Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 17
August 19, 2025
August 19, 2025
Yesterday, the 51 Democratic Texas state representatives who left the state for Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts on August 3 to prevent Republican lawmakers from redistricting Texas to give five Democratic congressional seats to Republicans went back home. Immediately, they discovered that Republican House speaker Dustin Burrows wanted them to sign a statement that committed them to showing up for the Wednesday morning vote on the rigged maps President Donald Trump demands, limiting their liberty until they enabled the Republicans’ power grab. Burrows also assigned state troopers to the Democrats to monitor their movements around the clock to make sure they were present Wednesday morning and until the final vote on the measure.
Refusal to sign the commitment meant risking arrest.
Representative Nicole Collier, a Black woman who represents a majority-minority district in Fort Worth, refused to sign. As Joe Sommerlad of The Independent reported, Collier said: “I refuse to sign. I will not agree to be in custody. I’m not a criminal. I am exercising my right to resist and oppose the decisions of our government. So this is my form of protest.” She said: “My constituents sent me to Austin to protect their voices and rights. I refuse to sign away my dignity as a duly elected representative just so Republicans can control my movements and monitor me with police escorts.” Noting that officers policing Democratic lawmakers were not on the beat, she suggested that loss made the public less safe.
Told she could not leave the Capitol building without being arrested, Collier spent the night inside the House chamber. When demonstrators showed up to support her, state troopers arrested them.
Texas state senator Roland Gutierrez posted a video of people outside the chamber chanting “Let Her Go!” to social media with the heading: “This is full-on authoritarianism.” In the video, he said: “This is the kind of bullsh*t that’s happening right now in the Texas legislature. Dustin Burrows has locked up Nicole Collier because she won’t sign some bullsh*t permission slip to be followed around by a DPS escort—that’s a cop following around for the next three weeks to make sure that she comes in and votes for this bullsh*t Donald Trump redistricting bill.”
“What’s going on in Texas is absolutely 100% wrong and locking up members of the legislature because they won’t sign your bullsh*t document: it’s just wrong. It’s wrong. We need more people up here fighting. We need more people up here fighting alongside state representative Nicole Collier who’s doing this protest because she must. And we all must. We must fight against Donald Trump and all of this madness that’s happening in this country and fight against his constant grab for power in the United States.”
Today, Collier filed an application for a writ of habeas corpus to force the Texas House of Representative’s Sergeant-at-Arms to end her “illegal confinement” immediately.
Under pressure from a deeply unpopular president to rig the 2026 elections to keep MAGA Republicans in power, the Texas governor has called the Texas legislature into session to rewrite congressional district maps to create five new Republican-dominated districts. When Democrats tried to stop this power grab, Republican legislative leadership responded by assigning state troopers to make sure they showed up to let that power grab go through. When one refused to enter police custody to perform her job as an elected legislator, the Republican leadership took away her liberty.
On the road to authoritarianism, this is a whole factory of red flags.
It lays bare the political power grab driving the Trump administration’s expansion of the police power. Although administration officials claim to be combating crime, they are setting up a one-state political system that will answer only to MAGA.
Trump’s announcement on August 11 that he was taking control of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department and calling out the District of Columbia National Guard to fight crime was in keeping with the determination to exert control over Democratic-led cities that he has exhibited since at least 2020. The government’s own statistics show that violent crime in Washington, D.C., is at a 30-year-low, but Trump describes it as a violent hellhole requiring a show of force. That show has included not only local police officers and the National Guard, but also officers from at least 10 federal agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
This morning, MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian reported that the Trump administration is taking FBI agents away from their specialties in combatting terrorism, hackers, and spies, as well as fighting public corruption, white-collar crime, civil rights, and child sex crimes. Instead, FBI director Kash Patel and deputy director Dan Bongino, both formerly MAGA influencers, are turning the FBI into a national police force, despite the fact that their own statistics show that violent crime rates are much lower than they were twenty years ago.
One former agent told Dilanian: “You have the top two decision-makers, both with limited exposure to the law enforcement and legal system, solely making long-impacting decisions based on social and political rhetoric, conspiracy theories rooted in 'deep state' cleansing, and lack of understanding of the true implications of the decisions which they will soon walk away from and leave for others to clean up.”
A map of where the troops have been seen in the nation’s capital makes it very clear they are not really there to combat crime. They are stationed in areas where they are mostly likely to be seen and to make a statement, especially around the White House and the national monuments on the National Mall. Many of them are simply standing around. They are there to demonstrate Trump’s control of the seat of government in the United States of America with an eye to convincing Americans he controls the government itself.
MAGA Republican governors are rushing to be part of the demonstration of the MAGA takeover of the country’s government, sending their state’s National Guard troops to Washington, D.C. This, too, has little to do with actual crime. Ohio, South Carolina, and West Virginia committed troops over the past few days, but as journalist Philip Bump noted, there are 43 cities in those states that have higher crime rates than Washington, D.C., does. Today, the governors of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee committed National Guard personnel to Trump’s crackdown in Washington, D.C.
