The Weekly Sift

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.

In short, individuals’ right to protest the government is one of the fundamental rights protected by the First Amendment, and just because some stray bad actors go too far does not wipe out that right for everyone. The idea that protesters can so quickly cross the line between protected conduct and “rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States” is untenable and dangerous.

– US DIstrict Judge Charles Breyer

There is no featured post this week; this weekly summary is all I’m writing.

It was a news-heavy week, most of it bad. In an earlier draft of this post, the opening quote was Shakespeare’s “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”

This week everybody was talking about right-wing political assassinations

Early Saturday morning, a man impersonating a police officer killed Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband at their home. He also shot and seriously wounded State Senator John Hoffman and his wife in a similar fashion. Hortman was the ranking Democrat in the Minnesota House and a former Speaker. A suspect has been captured and charged with murder and attempted murder.

A very good summary of what is known is in the NYT. Apparently, the Hoffmans were killed first, and their daughter called 911. Police checked on Hortman’s house and found a fake police vehicle in the driveway. The suspect was present and exchanged gunfire before running away.

A federal law enforcement official said that the vehicle was found with a list of about 70 potential targets. Also found were papers that referenced the “No Kings” protest, a series of anti-Trump rallies that were to be held on Saturday.

I’ve seen claims elsewhere that all 70 were Democrats, but I haven’t seen enough to trust that as a fact. The suspect did not register with a political party, but has given sermons against abortion and LGBTQ rights. A friend reported that he voted for Trump.

Trump’s first reaction Saturday was to issue a somewhat presidential statement on Truth Social:

I have been briefed on the terrible shooting that took place in Minnesota, which appears to be a targeted attack against State Lawmakers. Our Attorney General, Pam Bondi, and the FBI, are investigating the situation, and they will be prosecuting anyone involved to the fullest extent of the law. Such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America. God Bless the great people of Minnesota, a truly great place!

But by Sunday he had revered to form, telling ABC News that he “may” call Governor Walz, who is “a terrible governor” and “grossly incompetent”.

The gold standard for responses to violence from your supporters is the statement Bernie Sanders made after the Steve Scalise shooting.

I have just been informed that the alleged shooter at the Republican baseball practice is someone who apparently volunteered on my presidential campaign. I am sickened by this despicable act. Let me be as clear as I can be. Violence of any kind is unacceptable in our society and I condemn this action in the strongest possible terms. Real change can only come about through nonviolent action, and anything else runs against our most deeply held American values.

I’d love to hear Trump say outright that he doesn’t want his supporters committing violent acts, and calling on anybody who is planning such an act to stop. But I suspect I never will.

and Trump’s military occupation of Los Angeles

Federalized National Guard units and hundreds of Marines remain in Los Angeles, but I’ve had a hard time googling up any articles about what they’ve done these last two days. I hope that means they’ve been behaving themselves, protecting federal facilities and personnel, and not performing law enforcement tasks that would violate the Posse Comitatus Act.

A Washington Post reporter posted a video of police firing non-lethal shells at non-violent anti-ICE protesters approaching a federal building. But that’s ordinary police-escalated violence, and appears to have nothing to do with the military.

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In case you’ve been wondering, Posse Comitatus does actually have something to do with the posses that sheriffs round up to pursue bank robbers in the Western movies. Oversimplifying just a little, the law says that military forces can’t be part of a law-enforcing posse.

Both uses derive from the Latin verb posse, which means to be able or have power.

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Thursday, a federal judge ordered President Trump to return command of the federalized California National Guard troops to Governor Newsom. It hasn’t happened, because an appellate court stayed the order until it can have a hearing tomorrow. It’s easy to imagine that Trump might abuse the slowness of the judicial process to keep the troops there as long as he wanted to anyway.

But precedents are getting established along the way. Judge Breyer’s reasoning in the 36-page justification of his order echoes arguments made by a federal judge in the Alien Enemies Act case, which likewise is still winding its way through the system.

