Given that the number of people the want to deport is in the millions, anything realistic is going to add up, even allowing for the fact that the tents will get several people passing through.
IIRC, in the 1930s Germany found the same problem with mass deportation (it adds up), and tried other ways to remove the undesirable people from the country…
July 26, 2025 (Saturday)
Ten days ago, ten Republican senators wrote to Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, asking him to release the funds Congress appropriated in March to support education. Vought was a key author of Project 2025, which claims the federal government has been taken over by a radical left cabal and calls for the decimation of that government in favor of state power, enabling the construction of a religious government.
Vought was central to the cuts made by the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) and has recently pushed Congress to put its stamp of approval on $9.4 billion of those cuts. Over the objections of Democrats, Republicans agreed earlier this month to approve cuts the administration made to laws passed by Congress, known as "rescissions,” for the first time in decades. Trump signed that measure into law on Thursday.
The Constitution charges the president with making sure the laws passed by Congress are “faithfully executed,” and the 1974 Impoundment Control Act prohibits the executive branch from withholding funds appropriated by Congress, leading lawmakers to object that the Trump administration is breaking the law and trying to take over Congress’s job of writing laws. Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) said of the rescission package: “Let’s not make a habit of this. Let’s not consider this a precedent.” But Vought says those cuts are just the beginning.
In March, Congress approved nearly $7 billion in education funding that was supposed to be released by July 1, but the administration announced on June 30 it would not do so, saying officials were conducting a “review.” The funds included money to recruit and train teachers and to support arts and music education in low-income areas, as well as funds for children learning English and for the children of migrant farm workers. New York Times education reporter Sarah Mervosh noted that the Office of Management and Budget said federal dollars were being “grossly misused to subsidize a radical left-wing agenda.”
“We share your concern about taxpayer money going to fund radical left-wing programs,” the senators wrote to Vought, but “we do not believe that is happening with these funds.”
Also yesterday, Senator Katie Britt (R-AL), who chairs the Senate Appropriations homeland subcommittee, and thirteen of her Republican colleagues wrote a letter to Vought urging him to “fully implement” the government funding measure Congress passed in March, releasing money for programs funded by the National Institutes of Health. The letter clarified that its authors shared Vought’s “commitment to ensuring NIH funds are used responsibly and not diverted to ideological or unaccountable programs.” But, it warned, “Suspension of these appropriated funds—whether formally withheld or functionally delayed—could threaten Americans’ ability to access better treatments and limit our nation’s leadership in biomedical science.”
As Trump’s popularity falls, Republican lawmakers are having to confront the reality that the Project 2025 program the administration is putting into place is deeply unpopular not just with Democrats and Independents but also with Republicans. They appear to be trying desperately to shore up some of the damage the administration has done. And the White House seems to be concerned enough about the 2026 midterms that it’s listening. Yesterday the Trump administration announced it would release more than $5 billion in funding it had withheld from public schools.
The release of money before the start of the school year will help to hide from voters how the administration’s decisions are affecting their everyday lives, a helpful reprieve as the administration continues to stonewall over the files of late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Still refusing to entertain the idea of releasing the files themselves, administration officials have now met twice with Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse children. Trump’s former attorney Todd Blanche is representing the Department of Justice (DOJ). He wrote: “President Trump has told us to release all credible evidence. If Ghislane [sic] Maxwell has information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims, the FBI and the DOJ will hear what she has to say.”
Interviewing Maxwell, who is fishing for a reduction in her 20-year sentence, is unlikely to be a convincing substitute for the files themselves, especially since we now know Trump is mentioned in the files and lied that Attorney General Pam Bondi had not given him that information.
The circumstances around the talks also seem fishy. Alan Feuer of the New York Times reports that Blanche is a personal friend of Maxwell’s lawyer David O. Markus. Feuer also noted that Blanche has taken the lead in the discussions since the department fired Maurene Comey, who prosecuted the cases of both Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Maxwell herself is a problematic witness: in 2020, during Trump’s first administration, the Justice Department charged her with two counts of perjury in addition to the charges of sexually grooming children and sex trafficking. As CNN’s Aaron Blake pointed out today, in filing the charges, the Justice Department said that her lies “should give the Court serious pause” about trusting her and that her “willingness to brazenly lie under oath about her conduct…strongly suggests her true motive has been and remains to avoid being held accountable for her crimes.”
Yesterday Trump appeared to dangle a pardon over Maxwell when he pointed out to reporters that he’s “allowed” to pardon her.
As Republicans note Trump’s weakening power, elected officials appear to be pushing for rollbacks of his policies. At the same time, his appointees are pushing to put as much of their agenda into operation as they can, while they can.
Liz Essley Whyte reported yesterday in the Wall Street Journal that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to remove all sixteen members of a task force that advises the federal government on what preventative health care measures—things like cancer screenings—health insurers must cover. Whyte explains that the people currently on the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force have medical expertise, are vetted to make sure they don’t have conflicts of interest, and use the latest scientific evidence to determine which interventions work.
In June, Kennedy replaced all seventeen of the members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) with seven people who share Kennedy’s distrust of vaccines. They announced that they would reexamine the CDC’s recommended vaccine schedule for children and adults.
Hannah Natanson, Jeff Stein, Dan Diamond, and Rachel Siegel of the Washington Post reported today that staff associated with the “Department of Government Efficiency” are using artificial intelligence to eliminate half of the government’s regulations by next January. James Burnham, former chief attorney for DOGE, told the reporters: “Creative deployment of artificial intelligence to advance the president’s regulatory agenda is one logical strategy to make significant progress” during Trump’s term.
Officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which operates under the Department of Homeland Security, announced yesterday that it is starting a “detention support grant program” to fund temporary detention facilities. States have until August 8 to apply for grants from a pot of $608 million. FEMA and U.S. Customs and Border Protection will distribute the funds.
