Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 15
July 27, 2025
July 27, 2025
On July 23 the X account of the Department of Homeland Security posted an image of an 1872 oil painting by John Gast, titled American Progress. Gast represented the American East on the right side of the painting with light skies, a rising sun, and the bustling port of New York City, full of ships. He painted the American West in darkness, through which bison and Indigenous Americans flee the people in the middle of the painting: white hunters, farmers, settlers, and stagecoach riders. Over the scene floats a giant, blonde Lady Liberty, evidently moving west, carrying a schoolbook and a telegraph wire being laced on poles along a train track behind her.
Over the reproduced image, the Department of Homeland Security account wrote: “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.”
From the time Gast painted it, American Progress has been interpreted as a representation of the concept of manifest destiny: the mid-nineteenth-century notion that God had destined the people of the United States of America to spread democracy to the rest of at least the North American continent, and possibly South America as well. A number of people who saw the Homeland Security post saw it as the Trump administration’s embrace of that ideology.
Magazine editor John O’Sullivan coined the term “manifest destiny” in the July 1845 issue of Democratic Review, a magazine dedicated to defining what it meant to live in a democratic republic. O’Sullivan’s concept of manifest destiny was different from the constant expansionism of Euro-Americans before his time, in part because he was defending a specific partisan policy: Congress’s annexation of Texas in March 1845 and the apparent determination of Democratic president James K. Polk to seize more territory from Mexico. The Democrats’ political opponents, the Whigs, opposed the land grab, and Democrats justified their position on the grounds that they were simply honoring God’s plan.
The spread of democracy—and, with it, American greatness—was both the right and the duty of Americans, they claimed, overriding the despotisms of monarchs. Along with that democratic system would travel an economic system that developed resources for private owners, the Protestant religion, and a cultural system that privileged white people. Such a system was best for everyone, even those people whose land, lives, and culture would be absorbed by the movement. Democrats constructed a strong sense of U.S. nationalism around this idea and its corollary: the extension of human enslavement.
Manifest destiny both reflected and fed the era’s greed and racism. But there was a key political element in it that adherents to today’s right-wing political movement appear to reject. At the heart of manifest destiny, beneath the language of “civilizing” other peoples and the embrace of human enslavement, was the concept that the lands the U.S. acquired would become states equal to the older states in the Union and that the people in the lands the U.S. absorbed would eventually become Americans equal to those who had been in the United States for a generation or more.
“New territory is spread out for us to subdue and fertilize,” Daniel S. Dickinson of New York told the Senate; “new races are presented for us to civilize, educate and absorb; new triumphs for us to achieve for the cause of freedom.”
In the 1840s—indeed until the last few years—Americans accepted that the United States was based on an idea. Even in that era of crabbed racism that excluded Black Americans and women and circumscribed others, lawmakers embraced the idea that the U.S. could expand to include new people. In the immigration boom of the 1840s and 1850s, that was no small thing.
Rather than advancing the concept of manifest destiny—as deeply problematic as that would be—the Trump administration’s reposting of American Progress seems designed instead to harness American traditional symbols in order to advance the idea of “blood and soil” citizenship popularized in 1930s Germany.
“Blood and soil” ideology claimed true Germans were defined by race within a specific land. Nazi propagandist Richard Walther Darré reflected those ideas when he celebrated agricultural life and what he claimed were rural values. Elevating those who had lived in Germany for generations, he suggested that German blood was mystically connected to German soil. “[T]he German soul with its warmth is rooted in its agriculture and in a real sense always grew out of it,” Darré wrote. To maintain that soul, he wrote, Germany needed to preserve racial purity and reject foreign blood. To that end, it needed to protect pure marriages and encourage the right people to have lots of children: the main job of a wife was to produce children. Unless the country took drastic measures, he wrote, the German “race” might become extinct.
The details of the “blood and soil” ideology might not be clear to MAGA today, but its adherents definitely get the concept: at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, white nationalists shouted, “Blood and soil.”
Those ideas are now advanced by MAGA leadership. On July 5, 2025, Vice President J.D. Vance told an audience at the Claremont Institute he rejected the idea that being an American simply meant agreeing with the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence. He complained not only that such a definition would include too many people, but also that it would exclude those who disagreed with it, even if their ancestors had fought in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. “I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” he said.
