Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 16
August 24, 2025
August 24, 2025
As the administration of President Donald Trump is using loopholes in the nation’s laws to claim the right to use the military against American citizens, Democratic governors are pushing back.
The administration has taken control of the Washington, D.C., police under the 1973 Home Rule Act, which permits that takeover if “special conditions of an emergency nature exist.” Although the Department of Justice itself reported that crime in the city is at a 30-year low, Trump declared a crime emergency in the District of Columbia on August 11 to take control of the police.
The Home Rule Act limits the president’s takeover to 30 days unless the House and Senate pass a joint resolution to extend that time. On Friday, Representative Andy Biggs (R-AZ) introduced a bill to extend the takeover for about six months and to make that time the default for all future “emergencies.”
Tonight, California governor Gavin Newsom’s social media account posted: “Trump’s militarization of Los Angeles seems to have been just the start of an authoritarian takeover of American cities. This is not leadership. This is a scary, unlawful grab for power, and we should all be deeply concerned.”
Newsom has been calling attention to Trump’s erratic behavior and mental incapacity by imitating the president’s disjointed all-caps social media posts and mimicking the president’s merchandise. He recently replaced Trump’s name with his own on ball caps, for example, to say “Newsom was right about everything” after Trump appeared Friday with a cap saying “Trump was right about everything,” and has offered flags that say “Make America GAVIN Again” to troll Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. Right-wing media complaints about Newsom’s unprofessional behavior highlight Trump’s instability, for Newsom is simply imitating Trump.
On Saturday, Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post reported that for weeks the Pentagon has been planning a military deployment of National Guard members and possibly active-duty troops to Chicago. The president cannot send National Guard troops unless a governor requests them, but Trump deployed troops in Los Angeles with the argument that the soldiers were protecting federal buildings and personnel, an argument that could apply almost anywhere he sends Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker responded: “The State of Illinois at this time has received no requests or outreach from the federal government asking if we need assistance, and we have made no requests for federal intervention. The safety of the people of Illinois is always my top priority. There is no emergency that warrants the President of the United States federalizing the [Illinois National Guard], deploying the National Guard from other states, or sending active duty military within our own borders. Donald Trump is attempting to manufacture a crisis, politicize Americans who serve in uniform, and continue abusing his power to distract from the pain he's causing families. We'll continue to follow the law, stand up for the sovereignty of our state, and protect Illinoisans.”
This morning, Trump threatened to send troops to Baltimore, Maryland, after Maryland governor Wes Moore invited him in what Trump called “a rather nasty and provocative tone,” to join him on a walk through the streets of Baltimore. Trump wrote that “I gave Wes Moore a lot of money to fix his demolished bridge. I will now have to rethink this decision???” Trump appeared to be referring not to his own money, but to federal funds supporting the rebuilding of Baltimore’s Key Bridge, which collapsed after a container ship hit it on March 26, 2024. The collapse stopped operations at one of the busiest ports in the nation.
In another post, Trump suggested that Moore, who served in Afghanistan and received a Bronze Star, awarded for acts of valor in combat, had lied about getting a Bronze Star.
Moore responded: “President Bone Spurs will do anything to get out of walking—even if that means spouting off more lies about the progress we’re making on public safety in Maryland. Hey Donald, we can get you a golf cart if that makes things easier. Just let my team know.” He added: “Did Donald Trump, the President of the United States, lie about an injury to dodge the Vietnam draft?”
The AI feature of X, called “Grok,” helpfully added: “Trump received four student deferments during the Vietnam era, followed by a 1968 medical deferment for bone spurs in his heels, per official records. The diagnosing doctor's daughters later claimed it was a favor to Trump's father, with no actual spurs. [Trump fixer] Michael Cohen testified Trump admitted faking it. Trump denies this, saying it was legitimate but temporary. No medical records confirm or refute.”
On Face the Nation today, Moore said he was actively looking at redistricting in Maryland to offset the Republican mid-decade redistricting in Republican-dominated states Trump is demanding. Moore said: “[W]e…need to make sure that if the president of the United States is putting his finger on the scale to try to manipulate elections because he knows that his policies cannot win in a ballot box, then it behooves each and every one of us to be able to keep all options on the table to ensure that the voters’ voices can actually be heard. “
The National Guard troops deployed to Washington, D.C., will begin carrying firearms tonight.
But Trump appears angry that he is not being given enough scope for his desires. Tonight he posted on social media that the tradition of blue slips, which enables senators to stop the appointment of objectionable federal judges in their own states, has made it impossible for him to appoint the judges he wants. He wrote: “I have a Consultational [sic] Right to appoint Judges and U.S. Attorneys, but that RIGHT has been completely taken away from me…. [T]he only candidates that I can get confirmed for these most important positions are, believe it or not, Democrats! [Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee] Chuck Grassley should allow strong Republican candidates to ascend to these very vital and powerful roles, and tell the Democrats, as they often tell us, to go to HELL!”
