaced the output of U.S. farmers with soybeans from Brazil. Cuts to food programs have hit small producers, while the administration’s crackdowns on undocumented immigration have created shortages of workers.

There were more farm bankruptcies by the end of July than in all of 2024. The administration appears to be considering providing emergency aid for farmers as it did during the trade wars of Trump’s first term, although those programs often help larger producers more than smaller ones.

Knox notes that agriculture, food, and related industries contributed about $1.5 trillion to the economy—about 5.5% of gross domestic product—in 2023, making up about 22.1 million jobs.

Matt Egan reported in CNN today that Americans’ credit scores “are falling at the fastest pace since the Great Recession as Americans struggle to keep up with the high cost of living and the return of student debt payments.” The average FICO score, which assesses a borrower’s creditworthiness, dropped by 2 points this year, the largest drop since 2009.

Meanwhile, Stuart Anderson reported in Forbes that the officials who launched the raid on a Hyundai plant in Georgia, which has caused an uproar in South Korea after U.S. officials arrested more than 300 Korean workers, had a warrant to look for four people from Mexico. According to Anderson, once the officials were there, they decided to meet the quotas established by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller by arresting South Koreans.

A deep story by Eric Lipton, David Yaffe-Bellany, Bradley Hope, Tripp Mickle, and Paul Mozur in the New York Times yesterday suggested that the Trump administration has engaged in an astonishingly corrupt deal in which two multibillion-dollar deals appear to be intertwined.

In May an investment firm run by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who controls the sovereign wealth of the United Arab Emirates, announced it would invest $2 billion in World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency start-up founded by the Trump family and by Steve Witkoff and his son Zach Witkoff. Steve Witkoff is Trump’s Middle East envoy. Two weeks later, the administration permitted the UAE to gain access to hundreds of thousands of the world’s scarcest and most advanced computer chips as part of a new deal to turn the UAE into an artificial intelligence powerhouse. G42, a technology company controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon, would receive many of the chips.

“While there is no evidence that one deal was explicitly offered in return for the other,” the reporters write, “the confluence of the two agreements is itself extraordinary.” “Put plainly, while the U.A.E. was negotiating with the White House to secure chips for G42, a G42 employee was helping the Witkoffs and the Trumps make money.”

Yesterday, Trump filed a $15 billion lawsuit against the New York Times and some of its leading reporters for a grab bag of reasons, alleging “the Times is a full-throated mouthpiece of the Democrat Party.” The case filing praised Trump fulsomely for his success as a politician, entertainer, and entrepreneur. The New York Times said the case “lacks any legitimate legal claims and instead is an attempt to stifle and discourage independent reporting…. The New York Times will not be deterred by intimidation tactics. We will continue to pursue the facts without fear or favor and stand up for journalists’ First Amendment right to ask questions on behalf of the American people.”

Also on Monday, Trump posted on social media that U.S. military forces have struck another boat, apparently from Venezuela, killing three people. Trump said they were “positively identified, extraordinarily violent drug trafficking cartels and narcoterrorists,” but offered no evidence. Today he told reporters that forces had also “knocked off” another boat, but the military did not respond to questions about the claim.

Today, FBI director Kash Patel testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Patel is under scrutiny for his performance during the search for Kirk’s killer and for cuts he’s made to the agency. When pressed on the files concerning the Epstein investigation, Patel told Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) that the material in the case files is limited and does not show that Epstein trafficked girls to any people other than himself. “There is no credible information—none…that he trafficked to other individuals. And the information we have again is limited.”

Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) expressed astonishment at this statement. Then Patel yelled at Schiff when the senator challenged Patel’s assertion that the Bureau of Prisons alone made the unprecedented decision to move Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell to a minimum-security work camp after she spoke to Department of Justice officials. Hailey Fuchs and Kyle Cheney of Politico noted that the White House congratulated Patel for tangling with Schiff, whom Trump calls “Pencil Neck.”

