The Weekly Sift

Speed without rigor

No Sift for the next two weeks. New articles will appear September 29.

Judges in the trenches need, and deserve, well-reasoned, bright-line guidance. Too often today, sweeping [Supreme Court] rulings arrive with breathtaking speed but minimal explanation, stripped of the rigor that full briefing and argument provide.

– anonymous lower-court judge

This week’s featured posts are “Will the courts hold the line?” and “The Democrats’ Shutdown Strategy“.

Ongoing stories

Trump’s assault on American democracy. Fresh off a rebuke from a California judge about the meaning of the Posse Comitatus Act, Trump seems ready to send troops to Chicago.
Climate change. Windmills have not had this persistent an enemy since Don Quixote.
Gaza. Israel’s defense minister issued a “final warning” to Hamas: release the remaining hostages and lay down your weapons “or Gaza will be destroyed, and you will be annihilated.”
Ukraine. We’ve been hearing all summer that Putin was winning the war and Ukraine’s military was on the brink of collapse. But the summer offensive is all but over, and Russia has gained very little ground.

This week’s developments

Trump’s legal defeats

These are covered in one of the featured posts.

Epstein is back in the headlines

The whole point of starting Congress’ August recess sooner was to avoid voting on legislation to release the Epstein files. By September, Speaker Johnson figured, the whole thing would have died down.

Well, apparently not. Congress is back in session and the Epstein files are still a thing.

Early on, I wrote off the Epstein controversy as a Q-anon-related conspiracy theory (which it contributed to), so I didn’t pay attention to it. As a result, I completely misrepresented it when I first mentioned it here. (Commenters called me out for that, and they were right.)

For my sins, I watched the complete two-hour rally and press conference that Epstein survivors held Wednesday. I recommend it. It’s not an easy story to hear, and the victims’ stories get a little repetitive, but that’s sort of the point: This happened over and over again; it was reported to authorities over and over again; and nothing was done.

What happened over and over was that some attractive and impressionable 14-year-old was invited to come to Epstein’s mansion either with the offer of easy money ($200 to give some old guy a massage), help launching a modelling career, or immigration to the United States. That intro turned into sexual exploitation that was difficult to escape, sometimes for years.

The purpose of the rally was to try to get two more Republicans to sign Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY)’s discharge petition that will force a vote on legislation demanding release of all federal files on Epstein. (Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace, and Lauren Boebert are the other Republicans on board. If you’re uncomfortable being on the same side they are, join the club.) That effort seems to be failing, but the petition might succeed anyway after a few more Democrats fill vacancies by winning special elections later this year.

Opposing this bill looks terrible for congressional Republicans: They’re siding with sexual predators against their victims. You know that most of them must want to vote for it, at the very least just to avoid criticism. The only reason they don’t is pressure from Trump. Which leads to an obvious question: What in those files is so bad for Trump that he would torpedo his own party like this?

Declaring War on Chicago

That looks like a fake post some satirist made up, but it’s real. Our president put it out on social media on Saturday.

The previous Tuesday, Illinois Governor Pritzker had given a second speech [transcript, video] challenging the basis for Trump’s planned invasion: It’s not about crime and it’s not about immigration. There are proven violence-reduction programs that Trump cut, and even with majorities in Congress he has offered no plan to fix the immigration system.

Chicago has a

comprehensive evidence-based approach to crime: hiring more police officers and giving them more funding, gun and drug and gang interdiction, investing in community violence intervention, mental health supports, more substance use treatment. Those programs have shown real progress.

Then you know what happened? Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress cut those programs because they are unserious people who seem to know nothing about fighting crime.

Pritzker has pledged to go to court immediately if troops show up in Chicago. From previous court rulings, I think I know how that case will go. Requests for injunctions to stop Trump from sending in the National Guard have failed, because Congress really did delegate that power by law. But the next question is what those troops can do once they get somewhere: They can’t do law enforcement, because that violates the Posse Comitatus Act. Here’s the conclusion Judge Charles Breyer came to in the California lawsuit:

For the foregoing reasons, the Court ORDERS that Defendants are enjoined from deploying, ordering, instructing, training, or using the National Guard currently deployed in California, and any military troops heretofore deployed in California, to execute the laws, including but not limited to engaging in arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants, unless and until Defendants satisfy the requirements of a valid constitutional or statutory exception, as defined herein, to the Posse Comitatus Act.

The California injunction is stayed pending appeal, and doesn’t apply to Chicago or DC anyway. But the same principles hold once they are put before a judge: Nobody can stop Trump from sending troops to Chicago or anywhere else. But legally, they can’t do much once they get there.

Washington DC has also filed a lawsuit challenging Trump’s occupation of the city. They will win.

Something I don’t hear discussed often enough: Why would anybody expect a temporary military presence to resolve the crime problem in a major city?

Sure: muggers, carjackers, and the like might lie low while troops are patrolling the streets. But what long-term problem is getting solved? Or are the troops themselves the long-term solution, because they stay forever?

The only way any of this makes sense is if you believe the Trump myth that big-city crime is due to undocumented immigrants. In that fantasy world, ICE could deport the whole criminal class during the occupation, leaving a crime-free city at the end.

But if crime is the result of poverty, hopelessness, poor education, drug addiction, mental illness, and the lack of legal opportunities, then it will spring back up as soon as the troops leave.

the Navy attack on a drug-smuggling boat

Tuesday, a US Navy aircraft destroyed a boat that the Trump administration claims was smuggling drugs into the US and was operated by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Eleven people, alleged gang members, were killed.

I was skeptical of these kinds of attacks when Obama did them, so you can predict my position on this. But even more interesting is the view of Benjamin Wittes, founder of the Lawfare blog, who has long been a defender of “targeted strikes against enemy individuals or small groups”. This strike, though, is “not what I signed up for”.

Wittes makes three distinctions between this strike, and, say, the Obama drone attack that killed Anwar Al-Aulaqi (the very one I was complaining about in the link above). First is legality:

The first and most important difference is that those past strikes targeted people genuinely believed to be operational figures in terrorist groups who were at least plausibly covered by a congressional authorization to use military force, which was worded broadly to cover a broad range of worldwide operations.

Second, there were alternatives to deadly force:

When you’re dealing with one small boat heading to one’s own territory in international waters and the United States Coast Guard is available, there are plenty of options short of blowing up that boat. … [T]he United States targeted with lethal force people it believed to be civilian drug traffickers and acknowledged that it could have stopped them. This would be illegal for cops. And it should be unthinkable for the military too.

And finally, this just isn’t a military problem.

Cartel and gang members are not combatants in an armed conflict against the United States. And unless they are engaged in an ongoing or imminent military attack against the United States, it simply isn’t self-defense to attack them with lethal force either.

The question I always come back to is: What stops the President from calling in an airstrike on me? It seems like the restrictions on presidential killings are getting thinner and thinner. Ron Filipkowski expresses a similar view:

So if you are out on a boat Trump can just blow you up and kill you and everyone on board by saying you had drugs without presenting any proof? That’s how this works now?

RFK Jr. and the larger attack on science

The HHS Secretary testified for three hours before the Senate Finance Committee Thursday. The hearings came just a week after Kennedy was responsible for decapitating the CDC: The Trump-appointed head was fired and three other high-ranking officials resigned, largely due to Kennedy’s moves to restrict access to vaccines, relying on cranks and conspiracy theorists rather than the scientists of the CDC.

