Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 15
August 29, 2025
August 28, 2025
On August 29, 1970, journalist Rubén Salazar died instantly when Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy Thomas Wilson fired an 8-inch bullet-shaped tear gas projectile into the back of his head. Salazar and his colleague Guillermo Restrepo had ducked into the Silver Dollar bar after fighting had broken out between marchers and police officers during the massive National Chicano Moratorium March against the Vietnam War that drew more than 20,000 people into the streets of East Los Angeles.
Restrepo later recalled that Salazar told him they were being followed, so they slipped into the bar to lose their trackers and use the restroom. The bar had a curtain over the door. An eyewitness recalled that when two sheriffs came to the door, one held back the curtain and the other—Wilson—shot the projectile. Restrepo recalled the gun was aimed directly at their heads.
When homicide detectives from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department interviewed Wilson hours later, he said a bystander had thought he saw armed men enter the bar and had fired his weapon to get the men to come out. Witnesses told the detectives there had been no gunmen at the bar. A coroner’s inquest determined Salazar’s death was accidental. Wilson resigned from the Sheriff’s Department and left Los Angeles. The county admitted no wrongdoing but paid Salazar’s widow and three young children at least $700,000, worth close to $6 million today.
At the time of his death, Salazar was the most famous and influential Latino journalist in the United States. Born in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, in 1928, Salazar grew up in El Paso, Texas. After graduating from high school, he served in the U.S. Army and became a U.S. citizen after his service. He graduated from Texas Western College in 1954 with a degree in journalism and went to work at the El Paso Herald-Post, where his deep investigative work caught the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation almost immediately as Salazar exposed corruption and violence in the El Paso City Jail.
By 1959, Salazar was working at the Los Angeles Times where, among other assignments, he covered the Vietnam War. Back in the United States in 1968, he began to focus on the lives of Mexican-Americans, especially those in East Los Angeles. The media largely ignored the Latino community there except when it covered crimes.
In those years, the Mexican American community in the United States was building an exciting new intellectual and social movement: the Chicano Movement. In the introduction to his 2015 book The Chicano Generation: Testimonios of the Movement, historian Mario T. Garza explained that an earlier generation of Mexican Americans had focused on assimilating to Anglo culture, working to break down barriers to jobs, housing, education, the legal system, and voting, and fighting cultural stereotyping.
But in the 1960s, young Mexican Americans, most of whom had been born in the U.S., began to reimagine their community and its position in the United States. Calling themselves “Chicanos,” they called for a new identity based in the understanding that they were not outsiders at all, but rather natives of the northern region of old Mexico, a region that did not become part of the United States until long after the Chicano people—Indigenous Americans mixed with the descendents of Spanish invaders—had settled there.
Chicanos noted that they had not moved into the United States, but rather the United States border had moved over them. The U.S. had taken over the land on which they lived in 1848 after the U.S.-Mexico War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which had established the new boundary between the two countries far to the south of where it had been before, was supposed to guarantee the land titles of those Mexican landowners over whom the border had moved. But U.S. courts had disregarded the terms of the treaty and refused to recognize the rights of Mexicans, most of whom lost their land.
The Chicanos saw parallels between their own history and that of colonized peoples around the world. And in the 1960s, as new nations rebelled against the colonial powers that had sought to erase their culture, Chicanos worked to address poverty and racism by recovering their cultural identity and determining their own future.
This cultural autonomy manifested itself in the public schools. Los Angeles County had the biggest Latino community in the United States and sent more than 130,000 students to the public schools. But officials expected the students to become manual laborers and made little effort to steer them toward college, while they denigrated Mexican American history and forbade the students to speak Spanish. Graduation rates were abysmal: at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, the dropout rate was 57.5%. Those who did make it to college despite their lack of college preparatory classes fared little better. Mexican American students had a college graduation rate of about 0.1%.
Social studies teacher Salvador Castro at Lincoln High School urged Mexican American students to see themselves as central to the development of the state and the nation. In 1963, he and other teachers organized the Chicano Youth Leadership Conference to inspire students to address the failures of the educational system for Mexican American students and to urge those students to graduate from high school and college, as well as to demand better from their local schools.
