Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 14
August 2, 2025
August 1, 2025
Economists have been expressing concern about the accuracy of economic statistics coming out of the Trump administration for months. Cuts to the staff at agencies that collect data have meant that the consumer price index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, contains far more estimates of values than it did before the cuts.
With that warning, today’s jobs report packed a one-two punch.
The numbers showed that employers added only 73,000 jobs in July, way below the 115,000 economists had predicted. The numbers also showed that the jobs reports for May and June had significantly overestimated the new jobs added in those months. The department revised May’s original estimate of 144,00 down to 19,000, and June’s original estimate of 147,000 down to just 14,000. As Julien Berman of the Washington Post noted, that’s a decrease of almost 90%.
The numbers show that while the job numbers have looked good, in fact the economy has been weakening for months. Trump’s high tariffs and the chaos surrounding them appear to have slowed growth almost immediately. The only sector adding a lot of new jobs is healthcare, which is not as exposed to trade policy as other sectors. In contrast, hiring in manufacturing fell to a 9-year low in May.
Predictably, Trump lashed out.
Although U.S. statistics have been widely seen as the nonpartisan gold standard, Trump claimed that the commissioner of labor statistics, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, had manipulated the jobs report. “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” he wrote. He fired her.
Trump also insisted the head of the Federal Reserve, his own appointee Jerome Powell, should be “put ‘out to pasture.’” Powell has steadfastly refused to lower interest rates to pump money into the economy as Trump wants. Trump has no legal power to fire the Federal Reserve chair without cause, and lately has appeared to be trying to manufacture a cause by suggesting a remodeling of the agency’s headquarters has been wasteful.
“But,” he wrote, “the good news is, our Country is doing GREAT!”
That assurance sounded a little desperate. Today’s job numbers showing that Trump’s tariff war is hurting the economy arrived just hours after Trump announced the new tariff rates he will be imposing on other countries, although he pushed the start of the levies off until August 7 so Customs and Border Protection can prepare.
The jobs report, firing of the commissioner of labor statistics, and tariff announcement all worked together to drive the stock market downward. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1.23%, the S&P 500 fell 1.60% and the Nasdaq Composite fell 2.24%.
Tonight, Trump wrote that Powell “should resign.”
The jobs report seems to have come as a shock to Trump, who appears to have been absorbed by the growing scandal of his connections to convicted sexual assaulter Jeffrey Epstein. News broke today that officials from the Federal Bureau of Prisons had quietly moved Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell from the Florida prison where she was being held while she served a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking to a new minimum-security prison camp in Texas. According to Michael Kosnar and Raquel Coronell Uribe of NBC News, the Bureau of Prisons’s own designation policy makes Maxwell ineligible for transfer to a minimum-security prison camp because she is a convicted sex offender. The only person who can grant a waiver to that policy is the administrator of the Bureau of Prisons Designation and Sentence Computation Center.
It seems likely that Trump had the jobs report and the Epstein case in mind when, shortly before 1:00 Eastern Time this afternoon, he posted: “Based on the highly provocative statements of the Former President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, who is now the Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, I have ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that. Words are very important, and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols points out that Medvedev is little more than an internet troll at this point and that U.S. submarines carrying nuclear warheads routinely travel through the world’s oceans (all American submarines are nuclear powered, Nichols notes). Trump’s threat is unlikely to spark a nuclear crisis, Nichols writes, “at least not this time.” But it is reckless, he adds.
“Trump knows that a foreign-policy crisis, and anything involving nuclear weapons, is an instant distraction from other news,” Nichols writes. “The media will always zero in on such moments, because it is, in fact, news when the most powerful man on Earth starts talking about nuclear weapons…. Nuclear-missile submarines are not toys,” he points out. Previous presidents were sober and careful in how they talked about nuclear weapons. But now, Trump “has initiated a new era in which the chief executive can use threats regarding the most powerful weapons on Earth to salve his ego and improve his political fortunes.”
But if his threat against Russia was intended as a distraction, it didn’t work. “I can’t believe what I just saw,” Peter Mallouk, president and chief investment officer of Creative Planning, told Jeff Cox of CNBC. “This is not healthy,” he added. “We can’t have a set of numbers come out and fire somebody that served under numerous administrations in various roles because you don’t like the numbers.”
