I haven’t been feeling well for the past several days, and I’ve only been following the news superficially. There is so much going on, but I’ll do my best. Here’s the latest.
Trump is scheduled to give a speech from the White House tonight at 9PM.
President Donald Trump intends to preview his agenda for next year and beyond in a live speech from the White House on Wednesday night. His remarks are coming at a crucial time as he tries to rebuild his steadily eroding popularity.
The White House offered few details about what the Republican president intends to emphasize in the 9 p.m. EST speech. Public polling shows most U.S. adults are frustrated with his handling of the economy as inflation picked up after his tariffs raised prices and hiring slowed.
In 2026, Trump and his party face a referendum on their leadership as the nation heads into the midterm elections that will decide control of the House and the Senate.
Trump has said that he thinks more Americans would back him if they simply heard him describe his track record. Administration officials say investment commitments for new factories will reverse the recent decline in manufacturing jobs and that consumer activity will improve dramatically as people receive increased tax refunds next year.
“It has been a great year for our Country, and THE BEST IS YET TO COME!” Trump said in a Tuesday social media post announcing the speech.
Sorry, Grandpa. Your economy sucks because of your idiotic tariffs, your cruel mass deportations, and your general incompetence.
Tariffs are unpopular, prices remain stubbornly high and Americans are souring on President Trump’s handling of the economy.
So Mr. Trump has reprised a familiar political strategy: promise people cash.
The president has repeatedly floated the idea of sending one-time $2,000 rebate checks to many families.Credit…Eric Lee for The New York Times
The White House is trying to tamp down Americans’ economic anxieties by dangling the prospect of checks and other paydays next year, hoping that the money might assuage voters who blame the president for their rising cost of living.
Mr. Trump, who is set to address the nation on Wednesday night, has repeatedly teased the idea of sending one-time $2,000 rebate checks to many families, funded using money collected from his sweeping global tariffs. But he has not devised a detailed plan for providing the rebates, an expensive policy that Republicans in Congress must approve and one that they have not yet considered.
The president has also begun hyping up the tax refunds that Americans are slated to receive in 2026. For many people, these cash payments are expected to be larger than they were last year, after Republicans adopted a sprawling set of tax cuts in July.
Both Mr. Trump and members of his administration have periodically drawn an equivalence between the supposed tariff rebates and the enacted tax law. They have claimed the money could bolster the economy and alleviate some of the financial strains on families, even at a time when Mr. Trump maintains that much of the talk about affordability is a “hoax.”
“Next year is projected to be the largest tax refund season ever, and we’re going to be giving back refunds out of the tariffs, because we’ve taken in literally trillions of dollars,” Mr. Trump said at a cabinet meeting last week. “And we’re going to be giving a nice dividend to the people, in addition to reducing debt.”
But economists take a dimmer view. Even if Americans were to delight in a series of new government-issued checks, the payments would hardly address the reasons that prices remain so high — including a shortage in housing that has driven up rents and mortgages and the global tariffs that have made imports more expensive. And the money that may soon be sloshing around the economy could end up worsening inflation, undermining Mr. Trump’s own economic goals.
Alex Durante, a senior economist at the Tax Foundation, said that simply “pumping money” into the economy — without any other underlying changes — threatened to “just generate a cycle where you continue to get higher prices.”
When Politico recently asked Donald Trump to grade the current U.S. economy, he replied “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.” He made this boast at a time when actual economic data were still scarce, a consequence of the government shutdown that stopped or delayed key information about the state of the job market.
Yesterday the report on employment during the month of November finally arrived. And the message of the report on the state of the US economy was clear: A+++++ my A++. While it’s too soon to declare that we’re in a recession, the data are at least pre-recessionary: that is, the numbers are weak enough that we should be seriously worried that a recession is coming. And that’s a state of affairs completely at odds with Trump’s rose-colored — spray-tanned? — picture.
I’ll talk about the reasons the gap between Trump’s big boasts and the glum reality matters in a minute. First, however, let’s talk about what we learned from yesterday’s report.
Most importantly, the data show a weak labor market. Employment isn’t falling off a cliff, but job growth has been weak and hasn’t kept pace with the number of people seeking work. The headline unemployment rate in November was 4.6 percent, up from an average of 4 percent in 2024. That number is close to triggering the Sahm Rule, an economic rule of thumb devised by Claudia Sahm, a former economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, that has historically been highly successful at identifying the early stages of a recession.
We can’t do a strict application of the Sahm Rule yet because Sahm’s method is based on the average unemployment rate over the past three months. Unfortunately, the shutdown prevented the Bureau of Labor Statistics from collecting key data in October. But if we do an interpolation of October’s unemployment rate by averaging over September’s rate of 4.4% and November’s rate of 4.6%, we can estimate that October’s unemployment rate was 4.5%. And those 3 months of unemployment numbers bring us within a whisker of the unemployment rise that, according to the Sahm Rule, signals that a recession is on the horizon.
The state of the economy looks even worse if we take a wider view of the labor market. The BLS calculates 6 different measures of unemployment. The most commonly cited number is U-3 — the number of workers who are actively seeking jobs but haven’t found them. But the broadest measure is U-6, which includes underemployed workers stuck in part-time employment and discouraged workers who have temporarily given up job search. And U-6 has risen sharply since January, when Trump took office:
Source: BLS
Further evidence consistent with a poor and deteriorating job market is data showing that the number of job-seekers who are long-term unemployed – that is, have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more – has risen by almost a third (from 1.45 million to 1.91 million) since 2024. This means that the unemployed are finding it harder to find jobs.
Read more details at the Substack link.
Most Americans aren’t stupid. They can see how much prices have gone up on necessities like food and electricity. Trump is losing popularity even with his MAGA base.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: "I think the midterms are gonna be very hard for Republicans. I'm one of the people that's willing to admit the truth and say I don't see Republicans winning the midterms right now, so that doesn't bode well for Mike Johnson."
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) on Tuesday said President Donald Trump has “real problems” within the Republican Party, adding in an interview with CNN that the president is out of touch with voters on key issues such as affordability.
Greene told Kaitlan Collins on “The Source” that the “dam is breaking” in terms of Trump’s hold onsupport within the party and that she expects Republicans to struggle in next year’s midterm elections.
“I think the midterms are going to be very hard for Republicans,” Greene said. “I’m one of the people that’s willing to admit the truth and say I don’t see Republicans winning the midterms right now.” [….]
Greene had carved out a high-profile role as one of Trump’s most vocal allies, first in the “Make America Great Again” movement and then with her support for the “America First” agenda. But after weeks of speaking out against the president on several issues, Greene and Trump had an acrimonious public split last month after she joined with Democrats on a discharge position to compel a House vote calling on the Justice Department to release files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein….
Speaking to The Washington Post this week, Greene described herself as a “bellwether” who is closely attuned to Trump’s base. “I say it, and then within four to six months, everybody’s saying the same thing,” she said….
“He’s got real problems with Republicans within the House and the Senate that will be breaking with him on more things to come,” she added.
Greene also said Trump’s supporters “didn’t appreciate” the president’s reaction to the death of Rob Reiner, who was found stabbed to death alongside his wife, photographer Michele Singer Reiner, in their Los Angeles home Sunday. The couple’s son Nick Reiner faces two counts of first-degree murder, among other charges, in their deaths.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: "What I'd like to see from the president is empathy for Americans. Donald Trump is a billionaire and he's the president. When he looks into a camera and says 'affordability is a hoax,' he's talking to Americans that are suffering and have been for many years now."
Four House Republicans joined Democrats Wednesday to force a House vote on a straight three-year extension of the enhanced Obamacare tax credits that will expire Dec. 31, delivering a sharp rebuke to Speaker Mike Johnson and other GOP leaders.
Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Mike Lawler of New York, Rob Bresnahan of Pennsylvania and Ryan Mackenzie of Pennsylvania signed the discharge petition filed by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — hours after House GOP leaders rejected attempts by Fitzpatrick and other Republican moderates to seek a floor vote on extending the subsidies used by more than 20 million Americans.
Fitzpatrick said in a late-night House Rules Committee meeting Tuesday that “the only thing worse than a clean extension … would be expiration, and I would make that decision.” Lawler added that “the only feasible path forward is a discharge petition” if GOP leader reject a floor vote.
Under House rules, a completed discharge petition is subject to a waiting period, meaning no vote could happen until next month — though Johnson could choose to move sooner.
“We have worked for months to craft a two-party solution to address these expiring healthcare credits,” Fitzpatrick said in a statement Wednesday. “Our only request was a Floor vote on this compromise, so that the American People’s voice could be heard on this issue. That request was rejected. … Unfortunately, it is House leadership themselves that have forced this outcome.”
Jeffries told reporters Wednesday his discharge petition is “the most straightforward path to ensuring that tens of millions of Americans don’t have their health care ripped away from them because of the expiration of the Affordable Care Act tax credits.”
"It's idiotic, it's political malpractice," Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) told reporters Tuesday of Johnson refusing to give them an ACA extension vote.Lawler, and other moderate Republicans didn't rule out joining Democrats to force a vote on a three-year extension of the subsidies, Axios reported.
Donald Trump is worried that Republicans aren’t as afraid of him as they used to be. Despite his self-billing as a dealmaker, the president has only ever had one tool to control his party: fear. GOP politicians have been afraid of career damage and literal physical harm if they crossed him. Trump is not above reminding elected officials that he has unhinged followers who are known to be violent. But as his approval ratings fall and the 2026 midterm elections inch closer, it seems Republicans are slightly less worried about the president’s wrath.
The first indicator was the House vote on Nov. 18 to release the Epstein files against Trump’s expressed wishes. But the biggest sign that the president’s grip on power is weakening came last week, when a majority of Republicans in the Indiana statehouse struck down a gerrymandering bill Trump had demanded.
As I argued in the latest Standing Room Only newsletter, this context helps explain why Trump responded to the death of beloved director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele with an ugliness that’s shocking — even for this president. Although the Los Angeles Police Department had arrested the couple’s son for the apparent homicide, Trump insinuated on Truth Social that it was one of his own followers who killed the Reiners out of revenge for their anti-Trump activism. He doubled down when asked about it by reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. The message was hard to miss: If you oppose Trump, he wishes you dead.
