Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 14
September 3, 2025
September 3, 2025
[Please note that this post talks about sexual assault in the last four paragraphs.]
A Wall Street Journal–NORC poll released yesterday found that only 25% of Americans believe they have a good chance of improving their standard of living. Nearly 70% said it was no longer possible to work hard and get ahead. A majority of those polled said the generation before them had an easier time starting a business, buying a home, or staying at home to parent a child.
A different piece in the Wall Street Journal explained that there were 927 American billionaires in 2020 and 1,135 in 2024. Together, they are worth about $5.7 trillion. The 100 richest of the set control more than half of the total at about $3.86 trillion. As the number of billionaires grew, “supply side” economic policies in the U.S., designed to concentrate wealth at the top of the economy among investors rather than on the “demand side” made up of consumers, hollowed out the middle class. From 1975 to 2018, at least $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% to the top 1%.
Yet another piece in the Wall Street Journal, this one by Katherine Hamilton and Alison Sider, noted that consumer confidence is sliding. While wealthier Americans seem to be doing fine, they write, rising distress about the economy is obvious among the middle class: those making about $53,000 to $161,000 a year. Chief economist at Morning Consult John Leer told the reporters: “There was a period of time, briefly, where the middle-income consumer looked like they were being dragged up by all that was going well in the world. Then things fell off a cliff.”
In an interview with the Financial Times published yesterday, billionaire Ray Dalio, the founder of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, warned that the U.S. today looks a lot like “what happened around the world in the 1930–1940 period.” Dalio identified the policies of President Donald J. Trump as the sort of “strong autocratic leadership that sprang out of the desire to take control of the financial and economic situation” in the 1930s.
Trump’s rise in 2016 was fueled in part by his promise to defend those left behind in the supply-side economy. But he abandoned his economic promises with his 2017 tax cuts that benefited the wealthy and corporations far more than average Americans, and rallied his supporters with culture-war issues.
In 2024, Trump ran on the argument that Democrat Joe Biden had not adequately addressed inflation—although the U.S. managed the post-pandemic inflation spike better than any other developed economy—promising that he would make prices come down “immediately.” Instead, his tariffs and deportations have sent inflation upward again, and the budget reconciliation bill he forced through Congress is already pushing people off their healthcare insurance and threatening the survival of rural hospitals.
The law Trump and the Republicans dubbed the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act” is profoundly unpopular, with about two thirds of Americans opposed to it. So today, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio, and Trump political director James Blair met with Republican congress members to tell them that people will come to like the law if “they completely rebrand it and talk about it differently.”
The administration officials told the congress members, who have been hearing from constituents angry about the law’s deep spending cuts, that they should be pushing the idea that the law helps “working families.” Vice President J.D. Vance tried this last week in Wisconsin, and this afternoon, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) appeared to take that advice out for a spin, publicly referring to the law the same way Vance did: as the “working families tax cut act.”
The nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes that under the law, a family earning less than $50,000 a year would get less than $300 in tax cuts in 2027 while losing access to Medicaid and food assistance, while a filer earning more than $1 million would receive about $90,000 in tax breaks. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the 10% of Americans at the bottom of the economy will lose about $1,200 a year.
Trump’s policies are working well for his family, though. Angus Berwick of the Wall Street Journal reported that the Monday launch of their WLFI cryptocurrency netted them about $5 billion on paper. Today Eric Trump launched American Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency mining company; Kyle Khan-Mullins and Dan Alexander of Forbes reported today that he is now worth at least $3.2 billion.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to insist that he must have the powers of a dictator to make the country prosperous again. When a court found his use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to justify his sweeping tariffs was illegal, he said, “If you took away tariffs, we could end up being a third-world country,” although the U.S. was not a third-world country before Trump launched his tariff war in April. He has said he will take the case before the Supreme Court.
If he loses there, as Elisabeth Buchwald wrote for CNN, the U.S. might have to pay back more than $210 billion to the American businesses that have paid the tariffs. On Monday, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo pointed to a story Louise Matsakis and Zoë Schiffer of Wired reported in late July: Wall Street companies, including Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial services company run by the sons of billionaire commerce secretary Howard Lutnick since Lutnick joined the Trump administration, have been buying up the rights to collect tariff refunds if the tariffs are struck down.
Marshall notes that while making a bet on an uncertain outcome is a huge part of modern finance, the idea that a commerce secretary’s company is making bets on something the commerce secretary has significant authority over is a perfect symbol of the Trump era.
While the Trump family and loyalists cash in on their control of the government, Trump continues to assert that he requires authoritarian powers to “Make America Great Again.”
Trump has relied heavily on the Supreme Court’s defense of his leeway as the nation’s leader in foreign affairs, and after being stymied by the courts for its actions at home, the administration yesterday announced it had blown up a boat in international waters in the Caribbean with eleven people on it, alleging the boat was carrying illegal drugs to the United States from Venezuela. Although U.S. forces could have stopped the boat without destroying it and often do so, shooting at engines, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the boat posed an “immediate threat to the United States,” so the U.S. had the right to destroy it. Perhaps thinking it demonstrated power, the administration circulated a video of the strike.