Like the Alien Enemies Act case (still awaiting final decision), this case revolves around legislation that grants the president additional powers in certain situations. In each case, the question being challenged in court is whether the appropriate situation exists. Trump’s lawyers argue that it is up to him to judge whether the conditions to extend his powers apply. In practice, this would mean that the President has additional powers whenever he decides he wants them. So far, the courts are not buying this argument.

Between the unique concerns raised by federal military intrusion into civilian affairs and the fact that federal officials are not uniquely positioned to ascertain what is happening on the ground (as compared to, say, state and local officials), the Court is not convinced that the judiciary cannot question presidential assertions about domestic activities leading to military action. … Indeed, as Justice [Robert H.] Jackson explained using examples from Weimar Germany, the French Republic, and World War II–era Great Britain, “emergency powers are consistent with free government only when their control is lodged elsewhere than in the Executive who exercises them.”

The law in question allows federalization of the National Guard when there is a rebellion against he US government. But Judge Breyer skeptically applied the conservative principle of originalism: What did “rebellion” mean at the time the law was passed?

… the Court observes that the dictionary definitions from the turn of the century share several key characteristics. First, a rebellion must not only be violent but also be armed. Second, a rebellion must be organized. Third, a rebellion must be open and avowed. Fourth, a rebellion must be against the government as a whole—often with an aim of overthrowing the government—rather than in opposition to a single law or issue.

… The protests in Los Angeles fall far short of “rebellion.” … Moreover, the Court is troubled by the implication inherent in Defendants’ argument that protest against the federal government, a core civil liberty protected by the First Amendment, can justify a finding of rebellion.

I expect the appellate court to uphold that finding; the only question is how long it will take. I predict Trump will end his occupation of Los Angeles before the Supreme Court can also rule against him.

Pundits speculate about whether or not Trump and his people will obey a clear court order, but that’s not the only issue here. The National Guard units themselves will have to make a decision about which set of orders they receive are the legal ones.

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Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem:

The Department of Homeland Security and the officers and the agencies and the departments and the military people that are working on this operation will continue to sustain and increase our operations in this city. We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor had placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.

Take a minute to process that statement. Trump and his administration have sent military troops to LA to “liberate” the city from its elected leaders. Presumably, they expect Californians to be grateful to be relieved of the “burden” of democracy. What cities and states might they “liberate” next?

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Thursday, California Senator Alex Padilla was forcably removed from a Kristi Noem press conference, then pushed to the floor and handcuffed.

Noem lied about the incident afterward, saying that Padilla did not identify himself and no one recognized him. The idea that no one recognized one of the two California senators is ridiculous on its face. But tape shows Padilla clearly identifying himself. And Noem has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s panel on immigration, citizenship and border safety, where Padilla is the ranking Democrat. She knew who he was.

and Israel’s attack on Iran

Israel launched a campaign of air strikes against Iran Thursday, targeting nuclear facilities, nuclear scientists, and top government officials. The strikes appear to have been highly successful in an immediate tactical sense.

Warplanes struck the Natanz nuclear facility, while other operations killed Iran’s top military general, the leader of its Revolutionary Guards, the head of its Air Force, and at least six nuclear scientists. News images showed apartment buildings in Tehran with smoke billowing from specific rooms, indicating precisely targeted attacks (though Iran said that eighty civilians were also killed). An unnamed security source told Channel 12 that the Mossad intelligence services had recently established bases inside Iran, where they kept precision missiles and suicide drones. The news aired grainy black-and-white footage of masked Mossad agents on the ground there, delicately setting down what were reportedly explosive drones, aimed at destroying the country’s air defenses. For twenty years, Israel had threatened to attack Iran’s nuclear program. Seemingly within minutes, it suddenly had.

Whether or not it makes strategic sense for Israel to start a new war with Iran is another question that depends largely on the goal: Is the idea to “mow the lawn” by destroying resources Iran can eventually replace? Or is Israel aiming at some kind of regime change?

Iran has struck back with missile attacks on Israel, which are less sophisticated and less well targeted than the Israeli attacks.

