Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 12
August 11, 2025
August 11, 2025
President Donald J. Trump’s big announcement today at his press conference—to which he showed up late—was that he is assuming control over the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department and deploying more than 100 agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and about 40 from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, along with officers from the Secret Service and the U.S. Marshals Service and members of the District of Columbia National Guard, “to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor, and worse.” He reiterated that officers would clear homeless encampments from the city.
In fact, statistics from the Department of Justice show that violent crime in the nation’s capital was at a 30-year low in 2024 and, according to Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), is down 26% this year compared to the same period last year. Former undersecretary of state and editor of Time magazine Richard Stengel noted that Washington is “not even in [the] top 10 dangerous cities in [the] U.S.” Meanwhile, legal analyst Asha Rangappa notes that FBI agents are not trained to patrol the streets, and that every one of them assigned to do that is not investigating foreign spies, foreign and domestic terrorists, or crimes like fraud, murder, corruption, and human trafficking.
If that was Trump’s big announcement, the big story seems to have been something different.
Trump’s performance at the press conference—an event for which his handlers would have made sure he was at the top of his game—made it clear that his mental deterioration is moving rapidly. He let Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and FBI director Kash Patel explain the actual plan, taking the microphone himself to describe a fake world in which he plays the role of hero, solving five wars, creating a booming economy, solving the border security others couldn’t, protecting Americans from a hellscape that exists only in his rhetoric.
The administration’s seizure of power is anything but imaginary. As Stengel noted, “Throughout history, autocrats use a false pretext to impose government control over local law enforcement as a prelude to a more national takeover. That’s far more dangerous than the situation he says he is fixing.” While Trump is mobilizing the National Guard under a pretext now, he memorably refused to mobilize it on January 6, 2021, to protect the lawmakers under siege in the U.S. Capitol as his supporters tried to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president.
Some clues to what the administration is attempting showed up today in a court in California, where Governor Gavin Newsom and California Attorney General Rob Bonta are suing the Department of Justice, saying it broke the law by deploying about 4,000 troops from the National Guard and 700 U.S. Marines to Los Angeles in June without authorization. A federal law known as the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits federal troops from acting as law enforcement officers.
Anna Bower of Lawfare Media was following the events in court today. She posted that the government agreed the troops in Los Angeles were subject to the Posse Comitatus Act and that they were put in place simply to guard federal buildings and law enforcement officials. But witnesses said that troops accompanied ICE when they made arrests and one of the documents introduced that related to the massive troop presence in MacArthur Park on July 7 said the purpose of the mission was to “protect the execution of joint federal law enforcement missions...while preserving public safety and demonstrating federal reach and presence.”
The words “demonstrating federal reach and presence” seem to get to the heart of the administration’s object, for it is showing federal troops exercising power over civilians even while telling the court they are not. Making people fear the government is key to the rise of an authoritarian.
This mobilization echoes Trump’s attempt to take over Washington, D.C., in June 2020 when he was angry about the protests over the death of George Floyd, murdered in May 2020 by white police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. In 2020, members of Trump’s first administration stopped him from using the military against U.S. citizens, and, dramatically, members of the military stepped up to declare their support not for a president but for the United States Constitution.
This time around, Trump has installed loyalist Pete Hegseth at the head of the military. Hegseth made his support for the president’s plan clear today as he stood with Trump at the press conference. Ominously for civil liberties, observers note that no one from the administration is specifying where the administration intends to send people from the homeless encampments, although Trump wrote Sunday, “We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital.”
The administration is also consolidating power over the economy. Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal noted today that the U.S. is marching toward a form of state capitalism in which Trump looks much like the Chinese Communist Party, exercising political control not just over government agencies but over companies themselves. “A generation ago conventional wisdom held that as China liberalized, its economy would come to resemble America’s,” Ip wrote. “Instead, capitalism in America is starting to look like China.”
Ip points to the government’s partial control over U.S. Steel that it took as a condition for Nippon Steel’s takeover, the $1.5 trillion of promised investment from trading partners that Trump has claimed the right to direct personally, the 15% of certain chip sales of Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices to China that will go to the administration (although who or what entity will get that money I can’t figure out), and Trump’s demand that the chief executive of Intel resign.