Trump’s attempts to draw attention away from the news might have raised awareness of another issue, though. Chris Truax, an appellate lawyer who served as Southern California chair for John McCain’s 2008 primary campaign, noted that Trump’s wild stories, inability to understand numbers, and inability to place events correctly into a timeline are key signs of dementia. Truax published an article in The Hill today, titled: “Trump’s mental decline is undeniable—so what now?”
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Notes:
https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/07/28/federal-data-has-been-disappearing-under-trump
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/11/business/jobs-trump-tariffs-manufacturing
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/08/01/erika-mcentarfer-trump-tariffs-jobs-unemployment/
Donald Trump, Truth Social post, August 1, 2025, 2:09 p.m.
Donald Trump, Truth Social post, August 1, 2025, 3:44 PM.
Donald Trump, Truth Social post, August 1, 6:05 PM
Donald Trump, Truth Social post, August 1, 2025, 12:53 PM
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1ljlvg1e7eo
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn93e12rypgo
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/01/business/economy/trump-tariffs-stock-markets-trade-dollar.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czd049y2qymo
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/08/trump-nuclear-threat/683748/
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/01/trump-erika-mcentarfer-jobs-report-fired.html
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/5429516-trump-confabulation-dementia-signs/
Bluesky:
rpsagainsttrump.bsky.social/post/3lve76yfesk2n
paleofuture.bsky.social/post/3lvenzgvbr22d
smotus.bsky.social/post/3lvecomjwtc2c
August 1, 2025
July 31, 2025
July 31, 2025
On Monday, at a meeting with U.K. prime minister Keir Starmer in Scotland, President Donald Trump boasted that he was solving all the world’s problems: “I’ve stopped six wars in the last—I'm averaging about a war a month. But the last three were very close together. India and Pakistan, and a lot of them. Congo was just and Rwanda was just done, but you probably know I won't go into it very much, because I don't know the final numbers yet. I don't know. Numerous people were killed, and I was dealing with two countries that we get along with very well, very different countries from certain standpoints. They've been fighting for 500 years, intermittently, and we solved that war. You probably saw it just came out over the wire, so we solved it….”
Yesterday, as Jeff Tiedrich noted, he promised he would fix the United States as well. “I think we’re gonna have the richest economy you’ve ever seen. We have money coming in that we’ve never even thought about, at numbers that nobody’s ever seen before. We have a deal with Japan where they're going to pay us $550 billion. We have a deal with Europe where they're doing 750 billion plus 400 billion, plus 300 billion, and many other countries.”
Today the administration announced that Trump is adding a 90,000-square-foot event space to the White House. The White House itself, excluding the East Wing and the West Wing, is about 55,000 square feet. Groundbreaking for the new ballroom, which will replace the East Wing, is supposed to start in September, although it is not clear who picked the architects or the design. The administration says Trump and private donors will fund the building, which is estimated to cost around $200 million.
The announcement says that “[f]or 150 years, Presidents, Administrations, and White House Staff have longed for a large event space on the White House complex that can hold substantially more guests than currently allowed.” Traditionally, the White House has been called “The People’s House” because it symbolizes that the government belongs not to the temporary inhabitant of the building but to the American people.
And yet it seems as if rather than representing the people’s government, Trump is trying to turn that historic building into the kind of property in which he is comfortable, something like Mar-a-Lago, where he can host parties in a big gold room.
It certainly doesn’t seem as if much governance is going on in Trump’s White House. As Josh Marshall pointed out today in Talking Points Memo, when the head of the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy resigned today, it turned out that the White House had never formally appointed him in the first place. Marshall added: “We’re six months into this administration and it wasn’t even clear whether this guy was ever in the position at all…. And now he’s gone from the position…that he may or may not have held. This is the state of things from the very top to the very bottom of this administration. And the impact of that is bleeding out into every aspect of the society and economy."
