Well, it’s been quite a week. It’s been Jeffrey Epstein all the time. For the first time, it seems that a scandal is actually sticking to Trump, although he could still escape, as he usually does. He does seem uniquely panicked though. Yesterday, he sued the Wall Street Journal for publishing a suggestive message he reportedly sent to Epstein for his 50th birthday.
… WSJ poured more gas on Trump’s raging Epstein inferno with a new story about a birthday card that he sent to the child trafficker and rapist in 2003. The story said Ghislaine Maxwell asked friends of Epstein to submit cards to compile as a special gift for this 50th birthday, and Trump sent one is as one of his closest friends.
… “The letter bearing Trump’s name, which was reviewed by the Journal, is bawdy—like others in the album. It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.”
… Inside the outline of the naked woman was a typewritten note styled as an imaginary conversation between Trump and Epstein, written in the third person.
“Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything,” the note began.
Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.
Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.
Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.
Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?
Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.
Donald: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.
… When asked about the letter and picture prior to publishing, Trump naturally denied everything to the Journal: “This is not me. This is a fake thing. It’s a fake Wall Street Journal story. I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women. It’s not my language. It’s not my words. I’m gonna sue WSJ just like I sued everyone else.”
… The WSJ, other media sources, and social media users then posted online several drawings that Trump made at various times on different occasions to refute Trump’s claim.
Flipkowski included several of Trump’s drawings in his post.
But a review of the president’s past reveals that, for years, Mr. Trump was a high-profile doodler — or at least suggested he was. In the early 2000s, he regularly donated drawings to charities in New York. The drawings, many of which appear to be done with a thick, black-marker and prominently feature his signature are not dissimilar to how The Journal describes the birthday note he sent Mr. Epstein.
“It takes me a few minutes to draw something, in my case, it’s usually a building or a cityscape of skyscrapers, and then sign my name, but it raises thousands of dollars to help the hungry in New York through the Capuchin Food Pantries Ministry,” he wrote in his 2008 book, “Trump Never Give Up: How I Turned My Biggest Challenges Into Success.”
After Mr. Trump was elected president, some of the drawings he signed were auctioned off for thousands of dollars — even as he wrote in his book that “art may not be my strong point.”
Now we know why President Donald J. Trump earlier this week began saying nonsensically that Democrats he dislikes wrote the Epstein files. Apparently, Trump was trying to get out in front of the story Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo broke last night in the Wall Street Journal, reporting that Trump contributed what the newspaper called a “bawdy” letter to a leather-bound album compiled by Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell in 2003 for Epstein’s 50th birthday….
Sisters, by Elisheva Nesis
When the FBI raided Epstein’s mansion in Manhattan in 2019, they seized piles of evidence, including stacks of compact disks bearing the labels “Young [Name] + [Name],” suggesting he had kept video evidence of men sexually assaulting underage girls.
Within hours of the discovery of Epstein’s body in his prison cell in 2019, Trump was retweeting a conspiracy theory alleging that former president Bill Clinton was involved in his death. Trump and his loyalists pushed the idea that Epstein was trafficking girls to powerful Democratic politicians and Hollywood actors, an accusation that dovetailed with the QAnon conspiracy theory claiming that Trump was secretly leading the fight against such a cabal. Trump fed the idea that if reelected, he would release the information he claimed was being withheld as part of a coverup.
In fact, the politician most closely associated with Epstein was Trump himself. In 2002, Trump told New York Magazine: “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific 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. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
And yet Trump supporters overlooked Trump’s long friendship with Epstein until billionaire Elon Musk resurrected the story that Trump might be implicated in the records of the Epstein investigation. On June 5, in the midst of a fight with Trump, Musk posted on social media: “Time to drop the really big bomb: [Trump] is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”
Read the rest at the link. Richardson provides an excellent summary of the history of the Jeffrey Epstein case.
Trump, who angrily denies writing the letter, is seeking damages of no less than $10 billion in the lawsuit alleging defamation.
Named as defendants in the suit in federal court in the Southern District of Florida are Murdoch, his company News Corp and its CEO Robert Thomson, the Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones & Co., and the two reporters who wrote the article published Thursday evening.
A Dow Jones spokesperson sent the following statement to CNBC: “We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting, and will vigorously defend against any lawsuit.”
The suit comes as Trump faces growing pressure to have the Justice Department release its investigative files about Epstein, who killed himself in August 2019 after being arrested on federal child sex trafficking charges.
The Journal’s article said that the letter purportedly written by Trump to Epstein in 2003 was among documents reviewed by criminal investigators who ultimately built criminal cases against Epstein and his convicted procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell, who reportedly solicited the letter from the president.
For the first time, Trump’s base is questioning his excuses, although some of his followers are defending him against the Wall Street Journal revelations, according to Axios.
I feel so betrayed and so angry. This is not what I voted for.” “This cemented permanent deep state power.” “I’m concerned about being able to trust Donald Trump to keep his word.” “What about justice for these young ladies who were trafficked? What about their justice? Don’t they deserve justice?”
Yoga with my cat, Sharyn Bursic
These were MAGAjust a few of the calls that besieged conservative radio hosts across the US this week. The president’s ardent supporters spent the past decade fulminating over various foes, from Barack Obama and the deep state to undocumented immigrants and transgender children. Now they have a new target: Donald Trump himself.
The “Make America Great Again” (Maga) base is in revolt as never before. The trigger was Trump’s broken promise to publicly release details about Jeffrey Epstein, a wealthy financier and convicted sex offender, who was facing federal charges of sex-trafficking minors when he died in jail in 2019.
Spurred by the president and his allies, Trump’s movement has long latched on to the Epstein scandal, claiming the existence of a secret client list and that he was murdered in his cell as part of a cover-up. But last week the justice department and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced there was no evidence that the disgraced financier kept such a list or was blackmailing powerful figures.
Far from closing the case, the memo deepened supporters’ obsession and sense of grievance. A movement defined by the view that elites rig the system against them felt cheated. Trump made efforts to douse the flames with ever-shifting explanations, excuses and distractions but merely poured fuel on the fire.
To some, his erratic and evasive behaviour implies a guilty secret. It also evokes a line from President John F Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address: “Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.” Having spent years embracing QAnon-tinged propaganda that casts him as the only saviour who can demolish the “deep state”, Trump is now seen as co-opted by its corrupt bureaucracy.
Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who ran against Trump for president in 2020, said: “I talk to the base every day and nothing animates the base more than the deep state. This Epstein thing was Trump’s promise. This was going to finally expose the deep state. Now Trump says nothing there? It ain’t going to stand.”
More on the MAGA complaints:
When he was running for president, Trump said he would release files related to the case. But a bundle put out in February contained little new information. Then in June the spotlight turned back on the president when his former adviser Elon Musk claimed – in a now-deleted X post – that Trump is “in the Epstein files”.
Just a month later, a memo from the justice department and FBI said the Epstein files did not contain evidence that would justify further investigation. An almost 11-hour video published to dispel theories Epstein was murdered showed a section of the New York prison on the night Epstein died but appeared to be missing a minute of footage.
The Maga faithful erupted in fury. Media personality Tucker Carlson, activist Laura Loomer and Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon claim the government’s handling of the case lacks transparency. The far-right commentator Jack Posobiec said he would not rest “until we go full Jan 6 committee on the Jeffrey Epstein files”.
Baffled, flailing and unusually out of step, Trump used his Truth Social platform to call supporters off the Epstein trail amid reports of infighting between the attorney general, Pam Bondi, and the FBI deputy director, Dan Bongino, over the issue.
There’s much more at The Guardian. This is an excellent summary of the Epstein case and recent events.
Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., pressed Justice Department leadership about their handling of files related to the federal investigation into the late Jeffrey Epstein, including reports that FBI personnel were instructed to “flag” any records that mentioned President Donald Trump.
Mr. Angel, sir, Some Other Dude Done It, Elishiva Nesis
In a series of oversight letters written to Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, Durbin questioned Bondi about “contradictions” in her public statements on the case, Patel about reports that he was “pressured” by Bondi to place 1,000 personnel on 24-hour shifts to mine roughly 100,000 Epstein-related records and Bongino about reported disputes among Trump officials about “the lack of transparency” in their handling of the high-profile case.
In the letters sent Friday, Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked each of the Trump administration officials to respond to informationreceived by his office that suggested FBI personnel were specifically instructed to “flag” any records mentioning Trump.
“My office was told that these personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned…. Why were personnel told to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned,” Durbin asked Bondi,Patel and Bongino in separate letters. “What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?”
A Durbin aide told NBC News that the senator’s office received that information from a protected FBI whistleblower disclosure.
The FBI declined NBC News’ request for comment on Durbin’s letters.
One thousand agents were required to find all the Trump mentions? Good grief!
Durbin, like many of Trump’s supporters over the past week, asked the attorney general to reconcile her earlier public declarations with her department’s finding that “no further disclosures” are warranted in the case and that a review of records “revealed no incriminating client list.”
“Why did you publicly claim on February 21 that the client list was ‘sitting on my desk right now to review?'” Durbin asked Bondi. “If it was not a client list, what was ‘sitting on your desk’ at that moment?”
Bongino and Patel have also faced backlash online. Both of them previously promoted conspiracy theories that suggested the Epstein case was part of a government cover-up to protect powerful political players involved in a child abuse ring.
Patel, in the only post he’s made to his personal social media account since the Justice Department memo was released, said “the conspiracy theories just aren’t true” and “never have been.” Durbin, aiming to call attention to Patel’s past suggestions of a cover-up, asked the FBI director to detail the conspiracy theories he was referring to in his post.
“What are the conspiracy theories you are referring to in your July 12 tweet that ‘were never true?’ If there are more than one, please explain each in detail,” the senator wrote to Patel.
Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the powerful Senate Finance Committee, has been digging into Mr. Epstein’s financial network for the past three years. Some members of his staff have viewed confidential files that shed light on the immense sums of money that, they say, Mr. Epstein moved through the banking system to fuel his vast sex-trafficking network.