My reading of history is that no matter how big your current advantage may be, no one keeps the upper hand forever. So my question for the Netanyahu government and the Israeli electorate: Is maintaining permanent superiority your plan, or is there some vision of a stable equilibrium that you hope to achieve someday? I mean: an arrangement that your current enemies will someday accede to voluntarily, without an iron fist constantly over their heads?

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Trump is fond of claiming that any bad thing in the world — the Ukraine War, the October 7 Hamas attack, post-pandemic inflation, and so on — would not have happened if he had been president when it started. Such alternate-time-line boasts are nearly impossible to check, no matter how unlikely they seem.

But this is a case where a bad thing is directly attributable to Trump: If he had not junked Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, this war would not be happening.

As is so often the case, Trump claimed he could get a “better deal” and wound up with no deal. Trump’s prowess as a deal-maker is a big part of his myth, but has very little grounding in reality. Real deal-making isn’t about bombast and theatrics, it’s about understanding what your partner in the deal really wants, and what you can give up without trashing your own position. Trump’s brain can’t handle that level of detail and nuance. It’s not a matter of age; he never could.

Trump has tried to have it both ways with respect to this attack. He claims he had nothing to do with it, but also that he knew it was coming and that he warned the Iranians.

Certain Iranian hardliner’s spoke bravely, but they didn’t know what was about to happen. They are all DEAD now, and it will only get worse!

If I were an Iranian reading that tweet, I’d assume I was at war with the United States, not just with Israel.

and the No Kings protests

Other cities may have had larger turnouts, but San Francisco’s protest had the most style. Here’s a human banner at Ocean Beach.

Organizers estimated that the 2,100 separate protests drew 5 million participants, including 200,000 in Lost Angeles alone. I’m not sure I believe the claim of a million in Boston, but this drone video is pretty impressive. A drone view of the New York demonstration is also striking.

TPM collects photos.

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Dan Fromkin’s PressWatch blog has an article I wish more journalists would take seriously: ‘How many people were arrested?’ is a lousy way to cover protests. Fromkin points to a common way of covering protests that is particularly lazy and cowardly: Just talk to the cops.

Tell us what brought people out. Was it a range of issues or mostly just one? Tell us what some of the signs said – were they funny, angry, both? Tell us what the protesters did – did they march, chant, scream?

Were there speakers? What did they say? What are the organizers hoping to accomplish? What are their short-term goals and their long-term goals?

Describe the makeup of the crowd and give a rough indication of its size (yes you can make a reasonable estimate.) A sense of scale is crucial information.

and Trump’s sad military parade

No doubt when Trump envisioned his taxpayer-funded $45 million birthday bash, he pictured it being the biggest story of that news cycle, with even the denunciations drawing attention to it. In fact, it barely registered. I have not found an estimate of the crowd size, but numerous pictures show empty bleachers, and AP reported that

attendance appeared to fall far short of early predictions that as many as 200,000 people would attend the festival and parade.

Ostensibly, the parade was to honor the 250th birthday of the US Army, not Trump’s 79th birthday. But a similar anniversary is approaching for the Navy, and no similar spectacle is planned. And some spectators sang “Happy Birthday” to Trump after his speech.

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Republican senators need to pay more attention the lyrics of Paul Simon’s “The Boxer“:

I have squandered my resistance
For a pocketful of mumbles
Such are promises.
All lies and jest
Still, a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest.

Who can forget Susan Collins accepting Brett Kavanaugh’s pocketful of mumbles about respecting precedent and Roe v Wade being established law?

Finally, in his testimony, he noted repeatedly that Roe had been upheld by Planned Parenthood v. Casey, describing it as “precedent on precedent.”  When I asked him would it be sufficient to overturn a long-established precedent if five current justices believed it was wrongly decided, he emphatically said “no.” 