Legal analyst Ryan Goodman wrote: “I worked at [the Department of Defense]. I literally cannot imagine lawyers coming up with a legal basis for [the] lethal strike of [a] suspected Venezuelan drug boat. Hard to see how this would not be "murder" or war crime under international law that DoD considers applicable.”
Notre Dame law professor Mary Ellen O’Connell told John Hudson, Samantha Schmidt, and Alex Horton of the Washington Post that the strike violated international law. “When the president decides this is a person who can be killed summarily, there’s no restraint on him,” she told the reporters. “It’s a very dangerous new move,” since he could decide to launch similar strikes within the United States in pursuit of those he calls drug traffickers.
Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said the strike was “deeply concerning,” noting that “[t]he administration has not identified the authority under which this action was taken, raising the question of its legality and constitutionality.” Smith added: “The lack of information and transparency from the administration is even more concerning. Does this mean Trump thinks he can use the U.S. military anywhere drugs exist, are sold, or shipped? What is the risk of dragging the United States into yet another military conflict?”
Legal analyst Joyce White Vance noted that the justification for the strike was dubious enough that even Rubio appeared to want a little distance from it, as he made a point of specifying that the U.S. acted “on the president’s orders.”
Trump has attempted to demonstrate authoritarian power with his military displays in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and yesterday he announced that “we’re going in” to Chicago, although he didn’t offer any specifics. After Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker rejected the idea the president could simply send troops, Trump appeared to back off, saying Pritzker should ask him for help. “When did we become a country where it’s OK for the U.S. president to insist on national television that a state should call him to beg for anything—especially something we don’t want?” Pritzker said. “Have we truly lost all sense of sanity in this nation, that we treat this as normal?”
A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll shows just 38% of Americans approve of Trump’s deployment of troops in Washington, D.C.
Trump has reason to be afraid of the American people for another reason, too: they want to see the files from the federal investigation of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, especially now that they know Trump is mentioned in those files. Speaker Johnson dismissed the House early for its August break this year to avoid having to deal with the demands of members for the release of the files, but now Congress is back in session and the demands are right back on the table. Trump has tried to stop Republicans from asking for the files by warning such a demand would be seen as a hostile act against the administration.
Today the administration arranged a military flyover during the visit of President Karol Nawrocki of Poland, in honor of a Polish army pilot killed in a training exercise. The flyover occurred just at the time more than 100 of the women who survived sexual grooming, assault, and rape in their association with Epstein and his associate, convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, spoke at a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol, drowning out their words.
But it did not silence the words of survivor Jess Michaels.
“For 27 years, I thought I was the only one that Jeffrey Epstein raped. I believed I was alone, and I was kept silent by the shame that was inside me and by the fear outside in the world,” she said. “But I wasn't the only one. None of us were. And what once kept us silent now fuels that fire and the power of our voices. We are not the footnotes in some infamous predator’s tabloid article. We are the experts and the subjects of this story. We are the proof that fear did not break us. And we don't just speak for ourselves, but for every survivor whose story is still unspoken…. This is what power looks like. Survivors united, voices joined, refusing to be dismissed. Know this: justice and accountability are not favors from the powerful. They are obligations, decades overdue. This moment began with Epstein's crimes, but it's going to be remembered for survivors demanding justice, demanding truth, demanding accountability, and we will not stop until survivor voices shape justice, transform culture, and define the future. We are no longer whispers. We are one powerful voice, too loud to ignore, and we will never be silenced again.”
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Notes:
https://www.wsj.com/economy/wsj-norc-economic-poll-73bce003
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/02/business/trump-us-autocracy-ray-dalio-intl
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/28/economy/trump-inflation-price-promises
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/09/01/medicaid-cuts-rural-maternity-care/
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/09/03/congress/trump-megabill-rebrand-midterms-00541138
https://www.commondreams.org/news/gop-medicaid-cuts-polls
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/us/politics/trump-tariffs-appeals-court-ruling-economy.html
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/03/economy/trump-tariff-refund
https://www.wired.com/story/cantor-fitzgerald-trump-tariff-refunds/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/09/03/us-strikes-venezuela-alleged-drug-boat/
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-vows-crime-chicago-fast-after-violent-labor/story?id=125181053
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/02/politics/illinois-governor-pritzker-trump-test
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/27/trump-national-guard-poll-00531862
https://www.justsecurity.org/119982/legal-issues-military-attack-carribean/
https://www.ft.com/content/b86bd33b-b3e7-4485-8b1c-6f01e639dd04
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/03/politics/transparency-epstein-trump-administration
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September 2, 2025
September 2, 2025
In the early hours of Sunday morning, in the middle of a three-day holiday weekend, the Trump administration attempted to take children out of government custody and ship them alone to their country of origin, Guatemala.