There appears to be pushback against some of the extremes of the administration’s appointees. Greg Jaffe, Eric Schmitt, and Helene Cooper of the New York Times reported today that senior military officers are increasingly at odds with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon has been rocky, as most of his staff have either resigned or been fired and have not been replaced, and as he uploaded classified information about military strikes to a private Signal chat on which a reporter had been included.
Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), whose support for Hegseth earned him Senate confirmation, recently told CNN: “With the passing of time, I think it’s clear he’s out of his depth as a manager of a large, complex organization.”
No, the logistics of mass deportation was never a problem as such, what with an efficient railway system and state-of-the-art data processing thanks to IBM.
What needed optimization was ramping up the sheer numbers of slaughtering human beings to a truly industrial amount.
In taking a bunch of practice exams prepping for the bar exam, I’ve had several questions which were about the President not spending money allocated by Congress. The correct answer to every one of them has been that this action was unconstitutional. Not one of those questions mentioned the Impoundment Control Act. Even without that act, the President does NOT have the authority to not spend money allocated by Congress. That people aren’t suing over this shit is driving me nuts. Of course, the current SCOTUS might declare the Impoundment Control Act unconstitutional and find that “faithfully execute” doesn’t mean what it means, but we should still be trying to hold this asshole accountable for this shit. I swear, everyone in Washington is just hoping the guy dies soon. Apparently that’s easier than doing your job.
July 27, 2025 (Sunday)
On July 23 the X account of the Department of Homeland Security posted an image of an 1872 oil painting by John Gast, titled “American Progress.” Gast represented the American East on the right side of the painting with light skies, a rising sun, and the bustling port of New York City, full of ships. He painted the American West in darkness, through which bison and Indigenous Americans flee the people in the middle of the painting: white hunters, farmers, settlers, and stagecoach riders. Over the scene floats a giant, blonde Lady Liberty, evidently moving west, carrying a schoolbook and a telegraph wire being laced on poles along a train track behind her.
Over the reproduced image, the Department of Homeland Security account wrote: “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.”
From the time Gast painted it, American Progress has been interpreted as a representation of the concept of manifest destiny: the mid-nineteenth-century notion that God had destined the people of the United States of America to spread democracy to the rest of at least the North American continent, and possibly South America as well. A number of people who saw the Homeland Security post saw it as the Trump administration’s embrace of that ideology.
Magazine editor John O’Sullivan coined the term “manifest destiny” in the July 1845 issue of Democratic Review, a magazine dedicated to defining what it meant to live in a democratic republic. O’Sullivan’s concept of manifest destiny was different from the constant expansionism of Euro-Americans before his time, in part because he was defending a specific partisan policy: Congress’s annexation of Texas in March 1845 and the apparent determination of Democratic president James K. Polk to seize more territory from Mexico. The Democrats’ political opponents, the Whigs, opposed the land grab, and Democrats justified their position on the grounds that they were simply honoring God’s plan.
The spread of democracy—and, with it, American greatness—was both the right and the duty of Americans, they claimed, overriding the despotisms of monarchs. Along with that democratic system would travel an economic system that developed resources for private owners, the Protestant religion, and a cultural system that privileged white people. Such a system was best for everyone, even those people whose land, lives, and culture would be absorbed by the movement. Democrats constructed a strong sense of U.S. nationalism around this idea and its corollary: the extension of human enslavement.
Manifest destiny both reflected and fed the era’s greed and racism. But there was a key political element in it that adherents to today’s right-wing political movement appear to reject. At the heart of manifest destiny, beneath the language of “civilizing” other peoples and the embrace of human enslavement, was the concept that the lands the U.S. acquired would become states equal to the older states in the Union and that the people in the lands the U.S. absorbed would eventually become Americans equal to those who had been in the United States for a generation or more.
“New territory is spread out for us to subdue and fertilize,” Daniel S. Dickinson of New York told the Senate; “new races are presented for us to civilize, educate and absorb; new triumphs for us to achieve for the cause of freedom.”
In the 1840s—indeed until the last few years—Americans accepted that the United States was based on an idea. Even in that era of crabbed racism that excluded Black Americans and women and circumscribed others, lawmakers embraced the idea that the U.S. could expand to include new people. In the immigration boom of the 1840s and 1850s, that was no small thing.
Rather than advancing the concept of manifest destiny—as deeply problematic as that would be—the Trump administration’s reposting of American Progress seems designed instead to harness American traditional symbols in order to advance the idea of “blood and soil” citizenship popularized in 1930s Germany.
“Blood and soil” ideology claimed true Germans were defined by race within a specific land. Nazi propagandist Richard Walther Darré reflected those ideas when he celebrated agricultural life and what he claimed were rural values. Elevating those who had lived in Germany for generations, he suggested that German blood was mystically connected to German soil. “[T]he German soul with its warmth is rooted in its agriculture and in a real sense always grew out of it,” Darré wrote. To maintain that soul, he wrote, Germany needed to preserve racial purity and reject foreign blood. To that end, it needed to protect pure marriages and encourage the right people to have lots of children: the main job of a wife was to produce children. Unless the country took drastic measures, he wrote, the German “race” might become extinct.
The details of the “blood and soil” ideology might not be clear to MAGA today, but its adherents definitely get the concept: at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, white nationalists shouted, “Blood and soil.”
Those ideas are now advanced by MAGA leadership. On July 5, 2025, Vice President J.D. Vance told an audience at the Claremont Institute he rejected the idea that being an American simply meant agreeing with the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence. He complained not only that such a definition would include too many people, but also that it would exclude those who disagreed with it, even if their ancestors had fought in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. “I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” he said.
He continued: “I believe one of the most pressing problems for us to face as statesmen is to redefine the meaning of American citizenship in the 21st century.” America, he said, “is not just an idea, we’re a particular place with a particular people and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.”