The White House seems determined to provoke confrontations: after the Army said National Guard troops would neither carry weapons nor have weapons in their vehicles, the White House said in a statement on Saturday that National Guard troops “may be armed, consistent with their mission and training, to protect federal assets, provide a safe environment for law enforcement officers to make arrests, and deter violent crime with a visible law enforcement presence.”
When several masked agents assaulted and handcuffed a delivery worker near D.C.’s Logan Circle, bystanders videotaping the encounter repeatedly asked to see badges. One of the officers said: “Do I have to answer to you?” The bystander said: “You got to answer to somebody!” “Are you guys working for the U.S. government or not?” The agent answered: “Back the f*ck up.”
The bystander said: “You guys are ruining this country, you know that, right?”
The agent made his MAGA allegiance clear. He answered: “Liberals already ruined it.”
Tonight, Democratic members of the Texas House tore up the statements they had signed agreeing to let police accompany them to guarantee their appearance at the votes that would permit Republicans to rig the state’s congressional maps and said they would join Collier on the floor. State representative Cassandra Hernandez called their stance a “slumber party for democracy.”
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Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/15/dc-police-national-guard-map-trump/
https://www.msnbc.com/news/news-analysis/trump-fbi-violent-crimes-kash-patel-project-47-rcna225307
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5458527-national-guard-dc-troop-increase/
https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/federa...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/08/19/texas-lawmaker-spends-night-house-chamber/
Bluesky:
rolandfortexas.bsky.social/post/3lwpw47tocs2c
August 18, 2025
August 18, 2025
This morning, J.D. Wolf of Meidas News pulled together all of Trump’s self-congratulatory posts from Sunday morning, when the president evidently was boosting his ego after Friday’s disastrous meeting with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin in Alaska. Trump shared an AI-generated meme of himself with a large male lion standing next to him and the words “Peace through Strength. Anyone can make war, but only most courageous [sic] can make peace.” He posted memes claiming he is the “best president…in American history” and the “G[reatest] O[f] A[ll] T[ime], a “legend.”
Trump also reposted material from two QAnon-related accounts and pushed the QAnon belief that the Democratic Party is “the party of hate, evil, and Satan.” Trump has faced a rebellion among his QAnon supporters as he and administration officials have refused to release information from the federal investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and have moved Epstein's associate Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted of sex trafficking children, to a minimum-security prison camp and given her work-release privileges. It appears he’s working to make QAnon supporters forget that he was named in those files and to lure them back to his support.
For their part, Russia Today trolled Trump’s “peace through strength” boast this morning by posting a video of an armored vehicle first going slowly on a road and then dramatically speeding up. The vehicle was flying both Russian and U.S. flags.
Trump’s social media account this morning posted a long screed saying the president is “going to lead a movement to get rid of” mail-in ballots and voting machines, and lying that the U.S. is the only country that uses mail-in voting because it is rife with fraud. As usual, the post claimed that Democrats “CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE” and claimed they “are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM.” The post said he would sign an executive order “to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections.”
Then the post claimed that “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”
This is bonkers across the board. Dozens of countries use mail-in voting, and there is zero evidence of widespread voter fraud in the U.S. Just today, news broke that right-wing channel Newsmax will pay $67 million to Dominion Voting Systems for spreading false claims that the company’s voting technology had been rigged to give the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden.
Combining that sum with the $787 million Fox News paid for spreading the same lies means, as Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) wrote today, that media entities have paid out nearly $900 million “for publishing lies about the 2020 presidential election. Yet Donald Trump, who lost by more than seven million votes, keeps repeating the Big Lie and makes it compulsory dogma for his employees.”
Certainly, if Democratic leaders were so unelectable, the Republicans would not go to such lengths to rig district voting maps and keep Democratic voters from the polls. Indeed, while voter fraud is vanishingly rare, the Republicans are using the specter of it to engage in election fraud: manipulating the mechanics of an election to favor one side over another.
This manipulation is happening dramatically right now in Texas, where Trump pressured Governor Greg Abbott to redistrict the state in a highly unusual mid-decade map change in order to set Republicans up to gain five more seats in Congress in the next election. Abbott dutifully called a special session of the legislature to change the maps. Texas Democrats tried to stop the redistricting by leaving the state to deprive the Republicans of a quorum, that is, the minimum number of lawmakers necessary to conduct business. They stayed away until the special session expired. Abbott immediately called another one.
Today, with it clear Abbott would simply call special sessions until they returned, the Democratic legislators went back to Texas fifteen days after they left. “We killed the corrupt special session, withstood unprecedented surveillance and intimidation, and rallied Democrats nationwide to join this existential fight for fair representation—reshaping the entire 2026 landscape,” said the leader of the Texas House Democrats Gene Wu, acknowledging the protests across Texas at the legislative steal. “We’re returning to Texas more dangerous to Republicans’ plans than when we left. Our return allows us to build the legal record necessary to defeat this racist map in court, take our message to communities across the state and country, and inspire legislators across the country how to fight these undemocratic redistricting schemes in their own statehouses.”