Filmmaker Moctesuma Esparza, who attended the Youth Leadership Conference in 1965, recalled how life was changing in the late 1960s. “This is 1967, while the Vietnam War is in full bore, and protests are growing, and the Civil Rights Movement is flourishing. And throughout the world, young people are looking to change the world. And this was not lost on the kids in East L.A. They were able to see what their own circumstances were and how they were being oppressed, how they were being denied an opportunity for an education, an opportunity to fulfill their lives. And so, it was not difficult to organize them. They wanted to be organized. They wanted to do something.”
The students decided to launch walkouts, or “blowouts,” from school in March 1968. In the first week of the month, an estimated 15,000 students walked out of Woodrow Wilson, Garfield, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Belmont, Venice, and Jefferson High Schools. Administrators barred the doors of the schools, and police officers beat the students with nightsticks, but still they walked out.
On March 28 they produced a list of demands, asking that teachers who showed bias toward Mexican American students be removed and that curriculum center Mexican American history and experience in schools where a majority of the students shared that heritage. They demanded that curriculum in the schools acknowledge Mexican American history as American history.
The Los Angeles Board of Education rejected their demands, and three days later the police arrested thirteen of the walkout organizers for “conspiracy to disturb the peace.” Esparza later recalled that the press portrayed the protesters as “un-American. That we were outside agitators in our own community. That we were ungrateful, and that ‘they’ were doing the best they could for a population that really didn't have (what it took) to succeed.”
Salazar covered the blowouts for the Los Angeles Times and, in February 1970, wrote a column titled “Who Is a Chicano? And What Is It the Chicanos Want?” “A Chicano is a Mexican-American with a non-Anglo image of himself,” Salazar began. “He resents being told Columbus ‘discovered’ America when the Chicano’s ancestors, the Mayans and the Aztecs, founded highly sophisticated civilizations centuries before Spain financed the Italian explorer’s trip to the ‘New World.’” Salazar noted that “Mexican-Americans, though indigenous to the Southwest, are on the lowest rung scholastically, economically, socially and politically. Chicanos feel cheated. They want to effect change. Now.” “Chicanos,” he wrote, “are merely fighting to become ‘Americans’...but with a Chicano outlook.”
In April 1970, Salazar left the Times to become the news director for the Spanish-language television station in Los Angeles, KMEX. Salazar said in an interview that he “wanted to try my hand at communicating with the Mexican American community directly and in their language.”
But relations between Mexican American journalists and the police were deteriorating as police cracked down on the movement and on Chicano protesters increasingly frustrated by their exclusion from political power. Salazar collected information on police abuse, and in June he captured the paranoia and harassment of the Nixon administration toward protesters when he wrote that the “mood is not being helped by our political and law-and-order leaders who are trying to discredit militants in the barrios as subversive or criminal.”
Meanwhile, the escalation of the war in Vietnam dovetailed with the high school blowouts to push Chicano organizers toward anti-war protests. Because the public schools did not encourage them to go on to college, Mexican Americans did not qualify for the draft deferments that kept middle-class white Americans out of the war. This meant the government drafted them in disproportionately high numbers.
Chicano activists organized demonstrations against the war beginning in December 1969. They planned a large march for August 29, 1970, where they could illustrate that the Chicano Movement was not confined to students. As many as 20,000 Mexican Americans—entire families—turned out for the Chicano Moratorium in a festive spirit that celebrated their history and culture at the same time they spoke out against discrimination and the war.
But, as historian Garza records, county sheriffs and the Los Angeles Police Department refused to let Chicanos control the streets of East Los Angeles and attacked the participants at the end of the march. Police violence sparked a riot that led to injuries, more than 150 arrests, and the deaths of three people: two Chicano activists and journalist Rubén Salazar.
In the aftermath of Salazar’s death, organizers shifted from demonstrations to political mobilization, building the Raza Unida Party to achieve economic gains, social justice, and political self-determination for Mexican Americans.
When reporter Bob Navarro asked Salazar in May 1970 if he thought the Vietnam War had put the country in danger of a revolution, Salazar answered: “I think we are in a revolution. I think the United States is traditionally a revolutionary country.”
Navarro countered: “But I’m talking about it in the more sinister sense, an attempt to overthrow our more established institutions.” “I think that’s nonsense,” Salazar replied. “We are going to overthrow some of our institutions, but in the way that Americans have always done it: through the ballot, through public consensus. That’s a revolution. That is a real revolution.”