Trump is likely reacting to his inability to keep his attorney Alina Habba in the position of U.S. attorney for New Jersey after New Jersey senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim used blue slips to keep her from getting a Senate vote for confirmation. Trump appointed Habba acting U.S. attorney but after her 120-day interim period expired, a panel of judges skipped over her to appoint her assistant, Desiree Leigh Grace, to the job. Attorney general Pam Bondi then fired Grace, and Trump reappointed Habba. Last week, U.S. district judge Matthew Brann ruled that Habba was not holding the post lawfully.
There seems to be some tension in the White House tonight. As Trump’s poll numbers are in the low 40s on his job performance and underwater on every one of his policies, tonight he wrote: “Except what is written and broadcast in the Fake News, I now have the highest poll numbers I’ve ever had, some in the 60’s and even 70’s. Thank you. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”
Trump followed that post up with another. “Despite a very high popularity and, according to many, among the greatest 8 months in Presidential History, ABC & NBC FAKE NEWS, two of the worst and most biased networks in history, give me 97% BAD STORIES. IF THAT IS THE CASE, THEY ARE SIMPLY AN ARM OF THE DEMOCRAT PARTY AND SHOULD, ACCORDING TO MANY, HAVE THEIR LICENSES REVOKED BY THE FCC. I would be totally in favor of that because they are so biased and untruthful, an actual threat to our Democracy!!! MAGA”
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Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/23/dc-federal-takeover-police-extend/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/08/23/trump-chicago-military-national-guard/
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5467900-trump-criticizes-maryland-governor/
https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/data
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, August 24, 2025, 9:46 PM.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/24/alina-habba-slams-senate-blue-slips-00522501
YouTube:
X:
iamwesmoore/status/1959732998477168965
iamwesmoore/status/1959640110216978832
grok/status/1959745492293915035
GavinNewsom/status/1959686752161157259
GavinNewsom/status/1959674599676989523
Bluesky:
patriottakes.bsky.social/post/3lx5s4c27c22i
civictracker.us/post/3lx6s6qe6ez2b
governor.ca.gov/post/3lx6vtxhuw22z
August 23, 2025
August 23, 2025
“It is my Great Honor to report that the United States of America now fully owns and controls 10% of INTEL, a Great American Company that has an even more incredible future,” President Donald Trump wrote yesterday afternoon on social media. He took the stake in the company after calling on August 7 for its chief executive officer, Lip-Bu Tan, to step down. When Tan met with Trump on August 11, the president says, he told Tan the U.S. “should be given 10% of Intel.” Tan agreed. Announcing the deal, Trump referred to Tan as “the Highly Respected Chief Executive Officer of the Company.”
It is wild to see Republicans cheering on a president who publicly threatened a CEO and stated openly that he shook the man down for a major share in his company.
It is even wilder to see Republicans, who since 1980 have held so fervently to the idea of free markets that they have denounced even the most basic regulations as socialism, celebrate the government takeover of a private company.
The story of that shift is a larger story about how the Republicans came to put party over country and, now, how they have put power over everything.
It was not always this way.
After World War II, leaders of both major political parties agreed that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, protect civil rights, and shore up a rules-based international order to try to prevent another world war. Republicans and Democrats contended, sometimes bitterly, over policies, but members of both parties recognized that they shared with the other a loyalty to the country and a general set of beliefs about what was best for it that encouraged them to seek common ground.
As recently as 1974, Republican senators went to the White House to tell a member of their own party that the House of Representatives would vote to impeach him for covering up a break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic Party and that they would vote to convict him. After their visit, President Richard M. Nixon resigned.
But 1980 saw the takeover of the Republican Party by an extremist faction known as the “Movement Conservatives.” Their roots lay in 1937, when men who hated the New Deal legislation being put in place by the Democrats came together to destroy it. Businessmen who hated business regulations and taxes joined with southern racists who hated Black rights and with religious traditionalists who hated women’s rights and wanted the churches to control welfare programs so they could police behavior.
Calling themselves “conservatives” because they wanted to dismantle the laws and recreate the 1920s, the Movement Conservatives produced a list of demands. They called for deregulation, tax cuts, an end to social welfare spending, and an end to government support for workers, maintaining that those principles would protect the bedrock of the economy: private enterprise. They also called for states’ rights, home rule, and local self-government, by which they meant that southern states could maintain discriminatory laws against their citizens, no matter what the Fourteenth Amendment said.
Their goal was not to compromise with Democrats or Republicans who believed in an active government; their goal was to destroy that government. They insisted that government regulations and taxes were creeping socialism; they said that social welfare sapped American individualism; they said that civil rights laws destroyed democracy by overruling state voters. Most Americans wanted little to do with this faction until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that protected Black and Brown voting enabled the businessmen who hated regulation and taxes to mobilize racists.
Ronald Reagan tapped into the Movement Conservatives in 1964, when he backed Arizona senator Barry Goldwater for the presidency. When he ran for the presidency in 1980, his promises focused on economic freedom, but the racism and sexism in the radical faction was always present; he deliberately appealed to racists with a promise to defend states’ rights and to the sexists trying to combat the women’s liberation movement with an appeal to religious traditionalists. Reagan promised to put businessmen in the driver’s seat, but he depended on the votes of racists and sexists to win the White House.
