Lazy Caturday Reads: Will The Epstein Scandal Be Trump’s Watergate?

Posted: July 26, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because | Tags: cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein, pardons, Space Cat and the Kittens, the coverup is worse than the crime, Todd Blanche, Watergate | 11 Comments

Good Morning!!

The Caturday illustrations today come from a children’s book: Space Cat and the Kittens, by Ruthven Todd. The illustrator is Paul Galdone. I know it’s a little incongruous to include cute kitten pictures in a depressing political post, but perhaps they will provide a bit of relief from the ongoing evil deeds of Donald Trump and his gang.

Here is the summary of the book from Amazon:

Flyball, the famous Space Cat, is a father now! He and Moofa, the last of the Martian fishing cats, are the proud parents of a pair of mischievous, fun-loving kittens, Marty and Tailspin. The whole family joins Colonel Fred Stone and a new friend, Bill, on a mission to Alpha Centauri to seek out places where humans can live. Along the way, the crew makes an amazing discovery — a planet abounding in iguanodons, pterodactyls, tyrannosauri, and a host of other prehistoric creatures.

Now for today’s news. I admit it. I’m obsessed with the Jeffrey Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell story. And so is Donald Trump. He’s living in fear of the gory details of his close relationships with Epstein and Maxwell seeing the light of day. He ran away to play golf and open a new golf course in Scotland yesterday, but he can’t completely escape drip drip drip of revelations. Could this be the scandal that really damages him?

Jeff Zeleny and Adam Liptak at CNN: Trump flees Washington controversies for golf-heavy trip to Scotland.

Fleeing Washington’s oppressive humidity and nonstop questions over heated controversies, President Donald Trump is once again taking weekend refuge at his golf clubs — this time more than 3,000 miles away in Scotland.

While the White House has called his five-day trip a “working visit,” it’s fairly light on the formal itinerary. Trump is poised to hold trade talks Sunday with the chief of the European Union and is scheduled to meet with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday.

But he’s expected to spend most of his trip out of public view at two of his golf resorts – Trump Turnberry in the west and Trump International about 200 miles away in the north, near his mother’s ancestral homeland….

Even as protesters demonstrated against Trump here on Saturday, the four nights in temperate Scotland come as a summertime respite after six months back in office. His administration is engulfed in a deepening political crisis over its handling of disclosures around the case of Jeffrey Epstein, accused sex trafficker and former friend of the president’s.

Nearly every time Trump has spoken with reporters in recent weeks, he’s been pressed with new questions about the Epstein scandal, many of which are fueled by deep suspicions that he and his followers have been stirring for years. New revelations about his personal ties to the disgraced financier have kept the matter alive.

Scottish folks do not like Trump, to put it mildly.

Authorities in Scotland have spent weeks preparing for Trump’s arrival. Assistant Chief Constable Emma Bond told reporters the security operation would be the largest the country has mounted since the death of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022, including local officers, national security divisions and special constables.

The overall tone toward Trump has been markedly less fond, however. The Friday edition of The National, a liberal-leaning newspaper that supports Scottish independence, rolled out a not-so-welcoming message to Trump with a blaring and bold front-page headline: “Convicted US Felon to Arrive in Scotland.”

A group called Stop Trump Scotland, a coalition of demonstrators, organized protests at Aberdeen and outside the US consulate in Edinburgh as part of a “Festival of Resistance.” A few hundred people turned out Saturday to raise their voices against the visiting American president, waving colorful signs and chanting slogans….

It’s the first visit Trump has made to the country since 2023, when he broke ground on the golf course dedicated to his mother. But returning this weekend as the sitting American president has roused critics, including Green Party leader and member of parliament, Patrick Harvie.

“Donald Trump is a convicted criminal and political extremist,” Harvie told reporters in Scotland this week. “There can be no excuses for trying to cozy up to his increasingly fascist political agenda.”

I hope they make him miserable.

William Kristol at The Bulwark: It’s Starting to Smell Like Trump’s Watergate.

On June 6, 2025, Donald Trump’s FBI Director, Kash Patel, discussed the Jeffrey Epstein files with podcaster Joe Rogan. “We’ve reviewed all the information,” Patel stressed, “and the American public is going to get as much as we can release.”

One month later, on July 6, a joint, unsigned statement from the FBI and the Department of Justice announced that nothing would be released—except for a prison video. The video turned out not to be, in fact, the “raw” video the statement promised. But it was in any case an attempt at misdirection—an effort to get people to focus on the question of Epstein’s death, rather than on the crimes he committed when alive.

Space cats and brontosaurus

For that is where the danger to Trump lies. And, naturally, that is what is now being covered up.

As a story in yesterday’s New York Times makes clear, the documents about Epstein’s crimes were pretty much ready for release three months ago. The FBI and Justice Department had conducted extensive reviews and re-reviews of the files. They had considered what should and shouldn’t be released due to legal and privacy concerns.

The Times explains:

After the F.B.I. finished its review of the files, the materials were handed over to a team of dozens of Justice Department lawyers who were given the job of double-checking the bureau’s redactions to ensure that neither too much nor too little information was disclosed, according to a person familiar with the process. The lawyers, drawn from multiple divisions from within the department, sat at their desks beginning in late March or early April reviewing documents for the better part of two weeks, the person said. . . . By mid-April, the department’s review had been largely completed.

