Holy shit, if this guy was targeting Republican elected officials, he would be labeled a “far left terrorist.” Since he was targeting dems, “I guess we just can’t know.” He has a voluminous internet presence demonstrating his embrace of “violent prayer” and antiabortion radicalization. But he’s a conservative white guy, so gets every possible benefit of the doubt, right down to outright lying. I hate this timeline…
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Hell, THEY DID THAT ANYWAY! Maybe not the police, but I’ve seen a shitload of MAGAts call this guy a radical leftist terrorist.
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Yep. Someone posted in the Tramp thread (I think) about that all getting started because of a photo that showed flyers or something labeled No Kings in his car’s front seat. (Maybe he actually wanted to know where those protests were happening, to do some shoot em up there too?)
Anyway, that’s not to give MAGAts any benefit of the doubt by saying their labeling of him as a leftie terrorist is understandable or forgivable – it’s obviously not, and they would have done it anyway. All we have to do to see that is look at how grossly they and members of the Administration itself are inflating crowd sizes at the Big Beautiful Birthday Parade. They’re lying fascists.
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I hadn’t realised this fell on the same day as the UK’s “Trooping The Colour”.
My parents took us two boys to see it live back in the mid-70’s.
I was pretty impressed as a kid.
Today, though, I don’t even bother watching it on the telly.
Bob, an older friend of mine, loves the pageantry.
Me, I was here instead, chuckling at the US Army deliberately “Trolling The Culprit”.
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If I’ve learned anything from the Iraq boondoggle it’s that when the US accuses you of having WMDs, you better actually have some.
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June 17, 2025 (Tuesday)
Yesterday at the meeting of the leaders of the Group of Seven (G7), a forum of democracies with advanced economies, President Donald Trump told reporters: “The UK is very well protected. You know why? Because I like them, that’s why. That’s the ultimate protection.”
Commenters often note that Trump talks like a mob boss, but rarely has his organized-crime style of governance been clearer than in yesterday’s statement.
Also yesterday, Ana Swanson and Lauren Hirsch of the New York Times reported that Trump has taken unprecedented control over U.S. Steel. Japan’s Nippon Steel has been trying to take over U.S. Steel since 2023, but the Biden administration blocked the deal for security reasons. In order to move it forward, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick demanded an agreement that gives to the president and his successors, or a person the president designates, a single share of preferred stock, known as class G, or “gold.” The deal gives the president permanent veto power over nearly a dozen actions the company might want to take, as well as power over its board of directors.
Swanson and Hirsch note that the U.S. government historically takes a stake in companies only when they are in financial trouble or when they play a significant role in the economy. “We have a golden share, which I control, or the president controls,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Thursday. “Now I’m a little concerned whoever the president might be, but that gives you total control.”
This kind of deal echoes those of the authoritarians Trump appears to admire. His ongoing support for Russian president Vladimir Putin was on display at the G7, when he echoed Russian talking points that blamed European countries and the United States for Putin’s war against Ukraine, rather than acknowledging that it was Russia that attacked Ukraine after giving assurances that it would respect Ukrainian sovereignty in exchange for Ukraine’s giving up the Soviet nuclear weapons stored there.
Also yesterday, Rene Marsh and Ella Nilsen of CNN reported that officials from the Environmental Protection Agency under Trump have been telling staff in the Midwest—which the authors note has a legacy of industrial pollution—to “stop enforcing violations against fossil fuel companies.” At the same time, the Department of Justice has cut its environmental division significantly, leaving “no one to do the work.”
Trump vowed that if he were reelected he would slash the oil and gas regulations he claims are “burdensome.” Now, one EPA enforcement staffer told Marsh and Nilsen, “The companies are scoffing at the cops. EPA enforcement doesn’t have the leverage they once had.”
Also yesterday, outdoor journalist Wes Siler reported in Wes Siler’s Newsletter that while language inserted in the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill requires the sale of up to 3.3 million acres of publicly owned land, an amendment authorizes the sale of 258 million acres more over the next five years. The amendment comes from the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and was written by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Steve Daines (R-MT).