He continued: “I believe one of the most pressing problems for us to face as statesmen is to redefine the meaning of American citizenship in the 21st century.” America, he said, “is not just an idea, we’re a particular place with a particular people and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.”
Vance claimed that “Democrat politicians” and “corporate oligarchs” want to import “millions and millions of low-wage serfs,” and he hailed Trump’s immigration policies as “the most important part” of Trump’s first six months. He said “citizenship must mean recognizing the unique relationship, but also the obligations that we all share with our fellow Americans. You cannot swap 10 million people from anywhere else in the world and expect for America to remain unchanged…. “[T]his is a distinctive moment in time with a distinctive place and a distinctive people.”
Attacking “the left” as driven by hatred, Vance rejected the statement of Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor: “America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better.” Vance said Mamdani’s statement shows “no gratitude” and “no sense of owing something to this land.” “I wonder,” Vance said, “has he ever read the letters from boy soldiers in the Union Army to parents and sweethearts that they’d never see again?... Who the hell does he think that he is?”
The use of American iconography to push blood and soil showed in another post by the Homeland Security account from earlier this month. On July 14 it posted a painting of a white man with a white woman holding a baby in a covered wagon, an image the artist, Morgan Weistling, titled A Prayer for a New Life. The HHS account posted the image without Weistling’s permission, retitling it “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage: New Life in a New Land.”
The new name and capitalization are significant. Just as in the words in the post about John Gast’s painting, the two Hs are capitalized, evoking “HH,” accepted in right-wing circles as a way to write “Heil Hitler.”
On his web page, Weistling posted: “Attention: The recent DHS post on social media using a painting of mine that I painted a few years ago was used without my permission.”
—
Notes:
Frederick Merk and Lois Bannister Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), p. 29, at: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015043804908&seq=2
https://meidasnews.com/news/exclusive-artist-slams-dhs-for-using-painting-without-p ermission
Clifford R. Lovin, “Blut Und Boden: The Ideological Basis of the Nazi Agricultural Program,” Journal of the History of Ideas 28 (1967): 279–288.
https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/12/us/charlottesville-unite-the-right-rally
https://www.morganweistling.com/
X:
July 26, 2025
July 26, 2025
Ten days ago, ten Republican senators wrote to Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, asking him to release the funds Congress appropriated in March to support education. Vought was a key author of Project 2025, which claims the federal government has been taken over by a radical left cabal and calls for the decimation of that government in favor of state power, enabling the construction of a religious government.
Vought was central to the cuts made by the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) and has recently pushed Congress to put its stamp of approval on $9.4 billion of those cuts. Over the objections of Democrats, Republicans agreed earlier this month to approve cuts the administration made to laws passed by Congress, known as "rescissions,” for the first time in decades. Trump signed that measure into law on Thursday.
The Constitution charges the president with making sure the laws passed by Congress are “faithfully executed,” and the 1974 Impoundment Control Act prohibits the executive branch from withholding funds appropriated by Congress, leading lawmakers to object that the Trump administration is breaking the law and trying to take over Congress’s job of writing laws. Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) said of the rescission package: “Let's not make a habit of this. Let’s not consider this a precedent.” But Vought says those cuts are just the beginning.
In March, Congress approved nearly $7 billion in education funding that was supposed to be released by July 1, but the administration announced on June 30 it would not do so, saying officials were conducting a “review.” The funds included money to recruit and train teachers and to support arts and music education in low-income areas, as well as funds for children learning English and for the children of migrant farm workers. New York Times education reporter Sarah Mervosh noted that the Office of Management and Budget said federal dollars were being “grossly misused to subsidize a radical left-wing agenda.”
“We share your concern about taxpayer money going to fund radical left-wing programs,” the senators wrote to Vought, but “we do not believe that is happening with these funds.”
Also yesterday, Senator Katie Britt (R-AL), who chairs the Senate Appropriations homeland subcommittee, and thirteen of her Republican colleagues wrote a letter to Vought urging him to “fully implement” the government funding measure Congress passed in March, releasing money for programs funded by the National Institutes of Health. The letter clarified that its authors shared Vought’s “commitment to ensuring NIH funds are used responsibly and not diverted to ideological or unaccountable programs.” But, it warned, “Suspension of these appropriated funds—whether formally withheld or functionally delayed—could threaten Americans’ ability to access better treatments and limit our nation’s leadership in biomedical science.”