So in mid-April, the Trump administration was, it seems, very close to being ready to go with the oft-promised release of the bulk of the Epstein files.

But then, in May, Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy Todd Blanche briefed President Trump on the files. According to the Times, they told the president his name appeared multiple times.

Two months later, a decision: No files would be released….

But it is the safest of safe bets that Bondi and Patel didn’t simply sit and reflect and deliberate and come to a judicious determination not to release the files. We know Trump had been briefed on the files. We don’t know what subsequent conversations he had about them, or with whom. But we can safely conclude that the Justice Department and the FBI don’t make joint determinations on matters of great interest to the president without consulting him—indeed, without taking direction from him.

It is also the safest of safe bets that it was Trump’s determination that no further disclosure would be “appropriate or warranted.” And it is the safest of safe bets that Trump made that determination because he knew that no further disclosure would be in his interest. At this juncture, it’s impossible, indeed irresponsible, not to note that both Bondi and Blanche served as personal lawyers for Trump prior to taking on their government roles.

Epstein is President Trump’s coverup, as surely as Watergate was President Nixon’s.

And as we all know from Watergate, the cover-up is always worse than the crime. And the cover-up is moving in overdrive.

On his way out of town, Trump dangled a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell, who spent hours Thursday and Friday being interviewed by Trump’s former defense attorney and now second in command at DOJ. It was likely a “queen for a day” interview, in which she was given limited immunity–a guarantee that she can’t be prosecuted for anything she says in the interview, as long as she tells the truth.

NBC News: DOJ granted Ghislaine Maxwell limited immunity during meetings with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

A senior administration official confirms to NBC News that Ghislaine Maxwell was granted limited immunity by the Justice Department in order to answer questions about the Jeffrey Epstein case.

Astronauts and Pterodactyls

This type of immunity allowed Maxwell to answer questions from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche without fear that the information she provided could later be used against her in any future cases or proceedings.

The immunity is “limited” because it only covers Maxwell if she tells the truth; if it’s later determined that she lied during the interviews then the deal is off the table.

An immunity agreement like this one, often called “a queen for a day” deal, is common in criminal cases when a defendant offers to cooperate with prosecutors and provide information on an investigation and potential codefendants.

As part of the agreement, that information generally cannot be used against the defendant down the road.

In exchange, prosecutors will commonly consider the defendant’s cooperation while recommending a lighter sentence for a plea deal, or in some cases outright immunity from prosecution.

Aaron Blake at CNN: Trump just made a problematic Ghislaine Maxwell situation look even worse.

Interviewing Ghislaine Maxwell is the Trump administration’s first big move to allay concerns about its hugely unpopular handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on Friday wrapped up two days of interviews with Epstein’s convicted associate.

But there were already all kinds of reasons to be skeptical of this move and what it could produce, given the motivations of the two sides involved.

And President Donald Trump epitomized all of them in a major way on Friday.

While taking questions on his way to Scotland, Trump repeatedly held open the possibility of pardoning Maxwell for her crimes.

“Well, I don’t want to talk about that,” Trump said initially.

When pressed, he said, “It’s something I haven’t thought about,” while conspicuously adding, “I’m allowed to do it.”

I wonder if the MAGA crowd would be happy if Trump pardoned Maxwell? Anyone who actually cares about the victims would be outraged.

Sarah Ewall-Weiss at The Daily Beast: Ghislaine Handed DOJ 100 Names in Shameless Pardon Quid Pro Quo.

Ghislaine Maxwell, the partner of the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, completed a second day of questioning Friday, sharing information on about 100 different people with the Department of Justice.

Maxwell, who was convicted of child sex trafficking in connection with the disgraced financier in 2021, met with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche for about three hours on Friday at a courthouse in Tallahassee, Florida.

Escaping by helicopter

She also sat down with Blanche to answer questions for about six hours on Thursday as the DOJ tries to control the fallout from its handling of the Epstein files….

The meeting between the top Trump official and Maxwell was announced by the Justice Department amid mounting pressure for the administration to release more information on the case after it said there was no Epstein client list and indicated there would be no further prosecutions in a recent memo….

A bombshell report this week by the Wall Street Journal alleged that Attorney General Pam Bondi briefed Trump in May that his name was in the files multiple times, as were other names.

On Friday, the president would not rule out pardoning Maxwell, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2022 for facilitating and participating in the sex trafficking of teenage girls….

Maxwell’s lawyer said in Florida on Friday that his team has not spoken to Trump about a potential pardon but indicated they will push for one.

“We hope he exercises that power in a right and just way,” Markus said.

No kidding.

Sarah K. Burris at Raw Story: DOJ’s new move raises ‘huge red flags’ — and ‘could blow up in their face’: Legal expert.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche met for a second day with Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, and a long-time prosecutor and former general counsel at the FBI is warning it could all “blow up in their face.”

MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace noted on her Friday show that she can’t understand why Blanche would ignore the career prosecutors who have been steeped in the case for years and are aware of the details.

New York University Law School Professor Andrew Weissmann connected the dots from the cases involving Epstein and Maxwell to other Justice Department scandals, such as the one involving Mayor Eric Adams.