Finally, the U.S. Constitution is very clear that no president has the power to dictate election rules. The framers were determined to prevent that power from falling into the hands of a potential dictator and so gave it to the states and Congress, establishing that “[t]he Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”
These obvious lies make it seem crystal clear that Trump and his loyalists are preparing to reject any election results that they don’t like.
Trump’s panic about facing voters is increasingly evident. His job approval ratings are already abysmal, and the fallout from his tariffs and deportations is only now beginning to show. Last Thursday, a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the Producer Price Index—wholesale costs that will likely show up later in consumer costs—jumped 0.9% in July, the largest jump since June 2022, when the U.S. was mired in post-pandemic inflation. The wholesale price of vegetables jumped 38.9% in July.
On Friday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that the budget reconciliation bill (called by Republicans the OBBBA, for “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act”) that adds $3.4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade will trigger cuts of up to $491 billion in Medicare (not a typo) from 2027 to 2034 in addition to its cuts of almost a trillion dollars to Medicaid over the next ten years. The 2010 Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act (S-PAYGO) automatically triggers cuts to government programs if the budget deficit increases as it is expected to under the new law, and Medicare spending would be on the chopping block.
Although Democrats called attention to this threat to Medicare during debates over the measure, Republicans promised their cuts to Medicaid would target only “waste, fraud, and abuse” and promised they would not touch Medicare.
Today Marty Schladen of the Ohio Capital Journal showed what those cuts actually look like in one state. Schladen reported that the cuts to Medicaid will take insurance from 310,000 people. Schladen also noted that the law ended the “enhanced premium tax credit” that made health insurance purchased on the Affordable Care Act’s insurance markets more affordable for those who make between 100% and 400% of federal poverty guidelines. More than 530,000 people in Ohio have benefited from the program. Their premiums will go up dramatically when it expires at the end of this year, and experts warn that more than 100,000 healthier people will drop their coverage. That loss, in turn, will drive up costs for those remaining in the market.
Scott Horsley of NPR reported on Saturday that electricity prices in the country have “jumped more than twice as fast as the overall cost of living in the last year.” Prices are going up as producers export liquid natural gas and as data centers swallow energy to fuel the AI boom.
Elected on his promises to lower prices, Trump is in trouble with those who believed those promises. Today, former Ohio senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, formally announced his candidacy for the Senate seat vacated when J.D. Vance became vice president. Brown noted that in Ohio, which has a population of about 12 million people, “half a million are going to lose their [health] insurance. These are mostly working families that are working for an employer that doesn’t provide insurance, or they’re kids, or they’re seniors, or they’re disabled people. Those are the people who are losing their health insurance. People didn’t vote for that. They didn’t vote for drug prices to go up. They didn’t vote for higher grocery bills. They didn’t vote for veterans’ benefits being slashed. They didn’t vote for any of this.”
On Thursday, the Pew Research Center reported that only 38% of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance, with 61% disapproving of it.
And then there is the increasing evidence that Trump is unable to manage the presidency. Today Trump met with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, French president Emmanuel Macron, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, German chancellor Friedrich Merz, NATO secretary general Mark Rutte, United Kingdom prime minister Keir Starmer, and Finnish president Alexander Stubb. That so many foreign leaders dropped everything to rush to Washington, D.C., after Trump’s meeting with Putin on Friday indicated their alarm. The leaders reiterated that Putin started the war and could stop it at any time, and pressed Trump to back a ceasefire.
At today’s meetings, Trump repeated Russian talking points, complained about how poorly he is treated, said he had ended six wars, insisted that voting in the U.S. is full of fraud, and suggested he would cancel the 2028 elections. By the late afternoon, the president was unable to recognize President Stubb, who was sitting directly across the table from him. “President Stubb of Finland,” Trump said. Looking around, Trump continued: “And he’s uh, he’s somebody that, where are we here? Huh? Where? Where?” Stubb said, “I’m right here.” Trump focused on him and answered: “Oh. You look better than I’ve ever seen you look.”
This evening, CNN senior White House correspondent Kristen Holmes reported that Trump paused his negotiation with European leaders to call Vladimir Putin. Her source said that European leaders were not present for the conversation. Ivan Nechepurenko of the New York Times reported that the call was forty minutes long.
