Fuck
Not an essay that helps to start my day. This is exhausting. 
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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.
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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.
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TIL there’s a buildings thread…thank you!
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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?”
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What now? Why, there’s an amendment to the constitution that covers this sort of thing, he said trying to keep a straight face.
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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.”
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August 3, 2025 (Sunday)
Today, Democratic lawmakers from the Texas House of Representatives left the state to deny Republican lawmakers the quorum—the number of legislators required to pass legislation—they need in order to push through a new district map that would take five seats currently held by Democrats and give them to Republicans. President Donald J. Trump has demanded this rare mid-decade redistricting in an attempt to hold control of the House of Representatives in 2026. He is urging all Republican-dominated states to make a similar change to guarantee Republican dominance regardless of the will of voters.
Republicans in the Texas legislature rushed a bill that would make the new map law through committee on Saturday morning after the one public hearing they held on it showed overwhelming opposition. Sophia Beausoleil of NBC 5 in Dallas–Fort Worth reports that the Texas House is scheduled to vote on the bill Monday.
“My Democratic colleagues and I have just left our beloved state to break quorum and stop Trump’s redistricting power grab,” Texas state representative James Talarico said in a video posted to social media. “Trump told our Republican colleagues to redraw the political maps here in Texas in the middle of the decade to get him five more seats and protect his majority in Congress. They’re turning our districts into crazy shapes to guarantee the outcome they want in the 2026 elections. If this power grab succeeds, they will hang on to power without any accountability from the voters. But Texas Democrats are fighting back. We’re leaving the state, breaking quorum and preventing Republicans from silencing our voices and rigging the next election. We are not fighting for the Democratic Party. We are fighting for the democratic process, and the stakes could not be higher. We have to take a stand.”
The Texas legislators traveled to Boston, Massachusetts, and to Albany, New York, to confer with Democratic leaders. About 30 of them, though, went to Chicago, Illinois, where Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker welcomed them at a press conference tonight.
Texas House Democratic Caucus Chair Gene Wu emphasized that the Democrats had tried to work with the Republicans, but Texas governor Greg Abbott and the Republican lawmakers were forcing the new map through against the will of the voters because Trump told them to. Wu’s explanation mirrors that of Republican state representative Cody Vasut, who told Natasha Korecki and Ryan Chandler of NBC News: “This map was politically based, and that’s totally legal, totally allowed and totally fair.”
Wu warned that the attempt to grab five new seats in Texas to maintain control of the U.S. House of Representatives against the will of voters is a threat not only to Texas, but to the entire country and to the concept of America. “If Donald Trump is allowed to do this, if he is allowed to once again cheat and get away with it, there’s no stopping this. This will spread across the country, and…will occur everywhere. Because if one person’s going to cheat and no one’s going to stop it, why doesn’t everyone just do it then? And that is not a society, that is not an America that works.”
Wu continued: “Everyone is already tired of the hyperpartisan bickering and all the fighting because we never get anything done. And they are creating a system that will reinforce that and make it even worse. And we’re telling people, please come out, stand up against it, rise up and say no more. Enough."
Wu said the Texas Democratic representatives “did not make the decision to come here today…lightly, but we come here today with absolute moral clarity.”
Governor Pritzker has been in contact with the Texas Democrats to plan for such a moment. His staff will provide logistical support to the visiting Texans. Tonight he made it clear that the Texas Democrats’ fight against Trump’s power grab is the fight of all Americans to protect democracy. “Let’s be clear,” Pritzker said, “this is not just rigging the system in Texas. It’s about rigging the system against the rights of all Americans for years to come.”
Pritzker continued: “Texas Democrats were left no choice but to leave their home state, block a vote from taking place, and protect their constituents. This is a righteous act of courage.” Pritzker urged other Americans to “take a page from these leaders’s playbook. When you show people that you have the will to fight, well, they can muster the will to fight, too. Courage is contagious.”
“To be in public office right now is to constantly ask yourself, how do I make sure that we’re standing on the right side of history? There’s a simple answer. The wrong side of history will always tell you to be afraid. The right side of history will always expect you to be courageous. Expect courage from people around you, and it will show up. Expect fear, and fear will rule the day. Let the courage of these leaders be an example to the rest of the country. I’m proud to stand side by side with our friends from Texas today.”