Ip calls this system of state capitalism “a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.” He notes that it is a “sea change from the free market ethos the U.S. once embodied.”
Ip also notes that state capitalism is a means of political control, using the power of the state to crush political challenges. “In Trump’s first term, CEOs routinely spoke out when they disagreed with his policies such as on immigration and trade,” Ip writes. “Now, they shower him with donations and praise, or are mostly silent.” Ip pointed out that Trump is deploying financial power and regulatory power to cow media companies, banks, law firms, and government agencies he thinks are not sufficiently supportive.
But Trump’s press conference did not show a president in control of these dramatic changes. His words echoed the rhetoric he used to win office in 2016, rhetoric he summed up in his inaugural address that turned a speech usually designed to be uplifting into a description of what he called American carnage: “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our Nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.”
But in the context of the president’s rambling nonsense, that apocalyptic rhetoric, along with Trump’s focus on renovating and redecorating the White House to look like one of his gold-splattered properties, seems like an attempt to return to a past in which he felt powerful.
Meanwhile, Trump’s second presidency has been following the plan outlined in Project 2025 closely, even though Trump denied any association with Project 2025 when he ran for office. Russell Vought, now director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote the section of the plan that called for an extraordinarily strong executive in order to put in place Christian nationalism. Increasingly, it looks like members of his administration are using Trump in order to create a system that will respond to whoever is in charge, making it possible for today’s leaders to retain control over the country even without Trump there to mobilize MAGA voters.
Trump’s press conference today showed a badly weakened president. His apparent connections to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have already weakened him with his base. That story is not going away, and Trump has made it clear he is frantic over it. Then today he indicated even he is worried about his mental deterioration. At 7:36 this morning, he posted on social media that Representatives Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) are “morons.” He wrote: “Each of these political hacks should be forced to take a Cognitive Exam, much like the one I recently took while getting my ‘physical’ at our GREAT Washington, D.C., Military Hospital (W[alter] R[eed]!). As the doctors said, ‘President Trump ACED it, something that is rarely seen!’ These Radical Left Lunatics would all fail this test in a spectacular show of stupidity and incompetence. TAKE THE TEST!!!”
Vice President J.D. Vance appears to have been distancing himself from Trump and the administration by taking repeated vacations. As Bill Kristol noted today in The Bulwark, Vance also appears to be undercutting Trump over the Epstein files, twisting the knife while also seeming to make overtures to Trump’s MAGA voters, who have never warmed to Vance. As Kristol notes, Vance set up what Kristol calls a “very unusual” meeting at his residence to discuss Epstein, a meeting that just happened to leak to the press. Then yesterday, Vance brought up the issue again in an interview with Maria Bartiromo on the Fox News Channel, parroting MAGA beliefs that the files name prominent Democrats.
“[A] lot of Americans want answers. I certainly want answers,” Vance told Bartiromo. As Kristol notes: “With this bland statement, Vance succeeded—inadvertently, needless to say!—in reminding us that we don’t yet have the answers we want and deserve,” thus ginning up the Epstein story again.
Those people cheering on Trump’s drive for autocratic power because they still somehow think he will use that power to make their lives better might want to consider how their lives may change if that power is in the hands of J.D. Vance.
And so we have come full circle: the arbitrary nature of autocrats was, after all, what made our nation’s founders base a government not on men, but on impartial laws that defended the rights and liberties of the people.
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Notes:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-year-low
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/08/11/trump-national-guard-dc-crime-crackdown/
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/inaugural-address-14
https://calmatters.org/justice/2025/08/newsom-vs-trump-national-guard/
The BulwarkEt Tu, JD? Andrew’s back from northern Michigan today. Thanks to Ben and Jim for shouldering the Morning Shots load in his absence—and if any of you are trying to offload a lake house right now, Andrew might be in a very suggestible mood. Happy Monday…Read morea day ago · 741 likes · 314 comments · William Kristol, Andrew Egger, and Jim SwiftYouTube:
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stengel/status/1954919790390247753
Bluesky:
markjacob.bsky.social/post/3lw4tv5ugkc26
mindcite.bsky.social/post/3lw2zrque6k2k
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August 10, 2025
August 10, 2025
On Friday, Democracy Forward Foundation sued the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to make it respond to its request for the release of the Epstein files, as well as all communications the administration has exchanged over the files and President Donald Trump’s inclusion in them, as required under the Freedom of Information Act. The Democracy Forward Foundation filed Freedom of Information Act requests on July 28, asking for expedited processing in light of public interest in the files, but the DOJ and the FBI have not responded.