On Friday, Priscilla Alvarez of CNN broke the story that the administration was planning to move up to 600 children from the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), where they are held according to law until they can be released to a relative or a guardian living in the U.S. who can take care of them while their case for asylum in the U.S. is being processed.
ORR is an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. Its mission, according to its website, is to promote the health, well-being, and stability of refugees, unaccompanied alien children, and other eligible individuals and families, through culturally responsive, trauma-informed, and strengths-based services. Our vision is for all new arrivals to be welcomed with equitable, high-quality services and resources so they can maximize their potential.”
Alvarez notes that unaccompanied migrant children are considered a vulnerable population and are covered by the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. That law gives them enhanced protections and care, making sure they are screened to see if they have been trafficked or are afraid of persecution in the country they come from. Congress has specified that such children can be removed from the country only under special circumstances.
Nonetheless, the administration appears to have removed about 76 of these children from the custody of ORR—the only agency with legal authority to hold them—where they were waiting to be released to a relative or guardian, and transferred them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Once they were in ICE custody, the administration planned “to put them on flights to Guatemala, where they may face abuse, neglect, persecution, or even torture,” according to a U.S. court.
At about 1:00 in the morning, Eastern Time, on Sunday, August 31, advocates for the children filed a suit to prevent the administration from removing them. Shortly after 2:30 in the morning, Judge Sparkle Sooknanan got a phone call about the case, and by 4:00 she had issued an emergency order blocking the removal and scheduled a hearing for 3:00 that afternoon. She moved it up to 12:30 when she learned that the administration was already moving some children out of the country.
Legal analyst Anna Bower was on the call for the hearing and reported that Sooknanan said: “I got a call at 2:36 am because the government chose the wee hours of the morning on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend to execute a plan to move these children. That's why we're here. And I tried to reach the government. I have been up since then…and didn't reach anyone from the government until later this morning. And the imminence that the plaintiff claimed proved true, because, in fact, those planes *were* loaded. One actually took off and was returned. And so, absent action and intervention by the court, all of those children would have been returned to Guatemala, potentially to extremely dangerous situations.”
Some of the children were actually in a plane to be removed while the hearing was underway. Sooknanan required the government to report to her when each child was back in ORR custody. By noon Monday, according to the government’s lawyers, all the children were back in ORR custody.
The rush to deport children in the middle of the night on a holiday weekend, in apparent violation of the law, looked a great deal like the administration’s removal of undocumented immigrants from Venezuela to the notorious terrorist CECOT prison in El Salvador in March. At the time, President Donald J. Trump denied that he had signed the order invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act the administration used to justify the rendition of the men to El Salvador. “Other people handled it,” he said, even though his signature is on the document that appears in the Federal Register.
Trump’s apparent distance from that earlier removal comes to mind now because the other big story over Labor Day weekend was Trump’s relative disappearance from public view since last Tuesday. As Garrett Graff of Doomsday Scenario recorded, Trump, who normally talks to the press as often as possible, had no public appearances on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or Monday. Coming on top of Vice President J.D. Vance’s odd comment in an interview with USA Today last week that he was ready to be president if needed—“I’ve gotten a lot of good on-the-job training over the past 200 days,” he said—rumors flew. Over the weekend, “Is Trump dead?” was one of Google’s top searches.
Although he posted “NEVER FELT BETTER IN MY LIFE” on social media on Sunday, Trump continued to keep a long distance between himself and the press.
Trump appeared today in the Oval Office—an hour late—to announce he would move Space Force headquarters from Colorado to Alabama, apparently to put the rumors of his ill health to rest.
At the event, Trump referred to the recent court decision declaring many of his tariffs illegal, saying that “if you took away tariffs, we could end up being a third-world country.” In fact, the country’s economy has slowed significantly since Trump instituted his tariffs, and Trump’s agenda continues to take hits.
Yesterday, nine former directors of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who served under both Democratic and Republican presidents reaching back to President Jimmy Carter, published an op-ed in the New York Times warning that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “is endangering every American’s health.”
William Foege, William Roper, David Satcher, Jeffrey Koplan, Richard Besser, Tom Frieden, Anne Schuchat, Rochelle P. Walensky, and Mandy K. Cohen listed their concerns about Kennedy’s policies. He “has fired thousands of federal health workers and severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence and more,” they wrote.
“Amid the largest measles outbreak in the United States in a generation, he’s focused on unproven treatments while downplaying vaccines. He canceled investments in promising medical research that will leave us ill prepared for future health emergencies. He replaced experts on federal health advisory committees with unqualified individuals who share his dangerous and unscientific views. He announced the end of U.S. support for global vaccination programs that protect millions of children and keep Americans safe, citing flawed research and making inaccurate statements. And he championed federal legislation that will cause millions of people with health insurance through Medicaid to lose their coverage.”