“Mayor Eric Adams, where this administration learned to shut out the career people,” said Weissmann. “If you are trying to get the defendant or in this case, Ghislaine Maxwell, to say something that will help Donald Trump, if that’s your goal and it’s not about sort of justice writ large, it is a continuation of your work for the president. In other words, you were his personal attorney, and you are still essentially operating as his personal attorney. If that’s your goal, you do not want the career prosecutors and agents in the room for the same reason you didn’t want them in the room for Eric Adams.” [….]

“You’re not engaging in what’s in the public interest. You’re engaging in what is in Donald Trump’s interest, and whether that is to exonerate Donald Trump, as Tim [Miller] suggested, or whether it’s to implicate other people. So, it’s sort of a distraction. Those are things that Todd Blanche can do and can do better when he doesn’t have career people in the room,” Weissmann clarified.

And, of course, Pam Bondi fired the lead prosecutor in the Epstein and Maxwell cases, Maurene Comey.

Kittens and T Rex

Glenn Thrush and Valerie Crowder at The New York Times: After Ghislaine Maxwell Interview, Concerns Mount Over Possibility of Pardon.

Ms. Maxwell has made it clear she wants her 20-year sentence thrown out or reduced or a pardon. President Trump, asked whether he would consider pardoning her, said, “I’m allowed to do it, but it’s something I haven’t thought about.” He made the remarks before he headed off to Scotland, wishing her well….

Mr. Blanche has described his trip as a neutral fact-finding mission, saying he would share details of the discussion “at the appropriate time” — yet he has also declared that the federal criminal investigation into targets beyond Ms. Maxwell and Mr. Epstein remains closed. By that standard, new interviews would appear to serve a function beyond the purposes of traditional law enforcement, unless new evidence of criminality has been discovered, current and former officials said….

Teresa Helm, who was abused by Mr. Epstein and testified against Ms. Maxwell, was blunt about the consequences of such a deal in an interview with MSNBC on Friday. “It would mean the complete crumbling of this justice system that should first and foremost stand for, fight for and protect survivors,” she said, adding that the government had accused Ms. Maxwell of perjury on top of other charges.

“She should stay in prison,” said Lisa Lloyd, 65, the lone protester at the courthouse. “This is wrong. Anyone who is concerned with justice should be appalled by this.” [….]

Some conservative news outlets friendly to Mr. Trump have begun to soften their tone about Ms. Maxwell — whom they previously described as a child sex predator — suggesting she might now be trusted to tell the truth about the case. This week, a host on Newsmax who has praised Mr. Trump went so far as to suggest that Ms. Maxwell “just might be a victim” who was not given a fair legal hearing.

That is outrageous. Maxwell is far from being a victim. She lured young girls and brought them to Epstein to be abused. He couldn’t have had access to as many victims without her help. She also participated in the abuse.

Former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori at Politico Magazine: The Epstein Files Timeline Raises Real Questions for Trump.

The revelation this week from The Wall Street Journal about Donald Trump and the so-called Epstein files was shocking — and, for those following the administration closely in recent weeks, not shocking at all.

According to the Journal, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Trump during a White House meeting in May that his name appeared multiple times in the Epstein files. The fallout continues as we speak, with the White House and Republicans in Congress facing that age-old Washington question: What did they know, and when did they know it?

We have gathered below some of the most significant statements that Trump and his senior officials have made on the topic, focusing in particular on what they have said since Trump returned to office.

Several key themes emerge. Head straight to the timeline here.

For starters, there is a conspicuous rhetorical shift that occurs after May, when Bondi and Blanche reportedly briefed Trump. The administration’s statements became more terse, and Trump in particular began pointing the finger at people — the Democratic Party and the mainstream media — that had little to nothing to do with the Epstein frenzy.

Even before May, Trump himself tended to add qualifiers to his statements that he does not typically use when he talks about investigations — like the probe into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation by special counsel John Durham — that are of interest to him.

In an interview with Fox News last June during the heat of the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump said that he would release more information if reelected but hastened to add that he was concerned about the impact of revealing more material on third parties and the possibility that there might be “phony stuff” in the government’s investigative files. More recently, Trump has said that he supports the release of “credible” information and “pertinent” grand jury testimony while accusing the media of focusing on old news.

These are concerns that Trump does not typically invoke in other settings. Taken together, Trump’s comments suggest the possibility that he suspected that there may be politically damaging information about him in the files and wanted to preemptively discredit revelations about him. Following the reported briefing in May, Trump appears to have sought to narrow the government’s public disclosures to avoid releasing information. Trump has not been accused of any wrongdoing linked to Epstein.

I’m sure he did. Read the rest at the Politico link.

Space kittens and small horse

One more from Arwa Mahdawi at The Guardian: Will the ghost of Epstein finally bring down King Trump?

Brrrr. Brrrr. Brrrrrrr. That’s the sound of Donald’s Trump’s distraction machine, which has been running at full power as the president tries his best to stop us all from talking about Jeffrey Epstein. Or, to be more specific, from talking about just how chummy he was with the dead paedophile.

Though he’s usually a master of controlling the narrative, none of Trump’s normal distraction techniques seem to be working now. Indeed, at this point we should probably rename the Streisand effect the Trump-Epstein effect because the president’s repeated insistence that there is NOTHING TO SEE HERE EXCEPT A VERY NASTY WITCH-HUNT only has people scrutinizing his dealings with Epstein more carefully. From South Park to Scotland to billboards in Times Square, Trump can’t escape his past association with Epstein.