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Notes:
https://meidasnews.com/news/trump-flooded-social-media-with-self-praise-after-putin-meeting-disaster
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/18/politics/trump-mail-in-voting
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/18/politics/texas-california-redistricting-fight
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript
https://www.bls.gov/ppi/overview.htm
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-caused-the-u-s-pandemic-era-inflation/
https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2025-08/61659-SPAYGO.pdf
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/trump-tax-law-cause-medicare-cuts-congress-act-124692862
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/16/nx-s1-5502671/electricity-bill-high-inflation-ai
The ContrarianNew Lows for TrumpIn a summer of serial legal defeats, successive scandals, and sagging poll numbers, Donald Trump’s president hit new lows at the end of the last week. As with the big, ugly bill earlier in the summer, Trump’s attempts to boost his image and enhance his authoritarian reach backfired (several of them to a spectacular extent…Read morea day ago · 1541 likes · 211 comments · Jennifer RubinX:
KristenhCNN/status/1957555485852217643
Bluesky:
anneapplebaum.bsky.social/post/3lwobcx4oac2s
markjacob.bsky.social/post/3lwoibiiqbk2b
raskin.house.gov/post/3lwoxqihv3k2a
atrupar.com/post/3lwp4dst7522d
August 17, 2025
August 17, 2025
On the heels of President Donald J. Trump’s Friday meeting with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, Trump will meet with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky Monday afternoon at the White House. According to Barak Ravid of Axios, Trump called Zelensky from Air Force One on the way home from Alaska. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House special envoy Steve Witkoff were also on the hour-long call. The leaders of the European Commission, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the United Kingdom then joined the call for another half hour.
In the call, Trump embraced Putin’s view of the conflict, telling Zelensky and European leaders that Putin does not want a ceasefire. Trump indicated that he is abandoning his own demand for a ceasefire and adopting Putin’s position that negotiations should take place without one. Zelensky insists on a ceasefire before negotiations. After the call, Trump posted on social media that “it was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement, which often times do not hold up.” “All” is doing a lot of work in that sentence: it appears to mean Putin, with the possible agreement now of Trump.
Key unanswered questions from Friday’s summit were why it ended so abruptly, with the cancellation of a planned luncheon and more discussions, and why Trump immediately told Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity, “Because of what happened today, I think I don’t have to think about [further sanctions on Russia] now. I may have to think about it in two weeks or three weeks or something, but we don’t have to think about that right now.”
The abrupt cancellation could mean that U.S. officials sent Putin packing without lunch because he would not agree to a ceasefire. But it seems worth keeping on the table that Trump has recently exhibited both an inability to focus on any topic, and a need to live in a carefully constructed world that ignores reality and assures him he is the best and the brightest. A high-stakes meeting with principals about a very real situation might have been too much for him to manage for a full day.
At the press conference following the summit, NBC News White House correspondent Peter Alexander reported that what struck him was “the looks on the faces of a lot of the American delegation here. Karoline Leavitt…, Steve Witkoff, who came into the room, then left quickly, then came back in. Leavitt appeared to be a bit stressed out, anxious. Their eyes were wide, almost ashen at times.”
At 8:31 this morning, Trump posted one word, “bela,” on his social media account. California governor Gavin Newsom’s social media account, which has been trolling Trump by imitating his boastful, insulting, all-caps posts, wrote: “We broke Donald Trump.”
As of midday Sunday, there appeared to be no mention of the Alaska meeting on the State Department’s website, although it has been updated since Friday to acknowledge Indonesia Independence Day and the Gabonese Republic National Day.
What is clear from the summit, though, is that Trump and Putin badly miscalculated the nature of power in democracies.
It has seemed since 2016 that Putin believed that if he could drive a wedge between the U.S., NATO countries, and other allies, which together have defended a rules-based international order since 1949, he could break that order. Then, absent the system that worked to keep big countries from invading smaller ones, he could take over parts of Ukraine and possibly other countries around Russia. Together, Putin and Trump have gone a long way toward aligning the U.S. government with Putin and other authoritarians. In his first term, Trump talked of leaving NATO, but those in his administration who understood the nature of power prevented him. Now he is operating without those professionals and has shifted the U.S. to a foreign policy that is fraying our relationships with other countries.
But U.S. strength in international relations has always been its relationships, and with the U.S. withdrawing from its traditional democratic alliances, others are strengthening their relationships without the U.S. Today, at a meeting with Zelensky in Brussels, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen stressed that international borders cannot be changed by force. She called for Ukraine to become “a steel porcupine, indigestible for potential invaders.” French president Emmanuel Macron said that Ukraine’s borders must be honored and that “if we show weakness today in front of Russia, we are laying the ground for future conflict.”
These allies are standing together against Putin and, if necessary, against Trump. Von der Leyen will accompany Zelensky to a meeting at the White House on Monday. So will French president Emmanuel Macron, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, German chancellor Friedrich Merz, NATO secretary general Mark Rutte, United Kingdom prime minister Keir Starmer, and Finnish president Alexander Stubb.
National security scholar Tom Nichols noted on social media that it “suggests something went very wrong in Alaska if this many European leaders are coming to Washington on short notice.”
Trump has misunderstood the nature of power in a democracy at home, too. Rather than building domestic coalitions to support the government, he is overseeing the takeover of the government by a radical minority that seems to think the way to build power is for the government to attack its own people.