Kennedy’s firing of CDC director Dr. Susan Monarez last Wednesday, a firing Trump approved, appears to have been the event that spurred the former directors to speak up as a group. They wrote that what Kennedy has done to the CDC and to public health in the U.S. since taking office is “unlike anything we had ever seen at the agency and unlike anything our country had ever experienced.”
The former CDC directors warned that the health of every American is at risk. They urged Congress to exercise its authority over the Department of Health and Human Services, state and local governments and private philanthropy to cover the funding Kennedy has killed, and physicians to support their patients, and they called upon all Americans to “look out for one another.”
A post on Trump’s social media account yesterday morning seemed to try to blame “Drug Companies” for “let[ting] everyone rip themselves apart, including Bobby Kennedy Jr. and CDC,” suggesting that administration officials are aware that there is a political backlash brewing over the administration’s assault on public health.
The administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, says the administration is deliberately “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” Today, more than 85 scientists released a joint review of the U.S. Department of Energy’s new climate report, saying it was “biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policymaking.”
Trump’s attempt to defend Russian president Vladimir Putin took another hit yesterday when Russia appeared to jam the GPS of an airplane carrying European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen to Bulgaria. The European Commission is the executive branch of the European Union, which has stood firm against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and continues to support Ukraine. Russia appears to have been jamming plane GPS in the airspace around the Baltic coast since it invaded Ukraine again in 2022 but denies it is doing so.
A source told the Financial Times that the pilots of the plane carrying von der Leyen had to land using paper maps.
Today, Judge Charles Breyer of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that Trump, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegesth, and the Department of Defense acted illegally when they used the Marines and the National Guard in Los Angeles, California. (As legal analyst Bower noted, whether their deployment of the military is legal is a separate case now pending before the Ninth Circuit.)
Judge Breyer noted that Congress had spoken clearly when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878, prohibiting the use of the U.S. military to execute domestic law. “Nevertheless,” the judge wrote, “at Defendants’ orders and contrary to Congress’s explicit instruction, federal troops executed the laws.” Evidence at trial showed that armed soldiers set up protective perimeters and traffic blockages, engaged in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrated a military presence in and around Los Angeles. “In short,” he concluded, the “Defendants violated the Posse Comitatus Act.”
Breyer noted that 300 troops still remain in Los Angeles, and he warned that Trump and Hegseth have “stated their intention to call National Guard troops into federal service in other cities across the country…thus creating a national police force with the President as its chief.” The judge prohibited the defendants “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.” Breyer stayed the order until noon on September 12 to give the administration time to appeal.
Yesterday, Americans turned out across the country to protest Trump and the administration, and popular anger at government overreach may be showing in the legal system as well. Six times now, federal grand juries have declined to indict defendants picked up in connection with Trump’s deployment of troops in Washington, D.C. Although right-wing media is slamming Judge James Boasberg today for releasing Nathalie Rose Jones after she made threats against Trump, a grand jury refused to indict her.
More famously, a grand jury last week refused to indict Sean Dunn, the former Justice Department paralegal who threw a submarine sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection officer. The government charged Dunn with felony assault, for which he would have faced up to eight years in prison if convicted. Although officers tackled Dunn at the scene, the government later posted a dramatic video of heavily armed law enforcement officers going to Dunn’s apartment to arrest him.
As Liz Oyer, a former pardon attorney for the Department of Justice, said: “What’s so extraordinary about this is it shows that we the citizens are the last line of defense for our democracy…and we the citizens are standing strong.”
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Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/29/politics/migrant-kids-guatemala-immigration
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-03-20/pdf/2025-04865.pdf
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/21/politics/trump-signature-alien-enemies-act-proclamation
https://www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/it-...
Donald Trump, Truth Social post, August 31, 2025 4:42 PM.
https://acf.gov/orr (accessed September 2, 2025).
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/opinion/cdc-leaders-kennedy.html
The BulwarkTrump’s Real Health Care ProblemStop us if you’ve heard this one before: Congress is staring down the barrel of a possible government shutdown unless it can pass a new funding bill by October 1. There’s just those small little matters of the Epstein files and Trump’s D.C. takeover to square away first…Read morea day ago · 716 likes · 316 comments · William Kristol, Andrew Egger, and Jim Swifthttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9d07z1439zo
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1r3-lNf45sTIuurKYpFUHla5oKrSc3nxV/view
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/02/nx-s1-5521384/energy-report-scientists-climate-change
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September 1, 2025
August 31, 2025
August 31, 2025
Almost one hundred and forty-three years ago, on September 5, 1882, workers in New York City celebrated the first Labor Day holiday with a parade. The parade almost didn’t happen: there was no band, and no one wanted to start marching without music. Once the Jewelers Union of Newark Two showed up with musicians, the rest of the marchers, eventually numbering between 10,000 and 20,000 men and women, fell in behind them to parade through lower Manhattan. At noon, when they reached the end of the route, the march broke up and the participants listened to speeches, drank beer, and had picnics. Other workers joined them.