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Notes:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-06-19-me-14742-story.html
https://documents.latimes.com/salazar-el-paso-fbi-attention/
Mario T. Garza, The Chicano Generation: Testimonios of the Movement (University of California Press, 2015).
https://www.chicano.ucla.edu/files/events/Castro%20Program%20B%26W_52606.pdf
https://www.inmotionmagazine.com/mesparza.html
https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/lost-la/truths-unsilenced-the-life-death-and-legacy-of-ruben-salazar
https://documents.latimes.com/fbi-monitors-activists-after-salazar-dies/
https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft058002v2;brand=ucpress
https://rubensalazarproject.com/2012/06/14/the-story-of-ruben/
https://rubensalazarproject.com/2013/08/20/ruben-salazars-road-to-citizenship-2/
https://www.democracynow.org/2010/8/31/slain_latino_journalist_ruben_salazar_killed
Ruben Salazar, “Don’t Make the ‘Bato Loco’ Go the Way of the Zoot Suiter,” June 19, 1970 at: https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft058002v2&chunk.id=d0e8517&toc.depth=1&toc.id=d0e6486&brand=ucpress
https://www.latimes.com/local/la-xpm-2011-aug-05-la-me-0805-tobar-20110805-story.html
https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/raza-unida-party
https://documents.latimes.com/fbi-monitors-activists-after-salazar-dies/
YouTube:
watch?v=FAxLv9bx-IM
August 28, 2025
August 27, 2025
August 27, 2025
The image of National Guard troops, some of them from as far away as Louisiana and Mississippi, in Washington, D.C., spreading mulch around the cherry trees at the Tidal Basin and picking up trash, illustrates that President Donald J. Trump’s insistence that he needed troops to crack down on violent crime in the nation’s capital was always a cover for an authoritarian takeover.
As Kate Riga and Emine Yücel noted in Talking Points Memo today, earlier this spring Trump and congressional Republicans did all they could to weaken Washington, D.C. In March, Congress passed a resolution to fund the government temporarily while also freezing all federal spending. That included the District of Columbia, whose budget has to be approved by Congress although the monies involved come from local taxes, not federal funds.
Because those budget monies are local and not federal, according to Campbell Robertson of the New York Times, the Washington, D.C., budget is routinely exempted from federal spending freezes. But the House did not carve it out this time, leaving the city with a shortfall of $1.1 billion. The Senate unanimously approved a bill to fix the error, letting the city continue to operate under its current budget, but the House never took it up. Washington, D.C., mayor Muriel Bowser and local officials found a workaround to restore some funding but have had to freeze hiring and cut contracts, grants, and expenditures across the city’s agencies.
Cuts to city services have made it easier for Trump and his loyalists to insist the city is being poorly taken care of, although violent crime is dropping there, not rising, and the Department of Justice’s own numbers show it is at a 30-year low. Now, with troops stationed in the city, Trump and his MAGA loyalists are demonstrating that they control the federal capital.
Today, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that the administration will also take over Union Station in Washington, D.C., from which Amtrak and the city’s commuter rail lines run, saying such a takeover was part of Trump’s “beautification” program.
Amtrak took control of the station in July 2024, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of the Biden era provided $22 billion to Amtrak to modernize trains and stations. The administration cut a $120 million federal grant to Amtrak in April. Taking control of Union Station will put the administration in charge of key transportation lines into and out of the city. It also will create a federal presence in an area where veterans have been protesting.
The freezing of D.C.’s budget is a different process from the dramatic cuts the Trump administration has made across the federal government, although the effects of the two are similar. As Tara Copp of the Washington Post noted today, custodial work like that being done by the National Guard troops normally would have been performed by National Park Service employees. But that service was already short staffed when the administration slashed through the federal workforce. The park service used to have 200 people assigned to the thousands of acres of gardens and trees in the capital. Now it has 20.
A park service official told Copp: “It’s everybody—the masons, the maintenance workers, the groundskeepers, the plumbers. Every shop is short.”
The Trump administration inherited decades of Republican rhetoric insisting the federal government was bloated and inefficient. It set out immediately to gut the civil service through hiring freezes, reductions in force, and impoundment of funds.
In an interview with Eileen Sullivan of the New York Times on Thursday, August 21, Office of Personnel Management director Scott Kupor said that by the end of December 2025 there will be 300,000 fewer federal workers than there were in January. Sullivan notes that this is the largest single-year reduction in civilian federal employment since World War II.