But the president has not been able to get away from the Epstein files. Activists projected an image of Trump and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein onto the walls of Windsor Castle as Trump and First Lady Melania Trump landed in the United Kingdom for a state visit with King Charles III and Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Channel 4 television announced today that while the president is in the country, it will run a special show listing more than 100 lies Trump has told so far in his second term. Trump v. the Truth will air on Wednesday and will offer fact-checking of the president’s statements.

In Washington, D.C., work crews have begun moving some trees and cutting down others around the East Wing of the White House to prepare for Trump’s $200 million, 90,000-square-foot ballroom.

mickeyrat · September 18

September 17, 2025 (Wednesday)

This evening, John Koblin, Michael M. Grynbaum, and Brooks Barnes of the New York Times reported that ABC was pulling the television show of comedian Jimmy Kimmel off the air. The suspension is allegedly over his comments Monday about the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, although Chris Hayes of All In pointed out that after CBS pulled Stephen Colbert, another political comedian, off the air in July, President Donald Trump told reporters that comedians Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel would be “next. They’re going to be going. I hear they’re going to be going.”

Kimmel has one of the top late-night television shows, attracting younger viewers in the 18-49 year old demographic. He delivers monologues that skewer President Donald J. Trump and the administration. His YouTube channel, which replays his show, has more than twenty million subscribers.

During his monologue on Monday’s show, Kimmel said: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half staff which got some criticism but on a human level you can see how hard the president is taking this.”

Kimmel then played a clip of Trump’s response to a reporter who asked how the president was holding up after Kirk’s death. Trump answered: “I think very good. And by the way right there you see all the trucks, they just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House which is something they’ve been trying to get as you know for about for 150 years and it’s gonna be a beauty.”

On the podcast of right-wing influencer Benny Johnson on Wednesday, chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Brendan Carr said that Kimmel’s words were part of a “concerted effort to try to lie to the American people” and that the FCC was “going to have remedies that we can look at.” “Frankly, when you see stuff like this,” he said, “I mean look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Carr explained: "There's actions we can take on licensed broadcasters. And frankly, I think that it’s really sort of past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say…'We're not gonna run Kimmel anymore...because we licensed broadcasters are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC.'"

The largest operator of ABC affiliates, Nexstar—which needs FCC approval for a $6.2 billion merger—said it would stop airing Kimmel’s show from its stations. Then ABC suspended Kimmel’s show.

Benny Johnson, the podcaster on whose show Carr threatened Kimmel, was one of the influencers Russian state media funded to spread propaganda before the 2024 election. After Kimmel’s suspension, Johnson posted on social media: “We did it for you, Charlie. And we’re just getting started.”

Exactly two hundred and thirty-eight years ago today, on September 17, 1787, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the men we know now as the Framers signed their final draft of a new constitution for the United States, hoping it would fix the problems of the first attempt to create a new nation. During the Revolutionary War, the Second Continental Congress had hammered out a plan for a confederation of states, but with fears of government tyranny still uppermost in delegates’ minds, they centered power in the states rather than in a national government.

The result—the Articles of Confederation—was a “firm league of friendship” among the thirteen new states, overseen by a congress of men chosen by the state legislatures and in which each state had one vote. The new pact gave the federal government few duties and even fewer ways to meet them. Indicating their inclinations, in the first substantive paragraph the authors of the agreement said: “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every Power, Jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.”

Within a decade, the states were refusing to contribute money to the new government and were starting to contemplate their own trade agreements with other countries. An economic recession in 1786 threatened farmers in western Massachusetts with the loss of their farms when the state government in the eastern part of the state refused relief; in turn, when farmers led by Revolutionary War captain Daniel Shays marched on Boston, propertied men were so terrified their own property would be seized that they raised their own army for protection.

The new system clearly could not protect property of either the poor or the rich and thus faced the threat of landless mobs. The nation seemed on the verge of tearing itself apart, and the new Americans were all too aware that both England and Spain were standing by, waiting to make the most of the opportunities such chaos would create.