Over the past couple of weeks, a lot of new information has come out about just how close Epstein and the president were. On 17 July, for example, the Wall Street Journal reported Trump allegedly sent Epstein a 50th birthday card in 2003 with a drawing of a naked woman and a message which said, in part, “may every day be another wonderful secret.” Trump denied writing the card and filed a $10bn lawsuit against the rightwing paper and its owner, Rupert Murdoch, a day after the outlet published the story.

Trump’s lawsuit clearly didn’t scare off the Journal because, on Wednesday, it published a new report stating Trump’s name appears “multiple times” in justice department files about Epstein. On Wednesday CNN also published newly uncovered photos and video footage of the two men together, including one of Epstein at Trump’s wedding to Marla Maples at the Plaza hotel in New York in 1993 and footage from a 1999 Victoria’s Secret fashion event. Then, on Thursday, the New York Times confirmed that Trump’s name appeared on a contributor list for a book celebrating Epstein’s 50th birthday, as the Journal first reported, along with a number of other well-known Epstein associates including Leslie Wexner, then the owner of Victoria’s Secret. The Times further reported that in 1997 the president had written a note calling Epstein “the greatest!” in a copy of Trump: The Art of the Comeback.

While none of these new bits of information are evidence of criminal conduct on Trump’s part, the president’s furious reaction to anything Epstein-related, along with his administration’s sudden U-turn on its promise to release damning evidence related to possible Epstein clients, certainly makes Trump look like he’s got something to hide. And it’s not just Trump, of course. The sudden flurry of reporting about Epstein means that a lot of powerful men, including Bill Clinton, who the Journal says also sent a birthday letter to the disgraced financier, have been having a bad couple of weeks.

The big question now is this: will the renewed interest in Epstein blow over in a few more weeks or could this deal a serious political blow to Trump and his lackeys? Trump is nicknamed the “comeback kid” for good reason: the man has an uncanny ability to shake off scandal. Still, nobody is completely untouchable; could the ghost of Epstein be the thing that finally topples King Trump from his throne? While that’s obviously an impossible question to answer, there are a few ways this could all play out.

Again, read the rest at the link.

That’s it for me today. As I said, I can’t stop thinking about the Epstein story. What’s on your mind today?

Wednesday Reads: The Jeffrey Epstein Scandal and Immigration Horrors

Posted: July 23, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because | Tags: Deportation, Donald Trump, Ghislaine Maxwell, Glass House raid, House Speaker Mike Johnson, ICE, immigration, Jeffrey Epstein, President Barack Obama, Sen. Ron Wyden, Tulsi Gabbard, Ventura County CA | 9 Comments

Good Morning!!

Trump and Epstein ogle young women at a Mar-a-Lago party.

The Epstein story is still leading the news as Trump continues to panic and try desperately to distract from the scandal.

Yesterday, in a bizarre and incoherent oval office rant, he actually accused former president Barack Obama of committing treason by ordering an investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

Trump doesn’t understand the concept of treason, which is defined in the Constitution as follows:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

But for malignant narcissist Trump, treason means any fantasized attack on him personally. ABC News: Trump accuses Obama of ‘treason’ in the Oval Office.

Days after President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated fake video showing former President Barack Obama’s arrest on his social media platform, the current president pushed conspiracy theories about Obama in the Oval Office on Tuesday, accusing him of treason without providing evidence regarding the 2016 presidential election.

“They tried to rig the election, and they got caught. And there should be very severe consequences for that,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday.

Trump’s comments come after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard submitted a criminal referral to the Department of Justice threatening the Obama administration.

NBC News: Obama pushes back on Trump’s ‘outrageous’ and ‘bizarre’ treason claim.

Former President Barack Obama’s office issued a rare rebuke of President Donald Trump on Tuesday after the president accused his predecessor of having committed “treason” and rigging the 2016 and 2020 elections.

“Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response,” Obama spokesperson Patrick Rodenbush said. “But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.”

When reporters on Tuesday asked Trump about the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, he pivoted to what he called Obama’s “criminality.”

“After what they did to me — and whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people. Obama’s been caught directly,” Trump told reporters. “What they did in 2016 and 2020 is very criminal. It’s criminal at the highest level. So that’s really the things you should be talking about.”

“Look, he’s guilty. It’s not a question,” Trump added. “This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election.”

Imagine if any other president had said something like this. But Trump gets away with it.

Trump was referring to claims made by National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe in social media posts and television appearances that they had found Obama administration officials manipulated intelligence and conspired to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s electoral victory in 2016.

Gabbard posted on social media on Friday that she was making a criminal referral to the Justice Department.

At an event with congressional Republicans later Tuesday, Trump praised Gabbard and again accused Obama of being part of an effort to rig the elections. “These are vicious, horrible people,” he said of the former president and others.

Trump sits next to Epstein with two Don Jr. and Ivanka

Of course the Supreme Court claims the Constitution makes presidents immune from prosecution for official acts. But Trump is obviously freaking out about what releasing the Epstein files would reveal about him and desperately lashing out at his political enemies.

This is analysis by Stephen Collinson at CNN: Trump’s latest bid to end Epstein storm: Weaponizing the federal government.

Donald Trump’s bid to smother the uproar over accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein shows that he’s already achieved one goal his critics most feared from his second presidency.