The administration’s defunding of scientific research, medical care, environmental protection, food safety and security, and emergency management all threaten Americans’ health, safety, and security. Its attacks on history and education, as well as its firing of women and racial and gender minorities, seem designed to drive wedges among Americans. Its incarceration and disappearing of undocumented migrants both creates an “other” for Trump loyalists to hate and provides a warning of what could happen to the regime’s opponents.
Now, under the guise of fighting crime, the administration has quite literally turned guns on the American people.
On June 7, Trump deployed 700 Marines to Los Angeles and federalized 4,100 California National Guard personnel after scattered protests of immigration raids. Administration officials argue that the troops were not engaged in law enforcement but were simply protecting federal agents. California governor Gavin Newsom sued the administration to limit the use of the military in Los Angeles. In the trial, held last week, lawyers for the federal government said troops can protect federal agents wherever they go, effectively asserting that there are no limits to how a president can use troops domestically despite the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act saying the opposite.
That deployment was so deeply unpopular that, as Shawn Hubler of the New York Times reported in July, of the 72 soldiers whose enlistment was set to expire during the deployment, two had already left and 55 said they would not extend their service: a 21% retention rate when the normal retention rate is 60%. One told Hubler: “This is not what the military of our country was designed to do, at all.”
But if Trump’s deployments of troops in states can be challenged under the Posse Comitatus Act, that’s a harder call in Washington, D.C., which is overseen by Congress. There, the president controls the National Guard—in contrast to what Trump claimed in 2021—and so did not need additional authority. In addition, the 1973 Home Rule Act that established limited self-government in the city provided that the president could take control of the police department there. Trump is the first to do so.
On Monday, August 11, Trump announced he was placing the Washington, D.C., police department under federal control and deploying National Guard troops there. He asserted that violent crime in the city is “getting worse” and in an executive order claimed that “crime is out of control” in the city.
This is a transparently manufactured excuse to enable the administration to take over a Democratic city with troops they control. In fact, crime in Washington, D.C., has been trending downward for decades and violent crime is now, according to the Department of Justice’s own statistics, at a 30-year low. There is also the sticky little problem of the fact that Trump pardoned about 1,500 of those convicted of crimes for their participation in the riot of January 6, 2021, and that under his direction, the Department of Justice dismissed all pending cases against the remaining January 6 defendants. Many of those defendants attacked police officers.
More generally, the administration seems to be encouraging violence rather than shunning it. As Anna Merlan of Mother Jones reported on Friday, the White House, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Department of Homeland Security joke on social media about cruelty and torture, suggesting it’s fun to hurt people. They are sanitizing and popularizing state violence. Trump’s pardoning of drug trafficker Ross Ulbricht, sentenced to life in prison, and his welcome to the U.S. of a man convicted of killing three people in Spain suggest the president’s support for “law and order” is coverage for his own political ends.
MAGA’s violent rhetoric is bearing fruit in the shooting of two prominent Minnesota state lawmakers and their spouses in early June, killing two. Then, on August 8, a Georgia man who blamed the covid-19 vaccine for making him depressed and suicidal fired more than 180 shots into the Atlanta headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, killing police officer David Rose, a 33-year-old former Marine.
Yesterday the Republican governors of West Virginia, South Carolina, and Ohio all said they would send National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., to support Trump’s takeover of the city. They will be funded by the federal government—that is, our tax dollars. Journalist Philip Bump illustrated that the true goal of the forces in the city has little to do with actual crime rates by running the numbers. He showed that 43 cities in the states sending troops to Washington, D.C., have higher rates of violent crime than the capital does.
The Trump administration is launching a classic authoritarian project, attempting to take over a country through division and fear. But they badly misunderstand the nature of power. If they succeed, they will control a badly diminished United States of America, one that has fallen to the level of a country like Russia, far from the powerhouse it was when we recognized that the extraordinary strength of our nation always came not from force, but from alliances.
There is one thing Trump’s military deployments against the American people have accomplished though: media mentions of the Epstein files have plummeted.
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Notes:
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/16/trump-zelensky-meet-white-house-putin-summit
https://www.state.gov/newsroom/
https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-year-low
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/08/trump-administration-propaganda/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/national-guard-los-angeles-deployment-trial-day-3/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/16/us/trump-national-guard-california.html
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/08/13/trump-dc-police-national-guard/85622174007/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz7e0jve875o
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/world/americas/trump-venezuela-convicted-murderer-swap.html
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/in-cdc-attack-man-fired-180-shots-breaking-150-windows
https://www.wrdw.com/2025/08/17/atlanta-officer-killed-cdc-shooting-be-laid-rest-friday-family-says/
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5457056-trump-bela-post-mystery/
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-putin-meeting-news-08-15-25#cmedkl3jk00053b6uswo6bdj5
Hopium Chronicles By Simon RosenbergTrump, A Very Useful Idiot, Buckles In Alaska, Disastrously Sells Out Ukraine And The WestMorning all. Yes, it was as horrible as we all feared. Trump literally rolls out the red carpet for Putin on American soil and not only does he get nothing in return, but yesterday our weak, cowardly and corrupt leader broke with Ukraine and the Europeans/NATO and adopted Putin’s position on the conflict, folding like a cheap suit…Read more2 days ago · 473 likes · 107 comments · Simon RosenbergX:
RadioFreeTom/status/1957157264508489840
Bluesky:
wartranslated.bsky.social/post/3lwloh6mvfs2d
united24media.com/post/3lwmc764nhf26
August 16, 2025
August 16, 2025
Yesterday, military personnel from the United States of America literally rolled out a red carpet for a dictator who invaded a sovereign country and is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes including the stealing of children. Apparently coached by his team, Trump stood to let Russia’s president Vladimir Putin walk toward him after Putin arrived at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, putting Trump in a dominant position, but he clapped as Putin walked toward him. The two men greeted each other warmly.