Trump’s claim that he has ended six wars is pure fantasy, and as for his boasts that Europe and Japan are going to pay huge sums of money to the U.S.—which is not actually how trade deals work—the European Union and the U.S. have already published different versions of what was in the agreement between them, although that agreement itself was only preliminary.
Economist Paul Krugman wrote yesterday that the European Union appears to have promised private investments of $600 billion in the U.S.—an empty promise because the government cannot compel private investment—and pledged to buy $750 billion of U.S. energy, mostly from oil and gas, over three years. Krugman calls this pledge nonsense. Among other things, it would require significant increases in infrastructure capabilities, which couldn’t be built in three years even if anyone wanted to, which is unlikely given that Europe is switching to renewable energy quickly.
There also seems to be significant daylight between what Trump is claiming and what Japan says about their agreement, which was thrown together in just over an hour on Tuesday. Japan’s negotiator said the $550 billion investment was not “a target or commitment” but an upper limit, and Japanese officials said that “no written agreement with Washington” was made—“and no legally binding one would be drawn up.”
Meanwhile, Trump appears to be trying to exert his will by fiat, announcing new tariff rates tonight just hours before the self-imposed deadline of August 1. Today, after a federal appeals court heard a challenge to Trump’s tariffs on the grounds that Congress, not the president, is the only body the Constitution empowers to enact tariffs, the White House announced a base tariff rate of 10% on countries to which the U.S. exports more goods than it imports, with a 15% rate for countries that export more to the U.S. than they import. About a dozen countries—including Canada—will have even higher rates.
Before Trump started his trade war, U.S. tariff levies stood at about 2.4%.
Part of Trump’s determination to demonstrate his power is likely coming from the continuing unraveling of his involvement in the affairs of late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. On Tuesday, Trump seemed to try to cast himself as the protector of girls from Epstein, but his suggestion that he had turned on his friend after Epstein had hired 16-year-old Virginia Giuffre away from Mar-a-Lago in 2000 immediately attracted attention to the actual timeline of the friendship between the two men. It showed that their friendship lasted quite a bit longer. In fact, it was in 2002 that Trump told New York Magazine that Epstein was a “[t]errific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side."
Members of Giuffre’s family said in a statement yesterday: “It was shocking to hear President Trump invoke our sister and say that he was aware that Virginia had been ‘stolen’ from Mar-a-Lago. It makes us ask if he was aware of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal actions, especially given his statement two years later that his good friend Jeffrey 'likes women on the younger side…no doubt about it.’ We and the public are asking for answers; survivors deserve this.”
Tonight Trump told reporters he doesn’t know why Epstein was taking girls from Mar-a-Lago.
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Notes:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/sic-transit-16
Paul Krugman, “Fossil Fool, How Europe took Trump for a ride,” Paul Krugman, July 30, 2025.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/white-house-state-ballroom-east-wing-trump/
https://newrepublic.com/post/198469/trump-trade-deal-japan-falling-apart-joint-investments
Jeff Tiedrich, “shh! don’t wake the sleeping fuckwit, presidenting is hard,” everyone is entitled to my own opinion, July 31, 2025.
https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/trade-deadline-tariffs-trump-deals#cmds03d9n00053b6tmsyjlxhg
https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/trade-deadline-tariffs-trump-deals#cmds0clsz0000356toc8am68m
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr5rm7v5166o
Bluesky:
beyerstein.bsky.social/post/3lva47s6j2c2x
onestpress.onestnetwork.com/post/3lv4tewlzps2s
YouTube:
July 30, 2025
July 30, 2025
On July 2, 2024, just about a year ago, president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation Kevin Roberts told the listeners of Steve Bannon’s War Room webcast: “[W]e are going to win. We’re in the process of taking this country back.” Roberts pointed to the Supreme Court’s decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States the day before giving the president absolute immunity for committing crimes while engaging in official acts.
“That Supreme Court ruling yesterday on immunity is vital, and it's vital for a lot of reasons,” Roberts said, adding that the nation needs a strong leader because “the left has taken over our institutions.” “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution,” he said, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Roberts was the man who organized Project 2025, the blueprint for a new kind of government dictated by a right-wing strongman. Creating that new government would require a president willing to act illegally, stripping the secular language of civil rights from public life, packing the government with loyalists, ending the social safety net, killing business regulations, and purging American institutions of all but right-wing ideologues.