But even before these cuts, the federal workforce had not kept pace with the growth of the nation. The workforce when Trump took office in 2025 was about 2.4 million people, roughly the same number of government workers the nation had in 1969. As Bill Chappell of NPR reported in March, in 1969 the U.S. population was about 202.5 million. Now it is about 341.1 million.
The U.S. public workforce was about 14.9% of overall employment, significantly lower than our 37 peer nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, where public sector employment averages at 18.1%. In Canada, that number is 19.4%. Chappell also noted that an OECD report showed more than 90% of U.S. civil servants believed it was important for their work to serve the public good.
The old Republican argument for getting rid of civil servants was that private contractors would be more efficient, and so in place of civil servants, the U.S. has relied on private contractors since the 1990s. While the U.S. spent about $270 billion on federal workers’ salaries before the 2025 cuts, it spent $478 billion on government contractors. Public policy scholar Elizabeth Linos explained that even before the recent cuts, the U.S. had “something like three times as many [contractors] delivering the work of government” as it had civil servants.
The Trump administration’s drastic cuts were almost certainly designed to speed up the shift to private contractors. Under the direction of billionaire Elon Musk, the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) cut jobs willy-nilly, apparently under the impression that replacing people with AI contracts and consolidating databases would make civil servants redundant. But like the D.C. budget freeze, the cuts have weakened the nation and make it more susceptible to an authoritarian takeover.
Yesterday news broke that a whistleblower, identified as Social Security Administration chief data officer Charles Borges, claims that a former senior DOGE official put a copy of a key Social Security database on a server that was vulnerable to hacking. The DOGE employee copied the names, birthdays, and Social Security numbers of more than 300 million Americans to an unsecure cloud server accessible to other former DOGE employees.
Borges alleges that the copy “constitute[s] violations of laws, rules, and regulations, abuse of authority, gross mismanagement, and creation of a substantial and specific threat to public health and safety.” He also said that as of late June, there were no verified audit or oversight mechanisms in place to oversee where DOGE was sharing that data or what it was using the data for. The agency assessed that a breach of the database would be “catastrophic” for Social Security beneficiaries, making them susceptible to identity theft, the loss of health care and nutrition benefits, and so on.
Last week, as the Trump administration prepared to fire nearly 90% of the workforce of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, virtually all pending matters flagged by bank examiners were simply closed without action.
Layla A. Jones reported last week that while the administration insisted it was targeting “bias” at NPR and PBS when it defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the $1.1 billion in cuts means that the CPB can no longer provide public broadcasting stations with severe weather alerts. CPB administered the Next Generation Warning System in partnership with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to issue alerts and information over radio and television stations, many of which are in rural America, and can continue to operate when other systems fail.
Yesterday, 182 employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) wrote to Congress to warn that one third of FEMA’s full-time staff have separated from the agency this year, eroding institutional knowledge and relationships, even as FEMA employees have been reassigned to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The administration has cut funds for FEMA, has removed both public and internal information related to climate change, and has not appointed a qualified FEMA administrator as the law requires.
In this document, which they called the Katrina Declaration in memory of the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Gulf Coast almost exactly 20 years ago, they warned that the administration was making it impossible for FEMA to help Americans survive hurricanes, floods, fires, and other disasters. “FEMA’s mission to provide critical support [is being] obstructed by leadership who not only question the agency’s existence but place uninformed cost-cutting above serving the American people and the communities our oath compels us to serve.”
Thirty-six people signed their names to the document; 155 did not put their names down out of concern the administration would target them in retaliation for speaking out. They were right. All of those who used their names received emails Tuesday night saying they had been placed on administrative leave.
Tonight, Lena H. Sun, Dan Diamond, and Lauren Weber of the Washington Post reported a battle at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). When recently-confirmed director Susan Monarez refused to agree to change coronavirus vaccine guidelines without consulting advisors, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. urged her to resign. Monarez refused and called Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who was instrumental in securing Kennedy’s confirmation and who pushed back against him. Her involvement of the senator apparently infuriated Kennedy, and the department simply announced on social media that Monarez was no longer the CDC director.
Hours later, Monarez’s lawyers responded that she had neither resigned nor been fired, accused Kennedy of “weaponizing public health for political gain,” and said that his purge of health officials put “millions of American lives at risk.” “This is not about one official,” they wrote. “It is about the systematic dismantling of public health institutions, the silencing of experts, and the dangerous politicization of science. The attack on Dr. Monarez is a warning to every American: our evidence-based systems are being undermined from within.”