Their goal was to emphasize the importance of workers in the industrializing economy and to warn politicians that they could not be ignored. Less than 20 years before, northern men had fought a war to defend a society based on free labor and had, they thought, put in place a government that would support the ability of all hardworking men to rise to prosperity.
By 1882, though, factories and the fortunes they created had swung the government toward men of capital, and workingmen worried they would lose their rights if they didn’t work together. A decade before, the Republican Party, which had formed to protect free labor, had thrown its weight behind Wall Street. By the 1880s, even the staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune complained about the links between business and government: “Behind every one of half of the portly and well-dressed members of the Senate can be seen the outlines of some corporation interested in getting or preventing legislation,” it wrote. The Senate, Harper’s Weekly noted, was “a club of rich men.”
The workers marching in New York City carried banners saying: “Labor Built This Republic and Labor Shall Rule It,” “Labor Creates All Wealth,” “No Land Monopoly,” “No Money Monopoly,” “Labor Pays All Taxes,” “The Laborer Must Receive and Enjoy the Full Fruit of His Labor,” ‘Eight Hours for a Legal Day’s Work,” and “The True Remedy Is Organization and the Ballot.”
The New York Times denied that workers were any special class in the United States, saying that “[e]very one who works with his brain, who applies accumulated capital to industry, who directs or facilitates the operations of industry and the exchange of its products, is just as truly a laboring man as he who toils with his hands…and each contributes to the creation of wealth and the payment of taxes and is entitled to a share in the fruits of labor in proportion to the value of his service in the production of net results.”
In other words, the growing inequality in the country was a function of the greater value of bosses than their workers, and the government could not possibly adjust that equation. The New York Daily Tribune scolded the workers for holding a political—even a “demagogical”—event. “It is one thing to organize a large force of…workingmen…when they are led to believe that the demonstration is purely non-partisan; but quite another thing to lead them into a political organization….”
Two years later, workers helped to elect Democrat Grover Cleveland to the White House. A number of Republicans crossed over to support the reformer, afraid that, as he said, “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”
In 1888, Cleveland won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes, but his Republican opponent, Benjamin Harrison, won in the Electoral College. Harrison promised that his would be “A BUSINESS MAN’S ADMINISTRATION” and said that “before the close of the present Administration business men will be thoroughly well content with it….”
Businessmen mostly were, but the rest of the country wasn’t. In November 1892 a Democratic landslide put Cleveland back in office, along with the first Democratic Congress since before the Civil War. As soon as the results of the election became apparent, the Republicans declared that the economy would collapse. Harrison’s administration had been “beyond question the best business administration the country has ever seen,” one businessmen’s club insisted, so losing it could only be a calamity. “The Republicans will be passive spectators,” the Chicago Tribune noted. “It will not be their funeral.” People would be thrown out of work, but “[p]erhaps the working classes of the country need such a lesson….”
As investors rushed to take their money out of the U.S. stock market, the economy collapsed a few days before Cleveland took office in early March 1893. Trying to stabilize the economy by enacting the proposals capitalists wanted, Cleveland and the Democratic Congress had to abandon many of the pro-worker policies they had promised, and the Supreme Court struck down the rest (including the income tax).
They could, however, support Labor Day and its indication of workers’ political power. On June 28, 1894, Cleveland signed Congress’s bill making Labor Day a legal holiday.
In Chicago the chair of the House Labor Committee, Lawrence McGann (D-IL), told the crowd gathered for the first official observance: “Let us each Labor day, hold a congress and formulate propositions for the amelioration of the people. Send them to your Representatives with your earnest, intelligent indorsement [sic], and the laws will be changed.”
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Notes:
https://www.dol.gov/general/laborday/history-daze
New York Times, September 6, 1882, p. 8.
New York Times, September 6, 1882, p. 4.
New York Daily Tribune, September 7, 1882, p. 4.
https://blogs.loc.gov/law/files/2011/09/S-730.pdf
https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1851-1900/The-first-Labor-Day/
August 30, 2025
August 30, 2025
Just days before Labor Day, a holiday designed to celebrate the importance and power of American workers in the United States, the Transportation Department cancelled $679 million in funding for offshore wind projects, and the Department of Energy announced it is withdrawing a $716 million loan guarantee to complete infrastructure for an offshore wind project in New Jersey.
These cancellations reflect President Donald J. Trump’s apparent determination to kill off wind and solar power initiatives and to force the United States to depend on fossil fuels. He refers to climate change as a “hoax,” says that windmills cause cancer, and falsely claims that renewable energy is more expensive than other ways to generate power. Former president Joe Biden made investing in clean energy a central pillar of his administration; Trump often seems to construct policies mostly to erase the legacies of his predecessors.