Kennedy faced tough questioning not just from the Democratic minority on the committee, but also from Republicans Thom Tillis, John Barrasso, and especially Bill Cassidy, who had been the deciding vote on the committee that voted to approve Kennedy’s nomination in February.

Cassidy, a doctor, is like so many Republicans in Congress: He surely knew better in February, but for whatever reason decided to go along the Trump administration. In February he told the Senate about assurances he had gotten from Kennedy:

These commitments, and my expectation that we can have a great relationship to make America healthy again, is the basis of my support. He will be Secretary, but I believe he will also be a partner in working for this end.

If Mr. Kennedy is confirmed, I will use my authority as Chairman of the Senate Committee with oversight of HHS to rebuff any attempts to remove the public’s access to life-saving vaccines without ironclad, causational scientific evidence that can be defended before the mainstream scientific community and before Congress. I will carefully watch for any effort to wrongfully sow public fear about vaccines between confusing references of coincidence and anecdote.

But my support is built on assurances that this will not have to be a concern and that he and I can work together to build an agenda to make America healthy again.

Now, predictably, RFK Jr. has violated those commitments, including one to “maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without changes” (in fact he fired the whole committee and replaced them with cranks). Cassidy is left with no recourse beyond asking tough questions. He gave up real power when he had it, and now it is gone.

I watched the first hour of the three-hour hearing. Kennedy staunchly defended an alternate reality in which all evidence of vaccine effectiveness is propaganda from Big Pharma, which controls all medical journals, just about all scientists, and any member of the committee who leaned on him too hard. He did not explain where better information would come from.

I imagine that any MAHA true believers watching the hearing felt vindicated. In a world where there are no reference points and no sources of reliable information, why not believe whoever you want to believe?

Something similar is happening with climate change. The Trump administration put out a report written by five climate-change skeptics hand-picked by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, the former CEO of a fracking company, who said before his appointment: “There is no climate crisis and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either.”

The report was criticized by 85 climate scientists, who judged it “biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policymaking”, mainly because it cherry-picked data to reach a pre-determined conclusion, and cited papers as proving things that those papers’ authors disagree with. Andrew Dessler, one of the 85, wrote:

I did not go into science to make money, nor did I go in to push a “liberal agenda”. I went into science because I love science. I love the rigor, I love the discipline, I love looking at data and seeing how the world operates. Most importantly, I respect science. When I read the DOE report, I saw a document that does not respect science. In fact, I saw a document that makes a mockery of science.

He compares the DoE report to “research” put out in decades past by the Tobacco Institute, denying tobacco’s connection to cancer.

Their goal was not to win the debate that cigarettes were safe — they clearly understood they could not — but to muddy the waters enough to head off regulations on their business. Thus, the DOE report is designed to do exactly the same thing: muddy the waters enough that the government can claim there’s too much uncertainty to regulate carbon dioxide.

This is the method of the current authoritarianism: There is no capital-T Truth, just your experts arguing with my experts. So we should just all do what we want and whatever we have the power to do.

and FY 2026

Money to operate the government runs out when the fiscal year ends on October 1. One of the featured posts discusses the leverage this might give Democrats and what they should do with it.

and you also might be interested in …

Apparently, firing the head of BLS didn’t fix the jobs reporting process the way Trump wanted. The August report came out Friday, and was once again disappointing, or perhaps even alarming. The economy added only 22K new jobs in August, well below the 80K economists expected, not to mention the 168K per month rate of 2024.

As usual, past months’ estimates were revised as more complete data came in. July numbers were revised upward, but June downward, for a total loss of 21K jobs. The unemployment rate rose to 4.3%, its highest level since October, 2021, during the pandemic. 4.3% is not alarming in itself, but the trend is up.

The Texas legislature has passed, and Governor Abbott is expected to sign, a new law against abortion pills, modeled on its 2023 bounty-hunter law that allowed civil cases against anyone who helped a woman get an out-of-state abortion.

The background is that out-of-state doctors prescribe to Texas women abortion pills that are illegal in Texas. Such pills are easily mailed or carried across the border. Texas is searching for ways to penalize those doctors, but it keeps running into blue-state shield laws.

White supremacist and Christian nationalist rhetoric is moving into the mainstream.

Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) addressed the question “What is an American?” at the National Conservatism Conference in D.C. on Tuesday. He called into question the whole idea of immigration and naturalization, and argued against the notion that anyone who believes in our system of government can become an American. [I linked to the full text because you should be able to check that I’m summarizing him fairly.]

He seemed to carefully avoid any specifically racist or fascist quote that could be pulled out for criticism, but the basic ideas were there: American was built by a particular group of people for their descendants. He doesn’t say “White people” exactly, but

We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith.

He mentions the George Floyd “riots” as if they are code for something bad that he doesn’t want to spell out. He proudly points to his own German ancestors (arriving, like mine, in the 1840s), and the Scots-Irish who settled Missouri, who were “ideally suited to life on the edge of civilization”. He doesn’t come right out with proclaiming America a White homeland. But he closes with this:

This fight is about whether our children will still have a country to call their own. It’s about whether America will remain what she was meant to be: The apex and the vanguard of Western civilization. A strong, sovereign nation—not just an idea, but a home, belonging to a people, bound together by a common past and a shared destiny.

He cloaks this message in false class-consciousness. “They” are “the elites who rule everywhere but are not truly from anywhere.” “They” shipped your jobs overseas and brought in foreigners to compete with you. “They” are also “the Left”, which “took [America’s founding] principles and drained them of all underlying substance, turning the American tradition into a deracinated ideological creed.” [my emphasis] “They” are the ones who brought down the statues (of enslavers) and changed the names (of places honoring enslavers).

It’s perfectly rational for native-born Americans to worry about what has been happening to jobs and wages over the past 50 years. But twisting that legitimate impulse in a blood-and-soil direction is dangerous.

We’re real close to blatant ethno-nationalism here, and a vision where Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and even Jews are not really Americans — so why not send ICE after them? This kind of thinking is not hidden any more, and it’s not fringe.

Elon Musk has a new pay package agreement from Tesla. If he hits all the goals, in ten years he will be a trillionaire.

ProPublica looks at what happened when DOGE met Social Security. Social Security is a 90-year-old bureaucracy with ancient hardware and software, so a high-tech team empowered to promote “efficiency” should have been exactly what it needed. Instead, Musk’s minions went looking for non-existent fraud that might quickly provide fodder for good tweets.

and let’s close with something adorable

If you’ve made it through all this seriousness, you deserve seven minutes of escape. Here, National Geographic compiles video of cute baby animals in the wild. My favorites are the arctic foxes.

September 8, 2025 – 12:17 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (5)

Will the courts hold the line?

The Trump administration has suffered a series of defeats in court recently. Will that matter?

It’s been a bad week or two for Trump in court. Jay Kuo counts the ways:

A major ruling from the Federal Circuit invalidating most of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs;
A long weekend emergency ruling stopping planeloads of unaccompanied children from being deported to Guatemala;
Trump’s big loss after a bench trial in California over his unlawful use of federal troops in that state; and
The Fifth Circuit smackdown of Trump’s invocation of the “Alien Enemies Act” to justify summary deportation of alleged gang members.

After Kuo’s post, Trump suffered another loss in court:

A federal judge on Wednesday ruled Donald Trump’s administration unlawfully terminated about $2.2bn in grants awarded to Harvard University and can no longer cut off research funding to the Ivy League school.

The judges in these cases have been sending a clear message: The law still counts for something, and it doesn’t change just because Trump says so.

