Wednesday Reads: How Many Ways Can Trump Fail to Distract from The Epstein Files?

Good Afternoon!!

Trump’s efforts to distract from his close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein are doomed to failure.

It’s just another day under the rule of fascist dictator wannabe Trump. All I can say is whatever is in the Epstein files about Trump must be really damaging, because every day he dreams up one or two new distractions.

Raw Story: ‘I need a big thing!’ Trump said to be considering major betrayal as Epstein distraction.

President Donald Trump has reportedly been frantically calling aides and allies seeking a “big thing” to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, and he’s purportedly considering a major geopolitical move to turn the page politically.

Trump biographer Michael Wolff told The Daily Beast’s new podcast “Inside Trump’s Head” that the president has been making “relentless” phone calls demanding ideas to get him past questions about his longtime relationships with the late sex offender and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.

“Let me go back about a week or so, or 10 days, when Trump started to say to everyone who would listen — and everyone listens to Donald Trump — to staffers and on the phone calls, the relentless phone calls that he’s constantly making, he said, ‘I need a big thing, I need a big thing,'” Wolff told the podcast. ”What’s the ‘big thing?’ And everyone understood that this was code for I need a distraction from Epstein. What’s the thing that will move us beyond that?”

Trump considered turning New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani into a MAGA villain and reportedly called his chief rival Andrew Cuomo to discuss the plan, but Wolff said that option “didn’t get that traction,” so he next moved on to deploying soldiers and federal law enforcement in Washington, D.C., before landing on something else to distract his base.

“That is what he got to,” Wolff said. “‘I’m going to have to do Ukraine.’”

Wolff claims the president will pull the U.S. out of any involvement in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which Trump believes will appease the isolationist MAGA base, after he meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin this week in Alaska.

“He’s going to sacrifice Ukraine for Epstein,” Wolff said. “Essentially, this is, in his mind, a trade. It is the MAGA people who have pressed this Epstein issue constantly. I mean, they’re the threat.”

Wolff doesn’t think that will work either.

The National Guard began to show up on the DC streets yesterday.

Lisa Needham at Public Notice: Trump’s brownshirts deploy in DC.

On Monday, Trump dropped two executive orders, two fact sheets, and two “articles” (who knew that the White House issues articles?) about his decision to federalize the DC police and deploy the National Guard. Then, he held a bonkers press conference where he gave Attorney General Pam Bondi control of the DC police “as of this moment,” at which point Bondi took the podium to declare that “crime in DC is ending and ending today.”

It’s important to be precise about what’s happening in DC and why. As Chris Geidner explains at Law Dork, calling this a “takeover” of DC itself or the DC police is inaccurate.

DC’s Home Rule Act has a provision that lets the president direct the mayor to provide District police force service for federal purposes if he deems it necessary and determines an emergency exists. He can do that for 48 hours without informing Congress. Once he informs Congress, he gets 30 days. Past that, Congress needs to enact a joint resolution to extend it.

In theory, the legislative branch should act as a check on a lawless president. But given that the GOP majorities in both the House and Senate have willfully abdicated their responsibility to do so, there’s no reason to think lawmakers won’t let Trump’s brownshirts occupy DC as long as he wants.

There are no real impediments to the president calling up the DC National Guard. Unlike state National Guards, which are under the control of state governors, DC’s Guard is commanded by the president. Further, the position of the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel is that the DC National Guard can be used for federal work without being federalized, unlike state National Guards. This means it can be used for law enforcement purposes without running afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act, which otherwise prohibits the use of federal troops for civilian enforcement efforts.

National Guard troops arriving in DC yesterday

So, the DC Home Rule Act, combined with the structure of its National Guard, gives the president a perfectly legal and relatively friction-free way to make local police do his bidding and to have the National Guard roam the streets.

At the moment, there’s a pretense that the DC National Guard will not be performing law enforcement duties. Instead, they have the authority to detain people temporarily until federal agents arrive. But as any first-year law student can tell you, if someone cloaked in the authority of the government has the power to detain you, they are engaged in law enforcement duties. It doesn’t matter that they eventually hand you off to someone else with the proper authority to detain you.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth must be so hyped for this. He can pretend he’s a five-star general in charge of a vast array of troops rather than a doofus civilian whose main achievement currently consists of posting misogynist and eugenicist garbage on his social media accounts — well, and sharing classified military plans in the group chat. He’s pretty good at that. But now, Hegseth gets to do Fox hits and bray about how the DC Guard “will be strong, they will be tough and they will stand with their law enforcement partners.”

Read more at Public Notice.

Asawin Suebsaeng and Ryan Bort at Rolling Stone: Trump’s Military Crackdowns Are Only Going to Get Worse.