It includes Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service lands in 11 states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. As Siler notes, while the measure does not currently include national monument lands, the Department of Justice under Trump is arguing that the president can revoke national monument protections. If it did so, that would make another 13.5 million acres available for purchase.
Siler notes the process for selling those lands calls for an enormous rush on sales, “all without hearings, debate, or public input opportunities.”
Today, Eliot Brown of the Wall Street Journal reported that Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in India, is now one of the many wealthy foreign real estate developers “pouring money” into the Trump Organization. Brown noted that the Trump family is aggressively developing its businesses while Trump is in the White House, reaching past real estate into cryptocurrency and other sectors.
The growing power of international oligarchs to use the resources of the government for their own benefit recalls a speech Robert Mueller, then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, gave in New York City in 2011. In it, he explained that globalization and modern technology had changed the nature of organized crime. No longer regional networks with a clear structure, he said, organized crime had become international, fluid, and sophisticated, with multibillion-dollar stakes. Its operators were cross-pollinating across countries, religions, and political affiliations, sharing only their greed. They did not care about ideology; they cared about money. They would do anything for a price.
These criminals “may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military,” he said. “They are capitalists and entrepreneurs. But they are also master criminals who move easily between the licit and illicit worlds. And in some cases, these organizations are as forward-leaning as Fortune 500 companies.”
These criminal enterprises, he noted, were working to corner the market on oil, gas, and precious metals. And to do so, Mueller explained, they “may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called ‘iron triangles’ of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat.”
The FBI’s increasing focus on organized crime and national security is what prompted its interest in the connections between the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016.
The willingness of Republicans to enable Trump’s behavior is especially striking today, since June 17 is the anniversary of the 1972 Watergate break-in. On that day, operatives associated with President Richard M. Nixon’s team tried to tap the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington’s Watergate complex. Early in the morning of June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a 24-year-old security guard, noticed that a door lock had been taped open. He ripped off the tape and closed the door, but on his next round, he found the door taped open again. He called the police, who found five burglars in the Democratic National Committee headquarters located in the building.
The story played out over the next two years with Nixon insisting he was not involved in the affair, but in early August 1974 a tape recorded just days after the break-in revealed Nixon and an aide plotting to invoke national security to protect the president. Republican senators who had not wanted to convict their president of the charges of impeachment being considered in the House knew the game was over. A delegation of them went to the White House to tell Nixon they would vote to convict him.
On August 9, 1974, Nixon became the first president in U.S. history to resign.
Chris Geidner of LawDork notes that despite the lawmakers in our own era who are unwilling to stop Trump, “the pushback…is very real.” Geidner notes not just the No Kings Day protests of the weekend, but also a lawsuit by the American Bar Association (ABA) suing Trump for his attacks on law firms and lawyers, calling Trump’s actions “unprecedented and uniquely dangerous to the rule of law.”
Geidner also notes that lower court judges are upholding the Constitution, and he points especially to U.S. District Judge William Young, an appointee of Republican president Ronald Reagan. In a hearing yesterday, Young insisted on holding the government accountable “for both Trump’s actions and the follow-up actions from those Trump has empowered to act.”
Young called cuts to funding for National Institutes of Health research grants “illegal” and “void” and ordered the NIH to restore the funds immediately. “I am hesitant to draw this conclusion—but I have an unflinching obligation to draw it—that this represents racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community. That’s what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out.”
“I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable,” Young said during the hearing. “I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this.” He added: “You are bearing down on people of color because of their color. The Constitution will not permit that.… Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?”
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Do you feel safer now, Kier?
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Have you been living in a cave, your honor?
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I think cavepersons had higher standards. Possibly most of all because it made for better odds at surviving in an unforgiving environment, but still.
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June 18, 2025 (Wednesday)
Tomorrow is the federal holiday honoring Juneteenth, the celebration of the announcement in Texas on June 19th, 1865, that enslaved Americans were free.
