The Weekly Sift

I think many Americans wrongly believe there would be one clear unambiguous moment where we go from “democracy” to “authoritarianism.” Instead, this is exactly how it happens — a blurring here, a norm destroyed there, a presidential diktat unchallenged. Then you wake up one morning and our country is different.

– Garrett Graff, “Slouching Towards Fascism“

This week’s featured post is “Lysenkoism Comes to America“.

Ongoing stories

• Trump’s assault on American democracy. There are a number of developments to note in the next section. But one interesting general trend is the increasingly willingness of publications that lean left to say explicitly what’s going on. This week in The Guardian Jonathan Freedland wrote “Step back and take it in: the US is entering full authoritarian mode“. Under a photoshopped image of Trump as Chairman Mao, Callum Jones wrote “Chairman Trump: has the US turned its back on free-market capitalism?.”In Mother Jones, Garrett Graff wrote “Slouching Towards Fascism“.
• Climate change. Summer in Europe isn’t what it used to be. If a major Atlantic current changes, winter may never be the same either.
• Gaza. While the Israeli genocide continues, the Trump administration is picturing a fanciful reconstruction that depends on “at least a temporary relocation of all of Gaza’s more than 2 million population, either through what it calls ‘voluntary’ departures to another country or into restricted, secured zones inside the enclave during reconstruction.”
• Ukraine. Same old, same old. The war continues, both on the front lines and in the bombing of Ukrainian civilians.

The Trump vision of Future Gaza has to be seen to be believed.

This week’s developments

Blue cities resist military occupation

National Democrats have been slow to mobilize against the National Guard going to Washington D.C. Trump justified his takeover of the city’s police department by citing crime, which has been going down in recent years and is not as bad in DC as it is in red-state cities like Memphis or Little Rock. But crime is still a problem. Couple that with the number of times Democrats have been successfully smeared as “soft on crime”, and it makes leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries gunshy.

But last Monday, Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker [text, video] responded to reports that Trump was planning a similar occupation of Chicago with proper defiance.

Earlier today in the Oval Office, Donald Trump looked at the assembled cameras and asked for me personally to say, “Mr. President, can you do us the honor of protecting our city?” Instead, I say, “Mr. President, do not come to Chicago. You are neither wanted here nor needed here.”

Pritzker rejected the whole notion that Trump’s effort to occupy Democratic cities had something to do with crime. If Trump were serious about combating crime, he would not be “defunding the police”.

He would not be cutting over $800 million in public safety and crime prevention grants nationally, including cutting $158 million in funding to Illinois for violence prevention programs that deploy trained outreach workers to deescalate conflict on our streets. Cutting $71 million in law enforcement grants to Illinois, direct money for police departments through programs like Project Safe Neighborhoods, the state and local Antiterrorism Training Program, and the Rural Violent Crime Reduction Initiative, cutting $137 million in child protection measures in Illinois that protect our kids against abuse and neglect.

A president who actually cared about urban crime would be asking local officials what they need.

If this was really about fighting crime and making the streets safe, what possible justification could the White House have for planning such an exceptional action without any conversations or consultations with the governor, the mayor, or the police?

Let me answer that question: This is not about fighting crime. This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city, in a blue state, to try and intimidate his political rivals. This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities and end elections.

Pritzker made his speech flanked not just by his political allies, but by business, religious, and educational leaders of Chicago.

So far it seems to be working. The administration has subsequently announced plans to increase the ICE presence in Chicago, but is no longer talking about a complete takeover.

Pritzker did not just play the victim here; he threatened to strike back.

Finally, to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous: we are watching and we are taking names.

This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now, and eventually the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year. Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf.

You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually. If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.

I am reminded of Boris Yelstin’s response to the 1991 Soviet coup. At that time he was president of the Russian Republic of the USSR, and was armed with nothing but the dubious prestige of his office. But when tanks came to the center of government in Moscow, he stood on one of them and gave a speech pledging not just to end this coup but to hold its perpetrators to account. And he did.

This is a time to trust the perceptions of the American people. Democrats should tell it like it is, and not soft-pedal what is going on.

And finally, I want to call mainstream journalism out for its malfeasance. If you covered this speech as Pritzker positioning himself for 2028, you are part of the problem. America is facing a test of whether it can survive as a democratic republic. The 2028 horserace is a minor subplot, not the main story.

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TPM calls attention to the inconsistency of sending troops because DC had become a “hellscape”, after refusing to let the District spend $1 billion of its own money.

But before Trump reached for the old D.C. standbys to justify his occupation, he and his Republican allies in Congress did everything they could to weaken the district earlier this spring. They used the district’s lack of true self-governance to withhold over $1 billion of its own money, paid by its own taxpayers, in the middle of the fiscal year.

Other steps toward and away from authoritarianism

The big news this week was that the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the Court of International Trade that Trump’s reciprocal tariffs — which constitute most of Trump’s tariffs — are illegal.

The tariffs will remain in place pending the Supreme Court appeal that is surely coming.

The argument against the legality of the tariffs is fairly simple: Tariffs are taxes, and the Constitution assigns the taxation power to Congress, not the president. Congress can on occasion delegate that power, but the emergency laws Trump is invoking do not specifically mention tariffs. So Trump has no such power.

Unfortunately, the ruling is not unanimous, which means that four of the 11 judges thought there was enough wiggle room in the text to let Trump proceed. (The emergency law allows him to “regulate” foreign trade, which Congress might have intended to include tariffs.) That view is a stretch, but the Supreme Court’s partisan Republican majority has been willing to stretch the law for Trump before. (After their immunity ruling, I have lost all faith in their objectivity.)

An interesting feature of the ruling is that it invokes the “major questions doctrine“, which the Supreme Court created out of whole cloth in 2000, and greatly expanded so that it could strike down things President Biden did, like cancel student debt. SCOTUSblog defines that doctrine as “the idea that if Congress wants to give an administrative agency the power to make decisions of vast economic or political significance, it must say so clearly”.

Trump’s reciprocal tariffs are reorganizing the world economic order. Their significance dwarfs Biden’s student-debt relief. If the Court thinks that big a power can be hidden inside a speculative interpretation of “regulate”, then Justice Jackson is right: They are playing Calvinball.

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The WaPo points out a simple fix if the tariffs are as important as Trump says: Go to Congress to get the power that the appeals court said you don’t have.

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It’s a sign of the times that Trump’s attempt to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook is not the week’s biggest story. The Supreme Court has upheld an extreme view of unitary executive theory that has allowed Trump to fire officials previously thought to be beyond his reach, like the heads of independent agencies established by Congress. However, the Court explicitly exempted Fed governors from that ruling, so they can’t be fired at will.

So Trump is attempting to fire Cook for cause, citing an accusation that she claimed two homes simultaneously as her primary residence. If Court allows this, the Fed exemption becomes meaningless: If “cause” is whatever the President thinks is a cause, then he can make up something against anyone, and essentially fire them at will.

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An executive order issued last Monday instructs the Secretary of Defense to create a “quick reaction force” of National Guardsmen who could be deployed to any state to “quell civil disturbances”. It sounds like a way to use troops to put down peaceful protests against Trump.

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Trump informed Congress that he won’t be spending $4.9 billion that Congress appropriated for foreign aid. He’s taking advantage of a loophole in the law known as a “pocket rescission”.

The Impoundment Control Act (ICA) lays out rules governing that process and allows the administration to temporarily withhold funding for 45 days while Congress considers the request. If lawmakers opt not to approve the request, the funds must be released. A pocket rescission would see the president send the same type of request to Congress within 45 days of the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. The request is made so late that the funding is essentially paused until it runs out at the end of the year regardless of congressional action.