In particular, filings by four big banks flagged more than $1.5 billion in transactions — including thousands of wire transfers for the purchase and sale of artwork for rich friends, fees paid to Mr. Epstein by wealthy individuals, and payments to numerous women, the senator’s office found. The filings came after Mr. Epstein was arrested in 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges.
Catriona Millar
Large money transfers to individuals, foreign countries or obscure companies are the kind of things banks are supposed to be examining as potentially suspicious. Some of the Epstein money transfers disclosed in a report from JPMorgan Chase involved accounts at two Russian banks before those institutions were subject to U.S. sanctions. A few transactions red-flagged were for as much as $100 million.
Mr. Wyden said his investigation into Mr. Epstein’s finances had taken on new urgency now that the Trump administration was balking at releasing any of the information seized by the F.B.I. from Mr. Epstein’s homes or information collected from the nation’s banks. Like many Republicans on the far right, Mr. Wyden and a growing number of Democrats believe there are more details about Mr. Epstein that the federal government needs to reveal.
“We felt from the beginning this was a follow-the-money case,” Mr. Wyden said in an interview. “This horrific sex-trafficking operation cost Epstein a lot of money, and he had to get that money from somewhere.”
The bank records reviewed by Mr. Wyden’s staff — called suspicious activity reports or SARs — are meant to be an early warning system for law enforcement about signs of illegal activity. As dictated by federal law, the reports are so confidential that banks can’t even acknowledge filing them, and people who have seen the documents are under great constraint as to what they can say about them.
Members of Mr. Wyden’s staff provided an overview of the banks’ reports to The New York Times based on their review of the filings.
There’s much more detail in the story. You can use the above gift link to read the whole thing if you’re interested.
An ex-girlfriend of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein characterized his relationship with President Donald Trump as “very close and up to no good.”
“They were best friends,” Stacey Williams, who says she dated Epstein for “about four or five months,” told CNN’s Brianna Keilar. “The only friend he would mention every time we saw each other or every time we had a phone conversation was Donald.”
But Williams cast doubt on Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the disgraced financier.
“That was his bro, that was his wingman,” said Williams, 57, a former model who alleged that Trump groped her in 1993, the Guardianreported. Williams even said she met Epstein at a Christmas party that Trump threw at the Plaza Hotel in 1992….
Williams said during the Friday interview that Epstein would “share a lot of anecdotes” about his time with Trump. She added, “I have plenty of anecdotes. And yeah, they were they were very close and they were up to no good.”
The House is planning to vote on the Senate version of Trump’s spending and tax cut bill today. The Senate version is very different from the one the House originally sent them, so it’s not clear whether the bill will make it to Trump’s desk by July 4, as he has demanded.
As we all know, the bill will take away health care and food assistance from millions of Americans. Trump’s big bill will also vastly expand his power to target people he wants to make disappear. Yesterday Trump openly approved a true concentration camp in our country. I still haven’t recovered from the shock of seeing what these fascists are planning. And now Trump is talking about deporting U.S. citizens. The bill is cruel in so many ways, but mass deportation is Trump’s number 1 goal. I’m going to focus on that in this post.
….THE LEGISLATION SENATE REPUBLICANS passed on Tuesday is probably going to kill a lot of people.
It sounds stark when you put it that way, but death is a stark thing. It’s also what can be reasonably expected from the GOP legislation, especially the cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act projected to leave nearly 12 million Americans newly uninsured.
When people can’t pay for medical care they frequently don’t get it. And when people don’t get medical care, they’re more likely to die early from a preventable condition. That’s what you’ll find if you read the latest research, and what you’ll learn if you ask people working on the front lines of medical care.
And death doesn’t even capture the full impact of the bill, which thanks to Tuesday’s vote seems likely to become law.
That outcome is not yet a foregone conclusion, to be clear. The bill requires approval from the House, where a different version passed in May and where several Republicans have already said they object to the Senate’s iteration.
But while those Republicans have enough leverage to block approval, forcing some kind of negotiation between the houses, they are already under enormous pressure from party leaders—and, especially, from President Donald Trump, who has said he wants a bill on his desk by July 4….
Politically, it was a savvy strategy for avoiding scrutiny. So was packaging the entirety of the Trump domestic agenda into one legislative package, making it difficult for opponents to focus—and rally supporters around—any one part.
As of a few days ago, nearly half of America hadn’t heard anything about the “Big Beautiful Bill,” according to Democratic polling from Priorities USA. And only 8 percent had heard it included Medicaid cuts….
But in trying so hard to shield the bill’s true nature from the public, Republican leaders may have also succeeded in hiding parts from their own members, who might not appreciate just how much some features of the bill undercut supposedly cherished MAGA goals like lowering the cost of living and making U.S. industry more competitive.
And that’s to say nothing about the disproportionate effects some elements of the bill will have on their own constituents.
We know about the health care and food assistance cuts; Cohn lists examples of other disastrous cuts in the bill:
YOU CAN SEE IT CLEARLY in the provisions yanking away Biden-era subsidies for clean energy and electric vehicles, in many cases quickly. (The tax credit for consumers buying electric vehicles would end in September.) It’s a way to own the libs, now that Trump has turned clean energy into almost as much a bogeyman as trans athletes and woke professors.
Speaker Johnson touts the big ugly bill.
But Biden’s subsidies unleashed a factory-building boom that the legislation will weaken and maybe kill, which is why the bluest of blue-collar unions—electrical workers, building trades, iron workers—spent the last few days blasting the bill as a historic “job killer.” And those jobs are likely to have an outsized effect on red states like Texas, now America’s capital for solar-panel manufacturing, because that’s where a disproportionate share of the subsidies went.
And that’s just the immediate effect. Giving up support for wind and solar means giving up on the easiest, cheapest way to increase generating capacity right now—something tech executives desperately tried to convey to Trump and his allies, with a warning that it will set back U.S. firms in their quest to develop artificial intelligence. That’s on top of ceding industries like battery storage and electric vehicles to competitors, especially the one Trump brings up the most: China.
Look down the road and you’ll see an America that is more reliant on other countries for energy—and, most likely, paying a lot more than it would if it had spent the next few years keeping up in the global alternative-energy race. Americans can expect an extra $170 billion in annual energy bills between now and 2034, according to a projection by the firm Energy Innovation.
Please read the rest of this piece at the link. It’s an excellent summary of what the bill will do to our country.
Senate Republicans certainly lack spine. They are deathly afraid to cross Donald Trump, to put their cushy jobs at risk by provoking a primary challenge, to fall out of favor with the maliciously dishonest right-wing media, and/or to be ostracized from their close circle of sycophants, donors, and staff. But their greatest moral failure is arguably not lack of courage but rather lack of empathy. They simply do not care about the pain they are inflicting on others.
Senate and House Republicans know what this bill does. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and others can repeat the lie that no one will lose coverage, but it does not make it so. Seventeen million people will lose health care (including 11 million Medicaid beneficiaries). Millions will lose food assistance. The debt will grow by over $3 trillion. It is hard to find anyone outside the MAGA cult who thinks this will benefit America. Republicans respond by lying about the bill even when confronted with the misery their handiwork will cause.
“The facts matter. The people matter. The Senate’s Medicaid approach breaks promises and will kick people off of Medicaid who truly need it,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said on the floor, finally freed to speak honestly after announcing he would not seek reelection. His fellow Republicans shrugged. They heard the same litany of horrors from constituents, hospitals, doctors, state officials, and even right-wing think tanks.
Republicans still cannot imagine if they or a loved one:
Could not get food because their application for food stamps was snarled in red tape designed to kick people off benefits to which they were entitled;
Could not get preventive care, addiction treatment, nursing home care, or prescription drugs because they have been kicked off Medicaid and priced out of the Affordable Care Act exchanges;
Could not get to a rural hospital in an emergency after the local one closed;
Could not find a cancer trial after cuts to the National Institutes of Health;
Republicans refuse to admit that they are hurting ordinary, hard-working Americans trying to provide for themselves and their families. To do otherwise would be a confession of their inhumanity. Instead, using well-worn authoritarian techniques (e.g., demonization, dehumanization, and marginalization), MAGA politicians convince themselves that those who rely on vital benefits are unfit and undeserving. Republicans dub them “rats” or “vermin” or “murderers.”
In addition to cutting health care for the poor and providing tax relief for the rich, the legislation provided massive funding increases for the federal agencies carrying out the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant obsession. The bill adds a total of $170.7 billion to immigration enforcement. It roughly triples the annual detention and enforcement budgets for the masked men of Immigration and Customs Enforcement over the next four years.
And according to our vice president, JD Vance, this was the point of it all: “Everything else—the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”
President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem tour “Alligator Alcatraz” in Ochopee, Florida on July 1, 2025. (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDSAFP via Getty Imag
All those people losing health insurance? “Minutiae.” “Immaterial.” Mass detention and deportation are what matters. They’re not only key to Making America Great Again, they’re what it means to Make America Great Again. That’s the MAGA dream: Finally getting rid of all those foreigners seeking refuge and opportunity here, in our land.
And mass detention and deportation are also key to advancing the other point of it all: authoritarianism. That’s the other part of the MAGA dream: Finally getting rid of all those annoying features of due process and the rule of law, all those restraints of civility and decency, that have kept us from doing what we want.
And so, while his vice president was breaking the tied vote in the Senate, Donald Trump was celebrating a new detention facility in the Florida Everglades. It’s a physical manifestation and apt symbol of the MAGA dream. How proud they all were of its clever name—“Alligator Alcatraz”—and the collection of tents filled with cages to hold immigrants.
What were you doing the day the president attended the opening of an American concentration camp in the Everglades? Dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” by Republican officials because of the predators living in the surrounding swampland, it has been built to cage thousands of people rounded up by ICE and allied law enforcement agencies as part of President Trump’s mass deportations. “‘Alligator Alcatraz’ is a concentration camp,” Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night, a history of concentration camps, said on Tuesday.