When Americans learned about Project 2025, they hated it. An NBC News poll from September 2024 showed that only 4% of Americans saw the project favorably. Even among Republicans, that number climbed only to 7%. For those identifying as MAGA Republicans, the number rose to just 9%.
So Trump and his campaign advisors denied that he had anything to do with the plan. “I know nothing about Project 2025,” he wrote on social media in July. “I have no idea who is behind it.”
And yet six months into the second Trump administration, on the sixtieth anniversary of the law that symbolized the modern American state by establishing Medicare and Medicaid, it’s clear we are indeed in a revolution designed to destroy the government we have known in favor of the radical right-wing government envisioned by those who wrote Project 2025.
From the beginning, the administration declared war on the words that protected equal rights for all Americans, fired women and racial minorities from leadership positions, and attacked transgender Americans. It worked to replace civil servants with loyalists who embraced the tenets of Project 2025, putting people like former Fox News host Pete Hegseth at the head of government agencies. Yesterday Greg Jaffe and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that in a break with past practices, Hegseth, now secretary of defense, is requiring nominees for four-star general positions in the U.S. military to meet personally with Trump.
It worked to dismantle the government by refusing to release the money Congress had appropriated to fund the existing government. Thanks to billionaire Elon Musk at the “Department of Government Efficiency” and Russell Vought—another author of Project 2025—at the Office of Management and Budget, the administration illegally impounded funds, slashing through funding for foreign aid, cancer research, veterans’ benefits, air traffic control staffing, and so on, claiming to be eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” That fight is ongoing.
But while it shrank government programs that helped ordinary people—programs like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—as part of their claim to be returning power to the states, the administration did not shrink the government itself. Instead, it dramatically expanded the government’s capacity to arrest and detain undocumented migrants.
The administration set out to purge the country of what extremists claimed was “leftist” influence in law firms, media, and universities. It illegally blocked lawyers from law firms that represented Democrats from access to federal buildings, making it impossible for them to represent their clients. It sued media outlets for alleged bias, and it withheld congressionally appropriated funds for universities for alleged antisemitism.
Last week, in order to obtain the Federal Communications Commission's approval of an $8 billion merger between CBS parent company Paramount and Skydance Media, Skydance agreed not to set up programs related to civil rights, or “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and to produce “unbiased” journalism. Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr approved the merger, then bragged on right-wing media shows that CBS has agreed to put in place an internal political “bias monitor” who will report to the president of Paramount to make sure the channel’s news coverage is favorable to Trump and the right wing.
Last week, after Columbia University agreed to pay $221 million and to promise it will not use “race, color, sex, or national origin” in hiring decisions in exchange for the government’s restoring the $1.3 billion in funding the administration had withheld over charges of antisemitism, Trump’s education secretary Linda McMahon told Maria Bartiromo of the Fox News Channel: “[T]his is a monumental victory for conservatives who’ve wanted to do things on these elite campuses for a long time because we had such far left leaning professors.”
On Monday the Office of Personnel Management issued a memo allowing federal employees to pray publicly at work, as well as to try to “persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views.”
The administration has worked to dismantle the regulations that protect Americans by using artificial intelligence to slash regulations in half by next January. With the blessing of the Supreme Court, Trump has claimed the power to fire the heads of independent agencies, effectively giving him power over agencies created by Congress.
Yesterday the administration took its fight against public protections a leap further when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a new rule that would get rid of a rule in place since 2009 establishing, on the basis of scientific evidence, that the emission of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane warms the planet and thus endangers human life. Most of the vehicle, factory, and power plant emissions standards currently in place come from this “endangerment finding.”
EPA officials told Lisa Friedman of the New York Times they intend to argue that it is climate regulations, rather than greenhouse gas emissions, that cause the real harm to human health because they lead to higher prices and less consumer choice.