But for that message to stick, two things have to happen: The Supreme Court has to back up the lower-court decisions, and the Trump administration has to obey the court orders once they become final. Will those things happen? I’ve seen both optimistic and pessimistic views.

Kuo is the optimist.

There’s an understandable tendency to hear about a big court victory for the good guys but then cynically dismiss it, claiming either that the Supreme Court will overturn it, or that the Trump White House will simply ignore the courts’ orders.

I want to encourage readers to not fall into this trap. True, the Supreme Court has intervened in a few cases to lift a few injunctions imposed by lower courts, and that admittedly has been awful to see. But it hasn’t ruled substantively on much of anything yet. And that has allowed court victories by the good guys to produce some real progress.

He points to blue-state attorneys general suing to claw back CDC grants the Trump administration had frozen. Red states, with their Trump-worshipping AGs, have taken the loss.

The Department of Justice wants the American public to assume that none of the orders granted by federal judges are being heeded. They want us to believe that they, and not the judiciary, are in control. But this is simply not the case.

Kuo points to the Guatemalan-children case, where (unlike in an earlier case with adults) planes in the air really did turn around, because “this time the government wasn’t up to playing more games with the courts”.

The pessimist side is represented by Vox’ Ian Milhiser, who summarizes “The overwhelming evidence that the Supreme Court is on Donald Trump’s team“.

The Court’s Republican majority now hands Trump several victories every month, only explaining themselves when they feel like it. When they do explain those decisions, they are often incomprehensible. The Republican justices exempt Trump from rules that apply to every other litigant, including the most recent Democratic president. Their decision permitting Trump to commit crimes doesn’t even attempt to argue that presidential immunity can be found in the Constitution — instead making a policy argument that Trump should not be chilled from taking “bold and unhesitating action” for fear of prosecution.

Nor is Trump the only litigant who receives this Court’s special treatment. The Republican justices favor religious conservatives so much that they will make up fake facts to bolster Christian conservative litigants. Meanwhile, they hate abortion providers so much that they once handed down an anti-abortion decision that, if taken seriously, would permit every state to neutralize any constitutional right.

If any other government official behaved this way, it would be obvious they were placing partisanship ahead of the law. It is no less obvious when these six specific government officials do so. The most reasonable explanation for the Republican justices’ behavior is that they are acting in bad faith.

It’s possible that even the most well-reasoned lower-court decisions against Trump will be reversed based on some gobbly-gook reasoning that we can expect to conveniently vanish should a Democrat ever again assume the presidency. That’s certainly what happened in the Trump immunity ruling.

But it’s worth noting that although the Court has thrown procedural hurdles in the way of those who would stop Trump’s lawlessness, and has sometimes reversed injunctions without much explanation, so far it has given Trump very few outright victories on the underlying merits of the cases. Birthright citizenship, for example, still stands.

The people caught in the middle are the lower-court judges themselves, ten of whom took the unusual step of talking anonymously to NBC News. Their problem is simple: When you do your best to apply the law as it was written and has always been interpreted, and then the Supreme Court reverses your decision in a shadow-docket ruling with little or no explanation, what do you do with the next case? You can’t apply the Court’s new reasoning, because that reasoning was never published.

In late July, the Constitution Daily Blog listed five Trump executive orders that are likely to hit the Supreme Court soon:

reversing birthright citizenship.
invoking the Alien Enemies Act to deport immigrants
using emergency powers to impose tariffs
firing heads of agencies protected by Congress
banning transgender people from serving in the military

I could imagine (but not agree with) the Court siding with Trump on the last two. But if any of the first three get the Court’s blessing, something is seriously wrong.

September 8, 2025 – 10:35 am Categories: Articles | Comments (5)

Tagged law, Trump administration |

The Democrats’ Shutdown Strategy

The government runs out of money again on October 1. That gives the Democratic minorities in Congress some rare leverage. What should they do with it?

The 2026 fiscal year starts in less than a month, and nobody yet knows what the FY2026 federal budget will have in it.

In the House, Republicans currently hold a 219-212 majority, so they can pass whatever budget they want if they have fewer than four defectors. In the Senate they have a 53-47 majority, but they need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. So Democrats have leverage in the House only if the Republicans can’t stay unified, but Republicans need seven Democratic votes in the Senate unless they’re willing to nuke the filibuster. (Don’t count that out. Trump will almost certainly ask for it before conceding anything he cares about.)

This raises two questions: Are Democrats willing to shut down the government if Republicans don’t negotiate with them in good faith? And if they are willing to take such a stand, what concessions should they ask for?

Ezra Klein discussed the first question in yesterday’s NYT. He notes that Democrats faced a similar decision in March when the previous continuing resolution ran out. Hakeem Jeffries in the House wanted to go for a shutdown, but Chuck Schumer in the Senate didn’t. Schumer won out, and Democrats got nothing for their cooperation.

This looked really bad at the time, and demoralized Democrats around the country. But Klein notes that in the moment it actually was a close call. Schumer argued:

The courts were already reining in Trump’s excesses.
Markets were reeling from Trump’s tariff announcements; a shutdown would just give him a chance to blame Democrats for the economic chaos.
A shutdown would help DOGE eliminate government jobs and departments.

In addition, Klein notes that the Democrats weren’t ready for that battle. They hadn’t agreed on a message worth shutting down the government for.

But now, he claims, none of those arguments hold. The Supreme Court hasn’t held the line, markets have stabilized without a tariff-fueled economic catastrophe, and Elon Musk is gone.

Even more, Trump’s autocratic project is up and running now.

I want to be very clear about what I am saying here. Donald Trump is corrupting the government — he is using it to hound his enemies, to line his pockets and to entrench his own power. He is corrupting it the way the Mafia would corrupt the industries it controlled. You could still, under Mafia rule, get the trash picked up or buy construction materials. But the point of those industries had become the preservation and expansion of the Mafia’s power and wealth. This is what Trump is doing to the government. This is what Democrats cannot fund. This is what they have to try to stop.

… The case for a shutdown is this: A shutdown is an attentional event. It’s an effort to turn the diffuse crisis of Trump’s corrupting of the government into an acute crisis that the media, that the public, will actually pay attention to.

So when they get public attention, what exactly should Democrats demand? Jen Rubin makes these five suggestions:

Defend Congress’ power of the purse by undoing FY2025’s rescissions.
Reverse the Medicaid cuts that take effect after the 2026 elections.
Restrictions on DHS’ most outrageous practices: No rendition to third countries. No masks. Reports on how many people without criminal records are being rounded up.
New sanctions to pressure Russia into peace talks.
Ban stock trading for members of Congress, as well as the president and vice president.

The key test for demands is that Republicans should sound ridiculous defending what the Democrats want to put a stop to. (This is a lesson taught by the Epstein files.) Do Republicans want to shut the government down to defend Trump’s right to trade stocks? They should go right ahead.

If I had to sum up in one word the reason Democrats should give for their stand, it would be “corruption”. I think both Rubin and Klein would agree with that, and it’s also in line with what the Epstein phenomenon should be teaching Democrats.

BTW: A simple case in point about how Trump is using his power to gain wealth:

President Donald Trump said Friday that the U.S. will host next year’s Group of 20 summit at his golf club in Doral, Florida, arguing it was “the best location” for the high-stakes international gathering but insisting his family’s business “will not make any money on it.”

Of course it won’t. Trump would never lie about something like that, and no doubt his independent Justice Department would watch like a hawk to make sure nothing corrupt happened.

September 8, 2025 – 8:58 am Categories: Articles | Comments (6)

Tagged corruption, Trump administration |

The Monday Morning Teaser

Today’s Sift will be on the long side, both because a lot happened this week and because I’m about to take two weeks off.