The White House then formally fired Monarez, saying she was “not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again.” The attacks on Monarez came as administration firings, budget cuts, and policies prompted the resignations this week of the CDC’s chief medical officer, the director of its infectious disease center, the head of its center for immunization and infectious diseases, and the director of the office of public health data. One described Monarez as “hamstrung and sidelined by an authoritarian leader.”
On August 20, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and former deputy secretary of state William Burns thanked America’s fired public servants for serving their country with honor and told them they deserved better than the “gleeful indignity” inflicted on them by this administration. The current process of cutting the government is “not about reform,” he wrote, but about “retribution. It is about breaking people and breaking institutions by sowing fear and mistrust throughout our government. It is about paralyzing public servants—making them apprehensive about what they say, how it might be interpreted, and who might report on them. It is about deterring anyone from daring to speak truth to power.”
Deploying National Guard soldiers away from their families and sending them to Washington, D.C., in the heat of August to respond to an “emergency” only to put them to work spreading mulch and picking up trash certainly seems to fit the idea of inflicting indignity to break the nobility of public service for the nation.
The firefighters at work combating a wildfire in the state of Washington likely also felt the indignity inflicted by the government today when ICE agents showed up and made them line up so the agents could check their IDs. The agents arrested two firefighters, and when the a member of the crew asked for the chance to say goodbye, the agents responded: “[Y]ou need to get the f*ck out of here. I’m going to make you leave.” One firefighter said: “You risked your life out here to save the community. This is how they treat us.”
In his resignation letter today, Director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Demetre Daskalakis set an example for those refusing to be cowed. “The recent shooting at CDC is not why I am resigning,” he wrote. “My grandfather, who I am named after, stood up to fascist forces in Greece and lost his life doing so. I am resigning to make him and his legacy proud.”
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/27/us/washington-dc-budget.html
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-allies-weakened-dc-occupation-budget
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/us/politics/doge-social-security-data.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/22/us/politics/trump-federal-workers.html
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/06/nx-s1-5310542/federal-workforce-other-countries-compared
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/26/nx-s1-5517977/social-security-doge-privacy
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/us/politics/doge-social-security-data.html
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-public-broadcasting-cpb-npr-rural-severe-weather
https://www.standupforscience.net/fema-katrina-declaration
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/climate/fema-suspends-staff-who-criticized-trump-cuts.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/08/27/susan-monarez-cdc-director-ousted/
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/27/g-s1-85911/cdc-director-susan-monarez-ousted-leaders-resign
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/10/trump-retribution-public-servants/683914/
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/28/kennedy-cdc-vaccine-chief-resignation-post
Bluesky:
August 26, 2025
August 26, 2025
Today, for the second time in as many days, President Donald J. Trump suggested that Americans want a dictator. In a meeting in the Cabinet Room that lasted more than three hours, during which he listened to the fulsome praise of his cabinet officers and kept his hands below the table, seemingly to hide the bad bruising on his right hand, Trump said: “The line is that I'm a dictator, but I stop crime. So a lot of people say, ‘You know, if that's the case, I'd rather have a dictator.’”
With Trump underwater on all his key issues and his job approval rating dismal, the administration appears to be trying to create support for Trump by insisting that the U.S. is mired in crime and he alone can solve the problem. The administration’s solution is not to fund violence prevention programs and local law enforcement—two methods proven to work—but instead to use the power of the government to terrorize communities.
There is a frantic feel to that effort, as if they feel they must convince Americans to fear crime more than they fear rising grocery prices or having to take their children past police checkpoints on their way to school.
Last night, speaking with personality Sean Hannity on the Fox News Channel, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, widely believed to be the person behind the draconian immigration raids in the country, seemed to be angry that Washingtonians weren’t sufficiently grateful for Trump’s takeover of the streets. But Miller indicated that the administration is really focused on splitting Republicans and Democrats who disapprove of the administration's policies, demonizing the Democrats.
Miller asserted to Hannity that the “Democrat Party does not fight for, care about, or represent American citizens. It is an entity devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gangbangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization…. The Democrat Party, Sean, that exists today,” he said, “it disgusts me.”