President Donald Trump has expanded his military campaign against the United States by deploying armed troops to yet another major metropolitan area, announcing on Monday that he is sending the National Guard into Washington, D.C., to “liberate” the city.

Big Balls before and after attack

The D.C. operation, launched two months after the start of his Los Angeles crackdown, broadens a police-state-style domestic campaign that some senior Trump administration officials describe to Rolling Stone as a “shock and awe” show of force, a reference to the foreign war in Iraq that Trump has pretended to oppose.

It’s only going to get worse.

The president and his top government appointees are publicly stressing that this will not end with D.C. and L.A., that other military options are very much on the table. The facts, the laws, and data do not seem to matter: Trump and his team believe he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, including using the U.S. armed forces for domestic political purposes as well as intimidating his enemies. His team is privately putting together plans for him to do just that.

“Make no mistake, this is just the beginning,” U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro — a staunchly pro-Trump former Fox News host whom the president tapped specifically to “crack skulls” — said Monday night.

Can you believe Pirro is actually the US attorney anywhere?

At a press conference Monday announcing that the federal government had seized “direct” control of D.C.’s police department and that the National Guard would soon occupy the city, Trump warned that if he and his officials decide they “need to,” he will deploy military forces to other Democratic cities, too. The president named a few, including Chicago, Oakland, and Baltimore. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat whom Trump attacked by name, compared Trump’s use of the military to the Nazis tearing apart Germany’s constitutional republic, per the Chicago Tribune.

Trump has long yearned to unleash the military on American soil for his political agenda, and the D.C. and L.A. deployments this summer are critical stepping stones in his increasingly authoritarian government’s vision for punishing his enemies Democratic area of the country, carrying out his brutal immigration agenda, and making life hell for unhoused people. Trump said on Monday that federal forces will work to remove “homeless encampments from all over our parks,” and that the unhoused will not be “allowed to turn our capital into a wasteland for the world to see.” [….]

In recent months, according to government officials and other sources with knowledge of the situation, administration staff and lawyers have crafted detailed plans and menus of options for Trump to feed his desire for replicating and proliferating his militarized crackdowns — on immigrants and citizens alike — to different Democratic strongholds. National Guard troops are already mobilizing in D.C., and Trump has privately said, according to two sources familiar with the matter, that if he sees something that he feels crosses his line (like if street protests in the city grow too big or if he deems them a threat suddenly), he will gladly order larger numbers of troops to nation’s capital, as he did in Los Angeles earlier this year.

Trump has insisted to administration officials that it’s ridiculous that troops like National Guard members are not allowed to conduct various forms of domestic law enforcement, sources add. The president and his administration to some extent have had their hands tied on this due to the Posse Comitatus Act — which prohibits using the military for domestic law enforcement — though that isn’t stopping them from actively exploring ways around the law. “There are ways things were done, and that’s not always going to be how they should be done now or tomorrow,” a senior Trump administration official tells Rolling Stone.

MAGA mob attacks police line on January 6, 2001.

Luke Broadwater at The New York Times: Trump Deploys National Guard for D.C. Crime but Called Jan. 6 Rioters ‘Very Special.’

The heart of D.C. was in a state of lawlessness.

Roving mobs of wild men smashed windows, threatened murder and attacked the police.

One rioter struck an officer in the face with a baton. Another threw a chair at police officers and pepper-sprayed them. Others beat and used a stun gun on an officer, nearly killing him.

On Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob committed a month’s worth of crime in the span of about three hours.

The F.B.I. has estimated that around 2,000 people took part in criminal acts that day, and more than 600 people were charged with assaulting, resisting or interfering with the police. (Citywide, Washington currently averages about 70 crimes a day.)

But President Trump’s handling of the most lawless day in recent Washington history stands in sharp contrast to his announcement on Monday that he needed to use the full force of the federal government to crack down on “violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals” in the nation’s capital.

A bit more:

After a prominent member of the Department of Government Efficiency, known by his online pseudonym, “Big Balls,” was assaulted this month, the president took federal control of Washington’s police force and mobilized National Guard troops. His team passed out a packet of mug shots, and Mr. Trump described “roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people.”

That was nothing like the message he delivered to the mob of his supporters on Jan. 6, when he told them, as tear gas filled the hallways of the Capitol: “We love you. You’re very special.”

“If we want to look at marauding mobs, look at Jan. 6,” said Mary McCord, the director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law and a former federal prosecutor. “If you want to look at criminal mobs, we had a criminal mob and he called them peaceful protesters.”

In one of his first actions upon retaking the presidency, Mr. Trump issued a sweeping grant of clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the Capitol attack. The president issued pardons to most of the defendants and commuted the sentences of 14 members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers militia, most of whom were convicted of seditious conspiracy.