There will be two featured posts: the first about Democrats’ strategy for the FY2026 budget, which has to involve a willingness to shut down the government, plus a message that identifies issues worth shutting down the government for. That should be out shortly.

The second concerns the run of court losses the Trump administration had this week, and the question of what it all means: Will the Supreme Court make up new legal doctrines that allow it to reverse the lower courts? If the Supreme Court does take a stand for the law and constitution, will Trump follow their orders? I’ll try to get that out by 11 EDT.

That still leaves quite a list of things for the weekly summary to cover: the Epstein victims rally, Trump declaring war on Chicago, the Navy sinking an alleged drug-smuggling boat and killing its 11 passengers, the RFK Jr. Senate hearing, another bad jobs report, and a US senator giving an ethno-nationalist speech. I’ll try to get that posted by 1.

September 8, 2025 – 8:12 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Waking up to the difference

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.

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

*A massive photo of Trump hangs on the Labor Department headquarters in Washington, D.C.*

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The redistricting wars have moved on to Missouri.

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.

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.

September 1, 2025 – 12:53 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (9)

Lysenkoism Comes to America

As RFK Jr. purges the CDC and cancels billions in research grants, Americans need a refresher course on what happened to Soviet biological research during the Stalin years.

In many ways, Trofim Lysenko was just the man Stalin had been looking for. He grew up in the peasantry rather than the elitist intelligentsia. He promised new techniques for growing crops that might solve the Soviet Union’s difficulty producing food in the same quantities the Czars had. And he represented a rebellion against Mendelian genetics, whose vision of evolution relied more on the individual’s struggle for survival than on the collective class struggle more in line with Marxist ideology.

From our 21st century point of view, as well as from the perspective of 20th-century geneticists, Lysenko was a crank. He espoused “vernalization”, a process by which winter wheat could be converted to spring wheat and then pass its new abilities on to its descendants. Following LeMarck rather than Mendel, he believed that acquired characteristics could be inherited — a possibility that appealed to a regime dedicated to producing the “new Soviet man”.

Wikipedia explains:

Lysenko’s political success was mostly due to his appeal to the Communist Party and Soviet ideology. His attack on the “bourgeois pseudoscience” of modern genetics and the proposal that plants can rapidly adjust to a changed environment suited the ideological battle in both agriculture and Soviet society. Following the disastrous collectivization efforts of the late 1920s, Lysenko’s new methods were seen by Soviet officials as paving the way to an “agricultural revolution.” Lysenko himself was from a peasant family and was an enthusiastic advocate of Leninism. The Party-controlled newspapers applauded Lysenko’s practical “success” and questioned the motives of his critics, ridiculing the timidity of academics who urged the patient, impartial observation required for science. Lysenko was admitted into the hierarchy of the Communist Party, and was put in charge of agricultural affairs.

He used his position to denounce biologists as “fly-lovers and people haters”, and to decry traditional biologists as “wreckers” working to sabotage the Soviet economy. He denied the distinction between theoretical and applied biology, and rejected general methods such as control groups and statistics:

“We biologists do not take the slightest interest in mathematical calculations, which confirm the useless statistical formulae of the Mendelists … We do not want to submit to blind chance … We maintain that biological regularities do not resemble mathematical laws.”

By 1940, Lysenko had become the director of the Institute of Genetics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Those who opposed him or criticized his theories did not fare well.

From 1934 to 1940, under Lysenko’s admonitions and with Stalin’s approval, many geneticists were executed (including Izrail Agol, Solomon Levit, Grigorii Levitskii, Georgii Karpechenko and Georgii Nadson) or sent to labor camps. The famous Soviet geneticist and president of the Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, was arrested in 1940 and died in prison in 1943. In 1936, the American geneticist Hermann Joseph Muller, who had moved to the Leningrad Institute of Genetics with his Drosophila fruit flies, was criticized as bourgeois, capitalist, imperialist, and a promoter of fascism, and he returned to America via Republican Spain. Iosif Rapoport, who worked on mutagens, refused to publicly repudiate chromosome theory of heredity, and suffered several years as a geological lab assistant. Dmitry Sabinin’s book on plant physiology was abruptly withdrawn from publication in 1948. He died by suicide in 1951.

His hold on power began to waver after Stalin’s death in 1953, but he remained influential far into the Krushchev years. The results were predictable:

Lysenko’s ideas and practices contributed to the famines that killed millions of Soviet people; the adoption of his methods from 1958 in the People’s Republic of China had similarly calamitous results, contributing to the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1961.

Historians regard the Lysenko Era as a prime example of what can happen when ideology triumphs over science. During the same period, Soviet rocket scientists led the world in space exploration, and Soviet nuclear physicists nearly caught up with the far-better-funded Americans. But Soviet biology and agronomy could not free themselves from the ideological mud.

RFK Jr. Today, we are seeing history beginning repeat itself, with RFK Jr. as the new Lysenko. Like Lysenko, he has gained the backing of an autocratic regime; criticizing RFK Jr. or his Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement marks someone as anti-MAGA, exposing them to the retribution of the US government. At the moment, that just means firing from government jobs or the cancellation of research grants; it doesn’t yet send you to a labor camp. But the regime is young.

Unlike Lysenko, RFK Jr. is a child of wealth and privilege; he undoubtedly would not be where he is if his name were Smith. But he has tapped into a similar anger against elites and a distrust of expertise. He favors explanations that are sweeping and easily explained, while distrusting results that depend on careful procedures and statistical analysis.

Research. Also like Lysenko, Kennedy is a crank. His anti-vaccine ideas (which are his most prominent, but not his only departure from scientific orthodoxy) are fixed, baseless, and impervious to data. Control groups and statistics may “confirm the useless statistical formulae” of MRNA vaccines, or refute Kennedy’s hobby-horse belief that vaccines cause autism, but no matter. Henceforth, the US government will not fund MRNA research, and a report claiming that autism is caused by vaccines or other environmental factors should be out this month:

We will have announcements as promised in September, finding interventions, certain interventions, now that are clearly almost certainly causing autism. And we’re going to be able to address those in September.

Kennedy has long claimed that environmental factors like vaccines, toxins, or food additives are likely culprits behind the rising rate of autism diagnoses, arguing research to back this up has been blocked by federal authorities. In fact, research on the environmental factors related to autism had been proceeding for years at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Kennedy cancelled its funding, along with more than 50 other autism-related studies.

What is wrong with that research? It keeps coming to inconvenient conclusions. Autism, it seems, is a more complicated problem than Kennedy wants to acknowledge.

Genetic factors account for a significant portion of autism cases. Research like the kind McCanlies and other government-funded scientists have conducted over the past two decades has established that environmental factors have a role, too, and can combine with genetics. Multiple factors can even converge within the same individual. Some of those environmental risks could be reduced by the very measures the Trump administration is rolling back.

But “genetic factors” are anti-MAHA, just as they were anti-Soviet. All our ills must be traceable to human deeds in the food industry, Big Pharma, or our own lifestyle choices.

Ideology over science. This week, the Center for Disease Control was decapitated: RFK fired Director Susan Monarez, a Senate-confirmed Trump appointment who had only served for three weeks. Her attorneys said that she had “refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts.”