This summit between the president of the United States and the president of Russia came together fast, in the midst of the outcry in the U.S. over Trump’s inclusion in the Epstein files and the administration’s refusal to release those files.
U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff had been visiting Moscow for months to talk about a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine when he heard through a back channel that Putin might be willing to talk to Trump in person to offer a deal. On August 6, after a meeting in Moscow, Witkoff announced that Russia was ready to retreat from some of the land it occupies in Ukraine. This apparent concession came just two days before the August 8 deadline Trump had set for severe sanctions against Russia unless it agreed to a ceasefire.
Quickly, though, it became clear that Witkoff’s description of Putin’s offer was wrong, either because Putin had misled him or because he had misunderstood: Witkoff does not speak Russian and, according to former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, does not use a notetaker from the U.S. embassy. Nonetheless, on Friday, August 8, Trump announced on social media that he would meet personally with Putin in Alaska, without Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky.
That the president of the United States offered a meeting to Putin on U.S. soil, ground that once belonged to Russia and that Russian nationalists fantasize about taking back, was itself a win for Putin.
As Jonathan Lemire noted yesterday in The Atlantic, in the week before the meeting, leaders in Ukraine and Europe worried that Trump would agree to Putin’s demand that Ukraine hand over Crimea and most of its four eastern oblasts, a demand that Russian operatives made initially in 2016 when they offered to help Trump win the White House—the so-called Mariupol Plan—and then pressure Ukraine to accept the deal.
In the end, that did not happen. The summit appears to have produced nothing but a favorable photo op for Putin.
That is no small thing, for Russia, which is weak and struggling, managed to break the political isolation it’s lived in since invading Ukraine again in 2022. Further, the choreography of the summit suggested that Russia is equal to the United States. But those important optics were less than Russia wanted.
It appeared that Russia was trying to set the scene for a major powers summit of the past, one in which the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), also known as the Soviet Union, were the dominant players, with the USSR dominating the U.S. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov showed up to Alaska in a sweatshirt with the Russian initials for USSR, a sign that Russia intends to absorb Ukraine as well as other former Soviet republics and recreate itself as a dominant world power.
As Lemire notes, Putin indicated he was interested in broadening the conversation to reach beyond Ukraine into economic relations between the two countries, including a discussion of the Arctic, and a nuclear arms agreement. The U.S. seemed to be following suit. It sent a high-ranking delegation that included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Special Envoy Witkoff, press secretary Karoline Leavitt, Central Intelligence Agency director John Ratcliffe, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, deputy White House chief of staff Dan Scavino, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Exactly what the White House expected from the summit was unclear. Trump warned that if Putin didn’t agree to a ceasefire there would be “very severe consequences,” but the White House also had seemed to be walking back any expectations of a deal at the summit, downgrading the meeting to a “listening exercise.”
After Trump and Putin met on the tarmac, Trump ushered the Russian president to the presidential limousine, known as The Beast, giving them time to speak privately despite the apparent efforts of the U.S. delegation to keep that from happening. When the summit began, Rubio and Witkoff joined Trump to make up the U.S. delegation, while Putin, his longtime foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov, and Lavrov made up the Russian delegation. The principals emerged after a three-hour meeting with little to say.
At the news conference after their meeting, Putin took the podium first—an odd development, since he was on U.S. soil—and spoke for about eight minutes. Then Trump spoke for three minutes, telling reporters the parties had not agreed to a ceasefire but that he and Putin had made “great progress” in their talks. Both men appeared subdued. They declined to take reporters’ questions.
A Fox News Channel reporter said: “The way it felt in the room was not good. It did not seem like things went well. It seemed like Putin came in and steamrolled, got right into what he wanted to say and got his photo next to the president, then left.” But while Putin got his photo op, he did not get the larger superpower dialogue he evidently wanted. Neither did he get the open support of the United States to end the war on his terms, something he needs as his war against Ukraine drags on.
The two and a half hour working lunch that was scheduled did not take place. Both men left Alaska within an hour.
