Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 11
August 16, 2025
August 16, 2025
Yesterday, military personnel from the United States of America literally rolled out a red carpet for a dictator who invaded a sovereign country and is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes including the stealing of children. Apparently coached by his team, Trump stood to let Russia’s president Vladimir Putin walk toward him after Putin arrived at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, putting Trump in a dominant position, but he clapped as Putin walked toward him. The two men greeted each other warmly.
This summit between the president of the United States and the president of Russia came together fast, in the midst of the outcry in the U.S. over Trump’s inclusion in the Epstein files and the administration’s refusal to release those files.
U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff had been visiting Moscow for months to talk about a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine when he heard through a back channel that Putin might be willing to talk to Trump in person to offer a deal. On August 6, after a meeting in Moscow, Witkoff announced that Russia was ready to retreat from some of the land it occupies in Ukraine. This apparent concession came just two days before the August 8 deadline Trump had set for severe sanctions against Russia unless it agreed to a ceasefire.
Quickly, though, it became clear that Witkoff’s description of Putin’s offer was wrong, either because Putin had misled him or because he had misunderstood: Witkoff does not speak Russian and, according to former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, does not use a notetaker from the U.S. embassy. Nonetheless, on Friday, August 8, Trump announced on social media that he would meet personally with Putin in Alaska, without Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky.
That the president of the United States offered a meeting to Putin on U.S. soil, ground that once belonged to Russia and that Russian nationalists fantasize about taking back, was itself a win for Putin.
As Jonathan Lemire noted yesterday in The Atlantic, in the week before the meeting, leaders in Ukraine and Europe worried that Trump would agree to Putin’s demand that Ukraine hand over Crimea and most of its four eastern oblasts, a demand that Russian operatives made initially in 2016 when they offered to help Trump win the White House—the so-called Mariupol Plan—and then pressure Ukraine to accept the deal.
In the end, that did not happen. The summit appears to have produced nothing but a favorable photo op for Putin.
That is no small thing, for Russia, which is weak and struggling, managed to break the political isolation it’s lived in since invading Ukraine again in 2022. Further, the choreography of the summit suggested that Russia is equal to the United States. But those important optics were less than Russia wanted.
It appeared that Russia was trying to set the scene for a major powers summit of the past, one in which the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), also known as the Soviet Union, were the dominant players, with the USSR dominating the U.S. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov showed up to Alaska in a sweatshirt with the Russian initials for USSR, a sign that Russia intends to absorb Ukraine as well as other former Soviet republics and recreate itself as a dominant world power.
As Lemire notes, Putin indicated he was interested in broadening the conversation to reach beyond Ukraine into economic relations between the two countries, including a discussion of the Arctic, and a nuclear arms agreement. The U.S. seemed to be following suit. It sent a high-ranking delegation that included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Special Envoy Witkoff, press secretary Karoline Leavitt, Central Intelligence Agency director John Ratcliffe, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, deputy White House chief of staff Dan Scavino, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Exactly what the White House expected from the summit was unclear. Trump warned that if Putin didn’t agree to a ceasefire there would be “very severe consequences,” but the White House also had seemed to be walking back any expectations of a deal at the summit, downgrading the meeting to a “listening exercise.”
After Trump and Putin met on the tarmac, Trump ushered the Russian president to the presidential limousine, known as The Beast, giving them time to speak privately despite the apparent efforts of the U.S. delegation to keep that from happening. When the summit began, Rubio and Witkoff joined Trump to make up the U.S. delegation, while Putin, his longtime foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov, and Lavrov made up the Russian delegation. The principals emerged after a three-hour meeting with little to say.
At the news conference after their meeting, Putin took the podium first—an odd development, since he was on U.S. soil—and spoke for about eight minutes. Then Trump spoke for three minutes, telling reporters the parties had not agreed to a ceasefire but that he and Putin had made “great progress” in their talks. Both men appeared subdued. They declined to take reporters’ questions.
A Fox News Channel reporter said: “The way it felt in the room was not good. It did not seem like things went well. It seemed like Putin came in and steamrolled, got right into what he wanted to say and got his photo next to the president, then left.” But while Putin got his photo op, he did not get the larger superpower dialogue he evidently wanted. Neither did he get the open support of the United States to end the war on his terms, something he needs as his war against Ukraine drags on.