Reagan’s tax cuts tripled the federal debt and left his successor, George H.W. Bush, facing a $171 billion deficit in 1990, along with the threat of automatic cuts of 40% across the board if the deficit wasn’t reduced. Bush reneged on his promise not to raise taxes. Movement Conservatives signed on in private, but in public they attacked the deal as a betrayal of Reaganism and common people. Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich used the opportunity to purge the Republican Party of its traditional base: those who believed in an active government. He accused anyone who stood against him of being a “Republican In Name Only,” or “RINO.”
In 1994, Gingrich managed to flip the House of Representatives to the Republicans for the first time since 1954, and he set out to reshape the Republican Party into an instrument for destroying the modern government. That effort would require destroying the Democratic Party by referring to its members as “corrupt,” “intolerant,” “sick,” “traitors”; by launching investigations of what he insisted—without evidence—was “voter fraud,” and by investigating and then impeaching Democratic president Bill Clinton.
By the end of the 1990s, leading Republicans no longer saw party differences as differences of policy. Party trumped country because they believed they were in a fight for the soul of America, and they were on the side of the angels.
If keeping Democrats out of power meant it was necessary to skew the system, surely that was justified. Republicans began to talk of purifying the voter rolls in the 1990s, and in 1998 the Florida legislature passed a law that purged from the system as many as 100,000 Black voters presumed to be Democrats. This purge paid off in 2000, when Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore won the popular vote by more than half a million votes but was four votes short of a win in the Electoral College. The contest came down to Florida, where a confusing ballot had siphoned about 10,000 votes intended for Gore off to far-right candidate Pat Buchanan.
A hand recount had reduced Republican candidate George W. Bush’s lead from 1,784 to 537 when Republican operatives attacked the recount venue in Miami-Dade County to stop the recount, claiming there was “voter fraud.” The Supreme Court—led by five Republican-appointed justices—stepped in to give the victory to Bush.
When voters elected Democrat Barack Obama in 2008, Republicans declared war. On the night of Obama’s inauguration, Republican senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and other Republican leaders agreed over dinner to oppose anything that the new president proposed, regardless of whether they agreed with it. “For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,” Republican senators told incoming vice president Joe Biden.
They also worked to make it easier for Republicans to win. In 2010 the Supreme Court overturned a century of campaign finance laws to permit unlimited corporate and other outside money to flow into elections.
At the same time, Republican operatives launched Operation REDMAP, or Redistricting Majority Project, to take over statehouses before the redistricting after the 2010 census. They won the statehouses of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other, smaller states, and they redrew congressional maps using precise computer models. In the 2012 election, Democrats won the White House decisively, the Senate easily, and a majority of 1.4 million votes for House candidates. And yet Republicans came away with a 33-seat majority in the House of Representatives.
Three years later, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act by ending the requirement that states with a history of racial discrimination in voting preclear changes to their voting rules with the Department of Justice. Republican-dominated state legislatures immediately began to restrict voting rights.
But the Republican economic program of slashing regulations and taxes was never popular, and the Republicans stayed in power by doubling down on the racism and sexism of their voting base. After 1987, talk radio fed the rhetoric that racial minorities and women were ushering socialism into the United States, and after 1994 the Fox News Channel amplified it.
In 2016, Donald Trump rode to the White House by playing directly to that racism and sexism and asserting that white men should dominate women and people of color. Establishment leaders backed him for the tax cuts he promised, but they no longer called the shots. The racist and sexist MAGA base did. Trump and his loyalists took the idea that they had a right to rule to its logical extreme. When voters elected Democrat Joe Biden to the presidency, they tried to overturn that election with violence.
Now, back in office, Trump is dismantling the government as Movement Conservatives have wanted for decades. But he has abandoned the small-government principles Movement Conservatives claimed to champion and is using state power to terrorize citizens. He has abandoned the due process of the law and states’ rights and is working to rig the system permanently in his favor. And now he has abandoned the free-market principles around which the Movement Conservatives organized in the first place.
From the beginning, “Movement Conservatism” was anything but conservative. Its supporters embraced the radical goal of dismantling a practical system that stabilized the country after the Great Depression and a devastating world war, a system that was based in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But now they are embracing something altogether different.
Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo explained yesterday on social media that “a new conservatism has emerged. We are leading a rebellion against the establishment and dismantling the elements of the left-wing ideological regime—not for the purpose of nihilism, but for the purpose of rebirth, or restoration, of our republic.”
Rufo’s statement is, as one commenter noted, “just textbook 1930s fascism.”
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Notes:
https://www.usccr.gov/files/pubs/vote2000/report/exesum.htm
Michael Grunwald, The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era (Simon & Schuster, 2012). Also Jonathan Capehart, “Republicans had it in for Obama before Day 1,” Washington Post, August 10, 2012; Greg Sargent, “Biden: McConnell decided to deny us cooperation before we took office,” Washington Post, August 10, 2012.
Bluesky:
atrupar.com/post/3lwyzd6jwqq2x
kairyssdal.bsky.social/post/3lwzeyztuas2y
justinwolfers.bsky.social/post/3lx33uyntm72v
August 22, 2025
August 22, 2025
In these last days of August, with Congress on hiatus and the Epstein files looming, the Trump White House appears to be making a big move to consolidate power over the federal government, weaponize it against Trump’s opponents, and keep him in power indefinitely.