Vance claimed that “Democrat politicians” and “corporate oligarchs” want to import “millions and millions of low-wage serfs,” and he hailed Trump’s immigration policies as “the most important part” of Trump’s first six months. He said “citizenship must mean recognizing the unique relationship, but also the obligations that we all share with our fellow Americans. You cannot swap 10 million people from anywhere else in the world and expect for America to remain unchanged…. “[T]his is a distinctive moment in time with a distinctive place and a distinctive people.”
Attacking “the left” as driven by hatred, Vance rejected the statement of Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor: “America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better.” Vance said Mamdani’s statement shows “no gratitude” and “no sense of owing something to this land.” “I wonder,” Vance said, “has he ever read the letters from boy soldiers in the Union Army to parents and sweethearts that they’d never see again?.. Who the hell does he think that he is?”
The use of American iconography to push blood and soil showed in another post by the Homeland Security account from earlier this month. On July 14 it posted a painting of a white man with a white woman holding a baby in a covered wagon, an image the artist, Morgan Weistling, titled “A Prayer for a New Life.” The HHS account posted the image without Weistling’s permission, retitling it “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage: New Life in a New Land.”
The new name and capitalization are significant. Just as in the words in the post about John Gast’s painting, the two Hs are capitalized, evoking “HH,” accepted in right-wing circles as a way to write “Heil Hitler.”
On his web page, Weistling posted: “Attention: The recent DHS post on social media using a painting of mine that I painted a few years ago was used without my permission.”
Whites-only town in Arkansas, coming soon to Missouri, along with Greater Idaho…
What concerns me are statements like this from Vance:
Just how do they intend to redefine that meaning for current citizens who don’t meet their definition of “particular people”?
A painting in reply:
This is what rematriation looks like: sacred power returning to the soil, the bodies, the breath of this continent.
It is ceremony stretched across time, where tenderness dares to meet trauma and does not become it. The Land Back movement does not wish to mirror the blade of conquest. The Land Back movement extends the medicine of memory, the salve of restoration. It teaches that healing is relational, that the oppressor too has been disfigured by the machinery of empire.
Colonialism severed all of us from the sacred, leaving us hollow and haunted in different ways. It taught us to hoard, dominate, fear one another. But this has been an inherited fear passed through generations until someone decides to create a new path.
The new path signaled in this painting.
The work ahead is not to punish or displace, but to reconnect. To disarm the heart. To return what was taken, yes, but also to repair what was severed in all directions.
What Charles Hillard offers is not merely a reimagining of North America, it is a global invocation. A visual promise that healing is possible. That rematriation begins when we dare to remember. And that remembrance, fierce, tender, and rooted, is the healing balm.
July 28, 2025 (Monday)
Today’s theme seems to be Republican leadership digging into positions that are directly contradicted by facts.
On Sunday, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported that the price tag for renovating the “free” Boeing 747-8 President Donald J. Trump accepted from Qatar appears to be close to a billion dollars of taxpayer money. The reporters explored a “mysterious, $934 million transfer of funds” from a program to modernize the country’s ground-based nuclear missiles to an unnamed classified project. Air Force officials told them privately that the transfer is for upgrading the plane for use as Air Force One.
Yale historian Joanne Freeman posted: “He’s using our money to buy himself a gift. A billion dollar gift.”
Over the weekend, Trump called for musician Beyoncé to be prosecuted for breaking the law by taking $11 million for endorsing Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris in October 2024, and for Harris to be prosecuted for paying that sum. But this simply never happened.
CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale explained yesterday that this is a made-up story Trump apparently got from social media. The Harris campaign covered $165,000 of the costs connected to Beyoncé’s appearance, as required by law, but a spokesperson said they did not pay celebrity endorsers (although there is no federal law prohibiting such payments). Dale says there is no evidence for Trump’s $11 million claim.
And then there is the case of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
On Sunday, Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) appeared on CNN’s State of the Union and repeatedly insisted that it was the Obama administration in 2009 that allowed sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to avoid serious federal charges by agreeing to a “sweetheart plea deal.” But it wasn’t.
As CNN’s Jake Tapper reminded him, the agreement was drafted in 2007 and signed in 2008, under President George W. Bush. Mullin continued to try to rope the Democrats into the story of the deal, but Tapper reiterated: “the point is, the ‘sweetheart deal,’ which was completed in 2008, was under the Bush administration.” Tapper also reminded Mullin that Trump made Alex Acosta, the U.S. attorney who backed the extraordinary leniency for Epstein, his secretary of labor during Trump’s first term.
Today, at a press opportunity in Scotland, where Trump is opening a new golf course on one of his properties, Trump told a reporter that he hasn’t “been overly interested” in the case…it’s a hoax that’s been built up way beyond proportion. I can say this, those files were run by the worst scum on Earth. They were run by [former FBI director James] Comey, they were run by [former attorney general Merrick] Garland. They were run by [former president Joe] Biden, and all of the people that actually ran the government, including the autopen. Those files were run for four years by those people.” Then he suggested that Democrats have doctored the Epstein files with fake information to smear him.
Far from quieting questions about his involvement with Epstein, this line of argument seems to confirm that he knows there is something bad in the files and is trying to spin it before it might come to light.
Today, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, demanded that the Department of Justice produce all the recordings and transcripts of the July 24 and 25 meetings between DOJ officials and convicted sex trafficker and Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell. He also demanded that the DOJ commit that it would not offer either a pardon or to commute Maxwell’s sentence of 20 years in exchange for information she offered.
Today, Vice President J.D. Vance assured an Ohio audience that the Congressional Budget Office was wrong in predicting that the cuts in the budget reconciliation measure the Republicans passed and Trump signed into law on July 4 would push 10 million people off health insurance. “Don’t believe every false media report that you’ve heard,” he said, “because our explicit goal in the Trump administration is to protect people’s healthcare.”