Now, with Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker taking a stand against the deployment of troops in Chicago, Trump appears to be nervous about sending troops on his own hook and instead trying to pressure Pritzker to ask for them. In the Oval Office today, he complained that Pritzker wasn’t asking for troops, and on social media tonight he called Pritzker “an incompetent Governor who should call me for HELP.”
And yet, for all their talk of dispatching soldiers to combat crime, National Guard troops today were picking up trash in Washington, D.C., and working on dozens of “beautification and restoration" projects.
The administration’s focus on crime to win back support for the president is going to have to overcome increasing uneasiness with Trump’s attempt to take control of the nation’s monetary policy.
In a letter posted to social media last night at 8:02 Eastern Time, President Donald J. Trump announced that he was removing Federal Reserve Board governor Lisa Cook from her position “for cause.” That cause, he claimed, was the allegation from Trump loyalist William Pulte, who heads the Federal Housing Finance Agency, that Cook had made false statements on a mortgage years ago. With Pulte’s help, the administration has gone after a number of Democrats with such allegations. Cook has not been charged with any crime. Historically, “for cause” has meant corruption or dereliction of duty.
Trump has been at war with the Federal Reserve for months. The Fed is an independent institution that oversees the nation’s economy and manages the nation’s monetary policy, which means the Federal Reserve sets interest rates for the country. Trump wants it to lower interest rates to make it easier to borrow money. Cheaper money will goose the economy, but it is also likely to spur inflation, which is already on the rise thanks to Trump’s tariff war and massive deportations of migrant workers. Trump has been pressuring Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell to lower interest rates or, failing that, to resign.
Trump has mused about taking control of the Fed himself, but the politicization of the nation’s monetary policy so it responds to the whims of Trump rather than actual economic conditions makes economists and most elected officials recoil. Today in his newsletter, economist Paul Krugman wrote that if Trump’s illegal firing of Cook is allowed to stand, “the implications will be profound and disastrous. The United States will be well on its way to becoming Turkey, where an authoritarian ruler imposed his crackpot economics on the central bank, sending inflation soaring to 80 percent. And,” he added, “the damage will be felt far beyond the Fed. This will mark the destruction of professionalism and independent thinking throughout the federal government.”
In May the Supreme Court suggested it would overturn an almost century-old precedent saying that the president cannot remove the heads of independent agencies created by Congress. But even then, it protected the independence of the Fed, writing: “The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”
Trump administration officials appear to be trying to find a way around that ruling by going after Cook on trumped-up charges. After serving as a professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University and on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Cook has been on the board of governors since 2022. She is the first Black woman to sit on the board and might have drawn Trump’s ire as well when she noted publicly that the jobs report earlier this month could signal an economic turning point.
Cook responded to Trump’s letter in a statement saying: “President Trump purported to fire me ‘for cause’ when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so. I will not resign. I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy as I have been doing since 2022.”
The administration’s apparent persecution of undocumented immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom it unlawfully deported to the notorious terrorist CECOT prison in El Salvador in March and then refused to return despite court orders to do so, is a more immediate illustration of the lawlessness of authoritarian rule.
The government finally returned Abrego to the U.S., only to announce that it had secured an indictment against him in Tennessee for allegedly conspiring to transport undocumented immigrants for financial gain, charges stemming from a 2022 traffic stop for which Abrego was not charged with anything. He was jailed in Tennessee, and a judge ordered that he remain in jail to protect him from the government, which threatened to deport him again if he were released. He was finally released on August 22 and went home to his family in Maryland, but when he attended a mandatory check-in at the ICE facility in Baltimore, Maryland, on Monday, August 25, he was arrested.
Members of the administration routinely describe Abrego, who has no criminal convictions, as a gang member, a human trafficker, a domestic abuser, and child predator who is terrorizing the United States. Trump referred to him yesterday as “an animal.”
Now, as Jeremy Roebuck, Maria Sacchetti, and Dana Munro of the Washington Post explained yesterday, Abrego’s lawyers say the government is trying to coerce him into pleading guilty of human trafficking, offering to send him to the Spanish-speaking Latin American country of Costa Rica if he does, but threatening to deport him to Uganda if he does not. As legal analyst Harry Litman notes, deportation would enable the government to avoid “having to show their hand on what seems to be a very threadbare case.”
The official social media account of the Department of Homeland Security—a cabinet-level department of the United States government—trolled Abrego, whom the media often identifies as a “Maryland man,” by posting: “Uganda Man.”