The latest example of Republican senatorial gullibility is Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. A doctor who gained prominence by vaccinating low-income kids in his home state, Cassidy might have blocked RFK Jr.’s nomination as HHS secretary, and for a time appeared inclined to do so over Kennedy’s anti-vax activism. But after voting Yes in a key committee hearing,

Cassidy explained that he’d received “serious commitments” from the Trump administration that made him comfortable with voting yes. Speaking later on the Senate floor, he added that RFK Jr. had promised to “meet or speak” with him multiple times a month, that the Trump administration would not remove assurances from the CDC’s website that vaccines do not cause autism, and that the administration would give his committee notice before making any changes to the nation’s existing vaccine-safety-monitoring systems.

Lies and jests. Monday, RFK Jr. removed all 17 members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee. Wednesday he announced eight replacements: largely unqualified people, many of whom are on record as vaccine skeptics.

Diseases will spread and Americans will die because Senator Cassidy failed to do his job.

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New rules at the Veterans Administration have removed some non-discrimination protections, including those for marital status and political beliefs.

Medical staff are still required to treat veterans regardless of race, color, religion and sex, and all veterans remain entitled to treatment. But individual workers are now free to decline to care for patients based on personal characteristics not explicitly prohibited by federal law.

Language requiring healthcare professionals to care for veterans regardless of their politics and marital status has been explicitly eliminated. Doctors and other medical staff can also be barred from working at VA hospitals based on their marital status, political party affiliation or union activity, documents reviewed by the Guardian show.

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The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office came out with its analysis of the impact of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. To no one’s surprise, it makes life easier for the rich and harder for the poor.

The very poor tend to be unpopular, with a lot of Americans believing they are lazy bums who deserve what they get. (I’m not claiming that, I’m just pointing out that a lot of people believe it.) But I want to call your attention to the working poor: people in the 2nd and 3rd decile who probably work as hard as anybody, but in low-paying jobs. They are also worse off if this bill passes.

Meanwhile, the Senate’s version of the Big Beautiful Bill looks likely to include a provision to sell 3 million acres of public land. The proposal is dressed up as a solution to the national housing shortage, but in fact most of this land is far from any expanding town. An analysis by Headwaters Economics found that most of the land near expanding towns has high wildfire risk, while other sites are prone to drought or flood.

What’s the real reason to sell this land? Probably just an ideological hatred of public ownership.

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Philips O’Brien draws attention to something the mainstream media isn’t paying attention to: More and more, Trump officials echo Putin’s worldview.

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A. R. Moxon answers a question Rep. Nancy Mace threw at Governor Walz: “What is a woman?”

This is a pretty standard question from the type of bigot that Nancy Mace is. It’s meant to erase the existence of trans women, who are being especially targeted for cruelty and exclusion by [Trump] and all his little minions. The question is asked to attempt to enforce the asker’s own narrow definitions, and then to accuse anyone who refuses to accept those restrictions of sexism and bigotry.

Moxon suggests answering: A woman is not a what. A woman is a who.

I have noticed that what [Trump] and his hateful crew do as almost an instinct is reduce a who to a what, and they do it to women in just the same way as they do it to immigrants and anybody else they want to target, and for the same reason, which is to exclude them from their full humanity so that they can be more easily abused.

and let’s close with something natural

We often hear that it’s a dog-eat-dog world. But also sometimes it’s a turtle-help-turtle world.

In so holding, the court does not pass upon the wisdom or likely effectiveness of the President’s use of tariffs as leverage. That use is impermissible not because it is unwise or ineffective, but because [the law] does not allow it.

– US Court of International Trade,
rejecting Trump’s emergency tariffs

This week’s featured post is “Are Trump’s Tariffs Legal?“

This week everybody was talking about tariffs

That’s the subject of the featured post. The decision of the US Court for International Trade revolves around what powers Trump has and how he exercises them. In the conclusion I note that there are legal ways to achieve Trump’s legitimate purposes, but he has chosen illegal ways that put him into conflict with the courts.

You can view that tendency in a sinister way, as Trump seeking conflict as he angles toward dictatorial power. But the Atlantic’s David Graham puts a different spin on it.