At around 7:00 this morning, FBI agents searched the home and office of Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton, who has been a fierce critic of Trump since leaving his first administration. Officials told reporters the search was part of an investigation into whether Bolton illegally retained classified information or leaked it to news media. But as J.V. Last of The Bulwark noted, an investigation into classified documents from several years ago—as opposed to a search of, say, a drug dealer—would normally mean the government officials would have a conversation with Bolton’s lawyers and arrange for a routine search to which Bolton agreed. Instead, agents stormed his house and office in an early morning raid.
The raid seems a pretty clear warning to those Trump perceives as enemies that he will bring the full weight of the United States government to harass them. Bolton has been a thorn in Trump's side for years because he is a well-known right-wing figure who has not been shy about speaking out against Trump. As recently as last week, Bolton told CNN that Trump had “achieved very little” by meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Alaska, and that “Putin clearly won.” He also noted that Trump “looked tired.”
Earlier this month, when ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked Bolton if he was worried Trump would come after him as part of the president’s “retribution campaign” being waged through the FBI and the Department of Justice. Bolton pointed out that Trump had already come after him by removing his Secret Service protection despite specific Iranian threats against his life. Bolton added: “I think it is a retribution presidency.”
Targeting Bolton has been a goal of FBI director Kash Patel, whom Trump appointed after Patel made it clear he intended to use the power of government against Trump’s opponents. “We’re going to come after you whether it’s criminally or civilly,” Patel said in 2023 on Trump associate Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.
Indeed, Trump loyalist Attorney General Pam Bondi has launched criminal investigations into Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA), who led the House Intelligence Committee that broke the story of Trump’s phone call to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky asking him to smear Trump’s 2020 political opponent Joe Biden; New York Attorney General Letitia James, who successfully sued Trump and the Trump Organization for fraud; and now Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, who suggested on August 6 that the revision of the last few months’ jobs numbers might signal a turning point in the economy.
Those investigations come after another Trump loyalist, William Pulte, who heads the Federal Housing Finance Agency, alleged that the three committed mortgage fraud years ago. All three have denied the allegations, and Allan Smith, Steve Kopack, and Dareh Gregorian of NBC News note that accusation of mortgage fraud “has long been a common tactic in opposition research on political campaigns. James’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, pointed out that the administration does not appear to be investigating Trump loyalist Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who, divorce filings released this July show, claimed three different properties as his primary residence, thus securing lower-interest mortgages on them.
Earlier this week, bodycam footage released from a court filing by Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), whom the administration has charged with assaulting federal agents during the chaotic arrest of Newark, New Jersey, mayor Ras Baraka on May 9, shows that the Justice Department’s deputy attorney general Todd Blanche personally ordered Baraka’s arrest. The case was later dismissed.
And yet Trump loyalists are not just targeting people in order to intimidate opponents. They seem determined to rewrite history to suit Trump.
In July the Department of Justice launched investigations of former FBI director James Comey and former CIA director John Brennan, alleging they had made false statements to Congress about the investigation into the attempt by Russian operatives to help Trump’s 2016 candidacy. After all these years, Trump continues to come back to the scandal that he calls “Russia, Russia, Russia.”
Yesterday, Russia bombed a U.S. factory in Ukraine, wounding at least 15 people, and today, Russian officials made it clear they would not even entertain the bilateral summit with Ukraine Trump called for. Nonetheless, today in a bizarre session in the Oval Office, at what was supposed to be an announcement about next year’s FIFA World Cup, wearing a cap with the words “Trump Was Right About Everything,” Trump showed reporters a photograph of himself and Putin that Putin had sent him from their meeting in Alaska last week, and expressed sadness that Putin, who has murdered more than a million people and is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, can’t attend the FIFA games. Trump said he planned to sign the photograph as a gift for Putin.
The administration’s crusade against the U.S. intelligence agencies that uncovered the relationship between Russian operatives and Trump’s 2016 campaign is continuing as part of the administration’s power grab. On Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced she will cut 40% of her office, with cuts coming from the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which, as Maggie Miller and Dana Nickel of Politico note, “collects and analyzes data on foreign influence operations seeking to undermine U.S. democracy.”
Today Hegseth fired the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, U.S. Air Force Lt. General Jeffrey Kruse. The Defense Intelligence Agency provides intelligence to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and to U.S. military personnel in the field.
The crackdown in Washington, D.C., seems to have far less to do with combating crime in a city where crime rates are at a 30-year low than it does with demonstrating that the administration controls the capital, the seat of the U.S. government. As conservative lawyer George Conway, who helpfully videoed the FBI raid on John Bolton’s house this morning, put it: “If you want to have a coup against the constitutional order, you want to control the capital city. And if he has control of the policing in the city of Washington,... how do you stop him? Who's gonna tell him to leave the White House?"