Presumably, this referred to new recommendations on who should get Covid vaccines, and possibly other pending announcements from the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Kennedy dismissed all 17 members of the ACIP in June, and replaced them largely with unqualified people more in line with his views. (The resignation letter of Immunization and Respiratory Diseases head Demetre Daskalakis described them as “people of dubious intent and more dubious scientific rigor”.) Similarly, Monarez’ interim replacement is Jim O’Neill, who is neither a doctor nor a scientist, but

was an early supporter of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement and a vocal critic on social media of the CDC’s role during the pandemic.

The double-tap of firing Monarez and backing new vaccine recommendations motivated more by ideology than science led to the resignations of three other top CDC officials: Chief Medical Officer Deb Houry, Daskalakis, and Dan Jernigan, who led the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Disease.

A key issue for Houry, Daskalakis and Jernigan are the actions Kennedy has taken that align with the views of anti-science activists. Houry told NPR that ethically they couldn’t abide the direction the agency is taking, and she said they wanted to time their departures for impact after the news broke that Monarez was being fired.

Daskalakis’ resignation letter went into detail:

I am unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health. … The data analyses that supported this decision have never been shared with CDC despite my respectful requests to HHS and other leadership. This lack of meaningful engagement was further compounded by a “frequently asked questions” document written to support the Secretary’s directive that was circulated by HHS without input from CDC subject matter experts and that cited studies that did not support the conclusions that were attributed to these authors. … We are seven months into the new administration, and no CDC subject matter expert from my Center has ever briefed the Secretary. I am not sure who the Secretary is listening to, but it is quite certainly not to us. Unvetted and conflicted outside organizations seem to be the sources HHS use over the gold standard science of CDC and other reputable sources.

Thursday, CDC employees staged a brief walkout to protest the agency’s turn away from science, and to support Monarez and the resigning officials.

The medical community is beginning to adjust to a CDC that can no longer be trusted. For example, numerous non-government medical groups are preparing their own vaccine advice.

Political Pandering. Kennedy owes his position to Donald Trump, so MAHA will always serve MAGA. Trump’s EPA has been working entirely counter to Kennedy’s long-espoused views, but he has had nothing to say about that.

The Environmental Protection Agency, under Administrator Lee Zeldin, is rolling back rules and regulations that will result in an increase in air pollution, which multiple studies have linked to autism. The agency is in the process of reversing bans on several chemicals, including TCE, one of the solvents associated with the disorder, and has told a federal court it won’t legally defend certain aspects of a ban on methylene chloride, another of the solvents linked to autism. It also began dismantling its Office of Research and Development, which has funded research into the environmental conditions contributing to autism.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that RFK Jr. does not actually care about the things he says he cares about, but simply wants the spotlight and a position of power.

He has also gone along with the Trump administration’s anti-DEI mandates, which have been interpreted to blackball research into the ways that women’s health is different from men’s, or racial factors that affect illness. Both are legitimate areas of research, but can’t be discussed in the current political environment.

This is where we find ourselves: with current public health practices and future medical research controlled by one man who is as opinionated as he is ignorant: the American Lysenko.

September 1, 2025 – 10:17 am Categories: Articles | Comments (12)

Tagged cdc, health care, public health, Trump administration, vaccines |

The Monday Morning Teaser

As RFK Jr. dismantles American medical research and tries to reassemble it behind his crank ideas about vaccines and other hobby horses, I’ve been surprised that one historical comparison rarely comes up: Trofim Lysenko, who gained power over Soviet biological research during the Stalin years and ruthlessly pushed his own crank notions of LeMarckian evolution. Researchers who refused to abandon the scientific consensus around Mendel’s genetic theory might find themselves in labor camps or awaiting execution. Lysenkoism was not only a disaster for Soviet science, it contributed to famines and other public catastrophes.

Asking around, it turns out that few Americans know who Lysenko was or what he did. Maybe that’s why we’re so complacent about RFK Jr.’s destruction of American science. This week’s featured post “Lysenkoism Comes to America” is my attempt to fix that. It should be out by 10 EDT.

The weekly summary has a lot to report about Trump’s push towards authoritarianism and various attempts to push back. Chicago looks unlikely to submit meekly to the kind of military occupation Washington is experiencing, and Democrats in general seem to be finding their voices on this issue, putting aside their perpetual fears of seeming “soft on crime”.

An appeals court backed two other courts in declaring Trump’s tariffs illegal, teeing up yet another test of the Supreme Court’s partisanship. Trump tried out a new way to usurp Congress’ power of the purse: a pocket rescission. He’s also testing his ability to fire governors of the Federal Reserve. Alligator Alcatraz is closing after spending large amounts of money and abusing numerous detainees in such a short time.

I am admittedly light on non-Trump news this week, but I think that’s justified: A number of struggles seem to be coming to a head. I’ll try to get the weekly summary out by noon.

September 1, 2025 – 8:31 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (4)

Accusations

Tyrannies don’t always get their way by establishing a secret police force that arrests people at will — although we’re getting that too. Much of their power comes not from overt violence but from their ability to threaten people’s careers and livelihoods, up to and including trumped-up accusations of criminal behavior.

– Paul Krugman

This week’s featured post is “Policies to Make the Planet Hotter“.

Ongoing stories

As I explained last week, the really important stories are developing on scales longer than a week and wider than any single incident. It’s important not to lose sight of them, even as we pay attention to the news that is genuinely “new” this week. Here are the ones I’m keeping my eye on.

Trump’s assault on American democracy. Law enforcement targeted a Trump critic, as well as a Fed governor Trump wants to get out of the way. (Details below.) Trump called for ABC and NBC to lose their licenses for “unfair coverage of Republicans“. The gerrymandering war Trump declared is on: Texas fired the first shot and California is trying to respond.
Climate change. The featured post pulls together a lot of individual stories about the Trump administration actively working to make climate change worse.
Gaza. Israel prepared for its assault on Gaza City with a bombing campaign, which hit a major hospital and killed a number of journalists, including Americans. Also, an international group officially declared a famine in Gaza.
Ukraine. The big thing to know about the Ukraine War this week is that, for all the media attention it got, Trump’s summit with Putin accomplished nothing. Putin offered no concessions, Trump backed down from putting any real pressure on him, and the war continues apace.
Epstein. To me, this is more of a political story than a news story. Epstein’s crimes, horrible as they were, happened years ago, and Epstein himself is dead. His primary accomplice is in jail, and though there may be others who played a role, that’s a crime story, which I typically don’t cover. But the administration continues to respond to the controversy as if Trump himself had something to hide, and his base is beginning to doubt him in a way they never did before. One good point that the media hoopla consistently ignores: Yes, we’d know more if the Justice Department released its files, but the victims willing to tell their stories are getting surprisingly little attention. This week’s development: DoJ has begun to trickle out the documents it feels safe releasing, including the transcript of Deputy AG Todd Blanche’s interview with Ghislaine Maxwell.

This week’s developments

The redistricting wars

Texas passed its plan to gerrymander five more Republican House seats.

California responded by sending a ballot question to the voters this November: If it passes, California will gerrymander those five seats back.

If the Democrats had been willing to nuke the filibuster a few years ago, they could have passed a federal law that made gerrymandering illegal.

The raid on John Bolton’s house

Friday, the FBI raided John Bolton’s house in Bethesda, Maryland and another location whose relationship to Bolton I’m not certain of. They had a search warrant and the crime they claimed probable cause of was mishandling classified documents. Former FBI agent Asha Rangappa wrote in the NYT that they presumably had to get two search warrants from two different judges, which adds some credibility to the raid.