That announcement came as late as it did because, while General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the U.S. Army on April 9, 1865, it was not until June 2 that General Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered the Trans-Mississippi Department, the last major army of the Confederacy, to the United States, in Galveston, Texas. Smith then fled to Mexico.
Seventeen days later, Major General Gordon Granger of the U.S. Army arrived to take charge of the soldiers stationed in Texas. On that day, June 19, he issued General Order Number 3. It read:
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.”
Granger’s order referred to the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, which declared that Americans enslaved in states that were in rebellion against the United States “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons.” Granger was informing the people of Galveston that, Texas having been in rebellion on January 1, 1863, their world had changed. The federal government would see to it that, going forward, white people and Black people would be equal.
Black people in Galveston met the news Order No. 3 brought with celebrations in the streets, but emancipation was not a gift from white Americans. Black Americans had fought and died for the United States. They had worked as soldiers, as nurses, and as day laborers in the Union army. Those who could had demonstrated their hatred of enslavement and the Confederacy by leaving their homes for the northern lines, sometimes delivering valuable information or matériel to the Union, while those unable to leave had hidden wounded U.S. soldiers and helped them get back to Union lines.
But white former Confederates in Texas were demoralized and angered by the changes in their circumstances. “It looked like everything worth living for was gone,” Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight later recalled.
In summer 1865, white legislators in the states of the former Confederacy grudgingly ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished enslavement except as punishment for a crime. But they also passed laws to keep freedpeople subservient to their white neighbors. These laws, known as the Black Codes, varied by state, but they generally bound Black Americans to yearlong contracts working in fields owned by white men; prohibited Black people from meeting in groups, owning guns or property, or testifying in court; outlawed interracial marriage; and permitted white men to buy out the jail terms of Black people convicted of a wide swath of petty crimes, and then to force those former prisoners into labor to pay off their debt.
Congress refused to readmit the southern states with the Black Codes in place, and in December 1865, Americans added the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Six months later, Texas freedpeople gathered on June 19, 1866, to celebrate the coming of their freedom with prayers, speeches, food, and socializing.
By then, congressmen had turned to guaranteeing that states could not pass discriminatory laws against citizens who lived in them, laws like the Black Codes. In 1866 they wrote and passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Its first section established that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” It went on: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
That was the whole ball game, the one that would put teeth behind the principles in the Emancipation Proclamation. The federal government had declared that a state legislature—no matter who elected it or what voters called for—could not discriminate against any of its citizens or arbitrarily take away any of a citizen’s rights. Then, like the Thirteenth Amendment before it, the Fourteenth declared that “Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article,” strengthening the federal government.
Rather than accept this new state of affairs, leading white southerners decided they would rather remain under military rule. So in March 1867, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, calling for southern voters to elect delegates to new state constitutional conventions. And, for the first time in U.S. history, they mandated that Black men could vote in those elections.
Three months later the federal government, eager to explain to Black citizens their new voting rights, encouraged “Juneteenth” celebrations, and the tradition of Juneteenth began to spread to Black communities across the nation. The next year, the addition of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution remade the United States of America.
In 1865, Juneteenth was a celebration of freedom and the war’s end. In 1866 it was a celebration of the enshrinement of freedom in the U.S. Constitution after the Thirteenth Amendment had been ratified. In 1867, Juneteenth was a celebration of the freedom of Black men to vote, the very real power of having a say in the government under which they lived.
Celebrations of Juneteenth declined during the Jim Crow years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but as Black Americans from the South spread across the country during and after World War II, they brought Juneteenth with them. By the 1980s, Texas had established Juneteenth as a state holiday. Other states followed, and in 2021, thanks in part to pressure from activist Opal Lee, Congress made Juneteenth a federal holiday and President Joe Biden signed the measure into law.
But throughout our history, those determined to preserve a government that discriminates between Americans according to race, gender, religion, ability, and so on, have embraced the idea that true democracy means reducing the power of the federal government and centering the power of the state governments, where voters—registered according to state laws—can choose the policies they prefer…even if they are discriminatory. They have also insisted, as former Confederates did in the late 1860s, that any laws protecting the equal rights of minorities discriminate against the white majority.