That morning, Trump attended the camp’s opening in Ochopee, Florida, along with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. “We’d like to see them in many states,” Trump said at a press conference there. “And at some point, they might morph into a system where you’re going to keep it for a long time.” He complained about the cost of building jails and prisons, then complimented his team, who “did this in less than a week.”
For the event, Trump wore one of his signature red ball caps, this one reading “Gulf of America,” his jingoistic name for the nearby Gulf of Mexico; Noem wore a white “Make America Great Again” ball cap with gold stitching. The flimsy camp offered them some shelter from the punishing humidity, which would later give way to a downpour. A C-Span camera followed them into one of the massive tents, where rows of chain-link cages contained numerous bunk beds—for the moment, empty. Photographers raced ahead of Trump and Noem to get shots of them entering, taking in the cells, pausing to ask inaudible questions. DeSantis stood as if he did not know where to put his hands. “They’re going to sweep this six times to make sure there’s nothing that could be used as contraband, as weapons,” DeSantis told Trump a bit too brightly, “before the detainees come in.” He smiled as he told reporters about how soon their prisoners would “check in.”
The American concentration camp on view Tuesday was erected within the Big Cypress National Preserve, traditional Miccosukee land. The tribe was not consulted, said Betty Osceola, a member and activist who lives a few miles from the camp’s entrance. She was one of hundreds of people protesting on the road outside the camp over the last several days as massive trucks streamed into the site. “People should be concerned about the secrecy of this,” Osceola told the Fort Myers News-Press. “It’s a big deal. Our ancestors were laid to rest in this area, and they talk about it like it’s a vast wasteland. It’s not.”
The site of the camp is also public-owned land, most recently occupied by the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, “a remote facility for promising pilots to practice their touch-and-goes amid disinterested herons and alligators,” according toThe Palm Beach Post. An executive order issued by DeSantis cited a nonexistent “emergency” to get around the legal process for building on the site.
Not content with just shipping people to a foreign concentration camp, Donald Trump now has his own, homegrown concentration camp in Florida. Trump, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis gleefully toured the hastily constructed concentration camp in the Florida Everglades, obnoxiously referred to as Alligator Alcatraz, in reference to (1) the infamous island prison in San Francisco that Trump is obsessed with and (2) the number of alligators (and crocodiles — the one place in the world that has both) that live in and around the Everglades.
There’s no way to look at what the US government is doing here and not think of it more as Auschwitz than Alcatraz. The parallels are unmistakable: hastily constructed camps in remote locations, euphemistic naming designed to obscure their true purpose, and—most tellingly—officials proudly touring the facilities while discussing plans to build “a system” of such camps nationwide.
Trump and Noem touring Alligator Alcatraz
But here’s where today’s American concentration camps differ from their 20th-century predecessors: the Trump regime isn’t trying to hide what they’re doing. They’re merchandising it. They’re selling t-shirts celebrating human suffering as if it were a sports team or a vacation destination.
The United States government is literally selling branded merchandise to celebrate putting human beings in cages surrounded by dangerous predators. This isn’t just about policy—it’s about turning cruelty into a consumer product. It’s about making the suffering of others into something you can wear to own the libs.
This commodification of human rights violations represents something uniquely American and uniquely horrifying: the gamification of genocide. Previous authoritarian regimes at least had the decency to be ashamed of their concentration camps. Trump is selling tickets to the show.
These are the sorts of things that history books (should they exist in the future) will talk about as one of the many moments of pure evil that some people gleefully embraced without recognizing that people setting up concentration camps are, inherently, “the baddies.”
Donald Trump’s tour of the bloodcurdlingly-monikered – and hastily-constructed – “Alligator Alcatraz” migrants detention center in Florida’s Everglades had the hallmarks of a calculatedly provocative celebration of the dystopian.
Accompanied by Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, the Florida governor Ron DeSantis and a phalanx of journalists, the US president saw only virtue in the vista of mesh fencing, barbed wire and forbidding steel bunk beds.
“Between Kristi and Ron, it’s really government working together,” he said. “They have done an amazing job. I’m proud of them.”
Not that Trump was blind to the intimidating nature of the facility his long crusade against undocumented people had willed into existence in this hot, steamy part of southern Florida, prized by environmentalists as a crucial nature preserve but now redesigned to be a location of dread to those lacking documentary proof of their right to be in the US….
Trump seemed to revel in the potential for detainees’ misery at what was termed a round-table discussion but which devolved into fawning praise of his leadership from administration and state officials and obsequious questions from journalists representing friendly rightwing news outlets.
“It might be as good as the real Alcatraz site,” he said. “That’s a spooky one too, isn’t it? That’s a tough site.”
“Our superstar”
As if in confirmation that this was an event designed to showcase ruthlessness, Trump handed the floor to Stephen Miller, the powerful White House deputy chief of staff and widely-acknowledged mastermind of the anti-immigrant offensive, calling him “our superstar”.
Miller responded with a pithy summation of the policy’s raison d’être.
White House aide believes it’s more “dehumanizing” to let migrants into the country than it is to detain them in a camp surrounded by man-eating alligators.
“What you’ve done over the last five months [is] to deliver on a 50-year hope and dream of the American people to secure the border,” he said. “There’s a 2,000 mile border with one of the poorest countries in the world, and you have open travel from 150 countries into Central America and South America.
“There are 2 billion people in the world that would economically benefit from illegally coming to the United States. Through the deployment of the military, through … novel legal and diplomatic tools, through the building of physical infrastructure, through the empowering of Ice and border patrol and the entire federal law enforcement apparatus, President Trump achieved absolute border security.”
And there would be more to come – courtesy of funds secured for deportations in Trump’s sweeping spending bill, which secured narrow Senate passage during Trump’s visit to the facility.
“Once this legislation is passed, he will be able to make that, with those resources, permanent,” Miller said.
A justice department memo directing the department’s civil division to target the denaturalization of US citizens around the country has opened up an new avenue for Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda, experts say.
In the US, when a person is denaturalized, they return to the status they held before becoming a citizen. If someone was previously a permanent resident, for example, they will be classified as such again, which can open the door to deportation efforts.
The memo, published on 11 June, instructed the justice department’s civil division to “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence”. Immigration matters are civil matters, meaning that immigrants – whether they are naturalized citizens or not – do not have the right to an attorney in such cases.
Muzaffar Chishti from the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan thinktank, explained that much of immigration law was based on discretion by government officials. To revoke a person’s citizenship, US officials must demonstrate that they are not of “good moral character” – a subjective and broad term with little defined parameters.
Now, the recent memo lists a broad range of categories of people who should be stripped of their naturalized citizenship status, providing further guidance as to who is not of good “moral character”. This included “those with a nexus to terrorism” and espionage, war criminals and those who were found to have lied in their naturalization process. Officials still need to prove their case, Chisthi explained.
“[The administration] can’t, on their own, denaturalize people, they still have to go to a federal district court,” said Chisthi. “Denaturalization finally does belong to federal district courts – but they are obviously keen on finding every way they can to denaturalize people they think did not deserve to be naturalized.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump sycophant
A bit more:
However, the justice department’s memo is not solely confined to those expanded categories. It gives more discretion to officials to pursue these cases, prompting a fear for analysts and attorneys that the directive by the Trump administration is overly broad.
For Jorge Loweree, director of policy for the American Immigration Council, a new category in the memo stood out to him: individuals accused of being gang and cartel members.
Loweree is concerned “because of the way that the administration has treated people that it deems to be gang members”, he said. “ It wasn’t that long ago that the administration flew hundreds of people from the US to a prison in El Salvador on, in most instances, flimsy evidence.”
Although the memo marks an escalation by the Trump administration it is not entirely news, and in recent decades, other nations have also engaged in seeking to strip citizenship from certain people.
Denaturalization in the US has a long history. Throughout the 20th century, those seen by the US government as potential enemies to US interests were stripped of their citizenship. Journalists, activists and labor leaders, accused of being anarchists and communists, were frequently targeted.
I could go on like this for much longer, but this post is long enough. Suffice it to say that we are in big trouble as country. Please take care today. This is all so terrifying.
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Every time I get the grocery list together these days, I think about what I need to bulk order. It’s really hard to look at a finished consumer good and find all the value-added producers along with their various locations. I wonder how the distributors are going to sort this all out. I noticed prices creeping up in the usual items. I’m pretty sure my sister has hit Costco by now and filled up the pantry. I also watched the last of the Jazz Festers leave with relief. I bet this was their last jaunt of the year. You can see it in the numbers.
USA Today had this analysis by Betty Lin-Fisher. “How will Trump’s tariffs affect grocery store prices? We explain.”
While higher tariffs could still be coming after a 90-day-pause, the baseline 10% tariff on all goods, plus higher duties on Chinese products already in effect are a big increase in food costs for American’s budgets, said Thomas Gremillion, director of food policy at The Consumer Federation of America.
“The 10% ‘default’ tariffs alone represent a truly historic federal tax increase, maybe the largest in my lifetime, with a highly regressive impact,” Gremillion said.
The tariff only applies to the value of the product at the border, Ortega said. Then there are additional costs to the product, which are accrued domestically, like transporting the goods to the store, distribution, wholesale costs and retail markups. Those things are not subject to the tariff, Ortega said.
So that doesn’t mean that the price of a particular product will go up by 10% or whatever the tariff is, Ortega said.
Overall, 15% of the U.S. food supply is imported, including 32% of fresh vegetables, 55% of fresh fruit, and 94% of seafood, according to the Consumer Federation of America, citing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Some products, like coffee and bananas, are almost exclusively grown abroad.
Tariffs are causing uncertainty from families checking off their grocery lists to companies importing food, he said.
“For consumers, this can mean added difficulties in managing a food budget. For food companies, this means havoc on supply chains that could lead to more food waste and more food safety risk,” Gremillion said.
Did I mention the youngest son-in-law is a biomedical engineer who is in charge of designing medical, surgical, and prosthetic devices? Plus, the oldest daughter and son-in-law are doctors. It’s just me and my youngest daughter out here trying to figure out what the economy and financial markets are experiencing. The others are just trying to deal with that, and the usual helpful regulations are being replaced with crazy ones.