And so, in 1786, leaders called for a reworking of the new government centered not on the states, but on the people of the nation represented by a national government. The document began, “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union….”

The Constitution established a representative democracy, a republic, in which three branches of government would balance each other to prevent the rise of a tyrant. Congress would write all “necessary and proper” laws, levy taxes, borrow money, pay the nation’s debts, establish a postal service, establish courts, declare war, support an army and navy, organize and call forth “the militia to execute the Laws of the Union,” and “provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.”

The president would execute the laws, but if Congress overstepped, the president could veto proposed legislation. In turn, Congress could override a presidential veto. Congress could declare war, but the president was the commander in chief of the army and had the power to make treaties with foreign powers. It was all quite an elegant system of paths and tripwires, really.

A judicial branch would settle disputes between inhabitants of the different states and guarantee every defendant a right to a jury trial.

In this system, the new national government was uppermost. The Constitution provided that “[t]he Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States” and promised that “the United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion….”

Finally, it declared: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”

But after their experience throwing off the yoke of what they considered an overly powerful king, those concerned about creating too powerful a national government worried the new government would endanger individual liberty. They demanded that the framers of the new government enumerate the ways in which it could not intrude on the rights of the people.

In 1789 the new Congress passed ten amendments to the Constitution, and the states ratified them the same year. Taken together, the amendments were known as the Bill of Rights.

The first of those amendments prohibits the government from intruding on the basic liberties that enable individuals to challenge it. It prohibits the government from establishing a state religion or infringing on the right of individuals to publish whatever they wish, to assemble peacefully, or to ask the government to remedy unfair situations.

It prohibits the government from infringing on the right of individuals to speak freely, without fear of government retaliation.

Americans take their First Amendment rights seriously. In April 2025, a Pew Research Center poll showed that 92% of Americans thought it was important “that the media can report the news without state/government censorship.”

Kimmel’s suspension has produced an uproar. Comedian Paul Scheer noted that Kimmel is off the air but Brian Kilmeade of the Fox News Channel, who recently called for killing homeless Americans by “involuntary lethal injection,” is still employed. The union that represents the musicians on Kimmel’s show called the suspension “a direct attack on free speech and artistic expression,” adding: “These are fundamental rights that we must protect in a free society.” The Writers Guild of America posted: “The right to speak our minds and to disagree with each other—to disturb, even—is at the heart of what it means to be a free people…. If free speech applied only to ideas we like, we needn’t have bothered to write it into the Constitution…. Shame on those in government who forget this founding truth.”

On CNN, conservative pundit David Frum called it “state repression.” On his show, right-wing activist Tucker Carlson said: “if they can tell you what to say, they’re telling you what to think. There is nothing they can’t do to you because they don’t consider you human…. A free man has a right to say what he believes.”

Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker posted: “This is an attack on free speech and cannot be allowed to stand. All elected officials need to speak up and push back on this undemocratic act.” He pointed out that in 2023, Brendan Carr himself posted: “Free speech is... the check on government control. That is why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream.” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) warned of a coming campaign to “use the murder of Charlie Kirk as a pretext to use the power of the White House to wipe out Trump’s critics and his political opponents."

From England, where he is on a state visit, Trump posted: “Great News for America: The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED. Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what needed to be done. Kimmel has ZERO talent, and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that’s possible. That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!! President DJT”

Two hundred and thirty-eight years ago today, the Framers signed their names to the blueprint for a new government established by “We the People of the United States.”

cincybearcat · September 18

I don't know, I think it's ok to dump people for low ratings....what's Donald's rating currently again????

mickeyrat · September 19

September 18, 2025 (Thursday)

Since he took office in 2017, President Donald J. Trump has worked hard to convince Americans that they are divided into two partisan camps: Republicans, whom he defines as those people loyal to him, and Democrats, a group made up of everyone else. In his first term, when actual Republicans, some of whom he appointed himself, challenged him, he simply redefined them as Democrats. In his telling, major figures in the investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign’s association with Russian operatives, including special counsel Robert Mueller and his staff, FBI director James Comey, and deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, were all Democrats.