He has sought to rewrite the history of the riot and called those arrested “hostages.”

In another fascist takeover attempt, Trump is trying to control what The Smithsonian puts on display.

The New York Times (gift link): White House Announces Comprehensive Review of Smithsonian Exhibitions.

The Trump administration said on Tuesday that it would begin a wide-ranging review of current and planned exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution, scouring wall text, websites and social media “to assess tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals.”

White House officials announced the review in a letter sent to Lonnie G. Bunch III, the secretary of the Smithsonian. Museums will be required to adjust any content that the administration finds problematic within 120 days, the letter said, “replacing divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate and constructive descriptions.”

The review, which will begin with eight of the Smithsonian’s 21 museums, is the latest attempt by President Trump to try to impose his will on the Smithsonian, which has traditionally operated as an independent institution that regards itself outside the purview of the executive branch.

Kim Sajet, the head of the National Portrait Gallery, resigned in June after Mr. Trump said he was firing her for being partisan. The Smithsonian’s governing board said at the time that it had sole responsibility for personnel decisions.

News of the letter was earlier reported by The Wall Street Journal. It is signed by Lindsey Halligan, a special assistant to the president; Vince Haley, the director of the Domestic Policy Council; and Russell T. Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget.

A bit more:

In a statement, the Smithsonian said that its “work is grounded in a deep commitment to scholarly excellence, rigorous research and the accurate, factual presentation of history.”

“We are reviewing the letter with this commitment in mind,” it continued, “and will continue to collaborate constructively with the White House, Congress and our governing Board of Regents.”

Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

Mr. Bunch did not immediately returned a call seeking comment.

Some historians expressed concern at the political interference in an institution that was long viewed as independent. Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor at Harvard and president of the Organization of American Historians, said the Smithsonian was already doing a “fantastic job of presenting American history.”

“People are voting with their feet,” she said. “It’s a very popular place. The content of exhibits shouldn’t simply reflect any one administration’s preferences. They are the product of a lot of hard work by dedicated and honorable people who want to present the most accurate picture of American history as possible. That includes the triumphs and the tragedies.”

Samuel J. Redman, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who has written extensively about the Smithsonian, called the administration’s review “a full assault on the autonomy of all the different branches of the institution.”

Use the gift link to read the rest if you’re interested.

At Civil Discourse, Joyce Vance has a few choice words about this attack on the Smithsonian: Living in 1984.

The headline tonight reads, “White House to Vet Smithsonian Museums to Fit Trump’s Historical Vision.”It’s in The Wall Street Journal, not exactly a bastion of liberal views. “Top White House officials will scrutinize exhibitions, internal processes, collections and artist grants ahead of America’s 250th anniversary.”

Why? The Journal answers that question in the opening paragraph: “The White House plans to conduct a far-reaching review of Smithsonian museum exhibitions, materials and operations ahead of America’s 250th anniversary to ensure the museums align with President Trump’s interpretation of American history.”

Trump’s interpretation of American history? The man isn’t exactly a scholar.

During his first term in office, at a breakfast celebrating Black History Month in 2017, Trump said: “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.” Douglass, the famous abolitionist, died in 1895. At the time he made that comment, Trump seemed more enthusiastic about our national museums than he does today. He led into the comment by saying, “I am very proud now that we have a museum on the National Mall where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things.”

Perhaps this gaffe explains Trump’s subsequent antipathy to celebrating Black History Month. But he’s not someone who should be defining our history.

In 2009, Trump purchased a Virginia Golf Club. Its beautiful location on the Potomac River wasn’t enough for him—he needed it to have some historical importance. So he, or someone working for him, made it up. He put up a plaque claiming, “Many great American soldiers, both of the North and South, died at this spot…The casualties were so great that the water would turn red and thus became known as ‘The River of Blood.’ ” According to multiple experts, nothing of the sort ever happened there.

The New York Times reports that when Trump was confronted with the lie, he said, “How would they know that? Were they there?” Trump is clearly not the man to entrust with the telling of our national history. “Write your story the way you want to write it,” Trump told reporters who pressed him for any evidence to support the supposed history he attributed to the site.

In a phone call with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during his first term in office, Trump insisted that Canadians burned down the White House during the War of 1812. As every school child knows, it was the British.

And of course, there were Trump’s exaggerated claims about the size of the crowd at his first inauguration.

Read the rest at Civil Discourse.

This morning, Trump met virtually with European leaders and Ukraine’s President Zelensky ahead of his meeting with Putin in Alaska on Friday. I don’t really think that anything Trump said can be trusted, but here are some reports:

CNN: EU leaders hold call with Trump and Zelensky ahead of Alaska summit.

A call between European officials, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and US President Donald Trump took place today.