On July 18, health policy tracker KFF reported that health insurers have asked state regulators to approve the highest premium increases in more than five years. Just as Gene Sperling, who directed the National Economic Council under presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, noted in the Washington Post four days ago, insurers point to the end of the enhanced premium tax credits that provided financial assistance for people enrolled in healthcare through the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) as the main culprit in higher prices. The insurers predict that healthcare costs for those who took advantage of the tax credits will go up by more than 75% starting in January 2026. This will drive healthier enrollees out of the market, causing prices to rise for those left in the risk pool.
As Sperling pointed out, while Republicans claimed that the tax cuts that primarily benefited the wealthy and corporations was “current policy” whose extension didn’t count as a tax increase, they did not apply the current policy standard to the enhanced premium tax credits.
Insurers also point to Trump’s tariffs as a cause for higher premiums. They expect those tariffs to send drug prices higher.
Since the 1980s, Republicans have relied on their voters believing the worldview leaders projected, even when the facts told a different story. It is not clear they can continue to rely on that blind loyalty.
Jason Hancock of the Missouri Independent reported today that Missouri Republican lawmakers have inspired a backlash by resisting or overturning measures approved by voters to end puppy mills, expand Medicaid, legalize marijuana, create nonpartisan redistricting, expand paid sick leave, and amend the state constitution to protect abortion rights. Now a bipartisan group of organizations is trying to stop the Republican supermajority from ignoring or overturning the will of voters.
In response, some Republican lawmakers have claimed that out-of-state money swayed the votes on the measures they dislike, and are trying to change the process of initiating voter-led petitions, further silencing the voters. Others disagree. Veteran Republican consultant James Harris, who is from the state, told Hancock: “The legislature doesn’t really seem to understand, they’ve kicked the hornet’s nest. We may be about to cross the Rubicon…where the legislature loses a lot of its power.”
In North Carolina today, popular former governor Roy Cooper announced he is running for the North Carolina Senate seat currently held by Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican who announced his retirement after Trump turned on him for opposing the budget reconciliation measure that threatened healthcare in his state. When he was governor, Cooper expanded Medicaid to more than 650,000 North Carolinians.
Cooper’s announcement message focused on shoring up the middle class, meeting today’s moment by calling out billionaires. “[F]or too many Americans, the middle class feels like a distant dream,” he said, while “the biggest corporations and the richest Americans have grabbed unimaginable wealth at your expense. It’s time for that to change.”
Cooper told of growing up in North Carolina, raising his family, teaching Sunday school, and helping small businesses as a lawyer. “When you made me your attorney general, I prosecuted criminals and took on scammers, big banks, and drug companies,” he said. “When you made me your governor, we balanced the state budget every year and worked with Republicans to raise teacher pay, recruit thousands of better paying jobs, and expand Medicaid…. I never really wanted to go to Washington,” he said. “I just wanted to serve the people of North Carolina right here, where I’ve lived all my life.”
“But,” he continued, “these are not ordinary times. Politicians in D.C. are running up our debt, ripping away our health care, disrespecting our veterans, cutting help for the poor and even putting Medicare and Social Security at risk just to give tax breaks to billionaires. That’s wrong, and I’ve had enough. I’ve thought on it and prayed about it, and I’ve decided, I want to serve as your next United States Senator.”
The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which works to elect Republicans to the Senate, called Cooper “far-left.”
Meanwhile, in South Carolina, a key architect of Project 2025 will challenge Senator Lindsey Graham for the Republican nomination for Graham’s Senate seat. “This is a battle for the future of MAGA,” Paul Dans said. “This is really the turning point election that asks whether MAGA will sink back into the swamp and be subsumed, or whether this great movement will continue to grow, and the waters of the swamp retreat in Washington, and swamp critters like Lindsey are left to bake in the Palmetto sun.”
July 29, 2025 (Tuesday)
Trying to take some time off this summer, and after a bunch of work calls this morning, decided that today was too good a day to stay on the land. Found these boats on the back side of the island.
I’m going to head to bed early tonight. Will see you tomorrow.
July 30, 2025 (Wednesday)
On July 2, 2024, just about a year ago, president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation Kevin Roberts told the listeners of Steve Bannon’s War Room webcast: “[W]e are going to win. We’re in the process of taking this country back.” Roberts pointed to the Supreme Court’s decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States the day before giving the president absolute immunity for committing crimes while engaging in official acts.
“That Supreme Court ruling yesterday on immunity is vital, and it’s vital for a lot of reasons,” Roberts said, adding that the nation needs a strong leader because “the left has taken over our institutions.” “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution,” he said, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Roberts was the man who organized Project 2025, the blueprint for a new kind of government dictated by a right-wing strongman. Creating that new government would require a president willing to act illegally, stripping the secular language of civil rights from public life, packing the government with loyalists, ending the social safety net, killing business regulations, and purging American institutions of all but right-wing ideologues.
When Americans learned about Project 2025, they hated it. An NBC News poll from September 2024 showed that only 4% of Americans saw the project favorably. Even among Republicans, that number climbed only to 7%. For those identifying as MAGA Republicans, the number rose to just 9%.
So Trump and his campaign advisors denied that he had anything to do with the plan. “I know nothing about Project 2025,” he wrote on social media in July. “I have no idea who is behind it.”
And yet six months into the second Trump administration, on the sixtieth anniversary of the law that symbolized the modern American state by establishing Medicare and Medicaid, it’s clear we are indeed in a revolution designed to destroy the government we have known in favor of the radical right-wing government envisioned by those who wrote Project 2025.