In 2020, when Utah senator Mitt Romney voted to convict Trump on one of the charges on which the House impeached him, Trump tweeted a video calling him a “Democrat secret asset” who “tried to infiltrate Trump’s administration” while “posing as a Republican.” Romney was the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee.

In Trump’s worldview, it appears, those who oppose him, those he calls “Democrats,” are anti-American and dangerous. In his first term, he insisted those people were organized as “Antifa,” for “anti-fascist.” In summer 2020, in the midst of protests after the murder of George Floyd, Trump threatened to designate “Antifa” as a “major terrorist organization.” When FBI director Chris Wray, whom Trump appointed himself, said antifa is an ideology, not an organization, Trump posted: “I look at them as a bunch of well funded ANARCHISTS & THUGS who are protected because the Comey/Mueller inspired FBI is simply unable, or unwilling, to find their funding source, and allows them to get away with ‘murder’. LAW & ORDER!”

Dividing a population into friends and enemies is a tool of authoritarians, clearly articulated by Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, who is enjoying a burst of popularity right now in the American right wing. MAGA figures have pushed the idea that the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last week, apparently by a lone gunman, could be blamed on “Democrats” or “THEM.” Last night, after news broke that ABC was suspending comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s television show, the Trump administration announced it was putting the teeth of the government into this division of the world.

His social media account posted: “I am pleased to inform our many U.S.A. Patriots that I am designating ANTIFA, A SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER, AS A MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION. I will also be strongly recommending that those funding ANTIFA be thoroughly investigated in accordance with the highest legal standards and practices. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Legal experts point out that government officials can designate “foreign terrorist organizations,” but that there is no legal grounds for designating any domestic organization a “terrorist organization,” especially in light of the First Amendment that protects free speech and the right of Americans to assemble peacefully. Even if the designation can’t actually be made, though, the rhetorical division of the country into Americans and “Antifa” serves to divide the country into friends and enemies.

But the uproar over the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel brought to light a different, far more American, division in this country. Americans could divide along partisan lines so long as the guardrails of a secular, evidence-based, liberal democracy remained in place. But as the Trump administration smashes through those guidelines, it appears that rather than being divided along partisan lines, Americans are beginning to realign as “We the People” against a wannabe authoritarian.

Yesterday, Republican political strategist Karl Rove, who was a key member of President George W. Bush’s administration, pushed back against the friends and enemies distinction in the Wall Street Journal. “No,” he wrote. “Charlie Kirk wasn’t killed by ‘them.’ ‘They’ didn’t pull the trigger. One person did, apparently a young man driven by impulse and a terrible hate. If there were a ‘they’ involved, law enforcement would find ‘them’ and the justice system would hold ‘them’ accountable. But ‘he’ and ‘him’ are the correct pronouns for this horrendous act…. Using Charlie’s murder to justify retaliation against political rivals is wrong and dangerous. It will further divide and embitter our country. No good thing will come of it.”

As Trump’s popularity continues to plummet—The Economist today has his approval rating at -17%, down 2.6 points since last week—it’s becoming clearer every day that opposition to the president is not partisan. Yesterday, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Susan Monarez testified before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, where she explained that Health and Human Services Director Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is operating according to his ideology without regard for science. Kennedy fired her after she refused to rubber stamp his plans to change the childhood vaccination schedule without research supporting such a change.

Trump appointed Monarez.

Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) warned yesterday against the panelists Kennedy appointed to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices after he purged the panel making changes to the childhood vaccine schedule. Not only Cassidy but also insurance companies appear to have little confidence in the decisions of Kennedy’s panel. They say they will disregard any changes and continue covering the cost of vaccines—a clear sign they consider vaccines beneficial to helping people stay healthy.