However. Bolton, who for a time was national security advisor during Trump’s first term, has more recently been a major Trump critic. Prior to becoming FBI Director, Kash Patel included Bolton on a list of Deep State operatives in his book Government Gangsters. According to The Guardian

Bolton now joins a growing list of Trump critics from Patel’s roll the administration has targeted with what appear to be retaliatory federal investigations: James Comey, the former FBI director, John Brennan, the former CIA director, Miles Taylor, the ex-homeland security official and Lt Col Alexander Vindman. All five people, investigated in just seven months, were on Patel’s roughly 60-name list.

The statements made by Trump officials just couldn’t be more laughable, in view of the fact that Trump himself mishandled classified documents — a charge that was thrown out by Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon in spite of open-and-shut evidence: The government had negotiated to recover the classified documents Trump was holding, was told they had all been returned, and then found a trove of them at Mar-a-Lago.

In a post on X early Friday, Patel wrote, “NO ONE is above the law… @FBI agents on mission.” Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino also appeared to refer to the search in posts on X. “America’s safety isn’t negotiable. Justice will be pursued. Always,” Bondi wrote early Friday. “Public corruption will not be tolerated,” Bongino wrote.

But of course, Trump himself is above the law, now that he controls law enforcement and has the blessing of our partisan Supreme Court. Justice will not be pursued and public corruption will be tolerated where Trump is concerned.

Trump allies, like the January 6 defendants, are also above the law, and can beat police officers to their hearts’ content.

The other major case of weaponized law enforcement is Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve’s board. Trump wants Cook gone so that he can appoint her replacement and get closer to complete control of the financial system. (In addition to the policy implications, the possibilities for personal profit are enormous. Trump has bought more than $100 million worth of bonds, whose value will increase if the Fed succumbs to his pressure to reduce interest rates.)

In order to get rid of Cook, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency has accused her of committing “mortgage fraud” by claiming two properties as her primary residence simultaneously. (This accusation was made by Pulte on social media, and is not an official charge by the FHFA.) Trump is using this accusation to pressure Cook to resign, and has floated it as justification for firing her.

Paul Krugman points out how unusual this is. Even if the charge is true — a big If, given the lack of any official action and the general unreliability of Trump administration claims — this is not how such charges are usually handled.

The truth is that even when clear mortgage fraud has taken place, it almost always leads to an out-of-court settlement, with fees paid to the lender, rather than a criminal case. In 2024, only 38 people in America were sentenced for mortgage fraud.

One mortgage fraudster walking around free is Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Trump ally.

This is another case of shameless hypocrisy. Pulte claims that Cook “falsified bank documents and property records to acquire more favorable loan terms”. Falsifying business records to get a lower interest rate is what Trump was convicted of in New York.

Paul Krugman draws the conclusion:

The important thing to understand is that we are all Lisa Cook. You may imagine that your legal and financial history is so blameless that there’s no way MAGA can come after you. If you believe that, you’re living in a fantasy world. Criticize them or get in their way, and you will become a target.

and the Intel deal

The US government now owns 10% of Intel. Apparently, Intel had about $8.9 billion coming to it from two government programs:

$5.7 billion in grants previously awarded, but not yet paid, to Intel under the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act and $3.2 billion awarded to the company as part of the Secure Enclave program.

The Trump administration agreed to stop blocking this money in exchange for 10% of the company. Trump predicted that more such deals are coming.

I will make deals like that for our Country all day long. I will also help those companies that make such lucrative deals with the United States States. I love seeing their stock price go up, making the USA RICHER, AND RICHER.

I am reminded of a quote often attributed (perhaps incorrectly) to Mussolini:

Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.

and DC

The 2000 or so National Guard troops are still there. They just got authorization to carry weapons. So far they haven’t killed anybody. Yesterday Trump threatened to send troops to Baltimore as well.

Like the partial nationalization of Intel I mentioned above, this whole endeavor flies in the face of generations of conservative rhetoric. Remember when Ronald Reagan said this:

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”

The DC intervention is exactly the kind of federal overreach conservatives railed against for decades: The federal government decides it knows best, tells you what your problem is, and then imposes some heavy-handed solution without consulting anybody locally.

The reason this is acceptable in today’s GOP is that Republicans have been dehumanizing inner-city people for a long time, especially if they’re not White. It’s basically a colonial attitude: It would be terrible if the government started imposing its will on ME. But THOSE PEOPLE aren’t capable of making decisions for themselves. They may have elected officials to represent them, but they’re not advanced enough for democracy.

and that Third Way memo

Third Way, an organization whose basic premise is that Democrats and Republicans are more-or-less equally objectionable to most Americans, sparked a bunch of discussion with a post “Was It Something I Said?“. The post listed words that “Democrats and their allies” should avoid using, because they “alienate the many” by sounding “superior, haughty and arrogant”.

Language policing is tricky. I already avoid a few of Third Way’s taboo words and phrases for a variety of reasons. I don’t use Latinx, for example, because personally I’ve never heard someone of Latin ethnicity use it, and I’ve heard a few object: The x ending isn’t a traditional part of Spanish or Portuguese, and those languages aren’t mine to fix.

But policing language can also be a way to police ideas. That was a key “feature” of Newspeak in 1984: If you used Newspeak properly, anti-IngSoc ideas became inexpressible and perhaps even unthinkable.

Jamelle Bouie thinks that’s what’s going on here:

i think that the issue isn’t the words, it is the substantive positions. no amount of language self policing will satisfy someone who just disagrees with, say, legal protection from gender discrimination

I’ll elaborate on that point. Some of the words and phrases Third Way wants us to stop using are privilege, cultural appropriation, systems of oppression, barriers to participation, intersectionality, and patriarchy. The post makes no suggestions about how to acceptably raise the notion that American society is rigged to make success harder for some people than others, or that this rigging runs deeper than just individual prejudices. I suspect Third Way wants such ideas to be inexpressible.

We’re also not supposed to use existential threat to describe something like climate change. Or food insecurity to discuss the situation of people who are not hungry (and in fact may take considerable pride in the fact that they fed their children this week), but who aren’t sure yet how they’re going to afford groceries next week, or in some future week when the boss cuts their hours or the recent cuts to SNAP take effect. And if we can’t use subverting norms, how are we supposed to talk about all the actions Trump has taken that are not precisely illegal, but that until now have been off the table because they undermine small-d democracy, another forbidden term?

Until I hear some coherent response to these objections, I will regard the Third Way post as doubleplusungood.

Lindsay Cormack of DCInbox Insights has another objection to the Third Way memo: Who exactly was supposed to be using these terms? She did word counts on over 200K official congressional e-newsletters since 2010 and came to this conclusion:

Looking at actual usage, the Third Way memo reads less like an audit of Democrats’ language and more like a list of terms Republicans tell us Democrats are saying. The data show that many of these phrases barely exist in constituent communications, and when they do, Republicans are often the ones writing them either to lampoon Democrats or to spotlight them as proof of “wokeness.”

… People and politicians should be willing to adapt words when they don’t land and should be open to trying out new terms that capture novel experiences/problems that we need to deal with. But as long as Republicans can keep defining Democrats by terms Democrats themselves rarely use, and everyone comes to believe this through repetition is a much bigger challenge for the impressions of the Democratic Party than any lefty words they might on occasion.

This matches my impression of the 2024 campaign. I don’t know how many people have told me that it was a mistake for Democrats to “focus on” transgender issues. But when I ask for an example of the Harris campaign or any other Democratic campaign focusing on transgender issues, I get no answers.

In fact it was Trump who spent a great deal of money focusing on transgender issues and making sure everyone knew Harris supported trans rights. So the real point people are making is that Democrats should throw trans people under the bus, not that we should stop talking about them.

and let’s close with something

I’ve closed with this before, but it bears repeating. The Mitchell Trio, including a very young John Denver, sings a song we may need our own version of in a few years: The I-Was-Not-a-Nazi Polka.

August 25, 2025 – 1:00 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

Policies to Make the Planet Hotter

You may think that Trump’s policies are just indifferent to climate change. You would be wrong.

Not so long ago, conventional wisdom said that an administration should focus on one goal at a time. In order to get significant changes through Congress, it was necessary to shepherd public opinion, which would fail to coalesce if you pursued too many initiatives at once.

So if you had wanted the Obama administration to pursue green taxes or a cap-and-trade plan for CO2 emissions, you were out of luck: His priority was ObamaCare, and by the time he got around to climate change, he had lost his majority in Congress.

But things don’t work that way any more, largely because Trump barely needs Congress. If you rule by executive order rather than legislation, use the full power the Supreme Court has granted the unitary executive, don’t worry too much about the letter of the law, and dare the courts to stop you, you don’t need public support. And across the board, Trump doesn’t have it.

In fact, the shoe is on the other foot: It’s the opposition that needs public support to try to stop what Trump is doing. The more things he does at once, the more scattered the opposition gets. And our news cycle tends to fragment issues, making the larger picture harder to grasp.

Nowhere is this more apparent than with regard to climate change and CO2 emissions. You may have heard individual reports about how this offshore wind project was cancelled or those EV subsidies phased out. If you have heard enough such stories, you may have pieced together a general impression that the Trump administration is indifferent to climate change.

But the actual situation is far worse. Across the board, the administration has targeted any effort to take action to reduce CO2 emissions. Worse, the US government is now actively promoting fossil fuels, even in situations where the free market would make a more sustainable choice.

The Trump administration is not indifferent to climate change. It is working hard to make it worse.

Electrification

Fundamentally, the strategy for dealing with climate change has two pieces: electrify everything, and then produce electricity without burning fossil fuels. The Trump administration has attacked both sides of this plan.

Electric vehicles. The so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” cuts off virtually all subsidies for electric vehicles by the end of this fiscal year, September 30. That’s not just the tax credit for purchasing an EV, but also subsidies for electrifying commercial fleets and installing charging stations.

EVs are a natural fit for fleets of vehicles that have a defined territory and return to base every night, like postal delivery trucks. The Biden administration planned to use such government fleets to jump-start the larger EV market.

But under Trump, EVs have become no-nos within the federal government. Not only are federal agencies not installing any charging stations or buying new EVs, they’re ripping out brand-new charging stations and selling off EVs at a loss. All-in-all, de-electrifying the federal vehicle fleet could cost as much as $1 billion.

Think about that: The government is not just reassessing future EV purchases and deciding they are too expensive. That would be a suspicious calculation, but at least a plausible one. In fact, though, it is spending money to get rid of the EVs and EV infrastructure it has.

Sustainable electrical generation. Trump has long had an animus against wind power, going back at least to 2012, when he thought offshore wind turbines marred the view from his Aberdeenshire golf course. Since then, he has been a font of anti-wind disinformation, charging that wind turbines not only kill large numbers of birds, but that offshore wind farms are driving whales crazy and causing them to beach themselves and die. (The birds claim is exaggerated — birds do run into turbine blades occasionally, but a 2009 study concluded that wind farms kill far fewer birds per kilowatt hour than fossil fuel plants. The connection to whale deaths is entirely imaginary.)

Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill terminated a variety of subsidies for sustainable energy, wind and solar alike. But his administration is actively anti-sustainable-power. The Interior Department has created new bureaucratic requirements for wind or solar projects on federal land, and just this week halted work on a wind farm offshore from Rhode Island. The project was scheduled to begin delivering power to Rhode Island and Connecticut homes in 2026.

The order to stop work on the Revolution Wind project is the latest move by the Trump administration targeting the country’s renewable energy industry. President Trump, a longtime critic of the wind industry, in January issued a moratorium on new development of offshore wind projects. The Internal Revenue Service recently put out new guidance that makes it harder for companies building wind and solar projects to qualify for federal tax incentives. And the Commerce Department is investigating whether imports of wind turbines and their components threaten national security.

Wednesday Trump posted to Truth Social:

Any State that has built and relied on WINDMILLS and SOLAR for power are seeing RECORD BREAKING INCREASES IN ELECTRICITY AND ENERGY COSTS. THE SCAM OF THE CENTURY! We will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar. The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!! MAGA

End-to-end, this post is nutty. Electricity costs are rising because of demand, especially demand for computation related to AI and cryptocurrency mining. The Sustainability By Numbers blog ran the state-by-state numbers and found no correlation, positive or negative, between sustainable energy and prices.

Besides, just take a step back and think this through from economic first principles: Adding supply is not going to raise costs.

Meanwhile, farmers love their windmills and solar installations. The payments give them a source of income that isn’t affected by the usual hazards of drought, insects, or fungus.

Equally nutty is a Trump post that “STUPID AND UGLY WINDMILLS ARE KILLING NEW JERSEY”. NJ.com fact-checks: New Jersey’s offshore wind project has already been cancelled before coming online, and the state barely has any windmills.

Even worse than the specific projects being cancelled is the chill this sends across the industry. If you are a utility looking for additional generating capacity, wind and solar now entail a political risk that is hard to work into your calculations. If you make a success out of sustainable energy, you are making Trump look bad. He may come after you.

Conservation. One way to partially mitigate the increased demand from AI and crypto — both of which Trump favors — is to use less electricity to power our household appliances. This effort has been going on since the days of Bush Sr., and its flagship has been the Energy Star program. Energy Star certification has helped consumers identify appliances that use less electricity, saving them $500 billion in their utility bills.

Funding for Energy Star was zeroed out in Trump’s original Big Beautiful Bill proposal, but Congress seems to have put it back. Whether or not this money will actually be spent is another question, one that probably depends on what the Supreme Court says about Trump’s previous attempts to impound funds.

Drill, Baby, Drill

While the Big Beautiful Bill was zeroing out subsidies for EVs and sustainable energy, it was increasing subsidies for fossil fuel production. The Union of Concerned Scientists’ Equation blog lists the benefits and estimates the cost to the taxpayers at $80 billion over the next ten years.

But this week’s most outrageous energy story concerned a coal-fired utility plant in Michigan. Coal is probably the dirtiest form of energy in common use, but the Trump administration loves it.

Donald Trump has made several unusual moves to elongate the era of coal, such as giving the industry exemptions from pollution rules. But the gambit to keep one Michigan coal-fired power station running has been extraordinary – by forcing it to remain open even against the wishes of its operator.

The hulking JH Campbell power plant, which since 1962 has sat a few hundred yards from the sand dunes at the edge of Lake Michigan, was just eight days away from a long-planned closure in May when Trump’s Department of Energy issued an emergency order that it remain open for a further 90 days.

On Wednesday, the administration intervened again to extend this order even further, prolonging the lifetime of the coal plant another 90 days, meaning it will keep running until November – six months after it was due to close.

This order, like so many of the questionable things Trump has done, is justified by a mythical “state of emergency” that he can see but no one else can. The Energy Department says the local electrical grid will be strained by the loss of this plant, but the operating utility doesn’t think so. While it’s not unusual for a utility to seek permission to extend the life of a coal plant that violates pollution standards, extending the life of a plant the operator wants to close is virtually unheard of.