Some of Trump’s most notable collisions with the law and courts are less a product of him wanting powers that he doesn’t have than about him wanting things to happen faster than his powers allow. The president has a great deal of leeway to enforce immigration laws, but he is unwilling to wait while people exercise their right to due process, so instead he tries to just erase that right.

Trump could lay off many federal workers using the legally prescribed Reductions in Force procedure; instead, he and Elon Musk have attempted to fire workers abruptly, with the result that judges keep blocking the administration. Similarly, Trump could try to get Congress to close the Education Department or rescind funding for NPR, especially given the sway Trump holds over Republicans in both the House and the Senate. Instead, he has tried to do those things by executive fiat. Last week, a judge blocked his effort to shut down the department, and this week, NPR sued the administration over the attempt to slash funding, arguing that only Congress can claw back funds it has appropriated.

and Elon’s last day

Another SpaceX Starship rocket failed Tuesday. Friday was Elon Musk’s official last day as a “special government employee“, a status which was always supposed to have a 130-days-per-year time limit — pretty close to the time since Trump’s inauguration on January 21.

Trump and Musk marked the occasion with a joint Oval Office press conference. Send-offs are times for reflection, and this one raises a bunch of questions.

Is he really leaving? Trump says no, for what that’s worth.

Elon is really not leaving,” Trump said. “He’s going to be back and forth. I think I have a feeling [DOGE is] his baby, and I think he’s going to be doing a lot of things.

It’s hard to know how seriously to take that. On the one hand, Musk is still the richest man in the world and can single-handedly finance campaigns at multiple levels. He still owns X/Twitter, which is a powerful force for injecting his point of view into the public mind. So if he wants to have influence in politics, he can.

On the other hand, Musk’s time as the face of the (mostly illegal) DOGE firings and budget cuts has probably not been a fun experience for him. He’s been widely vilified. Trump may well see Musk as a used-up shield. He absorbed blame from Trump’s policies, but became so unpopular that Trump may well not want to be linked with him going forward.

Tesla sales have crashed, as potential buyers began associating the company’s cars with Musk’s politics. He blew $20-some million losing a Wisconsin Supreme Court race in which he led rallies himself.

It had to hurt when fellow mega-billionaire Bill Gates said:

The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one. I’d love for him to go in and meet the children that have now been infected with HIV because he cut that money

Seeing the New York Times publicize his drug use was probably also not fun.

So Musk may look back on his involvement in government as an unpleasant mistake. Time will tell.

What did he accomplish for the country? For the conservative cut-government-spending movement, not much. He came in promising to find $2 trillion of waste, fraud, and inefficiency. But in spite of all the people he fired or tried to fire, numbers of that size were never on the table. In the end, DOGE claimed it had saved $160 billion, but even that number was inflated. CBS reported an estimate from Partnership for Public Service that balanced that $160 billion with $135 billion in additional costs, resulting in a net savings of $25 billion. Once you factor in lost revenue (like the additional taxes those fired IRS employees might have collected) DOGE may have increased the federal deficit.

In addition, much of what Musk cut had real value, like medical research and the food and medical aid that Gates was talking about. Michelle Goldberg writes:

There is one place, however, where Musk, with the help of his minions, achieved his goals. He did indeed shred the United States Agency for International Development. Though a rump operation is operating inside the State Department, the administration says that it has terminated more than 80 percent of U.S.A.I.D. grants. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year. That is what Musk’s foray into politics accomplished.

What did he accomplish for himself? Quite a bit. The most obvious benefit Musk has obtained from the Trump administration was to stop government investigations into his companies.

Since the start of the second Trump administration, federal agencies that had scrutinized Musk and his business empire in recent years have begun to look a lot different. At the Department of Agriculture, for example, President Donald Trump fired the person who had been investigating the Musk company Neuralink. At other agencies including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Trump and Musk have tried to slash the number of employees — potentially hobbling those regulators’ ability to enforce the law against companies including Musk’s Tesla and X.