Since Trump took office in late January, multiple Food and Drug Administration webpages were removed (and then restored); employees were fired from the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (and some were asked back); and the Department of Health and Human Services unveiled a plan to lay off approximately 10,000 employees, including about 3,500 at the FDA.
Meanwhile, the economy has whipsawed due to an unpredictable and aggressive tariff strategy. Later, however, pieces were delayed or walked back.
The Trump administration has reshaped the medtech industry in significant ways, and potentially long-term, in just a few months. Now that Trump has settled into power, new questions have arisen about what the many changes will mean for companies and patients, and what’s coming next.
Tom Toles Editorial Cartoon
Also, lucky us, Medicare and Medicaid modernization with be the goal of TV snake oil salesman Dr. Mehmet Oz as he takes over both. This is also from the MEDTECHDIVE.
Dr. Mehmet Oz was sworn in as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator on April 18, cementing his role as head of the agency that provides insurance coverage to millions of Americans.
During a ceremony at the Oval Office, Oz, a physician and former TV personality, said he wanted to “save” the nation’s public health programs and focus on reducing chronic disease, “modernizing” Medicare and Medicaid, and targeting fraud, waste and abuse in government insurance offerings.
President Donald Trump reiterated that Republicans wouldn’t cut Medicare or Medicaid. “Just as I promised, there will be no cuts. We’re not going to have any cuts. We’re going to have only help,” he said during the ceremony.
As I’ve spent most of this year being poked, prodded, pricked, shocked, MRI’d, Ultrasound’d, and EMG’d, I sure don’t feel good about any of this. I fret about someone disappearing all of that, plus my Social Security.
Speaking of crazy policy, I happened on this last night. This is from NBC News. “Trump says he will reopen ‘enlarged and rebuilt’ Alcatraz prison. Alcatraz Island hasn’t been used as a federal penitentiary since 1963. It had a capacity of roughly 300 people.” I’m actually thinking this is another one of his threats to Judges since it’s way too small to hold many prisoners. I suppose that’s one way to destroy a national park and the US Constitution in one sweep.
Alcatraz Island, a former military fortress and prison in San Francisco Bay, was turned into a federal penitentiary in 1934 and over the course of 29 years housed more than 1,500 people “deemed difficult to incarcerate elsewhere in the federal prison system,” according to the National Park Service.
According to aNational Park Service study, it was initially deemed unfit to serve as a federal institution because of its small size, isolated location and lack of fresh water. However, Sanford Bates, the director of the Bureau of Prisons in 1933,later found it “an ideal place of confinement for about 200 of the most desperate or irredeemable types.” It was formally opened as a federal penitentiary the next year.
Trump suggested in his post that he’d like to restore the facility to that purpose.
This is from Ed Mazza writing for HuffPo. This sounds a lot like his real estate deals to me. “‘Clearly Unhinged’: Critics Sink Trump’s ‘Asinine’ Plan To Reopen Alcatraz Prison. The president wants to turn the site back into a penitentiary despite the fact that it would cost a fortune.”
Alcatraz is currently part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area and has about 1.2 million visitors per year. Those who tour the island in San Francisco Bay see facilities in various states of decay. The prison was crumbling even as it was still in operation, and the high cost of maintaining it was a key reason it was shuttered in 1963.
Given those realities, restoring Alcatraz and then expanding it, as Trump called for on his Truth Social platform, would likely cost a fortune ― and then another pile of cash would be needed to maintain it.
Reopening it as a prison would also mean the loss of the tourism revenue the island currently generates as well as a loss of habitat for its thriving bird population.
The president, however, said Alcatraz’s return to use as a prison would “serve as a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE.”
His critics fired back that the idea would be an expensive boondoggle:
President Donald Trump is opening a new salvo in his tariff war, targeting films made outside the U.S.
In a post Sunday night on his Truth Social platform, Trump said he has authorized the Department of Commerce and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to slap a 100% tariff “on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.”
“The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death,” he wrote, complaining that other countries “are offering all sorts of incentives to draw” filmmakers and studios away from the U.S. “This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat. It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda!”
The White House said Monday that it was figuring out how to comply with the president’s wishes.
“Although no final decisions on foreign film tariffs have been made, the Administration is exploring all options to deliver on President Trump’s directive to safeguard our country’s national and economic security while Making Hollywood Great Again,” said spokesperson Kush Desai.
It’s common for both large and small films to include production in the U.S. and in other countries. Big-budget movies like the upcoming “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” for instance, are shot around the world.
On Sunday, NBC News aired an interview with Trump in which he expressed ignorance of the black-letter standards of justice established in the country’s founding document.
“The Constitution says every person, citizens and noncitizens, deserve due process,” “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker pointed out. So why not bring Abrego García back to the U.S. and use legal avenues to potentially remove him?
“Well,” Trump replied, “I’ll leave that to the lawyers, and I’ll leave that to the attorney general of the United States.”
Welker noted that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had admitted that even immigrants had due process rights. Trump again downplayed the idea, saying that holding hearings would mean “we’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials.” This isn’t as big a hurdle as it may sound. In fiscal 2024, there were more than 900,000 immigration hearings completed. So far in fiscal 2025, there have been more than 460,000. More could be cleared if Trump hadn’t moved to fire a number of immigration judges.
Finally, Welker noted that Trump didn’t really have a choice.
“Even given those numbers that you’re talking about,” she asked, “don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?”
“I don’t know,” Trump replied. “I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”
You may recall that, in January, Trump put his hand on a Bible and affirmed to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. that he would “faithfully execute” his role as president and to the best of his “ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” But this has never been an oath he has appeared to actually take to heart.
Trump’s dismissiveness of the Constitution has manifested itself in a lot of ways. You may recall his lack of interest in leaving office when he lost the 2020 presidential election. You may be aware that he has readily, if not giddily, accepted personal income from foreign governments while serving as president. He views the law as a cudgel, not a constraint, issuing pardons for variouspolitical allies ensnared in criminal activity while directing federal law enforcement to fish for potential criminal charges against those who work against his political power.
At its heart, Trump’s approach to his role is rooted in his parochial sense of patriotism. He didn’t come to the White House after having worked his way up through lower offices, building consensus and working to appeal to a broad range of constituents. He had no appreciation for how legislation is crafted or for the hard work of reaching compromise. Perhaps most importantly, he has never indicated any robust understanding of American history or of the debates and agreements that led to the country’s creation.
In 2011, for example, Trump was asked by Stephen Colbert if he knew what the 13 stripes on the American flag represent. He said he didn’t.
More recently, Trump was asked by ABC News journalist Terry Moran what the Declaration of Independence (a copy of which the president recently had installed in the Oval Office) means to him personally.
“It means exactly what it says. It’s a declaration,” Trump replied. “A declaration of unity and love and respect, and it means a lot. And it’s something very special to our country.”
It is special to the country, of course, but not because it is a declaration of “love,” much less “unity.” As the name would suggest, it is precisely the opposite.
Trump doesn’t have the Declaration of Independence in the Oval Office because he wants its message to serve as a guidepost for his administration. He doesn’t even appear to know its message. He has it there because it is A Famous American Thing, another decoration in the newly gilded room meant to send a message about his power, not the nation’s.
Dan Froomkin–writing for Press Watch–suggests we need to keep track of all Trump’s oddities. “We need a way to aggregate what Donald Trump is doing to this country.”
News organizations, along with good-government groups and other interested parties, are doing a commendable job of chronicling the damage the Trump regime is doing to the government, the country, and the world.
But none of them, individually, is in a position to give the public the full picture. It’s just too much.
This is a feature of Trump’s strategy of “flooding the zone.” No one entity can possibly keep up.
And as we go forward, how can any one organization keep tabs on all the fallout? It’s not possible.
What we need is a central repository of information so that the full extent of the damage can be found in one place and assessed by the public — and so that there’s a comprehensive record of what needs to be fixed and restored when the time comes to do so. (Sort of like a truth commission, but in real time.)
To aggregate all the existing information, organize it, and collect new data, we need a place, a process, and people.
It makes sense to me since Trump seems to want to undocument more than just people. Who knows how many things Doge has destroyed in the wake of having all-access to every government database and more. He’s disappearing people, children, scientific research, due process, and entire agencies and programs.
This is a site that I was just sent to by a Blue Sky Link. This DNYUZ link has an article by the NYT’s by Jack Goldsmith of Lawfare fame and Harvard Law School. This has been an issue for many people in modern times, with both parties playing the role of enablers. “It’s Not Just Trump. The Presidency Has Become Too Powerful.” So, I need to put this example of both siderisms into perspective. “Mr. Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general under George W. Bush, is an author, with Bob Bauer, of a newsletter about presidential and executive power.”
Donald Trump’s wrecking-ball second term has revealed the full latent power of the presidency. His administration has done this most clearly in its comprehensive elimination of legal and norm-based checks inside the executive branch, its systematic disrespect of judicial process, its extortionate abuse of government power to crush foes and its destructive rhetoric and nastiness.
Yet it is important to recognize that many of Mr. Trump’s efforts to expand the powers of the office build substantially on the excesses of recent presidencies. The overall pattern of presidential action over the past few decades reveals an escalation of power grabs that put the country on a terrible course even before Mr. Trump took office again.
The presidency needs reform, and Americans must consider ways — however implausible they may seem in the context of today’s politics — to get there.
Expansionist presidential acts go all the way back to George Washington, who invited charges of monarchism with his use of the Constitution’s broad yet undefined “executive Power.” From there the presidency, with its loose design, grew and grew, with major surges during the Civil War and New Deal era. That trend continued through the 20th century, aided by the rise of mass communication, substantial delegations of power from Congress and an approving Supreme Court.
Mr. Trump’s radical second presidency is, to an underappreciated extent, operating from a playbook devised by his modern predecessors.