As Roberts said, the Supreme Court’s decision giving Trump immunity was important because destroying the country’s institutions would require lawbreaking. In nothing has that been so clear as in the administration’s handling of the rendering of undocumented migrants to third countries. Whistleblowers from the Department of Justice claim that DOJ official Emil Bove told DOJ attorneys they could ignore court orders stopping migrant flights, saying they should consider telling the courts “f*ck you.”
Last night, the Senate confirmed Bove to a federal judgeship, with 50 Republicans voting in favor. Forty-seven Democrats voted no. They were joined by Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who said: “I don’t think that somebody who has counseled other attorneys that you should ignore the law, you should reject the law, I don’t think that that individual should be placed in a lifetime seat on the bench.”
But Thom Tillis (R-NC) voted in favor of Bove’s confirmation, illustrating that even those Republicans who have put distance between themselves and Trump are enabling the revolution in our government.
Republicans in Congress have enabled the dismantling of the country’s social safety net with dramatic cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program while also extending significant tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and pouring money into purges of undocumented migrants. Today Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told an audience at an event for the right-wing media outlet Breitbart that the new “Trump accounts” established by the budget reconciliation bill are “a backdoor for privatizing Social Security.”
Congress’s unwillingness to stand against Trump shows most dramatically in its reluctance to reassert the power the Constitution gives to it—and only to it—over tariffs. Trump has fought his tariff war only by asserting emergency power, but he has used that power to change world trade and to punish countries like Brazil for its prosecution of Trump’s political ally, former president Jair Bolsonaro. Tomorrow, the day before the August 1 deadline on which most of Trump’s tariffs will go into effect, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit will weigh in on whether those tariffs are legal.
When Kevin Roberts announced a year ago that the radical right was launching a second American revolution, he was telling the truth. But the new world they want to bring to life seems no more popular now than it was then.
And now the growing scandal around President Donald J. Trump’s connections to late convicted sex predator Jeffrey Epstein shows that the MAGA movement is apparently willing to accept the sexual abuse of children in order to cement their worldview.
Yesterday Trump tried to cast himself as a sort of protector when he claimed that he turned against Epstein because Epstein “stole people that worked for me.” When asked if those employees were young women, Trump answered “yes” and that they were hired “out of the spa” he ran. He said one of those girls was Virginia Giuffre, who was sex trafficked as a teenager by Ghislaine Maxwell and died by suicide earlier this year. Although Trump’s timeline did not add up—Guiffre left her job at Mar-a-Lago in 2000 and the friendship between the two men continued for several more years—the story itself suggests what’s on his mind. Today, a reporter asked Trump about those girls: “What did you think Epstein was stealing those women for?”
Today Dan Ruetenik of CBS News issued a detailed report on the video from outside Epstein’s jail cell that the DOJ has released as proof he died by suicide. A government source told Ruetenik that the released video is not raw footage—confirming a report by Dhruv Mehrotra of Wired on July 15—and that it is two videos stitched together. Ruetenik reported that the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, and the DOJ inspector general all possess the longer video.
And perhaps there is also a story about Project 2025’s staying power in the fact that this damning report dropped less than a week after Trump officials celebrated their control over CBS.
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/21/magazine/heritage-foundation-kevin-roberts.html
https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/what-is-project-2025-and-why-is-it-alarming/
https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/03/us/politics/heritage-foundation-2025-policy-america.html
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/here-we-are-2
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/29/us/politics/generals-trump.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/28/trump-federal-employees-preach-faith-work-00480696
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/25/nx-s1-5479240/columbia-trump-administration-settlement-details
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/business/media/fcc-skydance-merger-paramount.html
https://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/supreme-court-puts-humphreys-executor-on-death-bed/
American CrisisAmerican Crisis exclusive: The 'Media Capitulation Index'If you’ve been paying attention to the news lately, you know that the media has been on a capitulation-and-kowtowing spree…Read more2 days ago · 327 likes · 70 comments · Margaret Sullivanhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/climate/epa-endangerment-finding-rescind.html
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/27/politics/justice-department-official-second-whistleblower
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/senate-emil-bove/
https://thehill.com/newsletters/the-gavel/5426300-trumps-tariffs-back-in-court/
https://www.wired.com/story/the-fbis-jeffrey-epstein-prison-video-had-nearly-3-minutes-cut-out/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyvn7ee3539o
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/29/trump-epstein-virginia-giuffre-mar-a-lago-spa/
Meidas+The Epstein Crisis No One ControlsGuest article by Michael Cohen…Read more18 hours ago · 855 likes · 130 comments · Michael Cohen and MeidasTouch Networkhttps://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-jail-video-investigation/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/07/26/doge-ai-tool-cut-regulations-trump/
https://www.cms.gov/about-cms/who-we-are/history
Bluesky:
atrupar.com/post/3lupiv74kmm2n
July 29, 2025
July 29, 2025
Trying to take some time off this summer, and after a bunch of work calls this morning, decided that today was too good a day to stay on the land. Found these boats on the back side of the island.