As Trump’s popularity falls, Republican lawmakers are having to confront the reality that the Project 2025 program the administration is putting into place is deeply unpopular not just with Democrats and Independents but also with Republicans. They appear to be trying desperately to shore up some of the damage the administration has done. And the White House seems to be concerned enough about the 2026 midterms that it’s listening. Yesterday the Trump administration announced it would release more than $5 billion in funding it had withheld from public schools.
The release of money before the start of the school year will help to hide from voters how the administration’s decisions are affecting their everyday lives, a helpful reprieve as the administration continues to stonewall over the files of late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Still refusing to entertain the idea of releasing the files themselves, administration officials have now met twice with Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse children. Trump’s former attorney Todd Blanche is representing the Department of Justice (DOJ). He wrote: “President Trump has told us to release all credible evidence. If Ghislane [sic] Maxwell has information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims, the FBI and the DOJ will hear what she has to say.”
Interviewing Maxwell, who is fishing for a reduction in her 20-year sentence, is unlikely to be a convincing substitute for the files themselves, especially since we now know Trump is mentioned in the files and lied that Attorney General Pam Bondi had not given him that information.
The circumstances around the talks also seem fishy. Alan Feuer of the New York Times reports that Blanche is a personal friend of Maxwell’s lawyer David O. Markus. Feuer also noted that Blanche has taken the lead in the discussions since the department fired Maurene Comey, who prosecuted the cases of both Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Maxwell herself is a problematic witness: in 2020, during Trump’s first administration, the Justice Department charged her with two counts of perjury in addition to the charges of sexually grooming children and sex trafficking. As CNN’s Aaron Blake pointed out today, in filing the charges, the Justice Department said that her lies “should give the Court serious pause” about trusting her and that her “willingness to brazenly lie under oath about her conduct…strongly suggests her true motive has been and remains to avoid being held accountable for her crimes.”
Yesterday Trump appeared to dangle a pardon over Maxwell when he pointed out to reporters that he’s “allowed” to pardon her.
As Republicans note Trump’s weakening power, elected officials appear to be pushing for rollbacks of his policies. At the same time, his appointees are pushing to put as much of their agenda into operation as they can, while they can.
Liz Essley Whyte reported yesterday in the Wall Street Journal that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to remove all sixteen members of a task force that advises the federal government on what preventative health care measures—things like cancer screenings—health insurers must cover. Whyte explains that the people currently on the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force have medical expertise, are vetted to make sure they don’t have conflicts of interest, and use the latest scientific evidence to determine which interventions work.
In June, Kennedy replaced all seventeen of the members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) with seven people who share Kennedy’s distrust of vaccines. They announced that they would reexamine the CDC’s recommended vaccine schedule for children and adults.
Hannah Natanson, Jeff Stein, Dan Diamond, and Rachel Siegel of the Washington Post reported today that staff associated with the “Department of Government Efficiency” are using artificial intelligence to eliminate half of the government’s regulations by next January. James Burnham, former chief attorney for DOGE, told the reporters: “Creative deployment of artificial intelligence to advance the president’s regulatory agenda is one logical strategy to make significant progress” during Trump’s term.
Officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which operates under the Department of Homeland Security, announced yesterday that it is starting a “detention support grant program” to fund temporary detention facilities. States have until August 8 to apply for grants from a pot of $608 million. FEMA and U.S. Customs and Border Protection will distribute the funds.
There appears to be pushback against some of the extremes of the administration’s appointees. Greg Jaffe, Eric Schmitt, and Helene Cooper of the New York Times reported today that senior military officers are increasingly at odds with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon has been rocky, as most of his staff have either resigned or been fired and have not been replaced, and as he uploaded classified information about military strikes to a private Signal chat on which a reporter had been included.
Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), whose support for Hegseth earned him Senate confirmation, recently told CNN: “With the passing of time, I think it’s clear he’s out of his depth as a manager of a large, complex organization.”
