Of all the indignities the second Trump administration has put me through, this may be the most annoying: Today I have to write about Jeffrey Epstein.
Epstein is the guy who seduced underage girls into having sex, and allegedly shared them with a long list of rich and powerful men that he then blackmailed to keep himself rich and out of prison. How much of that is true is anybody’s guess, as is the list of those rich and powerful men. Epstein’s apparent jailhouse suicide in 2019 has been a mother lode for conspiracy theories, especially in the fever swamps of the MAGA movement. Hardly anybody claims to be Q-Anon any more, but Q-Anon’s belief in a vast conspiracy of elite pedophiles has taken root in MAGA World, and Epstein is the one real-world hook you can hang that theory on.
This week, Attorney General Pam Bondi tried to remove that hook: Never mind, she says. There is no Epstein “client list”, nobody else needs to be charged with anything, and no further release of Justice Department information is warranted. Move along, people. Nothing to see here.
Now, I moved along years ago. I have no theory about what “really” happened to Epstein, and no interest in forming one. But the controversy itself has become news. There’s a real uprising in MAGA World, and Trump telling everyone to settle down and get back in line doesn’t seem to be working. The Trump faithful have ignored real issue after real issue, but this one seems to be more than they can stand.
Anyway, “Is Epstein the issue that will finally break through?” is this week’s featured post. It should be out shortly. The rest of the week’s news — court rulings about birthright citizenship, response to the Texas floods, and so on — will be in the weekly summary, which will appear around noon.
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.
A scheduling problem has created a Monday-morning conflict for me, so I’m not going to be putting out the Sift on its usual schedule. There is no weekly summary this week, just a featured post: “The Rot Goes Deeper Than Trump” about the social and cultural failings that Trump exploited but did not create. That will go out soon — on Sunday night rather than Monday morning.
Expect a more normal schedule next week.
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.
The Sift will be a bit abbreviated this week, because I’m on vacation in New York City. (I saw Hadestown yesterday, which I can heartily recommend to anyone who hasn’t had a spouse die recently.) There won’t be a featured post this week, but I will try to cover the broad sweep of serious events that happened this week: the political assassinations in Minnesota, Trump’s continuing occupation of Los Angeles, the court pushback against that occupation, the No Kings protests, Israel’s attack on Iran, and Trump’s military celebration of his own birthday.
I’m going to try to get done early today, maybe by 11 EDT. Then on to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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.
Three big things happened this week:
- The US Court of International Trade struck down most of the new tariffs Trump has imposed, while putting major restrictions on the tariffs he can impose in the future.
- Ukraine launched an incredible drone strike thousands of miles from its border, destroying bombers on three Russian air bases.
- Elon Musk had his last day as a “special government employee”, prompting reflections on what the whole DOGE thing has accomplished.
The featured post will delve into the court ruling on tariffs, leaving Ukraine and Musk for the weekly summary. Expect to see the featured post around 10 EDT, and the summary around noon.
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.
From my point of view, two things that happened this week are worth paying attention to: Trump and the Supreme Court continued steaming towards a democracy-rattling confrontation, and Republicans in Congress made a few more steps in the direction of passing a disastrous budget for the fiscal year that starts in October. Each one of those developments gets a (fairly short) featured post.
The first, “What’s up with the Supreme Court?” is done and should post soon. The second “The Big Beautiful Bill” should appear by 10 EST.
That leaves a few major things for the weekly summary: Trump’s turnaround on tariffs, his corruption-filled trip to the Persian Gulf, the Palm Springs bombing, and a few other things. That should be out by noon or so.
So I’m back. Did anything happen in the last three weeks?
Well, we’ve got a new pope, an American who represents a continuation of Francis’ vision rather than a reversion to Benedict’s harsher culture-war positions.
In US politics, the conflict between Trump and the courts continues to escalate, pushing towards the crisis that has been coming since he took office: The Supreme Court makes a very precise order for Trump to stop doing something he really wants to do, an order he will have to either obey or defy. Then we’ll see if we still have the rule of law in this country. (I know what commenters are preparing to type: They already did that with the order to “facilitate” Albrego Garcia’s release from the concentration camp in El Salvador, an order that Trump defied. But that’s not exactly what happened. They gave an order they assumed the administration would interpret in good faith and instead it was interpreted in egregiously bad faith. The crisis we’re steaming towards is one where the Court stops assuming good faith and instead is very explicit.)
I spent my two weeks off driving from Massachusetts to Illinois and back, stopping to see a number of friends and relatives along the way (if Nashville counts as “along the way”). I wound up in my hometown, Quincy Illinois, to give a sermon about grief — something I’ve seen close-up these last six months — at the local Unitarian church. I’ve posted the text.
Something striking I noticed: Just about all my friends are more pessimistic and depressed about the political situation than I am. I’ll try to explain in the featured post, which should be out by 10 EST or so. The gist: The crisis we’re approaching has been inevitable since Trump was elected, and we’re in better shape to get through it than I had expected.
The weekly summary will cover the new pope, the recent court decisions, prospects for the FY 2026 budget, and a few other things. I’ll try to get it out by noon.
The Weekly Sift 