Tonight U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) told an audience in Phoenix, Arizona: “My former colleagues from the Texas House—those Texas Democrats—decided to get the hell out of Texas…and breaking quorum is where they’re at right now. And they didn’t just do it by themselves—they went to Illinois, where there is a governor that gives a damn. You see, this fight is going to take all of us.”
Crockett’s comments came at tonight’s launch of the “Won’t Back Down” Tour, organized by MoveOn and MeidasTouch, to hold Republicans accountable and organize for 2026. Crockett, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), and Representative Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ) spoke tonight; Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Representative Maxwell Frost (D-FL) will take the tour to Nebraska next.
Texas governor Abbott responded to the Texas House Democrats’ quorum break by threatening to remove from office any Democrats who are not back in their seats for Monday’s vote and to replace them “swiftly” with his own appointees thanks to his power to fill vacancies. He also suggested he would consider them felons for accepting money to pay for their food and housing in Chicago and that such a designation would enable him to cross state lines to get them back. He threatened to use “my full extradition authority to demand the return to Texas of any potential out-of-state felons.”
When a reporter asked about Abbott’s threat, Pritzker responded: “They’re here in Illinois. We’re going to do everything we can to protect every single one of them…. It’s the leaders of Texas who are attempting not to follow the law. They’re the ones that need to be held accountable.”
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The governor of Texas has no authority to unilaterally remove any legislator from office.
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Some people lately have been doing all sorts of things they don’t have the legal authority to do.
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I know, but HCR should have mentioned that. It’s important to keep reminding everyone when these people are acting illegally.
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Fighting for the union, again. We are already in Civil War II. And Illinois was on the right side then, too.
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This really does have potential for armed forces facing off against each other. Illegally replacing elected representatives, threatening to invade another state, tearing up any concept of democracy. This is coming to a head far more quickly than i would have thought.
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He claims he will invoke an OAG opinion KP-0382 that determined legislators can be removed if they have abandoned their office, and leaving to prevent a quorum might be abandonment.
What he doesn’t mention is that (1) OAG opinions are not legally binding (although often given deference), (2) a court has to make the determination a legislator abandoned their office, and (3) the governor cannot appoint a replacement. He can only call for a special election to elect a replacement.
Not sure how this might affect quorum if the seat is determined to be vacant.
I’d have to dig further to figure out if the courts with jurisdiction would be the ones in the capitol area. That is Travis County and the judges here are mostly Democrats themselves. But I don’t have time.
Unfortunately, this is probably a temporary measure. The last time the Texas Democratic reps tried this, the bill they attempted to stymie went through as soon as they returned. But maybe they are hoping to run the clock on the special session, force another special session, and do it again until there isn’t enough time before the election to change the maps. Not sure if that would work 
Edit to add number 3 above.
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I find it odd she didn’t mention it too. Maybe because it’s kind of complicated and she didn’t have time to run that down?
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It’s really not complicated. The idea that a governor could unilaterally remove an elected official from their office is anathema to the principle of separation of powers. It’s only complicated because Numbnuts McDickhead, aka Ken Paxton, made up an executive power out of thin air.
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August 4, 2025 (Monday)
President Donald J. Trump’s firing of the commissioner of labor statistics on Friday for announcing that job growth has slowed dramatically has drawn a level of attention to Trump’s assault on democracy that other firings have not. Famously, authoritarian governments make up statistics to claim their policies are working well, even when they quite obviously are not.
Yesterday former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers told George Stephanopoulos of This Week on ABC News: “This is the stuff of democracies giving way to authoritarianism…. [F]iring statisticians goes with threatening the heads of newspapers. It goes with launching assaults on universities. It goes with launching assaults on law firms that defend clients that the elected boss finds uncongenial. This is really scary stuff." In The Bulwark, Bill Kristol called out the open assault “on the truth, on the rule of law, on a free society” as “part of the broader pattern of the transformation of government information into pure propaganda.”
Summers shot down Trump’s claim that the commissioner had rigged the numbers in the jobs report to make him look bad. "These numbers are put together by teams of literally hundreds of people following detailed procedures that are in manuals,” he said. “There’s no conceivable way that the head of the [Bureau of Labor Statistics] could have manipulated this number.”
Kathryn Anne Edwards at Bloomberg explained the implications of Trump’s determination to control economic statistics: “The peril…isn’t a potential recession; it’s losing highly reliable, accurate and transparent data on the health of the world’s largest economy.” As Ben Casselman pointed out in the New York Times, officials at the Federal Reserve, for example, need reliable statistics on inflation and unemployment to inform decisions about interest rates, which in turn affect how much Americans pay for car loans and mortgages.