John Yoo, the former deputy assistant attorney general under President George W. Bush who wrote the legal justification for torture during the war on terror, pushed back on the extreme powers Trump is claiming to kill those he labels terrorists. “There has to be a line between crime and war,” Yoo said. “We can’t just consider anything that harms the country to be a matter for the military. Because that could potentially include every crime.”

Some voices on the right who, in the past, were protected by the laws and norms of democracy are now calling out its loss. Last night, after the administration pressured ABC to suspend Kimmel’s show, right-wing media host Tucker Carlson explained why a government must not be able to limit speech. “You hope that a year from now, the turmoil we're seeing in the aftermath of his murder won't be leveraged to bring hate speech laws to this country. And trust me…if that does happen, there is never a more justified moment for civil disobedience than that, ever, and there never will be, because if they can tell you what to say, they're telling you what to think. There's nothing they can't do to you, because they don't consider you human. They don't believe you have a soul. A human being with a soul, a free man, has a right to say what he believes, not to hurt other people, but to express his views.”

Today, agents from the Department of Homeland Security arrested New York City comptroller Brad Lander and public advocate Jumaane Williams along with ten other city and state elected officials near federal immigration courts when they tried to conduct oversight of people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the building.

mickeyrat · September 20

September 19, 2025 (Friday)

Today U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday threw out the $15 billion lawsuit President Donald J. Trump filed on September 15 against the New York Times for defamation. The judge, who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush, called the complaint “decidedly improper and impermissible” and took Trump’s lawyers to task for using a legal complaint as a public forum for abusive language.

Noting that the two defamation counts followed eighty pages of praise for Trump and allegations against the "hopelessly compromised and tarnished 'Gray Lady,'"—an old nickname for the New York Times—he set a forty-page limit on any amended complaint.

The administration’s pressure on ABC to fire comedian Jimmy Kimmel is very unpopular, as G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers notes, with people polled by YouGov on September 18 seeing it as an attack on free speech.

That unpopularity showed today when podcaster and senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) celebrated Kimmel’s firing but called the threat of Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr to retaliate against ABC “unbelievably dangerous.” Cruz called Carr’s threats “right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”

He explained: “I think it is unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying, ‘We’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you off air if we don’t like what you’re saying.’”

Democratic political strategist Simon Rosenberg noted that three new polls out this week show Trump’s approval rating dropping and commented that voters don’t like “[t]his dictator sh*t.” AP-NORC observed that Republicans are growing pessimistic about the direction of the country. While the share of all American adults who say the country is off track has increased 13 percentage points since June, from 62% to 75%, the biggest change has been among Republicans. In June, 29% of Republicans were concerned about the direction of the country; now that number is 51%.

Most American adults think Trump has gone too far with his tariffs, his use of presidential power, and sending troops into U.S. cities.

Democratic lawmakers this week have reflected the growing opposition to Trump and his administration. Today in The Contrarian, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker wrote that Trump’s attacks on Chicago aren’t really about stopping crime. Instead, Trump is creating chaos and destabilizing the country in order to erode our democratic institutions and cement his power.

Pritzker warned that Trump “has become increasingly brazen and deranged in his rhetoric and his actions” and that the things he “is doing and saying are un-American.” In contrast, Pritzker held up as a model “our collective Midwestern values of hard work, kindness, honesty and caring for our neighbors,” and urged people to “be loud—for America.”

Yesterday Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) spoke at the Center for American Progress. He, too, outlined the administration's attacks on the rule of law and blamed “billionaires padding their stock portfolios and buying up politicians,” “self-interested CEOs cynically dialing up the outrage and disinformation on their social media platforms,” and “politicians who saw more value in stoking grievance than solving problems” for creating the conditions that ushered Trump into the presidency.