In general, Trump sees congressional appropriations as a ceiling on government spending, not a floor. There are some situations where this view makes sense and others where it doesn’t. If, say, Congress appropriated $100 million for a new bridge and the administration managed to get it built for $90 million, it would be silly to object. But if the administration decides to save the whole $100 million by not building the bridge at all, that seems like a usurpation of power.

No president has used the pocket rescission in 50 years, and it throws yet another wrench into Congress’ efforts to fund the government when the new fiscal year starts on October 1. Typically, the last negotiations on a spending package are between the two parties: I’ll support your project if you support mine. But all that goes out the window if Trump can decide to spend the money on the Republican projects, but not the Democratic ones.

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The redistricting wars have moved on to Missouri.

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Alligator Alcatraz, Florida’s immigrant gulag in the Everglades, is shutting down with a major loss for the state.

US District Judge Kathleen Williams denied requests to pause her order to wind down operations, after agreeing last week with environmental groups and the Miccosukee Tribe that the state and federal defendants didn’t follow federal law requiring an environmental review for the detention center in the middle of sensitive wetlands.

and the CDC

The decapitation of the CDC was covered in the featured post.

and you also might be interested in …

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi went to China this week, attending the Shanghai Cooperation Summit, along with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and several other leaders. For years, US diplomacy has tried to position India as a fellow democracy in competition with China, and India has tried to appeal to US businesses as an alternative to Chinese factories. But Trump’s tariffs have changed all that. The NYT reports:

President Trump’s 50 percent tariffs landed like a declaration of economic war on India, undercutting enormous investments made by American companies to hedge their dependency on China.

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Unofficial reports say Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa will not seek reelection next year. Iowa Democrats have a prime candidate to run for the now-apparently-open seat: Josh Turek, who has won a seat in the legislature twice in a very red district.

Ernst’ decision may have something to do with Democrat Catelin Drey flipping an Iowa state senate seat in a very red district in a special election held Tuesday.

and let’s close with something far out

If you want to get away from the stress of everyday life, you need only look up. Well, assuming you have billions of dollars of equipment. Here, the Hubble telescope looks at the Eagle Nebula’s Pillars of Creation, formations of gas and dust that are in the process of creating new stars.

If we show weakness today in front of Russia, we are laying the ground for future conflict.

– President Emmanuel Macron of France

This week’s featured post is “The Timescale of News, or why the Sift’s weekly summary has a new format“.

Significant ongoing stories

As I explain in this week’s featured post, our news media only sees motion. So events that move slowly tend not to get covered. That doesn’t mean they aren’t important, just that they don’t fit into a breaking-news model. If they get covered at all, it’s usually as “context” for some faster-moving story. (Some of those faster-moving stories will get covered in the next section.) But whether you hear anything “new” about them or not during a particular news cycle, you shouldn’t lose sight of them.

Here’s a list of the ongoing stories that I’m paying attention to, and a few ways they manifested in this week’s news.

• Climate change. This week the faster-moving story was Hurricane Erin, which briefly hit category 5 on Saturday.
• The genocide in Gaza. This tends to get coverage whenever the Israeli government announces something new. (This week Israel announced plans for a new offensive that would displace over a million Palestinians, most of whom have already been displaced multiple times.) But whether there are new announcements or not, the beat goes on: There isn’t enough food; more people starve; more buildings are turned to rubble and life gets more precarious for Gaza’s 2 million residents.
• Trump’s assault on American democracy. This theme ties together a bunch of related stories that have played out over the last seven months. Recently, the faster-moving stories that have gotten attention are Trump’s takeover of the DC police, and Texas’ attempt to give Republicans five more House seats via a mid-decade gerrymander. Also, I’ve linked below to an account of how shows trials against people like John Brennan might go.
• The war in Ukraine. Friday’s Trump-Putin summit got all the attention, but meanwhile the war continued. Russian forces continue to inch forward at a terrible cost, while Ukraine puts up a fierce resistance, also at a terrible cost. Trump is right to want to “stop the killing”, as he so often says. But fundamentally this is a war of conquest, so it will continue until the aggressor — Putin’s Russia — either achieves its goals on the battlefield or is convinced that it can’t achieve them.
• Trump’s tariffs are tanking the economy. I explained the larger pattern last week in “An Authoritarian Economy is a Bad Economy“. This week’s news-visible piece was a report from the Labor Department on the producer price index (PPI), which rose 0.9% in July. That’s the largest monthly jump in three years.

The Epstein-files story is not gone yet, though I continue to wonder how significant it is. It didn’t make many headlines this week, largely because Congress is in recess. The basic situation is that Trump’s Justice Department has a lot of information on Epstein which it refuses to release, despite the fact that Trump campaigned on releasing it, and the Justice Department is run by people who used to insist on releasing it. Administration officials constantly say that they want full transparency. But they clearly don’t, and (while it’s easy to imagine that the reason somehow concerns Trump’s friendship with Epstein) no one knows exactly why.

The Justice Department tried to pass the buck by asking a court to release the grand jury files on Epstein-related cases. But a judge turned that request down, and anyway, those files probably don’t contain much relevant evidence that isn’t already public. Congress went into recess early so that Republicans could avoid voting on a resolution calling for release of the Justice Department’s Epstein files. But the story hasn’t died, and they’ll have to come back into session eventually.

The one clear significance the Epstein files story has is political: It’s the first broken Trump promise that his base is taking seriously.

This week’s developments

The Trump-Putin summit

All week the news networks were full of speculation about what would happen when Trump and Putin met Friday. I found this tedious, because it was totally obvious what would happen: the same thing that always happens. As I observed last week: “Whenever Trump meets with Putin, he comes out repeating Putin’s talking points.”

Going in, Trump was demanding an immediate ceasefire and threatening “severe consequences” if he didn’t get one. But Putin didn’t agree to the ceasefire, and there are no consequences.

Putin went in saying that a ceasefire could only come about as part of a comprehensive settlement that involved Ukraine yielding significant amounts of territory to Russia. He clearly thinks he is winning on the battlefield — albeit slowly — and will continue to win as long as the West fails to provide Ukraine with enough weapons to turn the tide. So he believes that time is on his side. He’ll only stop the fighting if he is given what he wants.

Trump came out of the summit saying that he would push for a comprehensive settlement rather than an immediate ceasefire. And that Ukraine would have to yield significant amounts of territory to Russia.

Fox News reported:

After meeting with Putin, Trump said the Russian leader was willing to end the war in exchange for key Ukrainian territorial concessions. He added that Kyiv should take the deal because “Russia is a very big power, and they’re not.”

On Truth Social, Trump painted Zelenskyy as the obstacle to peace.

President Zelenskyy of Ukraine can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight. Remember how it started. No getting back Obama given Crimea (12 years ago, without a shot being fired!), and NO GOING INTO NATO BY UKRAINE.

This is exactly Putin’s position: The fighting will stop when Ukraine gives up the territory Russia wants. In exchange they’ll get his pinkie-swear that he won’t invade the rest of the country after he’s had time to replenish his losses. And any enforceable guarantees to the rest of Ukraine, like membership in NATO, is off the table.

Trump also may pinkie-swear that Putin will face severe consequences if he starts the war up again at a more convenient time. (News stories refer to this as “security guarantees”.) But we’ve seen what Trump’s “consequences” amount to when he’s dealing with Putin.