From the beginning, the administration declared war on the words that protected equal rights for all Americans, fired women and racial minorities from leadership positions, and attacked transgender Americans. It worked to replace civil servants with loyalists who embraced the tenets of Project 2025, putting people like former Fox News host Pete Hegseth at the head of government agencies. Yesterday Greg Jaffe and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that in a break with past practices, Hegseth, now secretary of defense, is requiring nominees for four-star general positions in the U.S. military to meet personally with Trump.
It worked to dismantle the government by refusing to release the money Congress had appropriated to fund the existing government. Thanks to billionaire Elon Musk at the “Department of Government Efficiency” and Russell Vought—another author of Project 2025—at the Office of Management and Budget, the administration illegally impounded funds, slashing through funding for foreign aid, cancer research, veterans’ benefits, air traffic control staffing, and so on, claiming to be eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” That fight is ongoing.
But while it shrank government programs that helped ordinary people—programs like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—as part of their claim to be returning power to the states, the administration did not shrink the government itself. Instead, it dramatically expanded the government’s capacity to arrest and detain undocumented migrants.
The administration set out to purge the country of what extremists claimed was “leftist” influence in law firms, media, and universities. It illegally blocked lawyers from law firms that represented Democrats from access to federal buildings, making it impossible for them to represent their clients. It sued media outlets for alleged bias, and it withheld congressionally appropriated funds for universities for alleged antisemitism.
Last week, in order to obtain the Federal Communications Commission’s approval of an $8 billion merger between CBS parent company Paramount and Skydance Media, Skydance agreed not to set up programs related to civil rights, or “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and to produce “unbiased” journalism. Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr approved the merger, then bragged on right-wing media shows that CBS has agreed to put in place an internal political “bias monitor” who will report to the president of Paramount to make sure the channel’s news coverage is favorable to Trump and the right wing.
Last week, after Columbia University agreed to pay $221 million and to promise it will not use “race, color, sex, or national origin” in hiring decisions in exchange for the government’s restoring the $1.3 billion in funding the administration had withheld over charges of antisemitism, Trump’s education secretary Linda McMahon told Maria Bartiromo of the Fox News Channel: “[T]his is a monumental victory for conservatives who’ve wanted to do things on these elite campuses for a long time because we had such far left leaning professors.”
On Monday the Office of Personnel Management issued a memo allowing federal employees to pray publicly at work, as well as to try to “persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views.”
The administration has worked to dismantle the regulations that protect Americans by using artificial intelligence to slash regulations in half by next January. With the blessing of the Supreme Court, Trump has claimed the power to fire the heads of independent agencies, effectively giving him power over agencies created by Congress.
Yesterday the administration took its fight against public protections a leap further when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a new rule that would get rid of a rule in place since 2009 establishing, on the basis of scientific evidence, that the emission of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane warms the planet and thus endangers human life. Most of the vehicle, factory, and power plant emissions standards currently in place come from this “endangerment finding.”
EPA officials told Lisa Friedman of the New York Times they intend to argue that it is climate regulations, rather than greenhouse gas emissions, that cause the real harm to human health because they lead to higher prices and less consumer choice.
As Roberts said, the Supreme Court’s decision giving Trump immunity was important because destroying the country’s institutions would require lawbreaking. In nothing has that been so clear as in the administration’s handling of the rendering of undocumented migrants to third countries. Whistleblowers from the Department of Justice claim that DOJ official Emil Bove told DOJ attorneys they could ignore court orders stopping migrant flights, saying they should consider telling the courts “f*ck you.”
Last night, the Senate confirmed Bove to a federal judgeship, with 50 Republicans voting in favor. Forty-seven Democrats voted no. They were joined by Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who said: “I don’t think that somebody who has counseled other attorneys that you should ignore the law, you should reject the law, I don’t think that that individual should be placed in a lifetime seat on the bench.”
But Thom Tillis (R-NC) voted in favor of Bove’s confirmation, illustrating that even those Republicans who have put distance between themselves and Trump are enabling the revolution in our government.
Republicans in Congress have enabled the dismantling of the country’s social safety net with dramatic cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program while also extending significant tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and pouring money into purges of undocumented migrants. Today Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told an audience at an event for the right-wing media outlet Breitbart that the new “Trump accounts” established by the budget reconciliation bill are “a backdoor for privatizing Social Security.”
Congress’s unwillingness to stand against Trump shows most dramatically in its reluctance to reassert the power the Constitution gives to it—and only to it—over tariffs. Trump has fought his tariff war only by asserting emergency power, but he has used that power to change world trade and to punish countries like Brazil for its prosecution of Trump’s political ally, former president Jair Bolsonaro. Tomorrow, the day before the August 1 deadline on which most of Trump’s tariffs will go into effect, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit will weigh in on whether those tariffs are legal.
When Kevin Roberts announced a year ago that the radical right was launching a second American revolution, he was telling the truth. But the new world they want to bring to life seems no more popular now than it was then.
And now the growing scandal around President Donald J. Trump’s connections to late convicted sex predator Jeffrey Epstein shows that the MAGA movement is apparently willing to accept the sexual abuse of children in order to cement their worldview.
Yesterday Trump tried to cast himself as a sort of protector when he claimed that he turned against Epstein because Epstein “stole people that worked for me.” When asked if those employees were young women, Trump answered “yes” and that they were hired “out of the spa” he ran. He said one of those girls was Virginia Giuffre, who was sex trafficked as a teenager by Ghislaine Maxwell and died by suicide earlier this year. Although Trump’s timeline did not add up—Giuffre left her job at Mar-a-Lago in 2000 and the friendship between the two men continued for several more years—the story itself suggests what’s on his mind. Today, a reporter asked Trump about those girls: “What did you think Epstein was stealing those women for?”