The case has been assigned to Judge Tanya Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who presided over Trump’s criminal trial for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Drawing Chutkan for an Epstein case means decisions will not be weighted in Trump’s favor.
On Saturday, Trump posted a screed against former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) accusing her of insider trading and calling her “a disgusting degenerate, who Impeached me twice, on NO GROUNDS, and LOST! How are you feeling now, Nancy???”
Since Attorney General Pam Bondi announced on July 7 that the administration would not be releasing any more information about the Epstein investigation and especially since July 23, when the Wall Street Journal reported that Bondi had told Trump in May that his name appears in those files, the president has thrown up one distraction after another. The attack on Pelosi fits that mold.
But it is interesting that the president appears to have impeachment on his mind.
Also on Saturday, Trump launched new action against Washington, D.C. He has threatened to “federalize” the nation’s capital since the 2024 presidential campaign, and now has found a trigger in the alleged carjacking attempt by two unarmed 15-year-olds—one girl and one boy—on August 6 against 19-year-old former “Department of Government Efficiency” staffer Edward Coristine, also known as “Big Balls.” Law enforcement officers apparently stopped the alleged attempt while it was in progress and arrested the two youths, but Trump posted on social media a picture that he claimed was Coristine, covered in blood, and wrote that the incident showed that “crime in Washington, D.C. is totally out of control.”
Although violent crime in Washington, D.C., has reached its lowest level in 30 years, Trump announced that he will hold a press conference Monday “which will, essentially, stop violent crime in Washington, D.C. It has become one of the most dangerous cities anywhere in the World. It will soon be one of the safest!!! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
Today, he plugged his news conference again on social media and wrote: I’m going to make our Capital safer and more beautiful than it ever was before. The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY. We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital. The Criminals, you don’t have to move out. We’re going to put you in jail where you belong. It’s all going to happen very fast, just like the Border. We went from millions pouring in, to ZERO in the last few months. This will be easier—Be prepared! There will be no ‘MR. NICE GUY.’ We want our Capital BACK. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Two hours later, he posted again, appearing to refer to his false claim that Washington, D.C., is beset by crime and also appearing to refer to his new plan to replace the East Wing of the White House with a 90,000-square-foot event space. And then he pivoted to an attack on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, whom he appears to be trying to hound out of office with complaints about the cost of renovating two buildings the Fed uses. Then he turned back to crime in Washington, saying, “The Mayor of D.C., Muriel Bowser, is a good person who has tried, but she has been given many chances, and the Crime Numbers get worse, and the City only gets dirtier and less attractive. The American Public is not going to put up with it any longer.”
Then he turned to his immigration sweeps, saying: “Just like I took care of the Border, where you had ZERO Illegals coming across last month, from millions the year before, I will take care of our cherished Capital, and we will make it, truly, GREAT AGAIN! Before the tents, squalor, filth, and Crime, it was the most beautiful Capital in the World. It will soon be that again.”
Trump seems to be suggesting that he wants to take control over Washington, D.C., the seat of the United States government. That will not be easy, as the U.S. Constitution gives control of the federal district to Congress, and a 1973 law permitted the inhabitants of the district to elect a mayor and a city council.
Trump’s fascination with Washington, D.C., might also be a reflection of a turn toward a focus on real estate, the sector in which he is most comfortable, as his administration is flailing and his own cognitive abilities are slipping. In The Atlantic today, Peter Wehner and Robert P. Beschel Jr. noted that people were willing to vote for Trump despite his corruption because they believed he would be an effective leader who would make their lives better.
Now, though, the public’s faith in his governing ability has plummeted. A recent Gallup poll found his approval rating at 37%, and more people disapprove than approve of his handling of the economy, immigration, and government efficiency.