The two and a half hour working lunch that was scheduled did not take place. Both men left Alaska within an hour.
Speaking with European leaders in a phone call from Air Force One on his way home from the summit, Trump said that Putin rejected the idea of a ceasefire and insisted that Ukraine cede territory to Russia. He also suggested that a coalition of the willing, including the U.S., would be required to provide security guarantees to Ukraine. But within hours, Trump had dropped his demand for a ceasefire and instead echoed Putin’s position that negotiations for a peace agreement should begin without one.
In an interview with Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity after the meeting, Trump said he would not impose further sanctions on Russia because the meeting with Putin had gone “very well.” “Because of what happened today, I think I don’t have to think about that now,” Trump told Hannity. “I may have to think about it in two weeks or three weeks or something, but we don’t have to think about that right now.”
Trump also suggested he was backing away from trying to end the war and instead dumping the burden on Ukraine’s president. He told Hannity that “it’s really up to President Zelensky to get it done.”
Today Chiara Eisner of NPR reported that officials from the Trump administration left eight pages of information produced by the U.S. State Department in a public printer at the business center of an Alaskan hotel. The pages revealed potentially sensitive information about the August 15 meetings, including the names and phone numbers of three U.S. staff members and thirteen U.S. and Russian state leaders.
The pages also contained the information that Trump intended to give Putin an “American Bald Eagle Desk Statue,” and the menu for the cancelled lunch, which specified that the luncheon was “in honor of his excellency, Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation.”
—
Notes:
https://www.reuters.com/world/updates-trump-putin-meet-alaska-summit-war-ukraine-2025-08-15/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/08/politics/trump-putin-meeting
https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/08/15/lavrov-ussr-russia-trump-putin-ukraine-summit-alaska
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/08/trump-putin-alaska-summit/683897/
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/who-is-in-meeting-with-trump-putin-alaska-summit/story?id=124689596
https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/trump-putin-summit-ends-without-breakthrough-7406d667
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-putin-meeting-news-08-15-25
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/15/trump-putin-alaska-ukraine-00512589
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/15/trump-putin-summit-alaska-ceasefire
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/15/putin-trump-summit-first-visit-us
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5455600-trump-zelensky-russia-peace-deal/
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/16/nx-s1-5504196/trump-putin-summit-documents-left-behind
X:
McFaul/status/1954223991331385557
Bluesky:
thetnholler.bsky.social/post/3lwjmwkfg5c2g
onestpress.onestnetwork.com/post/3lwhlcpimyk2o
atrupar.com/post/3lwhkrntv3i2p
antongerashchenko.bsky.social/post/3lwh5q5s6jc2k
wartranslated.bsky.social/post/3lwgsqecjl223
August 15, 2025
August 15, 2025
A friend tells me I’ve been burning the candle at both ends for far too long, and I’m not going to dispute it. It’s been a fascinating day in American politics, but I suppose we can get a good night’s sleep and look at it tomorrow.
Tonight’s image is from earlier this week when I took my first trip to North Haven Island. North Haven and its neighbor Vinalhaven are very different from each other, but both are so beautiful it’s hard to believe they’re real.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
August 14, 2025
Today, flanked by California’s Democratic elected officials and union leaders, California governor Gavin Newsom responded to Trump’s attempt to strongarm the Texas legislature into redistricting the state to give Trump the five additional congressional representatives to which he feels “entitled.” Newsom announced that California will hold a special election on November 4 for voters to consider redistricting their state temporarily if Texas redistricts, so that California can neutralize Trump’s rigging of the state of Texas. The plan would only go into effect if Texas—or any of the other states pressured by Trump to redistrict to get more votes—launches its mid-decade redistricting that is transparently designed to help resurrect the Republicans’ prospects for 2026 and 2028.
After years of criticism that Democrats have not fought hard enough against Republicans’ manipulation of the system to amass power, the California plan, along with Newsom’s announcement of it, flips the script. The plan leverages Democrats’ control of the most populous state in the Union to warn Republicans to back away from their attempt to rig the 2026 election.