Trump has rewarded those who fought to steal the 2020 election for him, pardoning or commuting the sentences of more than 1,500 people convicted or charged in connection with the January 6, 2021 riot designed to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Biden president, and yesterday he demanded that Colorado officials release former election officer Tina Peters, whom a jury found guilty of four felonies for breaching election equipment to supporte Trump’s lies about election fraud after that election. Trump posted on social media: “She did nothing wrong, except catching the Democrats cheat in the Election [sic]…. If she is not released, I am going to take harsh measures!!!”
Now Trump and his allies appear to be cementing control of the capital. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said in a statement today from the Pentagon that the 2,000 National Guard members stationed in Washington, D.C., will begin to carry weapons. More National Guard personnel are on the way. At the same time, FBI Director Patel and deputy director Dan Bongino appear to be turning the FBI into a national police force: dropping the requirement for a college degree, reducing training hours, and focusing on street crime rather than the bureau’s traditional expertise in white collar crime, corruption, and so on.
Trump said yesterday he wants to extend the deployment for more than the 30-day limit the law allows, and today he warned that he would take over the city “with the federal government.” Today, in the Oval Office, Trump told reporters that his administration would invade Chicago, which he called a “mess,” next. He said that “African American ladies, beautiful ladies, are saying, ‘Please, President Trump, come to Chicago, please.’”
On August 18, Democracy Docket’s Marc Elias warned that Trump is “stationing the military and other federal law enforcement in blue areas so—when the time comes—he can pivot their mission to suppressing voting rights and undermining free and fair elections.” On Tuesday, Trump ally Steve Bannon said on his webcast War Room: “They're petrified over at MSNBC and CNN that, hey, since we’re taking control of the cities, there's going to be ICE officers near polling places. You damn right.”
Last March, scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder wrote that those who fantasize about a strongman make the terrible mistake of thinking “that a strongman will be your strongman. He won't,” Snyder wrote. “In a democracy, elected representatives listen to constituents. We take this for granted, and imagine that a dictator would owe us something.” But he doesn’t, Snyder explains: your support makes you irrelevant.
Those who supported Trump from a belief that he would protect American business from state interference received yet another example of Snyder’s point today when Trump boasted that the government has taken a 10% stake in Intel, which builds semiconductors and chips. Trump says he intends to take similar stakes in other companies.
In the midst of the day’s firestorm of news, the administration released several pieces of the transcripts of Todd Blanche’s interview with Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell. In them, she is recorded as saying, among other things: “[A]s far as I'm concerned, President Trump was always very cordial and very kind to me. And I just want to say that I…admire his extraordinary achievement in becoming the president now. And I like him, and I've always liked him.”
Trump apologist lawyer Jonathan Turley suggested the Maxwell interviews would lay the story of the Epstein files to rest. But the interviews were always a distraction from the Epstein files themselves. Prosecutors at the Department of Justice itself called Maxwell a serial liar, and as Erica Orden, Josh Gerstein, and Kyle Cheney of Politico note, she is now angling for a pardon after her conviction on sex trafficking charges.
In Illinois today, Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson called Trump’s threat to take over the city an illegal abuse of power.
On X, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker posted: “Things People are Begging for: 1. Cheaper groceries 2. No Medicaid and SNAP cuts 3. Release of the Epstein Files.” He added: “Things People are NOT begging for: 1. An authoritarian power grab of major cities.”
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Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/08/22/bolton-home-fbi-search-trump/
The BulwarkAbout Courage1. John Bolton and Tina Peters…Read more21 hours ago · 1122 likes · 514 comments · Jonathan V. Lasthttps://abcnews.go.com/Politics/week-transcript-8-10-25-nato-secretary-general/story?id=124514011
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/federal-reserve-lisa-cook-jobs-report-concerning-economy-turning-point/
https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/ken-angela-paxton-mortgage-primary-residence-homestead-exemption/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/09/politics/comey-brennan-ratcliffe-fbi-cia-referral
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y7l47xrpko
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4914462-colorado-county-clerk-sentenced-election-breach/
Trump, Truth Social post, August 21, 2025, 8:07 AM.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/07/proud-boys-lawsuit-100-million/84086933007/
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/08/22/trump-chicago-crackdown/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/18/newark-mayor-arrest-bodycam-footage-todd-blanche-00513734
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/23/gabbard-russia-2016-election-declassification-00471289
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/21/g-s1-84146/russia-ukraine-american-factory
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/20/gabbard-odni-cuts-00517232
https://newrepublic.com/article/199465/trump-fbi-raid-john-bolton-home
https://newsletters.democracydocket.com/trumps-militarization-of-u.s.-cities-grows-more-dangerous
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/us/politics/fbi-agent-recruitment-requirements-trump.html
Thinking about...The Strongman Fantasy (updated)(Note to readers: this is a text I wrote in March, looking ahead. Given where we are now in the US, I thought it deserved an update. Please share it…Read morea year ago · 2985 likes · 188 comments · Timothy Snyderhttps://www.cnn.com/2025/08/22/tech/trump-intel-10-percent-stake
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/14/tech/intel-trump-us-government-investment
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-shows-off-photograph-putin-alaska-summit/story?id=124892306
X:
BulwarkOnline/status/1958906288487739681
JBPritzker/status/1958965961815392342
Bluesky:
acyn.bsky.social/post/3lwzm62b5kc23
ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3lwz76hrfu22z
did:plc:kjjhbsc3pp3vkqjsivk6z2yd/post/3lwzgaducck2q
atrupar.com/post/3lwyylh4esu2a
August 21, 2025
Yesterday, Republicans in the Texas House of Representatives approved a new map redrawing congressional districts to switch five seats from Democratic control to Republican. Now the Texas Senate will take it up. President Donald Trump demanded the new map because with popular support for his administration plummeting, he is worried about facing voters in the 2026 midterm elections. Texas Republicans are quite open that they launched a rare mid-decade redistricting simply to maximize their partisan gain. Although people of color are driving Texas’s population growth, the new maps put the vast majority of electoral power in the hands of white Texans.
