The Weekly Sift

Everything is going to run late today because I’m on vacation near Denver, two hours behind my usual eastern time zone.

The featured post today is “Yes, he does think you’re stupid”, which outlines how I think Democrats should respond to the continuing strife in MAGA World concerning Jeffrey Epstein. That should be out shortly, maybe by 10 EDT (8 Mountain Daylight).

The weekly summary will then cover Congress’ vote to defund $9 billion of money it had already appropriated, focused on cutting public broadcasting and foreign aid; the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s late-night TV show; the poet Andrea Gibson, who I had never been aware of before her death this week; Trump’s attempt to rescue a fellow autocrat wannabee, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, from his well-deserved legal jeopardy; the harm anti-abortion laws have done to women’s health; and a few other things, culminating in your moment of schadenfreude, the CEO who got caught on the kisscam at a Coldplay concert. That should appear by 11 EDT, or 9 Mountain.

So the Big Beautiful Bill got passed and signed. I have to confess that I underestimated Trump’s ability to intimidate Republicans in Congress, several of whom have publicly admitted that the bill will hurt their constituents. (Immediately after she voted for it, Senator Murkowski said she hoped the House wouldn’t pass it in the form she had voted for. But of course the House did.)

I feel like the basics of the bill have been well covered, at least for those outside the MAGA news bubble: It will benefit the rich by cutting their taxes, hurt the poor by taking away their health insurance and food assistance, and increase the national debt.

But while the increased spending on immigration enforcement has also been covered, I feel like the massive size of the increase — and the negative implications for the future of American democracy — haven’t gotten nearly the attention they deserve. So that’s the subject of today’s featured post: “Trump only has ICE for you”. When you make Nazi comparisons you always risks being written off as an alarmist, but some fairly well known democracy experts are pointing out how the BBB lays the groundwork for a Trump Gestapo and Trump concentration camps. Trump may not be Hitler yet, but when Dachau opened in 1933, Hitler wasn’t Hitler yet either.

That post is basically done and should be out before 9 EDT.

That leaves the rest of the BBB to the weekly summary. Also: the role federal policy played in the Texas floods, the soon-to-run-out 90-day pause on the Trump tariffs, a somewhat sorrowful 4th of July, and a few other things. I’ll try to get that out by noon.

Breaking news keeps interfering with my plans. I have a number of planned articles that haven’t gotten finished in recent weeks because something else has come up to grab my attention.

This week, the obvious attention-grabber is war. Here we are, involved in another Middle Eastern war. Saturday, President Trump announced that US warplanes had bombed Iranian nuclear facilities. Maybe this will be a one-and-done situation, as Trump and his administration sometimes seem to hope. Maybe Iran will take its punch-in-the-nose and go on about its business. Or maybe Trump will push for regime change in Iran, which might make us responsible for the regime that follows, as we were in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or maybe we’ll be happy with a large oil-rich failed state.

I often warn about the dangers of speculation that purports to be news coverage. It’s always important to separate what we know from what we hope or fear. Speculation at best is a poor use of your time, and at worst can make you crazy about possibilities that never manifest. So I’ll try to discipline myself. Rather than claim to know things, I will just raise “Questions to Ask at the Start of a War”. That article probably won’t appear until 11 or so EDT.

In the meantime, I’m going ahead with another article based on breaking news: the Supreme Court’s refusal to strike down Tennessee’s law banning gender-affirming care. “The Court fails trans youth” will summarize both what should have happened and what did happen. I’m hoping to get that out by 10.

That still leaves a few things for the weekly summary: new outrages in the Big Beautiful Bill, the continuing military occupation of Los Angeles, what Trump plans for ICE, the cases we’re still waiting for at the end of the Supreme Court’s term, and a few other things. That may not appear until after noon.

It’s been one of those weeks where everything seems like a distraction from everything else. Trump and ICE have provoked a showdown with protesters in Los Angeles, and used it to push another overreach of executive power: Any violence that erupts during a protest is now evidence of a “rebellion against the government of the United States”, and justifies taking federal control of state National Guard units.

Meanwhile, Trump and Elon Musk had a major falling out this week, putting passage of Trump’s “big beautiful bill” in jeopardy. And it turns out that the Trump administration can get Kilmar Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador after all — now that they’ve got charges to file against him.

Anyway, the featured post deals with the situation in Los Angeles. As always, I stay away from trying to cover unfolding events. But the legal authority Trump is invoking and its implications are worth paying attention to sooner rather than later. That should be out shortly.

Musk and Garcia are covered in the weekly summary. I’ll mostly avoid the sensational parts of the Trump/Musk spat, but the story implies a bunch of things that the mainstream media is mostly ignoring. Like this: If Trump isn’t corruptly using his power to reward his friends and punish his enemies, why does Tesla’s stock price gyrate based on whether Musk seems like a friend or enemy at the moment?

Also in the summary: Southern Baptists debate whether to try to reverse same-sex marriage. Missouri’s broken public schools are a preview of what the GOP has planned nationally. And a few other things. That should be out by noon EDT.

The featured post today is another take-a-step-back post, where I try to make sense out of something that looks mysterious at first glance. The subject this week is greatness, as in “Make America Great Again”. There’s been a lot of debate about what era “again” refers to: the Confederacy? the Gilded Age? Jim Crow? Pre-feminism? When?

But hardly anybody asks what era “great” refers to. Because the meaning of national greatness has changed over the centuries. You can drive yourself nuts trying to figure out how “national greatness” can lead a movement to slash funding for science, destroy higher education, weaken our alliances, or undermine the rule of law. From a 21st-century perspective, everything Trump is doing tears down America’s greatness. So how can his followers be so gullible as to imagine he’s making us “great again”?

I think I know the answer to that one: Trump and his most ardent followers don’t have a 21st-century concept of greatness. They’re stuck in the Napoleonic Era, when “greatness” meant something completely different, like territorial expansion and mercantile dominance.

That’s the topic of the featured post, “The Greatness Paradox”, which should be out before 9 EST.

That leaves a lot for the weekly summary: passage of the “big beautiful” budget bill through the House, the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis, and so on. I’ll try to get that out by noon.