Reversing the shift toward renewable energy not only attacks attempts to address the crisis of climate change and boosts the fossil fuel industry on which some of Trump’s apparent allies depend, but also undermines a society based on the independence of American workers. In 2023, about 3.5 million Americans worked in jobs related to the renewable energy sector, and jobs in that sector grew at more than twice the rate of those in other sectors in what was a strong U.S. labor market. The production of coal, which Trump often points to as an ideal for American jobs, peaked in 2008. Between then and 2021, employment in coal mining fell by almost 60% in the East and almost 40% in the West, leaving a total of about 40,000 employees.
Another cut last week sums up the repercussions of the administration’s attack on renewable energy. On August 22 the Interior Department suddenly and without explanation stopped construction of a wind farm off the coast of Connecticut and Rhode Island that was 80% complete and was set to be finished early next year. As Matthew Daly of the Associated Press noted yesterday, Revolution Wind was the region’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm. It was designed to power more than 350,000 homes, provide jobs in Connecticut and Rhode Island, and enable Rhode Island to meet its goal of 100% renewable energy by 2033.
The Board of Directors of the Chamber of Commerce of Eastern Connecticut expressed their dismay at the decision, noting that Revolution Wind employed more than 1,000 local union workers and is part of a $20 billion investment in “American energy generation, port infrastructure, supply chain, and domestic shipbuilding and manufacturing across over 40 states” by Ørsted, a Danish multinational company.
“Stopping this fully permitted, important project without a clear stated reason not only seriously undermines the state’s efforts to work towards a carbon neutral energy supply but equally important it sends a message to investors from all over the world that they may want to rethink investing in America. The message resulting from the President’s action is a lack of trust, uncertainty, and lack of predictability,” they wrote.
Connecticut governor Ned Lamont and Rhode Island governor Dan McKee, both Democrats, are working together to save the project. In a statement, Lamont said: “We are working closely with Rhode Island to save this project because it represents exactly the kind of investment that reduces energy costs, strengthens regional production, and builds a more secure energy future—the very goals President Trump claims to support but undermines with this decision.”
“It’s an attack on our jobs,” McKee said. “It’s an attack on our energy. It’s an attack on our families and their ability to pay the bills.”
The Trump administration launched this attack on renewable energy at a time when electricity prices are bouncing upward. According to Ari Natter and Naureen S. Malik of Bloomberg, electricity prices jumped about 10% between January and May and are projected to rise another 5.8% next year. Trump has tried to blame those rising costs on renewable energy, but in the country’s largest grid, which stretches from Virginia to Illinois, nearly all the electricity comes from natural gas, coal, and nuclear reactors.
More to the point is that the region also has the world’s highest concentration of AI data centers, driving power demand—and costs—upward. At the same time, according to Natter and Malik, the infrastructure for transmission is too outdated to handle the amounts of electricity the data centers will need.
Trump’s cuts are adding stress to this already overburdened system. Over the next decade, they are projected to reduce additions to the electric grid by half compared to projections from before his cuts. In July, Ella Nilsen of CNN reported that cuts to renewable power generation, as well as to the tax credits that encouraged the development of more renewable power projects, are exacerbating the electrical shortage and driving prices up.
The Trump administration claims that relying on fossil fuels will jump-start the economy, but higher costs for electricity are already fueling inflation, and in the longer term, more expensive power will slow economic growth. In contrast, China has leaped ahead to dominate the global clean energy industry. Cheaper electricity there is expected to make it more attractive for future investment.
Renewable energy is crucial to addressing the existential crisis of climate change, but as former president Joe Biden emphasized, developing the sector was also key for building a strong middle class. Well-paying jobs, in turn, help to protect democracy.
Historically, a system in which local economies support small businesses and entrepreneurs promotes a wide distribution of political power. In contrast, extractive industries support a system that concentrates wealth and power in the hands of a few individuals. The extractive systems in the pre–Civil War American South, where cotton concentrated power and wealth, and later in the American West, where mining, cattle, and agribusiness did the same, nurtured political systems in which a few men controlled their regions.
As president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO Chrissy Lynch said in July after the Republicans passed the budget reconciliation bill cutting clean energy tax credits: “Working families shouldn’t have to purchase energy from billionaire oil tycoons and foreign governments or let them set the price of our energy bills.”
Her observation hit home earlier this week, when Joe Wallace, Costas Paris, Alex Leary, and Collin Eaton of the Wall Street Journal reported that the comments of Russian president Vladimir Putin and Trump at their meeting in Alaska on August 15 in which they talked about doing more business together were not vague goodwill. ExxonMobil and Russia’s biggest energy company, Rosneft, have been in secret talks to resume a partnership to extract Russian oil, including in the Arctic, that had been severed by Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022.