—
Notes:
https://www.capito.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/letter_to_director_vought.pdf
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-signs-rescissions-package-foreign-aid-npr-pbs-funding/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/15/senate-republicans-trump-rescissions-bill/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/25/us/education-funds-released-white-house.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/us/politics/todd-blanche-epstein-ghislaine-maxwell-trump.html
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/25/politics/ghislaine-maxwell-trump-epstein-doj
https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/rfk-health-screening-panel-members-c308cbb0
https://19thnews.org/2025/06/rfk-jr-fires-vaccine-panel-replacements/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjd2de8zz5go
https://sam.gov/fal/9ee7147447584efda2d2ed4ac51a92aa/view
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/us/politics/tillis-hegseth-vote-unfit.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/07/26/doge-ai-tool-cut-regulations-trump/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/26/us/politics/hegseth-pentagon-leadership.html
X:
July 25, 2025
July 25, 2025
“We’re going to end up shooting some of them.”
At 9:00 on the morning of May 2, 2025, a Florida Highway Patrol officer pulled over a van with 18-year-old U.S. citizen Kenny Laynez-Ambrosio and two undocumented men in it. Laynez-Ambrosio’s mother was driving the men to their landscaping job. The patrol officer called U.S. Border Patrol agents. Laynez-Ambrosio recorded what happened next. The Guardian’s Clare Considine reported the story today.
The video shows a female officer asking if anyone in the van is in the U.S. illegally. One man said he was undocumented. “OK, let’s go,” Laynez-Ambrosio heard one of the officers say. An officer popped the door of the van open and grabbed the man by the neck in a chokehold. In the video, several officers pull the man from the van and tell him to “put your f*cking head down.” While Laynez-Ambrosio can be heard telling his friend in Spanish not to resist, the officers drop the man to the ground with a stun gun.
“You’re funny, bro,” one officer says to another, apparently the one who used the stun gun. The officers laugh.
Another says, “They’re starting to resist more now,” to which an officer replies: “We’re going to end up shooting some of them.”
Later the officers say: “Goddamn! Woo! Nice!” adding: “Just remember, you can smell that [inaudible] $30,000 bonus.”
Diamond Walker and Valentina Palm of the Palm Beach Post added that an officer explained the stun gun: “He was being a d***. “That’s the one we tased.”
The officers arrested Laynez-Ambrosio, a U.S. citizen, and held him for six hours in a cell at a Customs and Border Patrol station, then charged him with obstruction without violence. He was sentenced to 10 hours of community service and a four-hour anger management course.
Eighty-four years ago today, on July 25, 1941, Emmet Till was born in Chicago, Illinois.
In August 1955, when he was fourteen years old, Till went to visit relatives in a small Mississippi town. After the wife of a white man named Roy Bryant accused the Black boy of flirting with her, Bryant and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, kidnapped Till, brutally beat him, mutilated him, shot him in the back of the head, and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River.
In September 1955 an all-white jury took just over an hour to find Bryant and Milam not guilty. A member of the jury said, “We wouldn’t have taken so long if we hadn’t stopped to drink pop.”
Immune from further prosecution, Bryant and Milam told their story to Look magazine for $4,000. They said they had kidnapped and beaten Till to frighten him, but when he refused to beg for mercy, they drove him to the river. Milam asked, “You still as good as I am?” and when Till answered, “Yeah,” they shot him, tied a 75-pound cotton gin fan around his neck with barbed wire, and threw him in.
“What else could we do?” Milam said. “He was hopeless. I’m no bully. I never hurt a n*gger in my life. I like n*ggers, in their place. I know how to work ’em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, n*ggers are gonna stay in their place.”
After Till’s body had been recovered from the Tallahatchie, the county sheriff directed that the body be buried quickly, but Till’s mother insisted that her son’s body be returned to Chicago.
There, she insisted on an open-casket funeral.
“Let the world see what I have seen,” she said.
—
Notes:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/25/florida-teen-immigration-arrest
https://www.life.com/history/the-murder-of-emmett-till-and-the-sham-trial-that-shocked-the-nation/
https://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/till/confession.html
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/emmett-trial-jw-milam-and-roy-bryant/
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H.
July 24, 2025
July 24, 2025
The Epstein list made it into last night’s premiere of the twenty-seventh season of the television series South Park when Satan, in bed with Trump, commented, “It’s weird that whenever it comes up, you just tell everyone to relax.”
The episode hit the president’s lawsuit against the parent company of CBS News, Paramount Global, which paid Trump $16 million to settle his complaint that it had edited an interview with then–Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris misleadingly. Paramount also said it would not renew comedian Stephen Colbert’s contract just days after the deal was announced. Paramount and Skydance Media are in the midst of an $8 billion merger, and they needed the approval of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to complete the deal. Today, Skydance Media promised to eliminate Paramount’s diversity, equity, and inclusion practices and to root out the “bias” at CBS News in order to win the administration's support for the merger. This afternoon, the FCC approved the deal.
Charlotte Clymer of Charlotte’s Web Thoughts notes that on Monday, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone signed a $1.5 billion, five-year deal with Paramount for global streaming rights to the show. This new episode skewered Paramount’s cozying up to Trump.
Clymer points out that the South Park writers go on to portray Trump exactly as they once did Saddam Hussein, not only putting him in bed with Satan as they did Saddam, but also giving Trump the ‘“[s]ame mannerisms. Same voice inflections. Same love affair with Satan. Same dictatorial chaos. In fact, Satan references this by telling Trump he reminds him of a guy he used to date.” Clymer notes that the writers of one of the country’s hottest shows are “communicating that they think Trump is a bullsh*t, two-bit dictator.”
The Bulwark’s Joe Perticone reported today that in a decade of reporting on Congress, he has never seen such a level of panic among Republican lawmakers. In the past, he notes, Trump could weather crises because Republicans closed ranks around him. The Epstein issue, though, has driven a wedge through the Republicans themselves, some of whom are turning against Trump just as the House of Representatives is headed back home. There, Republican members will hear directly from constituents who are angry over the administration’s about-face on releasing more information about Epstein and his associates.
Trump boasted to the House Republicans on Tuesday that his poll numbers are the best he’s ever had, but in fact a Gallup poll out today shows his approval rating at its lowest in his second term: just 37% of American adults approve of his performance in office. Journalist Bill Grueskin notes that this puts Trump six points below where Biden was after the final U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. The biggest shift has been among Independents. Only 29% of them say they approve of his job performance, down from 46% at the beginning of his term.
Gallup reports that 60% of American adults disapprove of how Trump is handling immigration, with only 38% approving. That is unlikely to change as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), newly flush with funding from the budget reconciliation bill, ramps up both immigration sweeps and detention. Neither is popular with Americans as they hear stories of overcrowding at ICE facilities and inhumane and unsanitary conditions.
On Tuesday, Nicole Acevedo of NBC News reported that detainees at the detention center in the Florida Everglades spoke of “torturous conditions in cage-like units full of mosquitoes,” with lights on at all times, lack of food and medical treatment, and unsanitary conditions. On June 20, she reported, the U.S. was holding more than 56,000 people in detention centers, the highest number in U.S. history. Nearly 72% of those held had no criminal history.
Just two days after the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Urban Search and Rescue branch, Ken Pagurek, resigned out of frustration with the administration’s work to destroy the agency, and the same day FEMA acting director David Richardson would not commit to the agency’s continued existence, Colleen DeGuzman of the Texas Tribune reported that the U.S. Department of Defense had awarded a $1.26 billion contract to build the largest detention facility in the U.S. at Fort Bliss, an army base in El Paso, Texas. The facility will be designed to hold 5,000 people in tents, and it is expected to open in September 2027. DeGuzman notes that the company that was awarded the contract, Acquisition Logistics, appears not to have experience running detention centers.
On Friday, July 18, the government of El Salvador repatriated more than 250 Venezuelan men who had been held at the notorious CECOT prison after being sent there by the Trump administration. The administration maintained it was not responsible for the men after they left U.S. territory, a claim the government of El Salvador repeatedly refuted. But with the repatriation of the men in exchange for the release of ten U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents held as political prisoners in Venezuela, the State Department claimed the exchange was “thanks to President Trump’s leadership and commitment to the American people.”
The former CECOT prisoners are telling the story of their four-month incarceration, detailing human rights abuses: beatings, being shot with pellets, deprivation of due process, torture.