In 2025, as the Trump administration echoes those people, celebrations of Juneteenth are being cut back or even canceled. Corporate sponsors and local governments, as well as the national government, are pulling back their support for festivals and Juneteenth events.
Our history matters. Juneteenth is the celebration of a new nation, one that would honor the equality of all Americans—and one that, 160 years after it was established, we are in danger of losing as those in power set about rewriting the record.
To make sure people can still get the real story of Juneteenth and why it matters, my team produced this short video.
Wishing you all a meaningful Juneteenth.
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June 19, 2025 (Thursday)
Just a week ago, the Trump administration was preparing for a sixth round of negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, scheduled to be held in Oman on June 15.
In 2018, President Donald J. Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated in 2015 by President Barack Obama, under which the U.S., China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom lifted economic sanctions against Iran in exchange for limits to Iran’s nuclear program. With the U.S. withdrawal, the agreement fell apart.
Trump launched a “maximum pressure campaign” of stronger sanctions to pressure Iran to renegotiate the JCPOA, which lasted throughout his first term. Back in office, Trump relaunched that campaign in February 2025. Then, in March 2025, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Congress that the assessment of the Intelligence Community was that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon.
In the same month, Trump said on the Fox News Channel that he had written a letter to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, urging the Iranians to negotiate “because if we have to go in militarily it’s going to be a terrible thing for them.” Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said Iran would not “enter any direct negotiations with the U.S. so long as they continue their maximum pressure policy and their threats.”
But Iran’s allied militant actors Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon have been badly hurt by Israeli strikes since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Iran’s major ally in the Middle East, Bashar al-Assad of Syria, fell in December 2024. Discussions began in April of this year, and negotiators met for five rounds by the end of May.
Israel was not included in the negotiations, and on Thursday, June 12, it launched strikes against nuclear and military targets in Iran. The strikes killed a number of nuclear scientists and senior military personnel. Iran retaliated, and the countries have been in conflict ever since.
After the strikes, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also became the acting national security advisor after Trump fired his first national security advisor for inviting a journalist onto a Signal chat about a military strike against the Houthis, issued a statement distancing the U.S. from Israel’s attack on Iran. “Tonight,” he said, “Israel took unilateral action against Iran. We are not involved in strikes against Iran and our top priority is protecting American forces in the region. Israel advised us that they believe this action was necessary for its self-defense. President Trump and the Administration have taken all necessary steps to protect our forces and remain in close contact with our regional partners. Let me be clear: Iran should not target U.S. interests or personnel.”
But by early Friday morning, Trump appeared to be trying to take credit for the strikes and demanded that Iran make a deal. The next day—Saturday, June 14—was the day of No Kings protests in which at least 2% of the U.S. population turned out to oppose his presidency, as well as the sparsely attended military parade in Washington, D.C., an embarrassing contrast for the president.
The U.S. possesses a 30,000-pound bomb that would perhaps be able to penetrate Iran’s underground nuclear sites, which are fortified against attack. According to Alex Horton, Maham Javaid, and Warren P. Strobel, the “Massive Ordnance Penetrator” (MOP) can penetrate the ground up to at least 200 feet. The U.S. B-2 Spirit stealth bomber is the only Air Force aircraft that can deploy the heavy MOP.
On June 16, while at the G7 meeting in Canada, Trump posted that Iran “should have signed the ‘deal’ I told them to sign.” He continued: “What a shame, and waste of human life. Simply stated, IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. I said it over and over again! Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!” More than 9 million people live in Tehran, with more than 16 million in the metropolitan area.