I'm going to head to bed early tonight. Will see you tomorrow.
July 28, 2025
July 28, 2025
Today’s theme seems to be Republican leadership digging into positions that are directly contradicted by facts.
On Sunday, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported that the price tag for renovating the “free” Boeing 747-8 President Donald J. Trump accepted from Qatar appears to be close to a billion dollars of taxpayer money. The reporters explored a “mysterious, $934 million transfer of funds” from a program to modernize the country’s ground-based nuclear missiles to an unnamed classified project. Air Force officials told them privately that the transfer is for upgrading the plane for use as Air Force One.
Yale historian Joanne Freeman posted: “He’s using our money to buy himself a gift. A billion dollar gift.”
Over the weekend, Trump called for musician Beyoncé to be prosecuted for breaking the law by taking $11 million for endorsing Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris in October 2024, and for Harris to be prosecuted for paying that sum. But this simply never happened.
CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale explained yesterday that this is a made-up story Trump apparently got from social media. The Harris campaign covered $165,000 of the costs connected to Beyoncé’s appearance, as required by law, but a spokesperson said they did not pay celebrity endorsers (although there is no federal law prohibiting such payments). Dale says there is no evidence for Trump’s $11 million claim.
And then there is the case of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
On Sunday, Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) appeared on CNN’s State of the Union and repeatedly insisted that it was the Obama administration in 2009 that allowed sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to avoid serious federal charges by agreeing to a “sweetheart plea deal.” But it wasn’t.
As CNN’s Jake Tapper reminded him, the agreement was drafted in 2007 and signed in 2008, under President George W. Bush. Mullin continued to try to rope the Democrats into the story of the deal, but Tapper reiterated: “the point is, the ‘sweetheart deal,’ which was completed in 2008, was under the Bush administration.” Tapper also reminded Mullin that Trump made Alex Acosta, the U.S. attorney who backed the extraordinary leniency for Epstein, his secretary of labor during Trump’s first term.
Today, at a press opportunity in Scotland, where Trump is opening a new golf course on one of his properties, Trump told a reporter that he hasn’t “been overly interested” in the case…it's a hoax that's been built up way beyond proportion. I can say this, those files were run by the worst scum on Earth. They were run by [former FBI director James] Comey, they were run by [former attorney general Merrick] Garland. They were run by [former president Joe] Biden, and all of the people that actually ran the government, including the autopen. Those files were run for four years by those people.” Then he suggested that Democrats have doctored the Epstein files with fake information to smear him.
Far from quieting questions about his involvement with Epstein, this line of argument seems to confirm that he knows there is something bad in the files and is trying to spin it before it might come to light.
Today, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, demanded that the Department of Justice produce all the recordings and transcripts of the July 24 and 25 meetings between DOJ officials and convicted sex trafficker and Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell. He also demanded that the DOJ commit that it would not offer either a pardon or to commute Maxwell’s sentence of 20 years in exchange for information she offered.
Today, Vice President J.D. Vance assured an Ohio audience that the Congressional Budget Office was wrong in predicting that the cuts in the budget reconciliation measure the Republicans passed and Trump signed into law on July 4 would push 10 million people off health insurance. “Don’t believe every false media report that you’ve heard,” he said, “because our explicit goal in the Trump administration is to protect people’s healthcare.”