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, whose order to return Abrego to the U.S. the government ignored for months, indicated she had no faith that the government would obey the law. She temporarily barred the administration from deporting Abrego until she can make sure the government follows the law, making Department of Justice lawyer confirm he understood that “[y]our clients are absolutely forbidden at this juncture to remove Mr. Abrego Garcia from the continental United States.”
Tonight, Democrat Catelin Drey won a special election for the Iowa state senate, breaking a Republican supermajority and flipping a seat in a district Trump won by 11.5 points in 2024. Drey won the seat by 10.4%, showing a swing of more than 2o points to the Democrats. And in a seven-way race in Georgia for the state Senate in a deep red district, the lone Democrat, Debra Shigley, came in first with 40% of the vote. Since no candidate won 50% of the vote, Shigley will face whichever Republican candidate comes out on top—the top two are currently hovering around 17%—in a runoff on September 23.
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Notes:
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, August 25, 2025, 8:02 PM.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/fedexplained/who-we-are.htm
Paul KrugmanIn the Matter of Lisa CookYesterday Donald Trump said that he had fired Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. My wording is advisable: He “said” that he had fired her. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems clear that he does not have the right to summarily fire Fed officials, certainly on tissue-thin allegations of mortgage fraud before she even went to the Fed…Read morea day ago · 2310 likes · 496 comments · Paul Krugmanhttps://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/22/supreme-court-federal-reserve-trump.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/federal-reserve-lisa-cook-jobs-report-concerning-economy-turning-point/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/us/politics/trump-cabinet-meeting.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/08/25/kilmar-abrego-garcia-detained/
https://georgiarecorder.com/2025/08/26/live-results-for-georgias-special-state-senate-election/
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5471284-drey-victory-breaks-gop-majority/
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The Nineteenth Amendment
Yesterday, I intended to write about the Nineteenth Amendment prohibiting states from denying women the right to vote because today is the anniversary of the amendment’s certification in 1920. But I decided the political news yesterday couldn’t wait, so I dropped the plan and wrote about Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker’s stand against President Donald J. Trump.
Still, as right-wing Christian nationalists supported by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth are calling for an end to women’s right to vote, it seems crucial to remember the history of the drive for women’s suffrage in the United States of America. While you won’t get the full letter about it I had intended, my team put together a 3-minute video about the history, linked here.
(This is not tonight’s letter, by the way. I just couldn’t bear to let the anniversary pass without noting it.)
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August 25, 2025
August 25, 2025
This morning, President Donald J. Trump talked to reporters as he signed several executive orders in the Oval Office. Trump sat behind the Resolute Desk as he has been doing lately, seeming to put its bulk between him and the reporters. Also as he has been doing lately, he kept his left hand over the right, seemingly to hide a large bruise.
Trump was there to announce an executive order charging Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth with creating “specialized units” in the National Guard that will be “specifically trained and equipped to deal with public order issues,” apparently setting them up to take on domestic law enforcement as part of Trump’s attempt to take control of Democratic-run cities.
At the press opportunity, Trump claimed that he saved Washington, D.C.—where crime was at a 30-year low before he took control of the Metropolitan Police Department and mobilized the National Guard—from such rampant crime that no one dared to wear jewelry or carry purses. “People,” he said, “are free for the first time ever.”
Although in 1989 the Supreme Court ruled that burning a flag is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment, Trump ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute anyone who burns a flag, claiming they would automatically go to prison for a year (he has no authority to make such an order). After seven European leaders rushed to the White House to stabilize the U.S. approach to Russia after Trump’s disastrous meeting with Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, in Alaska on August 15, Trump claimed that the seven leaders actually represented 38 countries and that they refer to Trump as “the president of Europe.”
Calling Chicago, Illinois, a “a disaster” and “a killing field,” Trump referred to Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker as “a slob.” Trump complained that Pritzker had said Trump was infringing on American freedom and called Trump a dictator. Trump went on: “A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator. I don't like a dictator. I'm not a dictator. I'm a man with great common sense and a smart person. And when I see what's happening to our cities, and then you send in troops instead of being praised, they're saying you're trying to take over the Republic. These people are sick.”
This afternoon, standing flanked by leaders from business, law enforcement, faith communities, education, local communities, and politics at the Chicago waterfront near the Trump Tower there, Governor Pritzker responded to the news that Trump is planning to send troops to Chicago.