At the same time, the plan’s authors protected against claims that they were themselves trying to rig the game: the plan goes into effect only if Republicans push through their new maps, and it declares that the state still supports the use of fair, nonpartisan redistricting commissions nationwide, a system Republicans oppose.
Newsom’s announcement of the plan continued a shift in Democratic rhetoric from defense to offense. After years of Trump and Republicans attacking California, Newsom celebrated his state and the principles it reflects. “We are in Los Angeles, the most diverse city, in the most diverse county, in the most diverse state, in the world's most diverse democracy,” he said. “And I've long believed that the world looks to us…to see…it's possible to live together and advance together and prosper together across every conceivable and imaginable difference. What makes L.A. great, what makes California great, and what makes the United States of America great—is that…we don't tolerate our diversity, we celebrate our diversity, and it's a point of pride, because we're all in this together,” he said.
California has the population of 21 smaller states combined, he pointed out, and the fourth largest economy in the world. Pushing back on the trope that says, “Don't mess with Texas,” Newsom warned: “Don't mess with the great Golden State.” In a reference to the 1846 California Republic, also known as the “Bear Flag Republic”—a history captured by the California grizzly bear on the state’s flag—Newsom echoed the words of Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) when he added: “Donald Trump, you have poked the bear, and we will punch back.”
Newsom emphasized that democracy is under siege by Trump and his MAGA loyalists, a point illustrated by the fact that officials had sent more than a dozen masked and armed Border Patrol agents to the Japanese American National Museum in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles, where Newsom was speaking. Some of the agents were carrying rifles. A Border Patrol chief, Gregory Bovino, made it clear the agents were there to intimidate state officials, saying: ““We’re here making Los Angeles a safer place, since we don’t have politicians who can do that. We do that ourselves.”
Trump “doesn't play by a different set of rules,” Newsom said. “He doesn't believe in the rules. And as a consequence, we need to disabuse ourselves of the way things have been done…. We have got to meet fire with fire…. So that's what this is about. It's not complicated. We're doing this in reaction to a president of the United States that called a sitting governor of the state of Texas and said, find me five seats…. We can't stand back and watch this democracy disappear, district by district all across this country…. We need to be firm in our resolve. We need to push back.” He called this moment “a break the glass moment for our democracy, for our nation.”
Newsom called for Americans to “[w]ake up to what Donald Trump is doing…. Wake up to the assault on institutions and knowledge and history. Wake up to his war on science, public health, his war against the American people. This is a guy who lays claim to want to get a Nobel Prize sitting there and bending his knee to Mr. Putin.”
“We do have agency,” Newsom reminded his audience. “We’re not bystanders in this world. We can shape the future.” Noting that “this time requires us to act anew, not just think anew,” Newsom nodded to President Abraham Lincoln’s famous call from 1862: “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise—with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”
Newsom’s team has been garnering attention lately by trolling Trump on social media, taunting the president with grandiose, jerky, all-caps posts that mimic Trump’s own. Today, Newsom continued that taunting by pointing out that Trump wants to rig the district maps because he knows his party is going to lose the midterms. Newsom called Trump “a failed president” and pointed to Trump’s dispatch of the Border Patrol to intimidate the people in attendance at the event as proof Trump is “weak…broken, someone whose weakness is masquerading as his strength…. The most unpopular president in modern history.”
On a day in which a new report this morning from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed flashing red lights over inflation caused by Trump’s tariffs, Newsom trolled Trump by echoing the president’s triumphant promise that April 2, when he announced those tariffs, was “Liberation Day. Newsom called today’s announcement “Liberation Day in the State of California.”
When a reporter asked Newsom whether his mimicry of Trump’s social media posts is a strategy, he replied: “I hope it's a wake up call…. If you've got issues with what I'm putting out. You sure as hell should have concerns about what he's putting out as president…. But I think the deeper question is, how have we allowed the normalization of his tweets through social posts over the course of the last many years to go without similar scrutiny and notice.”
In a press release about the event, Newsom’s office emphasized that Democratic leaders from across the country have been launching similar broadsides against Trump’s push for redistricting, quoting Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego, Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, New York governor Kathy Hochul, New Jersey governor Phil Murphy, and Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker.
After the events, Newsom’s press office posted on social media: “DONALD IS FINISHED—HE IS NO LONGER “HOT.” FIRST THE HANDS (SO TINY) AND NOW ME—GAVIN C. NEWSOM—HAVE TAKEN AWAY HIS “STEP.” MANY ARE SAYING HE CAN’T EVEN DO THE “BIG STAIRS” ON AIR FORCE ONE ANYMORE—USES THE LITTLE BABY STAIRS NOW. SAD! TOMORROW HE’S GOT HIS “MEETING” WITH PUTIN IN “RUSSIA.” NOBODY CARES. ALL THE TELEVISION CAMERAS ARE ON ME, AMERICA’S FAVORITE GOVERNOR. EVEN LOW-RATINGS LAURA INGRAM (EDITS THE TAPES!) CAN’T STOP TALKING ABOUT MY BEAUTIFUL MAPS. YOU’RE WELCOME FOR LIBERATION DAY, AMERICA! DONNIE J MISSED “THE DEADLINE” (WHOOPS!) AND NOW I RUN THE SHOW. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! —GCN”
The office followed that post up with one that recalled Trump’s February 2025 reference to himself as a king, a reference that likely referred to a decades-old puff piece that called Trump “the king of New York.” After a popular outcry at Trump’s apparent claim to a throne, the White House followed up with an AI-generated image of the cover of what appeared to be Time magazine showing Trump wearing a crown in front of the New York City skyline with the legend “Long live the king.”
Newsom’s version replaced Trump’s image with his own, symbolically taking over turf that at the height of his popularity Trump considered his own. It declared: “A SUCCESSFUL LIBERATION DAY! THANK YOU!”
—
Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/us/newsom-la-immigration-agents.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/us/politics/trump-king-image.html
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/white-house-post-trump-as-king/
https://bellanyc.com/the-king-of-new-york-donald-trump/
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/second-annual-message-9
YouTube:
X:
GovPressOffice/status/1956179690449985876
August 14, 2025
Live with Heather Cox Richardson
California governor Gavin Newsom and I chatted earlier today about his announcement that California will hold a special election on November 4 for voters to consider redistricting the state temporarily if Texas redistricts to give President Donald Trump the five additional seats to which he believes he is “entitled.”
Get more from Heather Cox Richardson in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app
August 13, 2025
August 13, 2025
On August 14, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. While he had already put in place new measures to regulate business and banking and had provided temporary work relief to combat the Depression, this law permanently changed the nature of the American government.
The Social Security Act established a federal system of old-age benefits; unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services. It was a sweeping reworking of the relationship between the government and its citizens, using the power of taxation to pool funds to provide a basic social safety net.
The driving force behind the law was FDR’s secretary of labor, Frances Perkins. She was the first woman to hold a position in the U.S. Cabinet and still holds the record for having the longest tenure in that job: she served from 1933 to 1945.
Perkins brought to the position a vision of government very different from that of the Republicans who had run it in the 1920s. While men like President Herbert Hoover had embraced the idea of a “rugged individualism” in which men provided for their families on their own, Perkins recognized that the vision of a hardworking man supporting his wife and children was more myth than reality: her own husband suffered from bipolar disorder, making her the family’s primary support. She understood that Americans had always supported each other.
As a child, Perkins spent summers with her grandmother, with whom she was very close, in the small town of Newcastle, Maine, surrounded by a supportive community. In college, at Mount Holyoke, she majored in chemistry and physics, but after a professor required students to tour a factory to observe working conditions, Perkins became committed to improving the lives of those trapped in industrial jobs. After college, Perkins became a social worker and, in 1910, earned a masters degree in economics and sociology from Columbia University. She became the head of the New York office of the National Consumers League, urging consumers to use their buying power to demand better conditions and wages for the workers who made the products they were buying.
The next year, in 1911, she witnessed a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in which 146 workers, mostly women and girls, died. They were trapped in the building when the fire broke out because the factory owner had ordered the doors to the stairwells and exits locked to make sure no one slipped outside for a break. Unable to escape the smoke and fire in the factory, the workers—some of them on fire—leaped from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the building, dying on the pavement.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire proved to Perkins that voluntary organizations would never be enough to improve workers’ lives. She turned toward using the government to adjust the harsh conditions of industrialization. She began to work with the Democratic politicians at Tammany Hall, who presided over communities in the city that mirrored rural towns and who exercised a form of social welfare for their voters, making sure they had jobs, food, and shelter and that wives and children had a support network if a husband and father died. In that system the voices of women like Perkins were valuable, for their work in the immigrant wards of the city meant that they were the ones who knew what working families needed to survive.
The overwhelming unemployment, hunger, and suffering during the Great Depression convinced Perkins that state governments alone could not adjust the conditions of the modern world to create a safe, supportive community for ordinary people. She came to believe that, as she said: “The people are what matter to government, and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.”
Perkins met FDR through her Tammany connections, and when he asked her to be his secretary of labor, she told him that she wanted the federal government to provide unemployment insurance, health insurance, and old-age insurance. She later recalled: “I remember he looked so startled, and he said, ‘Well, do you think it can be done?’”
Creating federal unemployment insurance became her primary concern. Congressmen had little interest in passing such legislation, claiming that unemployment insurance and federal aid to dependent families would undermine a man’s willingness to work. But Perkins recognized that the Depression had added pressure to the idea of social insurance by emphasizing the needs of older Americans. In Long Beach, California, Dr. Francis Townsend had looked out of his window one day to see elderly women rooting through garbage cans for food. Appalled, he came up with a plan to help the elderly and stimulate the economy at the same time. Townsend proposed that the government provide every retired person over 60 years old with $200 a month, on the condition that they spend it within 30 days, a condition designed to stimulate the economy.
Townsend’s plan was wildly popular. More than that, though, it sparked people across the country to start coming up with their own plans for protecting the elderly and the nation’s social fabric.
It also spurred Congress to action. Perkins recalled that Townsend “startled the Congress of the United States because the aged have votes. The wandering boys didn't have any votes; the evicted women and their children had very few votes. If the unemployed didn't stay long enough in any one place, they didn't have a vote. But the aged people lived in one place and they had votes, so every Congressman had heard from the Townsend Plan people.”
FDR put together a committee to come up with a plan, but committee members could not make up their minds how to move forward. Perkins continued to hammer on the idea they must come up with something, and finally locked the members of the committee in a room. As she recalled: “Well, we locked the door and we had a lot of talk. I laid out a couple of bottles of something or other to cheer their lagging spirits. Anyhow, we stayed in session until about 2 a.m. We then voted finally, having taken our solemn oath that this was the end; we were never going to review it again.”
By the time the bill came to a vote, it was hugely popular. The vote was 371 to 33 in the House and 77 to 6 in the Senate.
When asked to describe the origins of the Social Security Act, Perkins mused that its roots came from the very beginnings of the nation. When Alexis de Toqueville wrote Democracy in America in 1835, she noted, he thought Americans were uniquely “so generous, so kind, so charitably disposed.” “Well, I don't know anything about the times in which De Tocqueville visited America,” she said, but “I do know that at the time I came into the field of social work, these feelings were real.”
With the Social Security Act, Perkins helped to write into our laws a longstanding political impulse in America that stood in dramatic contrast to the 1920s philosophy of rugged individualism. She recognized that the ideas of community values and pooling resources to keep the economic playing field level and take care of everyone are at least as deeply seated in our political philosophy as the idea of every man for himself.
In a 1962 speech recalling the origins of the Social Security Act, Perkins reflected: “Of course, the Act had to be amended, and has been amended, and amended, and amended, and amended, until it has now grown into a large and important project, for which, by the way, I think the people of the United States are deeply thankful. One thing I know: Social Security is so firmly embedded in the American psychology today that no politician, no political party, no political group could possibly destroy this Act and still maintain our democratic system. It is safe. It is safe forever, and for the everlasting benefit of the people of the United States.”
—
Notes:
https://www.ssa.gov/history/35act.html
https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php
https://www.ssa.gov/history/perkins5.html
https://francesperkinscenter.org/life-new/
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2024-republican-party-platform
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/4583/all-actions
August 12, 2025
August 12, 2025
Liberal commentator Jessica Tarlov nailed it this morning when she wrote: “He’s doing everything EXCEPT releasing the Epstein files.” Her comment was in reference to President Donald Trump’s social media post of 7:30 this morning, when he chummed the water by suggesting that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, more commonly known as the Kennedy Center, would soon be called the “TRUMP/KENNEDY CENTER.” He made the comment as he said this year’s Kennedy Center Honors recipients would be announced tomorrow.
Trump has been frantically trying to change the subject away from his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein since July 7, when Attorney General Pam Bondi stirred up fury from Trump’s MAGA base by saying the Department of Justice will not release any more information from the Epstein investigation.
On July 23, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s name is in the Epstein files “multiple times.”
But even Trump’s attack on Washington, D.C., yesterday has not managed to distract attention from the possibility that the president of the United States sexually assaulted children. Epstein’s associate, convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, has been in the news because of the administration’s sudden transfer of her from a low-security prison in Florida to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas. In 2021, Maxwell was convicted of conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse children and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Allison Gill, who goes by the name Mueller She Wrote on social media and who writes at The Breakdown, reported yesterday on Ghislaine Maxwell’s electronic file from the Bureau of Prisons, to which she got exclusive access. Sex offenders are not eligible to serve their sentences in minimum security prisons, but the file shows that someone waived that status to permit her transfer. Gill’s information also shows that the terms of her custody permit her “to leave the minimum security campus for work assignments; much like Jeffrey Epstein was allowed to leave prison as part of the sweetheart deal he got from Alex Acosta.”
Writing in The Hill today, former deputy U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York James Zirin wrote: “You may ask whether Trump approved the transfer. You can bet on it. This Justice Department doesn’t make a move without Trump’s thumb on the scale.”
Also yesterday, Judge Paul Engelmayer of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York refused to grant the Trump administration’s request that grand jury files from Maxwell’s sex trafficking case be unsealed. As Zirin noted, that request was always a red herring: grand jury minutes do not include evidence or witness statements and are “largely uniformative.”
Judge Engelmayer was even clearer. As Casey Gannon noted at CNN, the judge called out the Department of Justice for misleading the public about what the files would reveal. “Its entire premise—that the Maxwell grand jury materials would bring to light meaningful new information about Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes, or the Government’s investigation into them—is demonstrably false,” he wrote, and pointed out that the material is already almost all public.
Engelmayer continued with an observation about why Bondi might have made the request: “A member of the public, appreciating that the Maxwell grand jury materials do not contribute anything to public knowledge, might conclude that the Government’s motion for their unsealing was aimed not at ‘transparency’ but at diversion—aimed not at full disclosure but at the illusion of such,” he wrote.
The administration also has an interest in getting people to look away from the rising inflation numbers. A report released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that consumer prices rose again in July, an indication that businesses are beginning to pass on the cost of tariffs to consumers. As economist Justin Wolfers noted, after declining for two years, inflation is on its way back up and is now at 3.1% for the year. Those numbers do not include the tariffs that went into effect on August 7.
Meanwhile, as Aliss Higham of Newsweek reported today, layoffs in the U.S. “surged in July to their highest level since the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.” After the July jobs report showed that hiring has stalled and that hiring in May and June had been dramatically overestimated, Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, claiming that the numbers in the report were rigged.
Yesterday Trump nominated E.J. Antoni, a 37-year-old economist from the right-wing Heritage Foundation, to replace McEntarfer. Heritage was the driving force behind Project 2025, and in keeping with that institution’s drive toward Christian nationalism, Antoni’s doctoral dissertation from Northern Illinois University thanks his “spiritual patrons: Our Lady of Victory, St. Joseph, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Jude, St. Joseph of Cupertino, and Sts. Peter and Paul. Thank you, most especially, to Our Lord, with whom anything is possible.” Antoni is known primarily for media work, including appearances on the Fox News Channel, where he has relentlessly cheered on Trump’s policies.
Dominic Pino of the conservative National Review wrote today that Antoni is “nowhere near qualified to be BLS commissioner,” noting that “he has demonstrated time and again that he does not understand economic statistics.” As J.V. Last of The Bulwark notes, destroying faith in statistics by cooking the books is actually Trump’s plan, illustrated in his announcement of Antoni’s nomination when he wrote: “Our Economy is booming, and E.J. will ensure that the Numbers released are Honest and Accurate.”
Last notes that if Trump wanted to reassure people that government statistics are trustworthy, there are plenty of conservative economists he could have chosen to take the job of commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Instead, he picked “a hack he sees on Fox” to show that he is imposing his will even on the numbers that businesses, banks, and people need to make good decisions about investments.
In an interview on Fox Business News that appeared yesterday, before his nomination was announced, Antoni suggested that the government should stop issuing the monthly job reports, focusing instead on quarterly reports.
Last points out in his Bulwark article that Project 2025 called for consolidating the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Census Bureau, and Bureau of Labor Statistics into a single office and aligning their “mission with conservative principles,” as well as putting as many loyalists into statistical positions as possible.
Today the administration advanced Project 2025 ‘s determination to reshape American culture from a right-wing perspective when it sent a letter to Dr. Lonnie Bunch, the historian who serves as the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, informing him they intend to review museum exhibitions, curatorial processes, planning, the use of collections, and artists grants in order to make sure they align “with the president’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.”
Meredith McGraw and Jasmine Li of the Wall Street Journal, who reported the letter, say that the review will focus on the “National Museum of American History, the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Air and Space Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.”
Legal analyst Anna Bower notes that the woman in charge of reviewing the Smithsonian is his Florida criminal defense attorney, who joined his team from the field of property law and who, as Bower writes, “didn't like some of the museum's exhibits when she visited after the inauguration so she convinced Trump to sign an executive order putting her in charge.” Also on the three-person team is Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget and a key author of Project 2025.
Trump’s assumption of control over the Washington, D.C., police force and his calling out of the D.C. National Guard are definitely ways for him to divert attention from the Epstein files and the stalling economy. But they are also an attempt to create a dictatorship as Project 2025 prescribed. Both can be true at the same time.
Today Alex Horton and David Ovalle of the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration is looking at putting 600 National Guard troops on standby at all times as a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” to deploy into American cities to combat protest or civil unrest. The troops would be split into two groups of 300, stationed at military bases in Alabama and Arizona to cover the regions east and west of the Mississippi River. The cost would run into hundreds of millions of dollars, and funding could not start before fiscal year 2027.
National security affairs scholar Lindsay P. Cohn told the reporters that while National Guard units are commonly deployed for emergencies within their own states, this “is really strange because essentially nothing is happening. Crime is going down. We don’t have major protests or civil disturbances. There is no significant resistance from states” to federal immigration policies. “There is very little evidence anything big is likely to happen soon,” she said. But the proposal could take resources that states will need to respond to national disasters or other emergencies.
This morning, about 800 National Guard troops arrived at the D.C. Armory to report for duty. They have been deployed until September 25.
But the power grab underway among MAGA leaders is not going unchallenged.
Yesterday MSNBC ran a column of statistics fact-checking Trump live during his press conference, showing that crime in Washington, D.C.—and across the country—is falling significantly, despite Trump’s claim that we are in a crime wave. It appears at least some in the media are catching on to the idea that his lies must be challenged as they happen, rather than hours later when public attention has moved on.
Also yesterday, California governor Gavin Newsom issued a public letter telling Trump that if he doesn’t back off on his attempts to redistrict Republican-dominated states in order to rig the 2026 elections, Newsom will be forced to work to redistrict California. “You are playing with fire, risking the destabilization of our democracy,” Newsom wrote, “while knowing that California can neutralize any gains you hope to make…. I do not do this lightly, as I believe legislative district maps should be drawn by independent, citizen-led efforts,” he wrote. But "California cannot stand idly by as this power grab unfolds.”
Newsom’s press office followed the letter up this morning with a post on social media: “DONALD TRUMP, THE LOWEST POLLING PRESIDENT IN RECENT HISTORY, THIS IS YOUR SECOND-TO-LAST WARNING!!! (THE NEXT ONE IS THE LAST ONE!). STAND DOWN NOW OR CALIFORNIA WILL COUNTER-STRIKE (LEGALLY!) TO DESTROY YOUR ILLEGAL CROOKED MAPS IN RED STATES. PRESS CONFERENCE COMING—HOSTED BY AMERICA’S FAVORITE GOVERNOR, GAVIN NEWSOM. FINAL WARNING NEXT. YOU WON’T LIKE IT!!! THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.”
Then the account posted: “FINAL WARNING DONALD TRUMP—MAYBE THE MOST IMPORTANT WARNING IN HISTORY! STOP CHEATING OR CALIFORNIA WILL REDRAW THE MAPS. AND GUESS WHO WILL ANNOUNCE IT THIS WEEK? GAVIN NEWSOM (MANY SAY THE MOST LOVED & HANDSOME GOVERNOR) AND A VERY POWERFUL TEAM. DON’T MAKE US DO IT!!! THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.”
A follow-up post tonight read: “DONALD ‘TACO’ TRUMP, AS MANY CALL HIM, ‘MISSED’ THE DEADLINE!!! CALIFORNIA WILL NOW DRAW NEW, MORE ‘BEAUTIFUL MAPS,’ THEY WILL BE HISTORIC AS THEY WILL END THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY (DEMS TAKE BACK THE HOUSE!). BIG PRESS CONFERENCE THIS WEEK WITH POWERFUL DEMS AND GAVIN NEWSOM—YOUR FAVORITE GOVERNOR—THAT WILL BE DEVASTATING FOR ‘MAGA.’ THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! —GN”
Tonight, Elizabeth Blair of NPR reported that Trump’s announcement this morning that Kennedy Center Honors recipients would be named tomorrow caught the staff of the Kennedy Center entirely off guard.
—
Notes:
The BreakdownEXCLUSIVE: I Have Ghislaine Maxwell's Security Score, Custody Level, Transfer Code, and Sex Offender Waiver Today, we learned from Adam Klasfeld at All Rise News that Senator Whitehouse (D - RI) has penned a letter to the Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons William Marshall demanding answers surrounding the redesignation and transfer of convicted serial sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell to a minimum security facility…Read more2 days ago · 1732 likes · 150 comments · Allison Gillhttps://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26047433-maxwell-grand-jury-material-order/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/11/politics/maxwell-epstein-grand-jury-files-rejected
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/08/12/business/cpi-inflation-tariffs-fed?smid=em-share
https://www.newsweek.com/us-hits-highest-layoffs-since-covid-2111794
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/01/trump-erika-mcentarfer-jobs-report-fired.html
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/trump-wants-a-bureau-of-maga-statistics/
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, August 11, 2025, 6:39 p.m.
The BulwarkThe Ministry of Truth Is Real NowI realize I promised you Russia–Ukraine today. It’ll have to wait. Meanwhile, you can tide yourself over with the articles we’ve published by Cathy Young and Nick Grossman. —JVL…Read more21 hours ago · 763 likes · 654 comments · Jonathan V. Lasthttps://www.cnn.com/2025/08/12/economy/antoni-bls-mulls-suspending-jobs-report
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/08/12/national-guard-civil-unrest/
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/lindsey-halligan-trump-smithsonian-executive-order-2626200
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/12/nx-s1-5500151/kennedy-center-honors-trump
X:
GovPressOffice/status/1955279652794306597
GovPressOffice/status/1955411757540970603
GovPressOffice/status/1955373920976326668
Bluesky:
jessicatarlov.bsky.social/post/3lw7hkx5avs22
emptywheel.bsky.social/post/3lw7gifibis2k
justinwolfers.bsky.social/post/3lw7d6agidv2j
mikesington.bsky.social/post/3lw4zwylgjs2f
kylegriffin1.bsky.social/post/3lw7wookazc2y
ericcolumbus.bsky.social/post/3lw5vdmkp5c23
atrupar.com/post/3lw7cwmkf3s2g
Heather Cox Richardson's Blog
- Heather Cox Richardson's profile
- 1300 followers