Fundamentally, this is the same deal that Neville Chamberlain made with Hitler at Munich: Give up territory, get meaningless promises.

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Zelenskyy is scheduled to visit the White House today, flanked by some supportive European leaders. Presumably the Europeans want to avoid the ganging-up-on-Zelenskyy that happened the last time he went to the White House.

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James Fallows describes just how weird the vibe was at the Trump-Putin post-summit press conference. Trump was both the host and the leader of the more powerful country. He should have indisputably been in charge. But he wasn’t.

In every previous such event I have seen, the American president has always taken control. The president steps first to the microphone and begins the proceedings. He welcomes guests and foreign counterparts. He frames the issues. He expresses American ambitions, values, and interests.

He acts, in effect, not just as host but also as the boss. No one doubts who is running things.

And he does this all in English. Even if he could speak other languages. (Several presidents have been functional in a variety of languages, including Herbert Hoover in Chinese.) He does this because he is in the United States. We are playing by his home country’s rules.

But yesterday, in every conceivable way, Vladimir Putin was in command.

Putin spoke first, spoke at greater length than Trump, and framed all the issues Russia’s way. There’s an alpha in the Putin/Trump relationship, and it isn’t Trump.

Trump sending the National Guard to D.C.

Last Monday, Trump declared a “crime emergency” in the District of Columbia, proclaiming that “crime is out of control” in DC.

But just last January, DoJ reported that violent crime in DC was at a 30-year low. US News maintains a list of the 25 most dangerous cities in the US, and DC is not on it. (#1 is Memphis. Maybe Trump should take that up with Tennessee’s Republican governor. Red states Missouri and Ohio each have three cities on the list.)

That’s not to deny that there is crime in DC and crime is bad wherever it is. But the point here isn’t to fight crime, it’s to

• burnish Trump’s image as a tough guy who makes forceful decisions and isn’t afraid to unleash the military on American citizens
• reinforce the false impression that cities governed by Democrats are dangerous
• hopefully produce video of National Guardsmen beating up some black or brown people. (Trump’s base eats that stuff up.)

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What the invasion of DC has produced is overreach that has gotten ridiculed. Sean Charles Dunn, a veteran and former DoJ lawyer, got into a confrontation with a border patrol agent. He yelled obscenities at the agent, and then threw a “sub-style sandwich” at him. He was charged with assaulting a federal officer, a felony.

Referring to Dunn’s offense, AG Pam Bondi tweeted:

If you touch any law enforcement officer, we will come after you.

That’s really, really hilarious, given Trump’s pardon of the people who assaulted police officers with flagpoles and bear spray on January 6. Some of them now work for the Trump administration.

Social media couldn’t stop laughing, producing memes like the one to the right.

The redistricting wars

The Texas Democrats who left the state to deny Republicans a quorum in the legislature are returning today. Presumably the vote on Trump’s plans to gain five more House seats via gerrymandering will move forward.

It was never reasonable to expect the Democratic legislators to stay away forever. The Texas legislature is not a full-time job, and these people have lives they need to get back to. Kids are starting school, their other jobs won’t stay open forever, they need paychecks, and so on.

What they accomplished with their 15-day walkout was to give Democrats a chance to publicize this attempt to cheat in the 2026 midterms, and make it possible for Gavin Newsom to come up with a counter-plan to redistrict California. The plan depends on a voter referendum to be voted on in November. We’ll see if the current state of Democratic anger and commitment can maintain itself until then.

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Meanwhile, Governor Newsom has been doing some epic trolling of Trump, issuing threats to redistrict California in Trump’s social media style:

DONALD “TACO” TRUMP, AS MANY CALL HIM, “MISSED” THE DEADLINE!!! CALIFORNIA WILL NOW DRAW NEW, MORE “BEAUTIFUL MAPS,” THEY WILL BE HISTORIC AS THEY WILL END THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY (DEMS TAKE BACK THE HOUSE!). BIG PRESS CONFERENCE THIS WEEK WITH POWERFUL DEMS AND GAVIN NEWSOM — YOUR FAVORITE GOVERNOR — THAT WILL BE DEVASTATING FOR “MAGA.” THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! — GN

Stories that should have gotten coverage but didn’t

But it’s important not to identify all Israelis or all Jews with the Netanyahu government. Something like 400K Israelis protested yesterday, demanding an end to the war.

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Pretty much every week, climate change could be in the news much more than it is.

Other things you might find interesting

An appeals court lifted a lower court’s order for the Trump administration to restore funding to USAID. It was a 2-1 ruling. The court didn’t deal with the underlying question of whether Trump can impound funds appropriated by Congress. It just found that the wrong people sued. An anti-impoundment lawsuit, apparently, needs to come from the Government Accountability Office.

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It’s easy to brush off Trump’s threats to unleash the Justice Department on people like Senator Adam Schiff or former CIA Director John Brennon. He can order investigations, but there’s nothing to find and there’s still a justice system. So the threat of prison is not serious.

Marcy Wheeler, though, unpacks what a show trial might look like, using the example of John Durham’s investigation from Trump’s first term. He had nothing and must have known he had nothing, but he garnered a lot of Fox News headlines on his way to losing in court.

and I’ll get back to closing segments

I really will. I just ran out of time this week.

We can expect the governing class to adapt pragmatically to the electorate’s collective decline in rational capacity, for example, by retaining the rituals associated with mass democracy, while quietly shifting key policy areas beyond the reach of a capricious and easily manipulated citizenry.

– Mary Harrington “Thinking is Becoming a Luxury Good“

This week’s featured post is “Shaping Ourselves“, which raises questions about the effect on democracy of a decline in literate culture.

This week everybody was talking about the Mad King’s reaction to a bad jobs report

Friday, the July jobs report validated many economists’ critiques of Trump’s tariff policies. Economists in general don’t like tariffs, but Trump’s chaotic implementation of them has looked particularly problematic. With so much uncertainty about the future, it seemed, decision-makers would freeze rather than invest in new businesses and new production. The result would be slower growth, if not outright recession.

But until Friday, it was hard to find solid evidence for that prediction. The unemployment rate remained low and GDP numbers looked acceptable. Friday, though, the Bureau of Labor Statistics — one of those vital-but-boring agencies whose name its workers’ mothers probably can’t always remember correctly — put out its monthly jobs report.

Not only was July’s job growth anemic — only 73K jobs, well below expectations — but the BLS also revised its job-growth estimates for May and June, virtually wiping out all the jobs previously reported. All in all, the total number of jobs was actually 250K less than previously thought. And the turning points were disturbingly close to two events: Trump’s election in November and the “liberation day” announcement of his tariff policy in April.

Couple that with recent reports that the inflation rate is climbing again — slowly maybe, but that’s how these things get started — and the whole Trump economy doesn’t look so good.

OK, then, bad news. Administrations get bad news all the time. I’m sure Biden didn’t like the inflation reports in 2023. So you send your press secretary out to spin: The numbers don’t mean what they appear to mean, you can’t read too much into one report, next month will be better, and so on.

But not Donald Trump. He responded by firing the head of the BLS. Don’t like the numbers? Fire the top number-cruncher. It’s like firing the weatherman because your picnic got rained out. That’ll fix it.

More accurately, it’s like something Trump did in his first term: Blame rising Covid rates on the availability of tests.

If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.

It’s hard to appreciate just how destructive this firing is. All previous administrations, including Trump’s first, shared a commitment to independent agencies producing accurate data to the best of their abilities. The rates of inflation and unemployment, the total national debt, current population, crime rates … they were what they were. Presidential spokespeople might spin those numbers, or critics might grouse about definitions by claiming that the “real” unemployment rate is U-6, rather than the much lower U-3 that gets the headlines.

But the numbers were what they were. Underneath it all was a core assumption that career bureaucrats were trying to get these numbers right. They held their jobs from one administration to the next and they had professional pride. No doubt each of them voted for somebody and had some individual political views, but when they went to the office none of that mattered.

Overall, the United States has benefited tremendously from having an honest and widely respected civil service. Investors, both foreign and domestic, don’t have to build an extra risk premium into their decisions to account for their distrust of the government statistics. (When dealing with many other countries — China, Russia, the third world, etc. — they do need that extra risk premium.) One reason the world has been content to let the dollar be the fundamental currency of international trade, or to route their own payment systems through our Federal Reserve, is that you could always count on the US to do honest bookkeeping.

Well, Trump threw that all away Friday. The National Association for Business Economics immediately denounced the move:

The National Association for Business Economics (NABE) strongly condemns the baseless removal of Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Commissioner Erika McEntarfer and the unfounded accusations leveled against the work of the agency. This unprecedented attack on the U.S. statistical system threatens the long-standing credibility of our economic data infrastructure

Business leaders and policymakers depend on reliable, impartial economic data to guide decisions that affect investment, employment, and the health of the economy. The BLS produces these data using transparent, rigorously documented, and scientifically sound methodologies. U.S. economic statistics are regarded as the gold standard worldwide, setting the benchmark for accuracy, transparency, and independence.

Here was Trump’s justification:

In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad. … We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified.

In other words, the fired BLS head will be replaced by someone who will cook the books for Trump. Paul Krugman has been anticipating this since before the inauguration.

But why assume that the data will, in fact, remain objective? Imagine that we’re heading into an election and inflation numbers are running at, say, 4 or 5 percent. Do you have any doubts that Trump will insist that the inflation is fake news and pressure the B.L.S. to report better numbers?

To a lot of people, these kinds of worries sounded crazy six months ago. But here we are. Krugman sums up:

It’s one more step on our rapid descent into banana republic status.

and Gaza

It’s hard to know what to say about Gaza, because while it is one of the most important things happening in the world, the story is the same week after week: People are starving; Israel has the power to save them but chooses not to.

I sympathize with the Israelis who were traumatized by the October 7 attacks and feel that Hamas must be eliminated at all costs. But here’s the problem: Hamas isn’t a leader, a group of people, or even an organization. Anything bombs can destroy or soldiers can kill is not Hamas.

Fundamentally, Hamas is an idea: the belief that Israel can’t be negotiated with, and that no peaceful solution of the Palestine/Israel conflict is possible. As long as that belief persists among Palestinians, Hamas will always be able to rise from the ashes.

Now imagine the generation growing up in Gaza, watching their parents, siblings, and friends starve to death because Israel prevents them from getting food. Will they someday see Israel as a partner in peace, or imagine themselves living side-by-side with Israelis? Or might they think of Israelis the way that the author of Psalm 137 thought of his own oppressors:

Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us. Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.

I quote this not to incite violence against Israelis, or Jews in the US or elsewhere, but to point out that this kind of reaction is very human. Jews have felt it in the past and Palestinians no doubt are feeling it now.

The Israeli effort to wipe out Hamas is in fact guaranteeing its survival.

and the Smithsonian

Thursday brought an Orwellian moment, when the Washington Post revealed that the Smithsonian had removed mention of Trump’s impeachments from an exhibit about the presidency. A Smithsonian spokesperson explained like this:

In reviewing our legacy content recently, it became clear that the ‘Limits of Presidential Power’ section in The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden exhibition needed to be addressed. Because the other topics in this section had not been updated since 2008, the decision was made to restore the Impeachment case back to its 2008 appearance.

The 2008 version said that only three presidents had faced a serious threat of removal via impeachment: Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton.

The statement makes it sound like Trump had nothing to do with this “review of legacy content”, but in fact it is a direct response to an executive order Trump issued in March, which targeted the Smithsonian by name for “replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth”.

Saturday, the Smithsonian was saying it would update the exhibit to re-include Trump’s impeachments “in the coming weeks”. We’ll see if they manage to do it without provoking another “off with his head” response.

and the Texas gerrymander

By 2024, we seemed to have reached a national balance in terms of congressional gerrymandering: The GOP won a slight victory in the national popular vote, and got a slight majority of House seats for it.

Trump wants to undo that balance. Knowing that his policies are unpopular, he wants to be able to hang onto the Republican House majority even if the voters want something else. So the Trump-enslaved Republican majority in the Texas legislature is trying to vote on a mid-decade redistricting that will give Republicans five more safe seats.

Democrats have responded by leaving the state, in hopes of denying the legislature the quorum necessary to pass laws. (A quorum is 2/3rds of members.) Governor Abbott is threatening to have absent legislators removed from office, which would certainly have to be decided in court. It’s not clear to me how long the Democrats would have to stay away to block the redistricting.

Democratic states like New York and California have threatened to retaliate, but considerable legal hurdles are in the way.

and the those trade deals

The NYT has been buying the claim that “Trump is winning his trade war“, but it ought to be more skeptical. Last week I told you about Paul Krugman’s analysis of the Japan deal, and said that the deal with the EU was too new to analyze. So let’s come back to the EU deal.

Krugman sees the deal as mostly nothing: The EU promised to do things it was doing anyway (invest money in the US, buy US products), and there is no enforcement mechanism to make sure it does. The investment, for example, is supposed to come from private companies, which the EU government has no power to coerce. Similarly,

A commitment to spend $250 billion per year on U.S. energy products would also require Europe to triple their annual American energy imports. “Question one is if they need that much, can afford that much,” [William] Reinsch [former president of the National Foreign Trade Council] said. “Question two is if we can even supply that much.”

What Trump got, though, was a headline: He “won”. That seems to be all he wants.

and ICE

Reports continue to mount up of masked ICE agents terrorizing people doing nothing wrong. Here, humanitarian aid workers on the border report being harassed. In this video, people videoing ICE are pushed around.

This video appears to be local police beating up anti-ICE protesters on a bridge connecting Cincinnati to Covington, Kentucky. A more detailed report was on CNN and local WLWT. The protest was against the arrest of a Muslim hospital chaplain who was here legally, but had his asylum revoked.

It’s hard not to notice the pro-police news slant: Police “clash” with protesters rather than attack them. I can appreciate why local police would want to clear a bridge and get traffic moving again, but once protesters have been moved to the sidewalk, the emergency is over. And continuing to punch people who have already been wrestled to the ground is assault, not law enforcement.

and you also might be interested in …

People are starting to notice how much damage MAGA Christians are doing to Christianity.

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Why don’t examples of Trump’s loss of mental acuity get covered as intensely as Biden’s were?

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We begin to see the first fallout from the rescission package Congress passed last week.

First, the direct fallout: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced it will shut down after 57 years.

Most CPB staff will be terminated by September’s end, with a small transition team remaining through January 2026 to wind down operations.

The rescission bill zeroed out funding for CPB, which previously had received about a half billion a year, which it distributed mostly to local public TV and radio stations. Most of those individual stations — especially the ones in big liberal cities like Boston or New York — will absorb the funding cuts and continue functioning. But CPB has been the main source of funding for many rural stations, which may have to close their doors as well, or sharply curtail their operations.

It’s another example of Trump victimizing his own voters.

Rural communities are already hard hit by a lack of community journalism, as one in three US counties do not have a full-time local journalist, according to a July report from Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News.

The second bit of fallout is more subtle: Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is calling for Democrats not to participate in negotiations over the FY 2026 budget until Trump unfreezes money that Congress appropriated for FY2025.

Her demand makes sense, and I hope the rest of the Democratic Party backs her up on this. The budget process is a back-and-forth horse-trading between the two parties, with Democrats generally supplying the last few votes to get bills over the finish line in exchange for protecting programs that they consider important. But if Trump can simply refuse to spend the money, or if congressional Republicans can renege on their deal by passing a rescission on a party-line vote, then the whole process is a charade.

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When Elon Musk’s DOGE was firing people and closing agencies in the first few months of the Trump administration, two criticisms were obvious:

• Cuts to food and medical aid were hard-hearted and short-sighted, because feeding hungry kids and containing disease outbreaks is not “waste”, even if the immediate beneficiaries aren’t Americans.
• Making workers suddenly disappear does not in any way promote “efficiency”.

The first criticism has gotten a lot of coverage, with estimates that the DOGE cuts will ultimately be responsible for 14 million deaths. But the Trump administration has largely skated around blame for the second.

This week Democrats on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a 55-page report that totals up just how much federal money DOGE wasted in its campaign against “waste”: around $21.7 billion. Most of the wasted money comes from paying federal workers not to work, including $14.8 billion in the deferred resignation program, which invited federal employees to resign immediately, but get paid through the end of the fiscal year. About 200K feds took that offer. Another $6.1 billion was paid to 100K employees that were put on administrative leave, many of them in agencies like USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Notice that these are just the easily totaled costs. We don’t know how much work didn’t get done or was done badly because the federal workers who remain were demoralized or terrorized. Some people imagine that fear of getting fired will scare lazy workers into action. But if you’ve ever worked in any kind of office, you know that very little gets done when everyone is trying to figure out where the ax will fall next.

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The next cartoon requires some explanation: former football players who believe they are suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) have been known to commit suicide by shooting themselves in the chest, so that their brains can be studied.

The cartoonist (Bill Bramhall) is suggesting that America’s gun laws can only be explained by some kind of national brain damage.

and let’s close with something foul-mouthed but tasty

Definitely NSFW, like most of Samuel L. Jackson’s most memorable stuff. Here, he’s advertising Windfarm Seaweed Snacks, made from seaweed cultivated at an offshore wind farm.

There is a terrifying amount of hate in our country, yes. But there is far more fear. Hate is the end of a conversation. Fear isn’t always. I’ve been on the lookout for moments when an honest and respectful conversation might reach the root of someone else’s fear.

– Andrea Gibson “Post-Election Letter to a Friend“

This week’s featured post is “Yes, he does think you’re stupid“.

This week everybody was still talking about Jeffrey Epstein

The featured post discusses how to take advantage of the strife in MAGA World.

The Onion had two articles that lampooned what’s been happening these last two weeks:

“MAGA Voter Drills Hole Into Skull To Relieve Sudden Doubts About Trump“.

And “Elderly Woman Keeps Mind Active Justifying Trump’s Actions“.

“I’m developing new neural pathways each time I shrug off Trump’s clear violations of the Constitution and his total contempt for our system of checks and balances. You know, I have some friends who didn’t spend time rationalizing Trump’s actions, and they ended up in nursing homes.”

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Meanwhile, Some Trump pronouncements are so detached from reality they seem like Onion articles even when they’re legit. Like this Truth Social post:

The Washington “Whatever’s” should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team. There is a big clamoring for this. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams, with a storied past. Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them.

which was quickly followed by a threat:

My statement on the Washington Redskins has totally blown up, but only in a very positive way. I may put a restriction on them that if they don’t change the name back to the original “Washington Redskins,” and get rid of the ridiculous moniker, “Washington Commanders,” I won’t make a deal for them to build a Stadium in Washington.

That’s delusional world he lives in: Native Americans were honored by the Redskins and Indians. Those teams should change their names back out of respect.

Oh, and the Indians being “one of the six original baseball teams” is another delusion.

The concept of an “original six” does not exist in baseball, though it does in ice hockey. The Cleveland MLB team currently known as the Guardians began play in the late 1800s in a league with eight teams, before becoming one of the eight charter members of the modern American League in 1901. Like most baseball teams, the franchise has undergone numerous moves and moniker changes. Since arriving in Cleveland in 1900, the team was known as the Lakeshores (for one year), Bluebirds (in 1901), Broncos (in 1902), Naps (from 1903-1914), and Indians (from 1915-2021).

and the rescission vote

Congress passed a rescission package to take back $9 billion it had already appropriated. The bill defunds NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It also OKs foreign aid cuts Trump was already making. The bill passed with zero Democratic votes. But with only two Republican defectors in each house, it had enough support to get through.

This bill is bad on two levels: Taken as a unique event, it cuts stuff that ought to be funded. But viewed from a higher perspective, it also creates a precedent that will make the next government shutdown much harder to avoid.

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Let’s start with public broadcasting, which loses $1.1 billion. This is another example of congressional Republicans abusing their own voters. People like me, who live near a big blue city like Boston, will barely notice. WGBH and WBUR get a lot of contributions from their listeners as well as grants from local foundations. They’ll be inconvenienced by the loss of federal money, but they’ll get by. Ditto for WNYC in New York, WHYY in Philadelphia, and KQED in San Francisco.

But if you live in Trump Country — rural Kansas, say — you’re going to see a real difference.

Public media advocates say it is these local stations, particularly the ones in rural areas like Smoky Hills PBS, that will bear the brunt of the federal funding cuts. Aside from the potential job losses, they say it would also mean less information distributed to an already-underserved population, less coverage of popular local events such as high school wrestling and less attention to day-to-day life in rural America.

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Then there’s foreign aid. The rescission package zeroes out USAID, which had already had its appropriation blocked by DOGE. Politico reports:

Nearly 800,000 mpox vaccine doses the U.S. government had promised to donate to African countries experiencing an outbreak of the rash-causing disease cannot be shipped because they’re expiring in less than six months, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

And The Atlantic adds:

Five months into its unprecedented dismantling of foreign-aid programs, the Trump administration has given the order to incinerate food instead of sending it to people abroad who need it. Nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food—enough to feed about 1.5 million children for a week—are set to expire tomorrow, according to current and former government employees with direct knowledge of the rations. Within weeks, two of those sources told me, the food, meant for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, will be ash.

The Economist draws the obvious conclusion: These cuts are “a gift for China as it vies with America for soft-power supremacy”.

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As you consider all this, remember that the Big Beautiful Bill set aside $170 billion to support Trump’s mass deportation policy, including $45 billion to build concentration camps. Republicans justified their vote for the rescissions by describing the $9 billion of cuts as “a small but important step toward fiscal sanity that we all should be able to agree is long overdue”.

When we’re saving lives or making sure kids can see Sesame Street or competing with China for influence in Africa, we have a spending problem. But there’s always plenty of money for cruelty.

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Now we come to the broader perspective. The appropriations being rolled back are part of the bipartisan deal that prevented a government shutdown in March. With majorities in Congress being as narrow as they’ve been in recent years, we have these kinds of deals every year or two.

Now, how can the Democrats ever do a deal like this again? A bipartisan spending bill typically contains some provisions that either party doesn’t like; you allow spending you don’t want here in order to get the spending you do want there. But now imagine that Republicans can take that deal, and then pass a rescission package to roll back every plum Democrats got in exchange for their votes. There is no deal that the minority party can make the majority uphold.

The next fiscal year starts on October 1. Expect to see some chickens come home to roost.

and Stephen Colbert

CBS announced that when Stephen Colbert’s contract ends next May, that will be the end not just of Colbert’s role at CBS, but of The Late Show, which David Letterman established in 1993.

“This is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night,” read the statement. “It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.

No one is buying that. Yes, it’s true that late-night TV in general has seen its ratings decline in recent years. But Colbert’s Late Show still leads the competition by a wide margin. Some kind of reorganization might be warranted, and maybe Colbert’s next contract shouldn’t be as lucrative is the current one. But finances dictated the end of the show? Not believable.

Vox explains the background:

Paramount Global is currently attempting to merge with Skydance Media, and company leadership has been acting as though they are concerned that President Donald Trump might try to block the merger. Earlier this month, CBS and 60 minutes announced a $16 million settlement in its lawsuit with Trump over the editing of a segment about former Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris — an extraordinary concession for a media company in a case that experts agree CBS would have likely won in court.

The apparent legal settlement, in other words, was actually a bribery/extortion situation. Colbert said as much on the air:

I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles: It’s “big fat bribe”.

Two days later, Colbert was told his show was cancelled.

On Truth Social, Trump took a victory lap.

I absolutely love that Colbert’ got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert! Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them combined, including the Moron on NBC who ruined the once great Tonight Show.

(Greg Gutfeld hosts Fox News’ pathetic attempt at news-related comedy. The “moron on NBC” is Jimmy Fallon. When Trump criticized Kimmel’s hosting of the 2024 Oscars on Truth Social, Kimmel famously read the tweet on-air and responded: “Isn’t it past your jail time?“)

Trump isn’t the only one who sees this event as the first of many. Mother Jones writes:

[T]he end of Colbert signals a dark new chapter in Trump’s authoritarian slide. Though his second term has already produced a string of stunning capitulations by some of the most powerful forces in the country, one could argue that Trump’s attacks had yet to take down our actual culture. I’m talking about the literal content we consume—the television, art, movies, literature, music—no matter how much Trump complained. That it remained protected and free-willed, a rare area of control for a public that otherwise feels powerless to take action. Clearly, that was magical thinking. If this can happen to Colbert and a storied franchise, this can happen to anyone.

but I want to talk about Andrea Gibson

After my wife’s memorial service in January, the comment I heard most often — practically from everybody — was: “I never appreciated what an interesting person she was.” In a self-centered way, I was gratified to hear those words, because I had designed the service to evoke precisely that response. I had recruited speakers from every corner of her life, and not even I knew what all of them would say.

But on the other hand, that comment made me sad. Because it’s such a waste that even our close friends know us so poorly, and often we don’t really meet someone until we gather together to mark their death.

Well, this week I experienced that sorrow from the other side: I had never heard of Andrea Gibson until they died Monday, which started their poems bouncing around social media.

Rummaging through Andrea’s substack “Things That Don’t Suck“, I was struck by how well “Post-Election Letter to a Friend” holds up nine months later.

I understand why so many people are sharing what they think we should be feeling right now. Though there is love at the heart of that demand, there is no such thing as a moral emotion. No one owes the world their misery. What we owe is our active participation in finding creative and compassionate paths forward. Every activist I have ever known who believed they owed the world their unhappiness has burned out. If we consciously fuel our joy, if we put our attention on the world’s beauty, we will have far more strength and stamina to show up to the world’s pain. 

We need stamina. The 73 million people who voted for Trump appear to be more energized than ever. And it’s clear to me that the narrative that every Trump voter is “ignorant and hateful” is hurting our movements. 95% of our marginalized friends have at least one family member they deeply trust who voted for Trump this year. Most people, regardless of how they are voting, believe they are voting for a better world. There is a terrifying amount of hate in our country, yes. But there is far more fear. Hate is the end of a conversation. Fear isn’t always. I’ve been on the lookout for moments when an honest and respectful conversation might reach the root of someone else’s fear.

I will try to hold that in mind as I run into Trumpists. Maybe trying to figure out what they’re afraid of is a more productive path than meeting anger with anger and hate with hate.

That quote reminded of this one from the Sufi poet Hafiz.

Dear ones,
Beware of the tiny gods frightened men
Create
To bring an anesthetic relief
To their sad
Days.

Trump is exactly that: a tiny god made from his followers’ fear of the world that is coming to be. The pervasive cruelty of his movement is fear dressed up to deny fear: “We can’t be afraid, because we have made other people fear us.”

The masked ICE agent is the perfect symbol of MAGA: afraid to show his face, but trying to strike fear into others. They have the guns, the body armor, and sometimes the Marines to back them up, but no courage of their own.

And then there’s this, from Gibson’s poem “My Dog Knew I had Cancer Before I Did“:

“lifespan” is a word I no longer use to measure length––but width. “How wide can my heart open to this life, to this world, and to everyone in it?” feels like a far more important question now than, “How long will I live?”

More than one of my friends is dying right now. I don’t think I can do anything to lengthen their lives, but maybe I can still widen them a little.

and you also might be interested in …

Trump seems to have an uncanny knack for finding the wrong side of every issue.

In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro used to be president, and was sometimes described as Brazil’s Trump. He had a similar disdain for democracy, and when Brazilians voted him out in 2022 (just as Americans voted Trump out in 2020), his supporters stormed the seat of government, much as Trump supporters did on January 6.

Unlike the US, Brazil is holding Bolsonaro to account. He is currently on trial for his role in the coup attempt.

Recently, Trump has been trying to interfere with that trial. He threatened Brazil with 50% tariffs if they didn’t end Bolsonaro’s trial. This week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio withdrew US visas from judges in Bolsonaro’s trial.

Writing on X, Rubio said he had ordered visa revocations for the judge leading the investigation into Bolsonaro, Alexandre de Moraes, as well as “his allies on the court” and their family members.

So that’s where we are: We’re trying to interfere in the legal processes of the second-biggest democracy in the Western hemisphere, to the point of threatening sanctions against the family members of judges.

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ProPublica analyzed hospital-discharge data from Texas.

After Texas made performing abortions a felony in August 2022, ProPublica found, the number of blood transfusions during emergency room visits for first-trimester miscarriage shot up by 54%. The number of emergency room visits for early miscarriage also rose, by 25%, compared with the three years before the COVID-19 pandemic — a sign that women who didn’t receive D&Cs initially may be returning to hospitals in worse condition, more than a dozen experts told ProPublica.

The problem: A dilation and curettage procedure (D&C) is the safest way to clear the uterus of a woman who has had an early miscarriage. But a miscarriage followed by a D&C looks a lot like an abortion, and doctors don’t want to be exposed to prosecution under the new law.

The data mirrors a sharp rise in cases of sepsis — a life-threatening reaction to infection — ProPublica previously identified during second-trimester miscarriage in Texas.

Blood loss is expected during early miscarriage, which usually ends without complication. Some cases, however, can turn deadly very quickly. [Dr. Elliott] Main [a hemorrhage expert and former medical director for the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative] said ProPublica’s analysis suggested to him that “physicians are sitting on nonviable pregnancies longer and longer before they’re doing a D&C — until patients are really bleeding.”

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ProPublica also examined RFK Jr.’s latest avenue to attack vaccines. Back in the 1980s, Congress established the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. It’s a no-fault insurance program that covers the rare injuries caused by vaccines, and it’s funded by a 75-cent tax on each disease a shot is supposed to protect against. It compensates victims quickly without going through the ordinary system of lawsuits, and it shields vaccine manufacturers from more costly awards in court.

Kennedy is overhauling the system, and may do so in ways that break it. For example, if he adds autism to the list of automatically covered injuries, the trust fund that pays compensation will quickly go bankrupt. Kennedy keeps saying that vaccines cause autism, despite the fact that this theory has been studied exhaustively and has been refuted every time.

If the fund goes bankrupt and cases go back to the regular tort system, vaccine manufacturers may simply pull out of the US market. That was the problem the VICP was designed to solve.

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Paul Krugman:

Democrats have indeed moved a bit to the left on economic issues in recent years. But they’re hardly extremists. They’re basically a lot like a European Social Democratic party. Republicans, however, are extremists. The whole party has raced to the right into what amounts to full-on fascism.

If that last statement has you reaching for the smelling salts, ask yourself, what more evidence do you need? Do we have to wait until a Republican administration creates a masked secret police force that snatches people off the streets and starts building concentration camps? Wait, that has already happened.

and let’s close with a moment of schadenfreude

It’s hard to explain what’s so satisfying about this incident: The CEO and HR manager of the software company Astronomer were cuddling at a Coldplay concert in Boston’s Gillette Stadium when the kiss-cam put them on the big screen. They didn’t notice immediately, but when they did, the HR manager covered her face with her hands and the married-to-somebody-else CEO tried to sink into the ground. As so often happens, the cover-up is worse than the crime: Their horrified reaction to being caught together made the video go viral. Anybody who wasn’t supposed to see it has certainly seen it by now.

Reportedly, Astronomer had a policy against employees dating, which the HR manager should have been familiar with. The CEO has subsequently resigned.

It’s tempting to think that we are living in a new era of lawlessness, but that would fail to capture the change staring us in the face. This is not about the lack of law. It’s about the remaking of the law. What Trump and leaders like him seek is not so much to destroy the law as to colonize it, to possess the law by determining its parameters to serve their interests. For them, the law exists to bend to their will, to destroy their adversaries, and to provide an alibi for behavior which, in a better version of our world, would be punished as criminal.

– Moustafa Bayoumi
“The destruction of Palestine is breaking the world“

This week’s featured post is “Trump only has ICE for you“.

This week everybody was talking about Trump’s bill

The featured post covers how the massive $170 billion appropriation for immigration enforcement could lead to ICE becoming Trump’s Gestapo and immigrant detention centers turning into concentration camps. I understand how alarmist that sounds, but I’m drawing on some pretty reliable folks: Timothy Snyder, Theda Skocpol, and others.

That leaves coverage of the rest of the bill here. Ignoring the implications for democracy, the big thing to know about the bill is that it robs from the poor to give to the rich.

One snarky meme I saw Friday hoped that “Big Beautiful Bill” will be the nickname of Trump’s cellmate some day. I suspect the poster has more faith in God’s justice than I do.

But anyway, the Republicans got it done, without a single Democratic vote in either house of Congress. Up until a few weeks ago, I honestly thought they wouldn’t. The bill hurts so many Republican voters (see the note below on Frontier County, Nebraska) and the GOP’s margins in Congress are so small. I thought that a few more Republicans would vote against a bill they obviously knew was wrong for the country and for their constituents.

Back in May, for example, Josh Hawley wrote an op-ed describing in detail what was wrong with cutting Medicaid. He blamed the GOP’s “Wall Street wing” for a bill that was “both morally wrong and politically suicidal”.

If Congress cuts funding for Medicaid benefits, Missouri workers and their children will lose their health care. And hospitals will close. It’s that simple. And that pattern will replicate in states across the country.

But he voted for the bill, morality be damned.

Research backs up the point he was making. The University of Pennsylvania’s health economics institute calculated that the bill would lead to 51,000 preventable deaths annually. The idea that Americans die for lack of health insurance has long been denied on the Right, going back to 2012 when presidential candidate Rick Santorum rejected “completely … that people die in America because of lack of health insurance.”

Santorum and others often point to rules that require emergency rooms to care for people regardless of their ability to pay. So no, you won’t die from a car accident because you aren’t insured. But you may skip a regular check-up that would have saved you from a heart attack, or go without the blood-pressure meds that prevent a stroke. Spread over a nation, those cases add up.

It’s hard to know what to do with people like Hawley. They don’t need to be convinced; they know. They just don’t care enough or have the courage to do anything about it. After she provided the deciding vote that got the bill through the Senate, Lisa Murkowski wrote:

But, let’s not kid ourselves. This has been an awful process—a frantic rush to meet an artificial deadline that has tested every limit of this institution. While we have worked to improve the present bill for Alaska, it is not good enough for the rest of our nation—and we all know it.   My sincere hope is that this is not the final product. This bill needs more work across chambers and is not ready for the President’s desk.

But of course the House passed it without amendment and the President signed it, so the bill Murkowski voted for is now law. As so often happens — remember Mitch McConnell, after voting to acquit Trump in his second impeachment, saying that Trump hadn’t gotten away with anything “yet” — Murkowski hoped somebody else would save the country from Trump, when she had the power to do it and would not.

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Lots of last-minute horse-trading happened, including a bunch of Alaska exemptions to nail down Murkowski’s vote, so what does the final bill actually do?

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What I believe is the only hospital in Frontier County, Nebraska will close down in response to “anticipated federal budget cuts to Medicaid”.

These are Trump voters. In the 2024 presidential election, Trump beat Harris 1213-185 in Frontier County. (On the map, Frontier County is the third county from the left in the second row from the bottom.) Frontier County’s congressman and both Nebraska senators voted for the Big Beautiful Bill.

They did it to themselves.

The fig leaf Republicans are wearing is that Medicaid and food stamps will only be denied to able-bodied people who won’t work. However, when states have instituted a work-requirement with a similar explanation, the resulting savings have come mainly from kicking out eligible people who get behind on their paperwork. (Implementing a work requirement means monthly forms verifying that you are working. The working poor tend to have very little free time for filling out forms. Many are poorly educated and have trouble understanding the rules or following the instructions.)

Paul Krugman provides a very well-constructed graphic about Medicaid recipients.

Finally, let’s think about the 3% of recipients who are of working age but don’t work. Let’s assume the worst about them, as Mike Johnson does: They’re lazy bums who sit around playing video games all day.

Do I approve of their lifestyle? No. Do I think that if they get sick they should be left to die? Also no.

Taking away people’s health insurance is not an appropriate form of discipline.

and trade

After Trump’s extreme “Liberation Day” tariff announcements on April 2 panicked global markets, he retreated by announcing a 90-day pause on the tariffs so that trade deals could be negotiated, promising “90 deals in 90 days“.

In fact, no deals have been completed. The administration has made much of “frameworks” of trade deals with China and the UK and Vietnam, but in trade agreements the devil is in the details, which are still being worked out. Georgetown Professor Mark Busch says:

These aren’t real trade deals. These are cessations of hostility. These are purchasing agreements that may or may not appease Trump for maybe a little while, thrown in with some aspirational stuff.

Well, the 90 days run on out Wednesday. But now officials are talking about August 1 as the real deadline. Will TACO Trump chicken out again, or will we see another stock market collapse? Stay tuned.

and the flash floods in Texas

Storms have been unpredictable since the days of Zeus and Thor, so it’s always hard to know exactly where to place the blame for a weather disaster. But Friday’s flash flood of Texas’ Guadalupe River (which so far has resulted in 82 dead, including 28 children, with ten girls from a Christian summer camp still missing) has at least two fingers pointing back towards the Trump administration.