He began by saying: “I want to speak plainly about the moment that we are in and the actual crisis, not the manufactured one, that we are facing in the city and as a state and as a country. If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.”
He acknowledged that “[o]ver the weekend, we learned from the media that Donald Trump has been planning for quite a while now to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago. This is exactly the type of overreach that our country's founders warned against. And it’s the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances. What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal, it is unconstitutional. It is un-American.”
Pritzker noted that neither his office nor that of Chicago’s mayor had received any communications from the White House. “We found out what Donald Trump was planning the same way that all of you did. We read a story in the Washington Post. If this was really about fighting crime and making the streets safe, what possible justification could the White House have for planning such an exceptional action without any conversations or consultations with the governor, the mayor or the police?”
“Let me answer that question,” he said. “This is not about fighting crime. This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city in a blue state to try and intimidate his political rivals. This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey Stephen Miller searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities, and end elections. There is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention. There is no insurrection.”
Pritzker noted that every major American city deals with crime, but that the rate of violent crime is actually higher in Republican-dominated states and cities than in those run by Democrats. Illinois, he said, had “hired more police and given them more funding. We banned assault weapons, ghost guns, bump stops, and high-capacity magazines” and “invested historic amounts into community violence intervention programs.” Those actions have cut violent crime down dramatically. Pritzker pointed out that “thirteen of the top twenty cities in homicide rates have Republican governors. None of these cities is Chicago. Eight of the top ten states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states is Illinois.”
If Trump were serious about combatting crime, Pritzker asked, why did he, along with congressional Republicans, cut more than $800 million in public safety and crime prevention grants? “Trump,” Pritzker said, “is defunding the police.”
Then Pritzker turned to the larger national story. “To the members of the press who are assembled here today and listening across the country,” he said, “I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is. This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story. This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored in favor of some horse race piece on who will be helped politically by the president's actions. Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city, punish his dissidents, and score political points. If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab.”
Pritzker continued: “Earlier today in the Oval Office, Donald Trump looked at the assembled cameras and asked for me personally to say, ‘Mr. President, can you do us the honor of protecting our city?’ Instead, I say, ‘Mr. President, do not come to Chicago. You are neither wanted here nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy.’”
The governor called out the president for his willingness to drag National Guard personnel from their homes and communities to be used as political props. They are not trained to serve as law enforcement, he said, and did not “sign up for the National Guard to fight crime.” “It is insulting to their integrity and to the extraordinary sacrifices that they make to serve in the guard, to use them as a political prop, where they could be put in situations where they will be at odds with their local communities, the ones that they seek to serve.”
Pritzker said he hoped that Trump would “reconsider this dangerous and misguided encroachment upon our state and our city's sovereignty” and that “rational voices, if there are any left inside the White House or the Pentagon, will prevail in the coming days.”
But if not, he urged Chicagoans to protest peacefully and to remember that most members of the military and the National Guard stationed in Chicago would be there unwillingly. He asked protesters to “remember that they can be court martialed, and their lives ruined, if they resist deployment.” He suggested protesters should look to members of the faith community for guidance on how to mobilize.
Then Pritzker turned to a warning. “To my fellow governors across the nation who would consider pulling your national guards from their duties at home to come into my state against the wishes of its elected representatives and its people,” he said, “cooperation and coordination between our states is vital to the fabric of our nation, and it benefits us all. Any action undercutting that and violating the sacred sovereignty of our state to cater to the ego of a dictator will be responded to.”
He went on: “The state of Illinois is ready to stand against this military deployment with every peaceful tool we have. We will see the Trump administration in court. We will use every lever in our disposal to protect the people of Illinois and their rights.”
“Finally,” he said, “to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous, we are watching, and we are taking names. This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now. And eventually, the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year. Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf. You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually.
“If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law. As Dr. King once said, the arc of the moral Universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Humbly, I would add, it doesn't bend on its own. History tells us we often have to apply force needed to make sure that the arc gets where it needs to go. This is one of those times.”
—
Notes:
https://newrepublic.com/post/199551/trump-tries-hide-bruised-hand-cameras-no-makeup
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/25/politics/trump-executive-order-national-guard-units-crime
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-burning-american-flag-executive-order-conservative-reaction-2119061
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/prosecuting-burning-of-the-american-flag/
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