Schiff called for restoring American democracy through legislation, litigation, and mobilization. He noted that Democrats have just introduced a package of reforms to put into law the norms Trump has violated. Democrats have also introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission decision permitting unlimited corporate money to flow into elections. While this legislation almost certainly won’t pass in a Republican-dominated Congress, he noted, it would force a debate.

He also noted that Democrats are conducting oversight, demanding accountability for wrongdoing and attacks on the rule of law, and are creating a record. Their victories, he noted, have been “modest,” but they have, for example, managed to force the administration to rehire employees at the National Weather Service and succeeded in preserving U.S. Department of Agriculture field offices in California.

Litigation has been more successful, Schiff said. Since January, plaintiffs have brought more than 400 suits against the administration, and courts have halted the administration's policies in more than 100 of them. Wrongly fired civil servants have been reinstated, funding has been restored to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, deportation flights have been grounded, Trump’s tariffs have been struck down.

“Ultimately, though,” Schiff said, “the most powerful check on Trump’s authoritarianism is not Congress. It is not the courts. It is the American people.”

And that was the rallying cry of Representative Jason Crow (D-CO) in Congress yesterday.

Crow, who entered Congress in 2019, is a former Army Ranger who completed three tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was with the 82nd Airborne Division and the 75th Ranger Regiment.

In his speech, Crow warned that Trump is tearing down the walls of our democracy and called out “some of our most elite and powerful individuals and institutions” for “failing to defend our democracy.” He noted that “[s]ome of our nation’s most powerful law firms have bent the knee. Some of our finest universities are buckling. Some of the most powerful CEOs have capitulated. And some of the largest media companies are simply surrendering.”

“If those with power and influence want to sell off our rights and freedoms to enrich themselves, then Americans should make it clear that cowardice and greed will fail them,” he said.

“We will not shop at your stores. We will not tune into your TV and radio stations. We will not send our kids and our money to your universities, or use your services if you are going to enable our slide to authoritarianism.”

Crow contrasted those elite failures with “the courage we’ve seen from everyday citizens”:

Coach Youman Wilder, who stood up to ICE agents when they started interrogating kids on a baseball diamond in Harlem. A schoolteacher in Twisp, Washington, who joins protests against cuts to Medicaid and SNAP every Saturday because, she says, “Democracy only works if we work it.” Massive demonstrations across the nation in April. Parents in Washington, D.C., patrolling schoolyards to protect the rights of students and other parents as ICE agents are raiding and the National Guard is on the streets. Journalists around the country “reporting the truth, despite threats to them and their family.”

“There is courage everywhere we look,” Crow said. “We have not yet lost our power. “

He continued: “Now is the time…for us to stand with all those defending democracy.

“Defending free speech.

“Defending freedom of religion.

“Defending due process.

“Defending the rule of law.

“Defending the right of schoolchildren to learn without fear of being shot.

“Defending government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

“As a young paratrooper, leading an infantry platoon in the invasion of Iraq,” he said, he was responsible for young men: “Black, White, Asian, Hispanic. From the North, from the South, East, and West. From farms and from cities. Rich and poor.

“When I think of America, I still think of those young paratroopers. How we came together, despite our differences, we served together, we fought together, we found great strength in one another.

“That is America.”

“There’s a tradition in the paratroopers,” he said, “that the leader of the unit jumps out of the plane first and then the others follow.”

He concluded: “I’m ready to jump.”

mickeyrat · September 21

September 20, 2025 (Saturday)

Is it possible that the last time I posted a picture was September 1? No wonder I’m tired.

Let’s take the night off and get back to it tomorrow.

I’ve been spending as much time on the water as possible these days, and the light in the crisp fall air is spectacular. Here is what the Maine coastline looked like this week from a kayak:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021252/uploads/editor/ij/qgdvvm6run7f.jpg

mickeyrat · September 22

September 21, 2025 (Sunday)

On Friday the Bureau of Labor Statistics postponed the release of the annual report on consumer expenditures—a key report for understanding inflation—without explanation. The BLS has been under stress since President Donald J. Trump fired its head, Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, after the July jobs report showed far weaker hiring statistics than expected as well as a downgrade for previous months. Officials at the BLS said the new report will be “rescheduled to a later date.”