Lou Antonellis, the business manager of the Massachusetts International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 103, added that the cuts to renewable energy projects in the U.S. were not just cuts to funding. “[Y]ou’re pulling paychecks from working families, you’re pulling apprentices out of training facilities, you’re pulling opportunity straight out of our communities. Every solar panel installed, every wind turbine wired, every EV charger connected, that’s a job with wages, healthcare, and a pension that stands for dignity for the American worker. You don’t kill that kind of progress: you build on it.”
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Notes:
https://ctexaminer.com/2025/08/30/dangers-of-pulling-the-plug-on-revolution-wind/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/16/climate/china-us-wind-solar-energy-trump
https://citizensclimatelobby.org/blog/policy/how-clean-energy-creates-more-jobs/
https://www.energy.gov/eere/job-creation-and-economic-growth
https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/exxon-rosneft-russia-oil-talks-f524e81f
August 29, 2025
August 29, 2025
Chaos continues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where President Donald J. Trump stepped in on Wednesday night to support Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his crusade to fire recently-confirmed Susan Monarez when she refused to rubber stamp his attack on vaccines.
With her ouster, three top scientists at the CDC resigned: Chief Medical Officer Debra Houry, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases director Demetre Daskalakis, and National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases director Daniel Jernigan. “The CDC you knew is over,” Daskalakis said. “Unless someone takes radical action, there is nothing there that can be salvaged.”
On Thursday, CDC staff and supporters rallied outside the agency’s Atlanta headquarters, whose windows are still pocked with bullet holes from a terrorist who had become convinced the coronavirus vaccine had injured him, to honor the resigning leaders.
In place of Monarez, the White House has appointed as acting CDC director Jim O’Neill, a biotech investor close to billionaire Peter Thiel and a former speechwriter at the Department of Health and Human Services during the presidential term of George W. Bush. O’Neill has no training in either medicine or the science of infectious diseases. As Maanvi Singh and Robert Mackey of The Guardian reported, O’Neill supported the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to treat covid despite no evidence that they worked. He also has embraced conspiracy theories about covid online.
The administration’s chaos extends to the Social Security Administration (SSA), where the administration forced Chief Data Officer Charles Borges to resign today. Borges had acted as a whistleblower for the agency when he identified serious data breaches that leave more than 300 million Americans at risk of identity theft and loss of benefits. In his resignation letter, Borges noted that he was leaving involuntarily after the administration had made it impossible to perform his duties legally and ethically and had caused him “serious attendant mental, physical, and emotional distress.”
In his letter, Borges noted that he has “served this Country for almost my entire adult life, first as an Active-Duty Naval Officer for over 22 years, and now as a civil servant. I was deployed during 9/11, decorated for valor in combat during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and graduated from US Naval Test Pilot School. As a civil servant, I have served as a Presidential Innovation Fellow, in the Centers for Disease Control during COVID, within [the Office of Management and Budget] on the Federal [Chief Information Officer] Data Team, and now serve as the SSA Chief Data Officer. I have served in each of these roles with honor and integrity.”
Makena Kelly and David Gilbert of Wired reported that less than 30 minutes after Borges’s resignation hit the in-boxes of SSA staff, it disappeared.
The removal of dedicated civil servants for trying to protect the public extends to the Environmental Protection Agency, where tonight the Trump administration fired at least seven employees for signing a letter criticizing the agency’s leadership for undermining “the EPA mission of protecting human health and the environment.” The firings are, Amudalat Ajasa of the Washington Post noted, “an escalation of the administration’s effort to clamp down on dissent within the federal bureaucracy.”
“The Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career officials using their agency position and title to unlawfully undermine, sabotage, and undercut the will of the American public that was clearly expressed at the ballot box last November,” an EPA spokesperson said. But, increasingly, it seems obvious that the administration is claiming a mandate for policies that voters did not intend to endorse.
That includes the outing last week of an undercover intelligence officer, which has in the past been enough to lead to an indictment of an administration official. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released the name of a senior undercover Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer when she published a list of 37 current and former officials from whom she was stripping security clearances. Brett Forrest of the Wall Street Journal reported that Gabbard did not consult with the CIA before posting the list on X. At the time, Gabbard said she was acting on Trump’s orders.
Andrew Egger of The Bulwark took a step back today to look at the general operating system of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) part of the Trump administration and noted that it has always operated by throwing out wild conspiracies while actual scientists try to do the work of protecting America’s public health. Now, he notes, Kennedy and MAHA are the dog that caught the car. Faced with creating the new system that they promised voters would keep them healthier, they are flailing. Their key public-health report relied on fake studies concocted by AI, and Kennedy has slashed through advisory bodies and is currently limiting access to covid vaccines, all while the administration’s budget reconciliation bill is forcing people off health care insurance. Kennedy recently mused wildly about watching children in airports and realizing they have mitochondrial challenges.
Egger’s observation about MAHA fits MAGA as a whole. Trump and his ilk have spent years carping about how poorly the government is working and how much better they would be doing if they were the ones in charge. Voters gave them what they asked for, and now they appear to be unwilling or unable to do the actual work of governing. Instead, Trump and his cronies are simply declaring emergencies and then announcing policies they claim will address those emergencies. When their policies backfire or raise opposition, they claim they are being sabotaged by the deep state or that statistics are wrong.