The crumbling presidency might be behind the rush to cement the land grab Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has wanted since at least 2016. Bojan Pancevski and Yaroslav Trofimov reported in the Wall Street Journal that Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, who is not a trained diplomat and does not speak Russian, appears to have misunderstood the terms Putin was offering for a ceasefire. After saying at first that Putin would withdraw his troops from parts of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in exchange for complete control of Donetsk, Witkoff later clarified that the only offer Putin had made was for Ukraine to withdraw from Donetsk.
“This is deeply damaging incompetence,” former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul posted on social media. “Witkoff should finally start taking a notetaker from the U.S. embassy for future meetings. That’s how professional diplomacy works.”
Trump is scheduled to meet with Putin in Alaska on August 15.
If Trump’s hope is to chum the news with stories about Washington, D.C., and his relationship with Putin so people forget about the Epstein files, he’s not getting much help from Vice President J.D. Vance. On Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo on the Fox News Channel this morning, Vance said: “We know that Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of connections with left-wing politicians and left-wing billionaires.... Democrat billionaires and Democrat political leaders went to Epstein Island all the time. Who knows what they did.”
Vance’s suggestion that keeping the files under wraps protects Democrats is unlikely to convince the MAGA Republicans clamoring for their release to let the issue go. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine any other angle Vance could have chosen that would have poured more fuel on that particular dumpster fire.
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Notes:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.283567/gov.uscourts.dcd.283567.1.0.pdf
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/10/trump-crime-data-federal-takeover/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/07/politics/federal-law-enforcement-dc-trump
https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-year-low
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/08/trump-incompetence/683779/
https://www.wsj.com/world/ukraine-and-europe-counter-putins-cease-fire-proposal-6a16133c
https://www.newsweek.com/steve-witkoff-putin-russia-talks-trump-2111348
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social Post, August 9, 2025, 9:40 a.m.
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social Post, August 10, 2025, 11:03 a.m.
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social Post, August 10, 2025, 1:40 p.m.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/19-year-former-doge-worker-assaulted-dc-carjacking/story?id=124406722
https://www.rawstory.com/jd-vance-afraid-of-epstein/
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McFaul/status/1954223991331385557
Bluesky:
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mickeykuhns.bsky.social/post/3lw3jxmae3227
August 9, 2025
August 9, 2025
Last Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reposted a video in which Christian nationalist pastors express their opposition to the idea of women voting. “I would like to see this nation being a Christian nation, and I would like this world to be a Christian world,” said Christian nationalist Doug Wilson. In his repost of the video, Hegseth wrote “All of Christ for All of Life.”
But the government of the United States of America is not, and never has been, based in Christianity. In his 1785 “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” framer of the Constitution James Madison explained that what was at stake in the separation of church and state was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental, unalienable human right—that of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants.
The United States of America is based not on religion but on the law. The country’s founding documents are the Declaration of Independence, which established the principle that all people are created equal, and the U.S. Constitution, which has gradually expanded since it was first written, increasingly recognizing the equal rights of all Americans.
The Constitution didn’t expand on its own. Since the time colonists first began to contemplate creating their own country, individuals have worked, step by step, to create an inclusive democracy. The Declaration of Independence gave them the language to claim those rights, and using it, along with logic, art, organization, and humor, they challenged the nation to turn the principles of the Declaration of Independence into reality.
At a time when political leaders like Hegseth are using their crabbed understanding of religion to take away rights, it seems worth remembering those who expanded rights by standing firm on the Declaration of Independence. The linked videos are a window into how ten people led the way.
So tonight is a night off from the firehose of the news and a reminder of what it has meant throughout our history to stand for American values.
I’ll be back at it tomorrow.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2dS6uX1RkUzIhvfzi1zPwdgTDv9NNnJK
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Notes:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/09/pete-hegseth-video-pastors-women-voting
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-08-02-0163#JSMN-01-08-02-0163-fn-0014-ptr
August 8, 2025
August 8, 2025 (Friday)
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed he could stop Russia’s war on Ukraine with a single phone call. Instead, Matt Murphy and Ned Davies of the BBC report that Russian attacks on Ukraine have doubled since Trump took office. Today was the deadline the president had announced for Russian president Vladimir Putin to agree to a ceasefire in his illegal invasion of Ukraine or face further sanctions. Instead, Trump announced this afternoon that he intends to meet with Putin on August 15 in Alaska.