Speaking at a news conference alongside Zelensky afterward, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Europe’s leaders are doing everything to ensure an upcoming meeting between Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin “goes the right way.”

Here are the latest developments:

• Joint meeting: A virtual summit involving US President Donald Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and several European leaders took place today.
• Trump support: In comments made after the meeting, Zelensky said that “there should be a ceasefire first, then security guarantees – real security guarantees,” and that Trump has “expressed his support.”
• Renewed calls: Speaking alongside Zelensky after the meeting, Merz reiterated his call for Ukraine to be at the table for negotiations and said that a ceasefire must come first in any deal, as he said Kyiv needed “robust guarantees.”
• “Major decisions:” Merz said there could be “major decisions” made during the Trump-Putin summit as he said Europeans are therefore “doing everything we can in order to lay the groundwork to make sure that this meeting goes the right way.”
• Territorial exchange: Also speaking after the call, French President Emmanuel Macron said any territorial exchange in Ukraine “must only be discussed with Ukraine, as he added that it was a “good thing” that Russia and the US were talking, but it was important that Europe is “heard.”
• Territory: Meanwhile, a Russian foreign ministry official has poured cold water on the idea that both Russia and Ukraine would need to swap territory to reach a peace agreement

Territorial questions that fall under Ukraine’s authority cannot be negotiated and will only be negotiated by the President of Ukraine, Macron said, adding that Trump had expressed the same. Philippe Magoni EPA

The Independent: US and Russia suggest ‘West Bank-style occupation of Ukraine.’

The U.S. and Russia are set to suggest a West Bank-style occupation of Ukraine as a way of ending the war, according to The Times.

Under the proposed plans, Russia would have both economic and military control of the occupied parts of Ukraine, utilizing its own governing body, mimicking Israel’s control of Palestinian territory taken from Jordan during the 1967 conflict.

The suggestion was put forward during discussions between President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and his Russian counterparts, a source with insight into the U.S. National Security Council told the paper.

Witkoff, who also serves as the White House’s Middle East envoy, reportedly backs the suggestion, which the U.S. thinks solves the issue of the Ukrainian constitution prohibiting giving up territory without organizing a referendum.

While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has rejected any notion of ceding territory, the new occupation proposal may lead to a truce following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022.

According to the proposal, Ukraine’s borders would remain officially unchanged, similar to the borders of the West Bank, even as Israel controls the territory.

I can’t see how Zelensky could accept that.

One more report from Politico: Trump agreed only Ukraine can negotiate territorial concessions, Macron says.

Finally, at The Wall Street Journal, Paul Kiernan has a profile on Trump’s pick for Bureau of Labor Statistics head: The Partisan Economist Trump Wants to Oversee the Nation’s Data.

Conservative economist Erwin John “E.J.” Antoni sometimes jokes on social media that the “L” in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ acronym is silent.

President Trump this week tapped Antoni to run the agency whose data and methodologies he has long criticized, especially when it produces numbers that Trump doesn’t like. He recently proposed suspending the monthly jobs report, one of the most important data releases for the economy and markets. On Tuesday, a White House official noted that Antoni made the comment before he knew he was going to be chosen and that his comments don’t reflect official BLS policy.

E.J. Antoni was nominated by the president this week to oversee the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Photo by C-SPAN

If confirmed by the Senate, Antoni would run a 141-year-old agency staffed by around 2,000 economists, statisticians and other officials. The BLS has a long record of independence and nonpartisanship that economists and investors say is critical to the credibility of U.S. economic data.

According to a commencement program from Northern Illinois University, Antoni earned a master’s and Ph.D. in economics from that school in 2018 and 2020, respectively, and a bachelor of arts degree from St. Charles Borromeo Seminary. Antoni’s LinkedIn profile says he attended Lansdale Catholic High School outside Philadelphia from 2002 to 2006.

According to the profile, Antoni went to work in 2021 as an economist at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank in Austin that has sued the federal government to overturn climate-change regulations. The following year, he joined the conservative Heritage Foundation as a research fellow studying regional economics. He is now the foundation’s chief economist and an adviser to the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a group of conservative economic commentators.

Past BLS commissioners have had extensive research experience, and many have climbed the ranks of the agency itself. Antoni doesn’t fit that profile. He doesn’t appear to have published any formal academic research since his dissertation, according to queries of National Bureau of Economic Research working papers and Google Scholar. Much of his commentary on the Heritage website praises Trump’s policies and economic record. He frequently posts on X and appears on conservative podcasts such as former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s “War Room,” where he criticized the economy under President Joe Biden and lauds Trump’s economy.

The Heritage Foundation declined to make Antoni available for an interview and didn’t respond to questions about his background.

There’s more at the link. I got past the paywall by using the link at Memeorandum.com.

That’s all I have today. What’s on your mind?