Then Trump abruptly left the G7 and on the trip home told reporters on Air Force One that he didn’t care what Gabbard said, and thought Iran was close to achieving nuclear capabilities. When France’s president Emmanuel Macron suggested Trump left to work on a ceasefire, Trump posted: “Wrong! He has no idea why I am now on my way to Washington, but it certainly has nothing to do with a Cease Fire. Much bigger than that. Whether purposely or not, Emmanuel always gets it wrong. Stay tuned!” Later that day, he posted that “[w]e”—a word suggesting U.S. involvement—“now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran,” and he credited U.S. weaponry with that dominance.
About a half-hour later, he posted: “We know exactly where the so-called “Supreme Leader” is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there—We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now. But we don’t want missiles shot at civilians, or American soldiers. Our patience is wearing thin.”
As Trump’s “Stay tuned!” suggested, his hints that he could bring the U.S. into the conflict monopolized the news. It has pushed the No Kings Day protests and the military parade to the background, putting Trump back on the front page.
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo interpreted Trump’s shift to back Israel as a typical Trump branding opportunity: “Israel has got a product ready to go to market and they’ve offered Trump the opportunity to slap the Trump name on it.” In the short term, that product offers a quick way to get rid of the Iranian nuclear program, which has long been a U.S. goal.
But Trump’s flirting with joining a Middle East war has badly split his supporters. Led by Steve Bannon, the isolationist wing is strongly opposed to intervention and suggests that the U.S. will once again be stuck in an endless war.
In contrast, the evangelical MAGA wing sees support for Israel as central to the return of Jesus Christ to Earth in the end times. Earlier this month the U.S. ambassador to Israel, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, said the U.S. was abandoning its longstanding support for a Palestinian state. Huckabee is a strong supporter of the expansion of Israel’s settlements. After the Israeli strikes, Huckabee messaged Trump to urge him to listen to the voice of God. In an apparent reference to Truman’s decision to drop a nuclear weapon on Japan at the end of World War II, Huckabee told Trump: “No President in my lifetime has been in a position like yours. Not since Harry Truman in 1945.”
At the unveiling of two 88-foot-tall (30.5 meters) flagpoles at the White House yesterday, Trump told reporters who asked what he planned to do about Iran: “I mean, you don’t know that I’m going to even do it. You don’t know. I may do it, I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.” He added, “Nothing’s finished until it’s finished. You know, war is very complex. A lot of bad things can happen. A lot of turns are made.”
He told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: “I have ideas as to what to do, but I haven’t made a final—I like to make the final decision one second before it’s due, you know, because things change.”
Meanwhile, in a hearing yesterday at the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) pointed out to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that the $1 billion mission he led against the Houthis—who do not have a navy—has not restored the ability of U.S.-flagged commercial vessels to go through the Red Sea. Instead, it cost the U.S. two F18 Hornets, which cost $60 million apiece, and seven Reaper drones that cost another $200 million. Duckworth accused Hegseth of “blowing through money” and said: “Your failures…since you’ve taken office, have been staggering. You sent classified operational information over Signal to chest thump in front of your wife, who, by the way, has no security clearance, risking service member lives in the process…. You’ve created such a hostile command environment that no one wants to serve as your chief of staff or work with you in other senior lead [Department of Defense] leadership roles.”
“But what we should all be talking about more than all of this,” she added, “is that you have an unjustified, un-American misuse of the military in American cities, pulling resources and attention away from core missions to the detriment of the country, the war fighters, and, yes, the war fighting that you claim to love.”
Warren P. Strobel, Alex Horton, and Abigail Hauslohner of the Washington Post reported yesterday that Hegseth and Gabbard have been sidelined in discussions of whether the U.S. will get involved in the conflict. The White House is also operating without a full complement of professional staffers at the National Security Council, since Rubio fired many of them when he took over from Waltz, apparently with the goal of replacing the think-tank mentality of past NSCs with a group that would simply implement the president’s ideas.
Talking Points Memo’s Marshall noted Tuesday that “there is really, literally no one in the inner discussion of U.S. foreign policy today who has any level of foreign policy or military crisis experience at all.”
Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is pushing back on the idea that Trump can unilaterally decide to take the United States into a war. On Monday, Democratic senator Tim Kaine of Virginia introduced a measure to reassert Congress’s power over the authority to make war. The Constitution explicitly gives that authority to Congress, not the president, but presidents have chipped away at that power for decades. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced another measure to bar the use of federal funds for military force without authorization by Congress.
Today, after Iranian missiles hit an Israeli hospital, Trump seemed to change direction. He issued a statement through White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, falling back on his usual tactic of promising something “in two weeks.” “Based on the fact that there’s a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks.”
Stay tuned.
Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted today: “A through-line through the last five months is that uncertainty is Donald Trump’s personal comfort zone, where he feels his power is maximized. But in basically every domain in which he operates uncertainty in itself is damaging to everyone else involved.”
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June 20, 2025 (Friday)
Individuals in plain clothes with their faces covered and without badges or name tags are snatching people off the streets and taking them away. Todd Lyons, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is housed within the Department of Homeland Security, claimed that such measures for anonymity are imperative because “ICE officers have seen a staggering 413 percent increase in assaults against them.”
Philip Bump of the Washington Post looked into that claim and noted that by using a percentage, ICE avoids the question of just how many assaults there have actually been. He points out that year-to-date assaults against Customs and Border Protection are currently 20% lower than they were in 2024 and that at least one ICE news release blurred the distinction between “threatening to assault” and “assaulting.” ICE would not provide evidence for their claims.
Bump concludes: “[W]e should not and cannot take ICE’s representations about the need for its officers to obscure their identities at face value.” After Bump’s article appeared yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security posted on social media: “New data reveals that ICE law enforcement is now facing a 500% increase in assaults while carrying out enforcement operations.”
Bump noted that ICE “has been eager to level dubious charges against Democratic legislators,” and the message from Homeland Security bears that claim out. After claiming a 500% increase in assaults, it continued: “Make no mistake, sanctuary politicians are contributing to the surge in assaults of our ICE officers through their repeated vilification and demonization of ICE. This violence against ICE must end.”
The Department of Homeland Security appears to be trying to convince Americans that their agents must cover their faces because their opponents, especially Democrats, are dangerous.
On Tuesday, masked, plainclothes ICE agents assaulted and arrested New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander, the city’s chief financial officer. Lander was accompanying an immigrant to a scheduled court hearing to try to protect him from arrest in one of ICE’s sweeps of those showing up for their court hearings. Lander asked the agents to produce an arrest warrant for the man they were arresting, and was himself arrested.
Homeland Security said it would charge him with impeding a federal officer and “assaulting law enforcement.” As Bump notes, a video of the incident shows that Lander “assaulted the officers in the sense that a bully might accuse you of having gotten in the way of his fist.” Lander was later released, and New York governor Kathy Hochul said the charges against him had been dropped.
The same pattern occurred last month, when federal prosecutors charged Newark, New Jersey, mayor Ras Baraka with trespassing and interim U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, Alina Habba, broke the Department of Justice rule that it would not comment on ongoing investigations by posting that Baraka had “committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey this afternoon. He has willingly chosen to disregard the law. That will not stand in this state. He has been taken into custody. NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.”
Ten days later, Habba quietly dropped the case and announced another one, this time against U.S. Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), charging her with “assaulting, impeding and interfering with law enforcement” during Baraka’s arrest.
U.S. Magistrate Judge André Espinosa, a federal judge, rebuked the officials who had charged Baraka, warning them that their rush to charge the mayor suggests “a failure to adequately investigate, to carefully gather facts, and to thoughtfully consider the implications of your actions before wielding your immense power.”
But the point of these arrests is almost certainly not an attempt to see justice done. They continue the longstanding Republican policy of seeding the media with a false narrative of bad behavior by their opponents—voter fraud, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails, and so on—in order to convince voters that their opponents are dangerous to America.
President Donald J. Trump relied on this political technique so thoroughly that in 2019 he tried to discredit his primary challenger for the 2020 presidential election, then former vice president Joe Biden, by getting Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into the Ukrainian company for which Biden’s son Hunter had worked.