On July 18, health policy tracker KFF reported that health insurers have asked state regulators to approve the highest premium increases in more than five years. Just as Gene Sperling, who directed the National Economic Council under presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, noted in the Washington Post four days ago, insurers point to the end of the enhanced premium tax credits that provided financial assistance for people enrolled in healthcare through the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) as the main culprit in higher prices. The insurers predict that healthcare costs for those who took advantage of the tax credits will go up by more than 75% starting in January 2026. This will drive healthier enrollees out of the market, causing prices to rise for those left in the risk pool.
As Sperling pointed out, while Republicans claimed that the tax cuts that primarily benefited the wealthy and corporations was “current policy” whose extension didn’t count as a tax increase, they did not apply the current policy standard to the enhanced premium tax credits.
Insurers also point to Trump’s tariffs as a cause for higher premiums. They expect those tariffs to send drug prices higher.
Since the 1980s, Republicans have relied on their voters believing the worldview leaders projected, even when the facts told a different story. It is not clear they can continue to rely on that blind loyalty.
Jason Hancock of the Missouri Independent reported today that Missouri Republican lawmakers have inspired a backlash by resisting or overturning measures approved by voters to end puppy mills, expand Medicaid, legalize marijuana, create nonpartisan redistricting, expand paid sick leave, and amend the state constitution to protect abortion rights. Now a bipartisan group of organizations is trying to stop the Republican supermajority from ignoring or overturning the will of voters.
In response, some Republican lawmakers have claimed that out-of-state money swayed the votes on the measures they dislike, and are trying to change the process of initiating voter-led petitions, further silencing the voters. Others disagree. Veteran Republican consultant James Harris, who is from the state, told Hancock: “The legislature doesn’t really seem to understand, they’ve kicked the hornet’s nest. We may be about to cross the Rubicon…where the legislature loses a lot of its power.”
In North Carolina today, popular former governor Roy Cooper announced he is running for the North Carolina Senate seat currently held by Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican who announced his retirement after Trump turned on him for opposing the budget reconciliation measure that threatened healthcare in his state. When he was governor, Cooper expanded Medicaid to more than 650,000 North Carolinians.
Cooper’s announcement message focused on shoring up the middle class, meeting today’s moment by calling out billionaires. “[F]or too many Americans, the middle class feels like a distant dream,” he said, while “the biggest corporations and the richest Americans have grabbed unimaginable wealth at your expense. It's time for that to change.”
Cooper told of growing up in North Carolina, raising his family, teaching Sunday school, and helping small businesses as a lawyer. “When you made me your attorney general, I prosecuted criminals and took on scammers, big banks, and drug companies,” he said. “When you made me your governor, we balanced the state budget every year and worked with Republicans to raise teacher pay, recruit thousands of better paying jobs, and expand Medicaid…. I never really wanted to go to Washington,” he said. “I just wanted to serve the people of North Carolina right here, where I've lived all my life.”
“But,” he continued, “these are not ordinary times. Politicians in D.C. are running up our debt, ripping away our health care, disrespecting our veterans, cutting help for the poor and even putting Medicare and Social Security at risk just to give tax breaks to billionaires. That's wrong, and I've had enough. I've thought on it and prayed about it, and I've decided, I want to serve as your next United States Senator.”
The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which works to elect Republicans to the Senate, called Cooper “far-left.”
Meanwhile, in South Carolina, a key architect of Project 2025 will challenge Senator Lindsey Graham for the Republican nomination for Graham’s Senate seat. “This is a battle for the future of MAGA,” Paul Dans said. “This is really the turning point election that asks whether MAGA will sink back into the swamp and be subsumed, or whether this great movement will continue to grow, and the waters of the swamp retreat in Washington, and swamp critters like Lindsey are left to bake in the Palmetto sun.”
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/us/politics/air-force-one-trump-cost.html
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/27/politics/trump-beyonce-prosecute-fact-check
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/27/business/trump-scotland-business-crypto
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/us/politics/ghislaine-maxwell-epstein-interview-durbin.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/07/24/republican-bill-health-care-taxes/
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