Putin generally cannot travel outside Russia because he has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, including the theft of Ukrainian children. And yet Trump is welcoming him to the United States of America.
This welcome gives Putin the huge gift of letting him touch down on U.S. soil after he invaded Ukraine in defiance of the policy established after World War II to prevent another such devastating war. In 1945 the United Nations charter declared that “[a]ll Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.” The United States was the key guarantor of this principle until Trump took office.
The U.S. has stood against Russian invasions into Ukraine not only on this general principle, but because of security guarantees the U.S., along with the United Kingdom and Russia, gave to Ukraine in 1994. After the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, Ukraine had the third-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. In exchange for Ukraine’s giving up those weapons, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia agreed to secure Ukraine’s borders. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, they agreed they would not use military force or economic coercion against Ukraine. Russia violated that agreement with its 2014 and 2022 invasions.
Now Trump will welcome Putin to the United States, to territory that once belonged to Russia, reinforcing for Russian nationalists the dream of recreating Russia’s old empire. That dream has been part of the ideology of Russia’s drive to seize Ukrainian land.
Donato Paolo Mancini, Alberto Nardelli, and Daryna Krasnolutska of Bloomberg reported this morning that U.S. and Russian officials are planning this summit to hammer out an agreement that will force Ukraine to cede to Russia its land currently occupied by Russian troops, as well as Crimea. This deal would hand Ukraine’s eastern industrial territory to Russia and bless the principle that one country can seize territory from another through force. Observers note that once this principle is established, as Putin wishes, there will be nothing stopping him from invading Ukraine again as soon as his war-weary country recovers its strength.
The plan revealed by the Bloomberg journalists is still vague, but it excludes Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky and European allies and is similar to the one Russia demanded in April 2025. That plan, in turn, rehashed almost entirely the plan Russian operatives presented to Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort, in exchange for helping Trump win the White House.
Russia had invaded Ukraine in 2014 and was looking for a way to grab the land it wanted without continuing to fight. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election explained that Manafort and his partner, Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, in summer 2016 “discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern region of Donbas, and having [Russian-backed Viktor] Yanukovych, the Ukrainian President ousted in 2014, elected to head that republic.”
The Mueller Report continued: “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.” The region that Putin wanted was the country’s industrial heartland. He was offering a “peace” plan that would carve off much of Ukraine and make it subservient to him. This was the dead opposite of U.S. policy for a free and united Ukraine, and there was no chance that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was running for the presidency against Trump, would stand for it. But if Trump were elected, the equation changed.
According to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, Kilimnik wrote: “‘[a]ll that is required to start the process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from D[onald] T[rump] saying ‘he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine’ and a decision to be a ‘special representative’ and manage this process.’ Following that, Kilimnik suggested that Manafort ‘could start the process and within 10 days visit Russia ([Yanukovych] guarantees your reception at the very top level, cutting through all the bullsh*t and getting down to business), Ukraine, and key EU capitals.’ The email also suggested that once then–Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko understood this ‘message’ from the United States, the process ‘will go very fast and DT could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration.’”
According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the men continued to work on what they called the “Mariupol Plan” at least until 2018.
After Russia invaded Ukraine again in 2022, Jim Rutenberg published a terrific and thorough review of this history in the New York Times Magazine. Once his troops were in Ukraine, Putin claimed he had annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, two of which were specifically named in the Mariupol Plan, and instituted martial law in them, claiming that the people there had voted to join Russia.
On June 14, 2024, as he was wrongfully imprisoning American journalist Evan Gershkovich, Putin made a “peace proposal” to Ukraine that sounded much like the Mariupol Plan. He offered a ceasefire if Ukraine would give up Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, including far more territory than Putin’s troops occupy, and abandon plans to join NATO.
On June 27, 2024, in a debate during which he insisted that he and he alone could get Gershkovich released, and then talked about Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Trump seemed to indicate he knew about the Mariupol Plan: “Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my—this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream.”
That plan reappeared in April and, once again, is back on the table.