In the past few months, Trump’s Justice Department has dropped a case against Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, and his Labor Department has canceled a planned civil rights review of his automaker, Tesla. Another regulatory matter against SpaceX has entered settlement talks with the National Labor Relations Board.

And in more than 40 other federal agency matters, regulators have taken no public action on their investigations for several months or more — raising questions about whether those cases may have become dormant, according to an NBC News review of regulatory matters involving Musk’s companies. Those matters range widely, from safety investigations into Tesla’s “self-driving” features to alleged workplace safety violations at SpaceX.

In addition, numerous government contracts have gone to Musk companies, like Starlink and SpaceX.

So maybe the $277 million he spent on the Trump campaign was a good investment.

and Ukraine’s well designed raid

Just a few months after Pearl Harbor, American spirits were lifted by a daring bombing raid on Tokyo, which everyone — including the Japanese — had believed was out of range. It became known as the Doolittle Raid, after its leader, Jimmy Doolittle. Doolittle’s team figured out how to launch the ordinarily land-based B-25 bomber from an aircraft carrier, then maneuvered the carrier close enough to make the attempt. All 16 planes were lost, but Doolittle got the Medal of Honor for the propaganda victory.

Sunday, Ukraine launched a similarly audacious attack, as it smuggled 117 drones close enough to Russian air bases deep in Siberia that it could destroy dozens of the Russian bombers that had been hitting Ukraine. The attacks hit three separate air bases. Ukraine claims to have damaged 40 Russian aircraft, and says that all drone operators are now safely out of Russia.

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I wouldn’t have guessed that this would be the insult that landed hard on Trump’s psyche.

Whenever Trump announces massive tariffs, stock prices plunge. But then something almost always happens, like he puts the tariffs on pause, and then stock prices rebound. If you had known he would do that, you could have “bought the dip” and profited hugely when prices went back up.

Well, among Wall Street traders, this buy-the-tariff-dip strategy became known as “the TACO trade“, where TACO stands for Trump Always Chickens Out. In other words, he’ll talk tough about high tariffs, but will always find some way to back down.

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More evidence that we are being governed by a child:

One idea that has been discussed is to transform the [presidential daily briefing] so it mirrors a Fox News broadcast, according to four of the people with direct knowledge of the discussions. Under that concept as it has been discussed, the national intelligence director’s office could hire a Fox News producer to produce it and one of the network’s personalities to present it; Trump, an avid Fox News viewer, could then watch the broadcast PDB whenever he wanted.

A new PDB could include not only graphics and pictures but also maps with animated representations of exploding bombs, similar to a video game, another one of the people with knowledge of the discussions said.

“The problem with Trump is that he doesn’t read,” said another person with direct knowledge of the PDB discussions. “He’s on broadcast all the time.”

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Conservatives have retaken power in Poland.

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One tool of the creeping surveillance state is the automated license plate reader. Put enough of them in enough places, and you can track who drives where. Like all powers, this can be used for good or ill purposes.

This week 404 Media reported that a Texas police officer used Flock to perform a nationwide search of more than 83,000 ALPR cameras while looking for a woman who had had an abortion. Abortion is almost entirely illegal in Texas but law enforcement reportedly looked at cameras in states such as Washington and Illinois, where abortion is legal.

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Jay Kuo’s brother Kaiser responds to Secretary of State Rubio’s announcement that the US has started revoking the visas of Chinese students.

The soft power cost is immeasurable. For decades, a degree from a U.S. university was the golden ticket, and not just for the prestige and the improved job prospects back home. It was often the start of a lifelong affinity for America, its values, and its people. Some of China’s best-known reformers and tech founders were educated in the U.S. They returned to China with not just skills and credentials, but admiration for an open society that welcomed them. Those days are ending. We are actively teaching the next generation of global talent that America is hostile, capricious, and unwelcoming.

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Sam Stein is an American-raised Jewish Israeli citizen who devoted half a year to being a “protective presence” for Palestinians in the West Bank occupied territories.