Today Neiyerver Adrián Leon Rengel filed an administrative claim against Homeland Security for wrongful detention when it sent him to the terrorist CECOT prison in El Salvador. The filing is the first step in a lawsuit. “I want to clear my name,” he told Jazmine Ulloa of the New York Times. “I am not a bad person.”
The Trump administration received a rebuke yesterday in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man wrongly deported to CECOT. The administration brought Abrego back to the U.S. only after it indicted him on charges of human smuggling. Once back, he was imprisoned in Tennessee, and the administration threatened to deport him again if he were released from custody pending trial.
Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland prohibited officials from taking Abrego into custody and said the administration must give him at least three days’ notice if it intends to deport him.
Shortly afterward, U.S. District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. ordered that Abrego be released from criminal detention, saying the government had not shown that he is a threat. While the administration insists that Abrego is a gang member, Crenshaw wrote that he had seen no evidence that Abrego “has markings or tattoos showing gang affiliation; has working relationships with known MS-13 members; ever told any of the witnesses that he is [an] MS-13 member; or has ever been affiliated with any sort of gang activity.” Jacob Knutson of Democracy Docket noted that Abrego requested to stay his release for 30 days, and a magistrate judge issued that stay yesterday.
The administration is facing rough waters elsewhere, too. On Monday the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its final score for the budget reconciliation bill that poured money into border security. Although Republicans insisted it would not add to the deficit, the CBO predicts it will in fact increase the federal deficit by $3.4 trillion and push 10 million people off health insurance. Most of the cost for the bill will come from the Republicans' extension of tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy.
In the Washington Post today, Gene Sperling, who served as director of the National Economic Council under presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, noted that while the Republicans insisted that extending the tax cuts should not be counted toward raising the deficit because they were part of “current policy,” they “entirely rejected” the current policy argument when it came to extending the increase in the Affordable Care Act’s premium tax credit (PTC) established under Biden. Unlike the tax cuts for the wealthy, Republicans are letting that tax credit die, a change that will mean a tax increase of $335 billion for working families over the next ten years.
The loss of the PTC will not only drive healthcare up more than $18,000 a year for a typical 60-year-old couple making $82,000 a year, Sperling writes, but will also drive healthier Americans out of the market, making healthcare coverage more expensive for those who remain in it. Sperling notes that unlike many of the cuts in the budget reconciliation bill, the PTC will expire this year, making voters aware of what the Republicans have done before the midterms—a reality that might have been behind the recent calls from some Republican lawmakers to extend the PTC.
Yesterday, Dan Lamothe and John Hudson of the Washington Post reported that the messages Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sent in a Signal chat came from an email with “SECRET” classification, meaning that disclosing that information could cause serious damage to national security. Senior members of the administration have repeatedly denied that classified information was shared in the chat.
Finally today, cryptocurrency reporter Molly White noted that a memecoin by cryptocurrency billionaire Justin Sun, who has invested about $213 million in cryptocurrency projects connected to Trump, posted a meme showing its mascot, sporting an evil grin, manipulating the White House with the mechanical system of a puppeteer. Over the image, the meme read: “You never truly know who’s pulling the strings.”
—
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/23/media/skydance-fcc-cbs-news-bias-ombudsman-dei-paramount
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fcc-approves-paramount-skydance-merger/
Charlotte's Web ThoughtsSouth Park Thinks Trump is a Little Fascist BitchRead morea day ago · 618 likes · 9 comments · Charlotte Clymer
The BulwarkThis Is the Most Panicked Republicans Have Been in YearsRepublicans are imploding over Jeffrey Epstein, and the evidence is hard to miss. The panic among GOP lawmakers is unlike anything I’ve seen in a decade of reporting on Congress…Read more18 hours ago · 423 likes · 83 comments · Joe Perticonehttps://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5418546-donald-trump-approval-gallup/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/21/politics/fema-search-and-rescue-chief-resigns
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/07/23/texas-migrant-detention-tent-camp-fort-bliss-el-paso/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/07/24/republican-bill-health-care-taxes/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/us/venezuelan-migrant-us-wrongful-detention.html
https://www.advocate.com/news/andry-hernandez-romero-cecot-torture
https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/federal-judge-kilmar-abrego-garcia-trump-custody/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/07/23/hegseth-signalgate-classified-secret/
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