Trump didn’t want an actual investigation; he wanted an announcement that an investigation was being launched. He could trust that media reports would carry the story and its suggestion of corruption from there, even in the absence of evidence, leaving behind his own administration’s deep involvement with Russia. Similarly, during Biden’s presidency, Republicans launched a sprawling investigation of what they insisted on calling the “Biden Crime Family” although there was never a Biden family business, their star witness went to prison after confessing to lying to the FBI, and they never produced any evidence that the president had taken foreign bribes. Now, though, with the Trump Organization—a family business—openly making deals with foreign governments, Republicans are silent.
Today, after a week of embarrassing news, Trump continued this pattern by announcing that he is calling for a special prosecutor to investigate claims that the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election. There has never been any evidence of this Big Lie, and courts dismissed the many cases brought over it. But raising it now, when MAGA is deeply divided over U.S. involvement in the Israel-Iran conflict, could create a distraction and reinforce his loyalists’ support.
There was, of course, a special counsel appointed to look into Trump’s attempt to stay in power despite losing the 2020 presidential election. His name was Jack Smith, and after his investigation, in 2023 a grand jury, made up of American citizens, indicted Trump for engaging in “dishonesty, fraud and conceit” to obstruct American democracy by stopping the counting of votes by which citizens choose their government officials. “Despite having lost,” the indictment reads, Trump “was determined to remain in power.”
Now he is back in office, but he remains unpopular. A new Fox News poll released yesterday shows that only 38% of registered voters like the Republicans’ budget reconciliation omnibus bill, while 59% oppose it, a difference of 21 points. The poll also showed that 55% of registered voters are worried about the economy, 84% are worried about inflation, and 57% think tariffs hurt the economy. Only 46% of respondents approve of Trump’s job performance, while 54% disapprove.
This week’s Economist/YouGov poll shows that 52% of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling deportations, while only 42% approve, and that Trump’s job approval rating among those from 18 to 29 years old has dropped 44 points since he took office. Many of Trump’s supporters believed he would be deporting only undocumented immigrants who had committed violent crimes, but an investigation by CNN reporters published on Monday showed that fewer than 10% of those taken into custody since October have been convicted of violent crimes.
So members of his administration are centering power in the White House while obscuring who, exactly, is giving orders that either are or might be violating the law. Administration lawyers are still hiding who was actually the head of the Department of Government Efficiency in its first months and who gave the order to send Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia to prison in El Salvador. Making lawbreaking opaque makes it harder to prosecute those doing the breaking. It is possible at least some of the drive to hide agents’ faces comes from that impulse, just as members of the Ku Klux Klan hid their faces in the 1860s and 1870s.
There is another important parallel to the Klan in the administration’s defense of masked agents who are terrorizing Americans even as they insist they are the ones under attack by dangerous Democrats. The Klan set out to “reform” governments elected by a majority of voters and take control themselves, permanently. In Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, about two thousand armed white Democrats overthrew a government of black Republicans and white Populists. The Democrats agreed that the town officials had been elected fairly, but they rejected the outcome of the election nonetheless, insisting that such people were “socialists” and had no idea how to run a government.
On June 12, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in Los Angeles, “We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”
When California senator Alex Padilla, the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on immigration, citizenship and border safety, tried to ask Noem a question, he was assaulted and handcuffed by agents from the Department of Homeland Security. Yesterday, he noted in a New York Times op-ed that “public safety is not the point; the spectacle is.” Trump “is testing the boundaries of his power,” Padilla wrote, “[a]nd he’s using the theatrics around his immigration policies to do it.”
“If federal troops can deploy to Los Angeles against the wishes of the governor, the mayor and even local law enforcement, they can do the same tomorrow in your hometown,” he wrote. “This is a fundamental threat to the rule of law nationwide.”
But Padilla noted that the attempt to force minority rule on the U.S. through violence shows that the administration is weak. “If the Trump administration was this afraid of one senator with a question,” he wrote, “imagine what the voices of tens of millions of Americans organizing will do.”