Last night, just before midnight, Trump cheered on the Texas Republicans and called for Florida, Indiana, and other states to do the same thing. He also called for Republicans in the state legislatures to “STOP MAIL-IN VOTING” and “go to PAPER BALLOTS before it is too late.” “If we do these TWO things,” he wrote, “we will pick up 100 more seats, and the CROOKED game of politics is over. God Bless America!!!”
The president of the United States is openly admitting that his party cannot win a free and fair election.
Instead of appealing to voters with popular policies, he is calling for rigging our elections so that his party cannot lose. This appears to have been the plan all along. In July 2024, Trump told an audience of evangelical Christians that if they voted for him in November, “in four years, you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good, you're not gonna have to vote."
Republicans have put their thumb on the scales of the nation’s election machinery for years, suppressing Democratic voting and gerrymandering the states to make it harder to elect Democrats than to elect Republicans. Now Trump has come right out and admitted that leaders understand they cannot win without jiggering the system to create what political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way call “competitive authoritarianism,” in which elections are held because leaders want the legitimacy of an election, but the competition is so unfair the outcome is pretty much preordained.
But after decades of trying to protect democracy by reinforcing democratic norms, Democrats and their allies appear to be willing to fight fire with fire. Democratic lawmakers in California responded to the Texans’ power grab by redrawing their own congressional districts to act as a counterweight to the Texas plan.
Today the California legislature passed two measures to send to voters the question of whether to redistrict the state temporarily to offset the new Texas map. The urgent measures received the required two-thirds majority to pass, and Governor Gavin Newsom signed them into law this evening. He also declared that the state will hold a special election on November 4 for voters to weigh in on whether to adopt the new maps temporarily to neutralize the Texas Republicans’ power grab.
Republicans are now openly rigging the system—itself a profound attack on our democracy— for a leader whose mental acuity is slipping and whose association with convicted sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein has weakened his support even among his base.
On the right-wing Todd Starnes Show today, Trump upped the number of wars he claims to have solved to ten, three more than the seven he has been claiming. “We ended seven wars,” he said. “Probably more than that. You know, I will, they wrote an article that they gave me three additional ones that I ended without even knowing it, but you know I saw things were going bad and it looked like it was going to go bad and it could’ve been, it could’ve been ten.”
For all that the president calls himself the peace president and seems so desperate to win a Nobel Peace Prize that he brought it up with Norway’s finance minister in a cold call about tariffs in July, he is increasingly turning to the use of the military.
In February, Trump designated certain Latin American drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, a designation normally applied to groups that use violence for political ends, like al-Qaeda. On August 8, in the midst of the deep furor after the Wall Street Journal reported that he was named in the Epstein files, Trump secretly signed a directive to use military force against those cartels. Now it appears the U.S. is moving military personnel toward Mexico and Venezuela.
Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum has been working with the U.S. to combat drug trafficking and has rejected the use of the U.S. military in Mexico. Scholar of military law Geoffrey Corn told Kevin Maurer and Asawin Suebsaeng of Rolling Stone that the government’s designation of cartels as foreign terrorist organizations does not authorize the use of force. For that, he said, “[y]ou have to make a credible argument that the U.S. faces an armed attack.”
Corn, who directs the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech School of Law, told Dan Gooding and Jesus Mesa of Newsweek: “Absent Mexican consent, any military action in Mexico will be condemned, I believe justifiably, as an act of aggression in violation of the most basic provision of the UN Charter and customary international law.” Experts add that strikes on Mexico would do little to stop the flow of drugs over the border and would increase violence in the region, intensifying pressure for the U.S. to provide asylum for migrants fleeing the country.
On Monday, August 18, Steve Holland of Reuters reported that three U.S. destroyers, the USS Gravely, the USS Jason Dunham, and the USS Sampson, were being deployed to Venezuela as part of the effort to combat cartels. On Tuesday, when a reporter asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt about those ships, with 4,000 Marines on board, she said that Trump “is prepared to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into our country and to bring those responsible to justice. The Maduro regime is not the legitimate government of Venezuela. It is a narco-terror cartel and [Venezuelan president Nicolás] Maduro, it is the view of this administration, is not a legitimate president. He is the fugitive head of this cartel who has been indicted in the United States for trafficking drugs into the country.” She did not take any further questions.
Trump could just release the Epstein files.