So far, 71 coal plants, along with dozens of other chemical, copper smelting and other polluting facilities, have received “pollution passes” from the Trump administration according to a tally by the Environmental Defense Fund, allowing greater emissions of airborne toxins linked to an array of health problems. Coal is, despite Trump’s claims, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels and the leading source of planet-heating pollution.

Information

If you want to assess the current state of the planet and its climate, the federal government does not want to help you.

In accordance with the Global Change Research Act of 1990, the federal government has produced a National Climate Assessment every four years.

The sprawling report is the most influential source of information about how climate change affects the United States.

The National Climate Assessment is widely used by teachers, city planners, farmers, judges and regular citizens looking for answers to common questions such as how quickly sea levels are rising near American cities and how to deal with wildfire smoke exposure. The most recent edition had a searchable atlas that allowed anyone to learn about the current and future effects of global warming in their specific town or state.

Sadly, though, the federal web site that hosts the report has been taken offline. Work on the next report has been halted and the contract to produce it cancelled. It’s up in the air whether any report at all will appear when the next one is due in 2027. Perhaps some fossil-fuel industry think tank will produce one. DoE recently published a climate-change-denying report by five fringe scientists.

The attack on the USGCRP and national climate assessment did not come as a surprise. In the Heritage Foundation’s far-right policy blueprint Project 2025, Russ Vought – now Trump’s head of the office and management and budget – called to end the USGCRP or fill it with pro-oil industry members.

Past climate assessments have been removed from government websites so they can be “updated” to better represent the administration’s anti-scientific views.

“We’re reviewing them, and we will come out with updated reports on those and with comments on those reports,” [Energy Secretary Chris] Wright told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in an interview on “The Source.”

Wright dismissed the past reports, saying “they weren’t fair in broad-based assessments of climate change.”

OK, that change involves assessment and dissemination of new climate info. But what about gathering it in the first place?

President Donald Trump’s budget request for fiscal year 2026 includes no money for the Orbiting Carbon Observatories, which can precisely show where carbon dioxide is being emitted and absorbed and how well crops are growing.

One of the observatories is a satellite launched in 2014, and the other was attached to the International Space Station in 2019. The two systems are

more sensitive and accurate than any other systems in the world, operating or planned, and a “national asset” that should be saved, said David Crisp, a retired NASA scientist who led their development. They helped scientists discover, for example, that the Amazon rain forest emits more carbon dioxide than it absorbs, while boreal forests in Canada, Russia and places where permafrost is melting absorb more than they emit, Crisp said. They also can detect the “glow” of photosynthesis in plants, which helps monitor drought and predict food shortages that can lead to civil unrest and famine, he said.

The OCO instruments in the space station might just be turned off, while the satellite could be “brought down”, i.e., allowed to burn up in the atmosphere. Needless to say, launching a replacement satellite (assuming the US government ever cares about climate again) will be far more expensive than just maintaining the one already in orbit.

Why make this very wasteful decision?

NASA said in an emailed statement Wednesday that the missions were “beyond their prime mission” and being terminated “to align with the President’s agenda and budget priorities.”

The Trump EPA is also taking steps to make it harder for a future administration to undo its damage. It is trying to reverse a 2009 finding that CO2 is a pollutant that it can regulate under the Clean Energy Act.

The endangerment finding is the basis for rules regulating climate pollution from coal and gas-fired power plants, car and truck exhaust and methane from the oil and gas industry.

Now, the Trump EPA is arguing that the endangerment finding was a mistake and overstepped the EPA’s statutory power. Daren Bakst, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, comments:

If the EPA finds the 2009 endangerment finding is no longer applicable, Bakst says that “would preclude future greenhouse gas regulations.” And he says “it should be easy to repeal existing rules that are predicated on the 2009 finding.”

Foreign policy

The administration is not just seeking to burn more fossil fuels at home, it’s also pushing fossil-fuel exports overseas. For example, the recent trade deal announced between the US and the EU stipulated that the EU buy $750 billion of US energy exports — primarily fossil fuels — over the next three years. Trump got this benefit for US energy companies by threatening Europe with crippling tariffs.

In June, the NYT contrasted the energy styles of the world’s two great powers, the US and China. The Chinese are investing heavily in sustainable energy and leading the world in exports of sustainable-energy technology.

While China is dominating clean energy industries, from patented technologies to essential raw materials, the Trump administration is using the formidable clout of the world’s biggest economy to keep American oil and gas flowing.

In a full reversal from the Biden administration’s effort to pivot the American economy away from fossil fuels, the Trump White House is opening up public lands and federal waters for new drilling, fast-tracking permits for pipelines and pressuring other countries to buy American fuels as a way of avoiding tariffs.

Washington is essentially pursuing a strong-arm energy strategy, both at home and abroad with allies and friends. It’s premised on the idea that the modern world is already designed around these fuels, and the United States has them in abundance, so exporting them benefits the American economy even if solar energy is cleaner and often cheaper.

This month, the International Energy Agency predicted something the Trump administration did not want to hear:

Lately, the I.E.A.’s influential forecasts have suggested that global demand for oil and gas could peak by the end of the decade as electric-vehicle sales grow and the cost of solar panels and battery storage plummets.

The US responded in a typical Trumpian fashion, by threatening the messenger.

Chris Wright, Mr. Trump’s energy secretary and a former fracking executive, has called the agency’s projections of peak oil demand “nonsensical” and has said the United States could withdraw from the global organization if it doesn’t change the way it operates. House Republicans have said the agency is publishing “politicized information to support climate policy advocacy” and have threatened to withhold U.S. funding.

In short, I don’t know what other conclusion to draw: The Trump administration is trying to make climate change worse. I could speculate about why, but that seems like a distraction. The What is more important than the Why. The Trump administration is trying to make climate change worse.

August 25, 2025 – 11:32 am Categories: Articles | Comments (15)

Tagged climate, climate-change, energy, environment, sustainability |

The Monday Morning Teaser

Last week I wrote about how the truly important stories, like Trump’s assault on democracy, are easy to miss because they play out on a scale longer than the daily or weekly news cycle. To see them, you have to assemble the trees of stories that get coverage into the forest of the larger story.

That’s been especially true of Trump’s anti-environment policies, especially policies that will make climate change worse. News reports may tell you that this wind project was canceled or that EV subsidy was rolled back. But you need a larger perspective to see the forest: Trump is doing everything he can to raise CO2 emissions and heat the planet.

Why? I don’t know. Maybe just to please his fossil-fuel-industry donors, but his motive seems to run deeper than that. In any case, we need to perceive the What even if we can’t identify the Why. That’s what this week’s featured post “Policies to Make the Planet Hotter” tries to do. It should be out around 10 or 11 EDT.

The weekly summary will cover developments like the redistricting battles, the raid on John Bolton’s house, court rulings both pro- and anti-Trump, Gaza officially being declared in famine, the continuing failure of the Ukraine peace negotiations, and a few other things. That should be out between noon and 1.

August 25, 2025 – 8:17 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (3)

Ongoing stories

This week’s developments

Trump’s legal defeats

Epstein is back in the headlines

Declaring War on Chicago

the Navy attack on a drug-smuggling boat

RFK Jr. and the larger attack on science

and FY 2026

and you also might be interested in …

and let’s close with something adorable

Ongoing stories

This week’s developments

Blue cities resist military occupation

Other steps toward and away from authoritarianism

and the CDC

and you also might be interested in …

and let’s close with something far out

Ongoing stories

This week’s developments

The redistricting wars

The raid on John Bolton’s house

and the Intel deal

and DC

and that Third Way memo

and let’s close with something

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