This weekend, Dan Frosch, Patrick Thomas, and Andrea Peterson of the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is ending its annual report on household food security. Those reports began in the 1990s to help state and local officials distribute food assistance. Last year’s report found that 18 million U.S. households experienced food insecurity during 2023. In a statement, the Department of Agriculture said: “These redundant, costly, politicized and extraneous studies do nothing more than fearmonger.”

Colleen Hefflin, an expert on food insecurity, nutrition, and welfare policy at Syracuse University, told the Wall Street Journal reporters: “Not having this measure for 2025 is particularly troubling given the current rise in inflation and deterioration of labor market conditions, two conditions known to increase food insecurity.” Whitney Curry Wimbish of The American Prospect reported last week that food banks across the country are seeing more visits even as immigrants are staying away from them out of concern that their information might be shared or that Immigration and Customs Enforcement might show up.

Nutrition scholar Lindsey Smith Taillie of the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health told the reporters: “I think the only reason why you wouldn’t measure it is if you were planning to cut food assistance, because it basically allows you to pretend like we don’t have this food insecurity problem.” The budget reconciliation law the Republicans passed in July cuts funding to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by about 20%, or $186 billion through 2034, the largest cuts to SNAP in its history.

This news got less attention last week than the administration’s apparent determination to silence its critics. Although, as Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times pointed out on Thursday, Trump promised in his second inaugural address to “immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America,” what he appeared to mean was that he intended to free up right-wing activists to spread disinformation about elections and Covid-19.

Now, in the wake of the murder of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, as Peter Baker pointed out today in the New York Times, the administration has cracked down on the media and political opponents under the guise of tamping down words that could cause political violence. But, as Baker notes, Trump is making it clear that he is trying to stop speech that criticizes him and his administration. Last week alone, he called for people who yelled at him in a restaurant to be prosecuted and for comedians who made fun of him to be taken off the air, and he sued the New York Times.

On Friday, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that covering the administration negatively is “really illegal.” He went on: “Personally, you can’t take, you can’t have a free airwave if you’re getting free airwaves from the United States government.” As Baker notes, Trump’s chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, who wrote the chapter of Project 2025 that covers the FCC, has complained that many broadcasters have a liberal bias and that they do not serve the public interest as the FCC requires.

That attempt to control information is showing clearly at the Pentagon. In February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth threw out long-standing media outlets who had been covering the Pentagon, including NPR, the New York Times, and NBC News, and brought in right-wing outlets including Newsmax and Breitbart. On Friday the Pentagon said it would revoke press credentials for any journalists who gather information, even unclassified information, that the Pentagon has not expressly authorized for release. Hegseth has been on a crusade to figure out who is leaking negative stories about him and defense issues under his direction, and he seems to have decided to try to stop their publication rather than the leaks themselves.

Although Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell called the changes “basic, common-sense guidelines to protect sensitive information as well as the protection of national security and the safety of all who work at the Pentagon,” Washington Post reporter Scott Nover noted that this position is a “sharp departure” from decades of practice. Until this year, the Pentagon held two televised question and answer sessions a week (and, in my observation, the journalists who covered the Pentagon were excellent).

The National Press Club also weighed in on Friday’s changes. “If the news about our military must first be approved by the government, then the public is no longer getting independent reporting,” said club president Mike Balsamo. “It is getting only what officials want them to see. That should alarm every American.”

On Friday the Pentagon referred to the White House questions about a strike on a third Venezuelan boat that Trump announced on social media. “On my orders, the Secretary of War ordered a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization conducting narcotrafficking in the USSOUTHCOM area of responsibility,” Trump posted. Trump said three men, whom he called “narcoterrorists,” were killed. He said the military showed him proof that the men in the boats were smuggling drugs, but he has not shared that evidence with lawmakers or the public.