These are promising signs, but it’s not worth holding your breath waiting for GOP politicians to openly turn on a president who demands absolute loyalty. Instead of public rebellion, most Republicans seem to be engaged in a form of quiet quitting. They won’t go out of their way to resist Trump, but they are losing enthusiasm for defending him. They’re struggling to hide their frustration or their scheming for a post-Trump world. Overall, the posture is one of lying low, waiting for the old man to be gone so they can begin the project of rebuilding the GOP and their own careers in a post-Trump era.
Read the rest at Salon.
Trump is also becoming noticeably less involved in actually running the government (gift link): The White House Is a Lost Cause.
There is a presidency at work in Washington, but it is not clear that there is a president at work in the Oval Office.
Ask Donald Trump about the goings on of his administration, and there is a good chance he’ll defer to a deputy rather than answer the question. “I don’t know her,” he said when asked about his nominee for surgeon general, Casey Means, earlier this year. “I listened to the recommendation of Bobby,” he said, pointing to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services.
Ask Trump for insight into why his administration made a choice or to explain a particular decision, and he’ll be at a loss for words. Ask him to comment on a scandal? He’ll plead ignorance. “I know nothing about it,” Trump said last week, when asked about the latest tranche of photographs released from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein.
None of this on its own means the president isn’t working or paying attention to the duties of his office. But consider the rest of the evidence. He is by most accounts isolated from the outside world. He does not travel the country and rarely meets with ordinary Americans outside the White House. He is shuttled from one Trump resort to another to play golf and hold court with donors, supporters and hangers-on.
Ronald Reagan took regular meetings with congressional leaders to discuss his legislative agenda; George H.W. Bush spearheaded negotiations with the nation’s allies and led the United States to war in Iraq; and George W. Bush was, for better or worse, “the decider” who performed leadership for the cameras as much as he tried to exercise it from the Oval Office. Trump is a ubiquitous cultural presence, but there is no outward sign that he is an active participant in running the national government. He was mostly absent during discussions of his signature legislation — the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act — and practically AWOL during the monthlong government shutdown.
It is difficult for any president to get a clear read on the state of the nation; it takes work and discipline to clear the distance between the office and the people. But Trump, in his second term, does not seem to care about the disconnect. Abraham Lincoln once remarked that it would “never do for a president to have guards with drawn sabers at his door, as if he fancied he were, or were trying to be, or were assuming to be, an emperor.” A president has to be engaged — attentive to both the government and the public he was elected to serve.
Trump is neither. He is uninterested in anyone except his most devoted fans, and would rather collect gifts from foreign businessmen than take the reins of his administration. “The president doesn’t know and never will,” Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, said in an interview with Vanity Fair, commenting on the work of Elon Musk in the first months of the year. “He doesn’t know the details of these smallish agencies.”
A bit more:
Russell Vought
Instead, the work of the White House has been delegated to a handful of high-level advisers. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, is the de facto shadow president for domestic affairs. As one senior government official told ProPublica, “It feels like we work for Russ Vought. He has centralized decision-making power to an extent that he is the commander in chief.” It was Vought who orchestrated the administration’s assault on the federal bureaucracy, including the wholesale destruction of U.S.A.I.D. It was Vought who either froze or canceled hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for anti-poverty programs, H.I.V. reduction initiatives and research into science, medicine and technology. And it is Vought who has been pushing the boundaries of executive power as he attempts to turn the federal government into little more than an extension of the personal will of the president — as channeled through himself, of course.
If Vought is the nation’s shadow president for domestic policy, then Stephen Miller is its shadow president for internal security. Miller, Trump’s top domestic policy adviser, is using the president’s authority to try to transform the ethnic mix of the country — to make America white again, or at least whiter than it is now. He is the primary force behind the expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection into a roving deportation force. He has pushed both agencies to step up their enforcement operations, targeting schools, restaurants, farms and other work sites and detaining anyone agents can get their hands on, regardless of citizenship or legal status. It is Miller who is behind the militarization of ICE, the use of the National Guard to occupy Democrat-led cities and assist deportation efforts, and the plan to blanket the United States with a network of detention camps for unauthorized immigrants and anyone else caught in his dragnet.
In other words, the Nazis are running White House policy. Use the gift link to read more.
The latest White House mess is the Vanity Fair profile of Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
Susie Wiles generally helps quietly shape headlines. She is rarely the focus of them.
That changed in dramatic fashion Tuesday after Vanity Fair published a deeply reported profile of the 68-year-old White House chief of staff, whose decades-long career in politics has been defined by a measured, steady-the-ship tone, never one that could be construed as undermining her boss.
In the two-part Vanity Fair piece — which included 11 interviews over nearly a year, with the White House’s cooperation — Wiles comes off as far more candid than her public persona. She not only speaks openly about both President Donald Trump and those who make up the core of his administration, but appears to acknowledge that at times she has been at odds with some of the policies that have been central to Trump’s second term. While not unusual for a chief of staff to disagree with the president they serve, those concerns generally remain part of private conversations.
Susie Wiles
Wiles revealed there had been “huge disagreements” over implementing tariffs, acknowledged that the administration must “look harder” at its process for mass deportation and said she had to “get on board” with Trump’s decision to give blanket pardons to Jan. 6 defendants. She said she initially believed only those who did not commit violent acts should be pardoned.
The profile prompted an all-hands-on-deck pushback from the White House and Trump’s political orbit. The central talking point became that the profile lacked context, and supporters blasted the outlet for being unfair rather than offering any direct refutation of the authenticity of quotes or what was reported.
Wiles herself also offered rare public condemnation.
“Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story,” she posted on social media. “I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.”
In an interview with the New York Post, Trump defended his top staffer.
“I think from what I hear, the facts were wrong, and it was a very misguided interviewer, purposely misguided,”he said.
Trump added “she’s fantastic” when asked if he continues to have full confidence in Wiles.
JJ spoke for me in her post yesterday. I too am completely exhausted by the news as well as personal stuff. I imagine any American who is paying attention is struggling to take it all in. I hope I can make some kind of sense today.
Trump is out of the country for awhile. He’s over in the UK where they are sucking up to him in hopes of getting more friendly treatment on his ridiculous tariffs and other policies. The Brits absolutely despise Trump, so there will be large protests. The powers that be are trying to keep Trump away from the protesters as much as possible.
President Donald Trump is set to spend nearly all of his two-day state visit to Britain this week behind closed doors — or, at least, manicured hedges — far from massive planned protests and without delivering a traditional address to potential critics in Parliament, which is scheduled to recess as his plane speeds over the Atlantic.
Although the invitation from King Charles III appears designed to please a president whose “America First” policies are upending trade and security relationships, that doesn’t mean Trump’s royal moment can’t be derailed. The president and the king have differences on a laundry list of geopolitical issues they will have to navigate as they project friendship before a global audience.
Trump gets the royal coach ride he always wanted.
Charles and Trump are notably at odds on environmental policy, for example. The British king recently delivered a subtle rebuke of Trump’s calls for Canada to become the 51st U.S. state, proclaiming in May that Canada should remain “strong and free.” As recently as last weekend, Trump told European leaders that they must apply economic pressure on Moscow to end the war in Ukraine before he would levy additional U.S. sanctions.
And the controversy over the ousted British ambassador to the United States still simmers. Last week, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer fired Peter Mandelson after more details emerged about his relationship with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, a former friend of Trump’s whose case has dogged the president.
Bloomberg News and the Sun reported that they obtained email messages sent by Mandelson to Epstein, who died in 2019 while in federal custody after his conviction on sex offenses. In one, Mandelson reportedly wrote: “I think the world of you and I feel hopeless and furious about what has happened.” The former envoy has not denied the authenticity of the emails but said he was duped by the assurances of Epstein and his team.
The agreed-upon European method of dealing with Trump?
During the trip,Trump will eschew public-facing traditions for foreign dignitaries that could lead to moments of tension, such as addressing Parliament or joining in a parade through British streets, as French President Emmanuel Macron did in July. The schedule also allows for tighter security at a time of heightened tensions after the killing of high-profile conservative commentator Charlie Kirk.
“The U.K. government has decided, like a lot of other allied governments, that there is this sort of formula to dealing with Trump,” said Jeremy Shapiro, a research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a former State Department official. “You flatter him, you appease him, you distract him, and, hopefully, he never figures out that you’re not actually doing what he wants.”
“There’s a lot of people from the first Trump administration going around telling governments that this is the way to do things,” Shapiro added. “The U.K. government has really taken this on in the second term, and the royal family is central to that.” [….]
So far, Starmer has led the charm offensive to bridge areas of divergence — using Trump’s fascination for the royals as a diplomatic carrot.
The British leader unveiled the invitation from Charles during an Oval Office meeting in February, presenting the letter-loving Trump with a cream-colored envelope and encouraging him to read the note on the spot.
“It’s an invitation for a second state visit. This is really special. This has never happened before. This is unprecedented,” Starmer said later. U.S. presidents are routinely invited for a state visit during their first terms.
It’s disgusting. Trump behaves like a spoiled child and other countries, as well as the U.S. media and Republican politicians, do everything they can to pacify him.
Police in the U.K. arrested four people after photos of President Donald Trump and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were projected onto Windsor Castle on Tuesday night.
Police in the U.K. arrested four people after photos of President Donald Trump and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were projected onto Windsor Castle on Tuesday night.
The projections included photos of Trump and Epstein; of the two joined by first lady Melania Trump with Epstein and his co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell; and of a lewd birthday message Trump allegedly sent Epstein in 2003 for a 50th birthday book.
Trump arrived in London on Tuesday for a state visit. He’s expected to spend most of Wednesday at the castle with King Charles III and Queen Camilla and other members of the royal family.
Thames Valley Police said in a statement Tuesday night that they arrested four adults “on suspicion of malicious communications following a public stunt in Windsor.” The police added they will conduct an investigation into the incident, and that all four people arrested remain in custody.