This morning, the White House budget office announced it was unilaterally cancelling $4.9 billion in foreign aid funding passed by Congress. The Office of Management and Budget is overseen by director Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025, the plan from right-wing institutions led by the Heritage Foundation designed to decimate the modern U.S. government and replace it with Christian nationalism.
The Constitution gives to Congress alone the power of spending money, and the executive branch has no authority to refuse to spend that money. Vought has argued that because the law permits the president to send to Congress a request to stop spending on certain items and gives Congress 45 days to consider the request, Trump can send a request with fewer than 45 days left before the end of the fiscal year and consider the request rubber stamped.
Both Republican Susan Collins of Maine and Democratic Patty Murray of Washington, who are the top two lawmakers on the Senate Appropriations Committee, reject the move. Collins called it “a clear violation of the law.” Murray called it a “brazen attempt to usurp” the power of Congress.
Another major area in which Trump has simply done as he wished without regard for the law or economic reality is tariffs. The U.S. Constitution gives exclusively to Congress the power to impose tariffs, but in 1977, Congress passed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, often abbreviated as IEEPA, delegating to the president the power to adjust tariffs in times of national emergency. On February 1, Trump declared such a national emergency to impose tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico, and on April 2 he again invoked it for new blanket tariffs.
Congress could have ended Trump’s power over tariffs by cancelling the national emergency, a step Democrats were willing to take. But Republicans in the House used a procedural rule to make sure that Democrats could not cancel that emergency. A challenge to the president’s declaration of a national emergency must come to the floor for a vote within 18 days of the challenge. The House defanged that rule by declaring that each day for the rest of the congressional session will not “constitute a day for purposes…of the National Emergencies Act.”
Importers hit by the tariffs sued, along with Democratic-led states, and in May a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that President Donald J. Trump’s sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs were illegal. The IEEPA has “meaningful limits,” it wrote, and “an unlimited delegation of tariff authority would be unconstitutional.” “Congress manifestly is not permitted to abdicate or to transfer to other the essential legislative functions with which it is thus vested,” the court wrote. It blocked the tariffs Trump imposed under the IEEPA. The administration appealed.
Today, by a 7–4 majority, a federal appeals court upheld the decision, striking down Trump’s use of emergency powers to impose tariffs. “[W]e conclude Congress, in enacting IEEPA, did not give the President wide-ranging authority to impose” sweeping tariffs, noting that such an authorization would mean “Congress had bestowed on a federal agency the taxing power.” Such an authorization would be “a sharp break with our traditions.”
The decision will not take effect until October 14 to allow the administration to appeal to the Supreme Court. For his part, Trump seemed to think the court would bend to his will, which is, in turn, based on an ideology that the last few months have proven demonstrably wrong. Shortly after the decision came down, Trump posted on social media:
“ALL TARIFFS ARE STILL IN EFFECT! Today a Highly Partisan Appeals Court incorrectly said that our Tariffs should be removed, but they know the United States of America will win in the end. If these Tariffs ever went away, it would be a total disaster for the Country. It would make us financially weak, and we have to be strong. The U.S.A. will no longer tolerate enormous Trade Deficits and unfair Tariffs and Non Tariff Trade Barriers imposed by other Countries, friend or foe, that undermine our Manufacturers, Farmers, and everyone else. If allowed to stand, this Decision would literally destroy the United States of America. At the start of this Labor Day weekend, we should all remember that TARIFFS are the best tool to help our Workers, and support Companies that produce great MADE IN AMERICA products. For many years, Tariffs were allowed to be used against us by our uncaring and unwise Politicians. Now, with the help of the United States Supreme Court, we will use them to the benefit of our Nation, and Make America Rich, Strong, and Powerful Again! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
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Notes:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/28/monarez-cdc-vaccines-rfk-trump-00533358
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/28/jim-oneill-cdc-profile?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
The BulwarkCamelot for CraziesNo newsletter Monday—enjoy the holiday. Happy Friday…Read morea day ago · 570 likes · 313 comments · William Kristol, Andrew Egger, and Jim Swifthttps://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cafc.23105/gov.uscourts.cafc.23105.159.0_1.pdf
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, August 29, 2025, 6:10 PM.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/08/29/epa-dissent-letter-employees-fired/
https://www.wired.com/story/charles-borges-resignation-email-disappearance/
https://www.advocate.com/politics/demetre-daskalakis-cdc-resignation-interview
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-28/trump-s-global-tariffs-blocked-by-us-trade-court
https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-trade-court-0392dbd59f548e49ad4f64254ae3f94a
https://www.cit.uscourts.gov/sites/cit/files/25-66.pdf
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-04-08-can-congress-take-back-tariff-authority-from-trump/
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