Speaking with European leaders in a phone call from Air Force One on his way home from the summit, Trump said that Putin rejected the idea of a ceasefire and insisted that Ukraine cede territory to Russia. He also suggested that a coalition of the willing, including the U.S., would be required to provide security guarantees to Ukraine. But within hours, Trump had dropped his demand for a ceasefire and instead echoed Putin’s position that negotiations for a peace agreement should begin without one.
In an interview with Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity after the meeting, Trump said he would not impose further sanctions on Russia because the meeting with Putin had gone “very well.” “Because of what happened today, I think I don’t have to think about that now,” Trump told Hannity. “I may have to think about it in two weeks or three weeks or something, but we don’t have to think about that right now.”
Trump also suggested he was backing away from trying to end the war and instead dumping the burden on Ukraine’s president. He told Hannity that “it’s really up to President Zelensky to get it done.”
Today Chiara Eisner of NPR reported that officials from the Trump administration left eight pages of information produced by the U.S. State Department in a public printer at the business center of an Alaskan hotel. The pages revealed potentially sensitive information about the August 15 meetings, including the names and phone numbers of three U.S. staff members and thirteen U.S. and Russian state leaders.
The pages also contained the information that Trump intended to give Putin an “American Bald Eagle Desk Statue,” and the menu for the cancelled lunch, which specified that the luncheon was “in honor of his excellency, Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation.”
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Notes:
https://www.reuters.com/world/updates-trump-putin-meet-alaska-summit-war-ukraine-2025-08-15/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/08/politics/trump-putin-meeting
https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/08/15/lavrov-ussr-russia-trump-putin-ukraine-summit-alaska
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/08/trump-putin-alaska-summit/683897/
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/who-is-in-meeting-with-trump-putin-alaska-summit/story?id=124689596
https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/trump-putin-summit-ends-without-breakthrough-7406d667
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-putin-meeting-news-08-15-25
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/15/trump-putin-alaska-ukraine-00512589
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/15/trump-putin-summit-alaska-ceasefire
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/15/putin-trump-summit-first-visit-us
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5455600-trump-zelensky-russia-peace-deal/
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/16/nx-s1-5504196/trump-putin-summit-documents-left-behind
X:
McFaul/status/1954223991331385557
Bluesky:
thetnholler.bsky.social/post/3lwjmwkfg5c2g
onestpress.onestnetwork.com/post/3lwhlcpimyk2o
atrupar.com/post/3lwhkrntv3i2p
antongerashchenko.bsky.social/post/3lwh5q5s6jc2k
wartranslated.bsky.social/post/3lwgsqecjl223
August 15, 2025
August 15, 2025
A friend tells me I’ve been burning the candle at both ends for far too long, and I’m not going to dispute it. It’s been a fascinating day in American politics, but I suppose we can get a good night’s sleep and look at it tomorrow.
Tonight’s image is from earlier this week when I took my first trip to North Haven Island. North Haven and its neighbor Vinalhaven are very different from each other, but both are so beautiful it’s hard to believe they’re real.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
August 14, 2025
Today, flanked by California’s Democratic elected officials and union leaders, California governor Gavin Newsom responded to Trump’s attempt to strongarm the Texas legislature into redistricting the state to give Trump the five additional congressional representatives to which he feels “entitled.” Newsom announced that California will hold a special election on November 4 for voters to consider redistricting their state temporarily if Texas redistricts, so that California can neutralize Trump’s rigging of the state of Texas. The plan would only go into effect if Texas—or any of the other states pressured by Trump to redistrict to get more votes—launches its mid-decade redistricting that is transparently designed to help resurrect the Republicans’ prospects for 2026 and 2028.
After years of criticism that Democrats have not fought hard enough against Republicans’ manipulation of the system to amass power, the California plan, along with Newsom’s announcement of it, flips the script. The plan leverages Democrats’ control of the most populous state in the Union to warn Republicans to back away from their attempt to rig the 2026 election.
At the same time, the plan’s authors protected against claims that they were themselves trying to rig the game: the plan goes into effect only if Republicans push through their new maps, and it declares that the state still supports the use of fair, nonpartisan redistricting commissions nationwide, a system Republicans oppose.
Newsom’s announcement of the plan continued a shift in Democratic rhetoric from defense to offense. After years of Trump and Republicans attacking California, Newsom celebrated his state and the principles it reflects. “We are in Los Angeles, the most diverse city, in the most diverse county, in the most diverse state, in the world's most diverse democracy,” he said. “And I've long believed that the world looks to us…to see…it's possible to live together and advance together and prosper together across every conceivable and imaginable difference. What makes L.A. great, what makes California great, and what makes the United States of America great—is that…we don't tolerate our diversity, we celebrate our diversity, and it's a point of pride, because we're all in this together,” he said.
California has the population of 21 smaller states combined, he pointed out, and the fourth largest economy in the world. Pushing back on the trope that says, “Don't mess with Texas,” Newsom warned: “Don't mess with the great Golden State.” In a reference to the 1846 California Republic, also known as the “Bear Flag Republic”—a history captured by the California grizzly bear on the state’s flag—Newsom echoed the words of Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) when he added: “Donald Trump, you have poked the bear, and we will punch back.”