His use of emergency powers to impose broad tariffs is similar to a move made in 1971 by President Richard Nixon. His claims of untouchable national security authority echo arguments made after the Sept. 11 attacks by the George W. Bush administration, in which I served.
Presidents for decades have issued pardons as political or personal favors or to avoid personal legal jeopardy. Mr. Trump took this practice to newextremes in his first term, and then President Joe Biden pre-emptively pardoned his son and family as well as members of his administration and Congress, in a similar pattern. Mr. Trump in his second term has already issued many self-serving pardons.
Mr. Trump’s executive-order program is an heir of the strategy used by President Barack Obama for large-scale and sometimes legally dubious policy initiatives, including some (involving immigration) where Mr. Obama had earlier admitted he lacked authority to act. Mr. Biden also confessed a lack of power but then acted unilaterally in seeking to forgive student loans.
Mr. Trump has disregarded statutory restrictions to fire officials in independent agencies including the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board. But in 2021, Mr. Biden extended the Supreme Court’s unitaryexecutive case law to fire the statutorily protected commissioner of the Social Security Administration. Mr. Biden was “the first unitary executive,” noted the legal writer Mark Joseph Stern in 2021.
Mr. Biden also purged the executive branch of Trump holdover officials who were not protected by statute, including members of arts and honorary institutions, the Administrative Conference of the United States and the Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council. The Biden administration’s defense of these firings resulted in judicialprecedents that Mr. Trump is now wielding to clean house on a broader scale.
The Trump administration has also built on past presidencies in not enforcing federal law — for example, in letting TikTok live on despite a congressional ban. This practice finds its modern roots in the Obama administration, which asserted broad nonenforcement discretion in high-profile cases involving immigration, marijuana and Obamacare, in effect changing the meaning of those laws.
Something similar has happened with spending. As one recent paper noted, “The past several presidents have all taken significant unilateral actions intruding on Congress’s control over federal spending.” The Trump 2.0 version greatly enlarges this unilateralist pattern.
There are a lot of examples here, and it’s worth thinking about. The Unitary Executive Theory has been around for a while, and since the Reagan years, it has picked up steam in the Supreme Court. Here is a recent article from Democracy Docket explaining the theory and relating to it to Yam Tits. The analysis is written by Jacob Knutsen. “What Is Unitary Executive Theory? How is Trump Using It to Push His Agenda?”
Since taking office, President Donald Trump has executed a whirlwind of dismissals across the federal government that violated federal statutes and decreed numerous executive orders, including one that blatantly defied the plain language of the Constitution.
Behind the seemingly scatter-shot opening acts of his second administration, legal analysts see a common goal: to test a once-fringe legal theory which asserts that the president has unlimited power to control the actions of the four million people who make up the executive branch.
If courts — specifically the Republican-appointed majority of the Supreme Court — uphold arguments based on the so-called “unitary executive theory,” it would give Trump and subsequent presidents unprecedented power to remove and replace any federal employee and impose their will on every decision in every agency.
Rulings in favor of the Trump administration would also further jeopardize the independence of key regulatory agencies that are susceptible to conflicts of interest and political interference, like the Federal Election Commission, which oversees federal elections and campaign finance laws.
Trump and his administration have furthered the theory by repeatedly invoking Article II of the Constitution, which vests executive power in the president, to justify the recent dismissals of federal officials. They have framed the article as allowing the president to use the whole of the executive branch for his political ends.
For example, the White House Feb. 18 invoked the article to rationalize an executive order signed that same day that asserted the president’s authority over almost all regulatory agencies that were created by Congress to act independently, or semi-independently, from the president.
Frank Bowman, a scholar of constitutional and criminal law at the University of Missouri School of Law, told Democracy Docket he believes the executive order is a step toward “an open declaration of dictatorship.”
“In essence, what he’s saying is, ‘I am the law. My will is the law. My view of what the law is the only view that can ever be expressed,’” Bowman said.
I think this take on executive power is one we should get more familiar with since it’s really taken a powerful rise. The Center for American Progress features an analysis in its series on Project 2025. This one was written back in October.”Project 2025 Would Destroy the U.S. System of Checks and Balances and Create an Imperial Presidency. Far-right extremists have a plan to shatter democracy’s guardrails, giving presidents almost unlimited power to implement policies that will hurt everyday Americans and strip them of fundamental rights.” It is an imperative read. Trump knows that he can be both pope and king.
Project 2025 takes an absolutist view of presidential authority
To wholly reshape government in ways that most Americans would think is impossible, the Project 2025 blueprint anchors itself in the “unitary executive theory.”22 This radical governing philosophy, which contravenes the traditional separation of powers, vests presidents with almost complete control over the federal bureaucracy, including congressionally designated independent agencies or the DOJ and the FBI. The unitary executive theory is designed to sharply diminish Congress’ imperative role to act as a check and balance on the executive branch with tools such as setting up independent agencies to make expert decisions and by limiting presidents’ ability to fire career civil servants for purely political purposes.
The road map to autocracy presented in Project 2025 extends far beyond the unitary executive theory first promoted by President Ronald Reagan, and later espoused by Vice President Dick Cheney, largely designed to implement a deregulatory, corporatist agenda.23 Instead, as discussed further below, Project 2025 presents a maximalist version that does not nibble around the edges but aims to thoroughly demolish the traditional guardrails that allow Congress an equal say in how democracy functions or what policies are implemented. One noted expert at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, Philip Wallach, said, “Some of these visions … start to just bleed into some kind of authoritarian fantasies where the president won the election, so he’s in charge, so everyone has to do what he says—and that’s just not the system the [sic] government we live under.”24
If Congress is robbed of its imperative role as a check and balance on a president’s power, and the judicial branch is willing to bestow a president with almost unlimited authority, autocracy results. And presidents become strongman rulers—free to choose which laws to enforce, which long-standing norms to jettison, and how to impose their will on every executive branch department and agency.
Well, all these pithy reads should keep you busy for the day. I hope your week goes well. I’ve got 2 doctors’ appointments, but gladly no more procedures. And I’d like just to add if they come for professors, that I’d rather be in the gulag that holds the country’s political cartoonists. To think, I used to just use wonderful paintings.
Happy Cinco de Mayo to all the wonderful folks of Mexican descent and to those of us who just enjoy the holiday!
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After Daknikat’s comprehensive post yesterday, it’s hard to imagine there could be any more news to report on today, but I’ve found a few things.
There were two notable deaths yesterday, pioneering blogger Kevin Drum and former Senator Alan Simpson, half of Simpson-Bowles, who created what came to be known as the “Cat Food Commission.”
Kevin Drum, who gave up his day job in software marketing to write online about politics, policy and his cats, quickly becoming a key figure in the vanguard of center-left bloggers during the genre’s heyday in the early 2000s, died on March 7. He was 66.
Mr. Drum, who lived in Irvine, Calif., had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2014 and had recently developed pneumonia. He blogged about those personal challenges openly and with the same insight that he brought to issues like health care policy and urban planning.
He spent most of his life in Orange County, Calif., which distinguished him from the majority of early big-name bloggers, many of whom hailed from the Washington-Boston corridor or from academic enclaves.
Mr. Drum began blogging in 2002 and quickly developed a large nationwide following. He helped shape what became known as the liberal blogosphere, populated by a broad amalgam of left-of-center thinkers who emphasized policy debates over political horse races.
His curiosity was broad, and he wrote on a variety of subjects from a variety of perspectives — sometimes casually observational, sometimes rigorously analytical — in a way that set him apart from the assorted camps that defined the blogosphere, including academics, politicos and ideologues.
Four years after that, Mr. Drum moved to Mother Jones, where he wrote not just blog posts but also extensive reported pieces for the magazine.
Most notable was a deep dive in 2013 into the theory that the crime wave of the late 20th century was driven in large part by childhood exposure to lead in gasoline and paint, a key factor in the development of behavioral problems and, in turn, delinquency. As lead was phased out, health outcomes improved and crime rates dropped.
“He was just able to unpack very complicated — particularly economically complicated — stories in an immensely readable way,” said Clara Jeffery, the editor in chief of Mother Jones.
Alan K. Simpson, a plain-spoken former Republican senator from Wyoming who championed immigration reforms and conservative candidates for the Supreme Court while fighting running battles with women’s groups, environmentalists and the press, died on Friday in hospice in Cody, Wyo. He was 93.
He had been struggling to recover from a broken hip that he sustained in December, according to a statement from his family and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, a group of museums of which he was a board member for 56 years. The statement said his recovery had been hindered by complications of a case of frostbite to his left foot that he endured about five years ago and that required the amputation of his left leg below the knee.
By Matt Cauley
Folksy, irreverent and sometimes cantankerous, a gaunt, 6-foot-7 beanpole with a ranch hand’s soft drawl, Mr. Simpson was a three-term senator, from 1979 to 1997, whom school children and tourists in the gallery sometimes took for a Mr. Smith-goes-to-Washington oddball, especially during his occasional rants against “bug-eyed zealots” and “super-greenies,” as he liked to call environmental lobbyists.
The son of a former Wyoming governor and United States senator, Mr. Simpson had been a hell-raiser as a teenager. He and some friends shot up mailboxes, killed a cow with rifles and set fire to an abandoned federal property. He punched a police officer who arrested him. While no one had been seriously hurt, he faced prison. But he was put on probation for two years and paid restitution….
Mr. Simpson had love-hate relationships with the press. Many journalists liked his earthy humor and easy accessibility. But his language could be coarse and his tone contemptuous when he attacked the news media, sometimes singling out reporters by name. He crossed a line when he accused Peter Arnett of CNN of being an enemy “sympathizer” for his reporting from Iraq during the Persian Gulf war, and wrongly accused him of bias in the Vietnam War because he had married a Vietnamese woman.
His political positions sometimes seemed contradictory, or perhaps personal. He supported abortion rights and right-wing nominees to the United States Supreme Court who might overturn Roe v. Wade. And partly out of a friendship forged when he was a 12-year-old Boy Scout, he called on the nation to apologize to Japanese Americans who were interned as potential security risks during World War II.
