No Sift next week. The next new articles will appear on December 22.
The degree to which America is clearly a country that is open for sale is also really remarkable. But countries that are buying your goodwill by bringing cash to the president, that is a different form of leadership than the kind where we’re guaranteeing their security and trying to have a decent world order for all of us.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. Thanks to the Supreme Court, Texas will conduct its 2026 congressional elections with a racially gerrymandered map.
Climate change. There are interesting and somewhat ironic developments in geothermal power. Details in a short note below.
Both Gaza and Ukraine fell off my radar this week.
This week’s developments
This week the focus was on Pete Hegseth
Secretary of War Defense Pete Hegseth is under fire from two directions:
Did he really give a “kill everybody” order that led to an attack on two men clinging to the wreckage of their boat? (If we’re not at war, that’s murder. If we are, it’s a war crime.)
The DoD inspector general’s report on Signalgate says Hegseth violated military regulations and endangered pilots engaging in an attack, but apparently stops short of finding a crime. The loophole here is that Hegseth himself had the power to declassify the information he released, even if it was irresponsible to do so.
Thursday, members of the House and Senate Armed Services and Intelligence Committees were briefed on the September 2 attack where a boat was sunk and then a second attack killed survivors clinging to the wreckage. All the reactions I’ve seen quoted followed party lines. Democrats like Mark Warner said the video was “very disturbing”, while Republican Tom Cotton said:
I saw two survivors trying to flip a boat loaded with drugs bound for the United States back over so they could stay in the fight, and potentially, given all the context we’ve heard of other narco-terrorist boats in the area coming to their aid to recover the cargo and recover those narco-terrorists
To me, the phrase “stay in the fight” is telling. What fight? Who were the boatmen trying to fight against?
The bottom line here is that eventually the video will come out, and the American people can resolve this argument for themselves. The question is whether people will be able to simply use their eyes, or will they see the scene through a haze of dehumanizing labels like “narco-terrorist”?
As for the legality of the whole boat-sinking campaign, Ron Filipkowski sums it up well:
The US government is summarily executing people on a weekly basis without telling the American people any of their names or presenting any proof of their guilt, for alleged crimes that do not carry the death penalty in the US.
An important related article: Overmatched by the NYT editorial board. It discusses how our big complicated and expensive military systems repeatedly fail us in war simulations where we try to defend Taiwan against China.
The basic problem was identified already in James Fallows’ 1981 book National Defense: We need small, simple weapons that are easy to produce in large numbers, but our procurement system favors big, complex weapons that are hard to keep running and hard to replace if they get damaged in battle.
It’s been decades since I read that book, but I think I remember one key example: how Nazi Germany lost the tank war in Russia. Individually, the Russian tanks were no match for the German Tigers and Panthers. But the Russian tanks (and the Shermans imported from America) were easy to make and maintainable by any good street mechanic, while the German tanks were much more complicated and much harder to fix if they broke down.
At some point, which may already have arrived, swarms of hypersonic drones will be able to overwhelm an aircraft carrier like the Gerald Ford, which we just deployed to the Caribbean.
and the Supreme Court
It shouldn’t be surprising when the Court ignores facts, laws, and precedents to give the Republican Party an advantage, but for some reason I still was taken aback when the Court OK’d the Texas congressional map that lower courts had found violated legal guarantees against racial gerrymandering.
I’ll leave the details of the case to Paul Waldman, but the gist is that the district court held extensive hearings about whether the new Texas map was drawn according to race, and found that it was. By precedent, higher courts are supposed to defer to a lower court’s findings of fact unless they spot a clear error. (There’s a reason for that: Higher courts don’t have as much time to devote to assembling and evaluating evidence. The district judge saw and heard the witnesses, while the justices could only read the transcripts.) But the Supreme Court ignored that provision, claimed that the lower court should have given more deference to the State of Texas, and then invoked the Purcell doctrine, that courts should not change maps on the eve of an election.
But of course, as Justice Kagan points out in her dissent, it was the Texas legislature that wanted to change maps, and the legislature that controlled the timing. Letting the old map stand would have disturbed nothing and confused no one.
If Purcell prevents such a ruling, it gives every State the opportunity to hold an unlawful election. The District Court, once again aptly, made the point: Were judicial review so broadly foreclosed, then to implement even a “blatantly unconstitutional map,” the “Legislature need only to pass” it on a schedule like this one. That cannot be the law—except of course that today it is.
This is yet another abuse of the Court’s “shadow docket”, a preliminary finding that applies in this case only and may be reversed eventually. But a temporary finding is all Texas Republicans need to deliver more House seats to Speaker Johnson.
Waldman goes on to argue that Democrats have to start running against the Supreme Court.
Any Democrat who says “Voters don’t really care about this stuff” needs a good smack in the head. The answer to that problem is to make them care. Republicans do this all the time; if they have something they wish was on the agenda, they force it on the agenda, no matter how ridiculous it is or how removed it is from people’s lives. How many Americans cared five years ago about whether some middle school trans kid a hundred miles from where they live wanted to play softball? But they care about it now, because Republicans made them care.
Democrats need to do the same with the Supreme Court — loudly, angrily, personally, relentlessly. If they don’t, the next Democratic president is utterly screwed.
and geothermal power
Normally, you think about geothermal power in places like Iceland or New Zealand — places with volcanoes, where hot lava is close to the surface. But the center of the Earth is 5000 degrees Celsius, so you can find heat just about anywhere if you drill deep enough.
For years that’s been considered impractical, but maybe not much longer. Ironically, the technology to make this work has been developed by the oil and gas industry. Want to drill deep as cheaply as possible? The oil companies know how. Want to get water through rock so you can heat it in the depths? That’s been solved by the fracking companies.
The small print below the “ICE WAS HERE” sign says that the Holy Family is safe inside the church’s sanctuary, and gives the number of a hotline to report local ICE activity.
At a time when there is a ridiculous backlog of asylum cases, Trump has been firing immigration judges. The immigration courts that decide such cases are not part of the judicial branch, but belong to the Department of Justice. So DoJ is looking to recruit.
DHS is trying to help by posting DoJ recruitment ads on its Facebook page. The scary thing is what their ads tell you about the kind of people they’re looking for. Here’s one:
The text that goes with it is: “Deliver justice to criminal illegal aliens. Become a deportation judge. Save your country.”
If you’re not up on comic-book-based movies, that’s Judge Dredd. Wikipedia describes him like this:
Judge Dredd is a law enforcement and judicial officer in the dystopian future city of Mega-City One, which covers most of the east coast of North America. He is a “street judge”, empowered to summarily arrest, convict, sentence, and execute criminals.
So if you fantasize about summarily arresting, convicting, sentencing, and executing “criminal illegal aliens”, the Trump regime has just the job for you.
I’m not sure what to make of this theory, but it sounds plausible: James Throt, who claims to be a neuropathologist from the UK, says that the lasting neurological effects of Covid changed our brains, reducing our executive function and making us less empathetic. He claims you can see the change in behavior on dating apps.
Since 2020, apps report the same pattern: shorter messages, less reciprocity, fewer follow-ups, lower meet-up rates & a collapse in sustained conversational ability. This isn’t just “people being tired”. It’s a measurable degradation of attention, initiative & social cognition.
It might also explain why the public so easily falls for the regime’s depersonalization of vulnerable groups like immigrants or the trans community.
Speaking of depersonalizing attacks, Jamelle Bouie looks at Trump’s smearing of all Somali immigrants.
It’s hard to let go of the Trump MRI story, because what he says about it doesn’t add up. There’s no such thing as a “routine” MRI, and it’s hard to believe doctors did one without telling him what they were looking at or for.
Joyce Strong, a nurse, puts clues together and says he probably got a CT-based vascular imaging with contrast. She’s speculating, but her guess is that the testing was motivated by what I’ve been calling Trump’s symptoms of dementia — babbling, falling asleep at meetings, random outbursts, and so on.
A Virginia state-run liquor store was ransacked by a masked bandit on Friday evening, authorities said, leaving a trail of broken spirit bottles strewn across the shop floor.
Apparently this kind of thing happens from time to time. The article also includes a 2016 video from Tennessee of another racoon doing something similar.
I don’t think we’re necessarily going to ask for a declaration of war. I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. We’re going to kill them. They’re going to be, like, dead.
– President Donald Trump Oct 23 (at 58:50 in the video)
Trump’s assault on American democracy. Courts continue to push back against Trump. Trump’s spiteful indictments of James Comey and Letitia James got thrown out.
Gaza. In spite of the “ceasefire”, the death toll keeps rising. It’s now over 70,000.
Ukraine. It looks like Marco Rubio has managed to stop the attempt to force Ukraine to surrender to Putin’s demands.
This week’s developments
This week the Ukraine peace negotiations got more confusing
Initially, we heard that the Trump administration had negotiated a 28-point plan to end the Ukraine/Russia War. Trump’s amateur diplomat Steve Witkoff (a real estate mogul) supposedly had worked it out with Putin’s representative Kirill Dmitriev (who is the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund).
Ostensibly, this was “the Trump plan”. But the deal looked suspiciously one-sided, and was essentially a reiteration of Putin’s demands: Ukraine would yield all the territory that Russia claims (including territory it has been unable to conquer), Ukraine would limit the size of its army, NATO would agree not to station peacekeeping troops in Ukraine or let Ukraine join the alliance, and a few more points. Russia would yield essentially nothing, beyond making commitments similar to ones it had already broken by invading Crimea in 2014 and attacking the rest of Ukraine in 2022. Western sanctions against Russia would be dropped, opening up lots of business opportunities for men like Witkoff and Trump, if Putin felt inclined to look on them favorably.
Worse, some odd phrasing in the proposal suggested it had been translated from Russian. In other words, Witkoff had received a Russian plan and passed it off as “the Trump plan”, which Trump seemed content to go along with. Trump gave Ukraine until Thanksgiving to respond to the plan, warning that Ukrainian President Zelenskyy “is going to have to approve it” or face an even worse future for his country.
Two major things have happened since. First, Marco Rubio managed to insinuate himself into the process, pull Ukraine and our NATO allies back in with him, and rewrite the plan in a more balanced way that Putin is likely to reject. In other words, Trump’s Secretary of State for now has managed to scuttle “the Trump plan” to force Ukraine’s surrender.
Second, Bloomberg (behind a paywall) released transcripts of phone calls Witkoff had with Dmitriev and Putin’s top foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov. The calls raise serious doubts about Witkoff’s true loyalties. (The Foreign Office blogger Michael Weiss refers to Witkoff as “Dim Philby”, a play on the name of the famous Cold War British traitor Kim Philby. The nickname seems to be catching on.) In the transcripts, Witkoff coaches the Russians in how to pitch their proposal to Trump, as if Witkoff’s job were to manipulate Trump for the Russians, rather than the Russians for Trump.
Trump is left with two choices: to either fire Witkoff, who is not a formally appointed official anyway, or essentially confirm that he is acting as a Russian tool as well. The fact that Trump has decided to send Witkoff to Moscow for further talks in the coming days suggests the latter.
The 28-point “Trump plan” is dead, at least for now. Ukraine will not be pressured to surrender for at least another week.
We’re going to see more of this kind of behind-the-throne maneuvering, as Trump’s cognitive abilities continue to fade. Strong-willed lieutenants like Witkoff, Rubio, J. D. Vance, Stephen Miller et al will keep trying to manipulate Trump’s increasingly simple thought processes to get their own pet projects through, or just do things and hope the details never rise to the level of Trump’s attention.
and someone killed one of the National Guard troops Trump posted to DC
Two members of the West Virginia National Guard were shot near the White House Wednesday. One, Sarah Beckstrom, has died. The other, Andrew Wolfe, is in critical condition. The two were victims of what appears to have been a planned attack. No motive has been identified.
The alleged gunman, identified as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, came to the US in September 2021 under an Operation Allies Welcome program that gave some Afghans who had worked for the US government entry visas to the US. He was granted asylum in April this year, under the Trump administration, Reuters reported. Lakanwal’s ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, which worked alongside US special forces in Afghanistan, were confirmed by the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, to media outlets. The New York Times reported that the shooting suspect had worked for several US government agencies in Afghanistan, including CIA-backed units in the southern province of Kandahar, a stronghold of the Taliban.
Trump, of course, did what he always does: blamed the Biden administration, took no responsibility for his own administration’s role, and cast collective blame on all asylum seekers.
The Trump administration has halted all asylum decisions following the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington DC, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) director has said. Joseph Edlow said the pause would be in place “until we can ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible”.
That article is an example of “sanewashing”. It makes Trump’s actions sound like a reasonable, if maybe misguided, response. But you get a different impression if you read what Trump actually posted:
Even as we have progressed technologically, Immigration Policy has eroded those gains and living conditions for many. I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden’s Autopen, and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country, end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization. These goals will be pursued with the aim of achieving a major reduction in illegal and disruptive populations, including those admitted through an unauthorized and illegal Autopen approval process. Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation. Other than that, HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL, except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for — You won’t be here for long!
So:
Trump wants us to believe that immigrants (and not billionaires or Trump’s tariffs) are responsible for the dismal current economy and the long-term hollowing out of America’s middle class.
In general, even illegal immigrants are not a “disruptive population”. The vast majority keep their heads down, try not to draw attention to themselves, and work hard for very little money.
Terminating Biden’s “illegal admissions” means getting rid of 1.3 million people who came here entirely legally, through programs like temporary protected status for victims of natural disasters.
“Denaturalization” is not a thing, unless your path to citizenship was based on fraud, as Melania’s probably was. Naturalized citizens are like native born citizens; you can’t get rid of them by labeling them “non-compatible with Western Civilization” or making vague claims about “undermining domestic tranquility”.
This is all White supremacist rhetoric otherwise unhinged from reality.
Some background: The US fought a war in Afghanistan for more than 20 years, until President Biden finally faced the reality that we were accomplishing nothing and pulled out in 2021. The pullout was chaotic, which only emphasized the need to get out: Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump had been telling us for 20 years that we were building a viable government with a viable military, but in fact everything collapsed before we could even get our people out of the country.
In the chaos, everyone who had helped the US military or the CIA was in danger. Operation Allies Welcome was designed to get them out of the country before the Taliban could find and kill them. It was followed by Operation Enduring Welcome. About 200,000 Afghans got at least temporary legal status in the US.
Now one of those 200,000 has done something terrible. So of course we should have left them all to the mercy of the Taliban. And refugees from every other country are also suspect — except Whites escaping South Africa.
and Trump continues to lose in court
Not long after last week’s Sift posted, a federal judge threw out the James Comey and Letitia James indictments because Lindsey Halligan had not been lawfully appointed as US attorney for eastern Virginia. Halligan is a former personal attorney of Trump’s and has no previous experience as a prosecutor. She was appointed after the previous US attorney refused to prosecute the Comey case.
The regime may find another way to prosecute James, but the statute of limitations has run out on what Comey is accused of.
Another court just took out a different Trump prosecutor: An appellate court panel upheld a lower court ruling that Alina Habba was not legally appointed as acting US attorney for New Jersey. Every case she has prosecuted since July 1 is now subject to challenge. The issues here are slightly different than in the Halligan situation, but similarly concerns a scheme to keep a Trump-friendly and unqualified US attorney in office without Senate confirmation, beyond the 120-day period allowed for acting appointments.
and you also might be interested in …
The Epstein files issue hasn’t gone away. The Epstein Transparency Act gives the regime until December 19 to release the files. The clock is ticking.
During the shutdown, Democrats were holding out to get ObamaCare subsidies extended, in an effort to avoid premiums skyrocketing on January 1. Republicans said no, but that they’d deal with the problem after the Democrats caved on the shutdown.
Well, Democrats eventually caved, and guess what? Republicans can’t get a proposal together. Trump briefly seemed to be pushing for a plan to extend the subsidies for two years. But that ran into opposition in the House and vanished.
The basic problem is that a sizeable number of Republicans favor a plan they can’t defend in public: Let poor people die.
Kristi Noem’s contempt of court got covered in the featured post. But that wasn’t even the only Noem scandal this week: $220 million of DHS money has gone to an ad firm with close ties to Noem. The money is for image-building ads starring Noem herself.
Under Noem, DHS bypassed the normal competitive bidding process when awarding the contracts — allocating the majority of the money to a mysterious Delaware LLC that was created days before the deal was finalized. The Strategy Group does not appear on public documents about the deal.
My annual dose of humility: The NYT’s 100 Notable Books list for 2025. This year I’ve read three: 1929, Katabasis, and Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.
In stark contrast to Trump’s apparent concern with drug smuggling, which has caused him to have the US Navy murder 80 or so Venezuelan fishermen — see the featured post — he said this week that he intends to pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who is serving a 45-year sentence in US prison for drug trafficking and related offenses.
Who knows what this is about? Maybe Hernandez paid somebody off. Or maybe Trump is just showing loyalty to a fellow criminal president, or his characteristic sympathy for people at the top of a pyramid, no matter how corrupt the pyramid is.
Similarly mystifying: Trump commuted the sentence of convicted fraudster David Gentile from seven years to 12 days. Gentile ran a Ponzi scheme that defrauded more than 10,000 investors. Does Trump just identify with fraudsters? Or is there something more sinister happening?
The War Defense Department is investigating Senator Mark Kelly for his role in an ad reminding members of the armed forces not to obey unlawful orders, which is just what the Uniform Code of Military Justice says.
President Bone Spurs and Secretary Drunkard don’t seem to understand that any story placing them next to decorated-pilot-and-astronaut Kelly works to his benefit, not theirs.
Meanwhile, South Park has its sites on Hegseth in its Thanksgiving episode. The episode ends on a song that obscenely insults Hegseth, then asks “Pete Hegseth, what you gonna do? Your kids will watch this, and their friends will see it too.”
and let’s close with something fishy
No doubt this question has been keeping you up nights: Can an octopus learn to play the piano? The answer is: kinda/sorta, if you apply huge amounts of time and ingenuity to the project.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. A judge found that federal agents in Chicago repeatedly instigated violence against protesters, then lied about it in reports that painted the protesters as violent.
Climate change.According to Grist, the COP30 conference in Brazil closed with “no new agreements to wind down fossil fuel use or curb deforestation”.
Ukraine. Representatives of Trump and Putin put together a 28-point peace plan, which Trump has given Zelenskyy until Thursday to accept. It comes at a time of internal Ukrainian weakness, and amounts to a demand for surrender. It’s currently being revised in talks with Ukraine and Europe, who were left out of the original formulation.
This week’s developments
This week Trump did a lot to raise your outrage
Maybe it comes from the sting of his defeat on the Epstein Transparency Act, or from worsening dementia limiting his ability to control himself, but Trump has said and done outrageous things recently at a pace that is unusual even for him. It’s hard to know how to cover them. It would be easy to fill the entire Sift with nothing else, and several hour-long news shows I watched on the rechristened MS NOW did precisely that. But I’m torn.
On the one hand, these incidents only reinforce things you already know:
Donald Trump is a disgusting human being.
He regularly gets away with outrages that would have ended the career of any previous president, or just about any previous American politician. We’re a long way from the era when Obama could spark outrage by wearing a tan suit or putting his feet up on the Resolute Desk.
Meanwhile, substantive things have been happening in foreign affairs, in the economy, in the courts, and so on. Being drawn into Trump’s Crazytown antics removes us from the world of events that have lasting consequences for our lives and for the future of our nation.
On the other hand, ignoring these persistent outrages makes us complicit in normalizing them. American presidents have never acted like this before, and no one should want this kind of behavior to become acceptable.
So here’s my compromise: I’m going to list the three biggest outrages and link to longer accounts of them, because you should know what happened. But I’m also not going to let them take over and drive out all other news.
He threatened six Democratic lawmakers with arrest, trial, and death for making a video repeating the standard Defense Department doctrine that soldiers should refuse to carry out unlawful orders. (No one seems to remember the origin story of the right-wing Oath Keepers after President Obama took office: “More specifically, the group’s members, which number in the thousands, pledge to disobey orders they deem unlawful”. Right-wingers considered that position patriotic in 2009.) Trump has since denied that he was making a death threat, but who knows how his more rabid followers might interpret his statements? If somebody actually does shoot at (rather than just threaten) one or more of the Democrats, it will be a textbook case of stochastic terrorism. Notably, one of the Democrats is Arizona’s Senator Mark Kelly, whose wife Gabby Giffords has already survived a shooting.
He called a female White House reporter “piggy”. A week ago Friday, Catherine Lucey from Bloomberg was part of a press gaggle on Air Force One. She asked the kind of hard, direct question reporters are supposed to put to presidents: “if there’s nothing incriminating in the [Epstein] files”, why was he blocking their release? Trump pointed to her in a threatening way (see photo above) and said, “Quiet, quiet piggy.” The White House press secretary later defended this response as “frank and honest“.
This wasn’t an action of Trump himself, but falls into the same outrage category: The Coast Guard briefly considered reclassifying swastikas and nooses as “potentially divisive” rather than hate symbols. Public outcry made them walk that back.
Meanwhile, we still haven’t seen the Epstein files. The Epstein Transparency Act gives the Justice Department 30 days to produce the files. Trump says his DoJ will because there’s nothing to hide, but we’ll see what happens.
The Trump-ordered sham investigations into Epstein’s links to prominent Democrats opens the possibility that DoJ will claim it can’t release information related to an ongoing investigation.
It bears repeating that Trump could have ordered the files released at any time and still could. He didn’t need an act of Congress to force his hand. It’s absurd to claim that you support doing something that you could have done a long time ago and chose not to do.
The best people to deal with absurdity are comedians, so here’s The Daily Show’s take on the situation, where Jordan Klepper applies “Occam’s Giant Fucking Machete“. The whole routine is amusing, but if you’re pressed for time skip ahead to about the 12:30 mark.
and Marjorie Taylor Greene
It’s been interesting these last few months watching MTG become estranged from the Trump regime on issues like Medicaid, ObamaCare subsidies, and the Epstein files. In every case, she has taken the path consistent with Trump’s base and the promises he made them, while Trump has done something else. Just before he flipped back to the release-the-files side (sort of), Trump branded MTG as “Marjorie Traitor Greene”, which MTG claimed (believably) resulted in death threats.
Sadly, like Jeff Flake, Adam Kinzinger, and others before her, MTG decided not to stand and fight. Friday night she released a video announcing that she will resign from Congress on January 5 (coincidentally, just after her pension vests).
Her video is worth watching, mostly because of how well she describes the people she claims to represent. There’s some Christian-right stuff in there about abortion and trans rights, but mostly she’s talking about working-class people who have seen their prospects diminish and who have little hope for their children to have a better life. She’s not wrong about that, and Democrats have to figure out how to speak to and for these people.
Two places in the video stand out for other reasons. Around the 6:30 mark, she has just finished outlining all the ways she has fought for Trump and the Trump agenda in Congress before differing with him on a few issues. But then she says:
Loyalty should be a two-way street, and we should be able to vote our conscience and represent our district’s interests, because our job-title is literally “representative”. … Standing up for American women who were raped at 14 years old, trafficked and used by rich powerful men, should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the president of the United States, whom I fought for.
Around 9:15, she compares her relationship with Trump to a broken marriage:
I refuse to be a battered wife, hoping it all goes away and gets better. If I am cast aside by the President and the MAGA political machine and replaced by neo-cons, Big Pharma, Big Tech, military-industrial war complex, foreign leaders, and the elite donor class that can never ever relate to real Americans, then many common Americans have been cast aside and replaced as well.
But there was real news about Ukraine
Thursday, Axios published a leaked draft of a 28-point peace plan worked out by representatives of Trump and Putin, without input from either Ukraine or its European allies. The plan is shockingly one-sided. Ukraine gives in to Russia’s demands: limiting the size of its army, rewriting its constitution to outlaw NATO membership, and even surrendering more territory than Russia has conquered. In exchange it gets only nebulous commitments without clear enforcement mechanisms. Timothy Snyder goes through the proposal point-by-point.
Snyder points to something others have noticed: The plan’s curious phrasing suggests that it was translated from Russian. In other words, Trump’s peace plan was really just Trump’s name attached to Putin’s demands. Much of the plan is in the passive voice, like “Ukraine’s sovereignty will be confirmed.” Exactly who is doing this confirming is never specified. Treaties and other agreements are not written like this.
At first it wasn’t clear whether this was a final product, but Trump quickly got behind it and insisted that Ukraine accept it by Thanksgiving. “He’s going to have to approve it,” Trump said of Zelensky, who is politically weak right now because of a corruption scandal in his administration.
Europe pushed back, and Trump fumed. But today it looks like a second draft will happen after consultation with Europe and Ukraine. Probably Russia will reject this, and we’ll be back to square one.
Thursday, US District Judge Sara Ellis ordered ICE and Border Patrol thugs to stop brutalizing the people of Chicago. But an appeals court stayed her order, claiming it was too broad. Then she released 233 very damning pages of her findings. Specifically, federal agents and their leader Greg Bovino repeatedly lied, submitting reports that didn’t match what their body cameras recorded.
After reviewing all the evidence submitted to the Court and listening to the testimony elicited at the preliminary injunction hearing, during depositions, and in other court proceedings, the Court finds Defendants’ evidence simply not credible. … Defendants specifically directed the Court to certain videos and timestamps “to aid the Court in its review of those videos.” Presumably, these portions of the videos would be Defendants’ best evidence to demonstrate that agents acted in line with the Constitution, federal laws, and the agencies’ own policies on use of force when engaging with protesters, the press, and religious practitioners. But a review of them shows the opposite—supporting Plaintiffs’ claims and undermining all of Defendants’ claims that their actions toward protesters, the press, and religious practitioners have been, as Bovino has stated, “more than exemplary.”
Quite the opposite, the videos repeatedly show federal agents as the provocateurs, introducing violence into otherwise peaceful protests:
For example, Defendants directed the Court to two videos of agents outside the Broadview facility the evening of September 19, 2025. In those videos, agents stand behind a fence preparing to leave the facility’s gates and disperse what Defendants described as an unruly mob. The scene appears quiet as the gate opens, revealing a line of protesters standing in the street holding signs. Almost immediately and without warning, agents lob flashbang grenades, tear gas, and pepper balls at the protesters, stating, “fuck yea!”, as they do so, and the crowd scatters. This video disproves Defendants’ contentions that protesters were the ones shooting off fireworks, refusing orders, and acting violently so as to justify the agents’ use of force.
Or this:
Defendants also highlighted an October 3, 2025 video, presumably to show that agents driving the streets faced constant danger from cars ramming them on purpose. But instead of leaving this impression, the video … suggests that the agent drove erratically and brake-checked other motorists in an attempt to force accidents that agents could then use as justifications for deploying force.
After listing other examples and alluding to many others, Ellis conclude:
[A]t some point, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to believe almost anything that Defendants represent. … Overall, after reviewing all the evidence, the Court finds that Defendants’ widespread misrepresentations call into question everything that Defendants say they are doing in their characterization of what is happening at the Broadview facility or out in the streets of the Chicagoland area during law enforcement activities.
Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern quotes Skye Perryman to respond to the objection that none of this matters because the Supreme Court will knuckle under to Trump anyway:
Listen, this is why we’re doing what we’re doing in the district courts. We are fully aware that somewhere down the line we can lose. But this is the place where the fog of war doesn’t enter the room. What enters the room is people telling the truth and the judge making findings. That is the story we tell, and it’s what we can do to hold the line right now. … [I]t’s frustrating that this order has been stayed. In other words, this changes nothing on the ground. But it is important to have the judge who ordered agents to wear bodycams now make findings in which she says: You just lied. And I think that is the value of all this.
And the prosecution of James Comey continues to be a comedy of errors. Recall: The career prosecutors found no case worth bringing to a grand jury, so Trump fired the US attorney and brought in Lindsey Halligan, his former personal lawyer. She couldn’t get any other lawyers in her office to accompany her, so she went to the grand jury alone. Having never prosecuted a case before, and trying to move quickly before the statute of limitations ran out, she made a botch of it.
It is actually hard to keep up with the pace of developments. Multiple times a day, documents land on this docket that contain new inanities, new abominations in the sight of the law, new factual revelations, new reasons to wonder not whether this case will collapse but only how. At the hearing the other day, Judge Michael Nachmanoff seemed to be struggling with exactly this question, asking an attorney for Comey—in effect—which motion he wants the judge to dismiss the case based on.
US District Judge James Boasberg will hold hearings next week to determine whether contempt charges are justified in the case where administration officials refused to turn around a plane deporting detainees to El Salvador.
The NYT is staying with the Kash Patel abuse-of-government-perks story. There are two pieces of it: use of his government jet for personal travel (something he criticized previous FBI Director Christopher Wray for), and assigning FBI SWAT agents as a protection team for his country-singer girlfriend.
and let’s close with something to be thankful for
I’ve long thought that the Fox News canard of a “war on Christmas” had it backwards: Christmas is the aggressor and is rapidly advancing against all our other holidays. As soon as Halloween was over, Christmas decorations started appearing, and the deluge of Christmas music can’t be far behind.
If you want to try to hold the Thanksgiving line, though, Country Living has a playlist of Thanksgiving songs you can use.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. Post his election disaster, the shutdown, and the growing threat of the Epstein files, Trump’s coalition is showing some cracks.
Climate change. The COP30 international conference is happening in Brazil, without the US. Everyone is frustrated by the world’s slow progress in addressing climate change.
Gaza. The UN is voting today on a US-sponsored resolution to establish an international Gaza stabilization force.
This week everybody was talking about the shutdown aftermath
No one is happy with how the shutdown came out. It lasted a record 43 days, during which a lot of people worked without pay, saw their government services delayed, or perhaps even went hungry. But in the end it turned out to be an almost entirely symbolic fight, as Democrats got no concessions on their central issue: keeping ObamaCare premiums from skyrocketing in 2026.
The question is whether a better deal could have emerged later. Fundamentally, the Democrats’ problem is that you can’t play chicken with somebody who’s not afraid to wreck their car. As much as Americans were suffering, and as much as they were blaming that suffering on Trump, it’s not clear that Trump cared.
As Politico notes: SNAP benefits will start again soon, if they haven’t already. But meanwhile, millions of Americans will lose their benefits, due to “work requirements” that seemed designed to trap people into disqualifying themselves.
and whether Trump was involved in Epstein’s crimes
Last night, Trump flipped on releasing the Epstein files. After unsuccessfully trying to badger Republicans like Nancy Mace and Lauren Boebert into removing their names from the discharge petition to bring the Epstein Transparency Act to a vote in the House, and facing an overwhelming defeat when it finally will be voted on later this week, Trump reversed course, announcing that “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files” because “we have nothing to hide”.
Probably this means that he is confident the Senate will block the bill, but we’ll see.
I have to confess that when the Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking scandal got sucked into Q-Anon’s crazy theory of a world-ruling pedophile cabal, I lost what little interest I had. Surely this was just another conspiracy theory, blown way out of proportion by a cult of lunatics. (After all, if Democrats were synthesizing some eternal-youth elixir out of the blood of children, why did Joe Biden and Bill Clinton look so old? This was just one of the many bits of cognitive dissonance even a cursory glance at the theory raised.)
But lo and behold, there’s a kernel of truth at the center of all that nonsense. Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell either induced or forced hundreds of under-age (or barely above the age of consent) girls into offering sexual services to their friends, who appear to have been some very powerful people. Rather than just internet rumors, there are real victims speaking out publicly, providing evidence strong enough to strip Prince Andrew of his title, send Maxwell to prison for sex trafficking, and get Epstein arrested and held in federal prison, where (the government says) he hung himself before a trial could happen.
In addition to trying to block release of what the Justice Department knows, various other facts make Trump look guilty of something:
Epstein’s apparent suicide happened during Trump’s first presidency
There’s certainly a lot of smoke there, but whether Trump himself is in the fire has not yet been proved. This week we got even more smoke, as the House Oversight Committee released 20,000 emails it obtained from the Epstein estate. Trump was mentioned thousands of times in the emails — more than anyone else — and the emails strongly imply that Trump knew what Epstein was doing but stayed quiet about it. In one, Trump is described as a “dog that hasn’t barked”.
Epstein victims made a one-minute video pushing to have all the Justice Department’s files released.
OK, just for a moment assume the worst: Trump is shown to be an Epstein client; he’s abused underage girls. Does it make a difference?
Tim Whitaker argues that for Trump’s Evangelical supporters, it won’t. His argument has two main points: First, none of Trump’s previous sexual scandals (which Whitaker lists) have dented the MAGA/Evangelical alliance.
Despite these realities White Evangelicals overwhelmingly voted for him in 2016, 2020 and 2024 choosing instead to ignore or explain away what is an obvious reality: Trump already IS a sexual abuser. He doesn’t need to be on a client list for that to be demonstrated. His words, actions and court cases prove that he is.
Second, Evangelical churches have tolerated vast amounts of sexual misconduct in their leaders. Even if a big-time preacher loses his position in scandal, before long he’s been rehabilitated and is leading somewhere else.
Megan Kelly is already lining up how she’ll defend Trump if he turns out to be a participant in Epstein’s crimes: Epstein wasn’t really that bad.
Kelly went on to allege that she knew “somebody very, very close” to the Epstein case “who is in a position to know virtually everything.” She claimed the unidentified individual “told me, from the start years and years ago, that Jeffrey Epstein, in this person’s view, was not a pedophile.”
“He was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls. And I realize this is disgusting. I’m definitely not trying to make an excuse for this,” she continued. “I’m just giving you facts, that he wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.”
OK, let’s start here: A 15-year-old isn’t “barely legal” in most states. At best she’s barely illegal. Here in Massachusetts, the age of consent is 16 — and the only reason it’s that low is to avoid criminalizing 16-year-old boys. If somebody wanted to raise the age-of-consenting-to-men-over-25 to 18 or higher, I’d be for it.
Additionally (as I’ve observed before about Israel and genocide), when you start listing technical distinctions in the definition of a word like “pedophile”, you’ve already gone far astray.
meanwhile, Trump’s coalition begins to crack
In the most plausible American-democracy-survives-Trump scenario, a Democratic sweep of the 2025 elections is followed by elected Republicans claiming independence from their president. It’s too soon to say that’s definitely happening, but there are signs.
One of the biggest factors enabling Trump’s rising autocracy in the nation as a whole has been that he had already achieved autocracy in the Republican Party. Combined with narrow Republican control of both houses of Congress, his complete domination of elected Republicans has allowed him to usurp congressional powers and avoid investigations of the most blatant corruption.
Recently, though, cracks have been forming. Trump’s cover-up of the Epstein scandal and the Big Beautiful Bill’s deep cuts to Medicaid and SNAP have allowed Marjorie Taylor Greene to get between Trump and his base. This week that dissension erupted into outright schism, as Trump withdrew his support of MTG, called her “Wacky” and “a ranting Lunatic”, and dangled an endorsement to tempt some Trump-loyal Republican to challenge her in a primary.
Tucker Carlson has also been increasingly critical of the regime lately, most recently claiming that the FBI is hiding something about Thomas Crooks, the gunman who tried to assassinate Trump during the 2024 campaign. Previously, he had denounced the post-Kirk-murder crackdown on free speech as well as the Epstein cover-up and the attack on Iran. (Isolationism is another issue where a Republican can out-MAGA Trump. Look for resistance to Trump’s escalating threats to Venezuela.)
When Trump demanded that Senate Republicans end the shutdown by scrapping the filibuster, Majority Leader John Thune calmly said no. Indiana just refused to accede to Trump’s redistricting demand. And former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels published an op-ed that appears to be even-handed, but contains some veiled criticism of Trump. He offers this hope for the future:
At some point, the public could tire of playground insults and asinine nicknames, and start asking for a little more substance from those elected to serve them. Interminable stalemate, especially when the country enters a stretch of serious economic or national security difficulty, could trigger a collective demand to “Grow up.”
It’s not a revolt yet, but Trump’s levers of power are becoming unreliable. A would-be autocrat’s most important asset is the belief that his power cannot be resisted, that everyone must either give in or be run over. That’s slipping.
Jack Hopkins is always more cynical and speculative than I am. Now he’s assessing signs that the powers behind Trump are already choosing their new champion.
Last month, President Trump granted a pardon to a billionaire felon, after the felon’s company enriched a Trump family business. The pardon went to Changpeng Zhao, a Chinese-born businessman, who was accused by the Justice Department of causing, quote, “…significant harm to U.S. national security…” The president says he does not know Zhao. Our reporting shows that Zhao’s company supported a Trump family firm at critical moments leading up to the president’s pardon.
Trump’s feds seem to be pulling out of Chicago. The next American city for them to invade is Charlotte. This is the first swing state Trump has invaded, and I suspect he’ll regret it in 2026.
The reason global air temperatures don’t go up every year is that some years the oceans soak up more of the extra heat. But that energy doesn’t go away. An article in Grist explores what happens when oceans start expelling heat rather than absorbing it.
We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people. We pray for an end to dehumanizing rhetoric and violence, whether directed at immigrants or at law enforcement. We pray that the Lord may guide the leaders of our nation, and we are grateful for past and present opportunities to dialogue with public and elected officials.
Something I wonder about: With all the federal agents doing stuff like this, or trying to find dirt on Trump’s enemies, or working on deporting nannies and landscapers, is anybody actually trying to catch criminals any more?
The regime didn’t start blowing up boats it claims were smuggling drugs until September, but apparently Emil Bove, who was acting attorney general at the time and has since become a federal appellate judge, was describing the policy back in February.
So far, 20 strikes have killed about 75 people, and the regime has offered no evidence for its claims that the boats were smuggling drugs.
Ignoring the morality of killing people because you suspect them of a crime, the attacks are also bad strategy. When you capture people, you can flip them to get information. You can also capture their phones and other information devices. When you blow the boat up, you can’t do any of that.
“All this strategy is doing is killing people and the same amount of drugs is getting into the U.S.,” the former senior DOJ official said. “You didn’t save anybody or increase the number of people you’re saving in the U.S. It’s extraordinarily shortsighted and I don’t think it gets you the goal you want.”
Trump’s assault on American democracy. Tuesday’s elections show that the clock is ticking on Trump’s bid for autocracy. If he allows fair elections in 2026, he’s going to lose control of Congress. Meanwhile, his thugs continue to abuse the citizens of Chicago.
Climate change. The COP30 summit is meeting in Brazil this week, with no US participation.
Gaza. The next step in the Gaza peace plan is to assemble a “stabilization force” of peace-keeping troops from other Muslim countries. The UAE has opted out. Turkey wants in, but Israel is dubious. Meanwhile, Netanyahu pledges to enforce the ceasefire “with an iron fist“.
Ukraine. The Russian advance continues, but it’s very slow and costly.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about the Democrats’ sweeping election victory
Many words have been written and spoken about what this means. To me, it comes down to this: In the rosy scenarios where the Trump autocracy fails and American democracy survives, winning big in 2025 was a key step. An autocrat’s biggest strength is the myth of his invincibility. You go along with what he wants because there seems to be no other choice.
Certainly that has been the case inside the Republican Party. For 10 months, Congress has virtually ceased to be a factor in American government, because the Republican majorities are so cowed by Trump. The Senate approved cabinet nominees (like Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and RFK Jr.) that everyone knew were unqualified and probably dangerous. Both houses have sat mutely while Trump usurps Congress’ power of the purse and its war powers. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill needed near-unanimous Republican support to pass, and got it — despite the fact that it will take Medicaid coverage away from millions of Republican voters. The House has simply gone home for six weeks rather than vote on subpoenaing the Epstein files.
After Tuesday, Republicans in elected offices have to wonder if they’re committing political suicide by following Trump so blindly.
Statewide, Trump lost New Jersey by less than 6%, but Mikie Sherill won by more than double that margin. A similar 6% swing in 2026 elections could flip a lot of Republican seats to the Democrats.
Of course, there is a downside to these results as well: Now that’s it’s obvious that MAGA candidates won’t hold control of Congress in free and fair 2026 elections, the pressure to steal those elections grows.
I think it’s important not to get caught up in the Democratic polarization narrative the mainstream media is pushing. Yes, Mamdani won as a Democratic Socialist, while Sherill and Spanberger won as moderate Democrats. I don’t see this as a problem.
The unifying principles are to be authentic, to recognize that a large percentage of the electorate feels poorly served by our economic system and left out of our politics, and to say to those people: “I see you, and I want to do specific things to help you.”
The specific policies, and whether they are leftist or centrist, are far less important.
Above all, don’t get caught up in the Socialism vs Capitalism argument, as if these were two Manichean forces inevitably at each other’s throats. We are all socialists and we are all capitalists. Do you support your town having a public fire department? To that extent, you’re a socialist. Do you want your town’s restaurants to compete on price and quality, letting the local market decide which ones thrive? To that extent, you’re a capitalist.
The issue is where to draw the line between the public and private sectors. That’s a serious and important question, but it has many viable answers and many opportunities for compromise that you’ll miss if you see nothing but capitalist/socialist polarization.
A lot of people are angsting over the conflicting poll results: Trump’s approval continues to sink, but the public’s opinion of the Democratic Party hasn’t improved. I don’t think it’s that mysterious: In most of the country, you can’t win just by being a generic Democrat. People don’t connect the Democrats with any particular message, so you have to bring your own message. You also have to be an individual and project a personality people identify with.
We might go into next November with the polls still close on whether people want Republicans or Democrats to control Congress. But if Democrats do their job right, people will look at the Democrat running in their district and find something they like or are even excited by.
funds the Departments of Agriculture and Veterans Affairs for the full fiscal year (i.e., until October 1)
funds SNAP (i.e. food stamps) for the full fiscal year
gives federal workers fired during the shutdown their jobs back and prevents further layoffs through January 30
grants backpay to all federal workers furloughed or working without pay during the shutdown
What it doesn’t do: anything to help the tens of millions of Americans whose ObamaCare premiums are going to skyrocket for 2026. Majority Leader Thune has promised a vote on a bill to preserve the subsidies that kept those plans affordable, but that’s a political concession rather than anything real. Even if the Senate passes that measure, Speaker Johnson has said it won’t get a vote in the House. So basically, the Senate vote will frame the issue, positioning Democrats as the ones who voted for it and Republicans as the ones who blocked it. But it won’t actually help anyone pay for health insurance.
Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, one of the eight Democrats who voted for the bill, exemplified the defeatist attitude Democrats so often bring to negotiations: “This was the only deal on the table.” The Republican position is what it is, and Democrats just have to adjust to it.
The Democrats’ surrender came in spite of all indications that they were winning the political battle of the shutdown: Polls showed Trump and the Republicans were taking more of the blame, and Democrats overwhelmingly won Tuesday’s elections.
Josh Marshall recognizes all that, but finds this silver lining:
When the time came Democrats fought. They held out for 40 days, the longest shutdown standoff in history. They put health care at the center of the national political conversation and inflicted a lot of damage on Trump. At 40 days they could no longer hold their caucus together. And we got this.
That’s a sea change in how the congressional party functions. And that’s a big deal. Many people see it as some kind of epic disaster and are making all the standard threats about not voting or not contributing or whatever. That’s just not what I see. It’s a big change in the direction of the fight we need in the years to come that just didn’t go far enough. Yet.
… Meanwhile, keep purging all the folks who can’t get with the new program. If a senator is from a comfortably Blue State and wasn’t vocally in favor of fighting this out, primary them — toss them overboard. After March, Dick Durbin realized he needed to retire. Let’s see some more retirements. But don’t tell me nothing has changed or that this is some cataclysmic disaster. It’s not. This accomplished a lot. It demonstrated that Democrats can go to the mat when the public is behind them and not pay a political price. It dramatically damaged Donald Trump. It cued up the central arguments of the 2026 campaign. It just didn’t go far enough.
Meanwhile, passing the House is not a done deal yet. It’ll be interesting to see how many Democrats hold out, and how many Republicans think even this victory isn’t big enough.
And the House will have to come back into session to end the shutdown. Will Johnson find some new excuse not to seat Adelita Grijalva? Will he violate House rules to avoid a vote on subpoenaing the Epstein files? Expect a lot of soap opera in the next few weeks.
and Trump’s violent thugs
Don’t miss this interview, where Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss talks to a woman who was victimized by Border Patrol agents in an Evanston incident that has gone viral. “They’re more afraid of us than we are of them,” she says.
What they — ICE and the Border Patrol — are afraid of is not violence, but people following their vehicles, blowing whistles around their agents, and making videos of what they do. Biss was also interviewed by Democracy Now (the link at the top of the page) in a segment that included video of major ICE abuses in Evanston.
Well, on Friday, which was, by the way, Halloween, ICE and CBP were all over Evanston. It was a terrifying day. I couldn’t go two minutes without a notification coming up on my phone: They’re at this corner; they’re at this corner; they’re grabbing this landscaper, and so forth. And they were doing what they usually do these days, which is drive around town looking for someone working on a lawn whose skin is not white, and grab that person and abduct them. And so, the rapid responders were out in force, and there was a lot of activity, and I was driving around trying to do what I could.
And then, in the early afternoon, the following thing happened. The vehicle, which was driven by a CBP agent, for whatever that’s worth, that had been driving around the region and was being followed by residents — which is what happens all the time because our community is rising up against this invasion — they decided they don’t want scrutiny, they don’t want to be followed, they don’t want to be observed, they don’t want to be videotaped, and, most of all, they don’t want to be criticized. They appear to have acted deliberately to cause an accident. They jammed on the brakes right after going through an intersection and to force the car following them to rear end them, which, of course, created a scene. And there were people who gathered, who were watching and who were yelling at them and blowing their whistles and screaming. And then they appear to have just started beating people up for no reason. And folks may have seen these videos, that have gotten a lot of attention, including one where they’ve got this young man on the ground, and his head is on the asphalt, and they’re literally punching him in the head. And then, after a while of this, they jammed three people into their vehicle, abducted them, drove them around, and eventually, later on, released them.
If you’re not familiar with the Chicago area, you may not realize how incredible this whole scene is. Evanston is the lakefront suburb just north of Chicago. It is the home of Northwestern University, and in general is very upscale. It’s not a place where ICE or CBP should be looking for “the worst of the worst”, as Trump promised during the 2024 campaign. So if you look at what Trump’s thugs are doing and say, “That would never happen here, in my town”, think again.
and the Supreme Court’s tariff hearing
I have been deeply skeptical of this Supreme Court’s ability to defend the Constitution against Trump. In particular, I’ve doubted they will apply the same standards to Trump that they did to Biden. They invented the “major questions doctrine” and greatly expanded the “non-delegation doctrine” precisely to limit Biden’s executive authority. Now, those same standards clearly apply to Trump’s sweeping tariffs, but I’ve doubted the Court will bother to notice.
I’m less sure about that skepticism now. Wednesday’s oral arguments showed some of the conservative justices — especially Gorsuch — worrying about major questions and non-delegation. The issue in a nutshell is that tariffs are taxes, and the taxing power belongs so intrinsically to Congress that it can’t be delegated to the President.
Gorsuch raised the question of whether Congress could also delegate its power to declare war, and later wondered what a more liberal president could do with the tariff power: Suppose a Democratic president declared a climate emergency and tariffed the importation of internal combustion engines?
You can’t always deduce justices’ final opinion from the questions they ask, but I expected the conservative justices to be creating room for themselves to give Trump what he wants, as they so often do. I didn’t see that.
By any standard, Pelosi is a giant in congressional history. She was the first female speaker, and the most effective speaker of either party in my lifetime. She took criticism from the left because of her broadly centrist policies, but I can’t remember her blocking any liberal proposal if the votes were there to pass it.
Retirement, like death, is one of those moments that calls for a magnanimous response. But of course, Trump doesn’t have a magnanimous bone in his body. He responded to the news by calling Pelosi an “evil woman” and saying that “she did the country a great service by retiring”.
I’m going to display my own lack of a magnanimous response by commenting on the death of Dick Cheney. I won’t rehash all the things I fault him for, but I regret that now he will never stand trial at the ICC in The Hague.
When 60 Minutes asked Trump about pardoning crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao, he claimed not to know who Zhao is. The company Zhao founded has made deals with the Trump family’s crypto venture, but that couldn’t have anything to do with the pardon, could it?
I’d like to ask Speaker Johnson which option is worse: that Trump is lying about a corrupt pardon, that he signs pardons without knowing who the people are, or that his dementia has progressed to the point that he can’t remember the decisions he makes.
Here’s a cartoonist’s take on how media coverage has changed in the last 50 years:
It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. The most important article to read this week came from the NYT’s Editorial Board: “Are We Losing Our Democracy?“. It lists 12 traits of an autocratic regime, and details how Trump has achieved some and is making inroads on the others. Articles like this one make it clear that words like “autocrat”, “fascist”, etc. or not just insults or evidence of Trump derangement. They are clear assessments of where we are.
Climate change. I’m late to notice, but the rhetoric of climate denial has changed.
Gaza. Nominally there is still a ceasefire, but the killing continues: “On Tuesday, Israeli airstrikes killed more than 100 Palestinians, at least 66 of them women and children, in the deadliest day since Donald Trump declared the war was over. Israel said the bombings were in response to an attack in Rafah city that killed a soldier carrying out demolitions there.”
Ukraine. Russia continues a slow and costly advance in the Donetsk region, while Ukrainian drones get increasingly effective inside Russia.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about the shutdown
A lapse in SNAP benefits and higher premiums on ObamaCare policies both kicked in on Saturday. That’s the topic of one of the featured posts.
This week Trump floated his solution to the shutdown, which is the one I predicted two weeks ago: The Senate should do away with the filibuster so that he wouldn’t have to negotiate with Democrats. So far, Senate Republicans don’t seem interested.
and tariffs
The Senate voted three times this week to revoke the national emergencies Trump declared to raise tariffs on Canada, Brazil, and the broad range of countries in his “liberation day” tariffs. The votes will have no practical effect because the House will not concur and Trump would veto the resolution if they did, but they do mark the first stirrings of resistance in the Senate, at least among Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Rand Paul, and Mitch McConnell.
Friday the Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 really works the way Trump says it does, and gives him the power to do whatever he wants with tariffs. Lower courts have said no, but that’s because they were doing law; the Supreme Court may be doing something else.
The Brazil and Canada tariffs should be the biggest piece of evidence against Trump having the power he claims. Both seem to have less to do with national security and more with Trump’s personal rages.
He imposed 50% tariffs on Brazil because that country prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, for doing essentially the same thing Trump did on January 6. He recently raised tariffs on Canada because the province of Ontario produced an ad he didn’t like.
and tomorrow’s elections
Odd-numbered years are usually slow for elections, but there are a few: Tomorrow New York City will elect a new mayor, and Virginia and New Jersey will elect new governors.
In NYC, Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary, but the party establishment has not united around him. Former Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo is running as an independent. Mamdani is ahead in the polls.
Mamdani is a charismatic candidate who appeals to young voters. He is also Muslim, has been critical of Israel, and is part of the Democratic Socialist wing of the party. Big money is being spent to take him down, but it doesn’t seem to be working.
and the White House
Three stories of Trump’s abuses of power got attention these last two weeks:
tearing down the East Wing of the White House to build a massive gilded ballroom
filing claims against his own Justice Department asking for $230 million
The president insisted on Tuesday that the government owes him “a lot of money” for previous justice department investigations into his conduct, while at the same time asserting his personal authority over any potential payout.“
It’s interesting, ’cause I’m the one that makes the decision, right?” Trump said at the White House, responding to questions about administrative claims he filed seeking roughly $230m related to the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago and the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The New York Times had reported the claims on Tuesday.
Trump’s comment lays out a circular situation: Trump as president would in effect decide whether Trump as claimant receives taxpayer money for investigations into Trump as defendant.
The circularity is the only reason these claims might be paid. Both the Mar-a-Lago search and the Russia investigation were totally justified, and his claims otherwise would be laughed out of court. Trump says he would give the money to charity, but he’s said things like that before.
You might wonder how Trump can spend $300 million on a ballroom without consulting Congress, but he says he’s raising the money privately, from a list of individuals and corporations all of whom will likely want government favors at some point. In the long run, taxpayers would probably be better off paying for the ballroom themselves.
He also hasn’t consulted the National Capital Planning Commission. Hillary Clinton made the key point: “It’s not his house.”
and you also might be interested in …
Here’s a typical story about how the Trump administration responds to corruption: Last Sunday, FBI Director Kash Patel began taking heat on social media for going to State College, PA on an FBI jet so that he could watch his girlfriend sing the national anthem at a wrestling match. The plane then went on to Nashville, where she lives.
Clearly somebody should be fired for this, and somebody was: the guy who oversees the FBI’s jet fleet. Patel appears to blame him for the story getting out, despite the fact that his flights were trackable by the general public.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) also considers disinformation to be part of its mission, which is how they got interested in climate change. They put out a report about how climate denialists have changed their tactics in 2024. (But I just noticed it this week). They distinguish “old denial” (which says climate change either isn’t happening or isn’t caused by humans burning fossil fuels) from “new denial” (which creates doubt about what can or should be done).
They had an AI algorithm produce and examine transcripts from more than 12K YouTube videos posted by climate denialists between 2018 and 2023. This graphic explains what they found.
This “climate change,” it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success. If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.
The PBS article I quoted this from debunks many of Trump’s claims.
One big step towards the MAGA takeover of American media is faux-independent Bari Weiss becoming editor-in-chief of CBS News. How this happened is an instructive lesson in media consolidation: CBS was taken over by Viacom in 2000, spun off in 2005, then reacquired in 2019. Viacom took the name of its subsidiary Paramount, reflecting its entertainment-media focus.
The best intro to Bari Weiss comes from John Oliver, who focused on her three weeks ago.
Now Bari Weiss is choosing the next anchor of CBS Evening News, which was the most important job in news back when Walter Cronkite had it. Most of the names being kicked around are from Fox News.
You might wonder why Texas AG Ken Paxton would do this:
Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Johnson & Johnson and Kenvue for deceptively marketing Tylenol to pregnant mothers despite knowing that early exposure to acetaminophen, Tylenol’s only active ingredient, leads to a significantly increased risk of autism and other disorders.
I mean, it’s not like anyone but RFK Jr. actually believes Tylenol significantly increases autism risk. So how can Paxton hope to win a suit claiming that Tylenol’s makers “knew” something none of the experts in the field know today?
Amanda Marcotte explains: Paxton has lost his lead over incumbent Senator John Cornyn for the GOP senate nomination in Texas. He desperately needs Trump’s endorsement, so he is demonstrating to the Mad King that he is willing to act on whatever nonsense the regime spits out.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. The American People pushed back a little this week. That’s the subject of the featured post.
Climate change. Lots of statistics get thrown around about climate change, but the most important one is the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere. In 2024, atmospheric CO2 jumped by a record 3.5 parts per million, to reach a record 424 ppm.
Ukraine. Over the last few weeks, Trump did what he does so often: floated an idea to support Ukraine (by supplying it with long-range Tomahawk missiles), got a lot of positive headlines for it, but then backed down after talking to Vladimir Putin. Now he’s planning to meet Putin in Budapest, a move that supports not just Putin, but Hungary’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán, Putin’s only ally in the EU. Trump likes to appear independent of Putin, but remains incapable of standing up to him.
This week’s developments
This week’s theme: resisting the regime
That’s the topic of the featured post, which covers the No Kings rallies, the revolt of the Pentagon press corps, universities refusing to sign Trump’s compact, Democrats standing firm on the budget, and an appeals court ruling keeping troops out of Chicago.
Yesterday the NYT published the most clueless article I’ve seen in some while: “It’s 2025, and Democrats Are Still Running Against Trump“. Apparently, we’re supposed to ignore the fascist takeover that’s happening and talk about more normal political issues.
I also love the idea that we should take advice from “a veteran Republican admaker and political strategist” who says “If I were running a Democratic campaign, I would be attempting to broaden my coalition beyond a visceral hatred of Trump”.
Maybe seeing democracy collapsing before their very eyes can change the minds of previously uncommitted voters. Anti-Trump might become a very broad coalition indeed.
and voting rights
John Roberts has been chipping away at the Voting Rights Act for years, enabling a great many voter suppression laws in red states. Now he seems ready to finish the job.
Basically, Roberts wants every government action to be color-blind. That sounds good if you don’t think about it too hard. But when generations of racism has created a problem, how do you address that problem without mentioning race?
Wednesday, the Court heard arguments in Louisiana v Callais, and the issue in question is whether states can engage in racial gerrymandering — the only kind of gerrymandering that current interpretations of the law bans.
Not only is this the kind of thing Roberts has wanted to do his whole career, it might have the side benefit of making it virtually impossible for Democrats to recapture the House in 2026, or maybe ever. An analysis in the NYT says that in some scenarios, Democrats would have to win the national popular vote by 5% or more in order to get a majority of House seats.
and the shutdown
Republicans are claiming that Democrats just didn’t want to fold before the No Kings rallies, but that they will now that the rallies are over. I’m not seeing it.
At stake here is the narrative of Trump’s invincibility: If he has to offer a concession, even a popular one, then resistance is productive. If Democrats cave without getting anything, then they’re useless.
A local TV station suggests five dates that are pressure points for the shutdown: three paycheck dates, the open-enrollment starting date for the ObamaCare exchanges (November 1), and Thanksgiving, when millions of Americans will try to travel and air-traffic controllers would still be working without pay.
I hear a lot of speculation of the form: “They’ll have to resolve this by X, because otherwise this painful thing will happen.” But which side does the pain move? Either Trump makes a concession or he doesn’t, so there’s no obvious compromise on that.
The only way out I see is for Republicans to nuke the filibuster in the Senate. Then they can run over Democrats without giving up anything.
and the Navy murdering Venezuelan fishermen
From the beginning, I’ve been appalled by the policy of blowing up boats in the Caribbean because someone suspects they might be carrying drugs. Appalled, but also puzzled: What’s the point here? Even if the suspicions are true, drug smuggling is not a capital offense, and the people on the boats have been denied due process, or any kind of process at all. The boats could have been stopped by the Coast Guard and the drugs confiscated. And boats from Venezuela are not the main avenue for drug smuggling anyway. So who is better off because the boats are destroyed and the people on it dead?
Well, it seems like the officer in charge has some of the same doubts. Admiral Alvin Holsey, the head of the U.S. Southern Command that oversees operations in the Caribbean, quit his job one year into a three-year assignment, and will retire after a 37-year career.
The strike, which President Donald Trump confirmed Friday, was the sixth known strike on a boat allegedly involved in drug trafficking. But it appeared to mark the first time an attack had not killed everyone on board.
The detention marks the first time that the Trump administration’s military campaign targeting drug traffickers has resulted in the US holding prisoners, and it sets up a complicated legal and policy situation for the administration. … The men held by the US Navy could hypothetically petition the courts to rule on the legality of their detention in what’s known as a habeas corpus claim, Finucane noted — a pathway followed by a number of detainees in the past that could reveal more information about the Trump administration’s secretive legal rationale for the strikes.
We may also finally find out what evidence the regime has that these boats are smuggling drugs. It’s a serious question whether these are actually drug smugglers, or just fishermen in the wrong place.
and you also might be interested in …
Montana has come up with a creative proposal to get corporate money out of politics. Prior to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, governments controlled corporate contributions directly, by passing campaign-finance laws. Jay Kuo:
The High Court’s decision rested on the notion that corporations, long defined as “legal persons,” are entitled to First Amendment protections just like actual people. Therefore, they held, it is a violation of their “freedom of speech” to put restrictions on what their money can say and do, even in politics.
We know what happened next. Big corporations, through super PACs and outside groups, flooded the system, drowning out individuals’ voices. And there seemed no way to stop it, short of a constitutional amendment that would allow limits on corporate political spending.
Just this summer, a federal court citing Citizens United struck down a Maine law that limited contributions to political action committees to $5,000 per donor, whether that donor was an individual or a corporation.
But a new idea is being pushed in Montana: Even if corporations are people, they are still defined by the state that incorporates them, and only have the powers their charters give them. Organizers hope to have a ballot initiative in 2026 that revises Montana’s corporate code to take away corporations’ power to contribute to political campaigns. Further, it would allow corporations incorporated in other states to have only the same powers as Montana corporations when they operate in Montana.
Unless the Supreme Court comes up with some new oligarchic doctrine knocking this down, other states could imitate it.
Vox’ Ian Milhiser lists the five safeguards we used to have against rogue government agencies like ICE, and how the Supreme Court has blocked them.
Is anyone really surprised to discover that when Young Republicans chat among themselves, the conversation turns racist and fascist?
One more reason why Pete Hegseth should never have been allowed anywhere near the SecDef office: He OK’d a plan to celebrate the birthday of the Marine Corps by firing live artillery shells over Interstate 5 in California.
Trump commuted the 7-year prison sentence of former congressman George Santos. There has never been any question about Santos’ guilt, so I can only surmise two justifications: (1) Trump doesn’t think Trump supporters should be punished for committing crimes. (2) Being a fraudster himself, Trump identifies with fraudsters.
Vox’ Bryan Walsh writes an optimistic piece about cities becoming more bike-able. Grist has an article on the same topic.
and let’s close with something unique
I don’t normally do much sports coverage, but it’s worth noting that in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series, Shohei Ohtani produced what is probably the greatest single-game performance in the history of baseball. Ohtani pitched six scoreless innings and hit three home runs in a 5-1 victory that sent the LA Dodgers to the World Series.
The only player comparable to Ohtani, Babe Ruth, had two 3-homer games in his career and also had scoreless pitching starts in the post-season, but never both in the same game.
Just over a year ago, President Joe Biden had proposed a similar deal to the one pitched by Trump, to no avail. Did Trump succeed by pressuring Netanyahu in a way that his predecessor refused to do? Or did Israel simply degrade Hamas so badly that the terrorist group had no choice but to agree? Both factors seem to have played a role. Did Arab countries sway Hamas, or did the monarchies push Trump to change his stance? Both, again, seem to have been factors, according to our conversations with 10 officials from the United States, Israel, Arab nations, and Europe, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing talks. Now the question is whether the swap of hostages for prisoners unfolds as planned, and whether this week’s diplomatic success will amount to anything more than a blip in the fighting.
and the ongoing invasion of Chicago
The semi-comic superhero Peacemaker once said: “I made a vow to have peace. No matter how many people I have to kill to get it.” Trump’s ICE raids and National Guard deployments are similar: He would have us believe that he is dead set on stopping crime, no matter how many laws he has to break to do it. And if armed men have to drag you and your family out of your home in the middle of the night and zip-tie you all in the back of a van in order to keep you safe, Trump’s people are up to the job.
Here are just a few of the cases I ran into this week:
In Chicago, ICE shot a Presbyterian pastor the head with a pepper ball. ICE agents shot from the roof of their building. The pastor was among nonviolent protesters in the street.
A Delaware domestic violence victim with protected status and no criminal record was taken from her home in front of her children and flown to ICE’s Louisiana concentration camp, where she was held for nearly a month before relatives and the Delaware attorney general were able to find her and negotiate her release.
A 13-year-old boy got arrested by police in Everett, Massachusetts. His mother was called to pick him up, but before she could get there ICE had wisked him away to Virginia. “The teen and his family, who are Brazilian nationals, have a pending asylum case and are authorized to work legally in the United States, [immigration lawyer Andrew] Lattarulo said.”
And this: “Doctors at Adventist Health White Memorial hospital in Boyle Heights told LAist that hospital administrators are allowing federal immigration agents to interfere in medical decisions and block doctors from properly treating detainees who need emergency care.”
I believe I could find large numbers of similar abuses if I looked harder. There is a crime wave in our cities, but it’s not immigrants: It’s ICE agents who pay no attention to the legal limits on their actions.
The big news this week mainly happened in court. The question to be resolved is how much deference courts owe a president who is either lying or completely deranged.
The laws that allow the President to federalize National Guard units and deploy them to American cities are all based on the existence of certain conditions, like “invasion” by a foreign nation, “rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States”, or “the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States”.
Ordinarily, if it’s anything like a close call, courts defer to a president’s judgment about whether such conditions exist. But if a president can make stuff up, then the conditions might as well not be in the law at all. If that’s what Congress intended, the law should just say, “The President can take command of the National Guard whenever he wants.”
Obviously, the law doesn’t say that, so there is some limit to the deference a president is owed. Just as obviously, when Trump described Portland as “war ravaged”, he passed that limit. His claims about Chicago are only somewhat more credible.
What Trump intends to do with the troops is also a factor. If the problem he intends to address is “crime” rather than rebellion or insurrection, that is better in one way and worse in another. All cities have crime, so he is at least not delusional when he refers to crime as a problem. But Posse Comitatus and other laws put firm limits on the conditions under which National Guard or regular military units can participate in law enforcement (which has long been a state and local responsibility). So he can call up units, but it’s hard to see what they can do (legally) to solve a crime problem.
Here’s where things stand at the moment. In Portland, a federal district judge barred Trump from sending National Guard troops — either Oregon’s or some other state’s — to Portland. However, a three-judge appeals court panel reviewing the matter has two Trump appointees, and they seemed skeptical of the lower-court’s order. Portland’s Channel 6 anticipates that Trump will be allowed to deploy the guard to protect ICE offices and other federal buildings, but not to do any law enforcement.
A Chicago-based federal appeals court has allowed National Guard troops (including 200 from Texas) to remain under federal control in Illinois, but not to deploy to Chicago.
This escalation of violence is targeted and intentional and premeditated. The Trump administration is following a playbook: cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem like peaceful protestors are a mob, by firing gas pellets and teargas canisters at them. Why? To create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act, so that he can send military troops to our city. He wants to justify and normalize the presence of armed soldiers under his direct command.
Crowds that have gathered daily and nightly outside the immigration facility in Oregon’s largest city in recent days have embraced the absurd, donning inflatable frog, unicorn, axolotl and banana costumes as they face off with federal law enforcement who often deploy teargas and pepper balls.
Sunday, there was a naked bike ride to protest against troops deploying into the city. See the closing for more Portlandish absurdity.
and the shutdown
There is essentially no progress to report. Democrats are refusing to approve a continuing resolution unless it addresses Obamacare subsidies, which are lapsing and will cause huge increases in many families’ health insurance premiums. Republicans are refusing any concessions, even though many of them realize their own constituents are being hurt.
This week the regime announced that it was using the excuse of the government shutdown to fire more federal workers. About 4600 were let go in all, which doesn’t sound like a lot compared to the size of the federal government. But certain areas were hit particularly hard: about 100 were fired from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Because, it’s not like substance abuse is a problem in America.
THE BIDEN FBI PLACED 274 AGENTS INTO THE CROWD ON JANUARY 6. If this is so, which it is, a lot of very good people will be owed big apologies. What a SCAM – DO SOMETHING!!! President DJT
Anybody see the problem? January 6 happened at the end of the first Trump administration. There was no “Biden FBI”. Did Trump forget he was president then?
Under the deal, AstraZeneca agreed to sell its drugs to Medicaid, the health insurance program for lower-income Americans, at about the same prices that it offers to wealthy countries in Europe.
As with all Trump announcements, we’ll have to wait and see whether this agreement has any actual effect. But I will guarantee you one thing: It won’t have the effect Trump promised. Here’s what he said:
Now drug prices are going to be going down 100 percent, 400 percent, 600 percent, 1,000 percent, in some cases. … And as an example, one particular drug that’s hot, very hot, 654 percent, on inhalers, COPD and asthma, as well as certain diabetics medications. They’re going to be averaging about 654 percent reduction in price.
If math isn’t your strong suit, let me interpret: Suppose a pill costs $1. A 100% price cut means that AstraZeneca gives you the pill for nothing. 1000% of $1 is $10. So a price reduction of 1000% means AstraZeneca will pay you $9 to take the pill. A 654% reduction means they’ll pay you $5.54. Do you really believe that’s going to happen?
This wasn’t a slip of the tongue or a teleprompter screw-up. At the 5:20 mark in the White House video, the camera pulls back enough that you can see a poster on an easel. The poster claims that some drug has a 654% price reduction.
This raises two issues:
Does Trump’s brain really work so badly these days that he believes price reductions over 100% are possible? (Seth Meyers would say yes.)
Think about the number of people who had to be involved in producing that poster and setting it up. None of them had the courage to push back and tell the Mad King “This doesn’t make any sense.”
And finally, let’s look at the credulous press coverage Trump gets. The WaPo article on this event doesn’t mention his laughable claims. The NYT mentions this dementia symptom in the 7th paragraph of its article:
He spoke of delivering seemingly impossible price reductions, such as a “654 percent discount” on Bevespi Aerosphere, an AstraZeneca inhaler for patients with respiratory problems.
Seemingly impossible? Compare this to the wall-to-wall coverage Biden would get whenever he flubbed something.
During the week that the Special Counsel’s report came out, we examined the top 20 articles on the Times’ landing page every four hours. In that time, they published 26 unique articles about Biden’s age, of which 1 of them explored the possibility that Trump’s age was of equal or more concern.
Now, Trump outright babbles and the WaPo ignores it while the NYT tells us he seems to have made a mistake. Apparently the NYT believes it is a matter of opinion whether drug prices are going down more than 100%.
and you also might be interested in …
Don’t forget the No Kings protests on Saturday. There’s bound to be one in your area. You may not feel like you can do much to stop the Trump regime. But you can at least do this.
After a few months of relative peace, the trade war with China has restarted. China is restricting exports of rare-earth metals that are used in a wide variety of electronic devices. Trump is threatening 100% tariffs on imports from China. Investment markets crashed on Friday and have recovered somewhat today.
A new report says that the Earth’s coral reefs are at a tipping point and have entered into a period of “long-term decline”.
The report from scientists and conservationists warns the world is also “on the brink” of reaching other tipping points, including the dieback of the Amazon, the collapse of major ocean currents and the loss of ice sheets.
Back in May, Trump added a carrot to the stick he brandishes against undocumented immigrants: If they would self-deport, the US would fly them to any other country for free, and also give them an “exit bonus” cash payment. ProPublica followed up with immigrants who tried to take advantage of this offer. For many, it hasn’t worked out the way Trump described.
Upon his arrival, he planted a majestic cross in a mighty act of devotion, dedicating the land to God and setting in motion America’s proud birthright of faith. … Guided by steadfast prayer and unwavering fortitude and resolve, Columbus’s journey carried thousands of years of wisdom, philosophy, reason, and culture across the Atlantic into the Americas — paving the way for the ultimate triumph of Western civilization less than three centuries later on July 4, 1776.
Isn’t it weird that the Native Americans aren’t more grateful for the “thousands of years of wisdom, philosophy, reason, and culture” Columbus brought to them?
and let’s close with something relevant
OK, normally the closing is supposed to get your mind off the news. But the most amusing video I’ve seen this week is this animated music video of Portland’s dancing frogs.
A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive, will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence [against] foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. Chicago and perhaps Portland are now under attack.
Climate change.Pope Leo spoke out reaffirming his predecessor’s opposition to climate change, saying that it should not be a divisive issue.
Gaza. A new peace plan is on the table. Is this any more likely to take hold than the previous ones?
Ukraine. I’m hearing very little news about advances on the ground in either direction. It seems for now to be mainly a drone war.
This week’s developments
The Trump/Hegseth Quantico speeches
Before the meeting of 800 admirals and generals called to Virginia, speculation was rampant about what it was for. Now that it has happened, we’re still wondering what it was for. I try to unravel it in one of the featured posts.
and the war against blue cities
This week, Blackhawk helicopters attacked an apartment building on Chicago’s south shore. The reality is just as crazy as it sounds. This is the topic of the other featured post.
I forgot to mention this in that post: The Guardian’s Oliver Laughland wrote a long on-the-scene account of the protests against ICE in Chicago, including a long interview with congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh.
and the government shut-down
It’s been a week and neither side is budging. I’m not sure what resolves this eventually, or how long it might take. Trump needs to preserve his authoritarian narrative — that you can’t resist him successfully, and if you try you’ll be punished. But it’s also hard to see how Democrats can give in without some kind of concession.
For what it’s worth, the public seems to be blaming Republicans more than Democrats: 39% blame the Republicans more, 30% Democrats more, and 31% both sides equally.
This is a situation where Trump-being-Trump works against his own interests. A number of congressional Republicans think they had a more persuasive blame-the-Democrats message: Let’s get a clean continuing resolution for a couple months while we work out the details, and not try to fight for policy changes yet.
But Trump keeps acting like a perpetrator rather than a victim. He wants to use the shutdown to fire more federal workers. He’s trolling Democratic leaders in insulting ways. He’s illegally using government websites and even out-of-office messages to make his political points.
Democrats, meanwhile, have a pretty good ask: Subsidies for ObamaCare healthcare policies are ending, and they want to get them re-funded. So they’re fighting to keep healthcare costs down for millions of Americans, including many Trump voters.
and Gaza
Trump put forward a peace proposal with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which Hamas gave qualified agreement to. Trump pounced on this as a win, making it hard for Netanyahu to back out.
I’m skeptical, though The New Yorker’s Ruth Margalit is less so: She considers it possible that the first step — release of Hamas’ remaining hostages in exchange for a ceasefire and release of about 2000 of Israel’s Palestinian prisoners — may go forward.
Speculation about Trump’s mental health has been ramping up lately for a number of reasons. His 70-minute ramble to the generals (see the featured post) was more muddled than usual, and he seemed tired. Governor Pritzker has raised the possibility that Trump’s bizarre posts about Portland and Chicago are demented. A judge Trump appointed himself said that his claims were “untethered to the facts“.
And why would Google need to put its thumb on the scale?
Henry Kissinger once lampooned Argentina’s strategic significance by calling it “a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica”. Argentina’s economy (the 23rd largest in the world, just behind Belgium) is also not particularly important. But the Trump administration is willing to risk $20 billion of taxpayer money to shore up Argentina just before a major election.
Why? The current president Javier Milei, is a Trump flatterer and a mini-Trump himself. And like Trump, he is very unpopular.
Milei earned many admirers on the right for undertaking a blitz of free-market reforms. Those included slashing government subsidies and regulations, in addition to thinning public sector ranks by 50,000 employees. In return, Trump has referred to Milei as his “favorite president” and offered an endorsement for his re-election.
Also, some well-connected hedge funds have interests in Argentina.
“Donald Trump gets a two-fer here,” [Senator Elizabeth] Warren said. “He gets to bail out his political ally in Argentina, who is very unpopular and in big trouble, and his treasury secretary apparently gets to help his hedge fund buddies.”
Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittifciation” to explain what has happened to all major internet platforms and services, such as Facebook and Twitter: They draw an audience by providing a convenient service, but then become profitable by abusing that audience after it gets locked in.
In this Guardian article, Doctorow explains in detail the enshittifcation of Amazon, which ensnared not just consumers, but the merchants who provide the products Amazon sells. He explains why the market itself will never fix Amazon, and how it has become impervious to individual action. Only regulation can solve the problem.
The path to a better Amazon doesn’t lie through consumer activism, or appeals to the its conscience. … Systemic problems have systemic solutions, not individual ones. You can’t shop your way out of a monopoly.
and let’s close with something festive
If you’re not finding a lot to dance about these days, maybe you should look at this collection of the 20 greatest dance routines.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. The assault accelerated, with violations of free speech, using the Justice Department to persecute enemies, and threats against the city of Portland.
Climate change. So much else happened in these three weeks, I could barely notice anything about the climate.
Ukraine.Trump apparently did an about-face on this war, suddenly appearing to support Ukraine. Personally, I don’t know why anybody pays attention to what he says, since it so seldom leads to action. Currently, Trump is threatening major new sanctions on Russia, but only after Europe completely stops buying Russian oil. There will always be something somebody else has to do first, because Trump is incapable of standing up to Putin.
The new fiscal year starts Wednesday, and there’s still no funding to keep the government open. The concessions Democrats are holding out for should be popular, but Trump seems to think a shutdown works to his advantage. So I think we’ll just have to have one and see who’s right.
I think we’re about to find out what all those people do.
and ICE
Wednesday, a rooftop gunman later identified as Joshua Jahn fired down on an ICE facility in Dallas, killing two detainees and wounding another before killing himself. No ICE agents were harmed. The killed appear not to have been targeted directly, but were just in the line of fire as he raked the building with bullets.
Official speculation says that Jahn intended to attack ICE agents, though independent blogger Ken Klippenstein talked to Jahn’s friends and described a more complex set of motives.
Both Jahn and Charlie Kirk’s killer exemplify how different most shooters are from the rest of us. Most of us have murderous fantasies at one time or another, so we imagine that actual murderers are like us, but with less self-control. I don’t think that’s true. Look inside the mind of a sniper and you’ll usually find a lot of weird stuff that has no parallel in your own mind. John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan to impress a movie star he was obsessed with; I can’t find any motive like that in my own mind.
Trump regime spokespeople are trying to use the shooting to gain sympathy for ICE and exempt them from criticism. And while I’ll grant that no one deserves to be shot at for doing their job, ICE itself does not deserve your sympathy and should be getting even more criticism.
Check out this video from New York, where an ICE agent physically attacks a woman who had been pleading with him for information about her husband, “who had been abducted by masked ICE agents who did not identify themselves, did not present a warrant, did not give any lawful grounds for his detention.” (To their credit, ICE removed the agent from duty and put out a statement saying that his actions were “unacceptable”. But I am left to wonder how many similar incidents pass without notice because no one turns them into viral videos.)
A Leominster family who has lived in the United States for more than 20 years said federal immigration agents held their 5-year-old daughter, who is a US-citizen and autistic, in custody outside their home in an effort to pressure the parents to turn themselves over to agents.
The family gave the Globe videos of the girl standing in the driveway, surrounded by armed agents. When the father told them not to touch her, one agent taunted back: “You’re more than welcome to come pick her up.”
Ian Roberts is the superintendent of Iowa’s largest school district. (Des Moines), and the first person of color to hold that position. Or at least he was until Friday morning when ICE arrested him. As of this weekend, he was in a county jail. Trump got elected pledging to round up violent criminals, but that’s not at all what he’s doing.
Here’s what I say to those who accuse liberals of “demonizing” ICE: It’s not demonization if your behavior is genuinely demonic.
A Reuters article notes that federal drug prosecutions are way down. That’s a hidden cost of shifting law-enforcement resources to mass deportation. I also wonder about white-collar crime, which Trump has no interest in stopping. This ought to be a golden age for would-be Bernie Madoffs.
There’s an ICE processing center in Burlington, MA, a few miles from where I live. Every Wednesday from 11 am to 1 pm, hundreds of people show up to protest. This week I went for the first time.
and corruption
Recent weeks have exposed corrupt acts of both omission and commission. The so-called Department of “Justice” has been using its shield to protect the guilty and its sword to attack the innocent.
In an undercover operation last year, the FBI recorded Tom Homan, now the White House border czar, accepting $50,000 in cash after indicating he could help the agents — who were posing as business executives — win government contracts in a second Trump administration, according to multiple people familiar with the probe and internal documents reviewed by MSNBC.
The FBI and the Justice Department planned to wait to see whether Homan would deliver on his alleged promise once he became the nation’s top immigration official. But the case indefinitely stalled soon after Donald Trump became president again in January, according to six sources familiar with the matter. In recent weeks, Trump appointees officially closed the investigation, after FBI Director Kash Patel requested a status update on the case, two of the people said.
Trump has gotten impatient with DoJ apparently dragging its feet about indicting and convicting his political enemies. Rather than call AG Pam Bondi on the phone, he posted to Truth Social:
Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, “same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam “Shifty” Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.” … We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!
[It’s worth pointing out that the only one “guilty as hell” is Trump himself. On the merits, both impeachments should have resulted in conviction and removal. With the cooperation of the Supreme Court and a puppet district judge, Trump avoided trial on the most serious indictments. The only time a jury heard the evidence against him, he was convicted on all counts.]
For the most part, DoJ prosecutors have been trying to placate Trump without doing too much injury to their personal integrity. The result has been what LawFare’s Benjamin Wittes calls “ghost investigations“: DoJ announces that it is investigating Trump’s enemies, allowing Fox News to tease its viewers with the anticipation of lurid show trials. But since these people have done nothing wrong other than antagonize Dear Leader, the investigations lead to “all talk, no action”, just as Trump said.
Announcing such investigations is an ethical violation in itself — DoJ should shut up until it has an indictment to file in court — but people unwilling to compromise themselves at least that far don’t survive in the Trump regime.
The most urgent enemy for Trump to indict was James Comey, because the statute of limitations was about to run out on his 2020 testimony to Congress. That effort at persecution had been running into roadblocks, mainly because professional prosecutors did not want to violate their integrity or ruin their reputation by pushing a phony indictment for political purposes.
To start with, Trump-appointed US Attorney Erik Siebert refused to try to indict Comey, believing there was no case. So Trump pushed him out and replaced him with his former personal lawyer (who has never prosecuted a case before) Lindsey Halligan. Halligan was met with a memo from her prosecutors more-or-less repeating that point.
It is unclear whether any career lawyers in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia agreed with the decision to seek charges against Comey or will be willing to help conduct the day-to-day work of the prosecution.
One of the points Halligan will have to defend against is malicious prosecution, for which a judge could throw the case out. To guard against that, you would expect the indictment itself to make a strong case, but the Comey indictment does not: It is a mere page-and-a-half, and just lists the charges without giving a hint as to why anybody should credit those charges. Reportedly, the grand jury refused to support a third count, and passed the other two with a bare 14-9 majority. That doesn’t speak well for Halligan’s ability to get a unanimous beyond-reasonable-doubt judgment from a trial jury.
But that seems to be beside the point: Halligan needs to please Trump, and Trump wants an indictment. So he got one.
and Portland
The latest American city Trump has chosen to invade for no legitimate reason is Portland.
At the request of Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists. I am also authorizing Full Force, if necessary.
Residents of Portland have no idea what he’s talking about. The city is not “War ravaged”. There have been a few small protests outside ICE offices (probably like the one I participated in Wednesday in Massachusetts), but they are not “under siege from attack by Antifa”.
200 troops from the Oregon National Guard have been deployed over the objection of their usual commander, Governor Tina Kotek. Oregon and Portland have come together to file a lawsuit seeking to stop the deployment.
“When the president and I spoke yesterday, I told him in plain language that there is no insurrection or threat to public safety that necessitates military intervention in Portland or any other city in our state,” Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek said in a news release Sunday. “Despite this — and all evidence to the contrary — he has chosen to disregard Oregonians’ safety and ability to govern ourselves. This is not necessary. And it is unlawful. And it will make Oregonians less safe.”
and autism
The great thing about being a crank is that you’re never wrong. Any bit of evidence that supports your view is reliable, while anything pointing the other way is fake. So as soon as Trump appointed well-known crank RFK Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services, you had to know what was coming: an announcement that a simple cause for rising numbers of autism diagnoses has been found, and that it has something to do with either a vaccine or a drug people take.
We got that predictable announcement Monday. Trump and RFK appeared together to announce that autism is caused by taking Tylenol late in pregnancy.
Trump kicked the meeting off by expressing the classic crank fantasy: I know way more than the experts and I always have.
It’s probably 20 years ago, in New York. I was a developer, as you probably heard, and I always had very strong feelings about autism and how it happened and where it came from. … It’s turning out that we understood a lot more than a lot of people who studied it.
In a word: no. The best reference I found on this topic was in Stat News. The gist is that there is a (small) correlation between women taking Tylenol during pregnancy and autistic children. But this has been studied for years and nobody has found any causation.
[W]hat researchers debate is whether Tylenol might cause autism, or whether Tylenol is simply more often used by people who experience certain conditions during pregnancy, such as infections or migraines, which might also be linked to autism. This is a key problem in science. Ice cream consumption increases in the summer, as do sunburns and shark attacks. But ice cream does not cause sunburns or shark attacks — they all just happen more often during the summer.
Nothing in the science justifies Trump’s unequivocal statement: “So taking Tylenol is not good. All right. I’ll say it. It’s not good.”
And even if the entire correlation were due to Tylenol causing autism, it’s way too small to explain the increase in autism diagnoses.
Oh, and there was a bunch of nonsense: Cuba and the Amish do indeed have autism, among other bits of misinformation.
The other headline from the announcement was an “exciting new therapy” for autism: leucovorin. This also is not new. There are some very small studies that show that leucovorin might help somewhat. The normal course of research would be to commission larger studies and see if the small-study result can be replicated — not to announce an “exciting new therapy”.
Finally, even though what they were presenting had nothing to do with vaccines, Trump just couldn’t couldn’t stop himself from babbling about them.
The other thing that I can tell you that I’ll say that they will maybe say at a little bit later date. But I think when you go for the shot, you do it over a five-time period, take it over five times or four times, but you take it in smaller doses and you spread it out over a period of years. And they pump so much stuff into those beautiful little babies, it’s a disgrace. I don’t see it. I think it’s very bad. They’re pumping — it looks like they’re pumping into a horse. You have a little child, a little fragile child and you get a vat of 80 different vaccines, I guess, 80 different blends and they pump it in. So ideally, a woman won’t take Tylenol. And on the vaccines, it would be good instead of one visit where they pump the baby, load it up with stuff, you’ll do it over a period of four times or five times. I mean, I’ve been so into this issue for so many years just because I couldn’t understand how a thing like this could happen and you know it’s artificially induced. It’s not like something that — when you go from all of those, you know, healthy babies to a point where I don’t even know structurally if a country can afford it and that’s the least of the problems. To have families destroyed over this is just so, so terrible. I also — and we’ve already done this. We want no mercury in the vaccine. We want no aluminum in the vaccine. The MMR, I think should be taken separately. This is based on what I feel. The mumps, measles and the three should be taken separately. And it seems to be that when you mix them, there could be a problem. So there’s no downside in taking them separately. In fact, they think it’s better.
A little over a week ago, I was flying back from a vacation in the Azores. (America and the Trump regime seemed very far away, thank you for asking.) My girl friend was sitting next to a doctor from Germany whose wife has a research job in the Boston area. The Azores seemed like a central point for the two to meet for a vacation, but they had to cut the vacation short due to an emergency.
The emergency had nothing to do with medical care, either needing it or needing to provide it. It had nothing to do with houses or kids or parents or any of the other emergencies we typically think of when we think of cutting short a foreign vacation. No, this was a political emergency. Trump has just signed an executive order saying:
entry into the United States of aliens as nonimmigrants to perform services in a specialty occupation under section 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b), is restricted, except for those aliens whose petitions are accompanied or supplemented by a payment of $100,000
That new policy would take effect at midnight on September 21. Our plane was landing around 8 p.m. on the 20th. Our seatmate’s wife had one of those 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b) (i.e. H1-B) visas, and was panicked that she’d owe $100K if she didn’t get back to the US before midnight.
Eventually the Trump regime clarified its order; in fact they wouldn’t have owed the money. The $100K is a one-time payment for new visas, not something H1-B holders owe every time they cross the border. But our doctor friend and his wife were not alone in his interpretation:
For a tense 24 hours, workers feared they could be locked out of the United States altogether. Tech companies and banks sent urgent memos advising employees not to leave the country. Bags were packed, tickets bought and families left behind as visa holders scrambled to beat what they believed was a looming deadline.
Video verified by NBC News showed chaos and confusion on a flight from San Francisco to Dubai after Trump’s announcement. The captain is heard citing “unprecedented” circumstances, saying, “There’s a number of passengers that do not wish to travel with us.”
Maybe your eyes glaze over when you see a bureaucratic phrase like “H1-B visa”, and maybe sometimes you even succumb to the regime’s dehumanization of H1-B holders as “immigrants” or “foreigners”. But they’re all real people. They have families, they take vacations, and sometimes they sit next to you on airplanes.
Here’s a less technical way to think about “section 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b)”: When most immigrants come to America, the impetus comes from them. They are either running from an unliveable situation somewhere else, or just seeking a better life here. Many Americans are afraid that if we let in everybody who wants to come, our society will be swamped. They’ll drive down wages; we’ll lose our unifying values, and so on. So we construct all sorts of legal hurdles people have to jump before they can come and stay for anything longer than a vacation.
But occasionally the impetus to bring someone to America comes from us. They have some rare (or even unique) talent that we need, so we want those people to be able to jump the line and come here quickly, without a bunch of barriers or hurdles. That’s what the H1-B visas are for. Every year, we let in about 85K foreigners under this program. They get a three-year visa which they can extend to six years. Many use those six years to apply for a green card and stay permanently.
A variety of exemptions have stretched the numbers in recent years, to 265,777 in 2022. That might be too many. There aren’t a quarter-million Einsteins trying to get into the country every year, and one reason entry-level jobs in technology are hard to find might be that companies are bringing in cheap programmers from India and other low-wage countries.
So the justifications given for Trump’s executive order were not entirely wrong:
[A]buse of the H-1B visa program has made it even more challenging for college graduates trying to find IT jobs, allowing employers to hire foreign workers at a significant discount to American workers. … Reports also indicate that many American tech companies have laid off their qualified and highly skilled American workers and simultaneously hired thousands of H-1B workers. … American IT workers have reported they were forced to train the foreign workers who were taking their jobs and to sign nondisclosure agreements about this indignity as a condition of receiving any form of severance. This suggests H-1B visas are not being used to fill occupational shortages or obtain highly skilled workers who are unavailable in the United States.
So the program is ripe for reform, and it shouldn’t be hard to build a bipartisan consensus around some simple changes. But why use a scalpel when you have a hatchet? Paul Krugman summarizes all the ways that Trump’s new rule will hurt the US economy and our standing in the world.
But I keep thinking about our seatmate. How many foreigners like him and his wife are getting the impression that the US is bad news? Getting involved with the United States or American companies means giving an unstable autocrat permission to pull your strings.
which all leads to an overwhelming question
All my life, I’ve been taught to respect the law. But what should we do when the law stops being respectable? Vassar Professor Daniel Mendiola raises this in a Guardian column “The US government is facing a crisis of legitimacy“.
Much of the blame for this lies with the Supreme Court, which decided to give Trump immunity for all official acts, whether they are legal or not. And through its shadow docket, it has repeatedly overturned injunctions that forced the Trump regime to obey the laws.
If courts can’t issue an injunction to stop the government from doing illegal things, then no matter how blatantly the government is violating people’s rights, it can keep doing it unimpeded so long as the case stays tied up in appeals – a process that often takes years. In this scenario, law exists in theory, but there are virtually no limits to what the government can do in practice.
At least four people were killed and eight others injured after a gunman opened fire at a Mormon church in Michigan and then set the building ablaze, authorities said. … In North Carolina, another 40-year-old Marine veteran who served in Iraq was the suspect in a shooting that killed three people and wounded five others less than 14 hours before the Michigan incident. … In Texas, about 12.15am on Sunday, two people died and five more were injured in a shooting at the Kickapoo Lucky Eagle casino in Eagle Pass, near the US-Mexico border, the local news outlet KSAT reported. … Meanwhile, in New Orleans, on the first block of Bourbon Street, the well-known entertainment thoroughfare, a triple shooting killed one woman, wounded two other women and injured a man, local police said. According to Guardian reporting partner WWL Louisiana, the slain woman was pronounced dead at the scene while the other three who were wounded were taken to a hospital.
Wired asked hundreds of federal employees what it was like last spring to have DOGE overlords roaming about. The gist: A lot of trivial harassment resulting in no actual savings or efficiencies. An anonymous woman from FEMA tells this story:
The women’s restroom was out of toilet paper within a week or so of us coming back to the office. I brought this up to Facilities, like, “Hey, this is kind of a sanitation and dignity issue, can you hook us up with more toilet paper?” They were like, “We’d love to, but we can’t purchase anything until they unfreeze the cards, and we don’t even know what the process is, because they have them sort of indefinitely frozen.” For five months we were instructed to bring in our own toilet paper. I literally kept two rolls at my desk. I wish I were joking.
Speaking of DOGE: We all remember hearing that DOGE shut down programs like USAID, cut a bunch of medical research grants, and fired lots of people. This was supposed to save money. But what happened to that money?
Across federal agencies, the Trump administration’s aggressive slash-and-burn approach to federal programs, grants and contracts has repeatedly challenged Congress’ power of the purse. The administration has claimed it has the discretion to redirect funds to programs aligned with Trump’s agenda — and Republican congressional leaders have largely let them do it.
The outcome: Billions in taxpayer dollars have become virtually untraceable — a level of opaqueness in government funds that’s raising questions around the legality of the administration’s actions.
Nobody is very good at predicting financial collapses, so you should always take economic doomsaying with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, one of the things pessimists look for is the possibility of a vicious cycle, where things briefly going bad (for any reason) might suddenly produce other reasons for things to go bad in a more serious way. The 2008 collapse was like that. Everything was fine as long as people kept bidding up house prices. But as soon as the housing boom faltered, banks started failing, causing more people to need to sell their houses.
The Guardian’s Larry Elliott has identified such a potential cycle. He starts out by noting the oddity of the current moment: Stock markets are setting records at a time when the underlying economy doesn’t look so good; growth stalling, inflation and unemployment both creeping up, and so on. If you’re in the bottom half of the economy, you’re probably worried about your future. But at the same time, things look pretty good for the wealthy.
The top 10% of earners account for almost half of consumer spending – the highest level since the late 1980s.
So if something made the well-to-do uneasy enough to cut back, they could start a recession all by themselves. What might make them do that? A drop in the stock market.
So we’re in a situation where some shock — say, an unexpected corporate bankruptcy or something — could cause a short-term drop in the markets, which would then start a recession, which would then lead to a bigger drop.
and let’s close with something out of this world
NASA and the European Space Agency regularly put videos on YouTube based on what they’re seeing through they Hubble Space Telescope. HubbleCast is up to its 133rd episode. Here’s Episode 1 to get you started.
The Weekly Sift 