The Justice Department and the head of the US intelligence community are now openly operating as fully weaponized tools to pursue the president’s personal political needs in a degradation of a governing system meant to be an antidote to king-like patronage.

This new dynamic underpinned a wild Oval Office press appearance by Trump on Tuesday, his latest attempt to put out the Epstein fire that had only the now-familiar effect of feeding the flames.

The extent of the president’s capture of two key agencies that are vital to keeping Americans safe was revealed when a reporter asked a question about his administration’s refusal to open all files related to the Epstein case.

The president pivoted to a tirade against Barack Obama, accusing the former president of staging a treasonous coup against him — basing his assault on a convenient and misleading memo about Russia’s 2016 election meddling that was released last week by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

The Justice Department has also been activated, yet again, to give Trump cover.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced Tuesday that he will take the highly unusual move of meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell — who was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for carrying out a yearslong scheme with Epstein to groom and sexually abuse underage girls — to ask what she knows but hasn’t so far told. Epstein died in jail while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

“I don’t know anything about it,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Tuesday.

This seems a stretch, since Blanche is Trump’s former personal lawyer and plans to speak with a prisoner who has a clear incentive to offer testimony that could help a president who has the power to let her out of prison.

Read the rest at CNN.

Meanwhile, Trump sycophant House speaker Mike Johnson took action by cancelling the rest of the House session. Paul Waldman at MSNBC: The Epstein fallout literally shut down the House early for the summer.

It’s been a week and a half since President Donald Trump complained on Truth Social that his many, many accomplishments were being overshadowed, “all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.” There is a kind of truth in Trump’s lament: Six years after his death in a Manhattan jail cell, Epstein lives on — and he has Republicans in something approaching panic. It’s gotten so bad that House Republicans apparently decided to shut the chamber down early before leaving town.

Things fell apart for the GOP in the House Rules Committee, which determines which legislation reaches the House floor. Knowing how much GOP leaders would like this issue to just go away, Democrats attempted to force the House to vote on releasing all the information the government has on Epstein. “To avoid embarrassing votes on Epstein,” NBC News reported, “Republicans decided to recess the committee and not attempt to pass a rule for bills this week. Without a rule, Republicans would be left with nothing to vote on after Wednesday.” Instead, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., began the chamber’s five-week summer recess early, apparently in hopes that by the time the members return in the fall, the affair will all have blown over.

The whole episode recalls the famous line from “All the President’s Men”: “The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of control.”

Jeffrey Epstein at Trump’s and Marla Maples’ wedding.

Waldman notes that most Republicans don’t buy all the conspiracy theories cooked up by their base, but the Epstein conspiracy theories are base in reality.

…[U]nfortunately for the president and his party, the public interest and the political debate around Epstein concerns real life, including his relationship with Trump. Epstein really was a fabulously wealthy and well-connected pedophile and sex trafficker. He really did die in jail, awaiting trial on sex trafficking and conspiracy charges. Both Trump and Vice President JD Vance really did encourage speculation that Epstein did not commit suicide. There really are a huge number of documents from the government’s investigation of Epstein that have not been made public.

And before the pair had a “falling-out” (in the president’s words) in the mid-2000s, Epstein really was good friends with Donald Trump. “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump said in 2002. “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.”

After reiterating that Epstein’s death was a suicide and the case was closed, the administration faced a revolt from right-wing influencers who had been telling their audiences for years that the new Trump administration would blow the lid off everything Epstein was involved in. Then Trump begged people to talk about something, anything else, though his pleadings are falling on deaf ears. And on Tuesday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that — at Attorney General Pam Bondi’s request — he intends to talk to Ghislaine Maxwell, currently serving a 20-year sentence for conspiring to aid Epstein in sex trafficking. The idea that Bondi and Blanche — both Trump loyalists who previously served among the president’s personal lawyers — are suddenly interested in Maxwell for solely apolitical reasons strains credulity, to say the least.

Waldman writes that Republicans are faced with an uprising from the base and Trump’s desire to prevent any further Epstein revelations, and so they decided to get out of town instead of taking a vote on the release of the Epstein files.

New Epstein Revelations

CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck: Exclusive: Newly discovered photos and video shed fresh light on Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

Newly uncovered archived video footage and photos reveal fresh details about Donald Trump’s past relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Photos from 1993 confirm for the first time that Epstein attended Trump’s 1993 wedding to Marla Maples. Epstein’s attendance at the ceremony at the Plaza Hotel was not widely known until now.

In addition, footage from a 1999 Victoria’s Secret fashion event in New York shows Trump and Epstein laughing and chatting together ahead of the runway event. CNN’s KFile uncovered the raw footage during a review of archival video of Trump at events in the 1990s and 2000s. Trump and Epstein appeared together in at least one video among the limited archival footage reviewed.

The new footage and photos, which have not been widely reported and pre-date any of Epstein’s known legal issues, come amid renewed scrutiny of Trump’s past relationship with Epstein. The Justice Department’s recent decision not to release long-promised files related to Epstein has spurred outrage in some corners of Trump’s MAGA movement, where people developed an expectation for bombshell revelations into Epstein’s alleged co-conspirators.

In a brief call with CNN on Tuesday, President Trump, asked about the wedding photos, responded, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” before repeatedly calling CNN “fake news” and hanging up.