Read more at the NYT if you’re interested. Frankly, I thought he was a horrible person, but what do I know?
Daknikat covered the Republicans’ horrific continuing resolution yesterday. Of course it pass with Democratic help.
In the end, nine senators who caucus with Democrats joined with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) in voting to advance legislation to avoid a government shutdown, essentially giving up Democratic leverage over President Donald Trump for the foreseeable future.
Their support meant the bill was able to break the 60-vote threshold to avoid a filibuster, 62-38….
“The off-ramp is in the hands of Donald Trump and Elon Musk and DOGE. We could be in a shutdown for six months or nine months,” Schumer told The New York Times earlier on Friday, arguing a shutdown would be far too unpredictable.
Internal party critics have said Schumer gave up a rare moment of leverage far too easily, misplaying his hand after an often-fractious House Republican Caucus passed a party-line spending bill with Trump’s blessing.
Schumer suggested he was willing to face withering criticism from moderate House members to angry progressive activists: “I’ll take some of the bullets.”
These nine senators are likely to share in Schumer’s political suffering, though none of them are an obvious target for an immediate primary challenge.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.): The party’s leading contrarian at the moment, Fetterman has repeatedly said he will never vote for a government shutdown under any circumstances. He’s not up for reelection until 2028.
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.): Cortez Masto said her vote was not an “easy decision,” but she was refusing to “hand [Trump and Musk] a shutdown where they would have free reign to cause more chaos and harm.” She’s not up for reelection until 2028.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.): Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the party’s Senate leadership, is up for reelection in 2026 but is widely expected to retire.
Sen. Angus King (I-Maine): King’s state is heavily reliant on government funds, and he said in a statement posted to his Facebook page giving Musk and Trump power would be a “significantly greater danger to the country than the continuing resolution with all of its faults.” King is not up for reelection until 2030.
Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii): Schatz is known to have leadership ambitions, and taking this vote may show he’s willing to take a political hit for the rest of the caucus. Hawaii is also heavily reliant on federal employees. “Given the number of federal workers in Hawai‘i, mass furloughs would be deeply painful for people across the state,” he said in a statement. Schatz is up for reelection in 2028.
Sens. Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.): The Granite State duo are both moderates, and Shaheen is set to retire rather than run for reelection in 2026. Hassan is up for reelection in 2028. “Allowing the federal government to shut down with this President in charge is too dangerous to risk,” Hassan said in a statement.
Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.): Peters has already announced his plan to retire in 2026. He said a shutdown under Trump would be “catastrophic”
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.): A close ally of her fellow New Yorker, Gillibrand is also the chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee this cycle. She’s not up for reelection until 2030.
I thought Schumer had some good arguments; but when we are facing a takeover by a dictator, it seems to me the Democrats should fight tooth and nail.
Schumer’s politically dicey decision—ahead of a midnight Friday shutdown deadline—has infuriated Democrats to the point some are suggesting he step aside as leader. He explained on the Senate floor late Friday afternoon that his decision was “a Hobson’s choice,” conjuring images of a chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk.
”I believe that allowing Donald Trump to take even more power via a government shutdown is a far worse option,” he said. “The shutdown would allow DOGE to shift into overdrive. It would give Donald Trump and DOGE the keys to the city, the state and the country. And that is a far worse alternative.”
Vintage Lady with White Cat, by Sharyn Bursic
“Next question,” House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries answered Friday afternoon when a reporter asked if it was time for new leadership in the Senate. Jeffries said House Democrats are “strongly opposed to the partisan funding bill” that Schumer says he now supports.
Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi repudiated Schumer’s choice earlier in the day, saying, “I salute Leader Hakeem Jeffries for his courageous rejection of this false choice, and I am proud of my colleagues in the House Democratic Caucus for their overwhelming vote against this bill.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Schumer’s “unthinkable” acquiesce was a “betrayal,” adding she was “texting, calling, sending carrier pigeons” to Senate Democrats to beg them to not follow suit.
Democratic lawmakers are so “infuriated” with Schumer that some have spoken to Ocasio-Cortez, a New York progressive, about running against him in a Senate primary race, according to CNN, which noted even “centrists” are “so mad” at Schumer they are “ready to write checks for AOC for Senate” come 2028 when he is up for re-election.
Daknikat wrote quite a bit about the Democrats’ anger yesterday. They were even angrier, if possible, after the bill passed. Schumer should retire anyway. We have to get rid of these old fossils.
Remember the days when the Bush administration was disappearing people they decided were terrorists? It looks like Trump is going to follow a similar playbook. I just hope it doesn’t involve torture. The Trump gang are coming down hard on Columbia and other elite universities about protests against the Israel war on Gaza. As you know, they have basically disappeared former Columbia student and protest leader Mahmood Kahlil.
Mahmoud Khalil — the pro-Palestinian activist and green card holder detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement this week — said he overheard federal agents say that the White House was asking for an update on his detention, his attorneys said.
“He was surrounded by many DHS agents, or people he believed to be DHS agents, and he believes that he saw or heard, during a call, one of them say that the White House wants an update on what’s going on,” Samah Sisay, a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights who is representing Khalil, said at a press conference Friday.
“We have every reason to believe, as we allege in the petition, that many people within the executive branch of the government were involved, including the White House,” Sisay said.
Khalil took part in student protests at Columbia University calling for the institution to divest and cut ties with Israel, and he participated in negotiations with university administration.
“His one and only goal was to get Columbia University to divest from its complicity with Israeli government crimes in Gaza and the West Bank,” said Ramzi Kassem, the director of CLEAR, a group representing Khalil….
The Trump administration has claimed that Khalil distributed “pro-Hamas propaganda fliers with the logo of Hamas,” without providing evidence.
The U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether Columbia University concealed “illegal aliens” on its campus, one of its top officials said Friday, as the Trump administration intensified its campaign to deport foreigners who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations at the school last year.
Agents with the Department of Homeland Security searched two university residences with a warrant Thursday evening. No one was arrested and it was unclear whom the authorities were searching for, but by Friday afternoon U.S. officials had announced developments related to two people they had pursued in connection with the demonstrations.
A Columbia doctoral student from India whose visa was revoked by the Trump administration fled the U.S. on an airliner. And a Palestinian woman who had been arrested during the protests at the university last April was arrested by federal immigration authorities in Newark, New Jersey, on charges that she overstayed an expired visa.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, speaking at the Justice Department, said it was all part of the president’s “mission to end antisemitism in this country.”
What a bunch of bullshit.
“Just last night, we worked with the Department of Homeland Security to execute search warrants from an investigation into Columbia University for harboring and concealing illegal aliens on its campus,” Blanche said. “That investigation is ongoing, and we are also looking at whether Columbia’s handling of earlier incidents violated civil rights laws and included terrorism crimes.”
Blanche didn’t say what evidence agents had of wrongdoing by the university. It was unclear whether he was accusing the school itself of “terrorism crimes” or saying that people involved in the protests had committed such crimes.
A Rhode Island doctor who had traveled to Lebanon to see her parents was prevented from re-entering the United States at Boston’s Logan International Airport on Thursday evening, her lawyer and a colleague said.
Dr. Rasha Alawieh, 34, who lives in Providence, has been working at Brown Medicine’s Division of Kidney Disease & Hypertension since last July, and she been part of the transplant service at Rhode Island Hospital, according to Dr. George Bayliss, the organ transplant division’s medical director. She has been studying and working in the United States for about six years, he said Friday.
The US consulate in Lebanon had issued her an H-1B visa, which is given to people in specialty occupations requiring expertise. The visa was valid through mid-2027, said Thomas S. Brown, an attorney representing her and Brown Medicine.
Alawieh was detained when she returned to Logan airport, and family members are afraid that she is about to be deported to Lebanon, he said.
“We are at a loss as to why this happened,” Brown said. “I don’t know if it’s a byproduct of the Trump crackdown on immigration. I don’t know if it’s a travel ban or some other issue.”
He said her phone has been seized and he has not been able to contact Alawieh.
Bayliss said a lawyer filed a petition with the US District Court in Massachusetts, and Judge Leo T. Sorokin issued an order saying Alawieh should not be moved outside of Massachusetts without 48 hours notice. But he said that message apparently did not reach immigration officials in time, and a plane carrying Alawieh left for Paris.
“This is outrageous,” Bayliss said in an interview. “This is a person who is legally entitled to be in the U.S., who is stopped from re-entering the country for reasons no one knows. It’s depriving her patients of a good physician.”
A far-right group that claimed credit for the arrest of a Palestinian activist and permanent US resident who the Trump administration is seeking to deport claims it has submitted “thousands of names” for similar treatment.
Betar US is one of a number of rightwing, pro-Israel groups that are supporting the administration’s efforts to deport international students involved in university pro-Palestinian protests, an effort that escalated this week with the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, an activist who recently completed his graduate studies at Columbia University.
This week, Donald Trump said Khalil’s arrest was just “the first of many to come”. Betar US quickly claimed credit on social media for providing Khalil’s name to the government.
Betar, which has been labelled an extremist group by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish advocacy group, said on Monday that it had “been working on deportations and will continue to do so”, and warned that the effort would extend beyond immigrants. “Expect naturalized citizens to start being picked up within the month,” the group’s post on X read. (It is very difficult to revoke US citizenship, though Trump has indicated an intention to try.)
The group has compiled a so-called “deportation list” naming individuals it believes are in the US on visas and have participated in pro-Palestinian protests, claiming these individuals “terrorize America”.
A Betar spokesperson, Daniel Levy, said in a statement to the Guardian that Betar submitted “thousands of names” of students and faculty they believe to be on visas from institutions like Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, Syracuse University and others to representatives of the Trump administration.
A Hmong American woman who has lived in the Milwaukee area since she was 8 months old was deported last week to Laos, a country she has never visited, and says she is stranded in a rooming house surrounded by military guards.