For six months, I lived alongside those I’d been relentlessly warned would kill me at first opportunity. The truths I learned there must be shared, especially with others raised on the same fears.

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The Real News Network’s Adam Johnson does a takedown of Jake Tapper and his new book “Original Sin”.

So Tapper has found the great scandal of the Biden years, and it is, of course, not one that upsets anyone at the Pentagon, the US Chamber of Commerce, the editorial boards of the New York Times or the Atlantic or AIPAC. The Biden aging story is the perfect pseudo-scandal for corporate media, and thus the perfect Jake Tapper story: vaguely true, but ultimately of peripheral importance, scapegoating a handful of Biden flunkies and, most important of all, it allows Tapper to polish his Speaking Truth to Power brand without speaking truth to anyone in a position of actual power.

Johnson’s candidate for the real Biden scandal is supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

[I]n over 15 months of co-hosting the influential Sunday news show State of the Union during the Gaza genocide under Biden, Tapper never once platformed a single Palestinian guest, while giving ample platform to a revolving door of Biden officials, Israeli spokespeople, and two softball interviews with Israeli Prime Minister—and fugitive from international justice—Benjamin Netanyahu. 

Consistent with his yawning through the genocide under Biden, Tapper mostly ignores it under Trump and only chimes in to frame the latest Israeli war crime in terms favorable to Israel. Even worse than never bothering to interview a single Palestinian, his Sunday news show, since Israel recommenced its genocide on March 18, hasn’t brought up Gaza as a topic once.

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Anthropologist Anand Pandian has traveled the country speaking to people of all backgrounds and opinions.

In my writing, I try to show how everyday structures of isolation – at home and on the road, for the body and the mind – magnify the social and political divides we lament so often. These interlocking walls of everyday life sharpen the divide between insiders and outsiders, making it hard to take unfamiliar people and perspectives seriously, to acknowledge the needs of others and relate to their struggles.

So much turns on the edges between the familiar and the foreign, these lines we’ve come to live with on a daily basis. Can we learn once again to take these edges as spaces of encounter, rather than hard divides between ourselves and the world beyond?

and let’s close with an intriguing thought

David Farrier considers the possibility that AI might crack animal languages, and what it might do to human consciousness if we learned how other species communicate.

In interspecies translation, sound only takes us so far. Animals communicate via an array of visual, chemical, thermal and mechanical cues, inhabiting worlds of perception very different to ours. Can we really understand what sound means to echolocating animals, for whom sound waves can be translated visually?

The German ecologist Jakob von Uexküll called these impenetrable worlds umwelten. To truly translate animal language, we would need to step into that animal’s umwelt – and then, what of us would be imprinted on her, or her on us? “If a lion could talk,” writes Stephen Budiansky, revising Wittgenstein’s famous aphorism in Philosophical Investigations, “we probably could understand him. He just would not be a lion any more.”

It’s hard to avoid the sense that what we’re seeing on tariffs is another version of the sanewashing that Trump has benefited from ever since he entered politics. People just keep wanting to believe that he’s making sense, that he isn’t as ignorant and irresponsible as he seems. But he is.

– Paul Krugman “The Trade War Isn’t Over“

This week’s featured posts are “What’s up with the Supreme Court?” and “The Big Beautiful Bill“.

This week everybody was talking about the FY 2026 budget

Trump’s “big beautiful bill” squeaked through the House Budget Committee yesterday. Details about what the bill is intended to accomplish are in one featured post.

and Trump’s retreat on tariffs

It’s been about six weeks since Trump announced “Liberation Day”, when drastically increased tariffs freed Americans from the tyranny of full shelves and cheap products made overseas. Stephen Miller called it “the most significant action on global trade policy that has taken place in our lifetimes”.

Then it all started to unravel. (Timeline from The Guardian.) The bizarrely determined individual “reciprocal tariffs” imposed on imports from each country came and went in less than a day, even though deals had been announced only with the UK — and that one was still tentative. A week ago, Trump announced that the 145% tariffs on Chinese goods would go down to 30% for 90 days.