In a statement to CNN, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said, “These are nothing more than out-of-context frame grabs of innocuous videos and pictures of widely attended events to disgustingly infer something nefarious.

“The fact is that the President kicked him out of his club for being a creep. This is nothing more than a continuation of the fake news stories concocted by the Democrats and the liberal media.”

Read the rest at watch videos at CNN.

Greg Sargent at The New Republic: Trump’s Epstein Fiasco Takes Darker Turn as Dem Senator Drops New Bomb.

A few days ago, as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal gripped Washington, Senator Ron Wyden offered a striking revelation in an interview with The New York Times. The Oregon Democrat said that his investigators had discovered that four big banks had flagged to the Treasury Department $1.5 billion in potentially suspicious money transfers involving Epstein, much of which appeared to be related to his massive sex-trafficking network.

Trump with Jeffrey Epstein at Victoria’s Secret event in 1999.

The revelation—which emerged via Wyden’s work as ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee—ratified widespread suspicions that there is still much we don’t know about Epstein’s relations with some of the most powerful and wealthy elites in the world in the lead-up to his 2019 arrest on sex-trafficking charges.

Now Wyden is ratcheting things up once again. Wyden’s office just sent a new letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi—which The New Republic obtained—suggesting seven potent lines of inquiry that the Justice Department could follow, right now, to dig more deeply into Epstein’s web of financial relations with global elites.

“I am convinced that the DOJ ignored evidence found in the U.S. Treasury Department’s Epstein file, a binder that contains extensive details on the mountains of cash Epstein received from prominent businessmen that Epstein used to finance his criminal network,” Wyden writes in the letter.

The Treasury Department has this information because that’s where banks file suspicious activity reports, or SARS. Wyden’s letter says his staff has documented that Epstein-related filings by banks contain “information on more than 4,725 wire transfers involving Epstein’s accounts, all of which merit further investigation.”

Wyden’s letter seeks to demonstrate what the Trump administration is not doing to examine Epstein’s financial relations with the rich and powerful….

Wyden’s move here is in some ways a trolling exercise, since DOJ won’t act on it. But such trolling by lawmakers can be constructive if it communicates new information to the public or highlights the failure of others in power to exercise oversight and impose accountability. Wyden’s letter does both.

Immigration News

I want to recommend a powerful article by Stephen W. Thrasher that was published at Literary Hub: What ICE’s Assault on Ventura County, California Means for the Rest of America. The piece is very long, so I can’t really summarize it with a few quoted paragraphs. I hope you’ll go read the whole thing.

“Mom is gone. They took her away.”

These are the words of an 8-year-old Mexican-American girl I will call Maria, in my hometown of Oxnard, California. She spoke them to her summer school teachers this past week, one of whom is a friend of mine.

Maria’s mother was disappeared by ICE, the worst fear for many families in Ventura County, which emerged on the world stage recently as an ICE raid on the Glass House cannabis farm in Camarillo resulted in the death of farmer Jaime Alanís, the kidnapping of California State University Channel Island professor Jonathan Caravello, and the disappearance and presumed deportation of at least 200 farmers.

Fortunately for Maria, her two tias picked her up the day her mom was kidnapped, and “they took me to Toppers, and I got to eat the ice cream cookie!” Her teacher—I’ll call her Miss Garvin—told me how Maria had never had the ice cream cookie at Toppers before, and that she was trying to hold onto this treat. It seemed as if the adults in Maria’s life were letting her have anything special to distract her—because they did not know when, or even if, she was going to see her mother again.

Miss Garvin told me that “it was a shitshow of a day” as she kept Maria in her line of vision throughout the breakfast and lunch periods.

“It broke my heart,” she told me, to see this normally vivacious girl sitting shell shocked and mute around her friends.

Like Maria, I hail from Ventura County, and am a product of its Title 1 schools. From six to nine years old, I was bused through Oxnard’s bountiful agricultural fields and (literally) across the railroad tracks to the La Colonia neighborhood, where Ramona School educated students like me pretty well despite how economically neglected we were. (I still remember how few streetlights there were when we were bused before dawn, and that there were chickens running through the pot-holed streets just outside our school’s windows).

A bit more:

Like Maria, my biological mother disappeared when I was about her age, though not because she was kidnapped. (She just disappeared for three years while no one, including the private detective my dad and stepmother hired, could find any trace of her beyond an abandoned car.) Like Maria, my survival depended on the care of an Oxnard teacher like Miss Garvin.

Like Maria, I am also a product of Ventura County’s fields, which gave me a place to play, taught me about labor politics, employed the vast majority of my classmates’ parents, and fed me.

But you, wherever you are reading this, you are likely a product of Ventura County’s fields, too—especially if you’ve ever eaten a strawberry. Strawberries are harvested with backbreaking work usually done by undocumented migrant farmers. Oxnard is the largest producer of strawberries in California and is known as the “strawberry capital of the world.” Our 93,000 acres of farmland provides California, the United States, and even other countries not just various berries but avocados, mushrooms, corn, citrus, and even marijuana.

And you are also a product of Ventura County because the Oxnard plain is a hot bed of radical politics. Historically, Ventura County has played a pivotal role in the evolution of labor organizing, as Cesar Chavez lived there for a time and had a strong base of operations during the rise of United Farm Workers.

Just as importantly, Ventura County is playing a crucial role in the attempt to stop fascism right now, for the good people of Ventura, Camarillo, and Oxnard are not taking ICE raids without a fight. Since Trump came back into office, groups like VC Defensa and the 805 Immigration Coalition have been training volunteers to patrol for ICE agents. And when they’re spotted, a call goes out for community members to show up—and people from all walks of life (students, citizens, senior citizens) do.

That’s what happened on July 11: a scout patrol spotted ICE agents and tipped off hundreds of people who showed up at the Glass House Farm to bear witness to the ICE raid.

Scene from Glass House raid in Ventural Country, CA

During that raid, a man was chased off a rooftop to his by masked ICE agents. An activist professor from Cal State Jonathan Caravello was also arrested and jailed after he tried to help a man escape from a tear gas cannister under his wheelchair. Thrasher describes the state of terror that immigrants face in Ventura county. He writes:

If Ventura County falls, we are all going to fall. And the way people there have been treated as threats for interfering with the duties of police—a criminal charge I briefly faced as a professor under similar circumstances as the CSUCI professor—reveal the terror hundreds of millions could face if ICE does, in fact, get a six-fold increase in funding and becomes a bigger internal force than most countries’ militaries….

Even without the threat of ICE, farming has long been identified as one of the most dangerous jobs in America. Given that “more people die while farming than while serving as police officers, firefighters or other emergency responders,” the idea that ICE officers fear for their lives while approaching farmers is absurd.

But the terror of ICE has pushed immigrant families in Ventura County to their deaths in ways fast and slow.

Immigration expert Jeff Crisp at The New York Times (gift link): Trump Is Building a Machine to Disappear People.

In May, the United States flew a group of eight migrants to Djibouti, a small state in the Horn of Africa. For weeks, the men — who are from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and South Sudan — were detained in a converted shipping container on a U.S. military base. More than a month later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the men, who had all been convicted of serious crimes, could be transferred to their final destination: South Sudan, a country on the brink of famine and civil war. Tom Homan, the border czar, acknowledged that he didn’t know what happened to them once they were released from U.S. custody. “As far as we’re concerned,” he said, “they’re free.”

Deporting foreign nationals to countries other than their homeland has quickly become a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s immigration policy. Thousands of people have been sent to countries in the Western Hemisphere, including Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico and Panama. At a recent summit of West African leaders, President Trump pressed them to admit deportees from the United States, reportedly emphasizing that assisting in migration was essential to improving commercial ties with the United States. All told, administration officials have reached out to dozens of states to try to strike deals to accept deportees. The administration is making progress: Last week, it sent five men to the tiny, landlocked country of Eswatini in southern Africa after their home countries allegedly “refused to take them back,” according to an assistant homeland security secretary, Tricia McLaughlin. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In some ways, this is nothing new. It has become increasingly common for the world’s most prosperous countries to relocate immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees to places with which they have little or no prior connection. Previous U.S. administrations from both parties have sought third-country detentions as easy fixes. In the 1990s, Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both sent thousands of Haitian refugees to detention camps in Guantánamo Bay before forcibly repatriating most of them to Haiti.

What is new about the Trump administration’s deportation efforts, unlike previous European or even past U.S. attempts, is their breadth and scale, effectively transforming migrant expulsions into a tool for international leverage. By deporting foreign nationals to often unstable third countries, the Trump administration is not only creating a novel class of exiles with little hope of returning to either the United States or their country of origin, but also explicitly using these vulnerable populations as bargaining chips in a wider strategy of diplomatic and geopolitical deal making.

This strategy marks a significant evolution in a practice that has been gaining traction throughout the developed world. In the early 2000s, Australia devised the so-called Pacific Solution, an arrangement that diverted asylum seekers arriving by boat or intercepted at sea to holding centers in the island states of Nauru and Papua New Guinea in exchange for benefits, including development aid and financial support. In 2016, amid what was then the largest displacement of people in Europe since World War II, the European Union struck a deal that allowed it to send migrants arriving in Greece from Turkey through irregular means back to Turkey — to the tune of six billion euros.

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

The Washington Post (gift link): U.S. deportees, freed from Salvadoran prison, describe ‘horror movie.’

Julio González Jr. had agreed to be deported to Venezuela. When the 36-year-old office cleaner and house painter boarded the flight in Texas in March, he assumed it would take him back to his home country.

Instead, the plane landed in El Salvador.

“The horror movie started there,” González said Tuesday.

When the shackled men refused to get off the plane, González and two other detainees told The Washington Post that they were yanked by their feet, beaten and shoved off board as the plane’s crew began to cry. Dozens of migrants were forced onto a bus and driven to a massive gray complex. They were ordered to kneel there with their foreheads pressed against the ground as guards pointed guns directly at them.

“Welcome to El Salvador, you sons of b—–s,”a hooded figure told them, González recalled. They had arrived at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT. The United States has paid the Salvadoran government of President Nayib Bukele $6 million to hold hundreds of migrants rounded up in President Donald Trump’s mass removals — many without ties to El Salvador, many without criminal charges — at the world’s largest prison.

In the four months they spent there, the detainees said, they were beaten repeatedly with wooden bats. González was robbed of thousands of dollars, he said, and denied access to lawyers or a chance to call his family. Joen Suárez, 23, was taken several times to a dark room known as La Isla — or “the island” — and beaten, kicked and insulted. Angel Blanco Marin, 22, said he was hit so hard he lost half of a molar. He asked for painkillers and medical attention but was given none for more than a month.