Today Dan Ruetenik of CBS News issued a detailed report on the video from outside Epstein’s jail cell that the DOJ has released as proof he died by suicide. A government source told Ruetenik that the released video is not raw footage—confirming a report by Dhruv Mehrotra of Wired on July 15—and that it is two videos stitched together. Ruetenik reported that the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, and the DOJ inspector general all possess the longer video.
And perhaps there is also a story about Project 2025’s staying power in the fact that this damning report dropped less than a week after Trump officials celebrated their control over CBS.
In a just world, it seems like this should be grounds for disbarment. Not a fucking lifetime appointment.
Everything in these three paragraphs is so fundamentally anti-American that this alone should be grounds for impeachment. This is petty 3rd world dictator bullshit. We are now in a dictatorship, and if it continues much longer, we will have an economy similar to other 3rd world dictatorships. It hasn’t happened yet, but the cracks in the economy are showing, and when this thing goes, it’s going to go fast.
Fuck
Not an essay that helps to start my day. This is exhausting. 
July 31, 2025 (Thursday)
On Tuesday, at a meeting with U.K. prime minister Keir Starmer in Scotland, President Donald Trump boasted that he was solving all the world’s problems: “I’ve stopped six wars in the last—I’m averaging about a war a month. But the last three were very close together. India and Pakistan, and a lot of them. Congo was just and Rwanda was just done, but you probably know I won’t go into it very much, because I don’t know the final numbers yet. I don’t know. Numerous people were killed, and I was dealing with two countries that we get along with very well, very different countries from certain standpoints. They’ve been fighting for 500 years, intermittently, and we solved that war. You probably saw it just came out over the wire, so we solved it….”
Yesterday, as Jeff Tiedrich noted, he promised he would fix the United States as well. “I think we’re gonna have the richest economy you’ve ever seen. We have money coming in that we’ve never even thought about, at numbers that nobody’s ever seen before. We have a deal with Japan where they’re going to pay us $550 billion. We have a deal with Europe where they’re doing 750 billion plus 400 billion, plus 300 billion, and many other countries.”
Today the administration announced that Trump is adding a 90,000-square-foot event space to the White House. The White House itself, excluding the East Wing and the West Wing, is about 55,000 square feet. Groundbreaking for the new ballroom, which will replace the East Wing, is supposed to start in September, although it is not clear who picked the architects or the design. The administration says Trump and private donors will fund the building, which is estimated to cost around $200 million.
The announcement says that “[f]or 150 years, Presidents, Administrations, and White House Staff have longed for a large event space on the White House complex that can hold substantially more guests than currently allowed.” Traditionally, the White House has been called “The People’s House” because it symbolizes that the government belongs not to the temporary inhabitant of the building but to the American people.
And yet it seems as if rather than representing the people’s government, Trump is trying to turn that historic building into the kind of property in which he is comfortable, something like Mar-a-Lago, where he can host parties in a big gold room.
It certainly doesn’t seem as if much governance is going on in Trump’s White House. As Josh Marshall pointed out today in Talking Points Memo, when the head of the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy resigned today, it turned out that the White House had never formally appointed him in the first place. Marshall added: “We’re six months into this administration and it wasn’t even clear whether this guy was ever in the position at all…. And now he’s gone from the position…that he may or may not have held. This is the state of things from the very top to the very bottom of this administration. And the impact of that is bleeding out into every aspect of the society and economy."
Trump’s claim that he has ended six wars is pure fantasy, and as for his boasts that Europe and Japan are going to pay huge sums of money to the U.S.—which is not actually how trade deals work—the European Union and the U.S. have already published different versions of what was in the agreement between them, although that agreement itself was only preliminary.
Economist Paul Krugman wrote yesterday that the European Union appears to have promised private investments of $600 billion in the U.S.—an empty promise because the government cannot compel private investment—and pledged to buy $750 billion of U.S. energy, mostly from oil and gas, over three years. Krugman calls this pledge nonsense. Among other things, it would require significant increases in infrastructure capabilities, which couldn’t be built in three years even if anyone wanted to, which is unlikely given that Europe is switching to renewable energy quickly.
There also seems to be significant daylight between what Trump is claiming and what Japan says about their agreement, which was thrown together in just over an hour on Tuesday. Japan’s negotiator said the $550 billion investment was not “a target or commitment” but an upper limit, and Japanese officials said that “no written agreement with Washington” was made—“and no legally binding one would be drawn up.”
Meanwhile, Trump appears to be trying to exert his will by fiat, announcing new tariff rates tonight just hours before the self-imposed deadline of August 1. Today, after a federal appeals court heard a challenge to Trump’s tariffs on the grounds that Congress, not the president, is the only body the Constitution empowers to enact tariffs, the White House announced a base tariff rate of 10% on countries to which the U.S. exports more goods than it imports, with a 15% rate for countries that export more to the U.S. than they import. About a dozen countries—including Canada—will have even higher rates.
Before Trump started his trade war, U.S. tariff levies stood at about 2.4%.
Part of Trump’s determination to demonstrate his power is likely coming from the continuing unraveling of his involvement in the affairs of late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. On Tuesday, Trump seemed to try to cast himself as the protector of girls from Epstein, but his suggestion that he had turned on his friend after Epstein had hired 16-year-old Virginia Giuffre away from Mar-a-Lago in 2000 immediately attracted attention to the actual timeline of the friendship between the two men. It showed that their friendship lasted quite a bit longer. In fact, it was in 2002 that Trump told New York Magazine that Epstein was a “[t]errific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side."
Members of Giuffre’s family said in a statement yesterday: “It was shocking to hear President Trump invoke our sister and say that he was aware that Virginia had been ‘stolen’ from Mar-a-Lago. It makes us ask if he was aware of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal actions, especially given his statement two years later that his good friend Jeffrey 'likes women on the younger side…no doubt about it.’ We and the public are asking for answers; survivors deserve this.”