The first finger, of course, is climate change, which raises the likelihood of any sort of extreme weather event.

Rainfall intensity in central Texas has been trending upward for decades, and this week’s rains were enhanced by the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry, which made landfall in northern Mexico last week. Barry’s circulation pulled record amounts of atmospheric moisture up to central Texas from the near-record warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

The mix of Barry’s circulation and climate warming helped create conditions of record-high atmospheric moisture content over central Texas – in line with the trend towards increasing atmospheric moisture content globally as the world warms and the air can hold more water vapor.

Trump has consistently played down climate change, occasionally referring to it as a “hoax”. His first administration emphasized “drill, baby, drill”, i.e. producing and burning more of the fossil fuels that cause climate change. In his second administration, he has rolled back nearly every effort President Biden made to set us on the path to a more sustainable economy. The League of Conservation Voters referred to the “big beautiful bill” he signed Friday as “the most anti-environmental bill of all time”, which “will do extreme harm to our communities, our families, our climate, and our public lands.”

Would a full-bore government focus on climate change since 2017, combined with putting the full pressure of the United States on other nations to phase out fossil fuel dependence, have prevented, or at least mitigated, the Guadalupe flood? As with any individual weather event, it’s impossible to say for sure.

But then we get to the second finger. If extreme weather events are going to be more and more frequent — and they are — common sense would lead us to invest more heavily in weather prediction, so that we see these events coming and have more time to get summer-campers out of harm’s way.

But Trump has been doing exactly the opposite. Tuesday — three days before the flood — The Guardian lamented:

As the weather has worsened, there have been fewer federal scientists to alert the public of it. Cuts to the weather service by Trump and the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) have left NWS local forecast offices critically understaffed throughout this year’s heightened severe weather. In April, an internal document reportedly described how cuts could create a situation of “degraded” operations – shutting down core services one by one until it reaches an equilibrium that doesn’t overtax its remaining employees.

Did NWS drop the ball here? Local officials claim they did, predicting 4-8 inches of rain rather than the 12 that actually fell. But maybe mistakes on that scale are inevitable and the local officials are just deflecting blame. Again, who can say?

The point is that this kind of thing is bound to keep happening: As our country’s policies work to increase bad weather events while cutting back on our ability to predict them, more and more often disaster is going to take us by surprise. And sometimes girls at summer camp will pay the price.

and the Fourth of July

Trump hasn’t been in office half a year yet, with 3 1/2 to go. But he has already done so much damage to American democracy that July 4 had a melancholy edge this year. Is the United States still worth celebrating in its current form? And if so, for how much longer?

Jay Kuo tries to reach past his patriotic sorrow:

While the lighthouse shining the way is admittedly hard to make out through the cruel fog that envelopes us, it is out there, sturdy upon the shore, and still blazing brightly. We must trust that we will rediscover its guiding power and, together, steer this ship safely home. We’ll do it together, and in our strong and welcome company we will find the courage and conviction we need.

Jennifer Rubin notes that the list of grievances in the Declaration of Independence seem particularly relevant this year.

The signers railed about exclusionary immigration policies that hurt the colonies (“He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither”). They inveighed against barriers to trade (“cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world”). And they condemned imposing “Taxes on us without our Consent,” which, if we remember that unilaterally imposed tariffs are a consumer tax, also sounds familiar. Tyrants, then and now, seek to dominate and micromanage commerce to the detriment of ordinary people seeking a better life.

And notice the common problem, then and now, when a tyrant attempts to corrupt the rule of law by seeking to intimidate and threaten members of the judiciary (“He has obstructed the Administration of Justice…. He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices”); seeks to impair due process (“depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury”); and even ships people out of the country for punishment (“Transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences”). The tyrant playbook has not changed much in nearly 250 years.

Using the military improperly has always been a go-to move for tyrants. “He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures” (or in our case, the governor of California) and tried to make “the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power” (by, among other things, threatening to deploy them to silence protests). “Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us” is still going on in Los Angeles. And “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us …”—or in Donald Trump’s case, incited violence, called it an insurrection and then used it as a pretext to send in the military.

and you also might be interested in …

The most thought-provoking thing I read this week was “The destruction of Palestine is breaking the world” by Moustafa Bayoumi, which is the source of this week’s top-of-the-page quote. The “world” Bayoumi is talking about is the post-World-War-II rules-based order, and he sees it breaking on multiple levels. International rules against genocide or using starvation as a weapon of war somehow don’t apply to what Israel is doing in Gaza. Similarly, US laws against supplying weapons to countries that block US humanitarian aid don’t apply to Israel. American principles of free speech don’t apply to people who protest for Palestinian rights.

Along the same lines: Peter Beinart notes how fast the conventional wisdom about Israel in American politics is changing.

The more Democratic elites continue their near-unconditional support for Israel despite overwhelming public opposition, the more vulnerable they will be to a Mamdani-style political insurgency in the next presidential primary.

He warns that Israel/Palestine could become a “moral consistency” issue that holds symbolic value even for many who feel no strong connection to either Israel or Palestine.

But unquestioned support for Israel has become, for many, a symbol of the timidity and inauthenticity of party elites — and that leaves them vulnerable to political insurgents who don’t compromise the values of equality and anti-discrimination.

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A depressing read is last Monday’s article in the NYT about the energy strategies of China and the United States: China is leading the world in clean energy development, while the US is pushing fossil fuels. China is building for the future, while the US is trying to hang onto the past.

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Tuesday, the federal government was supposed to release $7 billion in money Congress appropriated to fund summer and after-school programs.

But in an email on Monday, the Education Department notified state education agencies that the money would not be available.

The move is probably illegal, but the administration should be able to stall action in the courts until the programs would have ended anyway.

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In his members-only editor’s blog, Josh Marshall calls attention to the pro-Trump advertising that is paid for by your tax dollars. Reproducing part of a report from AdImpact, he observes that “The top advertiser in this political cycle so far is the Department of Homeland Security running political ads with taxpayer dollars on behalf of Donald Trump.” The total: $34 million.

Meanwhile, the Social Security Administration sent out an email praising (and lying about) Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. (I received it myself.) “Social Security Applauds Passage of Legislation Providing Historic Tax Relief for Seniors” was the subject line. This claim in particular is just blatantly false:

The bill ensures that nearly 90% of Social Security beneficiaries will no longer pay federal income taxes on their benefits, providing meaningful and immediate relief to seniors who have spent a lifetime contributing to our nation’s economy.

Actually:

the legislation provides a temporary tax deduction of up to $6,000 for people aged 65 and older, and $12,000 for married seniors. These benefits will start to phase out for those with incomes of more than $75,000 and married couples of more than $150,000 a year.

So if your monthly Social Security check is more than $1000, you’ll pay at least some tax on it. The average benefit is about double that.

Jeff Nesbit posted on X:

Unbelievable. I was a deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration. Appointed by President Biden. The agency has never issued such a blatant political statement. The fact that Trump and his minion running SSA has done this is unconscionable.

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Tesla’s sales are falling, which is a weird thing to stay about a company whose stock has a price/earnings ratio of 170. Investors appear to be buying the story that someday Tesla’s driverless taxis will be huge money-makers. I think I won’t be attending that party.

and let’s close with something refreshing and adorable

Feeling too hot this summer? Need more cuteness in your life? The Cincinnati Zoo offers this video of red pandas playing in the snow.