That issue is not going away. Social media users continue to hammer on it, and on Monday the House Oversight Committee began to hear testimony from those it subpoenaed after Democrats used a parliamentary maneuver to force chair James Comer (R-KY) to do so. Former attorney general William Barr, who was in office when convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein died in his cell in 2019, testified behind closed doors. The Department of Justice was supposed to begin handing over documents from the Epstein investigation on Tuesday but missed that deadline. Now it says it will hand them over beginning tomorrow.
According to Jeremy Roebuck of the Washington Post, Comer said that Barr had been “very transparent” and that he had never seen any evidence that Trump was involved in Epstein’s crimes. Of the document release, he said: “I appreciate the Trump Administration’s commitment to transparency and efforts to provide the American people with information about this matter.”
Meanwhile, U.S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams of the Southern District of Florida today prohibited Florida officials from incarcerating any more detainees at the immigrant detention center in the Everglades that supporters have called “Alligator Alcatraz.” The government’s lawyers said the facility housed people only temporarily, so stopping the arrival of new inmates should empty the center. The judge ordered that after 60 days, officials must begin to dismantle parts of the facility because of the damage it was inflicting on an environment that has been protected since 1947.
“[S]ince that time,” she wrote, “every Florida governor, every Florida senator, and countless local and national political figures, including presidents, have publicly pledged their unequivocal support for the restoration, conservation, and protection of the Everglades. This Order does nothing more than uphold the basic requirements of legislation designed to fulfill those promises.”
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/us/politics/california-newsom-redistricting-texas.html
https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-new-competitive-authoritarianism/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/us/trump-military-drug-cartels.html
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-plans-military-action-mexico-cartels-2117318
Bluesky:
marcelias.bsky.social/post/3lwwanqwy6s2m
ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3lwwhipbsgc2x
August 21, 2025
August 20, 2025
August 20, 2025
President Donald J. Trump created a firestorm yesterday when he said that the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex, located mostly in Washington, D.C., focuses too much on “how bad slavery was.” But his objection to recognizing the horrors of human enslavement is not simply white supremacy. It is the logical outcome of the political ideology that created MAGA. It is the same ideology that leads him and his loyalists to try to rig the nation’s voting system to create a one-party state.
That ideology took shape in the years immediately after the Civil War, when Black men and poor white men in the South voted for leaders who promised to rebuild their shattered region, provide schools and hospitals (as well as desperately needed prosthetics for veterans), and develop the economy with railroads to provide an equal opportunity for all men to work hard and rise.
Former Confederates, committed to the idea of both their racial superiority and their right to control the government, loathed the idea of Black men voting. But their opposition to Black voting on racial grounds ran headlong into the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which, after it was ratified in 1870, gave the U.S. government the power to make sure that no state denied any man the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” When white former Confederates nonetheless tried to force their Black neighbors from the polls, Congress in 1870 created the Department of Justice, which began to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan members who had been terrorizing the South.
With racial discrimination now a federal offense, elite white southerners changed their approach. They insisted that they objected to Black voting not on racial grounds, but because Black men were voting for programs that redistributed wealth from hardworking white people to Black people, since hospitals and roads would cost tax dollars and white people were the only ones with taxable property in the Reconstruction South. Poor Black voters were instituting, one popular magazine wrote, “Socialism in South Carolina.”
In contrast to what they insisted was the federal government’s turn toward socialism, former Confederates celebrated the American cowboys who were moving cattle from Texas to railheads first in Missouri and then northward across the plains, mythologizing them as true Americans. Although the American West depended on the federal government more than any other region of the country, southern Democrats claimed the cowboy wanted nothing but for the government to leave him alone so he could earn prosperity through his own hard work with other men in a land where they dominated Indigenous Americans, Mexicans, and women.
That image faded during the Great Depression and World War II as southerners turned with relief to federal aid and investment. Like them, the vast majority of Americans—Democrats, Independents, and Republicans—turned to the federal government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and support a rules-based international order. This way of thinking became known as the “liberal consensus.”
But some businessmen, furious at the idea of regulation and taxes, set out to destroy the liberal consensus that they believed stopped them from accumulating as much money as they deserved. They made little headway until the Supreme Court in 1954 unanimously decided that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Three years later, Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and mobilized the 101st Airborne Division to protect the Black students at Little Rock Central High School. The use of tax dollars to protect Black rights gave those determined to destroy the liberal consensus an opening to reach back and rally supporters with the racism of Reconstruction.
Federal protection of equal rights was a form of socialism, they insisted, and just as their predecessors had done in the 1870s, they turned to the image of the cowboy as the true American. When Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, who boasted of his western roots and wore a white cowboy hat, won the Republican nomination for president in 1964, convention organizers chose to make sure that it was the delegation from South Carolina—the heart of the Confederacy—that put his candidacy over the top.
The 1965 Voting Rights Act protected Black and Brown voting, giving the political parties the choice of courting either those voters or their reactionary opponents. President Richard Nixon cast the die for the Republicans when he chose to court the same southern white supremacists that backed Goldwater to give him the win in 1968.
As his popularity slid because of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and Cambodia and the May 1970 Kent State shooting, Nixon began to demonize “women’s libbers” as well as Black Americans and people of color. With his determination to roll back the New Deal, Ronald Reagan doubled down on the idea that racial minorities and women were turning the U.S. into a socialist country: his “welfare queen” was a Black woman who lived large by scamming government services.
After 1980, women and racial minorities voted for Democrats over Republicans, and as they did so, talk radio and, later, personalities on the Fox News Channel hammered on the idea that these voters were ushering socialism into the United States. After the Democrats passed the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, often called the “Motor Voter Act,” to make registering to vote in federal elections easier, Republicans began to insist that Democrats could win elections only through voter fraud.
Increasingly, Republicans treated Democratic victories as illegitimate and worked to prevent them. In 2000, Republican operatives rioted to shut down a recount in Florida that might have given Democrat Al Gore the presidency. Then, when voters elected Democratic president Barack Obama in 2008, Republican operatives launched Operation REDMAP—Republican Redistricting Majority Project—to take control of statehouses before the 2010 census and gerrymander states to keep control of the House of Representatives and prevent the Democrats from passing legislation.
In that same year, the Republican-dominated Supreme Court reversed a century of campaign finance restrictions to permit corporations and other groups from outside the electoral region to spend unlimited money on elections. Three years after the Citizens United decision, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act that protected minority voting.
Despite the Republican thumb on the scale of American elections by the time he ran in 2016, Trump made his political career on the idea that Democrats were trying to cheat him of victory. Before the 2016 election, Trump’s associate Roger Stone launched a “Stop the Steal” website asking for donations of $10,000 because, he said, “If this election is close, THEY WILL STEAL IT.” “Donald Trump thinks Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are going to steal the next election,” the website said. A federal judge had to bar Stone and his Stop the Steal colleagues from intimidating voters at the polls in what they claimed was their search for election fraud.
In 2020, of course, Trump turned that rhetoric into a weapon designed to overturn the results of a presidential election. Just today, newly unredacted filings in the lawsuit Smartmatic brought against Fox News included text messages showing that Fox News Channel personalities knew the election wasn’t stolen. But Jesse Watters mused to Greg Gutfield, “Think about how incredible our ratings would be if Fox went ALL in on STOP THE STEAL.” Jeanine Pirro, now the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, boasted of how hard she was working for Trump and the Republicans.
In forty years, Republicans went from opposing Democrats’ policies, to insisting that Democrats were socialists who had no right to govern, to the idea that Republicans have a right to rig the system to keep voters from being able to elect Democrats to office. Now they appear to have gone to the next logical step: that democracy itself must be destroyed to create permanent Republican rule in order to make sure the government cannot be used for the government programs Americans want.
Trump is working to erase women and minorities from the public sphere while openly calling for a system that makes it impossible for voters to elect his opponents. The new Texas maps show how these two plans work together: people of color make up 60% of the population of Texas, but the new maps would put white voters in charge of at least 26 of the state’s 38 districts. According to Texas state representative Vince Perez, it will take about 445,000 white residents to secure a member of Congress, but about 1.4 million Latino residents or 2 million Black residents to elect one.
In order to put those maps in place, the Republican Texas House speaker has assigned state troopers to police the Democratic members to make sure they show up and give the Republicans enough lawmakers present to conduct business. Today that police custody translated to Texas representative Nicole Collier being threatened with felony charges for talking on the phone, from a bathroom, to Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Democratic California governor Gavin Newsom.
Republicans have taken away the liberty, and now the voice, of a Black woman elected by voters to represent them in the government. This is a crisis far bigger than Texas.
When Trump says that our history focuses too much on how bad slavery was, he is not simply downplaying the realities of human enslavement: he is advocating a world in which Black people, people of color, poor people, and women should let elite white men lead, and be grateful for that paternalism. It is the same argument elite enslavers made before the Civil War to defend their destruction of the idea of democracy to create an oligarchy. When Trump urges Republicans to slash voting rights to stop socialism and keep him in power, he makes the same argument former Confederates made after the war to keep those who would use the government for the public good from voting.
Led by Donald Trump, MAGA Republicans are trying to take the country back to the past, rewriting history by imposing the ideology of the Confederacy on the United States of America.
But that effort depends on Republicans buying into the idea that only women and minorities want government programs. That narrative is falling apart as cuts to the government slash programs on which all Americans depend and older white Americans take to the streets. Today, with the chants of those protesting Trump’s takeover of Washington, D.C., echoing in the background, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told reporters: “We’re not going to let the communists destroy a great American city…. [T]hese stupid white hippies…all need to go home and take a nap because they’re all over 90 years old, and we’re gonna get back to the business of protecting the American people and the citizens of Washington, D.C.”
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/us/politics/trump-smithsonian-slavery.html
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explained
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/13/business/stop-the-steal-disinformation-campaign-invs
“Socialism in South Carolina,” The Nation, April 16, 1874, pp. 247–248.
https://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-hosts-private-texts-revealed-lawsuit-bombshells-2116299
https://time.com/7310875/texass-map-racial-division/
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/ohio-injunction-trump-roger-stone-polls-230754
Bluesky:
thejenniwren.teamlh.social/post/3lwuaavezhc2u
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