Today, at a news conference in Los Angeles, a reporter asked Vice President J.D. Vance if Trump’s administration is “cracking down on Democrats.” Vance, who served with Alex Padilla in the Senate, called his former colleague by the wrong name. Once again seeding the idea that a Democratic lawmaker must be a criminal, Vance called the California senator “José Padilla,” using the name of a man convicted in 2007 of conspiring to commit murder and fund terrorism.
The vice president’s press secretary said the vice president “must have mixed up two people who have broken the law.”
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The only thing they’re sure about is that it must have been a Democrat.
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So an “assault” is now questioning whether they have a warrant.
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Based on what they are doing in Portland, an assault on an ICE officer includes hitting them in the rubber bullet with your face or breathing in their experimental toxic crowd control gas.
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June 21, 2025 (Saturday)
At 7:50 this evening, Eastern Time, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media: “We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan. All planes are now outside of Iran air space. A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow. All planes are safely on their way home. Congratulations to our great American Warriors. There is not another military in the World that could have done this. NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
Then he reposted a message referring to the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, assumed to be at the center of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, saying: “Fordow is gone.”
Then he posted a statement saying: “I will be giving an Address to the Nation at 10:00 P.M., at the White House, regarding our very successful military operation in Iran. This is an HISTORIC MOMENT FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, ISRAEL, AND THE WORLD. IRAN MUST NOW AGREE TO END THIS WAR. THANK YOU!”
Then he posted an American flag.
Just after 10:00 tonight, flanked by Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State and acting National Security Advisor Marco Rubio, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Trump spoke briefly to the nation. He said:
“The U.S. military carried out massive precision strikes on the three key nuclear facilities in the Iranian regime, Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan. Everybody heard those names for years as they built this horribly destructive enterprise. Our objective was the destruction of Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity, and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world’s number one state sponsor of terror. Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated. Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier.
“For 40 years, Iran has been saying, ‘Death to America, death to Israel.’ They have been killing our people, blowing off their arms, blowing off their legs,with roadside bombs. That was their specialty. We lost over a thousand people, and hundreds of thousands throughout the Middle East and around the world have died as a direct result of their hate. In particular, so many were killed by their general, Qasem Soleimani [whom Trump ordered assassinated in 2020]. I decided a long time ago that I would not let this happen. It will not continue.
“I want to thank and congratulate Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. We worked as a team, like perhaps no team has ever worked before. And we’ve gone a long way to erasing this horrible threat to Israel. I want to thank the Israeli military for the wonderful job they’ve done.
“And most importantly, I want to congratulate the great American patriots who flew those magnificent machines tonight, and all of the United States military on an operation the likes of which the world has not seen in many, many decades. Hopefully, we will no longer need their services in this capacity. I hope that’s so. I also want to congratulate the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan “Razin” Caine, spectacular general, and all of the brilliant military minds involved in this attack
“With all of that being said, this cannot continue. There will be either peace, or there will be tragedy for Iran far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days. Remember, there are many targets left. Tonight’s was the most difficult of them all by far, and perhaps the most lethal. But if peace does not come quickly, we will go after those other targets with precision, speed, and skill. Most of them can be taken out in a matter of minutes.
“There’s no military in the world that could have done what we did tonight, not even close. There’s never been a military that could do what took place just a little while ago. Tomorrow, General Caine, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, will have a press conference at 8:00 a.m. at the Pentagon.
“And I want to just thank everybody and in particular, God, I want to just say we love you, God, and we love our great military, protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”
In The Atlantic, foreign affairs scholar Tom Nichols noted: “President Donald Trump has done what he swore he would not do: involve the United States in a war in the Middle East.”
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What about the agreement he trashed which would have carefully monitored and prevented any nuclear buildup (if in fact this is even true)?
A stitch in time saves nine….and in this case, would have saved lives and billions of dollars.
It’s so easy to see why the people in control in this administration have failing businesses. They really don’t understand how to budget and plan.
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