“Our officers responded swiftly to stop the projection and four people have been arrested,” the statement read.
President Trump accused The New York Times and four of its reporters of defaming him ahead of the 2024 election, claiming that a series of articles sought to undermine his candidacy and disparage his reputation as a successful businessman.
In a lawsuit filed on Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, Mr. Trump said the articles and a book published by two of the journalists were “specifically designed to try and damage President Trump’s business, personal and political reputation.”
According to the complaint, the articles and the book were published with “actual malice” toward Mr. Trump and caused “enormous” economic losses and damage to his “professional and occupational interests.” The lawsuit asked for damages of at least $15 billion.
The defendants named in the suit were The New York Times Company and Susanne Craig, Russ Buettner, Peter Baker and Michael S. Schmidt. The complaint also named Penguin Random House, which published a book about Mr. Trump written by Ms. Craig and Mr. Buettner, as a defendant.
The complaint claims that the defendants timed the publication of the articles and books “at the height of election season to inflict maximum electoral damage against President Trump.”
A spokesman for The Times responded: “This lawsuit has no merit. It lacks any legitimate legal claims and instead is an attempt to stifle and discourage independent reporting. The New York Times will not be deterred by intimidation tactics. We will continue to pursue the facts without fear or favor and stand up for journalists’ First Amendment right to ask questions on behalf of the American people.”
A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The Times, said in a note to staff on Tuesday that the lawsuit was “frivolous,” adding that “everyone, regardless of their politics, should be troubled by the growing anti-press campaign led by President Trump and his administration.”
A spokeswoman for Penguin Random House said: “This is a meritless lawsuit. Penguin Random House stands by the book and its authors and will continue to uphold the values of the First Amendment that are fundamental to our role as a book publisher.”
That sounds like an interesting book. Susanne Craig is a fantastic economics reporter.
Kirk’s assassination six days ago at an event at Utah Valley University sent shockwaves across the country and is the latest incident of violence tearing through American politics.
Utah County prosecutors charged Robinson through an information document rather than an indictment. An information court document allows prosecutors to charge someone directly and requires a probable cause hearing, during which a judge determines if there is sufficient evidence to proceed.
The charging document for the 22-year-old suspect outlines evidence collected by investigators, including DNA on the suspected murder weapon and a texted confession.
The charging document says Robinson “intentionally” targeted Kirk because of Robinson’s “belief or perception regarding Charlie Kirk’s political expression.” While prosecutors stopped short of specifically detailing what issues motivated Robinson to carry out the September 10 shooting, the charging document provided some clues.
In separate conversations with his roommate and family, Robinson shared that Kirk “spreads too much hate,” and he “had enough of his hatred,” the document said.
The document also said the suspect’s mother told investigators that “over the last year or so, Robinson had become more political and had started to lean more to the left – becoming more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented. She stated that Robinson began to date his roommate, a biological male who was transitioning genders.”
I admit I was wrong in my Saturday post. I suggested that Robinson was to the right of Charlie Kirk. Despite what Utah authorities are claiming, he wasn’t particularly involved in politics, based on his on-line postings. Investigative reporter Ken Klippenstein gained access to Robinson’s Discord chats, and the members of these groups appear to be friends who have varied political points of view and are mainly interested in playing video games. Everyone who is interested in this case should read this post.
“Hey guys, I have bad news for you all … it was me at UVU yesterday.” Thus Tyler Robinson messaged his friends on Discord, seemingly apologizing for murdering Charlie Kirk. “I’m sorry for all of this.”
I obtained this and other Discord chats I’ve decided to publish (the legacy news media, as usual, refuses), along with new information I’ve learned about Robinson from the people who knew him best.
Trump and company portray the alleged Utah shooter as left-wing and liberals portray him as right-wing. The federal conclusion will inevitably be that he was a so-called Nihilist Violent Extremist (NVE); meanwhile, the crackdown has already begun, as I reported yesterday. The country is practically ready to go to war.
“It’s been so terrible and seeing it from an inside perspective is so frustrating,” a friend of Robinson’s since middle school told me. The childhood friend, who asked not to be named for fear of threats, provided me with the above non-public photo of Robinson on a camping trip (a favorite activity of his) to corroborate their relationship.
“I think the main thing that’s caused so much confusion is that he was always generally apolitical for the most part,” the friend told me. “That’s the big thing, he just never really talked politics which is why it’s so frustrating.”
The picture that emerges bears little resemblance to the media version. Robinson, I am told, though quiet, was a well-liked person with a supportive family. The friend group who he interacted with on Discord, far from some kind of militia camp or Antifa bunker it’s been portrayed as, represented a range of different political views but mostly talked video games.
Yesterday, FBI Director Kash Patel said in an interview that Robinson “subscribed to left-wing ideology,” citing his family’s remarks to investigators. But those close to Robinson say there was a lot his family didn’t know about him.
“Their ideas are based on someone they didn’t fully understand,” the childhood friend told me. Though the family was generally supportive of Robinson (a claim corroborated by his mother’s Facebook account, brimming with praise for Tyler) they didn’t seem to know about his relationship with a transgender person named Lance, the friend said.
We haven’t heard directly from the transgender roommate, and Robinson is refusing to talk to authorities, which suggests that he has a good lawyer. We can’t know for sure what his motive was, but it seems possible that he objected to Kirk’s hatred of LGBTQ people. More from Klippenstein:
When I asked if his family would have been accepting, the friend replied: “I don’t think even Tyler knew the answer to that question, which is why he kept it so low key between themselves.”
Tyler’s bisexuality, the friend said, was coupled with openness on LGBT issues. But his wasn’t some cookie cutter lefty position on every or even most issues, his friends say.
Tyler Robinson appeared in court in a suicide vest.
“Obviously he’s okay with gay and trans people having a right to exist, but also believes in the Second Amendment,” the friend said, referring to the right to bear arms.
The friend described Robinson as fairly typical of a young man his age from Utah: someone who loved the outdoors, was a gamer, and into guns.
“To all of us he just seemed like a simple guy who liked playing games like Sea of Thieves, Deep Rock Galactic and Helldivers 2, loved to fish and loved to camp,” the friend said. “It really did seem like that’s all he was about.”
The phrase inscribed on one of the bullet casings from the shooting — “Hey fascist, catch!” — though widely reported to mean he was a man of the left, is in fact a reference to the Helldivers 2 game. Three arrows initially believed by federal agents to be a reference to Antifa are also a reference to Helldivers.
Private Discord messages shared with me by a friend of Robinson’s confirm that Robinson wasn’t some political martyr. A search for posts of Robinson’s containing keywords like “Biden” and “Trump” turned up just one hit each. The Trump post was a passing reference to the 2019 impeachment inquiry. The Biden one came on the day of the 2020 election, where he provided an update to another friend asking about the status of the vote count.
I hope you’ll go read the rest of Klippenstein’s piece.
Of course the Trump administration isn’t interested in Robinson’s real motives; they just want to pin the blame for Kirk’s death on Democrats, or as Trump puts it, “the radical left lunatics.”
In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, President Donald Trump and his allies have threatened to bring the weight of the federal government against what they refer to as the “radical left.”
“It is a vast domestic terror movement,” Stephen Miller, Trump’s top policy adviser, said Monday.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller during a television interview outside the West Wing of the White House on Aug. 29.Andrew Cabarello-Reynolds AFP – Getty Images file
“With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people,” he added. “It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”
But the suggestion that a secret network of violent left-wing extremists was behind the killing stands in contrast to the evidence that law enforcement officials presented on Tuesday in Utah, where Kirk was fatally shot. There was no indication presented Tuesday that the suspect, Tyler Robinson, was a member of a group or that he fell under the sway of a particular leader. The investigation is ongoing.
Utah County Attorney Jeffrey Gray laid out seven counts — including aggravated murder — against Robinson, and detailed the evidence against him in a 10-page court filing. In the hours after the shooting, Robinson was asked twice, by his father and his roommate, why he shot Kirk. He responded that Kirk “spreads too much hate” and “I had enough of his hatred,” the documents show.
Experts told NBC News that the Trump administration appears to be using Kirk’s assassination as an excuse to crack down on left-wing individuals and groups. While administration officials have yet to detail their plans, statements by Miller and others raise questions of who exactly would be targeted, how, and what effect this might have in stifling political dissent.
Russia moved to amplify online conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk’s killing just hours after it happened, seeding social media with the frightening claim that America is slipping into civil war.
Chinese and pro-Iranian groups also spread disinformation about the shooting, with those loyal to Iran’s interests backing antisemitic conspiracy theories while bots linked to Beijing claimed that Kirk’s death shows that the United States is violent, polarized and dysfunctional.
America’s adversaries have long used fake social media accounts, online bots and disinformation to depict the U.S. as a dangerous country beset with extremism and gun violence. Kirk’s killing has provided another opportunity for those overseas eager to shape public understanding while inflaming political polarization.
“Charlie Kirk’s Death and the Coming Civil War,” tweeted Russian ultranationalist Alexander Dugin, whose influence earned him the moniker “ Putin’s brain,” referring to Russia’s president. Pro-Russian bots blamed Democrats and predicted more violence. Russian state media published English-language articles with headlines claiming a conspiracy orchestrated by shadowy forces: “Was Charlie Kirk’s Killer a Pro?”
Foreign disinformation makes up a tiny fraction of the overall online discussion about Kirk’s death, but it could undermine any efforts to heal political divisions or even spur further violence.
For the moment, the BLS is still providing reliable measurements of economic activity in the USA. The employment numbers are showing signs of bad policy and Trump-inflicted wounds. The strain from the tariffs is beginning to show. This is from The Guardian. “US added just 22,000 jobs in August, continuing slowdown amid Trump tariffs. The latest report also contained more bad news – the US lost 13,000 jobs in June, according to the latest survey.”
“The US jobs market stalled over the summer, adding just 22,000 jobs in August and continuing a slowdown in the labor market as businesses adjusted to disruptions caused by tariffs.
The latest jobs report also contained more bad news. The US lost 13,000 jobs in June, according to the latest survey, the first time it went into the negative since December 2020.