At the same time, officials from this, the second Trump administration, are working to rewrite the history of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election that led to Trump’s first administration. Although it is well established that Russian operatives worked to elect Trump in 2016, Trump has consistently tried to undermine that history by insisting that the many findings of Russian help for his campaign in 2016 were a hoax.
Lately, MAGA loyalists have worked to claim that the real story of the 2016 campaign was not Russian support for the Trump campaign, but rather a Democratic conspiracy to push the story of the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia. On Wednesday, Warren P. Strobel of the Washington Post reported that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard last month overrode the advice of the Intelligence Community when she declassified and released a highly classified report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The document made reference to sensitive sources and methods, but Trump supported Gabbard’s release of the report.
White House officials appear to be revisiting the story of Russian interference in the 2016 election to try to distract voters from the story of Trump’s relationship to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Their pivot to this position has tied the two stories together in a way that had not previously been suggested. The surprising association has led Democratic political strategist Simon Rosenberg of Hopium Chronicles to speculate that Putin might possess “some form of the Epstein files” that Trump would prefer to keep from seeing the light of day.
Certainly, Putin is behaving like someone who is holding a strong hand of cards. Today Jennifer Jacobs, Margaret Brennan, and Olivia Gazis of CBS News reported that Putin “needle[d]” Trump this week by giving his special envoy Steve Witkoff the Order of Lenin, a Soviet-era award that commended outstanding service to the state, to pass on to the mother of 21-year-old American Michael Gloss, who was killed in 2024 fighting in Ukraine on behalf of Russia.
The journalists report that Gloss struggled with his mental health and did not appear to have been recruited by Russia. His family did not know he had enlisted in the Russian army or that he was in Ukraine.
Apparently, after he was killed, Russian officials learned that his mother, Juliane Gallina, serves at the CIA. By giving Witkoff an award named for the first head of the Soviet state to pass on to a CIA employee, Putin appeared to suggest that the Soviet Union had won the Cold War after all.
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Notes:
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/08/06/gabbard-russia-report-cia-trump/
Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections, ICA 2017-01D, January 6, 2017, at https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/magazine/russiagate-paul-manafort-ukraine-war.html
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/sites-default-files-documents-report-volume5.pdf (pp. vi, 99)
https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/dl (pp. 139–140)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yl6eegv63o
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/putin-award-order-of-lenin-american-ukraine/
Bluesky:
simonwdc.bsky.social/post/3lvwbdi4pas2j
profsaunders.bsky.social/post/3lvwgfbyhxs2a
realjakebroe.bsky.social/post/3lvweqrtpcs2p
August 7, 2025
August 7, 2025
At 7:22 this morning, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media: “I have instructed our Department of Commerce to immediately begin work on a new and highly accurate CENSUS based on modern day facts and figures and, importantly, using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024. People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Trump has no power to change the timing of the U.S. Census, which is mandated by the Constitution to take place every ten years.
He also has no power to declare that undocumented immigrants won’t be counted: the Constitution specifies that representatives “shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State.” MAGA turns sometimes to the Fourteenth Amendment’s exclusion of “Indians not taxed” from the count for representation as proof that lawmakers recognized that some people should be excluded from the census. But, in fact, “not taxed” identified a group of people who did not come under the purview of the United States government.
Just a year after the Civil War, lawmakers looked at the crisis caused by southern enslavers who had wielded outsized political power because the Constitution had allowed them to count enslaved Americans for purposes of representation and worried that a similar system would develop in the new states in the West. When they wrote the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866 (it was ratified in 1868), they explicitly excluded “Indians not taxed” out of concern that congressmen from the new western states would exercise more power than they should by counting the large numbers of Indigenous Americans who did not participate in the modern economy or have a say in the government. By excluding “Indians not taxed” explicitly, lawmakers demonstrated that they fully intended to include everyone else.
The U.S. government has always included “all persons” when taking the census.
Taking an accurate census suddenly is also not remotely possible. Setting one up takes most of the decade between them and costs close to $15 billion. Census officials are already working on the 2030 census.
Trump’s announcement is revealing, though, in two ways.
First, it shows how aware he and administration officials are that their program is deeply unpopular and that they expect to lose control of the House of Representatives in 2026 unless they rig the system. As Lisa Needham wrote today in Public Notice, “‘We stood aside so Trump could shutter vital agencies, take away your healthcare, and spend every last dime scooping up immigrants to help get Stephen Miller his 3,000 arrests a day’ is not exactly a rallying cry that will turn out voters.”
Republicans in Texas are trying to redistrict the state; Republicans in Indiana, Florida, and Ohio are considering the same tactic. Today, Adam Wren and Andrew Howard of Politico reported that Vice President J.D. Vance brought an entourage of White House officials with him to Indiana to pressure lawmakers there to redistrict the state, indicating just how important administration officials think redistricting is to keep control of the House. Now Trump has simply blurted out that he plans to change the game altogether and rig it to win.
But there is an even darker image behind destroying our democratic system. If undocumented immigrants aren’t counted, their districts will be shortchanged on representation and whatever federal monies are still available for states, for sure. But if undocumented immigrants aren’t counted, will they be easier to dehumanize? Already the government is taking people from the streets and denying their right to due process. Observers are describing human rights abuses in detention facilities where most of those incarcerated have no criminal record. If undocumented people are not officially recognized as existing, they could simply disappear.
Yesterday Adam Taylor, Hannah Natanson, and John Hudson of the Washington Post reported that, according to leaked drafts of the annual report on human rights from the State Department, the Trump administration plans to back away from criticizing El Salvador, Israel, and Russia for their extensive human rights abuses. In 2024, the State Department reported government-sanctioned killings, torture, and “harsh and life-threatening prison conditions” in El Salvador; the new report says there are “no credible reports of significant human rights abuses” in the country. Last year’s report for Israel was more than 100 pages; this year it is 25.
The State Department has also declared support for the end to presidential term limits in El Salvador. This change enables Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele, who allowed Trump to render Venezuelan immigrants to his infamous CECOT prison, to hold office indefinitely, establishing himself as a dictator. A spokesperson for the State Department said: “El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly was democratically elected to advance the interests and policies of their constituents. Their decision to make constitutional changes is their own. It is up to them to decide how their country should be governed.”
It is a truism that democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint.
But Americans are not simply accepting the administration’s reworking of American society. People congregating in the Indiana Statehouse today to protest redistricting met the news that Vance was in the building with resounding boos.
Last night, Trey Parker and Matt Stone skewered Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and ICE on South Park, and comedian Stephen Colbert went scorched earth on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., saying, among other things, that his cuts to vaccine research are “bad news for fans of living.”
The White House continues to try to put a lid on questions about the relationship between convicted sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein and Trump but is having little luck. After vehemently denying they had plans for a meeting last night to discuss responses to the Epstein issue, White House officials met last night after all, MSNBC reported. Those officials included Attorney General Pam Bondi and Federal Bureau of Investigation director Kash Patel.
Just after 12:00 a.m. Eastern Time today, Trump’s tariffs of at least 10% on products from other countries went into effect. As Josh Boak of the Associated Press reported, while Trump and administration officials continue to insist that Trump’s economic policies will create “unprecedented” growth, “there are signs of self-inflicted wounds to the U.S. as companies and consumers brace for the impact of the new taxes.”
Economic growth is slowing, job growth is stagnant, and prices are headed upward. Chao Deng and John Keilman of the Wall Street Journal reported today that rather than increasing as Trump claimed it would under his tariff regime, manufacturing activity in the U.S. has shrunk for most of Trump’s second term.
The one thing that appears to be going according to Trump’s wishes is his remaking of the White House. Trump’s new patio where the Rose Garden lawn used to be is finished. It now has café tables with yellow striped umbrellas. Brian Glenn of right-wing media outlet Real America’s Voice noted: “Very ‘Mar-A-Lago’ ish. Nice!”
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Notes:
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, August 7, 2025, 7:22 AM.
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-14/
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-105819
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/07/trump-new-census-00497025
Public NoticeThe GOP's gerrymandering frenzy is a sign of weaknessRead morea day ago · 329 likes · 26 comments · Lisa Needhamhttps://www.cnn.com/2025/08/06/world/el-salvador-eliminating-presidential-term-limits-intl-latam
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/07/entertainment/south-park-kristi-noem-trump-administration
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/07/vance-indiana-00497634
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