The three men returned to their family’s homes in Venezuela this week, among the 252 Venezuelans released from CECOT and taken to the South American country in a deal between the U.S. and Venezuelan governments. They arrived on two flights in exchange for the release of 10 American citizens and permanent U.S. residents imprisoned in Venezuela.

Again, use the gift link if you want to read the rest.

I’ll end there, and post a few more stories in the comment thread. What else is happening? Please feel free to share.

Lazy Caturday Reads: Is the Epstein Scandal Doing Real Damage to Trump?

Posted: July 19, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because | Tags: Donald Trump, Epstein Files, FBI, Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein, MAGA base, Pam Bpndi, Sen. Dick Durbin, Sen. Ron Wyden, sexual abuse of children, Stacey Williams | 13 Comments

Good Morning!!

Cat reading news, Deven Rex

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.

From Ron Filipkowski’s summary of yesterday’s politics news at Meidas:

… 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.

Tyler Pager at The New York Times on Trump’s claim he never draws pictures: Trump Says He Doesn’t ‘Draw Pictures.’ But Many of His Sketches Sold at Auction.

President Trump mounted a vigorous rebuttal on Thursday night to a report in The Wall Street Journal that he sent a birthday greeting with a sexually suggestive drawing to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003.

His alibi: “I don’t draw pictures,” he wrote on Truth Social.

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.”

This is from historian Heather Cox Richardson’s recap of the day at Letters from an American:

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.

Dan Mangan at CNBC: Trump sues Murdoch for $10 billion over WSJ story on Epstein birthday letter.

President Donald Trump on Friday followed through on his threat to sue media mogul Rupert Murdoch after his Wall Street Journal published an article saying that Trump sent his then-friend Jeffrey Epstein a “bawdy” letter for Epstein’s 50th birthday.

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.

David Smith at The Guardian: ‘The ghost of Epstein is haunting Trump’s presidency’: inside the ‘Maga’ revolt.

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.”

Wednesday Reads: Trump’s Nightmare Bill and the Coming Concentration Camps

Posted: July 2, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Donald Trump, immigration, just because | Tags: Alligator Alcatraz, concentration camps, denaturalization, Donald Trump, immigration, Kiristi Noem, mass deportation, Stephen Miller, Trump's big beautiful bill | 11 Comments

Good Afternoon!!

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.

Trump’s Nightmare Bill

Jonathan Cohn at The Bulwark: An Ignominious Bill Passed By an Inglorious Body.

….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.

Jennifer Rubin at The Contrarian: The bottom line: The bill is cruel. Republicans don’t care about hurting people.

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;

Could not get care from Veterans Affairs.

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.”

Click the link to read the rest.

Trump’s Deportation Goals and Alligator Alcatraz

The bill provides massive amount of money for immigration enforcement. William Kristol at The Bulwark: How to Turn the U.S. Into an Immigration Police State in One Big Bill.

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.

Melissa Gira Grant at The New Republic: The Grand Opening of an American Concentration Camp.

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 to The Palm Beach Post. An executive order issued by DeSantis cited a nonexistent “emergency” to get around the legal process for building on the site.

Read the rest at TNR.

Mike Masnick at TechDirt: Trump Launches America’s Newest Concentration Camp, Complete With Tacky Merch.

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.”

For more details on the new concentration camp, read this very good article by Chelsea Bailey and Isabel Rosales at CNN: ‘Alligator Alcatraz’: What to know about Florida’s new controversial migrant detention facility.

Analysis by Robert Tait at The Guardian: Trump’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ tour was a calculated celebration of the dystopian.

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.

Read the whole thing at The Guardian.

Yesterday in Florida, Trump again talked about deporting U.S. citizens. José Olivares at The Guardian: Trump seizes on ‘moral character’ loophole as way to revoke citizenship.

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.

Mostly Monday Reads: Which Century are we in?

Posted: May 5, 2025 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: American Fascists, kakistocracy, religious extremists, Republicans against democracy, SCOTUS, tariffs, Threats to Democracy, Treason and Sedition Republican Style, Unitary Executive Authority | Tags: @repeat1968, Camp Alcatraz, Crazy #FARTUS Policies, Donald Trump, John Buss, misogyny, SCOTUS, Social Security, Theory of Unitary Executive, Trump Tariffs, unemployment | 13 Comments

“Size matters.” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

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.

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 gender neutral now. I know I can’t even properly pronounce most of them, let alone identify their sexual preferences. MEDTECHDIVE has this headline: Trump policies are upending healthcare technology. “Track the effect on the medtech industry here. Policies and actions reshaping the healthcare industry began pouring out of President Donald Trump’s White House nearly from day one. Follow the changes affecting the medical device industry.”

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 a National 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:

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. “Trump threatens a 100% tariff on foreign-made films, saying the movie industry in the US is dying.”

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.

Philip Bump–writing at WAPO–has an interesting Op-Ed up today. “America’s least American president. Donald Trump isn’t making America great again. He’s making it into something else entirely.”

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 various political 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 new extremes 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 unitary executive 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 judicial precedents 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!

What’s on your Reading and Blogging list today?

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