Ma Yang, 37, a mother of five, said she does not speak the Lao language, has no family or friends in the country and that the military is holding all her documents. She was born in Thailand, the daughter of Hmong refugees after the Vietnam War, and she was a legal permanent U.S. resident until she pleaded guilty to taking part in a marijuana trafficking operation.
“The United States sent me back to die,” she said. “I don’t even know where to go. I don’t even know what to do.”
As President Donald Trump pushes the mass deportation of immigrants, Yang believes she is one of the first Hmong Americans to be deported to Laos in recent years. As of November, the U.S. considered Laos an “uncooperative” country that accepted few, if any, deportees. Zero people were deported to Laos in the last fiscal year, according to federal data.
Once she arrived in the Laotian capital of Vientiane on March 6, she said she was questioned by military authorities then sent to a rooming house, where guards did not allow her to leave or contact anyone for five days. She paced in circles around the compound and ate food the guards gave her.
A few days ago, she was taken to buy a cellphone and withdraw cash. She could finally reach out to her partner of 16 years, Michael Bub of South Milwaukee, a U.S. citizen. The military official in charge of her situation — she does not know his rank or title — then said she could leave if she wanted. But she is scared to venture out.
The Trump administration is considering targeting the citizens of as many as 43 countries as part of a new ban on travel to the United States that would be broader than the restrictions imposed during President Trump’s first term, according to officials familiar with the matter.
A draft list of recommendations developed by diplomatic and security officials suggests a “red” list of 11 countries whose citizens would be flatly barred from entering the United States. They are Afghanistan, Bhutan, Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen, the officials said….
The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive internal deliberations, cautioned that the list had been developed by the State Department several weeks ago, and that changes were likely by the time it reached the White House.
Citizens on that list would also be subjected to mandatory in-person interviews in order to receive a visa. It included Belarus, Eritrea, Haiti, Laos, Myanmar, Pakistan, Russia, Sierra Leone, South Sudan and Turkmenistan.
See the full draft list of countries at the link. I can’t reproduce it here.
This is getting too long, but I need to touch on Trump’s speech at the “justice department” yesterday. The speech was supposed to be about fentanyl.
Taking over the justice department headquarters for what amounted to a political event, Donald Trump railed against the criminal cases he defeated by virtue of returning to the presidency in an extraordinary victory lap the department has perhaps never before seen.
The event was billed as a policy address for the administration to tout its focus on combating illegal immigration and drug trafficking, but the majority of the president’s freewheeling remarks focused instead on his personal grievances with the department.
Trump spoke from a specially constructed stage in the great hall of the main justice building, backed with blue velvet curtains that underscored the theatrics and symbolism of Trump cementing his control over the justice department, which had tried and failed to hold him to account.
The choice of venue carried additional resonance about how Trump has fully implemented his agenda at the justice department, doing away with the longstanding tradition of independence from partisan politics and instead turning it into an extension of the White House.
The great hall has historically been used for major law enforcement announcements by the justice department and its senior leaders, and when presidents have delivered speeches at the building, the remarks have been of a national security or non-political stripe.
In Trump’s hourlong speech, he repeatedly strayed from his prepared remarks to assail the criminal cases against him, various lawyers and former prosecutors by name and accused the Biden administration of trying to destroy him, declaring Joe Biden the head of a crime family.
“The case against me was bullshit,” Trump said with fury, in the building where the charges were approved.
But he heaped praise on his defense lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, whom he elevated to in effect run the justice department as the deputy attorney general and the principal associate deputy attorney general respectively, as well as the department’s chief of staff, Chad Mizelle….
Trump offered notable praise for the US district judge Aileen Cannon, who dismissed his criminal case on charges of mishandling classified documents, over decades of legal precedent. Trump claimed criticism of her made her angry, although he also said he had never spoken to her.
“She was brilliant,” Trump said of Cannon, “the absolute model of what a judge should be.”
President Donald Trump launched some of his harshest attacks yet on the media on Friday, using a speech at the Department of Justice to baselessly accuse outlets including CNN of illegal and corrupt behavior.
In his Friday speech, Trump praised Florida district court Judge Aileen Cannon, whom he appointed in 2020 and who sided with him in January, blocking the DOJ from sharing a report on Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents with members of Congress.
But Trump claimed news publishers had gone after Cannon because of the January ruling, alleging “they do it all the time with judges” and that they “will write whatever these people say,” without offering proof.
“The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and MSDNC, and the fake news, CNN and ABC, CBS and NBC, they’ll write whatever they say,” Trump said. “And what do you do to get rid of it? You convict Trump.”
“It’s totally illegal what they do,” Trump continued, addressing DOJ employees. “I just hope you can all watch for it, but it’s totally illegal.”
While Trump did not immediately clarify who “they” are, he later claimed that CNN and MSNBC are “political arms of the Democrat Party.”
“In my opinion, they’re really corrupt,” Trump said.
He’s doing everything in the dictator’s playbook, folks.
That’s it for me. What’s on your mind today?
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As we inch close to January 20 and another Trump administration, my feeling of dread only grows stronger. Already, Trump is dominating the news and acting as if he is in charge.
Last time, Trump had the “adults in the room” to occasionally hold back his efforts to destroy the country; this time, he only has Elon Musk, and Trump still doesn’t seem to comprehend that Musk is manipulating him. It’s going to be every bit as chaotic and exhausting as last time. And, of course, there will be the ugly Trump social media posts. Here’s his Christmas greeting from Truth Social:
Pieter Bruegel the Elder – Hunters in the Snow
Isn’t that sweet? I will never understand how anyone could stand to be in the same room with this monster, let alone vote for him for POTUS.
There’s not much exciting news today, but I’ve found some interesting reads.
The bald eagle has landed in the U.S. code after President Joe Biden signed a bill Tuesday making the predator the official national bird.
Congress passed the measure with unanimous support.
Although the bird of prey is at the center of the Great Seal of the United States, it was never formally recognized as the country’s official bird. Some of the Founding Fathers — Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson — were tasked with creating a national seal but simply couldn’t come to an agreement.
In 1782, a version of the seal with a bald eagle was submitted by Secretary of the Continental Congress Charles Thomson and approved. Most Americans are familiar with the seal’s eagle carrying a flag-emblazoned shield holding an olive branch in one talon and arrows in the other.
Franklin was historically against the decision, arguing in a letter to his daughter that the bald eagle was “a bird of bad moral character.”
Either way, the U.S. has not had an official bird in the almost 250 years since its founding.
Nearly eight years ago, reports began circulating in Washington that the Trump administration was going to be chaotic. One obvious sign was the rapid turnover of aides close to the president. Within months, Trump had replaced his chief of staff, national security advisor, press secretary and counselor to the president. Ultimately, in a four-year period, Trump would go through four chiefs of staff, four national security advisors, four press secretaries and five counselors to the president.
Beyond the rapid turnover, those who worked with Trump in his first term recounted his anarchic governing style. He refused to read briefing books before meeting with government leaders and simply “winged” important negotiations. He read only one-page summaries, and even then, only if they were filled with maps, photos and graphs. He ignored advice from his counselors in favor of information (or misinformation) from Fox News and extreme social media posts. He made policy on his own via tweets rather than through consultations with others.
Aides, who sought anonymity for obvious reasons, recounted that Trump was spending several hours every day watching television, typically Fox News, and impulsively walking out of meetings he was bored with. As a result, his governing style whipsawed between a lack of interest and sudden intense activity. Simply put, he did not pay attention until, suddenly, he understood a policy he did not like was being made without him. For example, in 2018, he intervened at the last minute as a government shutdown loomed to insist that the continuing resolution include money for a Mexican border wall. One aide reported that Trump was an “instinctive and reactive” leader.
His aides revealed that his attention span was extraordinarily short. They confessed that when he made some outrageous demand, they would distract him with something else, expecting he would forget about the order he just gave. One journalist found that Trump was live-tweeting Fox News, setting his agenda based on what Fox News was reporting.
Political scientist David Drezner analyzed statements by Trump aides and supporters comparing him to a toddler who throws temper tantrums when he does not get his way, has a short attention span, and has no interest in learning if it is not presented in an extremely simple manner. Drezner says his aides would treat Trump like a toddler by using reverse psychology on him (telling him he cannot do something that they actually wanted him to do), keeping him busy so he would not have time to tweet, and feeding him simple information.
Van Gogh-Snowy Landscape with Arles in Background
This time, it will be much, much worse. Trump has already threatened to take over Panama, Greenland, and Canada. And, of course, he has threatened repeatedly to attack Mexico.
The Danish government has announced a huge boost in defence spending for Greenland, hours after US President-elect Donald Trump repeated his desire to purchase the Arctic territory.
Danish Defence Minister Troels Lund Poulsen said the package was a “double digit billion amount” in krone, or at least $1.5bn (£1.2bn).
He described the timing of the announcement as an “irony of fate”. On Monday Trump said ownership and control of the huge island was an “absolute necessity” for the US.
Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory, is home to a large US space facility and is strategically important for the US, lying on the shortest route from North America to Europe. It has major mineral reserves.
Poulsen said the package would allow for the purchase of two new inspection ships, two new long-range drones and two extra dog sled teams.
It would also include funding for increased staffing at Arctic Command in the capital Nuuk and an upgrade for one of Greenland’s three main civilian airports to handle F-35 supersonic fighter aircraft.
“We have not invested enough in the Arctic for many years, now we are planning a stronger presence,” he said.
The defence minister did not give an exact figure for the package, but Danish media estimated it would be around 12-15bn krone.
The announcement came a day after Trump said on his social media platform Truth Social: “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.”
A major international crisis is “much more likely” in Donald Trump’s second term given the president-elect’s “inability to focus” on foreign policy, a former US ambassador to the United Nations has warned.
John Bolton, who at 17 months was Trump’s longest-serving national security adviser, delivered a scathing critique of his lack of knowledge, interest in facts or coherent strategy. He described Trump’s decision-making as driven by personal relationships and “neuron flashes” rather than a deep understanding of national interests.
Bolton also dismissed Trump’s claims during this year’s election campaign that only he could prevent a third world war while bringing a swift end to the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine.
“It’s typical Trump: it’s all braggadocio,” Bolton told the Guardian. “The world is more dangerous than when he was president before. The only real crisis we had was Covid, which is a long-term crisis and not against a particular foreign power but against a pandemic.
“But the risk of an international crisis of the 19th-century variety is much more likely in a second Trump term. Given Trump’s inability to focus on coherent decision making, I’m very worried about how that might look.” [….]
Bolton was Trump’s national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019.
Bolton recalled: “What I believed was that, like every American president before him, the weight of the responsibilities, certainly in national security, the gravity of the issues that he was confronting, the consequences of his decisions, would discipline his thinking in a way that would produce serious outcomes.
“It turned out I was wrong. By the time I got there a lot of patterns of behaviour had already been set that were never changed and it could well be, even if I had been there earlier, I couldn’t have affected it. But it was clear pretty soon after I got there that intellectual discipline wasn’t in the Trump vocabulary.”
“When you hear the acts of each, you won’t believe that he did this. Makes no sense. Relatives and friends are further devastated. They can’t believe this is happening!”
Trump vowed to take action as soon as he takes office.
“As soon as I am inaugurated, I will direct the Justice Department to vigorously pursue the death penalty to protect American families and children from violent rapists, murderers, and monsters,” he said in a follow up post. “We will be a Nation of Law and Order again!”
The Trump Store has a gift for every patriot on your Christmas list.
It’s a little late for this year’s celebrations, but you can get a very early jump on next year and count down with the $38 Trump Advent calendar. Or trim the tree with a $95 Mar-a-Lago bauble or a $16 MAGA hat ornament, sold in nine colors. (A glass version of the hat ornament is $92.) Stuff stockings with an $86 “GIANT Trump Chocolate Gold Bar” and a $22 pair of candy cane socks printed with “Trump.” Prepare a holiday feast with a $14 Trump Christmas tree pot holder and $28 Trump apron featuring Santa waving an American flag.
The profits from these holiday trinkets do not benefit a political committee or a charitable cause, but the Trump Organization, the Trump family’s privately owned conglomerate of real estate, hotel and lifestyle businesses. As the company encouraged customers to celebrate the holidays with Trump gifts for all ages, President-elect Donald Trump personally profited off of his upcoming term in a manner that is unprecedented in modern history — even during his unconventional first stint in the White House.
The Trump Organization thought of everyone celebrating Trump’s nonconsecutive terms this yuletide season, rolling out a line of merchandise printed with “45-47,” including $195 quarter-zip sweatshirts, $85 cigar ashtrays and $38 baseball caps. Fido can’t go without his gear, of course: The store also sells gifts for dogs, including orange leashes and camo collars emblazoned with Trump’s name. And don’t forget the kids! How about a $38 teddy bear wearing a red, white or blue Trump sweater, $8 MAGA hat stickers or an array of Trump sweets, including $16 gummy bears?
All of these gifts can be wrapped in $28 golden Trump wrapping paper or stuck into Trump ornament gift bags ($14 a pair), and accompanied by a note on $35 stationery featuring bottles of Trump wine.
“Make the holidays that much greater this year with essentials from the Trump Home and Holiday collection,” the website says, over a photo of an Elf on the Shelf toy and a lime-green MAGA hat.
Trump has long delighted in finding new ways to market his name, creating a merchandise empire that includes digital trading cards, pricey sneakers, expensive watches and signed Bibles. But his expansion of offerings in the run-up to the inauguration has further concerned ethics experts and watchdogs, who say his behavior is the opposite of what they expect from a president-in-waiting during the transition.
“How much is he going to use the presidency just to sell Trump products?” said Jordan Libowitz, vice president for communications for the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in
Claude Monet, The Magpie
Washington.
That’s what I want to know. Are he and Melania going to continue hawking their tasteless junk from the White House?
The hard lesson of 2024 is that liberals spent too much time fretting that Donald Trump would subvert democracy if he lost and not enough that Trump would win a free and fair election. We can argue about the reason why voters elected Trump—inflation, transgender hysteria, Joe Biden staying too long in the race—but we can’t pretend that those who cast their vote for Trump didn’t know they were choosing oligarchy.
Thanks to the 14-year run of The Apprentice, even the politically ignorant were well aware that Donald Trump (net worth $6.2 billion, per Forbes) was a wealthy real estate tycoon. If anything, the voting public judged Trump wealthier than he really is; as John D. Miller, a marketer for the NBC series, pointed out in October, “We created the narrative that Trump was a super-successful businessman who lived like royalty.” Given that narrative’s predominance, nobody can be surprised that the president-elect’s sidekick ended up being the richest person in the world, or that he’s appointed a dozen billionaires to top posts.
How could this happen? None of liberals’ usual explanations is available. We can’t blame Trump’s victory on the distortions of the Electoral College (as we could in 2016) because Trump won the popular vote. And we can’t blame Trump’s victory on the distortions of money, because even when you figure in outside money, including more than a quarter-billion to Trump from Elon Musk, it was the loser, Kamala Harris, who raised the most cash. Yes, Trump indicated before the election that if he lost he wouldn’t accept the result, just as he still refuses to concede the 2020 election. But in the end, democracy didn’t come under threat. Democracy turned out to be the problem.
This has happened before. The worst presidential choice prior to 2024 was James Buchanan in 1856. Like Trump, Buchanan won both the popular vote and the Electoral College. These two presidents are the lowest-ranked in an annual poll of American political scientists, and Buchanan ranks last in a 2021 survey of American political historians (though for some mysterious reason that one ranks Trump only fourth-worst). Buchanan is reviled for fumbling Confederates’ threats to secede, which of course led to the Civil War. I would argue that the public also chose very badly in reelecting Richard Nixon in 1972 and George W. Bush in 2004—and that in choosing Ronald Reagan in 1980, the party cleared a path that eventually led to Trump.
But 2024 may be the first election in American history in which a majority of United States voters specifically chose oligarchy. This is terra incognita, but it turns out to be a problem to which our second president, John Adams, gave considerable thought.
Democrats spent much of the presidential campaign warning that a second Donald Trump presidency would move methodically and remorselessly toward sinister goals: persecuting immigrants, enriching billionaires, ending democracy, imposing theocracy. This time, they said, he and his people would already know how to use the powers of his office. His party would put up less, maybe no, resistance. He now has the backing of the world’s richest man. The fact that Trump won a plurality of the popular vote and enjoys his best polling ever has deepened progressive despair.
Last week’s fight over the continuing resolution to keep the federal government funded should calm some of these fears. It won’t change progressive minds about Republicans’ ambitions. But it should suggest that many of the limits on Republican effectiveness that were in place during Trump’s first term remain — and new ones have arisen….
Trump’s decision to insist that the legislation include a lifting of the debt ceiling also suggests that he still has little interest in figuring out how to build a legislative coalition. He was effectively demanding that Republicans lift the debt ceiling on a party-line vote. He should have known that they would never accede. Now, seeing his demand so widely ignored has moved him a little closer to lame-duck status. Congressional Republicans may be learning that if enough of them balk at a Trump order — 38 of them voted down the funding bill he endorsed — he cannot credibly threaten all of them.
The president-elect also kneecapped Johnson by telegraphing his disappointment with the way the speaker handled the continuing resolution. This was unfair, since Trump hadn’t articulated his key priorities, such as raising the debt limit, or done anything else to make them achievable. It was also counterproductive. By blaming Johnson for the embarrassing zigzags of the spending bill, Trump avoids taking any responsibility himself. But he has increased the chances that House Republicans will be consumed by a fight over their leadership rather than enacting his administration’s agenda.
By now, though, Republicans are used to the drawbacks of working withTrump. Their new difficulty is Musk. During Trump’s first term, Republicans in Congress and the executive branch had to anticipate what would draw the president’s wrath. Now they will have to wonder, as well, what will bring them negative attention from Musk. They can’t count on either man to telegraph his views well ahead of time or privately; they will just have to keep a social media tab open. The two men also have varying views and priorities, with Musk more concerned about controlling federal spending than Trump has ever shown himself to be. (Even Musk, though, did not stir himself against the bipartisan bill to spend nearly $200 billion more on Social Security — which passed Congress at the same time as the government-funding deal.)
Republicans can’t be sure, either, how long Trump and Musk will stay allied. Musk isn’t like Steve Bannon, whom Trump could put into political exile and then summon back. He has fame, a fan base, a means of communication and resources of his own. This would be Trump’s messiest divorce yet.
I expect Trump to tire of Musk stealing the spotlight, but Ponnuru is probably right that Musk will be difficult for Trump to eliminate.
I hope you all have a nice, relaxing day whether you celebrate the holidays or not.
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Yup. And the FDA will not be looking around for that food safety risk now. It’s also upending Health Care, but we can rest knowing that all those generic names for medicine and things will be
Speaking of crazy policy, I happened on this last night. This is from 
This is from Ed Mazza writing for HuffPo. This sounds a lot like his real estate deals to me. “‘Clearly Unhinged’: Critics Sink Trump’s ‘Asinine’ Plan To Reopen Alcatraz Prison. The president wants to turn the site back into a penitentiary despite the fact that it would cost a fortune.”
This just really sounds like how he’d run his business. Also, he now wants tariffs on all incoming films. This is about as insane as it gets. 
Philip Bump–writing at WAPO–has an interesting Op-Ed up today
Dan Froomkin–writing for
It makes sense to me since Trump seems to want to undocument more than just people. Who knows how many things Doge has destroyed in the wake of having all-access to every government database and more. He’s disappearing people, children, scientific research, due process, and entire agencies and programs.
There are a lot of examples here, and it’s worth thinking about. The Unitary Executive Theory has been around for a while, and since the Reagan years, it has picked up steam in the Supreme Court. Here is a recent article from 
I think this take on executive power is one we should get more familiar with since it’s really taken a powerful rise. The 
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