Tonight Trump told reporters he doesn’t know why Epstein was taking girls from Mar-a-Lago.
Per the White House’s own press statement,
President Trump has chosen McCrery Architects as lead architect, which is well-known for their classical architectural design and based in our nation’s capital. CEO Jim McCrery said: “Presidents in the modern era have faced challenges hosting major events at the White House because it has been untouched since President Harry Truman. I am honored that President Trump has entrusted me to help bring this beautiful and necessary renovation to The People’s House, while preserving the elegance of its classical design and historical importance.”
The construction team will be headed by Clark Construction, and the engineering team will be led by AECOM.
More in the “buildings” thread because, frankly, building a McBallroom at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW is about the least of our problems with this administration right now.
TIL there’s a buildings thread…thank you!
August 1, 2025 (Friday)
Economists have been expressing concern about the accuracy of economic statistics coming out of the Trump administration for months. Cuts to the staff at agencies that collect data have meant that the consumer price index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, contains far more estimates of values than it did before the cuts.
With that warning, today’s jobs report packed a one-two punch.
The numbers showed that employers added only 73,000 jobs in July, way below the 115,000 economists had predicted. The numbers also showed that the jobs reports for May and June had significantly overestimated the new jobs added in those months. The department revised May’s original estimate of 144,00 down to 19,000, and June’s original estimate of 147,000 down to just 14,000. As Julien Berman of the Washington Post noted, that’s a decrease of almost 90%.
The numbers show that while the job numbers have looked good, in fact the economy has been weakening for months. Trump’s high tariffs and the chaos surrounding them appear to have slowed growth almost immediately. The only sector adding a lot of new jobs is healthcare, which is not as exposed to trade policy as other sectors. In contrast, hiring in manufacturing fell to a 9-year low in May.
Predictably, Trump lashed out.
Although U.S. statistics have been widely seen as the nonpartisan gold standard, Trump claimed that the commissioner of labor statistics, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, had manipulated the jobs report. “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” he wrote. He fired her.
Trump also insisted the head of the Federal Reserve, his own appointee Jerome Powell, should be “put ‘out to pasture.’” Powell has steadfastly refused to lower interest rates to pump money into the economy as Trump wants. Trump has no legal power to fire the Federal Reserve chair without cause, and lately has appeared to be trying to manufacture a cause by suggesting a remodeling of the agency’s headquarters has been wasteful.
“But,” he wrote, “the good news is, our Country is doing GREAT!”
That assurance sounded a little desperate. Today’s job numbers showing that Trump’s tariff war is hurting the economy arrived just hours after Trump announced the new tariff rates he will be imposing on other countries, although he pushed the start of the levies off until August 7 so Customs and Border Protection can prepare.
The jobs report, firing of the commissioner of labor statistics, and tariff announcement all worked together to drive the stock market downward. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1.23%, the S&P 500 fell 1.60% and the Nasdaq Composite fell 2.24%.
Tonight, Trump wrote that Powell “should resign.”
The jobs report seems to have come as a shock to Trump, who appears to have been absorbed by the growing scandal of his connections to convicted sexual assaulter Jeffrey Epstein. News broke today that officials from the Federal Bureau of Prisons had quietly moved Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell from the Florida prison where she was being held while she served a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking to a new minimum-security prison camp in Texas. According to Michael Kosnar and Raquel Coronell Uribe of NBC News, the Bureau of Prisons’s own designation policy makes Maxwell ineligible for transfer to a minimum-security prison camp because she is a convicted sex offender. The only person who can grant a waiver to that policy is the administrator of the Bureau of Prisons Designation and Sentence Computation Center.
It seems likely that Trump had the jobs report and the Epstein case in mind when, shortly before 1:00 Eastern Time this afternoon, he posted: “Based on the highly provocative statements of the Former President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, who is now the Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, I have ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that. Words are very important, and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols points out that Medvedev is little more than an internet troll at this point and that U.S. submarines carrying nuclear warheads routinely travel through the world’s oceans (all American submarines are nuclear powered, Nichols notes). Trump’s threat is unlikely to spark a nuclear crisis, Nichols writes, “at least not this time.” But it is reckless, he adds.
“Trump knows that a foreign-policy crisis, and anything involving nuclear weapons, is an instant distraction from other news,” Nichols writes. “The media will always zero in on such moments, because it is, in fact, news when the most powerful man on Earth starts talking about nuclear weapons…. Nuclear-missile submarines are not toys,” he points out. Previous presidents were sober and careful in how they talked about nuclear weapons. But now, Trump “has initiated a new era in which the chief executive can use threats regarding the most powerful weapons on Earth to salve his ego and improve his political fortunes.”
But if his threat against Russia was intended as a distraction, it didn’t work. “I can’t believe what I just saw,” Peter Mallouk, president and chief investment officer of Creative Planning, told Jeff Cox of CNBC. “This is not healthy,” he added. “We can’t have a set of numbers come out and fire somebody that served under numerous administrations in various roles because you don’t like the numbers.”
Trump’s attempts to draw attention away from the news might have raised awareness of another issue, though. Chris Truax, an appellate lawyer who served as Southern California chair for John McCain’s 2008 primary campaign, noted that Trump’s wild stories, inability to understand numbers, and inability to place events correctly into a timeline are key signs of dementia. Truax published an article in The Hill today, titled: “Trump’s mental decline is undeniable—so what now?”
What now? Why, there’s an amendment to the constitution that covers this sort of thing, he said trying to keep a straight face.
August 2, 2025 (Saturday)
Republicans in the Texas legislature are working to redistrict the state before the 2026 midterm elections. Although state legislatures normally redraw district lines every ten years after the census required by the Constitution, President Donald J. Trump has asked Texas Republicans to redistrict now, mid-decade, in order to cut up five districts that tend to vote Democratic and create districts Republicans will almost certainly win. Five additional seats will help the Republicans hold control of the House of Representatives despite their growing unpopularity.
Trump is urging other Republican-dominated state legislatures—those in Florida, Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Ohio, for example—to do the same thing. “We’re going to get another three or four or five, in addition,” Trump said to reporters about House seats. “Texas would be the biggest one, and that’ll be five.”
Shane Goldmacher and Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times note that “[v]oters are…reduced almost to bystanders as Republicans essentially admit to trying to determine the outcome of Texas races long before the elections are held.”
A person close to the president told Goldmacher and Corasaniti that the White House strategy is “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”
Trump and the Republicans would not be trying to rig the system if they thought they could win a majority of voters.
Carving districts to either “crack” political opponents into different districts or “pack” them into a single district is called “gerrymandering,” after Elbridge Gerry, an early governor of Massachusetts who signed off on such a scheme (even though he didn’t like it). Parties have always engaged in gerrymandering, but computers make it possible to carve up districts with surgical precision.
The extreme gerrymander Texas Republicans are attempting is coming on top of partisan gerrymanders already in place. As journalist David Daley explained in his book Ratf**cked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy, after Democrat Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, Republican operatives worked to make sure he had a hostile Congress that would keep him from passing legislation.
To push a plan they dubbed Operation REDMAP, which stood for Redistricting Majority Project, they raised $30 million, mostly from corporations, to buy ads and circulate literature that would convince voters to elect Republican state legislators in 2010. The legislatures elected in 2010 would get to redistrict their states with maps that would last for a decade.
The plan worked. After the 2010 election, Republicans controlled the key states of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other, smaller states, and they redrew congressional maps using precise computer models. In the 2012 election, Democrats won the White House decisively, the Senate easily, and a majority of 1.4 million votes for House candidates. But Republicans came away with a thirty-three-seat majority in the House of Representatives.
Gerrymandering doesn’t just weight the scales of an election toward one political party, it also depresses turnout for the opposing party: if you know your candidate is going to lose, why bother to vote? (In one heavily gerrymandered North Carolina district in 2024, Democratic candidate Kate Barr worked to call attention to gerrymandering by using the campaign slogan: “Kate Barr Can’t Win.”) Sometimes the opposing party doesn’t even bother to run a candidate.
Meanwhile, the party with a lock on the district gets more radical, as candidates have to worry about being primaried by someone more extreme than they are, rather than about attracting centrist voters that in a fair district they might lose to an opposing party’s candidate.
Trump is also confronting his unpopularity by trying to cement his power in the federal courts. Republicans began working to cement their power by stacking the courts during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Reagan’s attorney general, Edwin Meese, deliberately politicized the Department of Justice in an attempt, as he said, to “institutionalize the Reagan revolution so it can’t be set aside no matter what happens in future presidential elections.”
On July 20, Trump demanded the Senate abandon its longstanding tradition of so-called blue slips, an informal process by which a senator from the minority party can effectively block a judicial nominee proposed for their state. While this system can be abused by senators holding seats open for a president of their party—as Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) did during the Biden administration—it is designed to prevent a president from stashing unqualified or bad appointees in their states.
Benjamin S. Weiss of Courthouse News noted that Democratic New Jersey senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim used the system to prevent Trump’s lawyer and advisor Alina Habba from consideration to be the U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey.
After posting on social media that the practice means “the president of the United States will never be permitted to appoint the person of his choice,” Trump demanded that Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, end the system “IMMEDIATELY, and not let the Democrats laugh at him and the Republican Party for being weak and ineffective.” Trump then reposted other posts calling Grassley a “RINO”—or Republican In Name Only—and “sneaky” and suggesting he hates America.
Ending the practice would effectively cut senators in the minority from any influence at all on judicial appointments, and Grassley, who has gotten Trump’s many controversial appointees through Senate confirmation, has refused to agree. He said: “I was offended by what the president said, and I’m disappointed it would result in personal insults.”
In July, Trump demanded the Senate cancel its scheduled August break and long weekends to confirm his “incredible nominees.” Democrats have deployed the same techniques Republicans used to slow the confirmation of Democratic presidents’ nominations. According to Manu Raju and Victoria Stracqualursi of CNN, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said he would agree to let some nominees go through quickly in batches so the senators could go home, but only if the administration unfroze the federal funds Congress appropriated for agencies like the National Institutes of Health and programs like foreign aid, and only if Trump agreed he would not push for another rescissions package clawing back appropriations Congress passed.
Tonight, Trump posted: “Tell Schumer, who is under tremendous political pressure from within his own party, the Radical Left Lunatics, to GO TO HELL! Do not accept the offer, go home and explain to your constituents what bad people the Democrats are, and what a great job the Republicans are doing, and have done, for our Country. Have a great RECESS and, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”
Schumer reposted Trump’s rant and commented: “The Art of the Deal.”
Meanwhile, Democrats say they will fight back against Republican gerrymandering. They will challenge any Republican redistricting in court, but after standing firm on democratic institutionalism in the past, they now say they are willing to fight fire with fire and redistrict their own states to create Democratic districts.
What the Republicans are doing “is so un-American, and it’s a constant threat to our democracy,” Wisconsin governor Tony Evers said. “So I’m really pissed, frankly, and we are going to do whatever we can do to stop this from happening.” Governors Kathy Hochul of New York and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois are weighing options for redrawing maps in their own states. This will be more difficult for them than for Republican states because Democratic states tend to use independent citizen-led redistricting commissions rather than partisan systems.
California governor Gavin Newsom posted on social media: “[Trump] is so scared of the American people holding him accountable for his catastrophic actions, he wants Republicans to rig the 2026 elections for him.” Newsom pointed out that it would be easy for California to eliminate its Republican-leaning districts altogether, getting rid of nine Republican seats.
He posted on social media: “Game on.”