Newsom emphasized that democracy is under siege by Trump and his MAGA loyalists, a point illustrated by the fact that officials had sent more than a dozen masked and armed Border Patrol agents to the Japanese American National Museum in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles, where Newsom was speaking. Some of the agents were carrying rifles. A Border Patrol chief, Gregory Bovino, made it clear the agents were there to intimidate state officials, saying: ““We’re here making Los Angeles a safer place, since we don’t have politicians who can do that. We do that ourselves.”
Trump “doesn't play by a different set of rules,” Newsom said. “He doesn't believe in the rules. And as a consequence, we need to disabuse ourselves of the way things have been done…. We have got to meet fire with fire…. So that's what this is about. It's not complicated. We're doing this in reaction to a president of the United States that called a sitting governor of the state of Texas and said, find me five seats…. We can't stand back and watch this democracy disappear, district by district all across this country…. We need to be firm in our resolve. We need to push back.” He called this moment “a break the glass moment for our democracy, for our nation.”
Newsom called for Americans to “[w]ake up to what Donald Trump is doing…. Wake up to the assault on institutions and knowledge and history. Wake up to his war on science, public health, his war against the American people. This is a guy who lays claim to want to get a Nobel Prize sitting there and bending his knee to Mr. Putin.”
“We do have agency,” Newsom reminded his audience. “We’re not bystanders in this world. We can shape the future.” Noting that “this time requires us to act anew, not just think anew,” Newsom nodded to President Abraham Lincoln’s famous call from 1862: “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise—with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”
Newsom’s team has been garnering attention lately by trolling Trump on social media, taunting the president with grandiose, jerky, all-caps posts that mimic Trump’s own. Today, Newsom continued that taunting by pointing out that Trump wants to rig the district maps because he knows his party is going to lose the midterms. Newsom called Trump “a failed president” and pointed to Trump’s dispatch of the Border Patrol to intimidate the people in attendance at the event as proof Trump is “weak…broken, someone whose weakness is masquerading as his strength…. The most unpopular president in modern history.”
On a day in which a new report this morning from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed flashing red lights over inflation caused by Trump’s tariffs, Newsom trolled Trump by echoing the president’s triumphant promise that April 2, when he announced those tariffs, was “Liberation Day. Newsom called today’s announcement “Liberation Day in the State of California.”
When a reporter asked Newsom whether his mimicry of Trump’s social media posts is a strategy, he replied: “I hope it's a wake up call…. If you've got issues with what I'm putting out. You sure as hell should have concerns about what he's putting out as president…. But I think the deeper question is, how have we allowed the normalization of his tweets through social posts over the course of the last many years to go without similar scrutiny and notice.”
In a press release about the event, Newsom’s office emphasized that Democratic leaders from across the country have been launching similar broadsides against Trump’s push for redistricting, quoting Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego, Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, New York governor Kathy Hochul, New Jersey governor Phil Murphy, and Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker.
After the events, Newsom’s press office posted on social media: “DONALD IS FINISHED—HE IS NO LONGER “HOT.” FIRST THE HANDS (SO TINY) AND NOW ME—GAVIN C. NEWSOM—HAVE TAKEN AWAY HIS “STEP.” MANY ARE SAYING HE CAN’T EVEN DO THE “BIG STAIRS” ON AIR FORCE ONE ANYMORE—USES THE LITTLE BABY STAIRS NOW. SAD! TOMORROW HE’S GOT HIS “MEETING” WITH PUTIN IN “RUSSIA.” NOBODY CARES. ALL THE TELEVISION CAMERAS ARE ON ME, AMERICA’S FAVORITE GOVERNOR. EVEN LOW-RATINGS LAURA INGRAM (EDITS THE TAPES!) CAN’T STOP TALKING ABOUT MY BEAUTIFUL MAPS. YOU’RE WELCOME FOR LIBERATION DAY, AMERICA! DONNIE J MISSED “THE DEADLINE” (WHOOPS!) AND NOW I RUN THE SHOW. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! —GCN”
The office followed that post up with one that recalled Trump’s February 2025 reference to himself as a king, a reference that likely referred to a decades-old puff piece that called Trump “the king of New York.” After a popular outcry at Trump’s apparent claim to a throne, the White House followed up with an AI-generated image of the cover of what appeared to be Time magazine showing Trump wearing a crown in front of the New York City skyline with the legend “Long live the king.”
Newsom’s version replaced Trump’s image with his own, symbolically taking over turf that at the height of his popularity Trump considered his own. It declared: “A SUCCESSFUL LIBERATION DAY! THANK YOU!”
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/us/newsom-la-immigration-agents.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/us/politics/trump-king-image.html
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/white-house-post-trump-as-king/
https://bellanyc.com/the-king-of-new-york-donald-trump/
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/second-annual-message-9
YouTube:
X:
GovPressOffice/status/1956179690449985876
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