As Lara Seligman reported in the Wall Street Journal on September 17, military lawyers and officials from the Defense Department are concerned that decision makers in the Pentagon are ignoring their warnings that the administration’s strikes on the vessels Trump claims are bringing drugs to the U.S. are illegal.

David Ignatius of the Washington Post recalls that when he took office, Hegseth purged from the military the judge advocate generals, who are supposed to advise leaders on the rule of law and whether orders are legal. In February, calling the top lawyers in the Army, Navy, and Air Force “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief,” he fired them. Earlier this month, he announced he was moving as many as 600 JAG officers to serve as immigration judges.

Also on Friday, Trump announced that companies employing skilled workers who hold temporary H-1B visas would have to pay a $100,000 fee for their entry into the U.S. beginning Sunday. This set off a mad scramble as workers outside the country on business trips, vacations, or family visits rushed to get back into the U.S. before the new rule took effect. Not until Saturday did the administration clarify the new rule does not affect those who already hold visas.

Friday was a busy day. Trump also told reporters in the Oval Office that he wanted the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, “out” after Siebert declined to prosecute New York Attorney General Letitia James, who successfully sued the Trump Organization for fraud, for allegedly committing mortgage fraud. Siebert also declined to prosecute former FBI director James Comey, who refused to kill the investigation into the relationship between members of the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives, for allegedly lying to Congress.

Siebert was Trump’s own pick for the job and is a well-regarded career prosecutor. As legal analyst Joyce White Vance noted in Civil Discourse, Siebert managed to win the support of both the Virginia Republican Party and the senators from Virginia, both of whom are Democrats. His refusal to prosecute indicates there was not enough evidence to convict a defendant; Vance notes that’s the standard a prosecutor must meet to seek an indictment.

On Friday night, Seibert resigned.

On Saturday morning, Trump posted on social media: “He didn’t quit, I fired him!” In the evening, he posted on social media a missive that appeared to be intended as a direct message (DM) to Attorney General Pam Bondi. It read: “Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially ‘same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.’... We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!! President DJT.”

In other words, Trump wants to use the power of the government to punish those he considers his enemies. As Joyce White Vance puts it: “[L]et’s be clear about what Trump wants. He wants to turn us into a banana republic where the ability to prosecute people becomes a political tool in the hands of the president. That means he wants to exercise the ultimate power to put down any opposition to his rule.” She recalled the comment attributed to Lavrentiy Beria, head of the Soviet secret police under Stalin: “Show me the man and I’ll find the crime.”

A report from Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian of MSNBC yesterday showed what a politicized justice system looks like. They reported that FBI agents last year caught Tom Homan—now Trump’s “border czar”—on video accepting $50,000 in cash from agents posing as business executives after he promised he could help them win government contracts for border enforcement in a second Trump administration. The FBI had opened an investigation after someone told them Homan was soliciting payments in exchange for contracts under a future Trump administration.

After obtaining the evidence, the FBI and the Justice Department waited to see whether Homan would provide the aid he offered once he joined the new administration. But the case stalled as soon as Trump took office, and after FBI director Kash Patel recently asked for a status update on the case, Trump appointees officially closed the investigation.

The reporters say that when asked about it, the White House, the Justice Department, and the FBI all dismissed the investigation as politically motivated and baseless.

While Trump tries to silence his critics, Russia is taking advantage of U.S. inaction to test the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. On Friday, three Russian jets entered the airspace of Estonia. Italian fighters stationed in Estonia as part of NATO’s new Eastern Sentry operation responded and forced the Russian jets out. As Poland did last week after Russian drones and jets entered its airspace, Estonian officials requested consultations with the North Atlantic Council under Article 4 of NATO’s treaty.

High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Kaja Kallas, who hails from Estonia, called Russia’s incursions over Estonia an “extremely dangerous provocation.”

Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

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