The unemployment rate for August inched up to 4.3%, the highest it’s been since 2021.
The healthcare sector added 31,000 last month but most other sectors were flat or lost jobs.
President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics operated a since-deleted Twitter account that featured sexually degrading attacks on Kamala Harris, derogatory remarks about gay people, conspiracy theories, and crude insults aimed at critics of President Donald Trump.
E.J. Antoni, a 37-year-old economist for the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, posted the comments from approximately 2017 through 2020 under a series of usernames and display names. CNN verified that all of Antoni’s posts came from the same Twitter account and that the posts from the anonymous aliases shared strikingly similar biographical details as Antoni.
An outspoken critic of the nonpartisan BLS, which calculates US job growth and unemployment figures, Antoni is a stout Trump loyalist. NBC News reported and CNN confirmed that he was a “bystander” at the US Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. There is no evidence he entered the Capitol.
His appointment comes after Trump fired the Biden-appointed BLS commissioner and accused the agency without evidence of corruption after a report showed job growth in May and June was weaker than previously estimated.
Antoni has positioned himself as a watchdog for government accountability in media appearances and Heritage Foundation blog posts. But his own digital trail reveals a pattern of incendiary rhetoric that veered frequently into conspiracy theories and misogyny.
In 2019, the since-deleted account known as “ErwinJohnAntoni” changed its username to “phdofbombsaway.” The account posted at least five sexually suggestive tweets implying that then Sen. Kamala Harris had advanced her career through sexual favors.
Shortly after Harris ended her 2020 presidential campaign, Antoni wrote, “You can’t run a race on your knees,” in response to a tweet of a doctored campaign poster that depicted a sexually explicit image of Harris.
Antoni also referred to Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, as “Miss Piggy.” In February 2020, he retweeted a post titled “Advice For Women: How To Land a Great Guy,” which instructed women to “be in shape,” “grow your hair long,” “be sweet,” “learn to cook,” and “don’t be annoying.” The post concluded: “Angry feminists and simps will try to sabotage you in the comments. Don’t listen to them. Listen to me.”
Disgusting.
Speaking of disgusting Trump appointees, Steven Miller is evidently the one running the District into the ground, according to the Washington Post. “How Stephen Miller is running Trump’s effort to take over D.C.” It’s amazing how many young NAZIs are in his employ.
From the head of the conference table in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, Stephen Miller was in the weeds of President Donald Trump’s takeover of policing in the nation’s capital.
The White House deputy chief of staff wanted to know where exactly groups of law enforcement officers would be deployed. He declared that cleaning up D.C. was one of Trump’s most important domestic policy issues and that Miller himself planned to be involved for a long time.
Miller’s remarks were described to The Washington Post by two people with knowledge of the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House business. The result is a behind-the-scenes glimpse of one of Trump’s most trusted aides in action, someone who has emerged as a key enforcer of the D.C. operation in the month since Trump federalized the local police department and deployed thousands of National Guard troops to patrol city streets. While widely seen as a vocal proponent for the president’s push on immigration and law and order, Miller’s actions reveal how much he is actually driving that agenda inside the White House.
The deputy White House chief of staff has emerged as a key enforcer of the D.C. operation in the month since Trump federalized the local police department.
“It’s his thing,” one White House official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters. “Security, crime, law enforcement — it’s his wheelhouse.”
Miller’s team provides an updated report each morning on the arrests made the night before to staff from the White House, Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security, among others. The readouts include a breakdown of how many of those arrested are undocumented immigrants.
He has also led weekly meetings in the Roosevelt Room with his staff and members of the D.C. mayor’s office. Last week, he brought Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, according to two people briefed on the meeting. It’s unclear why Bessent attended the meeting.
A person familiar with Bessent’s thinking said he was encouraged by D.C. officials’ enthusiasm and collaborative tone.
Yam Tits and Miller know they have the District’s leaders over a barrel. Its special status gives the federal government a lot of power over the District. Its leadership is undoubtedly trying to avoid Trump taking the entire District over and removing them.
The source of all federal power over Washington comes from Article I, Section 8, Clause 17 of the Constitution. It grants Congress authority “To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever” over the federal district.
That phrase—”exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever”—is absolute. It establishes a power imbalance between the federal government and D.C. residents that has defined their relationship for over two centuries.
Undoubtedly, the Supreme Court would give Orange Tits whatever he wanted.
Trump’s approach to the economy and foreign policy continues to bring one failure after another. The Washington Examiner reports that “Immigration officers raid Hyundai EV manufacturing site in Georgia.” This is a bizarre strategy given that any produced in the United States goes to the US GDP numbers despite foreign ownership. Additionally, these are good jobs for parts of the country that really need them. Then there’s the factor that we just pissed off one of our major trade partners. This makes no sense whatsoever.
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesperson told the Associated Press that agents were focused on the electric vehicle battery plant construction site.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that agents executed a search warrant “as part of an ongoing criminal investigation into allegations of unlawful employment practices and other serious federal crimes.” It did not say whether anyone was detained or arrested.
Georgia State Patrol troopers blocked the road to the Hyundai plant, and the state Department of Public Safety said it was assisting. A social media video showed agents telling workers that they were with DHS and that they had a search warrant.
“We need construction to cease immediately,” the man said. “We need all work to end on the site right now.”
Operations at Hyundai’s EV manufacturing plant weren’t stopped, a spokesperson said.
The joint venture, HL-GA Battery Company, “is cooperating fully with the appropriate authorities,” the company said. “To assist their work, we have paused construction,” they added.
The administration has targeted other businesses in large raids as well. Two California cannabis farm raids in July yielded more than 300 arrests. One farm worker died after sustaining injuries during the raid.
The Trump administration has made deporting numerous illegal immigrants and migrants a top priority.
The Wall Street Journal reports, “Hundreds Arrested in Immigration Raid at Hyundai Site in Georgia. South Korea protests after more than 300 Korean company workers are detained.”
Nearly 500 people were arrested as part of an immigration raid at a Hyundai Motor battery plant under construction in Georgia as part of a criminal investigation into employment practices at the site, a Homeland Security official said Friday.
The operation Thursday resulted in the arrest of 475 individuals. More than 300 were South Korean nationals, according to an official from the country.
Those arrested had illegally crossed the border, entered through a visa waiver program that prohibited them from working or had overstayed their visas, Steven Schrank, a special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in Atlant a, said at a press conference Friday morning.
“This was the largest single site enforcement operation in the history of Homeland Security investigations,” Schrank said.
No criminal charges were filed as of Friday, he said, and the investigation remains ongoing.
“Those who exploit our workforce, undermine our economy, and violate our federal laws will be held accountable,” Schrank said. Schrank said the government’s investigation has been ongoing for months.
The carmaker has pledged $26 billion in U.S. investments in recent weeks.
South Korea protested the action to the U.S. and said it was trying to secure the release of its citizens.
“This was not an immigration operation where agents went into the premises, rounded up folks and put them on buses,” Schrank said. “This has been a multimonth criminal investigation where we have developed evidence, conducted interviews, gathered documents, and presented that evidence to the court in order to obtain a judicial search warrant.”
A search warrant in the case was issued Aug. 31, according to a court filing. The government filed a motion to unseal a redacted version of the warrant Friday, and a judge granted the request. A copy of the warrant wasn’t immediately available.
“The United States is proud to be a home for major investments and looks forward to continuing to build on these historic investments and partnerships that President Trump has secured,” said Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman. “Any foreign workers brought in for specific projects must enter the United States legally and with proper work authorizations. President Trump will continue delivering on his promise to make the United States the best place in the world to do business, while also enforcing federal immigration laws.”
The New York Times (gifted article)reports that we now have a diplomatic issue with an ally, South Korea. “South Koreans Swept Up in Immigration Raid at Hyundai E.V. Plant in Georgia. They were among nearly 500 workers apprehended at a construction site for a South Korean battery maker, officials said. The episode prompted diplomatic concern in Seoul.” Like I said previously, why would you want to disturb a huge plant that is creating good jobs and value for our country?
The battery manufacturer, LG Energy Solution, which co-owns the plant with Hyundai Motor Group, said in a statement that employees of both companies had been taken into custody.
Hyundai said in a statement that none of those detained were Hyundai employees, as far as the company was aware.
“We are closely monitoring the situation and working to understand the specific circumstances,” Hyundai said on Friday.
South Korea’s Foreign Ministry confirmed on Friday that South Koreans were among those in custody, without saying how many. Mr. Schrank told reporters at the plant on Thursday that some U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents had been detained initially and were being released.
The agencies involved in the operation included the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the F.B.I., according to the Atlanta division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which also participated.
The operation, part of President Trump’s crackdown on immigration, caused diplomatic alarm in South Korea. Just over a week earlier, Mr. Trump hosted President Lee Jae Myung of South Korea at the White House, where the South Korean leader pledged to invest an additional $150 billion in the United States, including in battery manufacturing.
The lithium-ion battery plant, which predated Mr. Lee’s pledge, was expected to start operating next year. It is the kind of large-scale, job-creating investment that the United States has pushed for from South Korea and other nations.
The Ellabell site is part of one of Georgia’s largest manufacturing plants. Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican, has promoted the $7.6 billion Hyundai E.V. factory there as the largest economic development project in state history.
Yes, I saved the most disgusting for last. The RFK Jr. hearing yesterday was on a whole different level as the pathological liar and loony proved himself unfit again and again. There were some major players in the Senate Committee showing exactly how ignorant Worm Boy is of his own department and science. The one thing I found amazing was the number of Republicans giving him a difficult time. There are likely several reasons for this. NBC News‘ Berkley Lovelace reports the story. “Ahead of Kennedy hearing, GOP saw poll showing Trump voters support vaccines. The poll, conducted by veteran Republican pollsters, found that a majority of Trump voters believe vaccines save lives and support immunizations against measles and hepatitis B.”
Polling showing that a majority of President Donald Trump’s voters support vaccines was shared with several Republicans lawmakers’ staffers in a closed-door meeting Wednesday, according to two people familiar with the meeting.