Economist Paul Krugman noted that Trump lashed out against the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because most economists warned that Trump’s economic policies would hurt the economy, and the official data is starting to confirm that he was wrong and they were right. Krugman suggested that those numbers will continue to get worse as Trump’s tariffs and deportations start to show up in inflation.
An Associated Press/ NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released today shows that 86% of American adults report that the cost of groceries is a source of stress, with 53% saying it causes “major” stress. Only 14% of adults say the cost of groceries is not a source of stress for them.
On all his key issues Trump is currently underwater—meaning that more people disapprove of his handling of them than approve—and reports that he is abandoning his campaign promise to require healthcare insurance companies to pay for in vitro fertilization, or IVF, will not endear him to those voters, either. Krugman notes that as Trump’s popularity is disintegrating, he appears to be ramping up his attempts to destroy American democracy.
At the same time, the administration continues to reel under pressure over the files related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Trump’s inability to let the issue drop is keeping it very much alive. On Sunday the president railed against radio host Charlamagne Tha God for saying that the administration’s poor handling of the Epstein issue created an opportunity for traditional Republicans to take their party back.
As more information emerges about Trump’s association with Epstein, Trump and his loyalists are trying hard to push stories suggesting that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton or former president Barack Obama or other Democrats are the real criminals.
On July 24, director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard claimed that officials in the administration of Barack Obama ”manufactured” evidence in 2016 to suggest that Trump’s campaign was connected to Russian operatives. This was ridiculous on its face, but then the administration declassified documents it claimed proved their allegations. But another set of documents released on August 1 said the two emails that purportedly proved such a plan were instead, as Charlie Savage of the New York Times put it, “most likely manufactured by Russian spies.”
After Gabbard made her claims, media outlets reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi was surprised as well as annoyed by Gabbard’s explosive accusations and, already in trouble for botching the Epstein issue, scrambled to support them.
Today Sadie Gurman, Josh Dawsey, and Brett Forrest of the Wall Street Journal reported that, according to an official at the Department of Justice, Bondi has signed an order directing a U.S. attorney to present evidence concerning the matter to a grand jury. This is a major escalation in their crusade to convince voters that the real story in the news should be that Trump is a victim.
The Wall Street Journal reporters note that the administration’s claims “come as the Trump administration has faced intense bipartisan criticism over its refusal to provide more information about the FBI investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.”
Another aspect of the Epstein issue is also in the news today. After the Wall Street Journal published the story by Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo reporting that Trump contributed a bawdy birthday letter to an album Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell compiled for Epstein’s fiftieth birthday in 2003, Trump sued the Wall Street Journal’s parent company Dow Jones and owner Rupert Murdoch for $10 billion. But the lawsuit read as if it were written primarily to rile up Trump’s base. The Wall Street Journal stood firm on the accuracy of its reporting, and the defendants moved to dismiss the lawsuit.
Then Trump asked a federal judge in Miami to force Murdoch to answer questions under oath within 15 days, and that, too, sounded like an attempt to display dominance. The request stressed Murdoch’s age and ill health as a reason for the request. “Murdoch is 94 years old, has suffered from multiple health issues throughout his life, is believed to have suffered recent significant health scares, and is presumed to live in New York, New York,” all making him unlikely to be able to testify at a trial, the filing read.
Today Trump quietly backed away from his demand for Murdoch’s deposition, and both sides put off discovery—the process of disclosing information and evidence to the other party—at least until after the motion to dismiss has been decided.
Trump’s former lawyer Todd Blanche, now deputy attorney general at the Department of Justice, has met twice with Maxwell, who says she will “testify openly and honestly” before Congress about Epstein if she gets a pardon. She is currently serving a twenty-year sentence for sex trafficking and other charges. Today Alexander Bolton of The Hill said Republican senators are warning Trump and Bondi that they should consider very carefully whether it would be a good idea to grant Maxwell a pardon.
Also today, Casey Gannon of CNN reported that two of Epstein’s victims have filed letters with the court expressing outrage at the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files, suggesting that the department was protecting wealthy men at the expense of the victims.
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Well, duh!
Not to mention having her testify before Congress.
The stench rising up from the Epstein scandal just keeps getting worse. It’s already far worse than that of Donny’s diapers. Maybe it won’t be long before almost no Republicans can stand it anymore.
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