So here we are. The Treasury secretary is still threatening that the “reciprocal” tariff levels will be back if countries don’t negotiate “in good faith”, as if the US has been acting in good faith. But the markets have returned to their pre-liberation levels, as investors seem to be pretending the last six weeks were just a bad dream. Maybe Trump has learned his lesson now, as Senator Collins claimed after voting to acquit in his first impeachment.

Paul Krugman would like to differ.

If you get your picture of what’s happening from “news analyses” rather than experts who actually do the math, you might well think that the Trump trade war is basically over, that we’re back to more or less normal policy.

The reality is that we’ve gone from a completely insane tariff rate on imports from China to a rate that’s merely crazy. And China accounts for only a fraction of our imports. Tariffs on everyone else are still at 10 percent, a level we haven’t seen in generations. And there are still other shoes to drop: Trump has, for example, been promising tariffs on pharmaceuticals.

The trade war is still very much on. … In other words, not much has changed since last week. We may not be looking at the complete economic meltdown that seemed quite possible (and is still a possibility), but we’re still looking at much higher inflation and an economic slowdown at best — i.e., stagflation.

and bribery

Other than going to Vatican City to sleep at Pope Francis’ funeral, the first overseas trip of Trump’s second administration was the tour of the oil-rich kingdoms of the Persian Gulf he completed this week. He took with him friendly tech-company CEOs “including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, Palantir’s Alex Karp and two dozen others”.

While it’s not unusual for presidents to promote US business interests overseas, the trip’s biggest headlines concerned the benefits to Trump himself, including Qatar’s gift of a $400 million “palace in the sky” intended to replace Air Force One, which Trump has long considered shabby and whose replacement is behind schedule. (Technically, the plane is a gift to the US government, but Trump’s plan is for it to go to his presidential library foundation — which he will control — after he leaves office.)

A much more direct enrichment of Trump came from an Abu Dhabi firm that invested $2 billion in his crypto-coin scheme. Some of the investments in US corporations involved changes in government policy, like allowing the United Arab Emirates to buy quantities of top Nvidia chips that would have been forbidden under Biden administration policies, trusting the UAE not to pass such advanced tech on to a rival superpower like China.

Richard Painter, previously a government ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, commented:

[T]he impression is given that the position of the United States can be swayed and even bought.

and the Guardian reported:

Past administrations would have run from the perceived conflicts of interest being welcomed by Trump. … “The status quo has been saying no, because it’s an actual and apparent conflict of interest, and it could jeopardize our domestic and foreign policies,” said [Scott] Amey [of the non-profit Project On Government Oversight]. ”It certainly doesn’t pass the sniff test for a lot of Americans.”

The lavish gifts and other investments come as Trump is reshaping America’s policy in the Middle East, skipping Israel and turning toward the Gulf states in a flurry of deal-making that could benefit both sides handsomely.

and the Palm Springs bombing

An IVF clinic in California was bombed Saturday morning, in an apparent terrorist attack. My first thought was that this was the work of people who believe in ensoulment at conception, upset that IVF clinics destroy fertilized embryos after they are no longer needed.

But no, it looks like the perpetrator, who also appears to have been the sole fatality, is an antinatalist. I had no idea what that was until NPR explained it: An antinatalist believes it is wrong to have children.

and you also might be interested in …

We can expect a robust tourist trade this summer.

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It’s got to be hard for satirical sites like The Onion to compete with real headlines like this one: “Trump’s DHS considers reality show where immigrants compete for citizenship, producer says“.

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DOGE is still around, and still exceeding any possible authority it might have. It’s been trying to take over agencies that serve Congress, like the Library of Congress and the General Accounting Office.

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Oklahoma’s new social studies curriculum will encourage students to believe Trump’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

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Some good news on climate change from the UK-based Carbon Brief website, which looks like a good source for in-depth information about the climate.

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and let’s close with something commercial

I’m not sure how Facebook figured out my sense of humor, but lately I’ve been deluged with ads for history-related t-shirts.