NBC News obtained a copy of a memo, dated Aug. 26, summarizing the poll results. It was conducted by veteran Republican pollsters Tony Fabrizio and Bob Ward and concluded “that there is broad unity across party lines supporting vaccines such as measles (MMR), shingles, tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis (TDAP), and Hepatitis B.” Fabrizio and Ward presented the findings during the meeting, the sources said.
In an email to NBC News, Ward confirmed the memo was authentic but declined to comment about the meeting. It’s unclear who commissioned the poll or arranged the meeting. A source close to the White House denied that the administration requested the poll.
Republican senators are sending clear signs of disapproval and unhappiness with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., making it plain to President Trump that they want the administration to address the chaos Kennedy has caused by trying to rewrite the nation’s vaccine policies.
GOP senators have stopped short of calling on Kennedy to resign and haven’t yet said they regret voting for him in February, but they want him to back off efforts to change vaccine policy recommendations without sound scientific backing as the administration faces a growing public backlash.
Kennedy received an unusual admonishment from Senate Republican Whip John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), an orthopedic surgeon, when he testified before the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday.
“I support vaccines. I’m a doctor. Vaccines work,” said Barrasso, the Senate’s No. 2-ranking Republican leader.
“Secretary Kennedy, in your confirmation hearings, you promised to uphold the highest standards for vaccines,” he said. “Since then, I’ve grown deeply concerned.”
Barrasso pointed to a national measles outbreak, the sudden ouster of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Susan Monarez, and questions raised by the leadership of the National Institutes of Health over mRNA vaccines as raising troubling questions.
“Americans don’t know who to rely on,” he said. “If we’re going to make America healthy again, we can’t allow public health to be undermined.”
Here’s Elizabeth Warren shredding the Worm Guy.
Some smart aide to my Senator Bill Cassidy evidently suggested that he kiss up to Yam Tits while shredding Worm Guy. He’s not so popular down here for reelection. The MAGA crowd calls him a Rhino and hates that he actually voted to impeach Trump. That vote was one of the few things he’s ever shown a spine about.
The drama between the rest of the world and Orange Caligula continues. Here are some headlines, including one of those “praise dear leader” by the tech businesses.
Brian Barrett / Wired: Tech CEOs Praise Donald Trump at White House Dinner — At a White House dinner Thursday night, America’s tech executives put on an uncanny display of fealty to Donald Trump. — The camera zooms too close to the president’s face; the table at which the tech executives are seated seems far too long.
Tom Nichols / The Atlantic: The World No Longer Takes Trump Seriously — At parades and in the halls of global power, America has been sidelined. — The leaders of Russia, China, and North Korea are not good men. They preside over brutal autocracies replete with secret police and prison camps.
I’m still waiting for the latest on our new Department of War and our open hostilities with Venezuela. Feeling great and safe yet?
Here’s one last article about one of the major loonies in the Supreme Court. This is from NBC News. “Justice Amy Coney Barrett says country is not in a ‘constitutional crisis’. Speaking to Free Press founder Bari Weiss to promote her new book, the conservative justice said the American people should trust the Supreme Court.” The last group of people I would trust with anything are the so-called conservatives on the Supreme Court.
Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett said Thursday she does not believe the United States is in a constitutional crisis as President Donald Trump seeks to unilaterally reshape the government and his administration frequently feuds with judges.
Barrett, a Trump appointee who is part of the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority, defended the Supreme Court as an institution and said Americans should have faith in its ability to address probing problems with integrity.
“I think the Constitution is alive and well,” Barrett said in an interview with Bari Weiss, hosted by the Free Press in New York, to promote her new book.
“I don’t know what a constitutional crisis would look like. I don’t think that we are currently in a constitutional crisis, however,” she added. “I think our country remains committed to the rule of law. I think we have functioning courts.”
A constitutional crisis would have arrived if “the rule of law crumbled,” Barrett said. But, she added, “that is not a place where we are.”
Lower courts have frequently blocked Trump’s executive actions as unlawful exercises of power, only for the Supreme Court in most cases to then rule in favor of the administration via brief orders that often include no reasoning.
And Weirdo Kavanaugh thinks shadow docket is too truthy and wants it renamed “interim docket”. This does not feel like the country I grew up in at all.
What’s on your Reading, Blogging, and Action list today?
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
The House is planning to vote on the Senate version of Trump’s spending and tax cut bill today. The Senate version is very different from the one the House originally sent them, so it’s not clear whether the bill will make it to Trump’s desk by July 4, as he has demanded.
As we all know, the bill will take away health care and food assistance from millions of Americans. Trump’s big bill will also vastly expand his power to target people he wants to make disappear. Yesterday Trump openly approved a true concentration camp in our country. I still haven’t recovered from the shock of seeing what these fascists are planning. And now Trump is talking about deporting U.S. citizens. The bill is cruel in so many ways, but mass deportation is Trump’s number 1 goal. I’m going to focus on that in this post.
….THE LEGISLATION SENATE REPUBLICANS passed on Tuesday is probably going to kill a lot of people.
It sounds stark when you put it that way, but death is a stark thing. It’s also what can be reasonably expected from the GOP legislation, especially the cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act projected to leave nearly 12 million Americans newly uninsured.
When people can’t pay for medical care they frequently don’t get it. And when people don’t get medical care, they’re more likely to die early from a preventable condition. That’s what you’ll find if you read the latest research, and what you’ll learn if you ask people working on the front lines of medical care.
And death doesn’t even capture the full impact of the bill, which thanks to Tuesday’s vote seems likely to become law.
That outcome is not yet a foregone conclusion, to be clear. The bill requires approval from the House, where a different version passed in May and where several Republicans have already said they object to the Senate’s iteration.
But while those Republicans have enough leverage to block approval, forcing some kind of negotiation between the houses, they are already under enormous pressure from party leaders—and, especially, from President Donald Trump, who has said he wants a bill on his desk by July 4….
Politically, it was a savvy strategy for avoiding scrutiny. So was packaging the entirety of the Trump domestic agenda into one legislative package, making it difficult for opponents to focus—and rally supporters around—any one part.
As of a few days ago, nearly half of America hadn’t heard anything about the “Big Beautiful Bill,” according to Democratic polling from Priorities USA. And only 8 percent had heard it included Medicaid cuts….
But in trying so hard to shield the bill’s true nature from the public, Republican leaders may have also succeeded in hiding parts from their own members, who might not appreciate just how much some features of the bill undercut supposedly cherished MAGA goals like lowering the cost of living and making U.S. industry more competitive.
And that’s to say nothing about the disproportionate effects some elements of the bill will have on their own constituents.
We know about the health care and food assistance cuts; Cohn lists examples of other disastrous cuts in the bill:
YOU CAN SEE IT CLEARLY in the provisions yanking away Biden-era subsidies for clean energy and electric vehicles, in many cases quickly. (The tax credit for consumers buying electric vehicles would end in September.) It’s a way to own the libs, now that Trump has turned clean energy into almost as much a bogeyman as trans athletes and woke professors.
Speaker Johnson touts the big ugly bill.
But Biden’s subsidies unleashed a factory-building boom that the legislation will weaken and maybe kill, which is why the bluest of blue-collar unions—electrical workers, building trades, iron workers—spent the last few days blasting the bill as a historic “job killer.” And those jobs are likely to have an outsized effect on red states like Texas, now America’s capital for solar-panel manufacturing, because that’s where a disproportionate share of the subsidies went.
And that’s just the immediate effect. Giving up support for wind and solar means giving up on the easiest, cheapest way to increase generating capacity right now—something tech executives desperately tried to convey to Trump and his allies, with a warning that it will set back U.S. firms in their quest to develop artificial intelligence. That’s on top of ceding industries like battery storage and electric vehicles to competitors, especially the one Trump brings up the most: China.
Look down the road and you’ll see an America that is more reliant on other countries for energy—and, most likely, paying a lot more than it would if it had spent the next few years keeping up in the global alternative-energy race. Americans can expect an extra $170 billion in annual energy bills between now and 2034, according to a projection by the firm Energy Innovation.
Please read the rest of this piece at the link. It’s an excellent summary of what the bill will do to our country.
Senate Republicans certainly lack spine. They are deathly afraid to cross Donald Trump, to put their cushy jobs at risk by provoking a primary challenge, to fall out of favor with the maliciously dishonest right-wing media, and/or to be ostracized from their close circle of sycophants, donors, and staff. But their greatest moral failure is arguably not lack of courage but rather lack of empathy. They simply do not care about the pain they are inflicting on others.
Senate and House Republicans know what this bill does. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and others can repeat the lie that no one will lose coverage, but it does not make it so. Seventeen million people will lose health care (including 11 million Medicaid beneficiaries). Millions will lose food assistance. The debt will grow by over $3 trillion. It is hard to find anyone outside the MAGA cult who thinks this will benefit America. Republicans respond by lying about the bill even when confronted with the misery their handiwork will cause.
“The facts matter. The people matter. The Senate’s Medicaid approach breaks promises and will kick people off of Medicaid who truly need it,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said on the floor, finally freed to speak honestly after announcing he would not seek reelection. His fellow Republicans shrugged. They heard the same litany of horrors from constituents, hospitals, doctors, state officials, and even right-wing think tanks.
Republicans still cannot imagine if they or a loved one:
Could not get food because their application for food stamps was snarled in red tape designed to kick people off benefits to which they were entitled;
Could not get preventive care, addiction treatment, nursing home care, or prescription drugs because they have been kicked off Medicaid and priced out of the Affordable Care Act exchanges;
Could not get to a rural hospital in an emergency after the local one closed;
Could not find a cancer trial after cuts to the National Institutes of Health;
Republicans refuse to admit that they are hurting ordinary, hard-working Americans trying to provide for themselves and their families. To do otherwise would be a confession of their inhumanity. Instead, using well-worn authoritarian techniques (e.g., demonization, dehumanization, and marginalization), MAGA politicians convince themselves that those who rely on vital benefits are unfit and undeserving. Republicans dub them “rats” or “vermin” or “murderers.”
In addition to cutting health care for the poor and providing tax relief for the rich, the legislation provided massive funding increases for the federal agencies carrying out the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant obsession. The bill adds a total of $170.7 billion to immigration enforcement. It roughly triples the annual detention and enforcement budgets for the masked men of Immigration and Customs Enforcement over the next four years.
And according to our vice president, JD Vance, this was the point of it all: “Everything else—the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”
President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem tour “Alligator Alcatraz” in Ochopee, Florida on July 1, 2025. (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDSAFP via Getty Imag
All those people losing health insurance? “Minutiae.” “Immaterial.” Mass detention and deportation are what matters. They’re not only key to Making America Great Again, they’re what it means to Make America Great Again. That’s the MAGA dream: Finally getting rid of all those foreigners seeking refuge and opportunity here, in our land.
And mass detention and deportation are also key to advancing the other point of it all: authoritarianism. That’s the other part of the MAGA dream: Finally getting rid of all those annoying features of due process and the rule of law, all those restraints of civility and decency, that have kept us from doing what we want.
And so, while his vice president was breaking the tied vote in the Senate, Donald Trump was celebrating a new detention facility in the Florida Everglades. It’s a physical manifestation and apt symbol of the MAGA dream. How proud they all were of its clever name—“Alligator Alcatraz”—and the collection of tents filled with cages to hold immigrants.
What were you doing the day the president attended the opening of an American concentration camp in the Everglades? Dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” by Republican officials because of the predators living in the surrounding swampland, it has been built to cage thousands of people rounded up by ICE and allied law enforcement agencies as part of President Trump’s mass deportations. “‘Alligator Alcatraz’ is a concentration camp,” Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night, a history of concentration camps, said on Tuesday.
That morning, Trump attended the camp’s opening in Ochopee, Florida, along with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. “We’d like to see them in many states,” Trump said at a press conference there. “And at some point, they might morph into a system where you’re going to keep it for a long time.” He complained about the cost of building jails and prisons, then complimented his team, who “did this in less than a week.”
For the event, Trump wore one of his signature red ball caps, this one reading “Gulf of America,” his jingoistic name for the nearby Gulf of Mexico; Noem wore a white “Make America Great Again” ball cap with gold stitching. The flimsy camp offered them some shelter from the punishing humidity, which would later give way to a downpour. A C-Span camera followed them into one of the massive tents, where rows of chain-link cages contained numerous bunk beds—for the moment, empty. Photographers raced ahead of Trump and Noem to get shots of them entering, taking in the cells, pausing to ask inaudible questions. DeSantis stood as if he did not know where to put his hands. “They’re going to sweep this six times to make sure there’s nothing that could be used as contraband, as weapons,” DeSantis told Trump a bit too brightly, “before the detainees come in.” He smiled as he told reporters about how soon their prisoners would “check in.”
The American concentration camp on view Tuesday was erected within the Big Cypress National Preserve, traditional Miccosukee land. The tribe was not consulted, said Betty Osceola, a member and activist who lives a few miles from the camp’s entrance. She was one of hundreds of people protesting on the road outside the camp over the last several days as massive trucks streamed into the site. “People should be concerned about the secrecy of this,” Osceola told the Fort Myers News-Press. “It’s a big deal. Our ancestors were laid to rest in this area, and they talk about it like it’s a vast wasteland. It’s not.”
The site of the camp is also public-owned land, most recently occupied by the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, “a remote facility for promising pilots to practice their touch-and-goes amid disinterested herons and alligators,” according toThe Palm Beach Post. An executive order issued by DeSantis cited a nonexistent “emergency” to get around the legal process for building on the site.
Not content with just shipping people to a foreign concentration camp, Donald Trump now has his own, homegrown concentration camp in Florida. Trump, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis gleefully toured the hastily constructed concentration camp in the Florida Everglades, obnoxiously referred to as Alligator Alcatraz, in reference to (1) the infamous island prison in San Francisco that Trump is obsessed with and (2) the number of alligators (and crocodiles — the one place in the world that has both) that live in and around the Everglades.
There’s no way to look at what the US government is doing here and not think of it more as Auschwitz than Alcatraz. The parallels are unmistakable: hastily constructed camps in remote locations, euphemistic naming designed to obscure their true purpose, and—most tellingly—officials proudly touring the facilities while discussing plans to build “a system” of such camps nationwide.
Trump and Noem touring Alligator Alcatraz
But here’s where today’s American concentration camps differ from their 20th-century predecessors: the Trump regime isn’t trying to hide what they’re doing. They’re merchandising it. They’re selling t-shirts celebrating human suffering as if it were a sports team or a vacation destination.
The United States government is literally selling branded merchandise to celebrate putting human beings in cages surrounded by dangerous predators. This isn’t just about policy—it’s about turning cruelty into a consumer product. It’s about making the suffering of others into something you can wear to own the libs.
This commodification of human rights violations represents something uniquely American and uniquely horrifying: the gamification of genocide. Previous authoritarian regimes at least had the decency to be ashamed of their concentration camps. Trump is selling tickets to the show.
These are the sorts of things that history books (should they exist in the future) will talk about as one of the many moments of pure evil that some people gleefully embraced without recognizing that people setting up concentration camps are, inherently, “the baddies.”
Donald Trump’s tour of the bloodcurdlingly-monikered – and hastily-constructed – “Alligator Alcatraz” migrants detention center in Florida’s Everglades had the hallmarks of a calculatedly provocative celebration of the dystopian.
Accompanied by Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, the Florida governor Ron DeSantis and a phalanx of journalists, the US president saw only virtue in the vista of mesh fencing, barbed wire and forbidding steel bunk beds.
“Between Kristi and Ron, it’s really government working together,” he said. “They have done an amazing job. I’m proud of them.”
Not that Trump was blind to the intimidating nature of the facility his long crusade against undocumented people had willed into existence in this hot, steamy part of southern Florida, prized by environmentalists as a crucial nature preserve but now redesigned to be a location of dread to those lacking documentary proof of their right to be in the US….
Trump seemed to revel in the potential for detainees’ misery at what was termed a round-table discussion but which devolved into fawning praise of his leadership from administration and state officials and obsequious questions from journalists representing friendly rightwing news outlets.
“It might be as good as the real Alcatraz site,” he said. “That’s a spooky one too, isn’t it? That’s a tough site.”
“Our superstar”
As if in confirmation that this was an event designed to showcase ruthlessness, Trump handed the floor to Stephen Miller, the powerful White House deputy chief of staff and widely-acknowledged mastermind of the anti-immigrant offensive, calling him “our superstar”.
Miller responded with a pithy summation of the policy’s raison d’être.
White House aide believes it’s more “dehumanizing” to let migrants into the country than it is to detain them in a camp surrounded by man-eating alligators.
“What you’ve done over the last five months [is] to deliver on a 50-year hope and dream of the American people to secure the border,” he said. “There’s a 2,000 mile border with one of the poorest countries in the world, and you have open travel from 150 countries into Central America and South America.
“There are 2 billion people in the world that would economically benefit from illegally coming to the United States. Through the deployment of the military, through … novel legal and diplomatic tools, through the building of physical infrastructure, through the empowering of Ice and border patrol and the entire federal law enforcement apparatus, President Trump achieved absolute border security.”
And there would be more to come – courtesy of funds secured for deportations in Trump’s sweeping spending bill, which secured narrow Senate passage during Trump’s visit to the facility.
“Once this legislation is passed, he will be able to make that, with those resources, permanent,” Miller said.
A justice department memo directing the department’s civil division to target the denaturalization of US citizens around the country has opened up an new avenue for Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda, experts say.
In the US, when a person is denaturalized, they return to the status they held before becoming a citizen. If someone was previously a permanent resident, for example, they will be classified as such again, which can open the door to deportation efforts.
The memo, published on 11 June, instructed the justice department’s civil division to “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence”. Immigration matters are civil matters, meaning that immigrants – whether they are naturalized citizens or not – do not have the right to an attorney in such cases.
Muzaffar Chishti from the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan thinktank, explained that much of immigration law was based on discretion by government officials. To revoke a person’s citizenship, US officials must demonstrate that they are not of “good moral character” – a subjective and broad term with little defined parameters.
Now, the recent memo lists a broad range of categories of people who should be stripped of their naturalized citizenship status, providing further guidance as to who is not of good “moral character”. This included “those with a nexus to terrorism” and espionage, war criminals and those who were found to have lied in their naturalization process. Officials still need to prove their case, Chisthi explained.
“[The administration] can’t, on their own, denaturalize people, they still have to go to a federal district court,” said Chisthi. “Denaturalization finally does belong to federal district courts – but they are obviously keen on finding every way they can to denaturalize people they think did not deserve to be naturalized.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump sycophant
A bit more:
However, the justice department’s memo is not solely confined to those expanded categories. It gives more discretion to officials to pursue these cases, prompting a fear for analysts and attorneys that the directive by the Trump administration is overly broad.
For Jorge Loweree, director of policy for the American Immigration Council, a new category in the memo stood out to him: individuals accused of being gang and cartel members.
Loweree is concerned “because of the way that the administration has treated people that it deems to be gang members”, he said. “ It wasn’t that long ago that the administration flew hundreds of people from the US to a prison in El Salvador on, in most instances, flimsy evidence.”
Although the memo marks an escalation by the Trump administration it is not entirely news, and in recent decades, other nations have also engaged in seeking to strip citizenship from certain people.
Denaturalization in the US has a long history. Throughout the 20th century, those seen by the US government as potential enemies to US interests were stripped of their citizenship. Journalists, activists and labor leaders, accused of being anarchists and communists, were frequently targeted.
I could go on like this for much longer, but this post is long enough. Suffice it to say that we are in big trouble as country. Please take care today. This is all so terrifying.
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
I’m feeling very sad today. I’ve actually been feeling sad and depressed for several days now. It just feels as if Trump is winning. He’s getting plenty of attention from his attack on Los Angeles, even though it’s illegal and so over-the-top as to be ridiculous. All this because people don’t like their law-abiding neighbors and co-workers being kidnapped by ICE thugs in masks.
Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” has faded into the background, but it’s still there, threatening to radically change our health care system and hurt millions of lower income and elderly people.
Yesterday, Trump gave a speech to active U.S. Army troops that was supposedly about the 250th anniversary of the army, but instead consisted of political attacks on Joe Biden and California and bragging about Trump’s supposed accomplishments. And the audience of young soldiers laughed and applauded. He left the stage to “YMCA” and even did his ridiculous fist “dance.”
This weekend Trump will celebrate his birthday with a sickening military parade reminiscent of those put on in Russia and North Korea. Those are only four of the things that are making me so sad.
I really don’t know where to begin, but here are some suggested reads.
The immigration protests and Trump’s military response:
Gov. Gavin Newsom made the case in a televised address Tuesday evening that President Trump’s decision to send military forces to immigration protests in Los Angeles has put the nation at the precipice of authoritarianism.
The California governor urged Americans to stand up to Mr. Trump, calling it a “perilous moment” for democracy and the country’s long-held legal norms.
California Governor Gavin Newsom
“California may be first, but it clearly won’t end here,” Mr. Newsom said, speaking to cameras from a studio in Los Angeles. “Other states are next. Democracy is next.”
“Democracy is under assault right before our eyes — the moment we’ve feared has arrived,” he added.
Mr. Newsom spoke on the fifth day of protests in Los Angeles against federal immigration raids that have sent fear and anger through many communities in Southern California. He said Mr. Trump had “inflamed a combustible situation” by taking over California’s National Guard, and by calling up 4,000 troops and 700 Marines.
“Trump is pulling a military dragnet all across Los Angeles,” Mr. Newsom said. “Well beyond his stated intent to just go after violent and serious criminals, his agents are arresting dishwashers, gardeners, day laborers and seamstresses.”
Donald Trump’s constant willingness to ignore the Constitution and core principles of American democracy means we are forever playing catch-up, stumbling behind while explaining why he absolutely cannot legally do the thing he is doing.
Digging into questions like “can Trump federalize the California National Guard because heavily-armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers picked a fight with a few hundred random Californians outside of Home Depot and lost?” is not a thing we should have to do, because the answer is no. The issue is that Trump just does these things anyway and justifies them with incoherent explanations that read as if an especially vicious badger memorized fragments of the Constitution and the US Code.
So, as we barrel toward a military occupation of California — and, really, anywhere else Trump wants — it’s time to figure out what on earth is going on, with two enormous caveats.
First, there are legal scholars who have spent their entire careers studying the deployment of the military on United States soil who are still trying to sort out what is happening. That’s not because they lack expertise, but because the situation is so rare and the administration’s justifications are so sloppy. Second, things are evolving so quickly that explanations quickly become outdated, so one has to try to anticipate the administration’s next wildly illegal move….
Generally, the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the use of federal troops for civilian law enforcement. State National Guards generally can’t run afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act because they are organized at the state level and report to a governor. That said, there are exceptions where, speaking only hypothetically, it would be completely legal for Trump to send National Guard members and even active duty troops to California. Identifying those possible situations is necessary to understand the relevant laws, but there’s no question that none of those situations currently exist in California or anywhere else.
The initial federalization of the California National Guard already happened on June 7 with Trump’s memo invoking 10 U.S.C. 12406. That allows state National Guards to be used in federal service for very limited reasons, but requires orders to be issued via the governor, a thing that definitely did not happen here.
Generally, the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the use of federal troops for civilian law enforcement. State National Guards generally can’t run afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act because they are organized at the state level and report to a governor. That said, there are exceptions where, speaking only hypothetically, it would be completely legal for Trump to send National Guard members and even active duty troops to California. Identifying those possible situations is necessary to understand the relevant laws, but there’s no question that none of those situations currently exist in California or anywhere else.
National Guard arrives in Los Angeles
The initial federalization of the California National Guard already happened on June 7 with Trump’s memo invoking 10 U.S.C. 12406. That allows state National Guards to be used in federal service for very limited reasons, but requires orders to be issued via the governor, a thing that definitely did not happen here….
Trump could also invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow him, in certain circumstances, to deploy a state National Guard even over the objection of the governor. Active-duty troops can only be sent in if the Insurrection Act is invoked, though it appears the Trump administration is just bypassing that step and sending in 700 Marines anyway.
Even if the administration hadn’t skipped getting Newsom’s agreement to federalize state National Guard members, the limits in section 12406 still apply. That section can only be used when (1) there is an invasion or danger of invasion by a foreign nation; (2) there is a rebellion or danger of rebellion against the government; or (3) the president cannot execute federal laws with the regular forces available. (Section 12406 has only been used once, in 1970, when President Nixon invoked it to have the National Guard help deliver mail during a postal worker strike.)
President Trump thinks it is a sign of strength to send in troops to deal with protesters in Los Angeles. To that end, he has federalized a portion of the California National Guard and mobilized nearby Marines to support Immigration and Customs Enforcement as it confronts large protests in opposition to its efforts to arrest and deport undocumented immigrant laborers in the city.
Trump wanted to do something like this in his first term, during the summer that sealed his fate as a failed first-term president. But Mark Esper, his secretary of defense, refused. The protests in Los Angeles are not nearly as large as those that consumed the country in 2020, but Trump wants a redo, and Pete Hegseth, Esper’s more sycophantic successor, is just as eager to unleash the coercive force of the United States government on the president’s political opponents as Trump is.
You can almost feel, emanating from the White House, a libidinal desire to do violence to protesters, as if that will, in one fell swoop, consolidate the Trump administration into a Trump regime, empowered to rule America both by force and the fear of force.
The problem for Trump, however, is that this immediate, and potentially unlawful, recourse to military force isn’t a show of strength; it’s a demonstration of weakness. It highlights the administration’s compromised political position and throws the overall weakness of its policy program into relief. Yes, a certain type of mind might see the president’s willingness to cross into outright despotism as evidence of brash confidence, of a White House that wants to fight it out on the streets with its most vocal opponents because it thinks it will win the war for the hearts and minds of the American people.
But strong, confident regimes are largely not in the habit of meeting protests with military force, nor do they escalate at the drop of the hat. The Trump administration seems to have exactly one tool at its disposal — blunt force — and it’s clear that it has no plan for what happens when Americans do not fear being hit.
The background:
Last month, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Miller, the president’s senior aide, confronted leadership at Immigration and Customs Enforcement with a demand: Deport more people. And while Trump promised during his campaign to focus on criminals and “the worst of the worst,” there was no way to meet his (and Miller’s) goals by carefully selecting targets.
Protesters and National Guard in Los Angeles
Instead, Miller, who was raised in nearby Santa Monica, “directed them to target Home Depot, where day laborers typically gather for hire, or 7-Eleven convenience stores,” The Journal reported, which is what ICE opted to do, conducting an immigration sweep last Friday “at the Home Depot in the predominantly Latino neighborhood of Westlake in Los Angeles, helping set off a weekend of protests around Los Angeles County, including at the federal detention center in the city’s downtown.” [….]
the administration’s crackdown on day laborers in the city sparked a predictable response from the community, which immediately rallied to their defense. Initially hundreds but soon thousands of residents went to the streets in what have been mostly peaceful protests, despite the police use of tear gas, flash-bang grenades, rubber bullets and other so-called less lethal armaments. But there has been property damage in the form of burned-out cars and broken windows. And this damage, along with a few instances of looting, is the president’s pretext for a military crackdown.
Read the rest at the NYT. I’ve included a gift link.
Donald Trump loves authoritarian theater, but let’s not forget that Stephen Miller is also to blame for the violence and chaos in Los Angeles. Last week, the right-wing Washington Examiner reported that Trump’s deputy chief of staff called a meeting with the top officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to “eviscerate” them for falling far short of the ridiculous goal he set of 3,000 deportations a day. In their desperation to keep Miller happy, ICE has already been targeting legal immigrants for deportation, mostly because they’re easy to find, due to having registered with the government. ICE agents stake out immigration hearings for people with refugee status and round up people here with work or student visas for minor offenses like speeding tickets, all to get the numbers up. But these actions were not enough for Miller.
“Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?” he reportedly screamed at ICE officials. One ICE leader protested that the agency’s lead, Tom Homan, said they’re supposed to be going after criminals, not people who are just working everyday jobs. Miller reportedly hit the ceiling, furious that arrests aren’t widespread and indiscriminate. Trump has repeatedly implied he was only targeting criminals, but as Charles Davis reported at Salon, that conflicts with his promise of “mass deportations.” Undocumented immigrants commit crimes at far lower rates than native-born Americans. The expansive efforts to find and arrest immigrants in California, which kicked off the protests, appear to be a direct reaction to Miller’s orders to grab as many people as possible, regardless of innocence.
But Miller doesn’t seem to care about crime. Or, perhaps he thinks having darker skin should be a crime. For Miller, the goal of “mass deportations” has never been about law and order, but about the fantasy of a white America. His desire to deport his way to racial homogeneity has always been not only deeply immoral, but pretty much impossible. His impotence shouldn’t breed complacency, however. As the violence in Los Angeles shows, petty rage can lead to all manner of evils.
Stephen Miller
The term “white nationalist” is often used interchangeably with “white supremacist,” but it has a specific meaning. White supremacists think the government should enshrine white people as a privileged class over all others. White nationalists, however, want America to be mostly, if not entirely, white — a goal that cannot be accomplished without mass violence. That Miller appears to lean more into the white nationalist camp is well known. In 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center reviewed a pile of leaked emails Miller had sent to media allies that illustrated his obsession with white-ifying America. He repeatedly denounced legal immigration of non-white people and endorsed the idea that racial diversity is a threat to white people. He longed for a return to pre-1965 laws that banned most non-white immigrants from moving to America.
“Trump’s mass deportation project is actually a demographic engineering project,” Adam Serwer of the Atlantic explained on a recent Bulwark podcast, pointing to the administration’s expulsion of legal refugees of color while making exceptions to the “no refugee” policy for white South Africans. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau defended the exception by claiming that “they can be assimilated easily into our country.”
But it’s clear this language is code for “white.” By any good-faith definition of the word, thousands of non-white people targeted for deportation have also assimilated. They have jobs. They get married. They have kids. They are part of their communities.
Sure enough, a sea of MAGA influencers have responded to the Los Angeles protests like parrots trained quite suddenly to say “ban third world immigration.”
Please read the whole thing. Amanda Marcotte is good.
The protests in LA have triggered more immigration protests around the country.
Those were the words thousands of people chanted near the city’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office, and throughout the streets of Manhattan Tuesday night as part of a series of nationwide rallies against President Trump’s immigration sweeps and the deployment of the U.S. military in California.
NYC protest
“There are many voices in my community that can’t be here today out of fear of what the administration is doing, so I want to be here for them,” 19-year-old Jeanet told NPR as she joined hundreds of other protesters in lower Manhattan Tuesday night….
Across the country, protesters also took to the streets in Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle, Dallas and half a dozen other cities.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement carried out its largest Nebraska workplace raid of the current presidential administration on Tuesday.
The raid on the Glenn Valley Foods meatpacking plant near 68th and J streets led to an estimated 75 to 80 people being detained, a spokesperson for U.S. Rep. Don Bacon told the Flatwater Free Press.
The large-scale raid also involved the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Marshals Service and Omaha police, according to the plant’s president.
It led to confusion inside the plant and anger outside of it, as some protesters clashed with law enforcement. It shocked company executives, who said they’d used the federal government’s system to verify the legal status of their employees. And it also set off a fresh round of fear and rumors that plants and stores elsewhere in Nebraska had been raided, or were soon to be. Those reports couldn’t be verified by the Flatwater Free Press on Tuesday evening.
ICE executed the federal search warrant on Glenn Valley Foods “based on an ongoing criminal investigation into the large-scale employment of aliens without authorization to work in the United States,” the agency said in a statement.
It’s not yet known where the workers were taken, but Glenn Valley employees leaving the scene told the Flatwater Free Press they saw dozens of their colleagues being led by agents into a white bus.
Tensions escalated between protesters and ICE as a procession of SUVs carrying federal agents left the plant after the raid. Several protesters cursed at law enforcement, jumped on moving vehicles and threw rocks and debris at the cars, shattering one window….
The raid shocked Glenn Valley Foods President Chad Hartmann, who said company leaders had “no notification, no idea whatsoever” that a raid was coming.
While Donald Trump has challenged many norms both as a presidential candidate and as president, he has made a special effort to violate the standards that have long kept the U.S. military out of partisan politics. To be clear, the U.S. armed forces have always engaged in politics, seeking to avoid getting involved in some conflicts, seeking to escalate in others. But they have not been a Democratic military or a Republican military since the Civil War. Generations of civilian and military leaders did much to keep party and military separate. Trump’s speech at Fort Bragg on June 10 may undo all that work.
In his first term, Trump did much to undermine the norms of American civil-military relations. Rather than appoint a civilian as secretary of defense, a tradition reflecting civilian control of the military, he appointed a recently retired general, James Mattis. He constantly referred to the senior military leaders as “my generals.” He blamed the military when soldiers were killed, rather than accept that the buck stops with the commander in chief. And according to his own secretary of defense at the time, Mark Esper, Trump asked whether soldiers could shoot peaceful protestors in their legs during demonstrations after the death of George Floyd in 2020.
Trump at Fort Bragg Tuesday
Less than five months into his second term, Trump has gone much further to challenge the traditional separation of the military from partisan politics. This time, he chose an unqualified Fox News host to be defense secretary to ensure he would not face the resistance he met from Mattis and Esper. Then he fired multiple senior leaders of the military for being, well, Black or female. Just in the past few days, Trump deployed the Marines to Los Angeles in response to anti-ICE protests, even though
Then on Tuesday, Trump gave a virulently partisan speech at Fort Bragg, during which he egged on the troops to boo the Democrats serving as mayor of Los Angeles and governor of California. This speech, by itself, is incredibly damaging, as it projects the image of the military siding with the president against his political foes.
When scholars like myself talk about politicization of the military, we mean one of two things: either the military is jumping into partisan politics or politicians are pulling the military there. In this case, Trump is dragging the U.S. military into the partisan fray, attempting to turn the American military into a Republican or Trumpian army.
Click the link to read why this is so terrible for our country.
President Donald Trump continued his war against America’s most cherished military traditions today when he delivered a speech at Fort Bragg. It is too much to call it a “speech”; it was, instead, a ramble, full of grievance and anger, just like his many political-rally performances. He took the stage to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA”—which has become a MAGA anthem—and then pointed to the “fake news,” encouraging military personnel to jeer at the press.
He mocked former President Joe Biden and attacked various other political rivals. He elicited cheers from the crowd by announcing that he would rename U.S. bases (or re-rename them) after Confederate traitors. He repeated his hallucinatory narrative about the invasion of America by foreign criminals and lunatics. He referred to 2024 as the “election of a president who loves you,” to a scatter of cheers and applause. And then he attacked the governor of California and the mayor of Los Angeles, again presiding over jeers at elected officials of the United States.
He led soldiers, in other words, in a display of unseemly behavior that ran contrary to everything the founder of the U.S. Army, George Washington, strove to imbue in the American armed forces.
The president also encouraged a violation of regulations. Trump, himself a convicted felon, doesn’t care about rules and laws, but active-duty military members are not allowed to attend political rallies in uniform. They are not allowed to express partisan views while on duty, or to show disrespect for American elected officials. Trump may not know these rules and regulations, but the officers who lead these men and women know them well. It is part of their oath, their credo, and their identity as officers to remain apart from such displays. Young soldiers will make mistakes. But if senior officers remain silent, what lesson will those young men and women take from what happened today?
The president cares nothing for the military, for its history, or for the men and women who serve the United States. They are, like everything else around him, only raw material: They either feed his narcissism, or they are useless. Those who love him, he claims as “his” military. But those who have laid down their life for their country are, as he so repugnantly put it, just suckers and losers, anonymous saps lying under cold headstones in places such as Arlington National Cemetery that clearly make Trump uncomfortable. Today, he showed that he has no compunction about turning every American soldier into a hooting partisan.
Why has no military leader spoken up about this outrage?
Trump’s supporters and his party will excuse his behavior at Fort Bragg the way they always have, the same way that indulgent parents shrug helplessly at their delinquent children. But senior officers of the United States military have an obligation to speak up and be leaders. Where is the Army chief of staff, General Randy George? Will he speak truth to the commander in chief and put a stop to the assault on the integrity of his troops? Where is the commander of the airborne troops, Lieutenant General Gregory Anderson, or even Colonel Chad Mixon, the base commander?
And if these men cannot muster the courage to defend American traditions—by speaking out or even resigning—where are the other senior officers who must uphold the values that have made America’s armed forces among the most effective and politically stable militaries in the world? Where is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dan Caine? He was personally selected by Trump to be America’s most senior military officer. Will he tell the man who promoted him that what he did today was obscene?
Use the gift link to read the rest.
On Saturday, Trump will celebrate his birthday with a military parade, and on the same day there will be “No Kings” protests around the country.
While tanks, armored troop carriers and artillery systems pour into Washington for the Army’s 250th birthday celebration, National Guard troops from the Army’s 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, supplemented by active-duty Marines, have been deployed to the streets of Los Angeles.
It is a juxtaposition that has military officials and experts concerned.
Army vehicles gathered in Jessup, Md., on Monday being prepared for the military parade in Washington, Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images
Several current and former Army officials said the military parade and other festivities on Saturday — which is also President Trump’s 79th birthday — could make it appear as if the military is celebrating a crackdown on Americans.
“The unfortunate coincidence of the parade and federalizing the California National Guard will feel ominous,” said Kori Schake, a former defense official in the George W. Bush administration who directs foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
Dr. Schake initially did not consider the parade much of a problem but is now concerned about “the rapid escalation by the administration” in Los Angeles.
The two scenes combined “erode trust in the military at a time when the military should be a symbol of national unity,” said Max Rose, a former Democratic congressman and an Army veteran.
“They are deploying the National Guard in direct contradiction to what state and local authorities requested, and at the same time there’s this massive parade with a display more fitting for Russia and North Korea,” he said.
Some veterans groups soured on the parade well before the latest deployments in Los Angeles. The Army recently asked the Vietnam Veterans of America chapter in Northern Virginia if it would provide 25 veterans to sit in the official reviewing stand. The group said no.
“If it were just a matter of celebrating the Army’s 250th birthday, there’d be no question,” said Jay Kalner, the chapter’s president and a retired C.I.A. analyst. “But we felt it was being conflated with Trump’s birthday, and we didn’t want to be a prop for that.”
Organizers with the “No Kings” movement are planning some 1,500 demonstrations across the country to protest the upcoming military parade on Saturday.
One notable location, however, is missing from that list — Washington, D.C., where the parade will take place.
Protest organizers have framed the move as a rejection of the spectacle, which will mark the 250th birthday of the Army as well as the 79th birthday of President Trump.
“Instead of allowing this birthday parade to be the center of gravity, we will make action everywhere else the story of America that day: people coming together in communities across the country to reject strongman politics and corruption,” organizers wrote.
They instead encouraged those in D.C. to join the flagship march in Philadelphia or one of the local protests in Virginia or Maryland. Organizers are also marketing DC Joy Day starting at 3 p.m. in Anacostia Park, which will have music, grilling, activities for children, and a grocery distribution.
Read more at The Hill.
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Trump’s new BLS leader has a disgusting past. This is from 
Disgusting.
Yam Tits and Miller know they have the District’s leaders over a barrel. Its
The 
The 
Yes, I saved the most disgusting for last. The RFK Jr. hearing yesterday was on a whole different level as the pathological liar and loony proved himself unfit again and again. There were some major players in the Senate Committee showing exactly how ignorant Worm Boy is of his own department and science. The one thing I found amazing was the number of Republicans giving him a difficult time. There are likely several reasons for this. 
Alexander Bolton from The Hill provides a similar analysis. 
I’m still waiting for the latest on our new Department of War and our open hostilities with Venezuela. Feeling great and safe yet?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments