Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 18
August 14, 2025
Live with Heather Cox Richardson
California governor Gavin Newsom and I chatted earlier today about his announcement that California will hold a special election on November 4 for voters to consider redistricting the state temporarily if Texas redistricts to give President Donald Trump the five additional seats to which he believes he is “entitled.”
Get more from Heather Cox Richardson in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app
August 13, 2025
August 13, 2025
On August 14, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. While he had already put in place new measures to regulate business and banking and had provided temporary work relief to combat the Depression, this law permanently changed the nature of the American government.
The Social Security Act established a federal system of old-age benefits; unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services. It was a sweeping reworking of the relationship between the government and its citizens, using the power of taxation to pool funds to provide a basic social safety net.
The driving force behind the law was FDR’s secretary of labor, Frances Perkins. She was the first woman to hold a position in the U.S. Cabinet and still holds the record for having the longest tenure in that job: she served from 1933 to 1945.
Perkins brought to the position a vision of government very different from that of the Republicans who had run it in the 1920s. While men like President Herbert Hoover had embraced the idea of a “rugged individualism” in which men provided for their families on their own, Perkins recognized that the vision of a hardworking man supporting his wife and children was more myth than reality: her own husband suffered from bipolar disorder, making her the family’s primary support. She understood that Americans had always supported each other.
As a child, Perkins spent summers with her grandmother, with whom she was very close, in the small town of Newcastle, Maine, surrounded by a supportive community. In college, at Mount Holyoke, she majored in chemistry and physics, but after a professor required students to tour a factory to observe working conditions, Perkins became committed to improving the lives of those trapped in industrial jobs. After college, Perkins became a social worker and, in 1910, earned a masters degree in economics and sociology from Columbia University. She became the head of the New York office of the National Consumers League, urging consumers to use their buying power to demand better conditions and wages for the workers who made the products they were buying.
The next year, in 1911, she witnessed a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in which 146 workers, mostly women and girls, died. They were trapped in the building when the fire broke out because the factory owner had ordered the doors to the stairwells and exits locked to make sure no one slipped outside for a break. Unable to escape the smoke and fire in the factory, the workers—some of them on fire—leaped from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the building, dying on the pavement.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire proved to Perkins that voluntary organizations would never be enough to improve workers’ lives. She turned toward using the government to adjust the harsh conditions of industrialization. She began to work with the Democratic politicians at Tammany Hall, who presided over communities in the city that mirrored rural towns and who exercised a form of social welfare for their voters, making sure they had jobs, food, and shelter and that wives and children had a support network if a husband and father died. In that system the voices of women like Perkins were valuable, for their work in the immigrant wards of the city meant that they were the ones who knew what working families needed to survive.
The overwhelming unemployment, hunger, and suffering during the Great Depression convinced Perkins that state governments alone could not adjust the conditions of the modern world to create a safe, supportive community for ordinary people. She came to believe that, as she said: “The people are what matter to government, and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.”
Perkins met FDR through her Tammany connections, and when he asked her to be his secretary of labor, she told him that she wanted the federal government to provide unemployment insurance, health insurance, and old-age insurance. She later recalled: “I remember he looked so startled, and he said, ‘Well, do you think it can be done?’”
Creating federal unemployment insurance became her primary concern. Congressmen had little interest in passing such legislation, claiming that unemployment insurance and federal aid to dependent families would undermine a man’s willingness to work. But Perkins recognized that the Depression had added pressure to the idea of social insurance by emphasizing the needs of older Americans. In Long Beach, California, Dr. Francis Townsend had looked out of his window one day to see elderly women rooting through garbage cans for food. Appalled, he came up with a plan to help the elderly and stimulate the economy at the same time. Townsend proposed that the government provide every retired person over 60 years old with $200 a month, on the condition that they spend it within 30 days, a condition designed to stimulate the economy.
Townsend’s plan was wildly popular. More than that, though, it sparked people across the country to start coming up with their own plans for protecting the elderly and the nation’s social fabric.
It also spurred Congress to action. Perkins recalled that Townsend “startled the Congress of the United States because the aged have votes. The wandering boys didn't have any votes; the evicted women and their children had very few votes. If the unemployed didn't stay long enough in any one place, they didn't have a vote. But the aged people lived in one place and they had votes, so every Congressman had heard from the Townsend Plan people.”
FDR put together a committee to come up with a plan, but committee members could not make up their minds how to move forward. Perkins continued to hammer on the idea they must come up with something, and finally locked the members of the committee in a room. As she recalled: “Well, we locked the door and we had a lot of talk. I laid out a couple of bottles of something or other to cheer their lagging spirits. Anyhow, we stayed in session until about 2 a.m. We then voted finally, having taken our solemn oath that this was the end; we were never going to review it again.”
By the time the bill came to a vote, it was hugely popular. The vote was 371 to 33 in the House and 77 to 6 in the Senate.
When asked to describe the origins of the Social Security Act, Perkins mused that its roots came from the very beginnings of the nation. When Alexis de Toqueville wrote Democracy in America in 1835, she noted, he thought Americans were uniquely “so generous, so kind, so charitably disposed.” “Well, I don't know anything about the times in which De Tocqueville visited America,” she said, but “I do know that at the time I came into the field of social work, these feelings were real.”
With the Social Security Act, Perkins helped to write into our laws a longstanding political impulse in America that stood in dramatic contrast to the 1920s philosophy of rugged individualism. She recognized that the ideas of community values and pooling resources to keep the economic playing field level and take care of everyone are at least as deeply seated in our political philosophy as the idea of every man for himself.
In a 1962 speech recalling the origins of the Social Security Act, Perkins reflected: “Of course, the Act had to be amended, and has been amended, and amended, and amended, and amended, until it has now grown into a large and important project, for which, by the way, I think the people of the United States are deeply thankful. One thing I know: Social Security is so firmly embedded in the American psychology today that no politician, no political party, no political group could possibly destroy this Act and still maintain our democratic system. It is safe. It is safe forever, and for the everlasting benefit of the people of the United States.”
—
Notes:
https://www.ssa.gov/history/35act.html
https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php
https://www.ssa.gov/history/perkins5.html
https://francesperkinscenter.org/life-new/
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2024-republican-party-platform
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/4583/all-actions
August 12, 2025
August 12, 2025
Liberal commentator Jessica Tarlov nailed it this morning when she wrote: “He’s doing everything EXCEPT releasing the Epstein files.” Her comment was in reference to President Donald Trump’s social media post of 7:30 this morning, when he chummed the water by suggesting that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, more commonly known as the Kennedy Center, would soon be called the “TRUMP/KENNEDY CENTER.” He made the comment as he said this year’s Kennedy Center Honors recipients would be announced tomorrow.
Trump has been frantically trying to change the subject away from his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein since July 7, when Attorney General Pam Bondi stirred up fury from Trump’s MAGA base by saying the Department of Justice will not release any more information from the Epstein investigation.
On July 23, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s name is in the Epstein files “multiple times.”
But even Trump’s attack on Washington, D.C., yesterday has not managed to distract attention from the possibility that the president of the United States sexually assaulted children. Epstein’s associate, convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, has been in the news because of the administration’s sudden transfer of her from a low-security prison in Florida to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas. In 2021, Maxwell was convicted of conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse children and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Allison Gill, who goes by the name Mueller She Wrote on social media and who writes at The Breakdown, reported yesterday on Ghislaine Maxwell’s electronic file from the Bureau of Prisons, to which she got exclusive access. Sex offenders are not eligible to serve their sentences in minimum security prisons, but the file shows that someone waived that status to permit her transfer. Gill’s information also shows that the terms of her custody permit her “to leave the minimum security campus for work assignments; much like Jeffrey Epstein was allowed to leave prison as part of the sweetheart deal he got from Alex Acosta.”
Writing in The Hill today, former deputy U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York James Zirin wrote: “You may ask whether Trump approved the transfer. You can bet on it. This Justice Department doesn’t make a move without Trump’s thumb on the scale.”
Also yesterday, Judge Paul Engelmayer of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York refused to grant the Trump administration’s request that grand jury files from Maxwell’s sex trafficking case be unsealed. As Zirin noted, that request was always a red herring: grand jury minutes do not include evidence or witness statements and are “largely uniformative.”
Judge Engelmayer was even clearer. As Casey Gannon noted at CNN, the judge called out the Department of Justice for misleading the public about what the files would reveal. “Its entire premise—that the Maxwell grand jury materials would bring to light meaningful new information about Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes, or the Government’s investigation into them—is demonstrably false,” he wrote, and pointed out that the material is already almost all public.
Engelmayer continued with an observation about why Bondi might have made the request: “A member of the public, appreciating that the Maxwell grand jury materials do not contribute anything to public knowledge, might conclude that the Government’s motion for their unsealing was aimed not at ‘transparency’ but at diversion—aimed not at full disclosure but at the illusion of such,” he wrote.
The administration also has an interest in getting people to look away from the rising inflation numbers. A report released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that consumer prices rose again in July, an indication that businesses are beginning to pass on the cost of tariffs to consumers. As economist Justin Wolfers noted, after declining for two years, inflation is on its way back up and is now at 3.1% for the year. Those numbers do not include the tariffs that went into effect on August 7.
Meanwhile, as Aliss Higham of Newsweek reported today, layoffs in the U.S. “surged in July to their highest level since the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.” After the July jobs report showed that hiring has stalled and that hiring in May and June had been dramatically overestimated, Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, claiming that the numbers in the report were rigged.
Yesterday Trump nominated E.J. Antoni, a 37-year-old economist from the right-wing Heritage Foundation, to replace McEntarfer. Heritage was the driving force behind Project 2025, and in keeping with that institution’s drive toward Christian nationalism, Antoni’s doctoral dissertation from Northern Illinois University thanks his “spiritual patrons: Our Lady of Victory, St. Joseph, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Jude, St. Joseph of Cupertino, and Sts. Peter and Paul. Thank you, most especially, to Our Lord, with whom anything is possible.” Antoni is known primarily for media work, including appearances on the Fox News Channel, where he has relentlessly cheered on Trump’s policies.
Dominic Pino of the conservative National Review wrote today that Antoni is “nowhere near qualified to be BLS commissioner,” noting that “he has demonstrated time and again that he does not understand economic statistics.” As J.V. Last of The Bulwark notes, destroying faith in statistics by cooking the books is actually Trump’s plan, illustrated in his announcement of Antoni’s nomination when he wrote: “Our Economy is booming, and E.J. will ensure that the Numbers released are Honest and Accurate.”
Last notes that if Trump wanted to reassure people that government statistics are trustworthy, there are plenty of conservative economists he could have chosen to take the job of commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Instead, he picked “a hack he sees on Fox” to show that he is imposing his will even on the numbers that businesses, banks, and people need to make good decisions about investments.
In an interview on Fox Business News that appeared yesterday, before his nomination was announced, Antoni suggested that the government should stop issuing the monthly job reports, focusing instead on quarterly reports.
Last points out in his Bulwark article that Project 2025 called for consolidating the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Census Bureau, and Bureau of Labor Statistics into a single office and aligning their “mission with conservative principles,” as well as putting as many loyalists into statistical positions as possible.
Today the administration advanced Project 2025 ‘s determination to reshape American culture from a right-wing perspective when it sent a letter to Dr. Lonnie Bunch, the historian who serves as the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, informing him they intend to review museum exhibitions, curatorial processes, planning, the use of collections, and artists grants in order to make sure they align “with the president’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.”
Meredith McGraw and Jasmine Li of the Wall Street Journal, who reported the letter, say that the review will focus on the “National Museum of American History, the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Air and Space Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.”
Legal analyst Anna Bower notes that the woman in charge of reviewing the Smithsonian is his Florida criminal defense attorney, who joined his team from the field of property law and who, as Bower writes, “didn't like some of the museum's exhibits when she visited after the inauguration so she convinced Trump to sign an executive order putting her in charge.” Also on the three-person team is Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget and a key author of Project 2025.
Trump’s assumption of control over the Washington, D.C., police force and his calling out of the D.C. National Guard are definitely ways for him to divert attention from the Epstein files and the stalling economy. But they are also an attempt to create a dictatorship as Project 2025 prescribed. Both can be true at the same time.
Today Alex Horton and David Ovalle of the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration is looking at putting 600 National Guard troops on standby at all times as a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” to deploy into American cities to combat protest or civil unrest. The troops would be split into two groups of 300, stationed at military bases in Alabama and Arizona to cover the regions east and west of the Mississippi River. The cost would run into hundreds of millions of dollars, and funding could not start before fiscal year 2027.
National security affairs scholar Lindsay P. Cohn told the reporters that while National Guard units are commonly deployed for emergencies within their own states, this “is really strange because essentially nothing is happening. Crime is going down. We don’t have major protests or civil disturbances. There is no significant resistance from states” to federal immigration policies. “There is very little evidence anything big is likely to happen soon,” she said. But the proposal could take resources that states will need to respond to national disasters or other emergencies.
This morning, about 800 National Guard troops arrived at the D.C. Armory to report for duty. They have been deployed until September 25.
But the power grab underway among MAGA leaders is not going unchallenged.
Yesterday MSNBC ran a column of statistics fact-checking Trump live during his press conference, showing that crime in Washington, D.C.—and across the country—is falling significantly, despite Trump’s claim that we are in a crime wave. It appears at least some in the media are catching on to the idea that his lies must be challenged as they happen, rather than hours later when public attention has moved on.
Also yesterday, California governor Gavin Newsom issued a public letter telling Trump that if he doesn’t back off on his attempts to redistrict Republican-dominated states in order to rig the 2026 elections, Newsom will be forced to work to redistrict California. “You are playing with fire, risking the destabilization of our democracy,” Newsom wrote, “while knowing that California can neutralize any gains you hope to make…. I do not do this lightly, as I believe legislative district maps should be drawn by independent, citizen-led efforts,” he wrote. But "California cannot stand idly by as this power grab unfolds.”
Newsom’s press office followed the letter up this morning with a post on social media: “DONALD TRUMP, THE LOWEST POLLING PRESIDENT IN RECENT HISTORY, THIS IS YOUR SECOND-TO-LAST WARNING!!! (THE NEXT ONE IS THE LAST ONE!). STAND DOWN NOW OR CALIFORNIA WILL COUNTER-STRIKE (LEGALLY!) TO DESTROY YOUR ILLEGAL CROOKED MAPS IN RED STATES. PRESS CONFERENCE COMING—HOSTED BY AMERICA’S FAVORITE GOVERNOR, GAVIN NEWSOM. FINAL WARNING NEXT. YOU WON’T LIKE IT!!! THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.”
Then the account posted: “FINAL WARNING DONALD TRUMP—MAYBE THE MOST IMPORTANT WARNING IN HISTORY! STOP CHEATING OR CALIFORNIA WILL REDRAW THE MAPS. AND GUESS WHO WILL ANNOUNCE IT THIS WEEK? GAVIN NEWSOM (MANY SAY THE MOST LOVED & HANDSOME GOVERNOR) AND A VERY POWERFUL TEAM. DON’T MAKE US DO IT!!! THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.”
A follow-up post tonight read: “DONALD ‘TACO’ TRUMP, AS MANY CALL HIM, ‘MISSED’ THE DEADLINE!!! CALIFORNIA WILL NOW DRAW NEW, MORE ‘BEAUTIFUL MAPS,’ THEY WILL BE HISTORIC AS THEY WILL END THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY (DEMS TAKE BACK THE HOUSE!). BIG PRESS CONFERENCE THIS WEEK WITH POWERFUL DEMS AND GAVIN NEWSOM—YOUR FAVORITE GOVERNOR—THAT WILL BE DEVASTATING FOR ‘MAGA.’ THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! —GN”
Tonight, Elizabeth Blair of NPR reported that Trump’s announcement this morning that Kennedy Center Honors recipients would be named tomorrow caught the staff of the Kennedy Center entirely off guard.
—
Notes:
The BreakdownEXCLUSIVE: I Have Ghislaine Maxwell's Security Score, Custody Level, Transfer Code, and Sex Offender Waiver Today, we learned from Adam Klasfeld at All Rise News that Senator Whitehouse (D - RI) has penned a letter to the Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons William Marshall demanding answers surrounding the redesignation and transfer of convicted serial sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell to a minimum security facility…Read more2 days ago · 1732 likes · 150 comments · Allison Gillhttps://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26047433-maxwell-grand-jury-material-order/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/11/politics/maxwell-epstein-grand-jury-files-rejected
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/08/12/business/cpi-inflation-tariffs-fed?smid=em-share
https://www.newsweek.com/us-hits-highest-layoffs-since-covid-2111794
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/01/trump-erika-mcentarfer-jobs-report-fired.html
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/trump-wants-a-bureau-of-maga-statistics/
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, August 11, 2025, 6:39 p.m.
The BulwarkThe Ministry of Truth Is Real NowI realize I promised you Russia–Ukraine today. It’ll have to wait. Meanwhile, you can tide yourself over with the articles we’ve published by Cathy Young and Nick Grossman. —JVL…Read more21 hours ago · 763 likes · 654 comments · Jonathan V. Lasthttps://www.cnn.com/2025/08/12/economy/antoni-bls-mulls-suspending-jobs-report
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/08/12/national-guard-civil-unrest/
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/lindsey-halligan-trump-smithsonian-executive-order-2626200
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/12/nx-s1-5500151/kennedy-center-honors-trump
X:
GovPressOffice/status/1955279652794306597
GovPressOffice/status/1955411757540970603
GovPressOffice/status/1955373920976326668
Bluesky:
jessicatarlov.bsky.social/post/3lw7hkx5avs22
emptywheel.bsky.social/post/3lw7gifibis2k
justinwolfers.bsky.social/post/3lw7d6agidv2j
mikesington.bsky.social/post/3lw4zwylgjs2f
kylegriffin1.bsky.social/post/3lw7wookazc2y
ericcolumbus.bsky.social/post/3lw5vdmkp5c23
atrupar.com/post/3lw7cwmkf3s2g
August 11, 2025
August 11, 2025
President Donald J. Trump’s big announcement today at his press conference—to which he showed up late—was that he is assuming control over the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department and deploying more than 100 agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and about 40 from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, along with officers from the Secret Service and the U.S. Marshals Service and members of the District of Columbia National Guard, “to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor, and worse.” He reiterated that officers would clear homeless encampments from the city.
In fact, statistics from the Department of Justice show that violent crime in the nation’s capital was at a 30-year low in 2024 and, according to Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), is down 26% this year compared to the same period last year. Former undersecretary of state and editor of Time magazine Richard Stengel noted that Washington is “not even in [the] top 10 dangerous cities in [the] U.S.” Meanwhile, legal analyst Asha Rangappa notes that FBI agents are not trained to patrol the streets, and that every one of them assigned to do that is not investigating foreign spies, foreign and domestic terrorists, or crimes like fraud, murder, corruption, and human trafficking.
If that was Trump’s big announcement, the big story seems to have been something different.
Trump’s performance at the press conference—an event for which his handlers would have made sure he was at the top of his game—made it clear that his mental deterioration is moving rapidly. He let Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and FBI director Kash Patel explain the actual plan, taking the microphone himself to describe a fake world in which he plays the role of hero, solving five wars, creating a booming economy, solving the border security others couldn’t, protecting Americans from a hellscape that exists only in his rhetoric.
The administration’s seizure of power is anything but imaginary. As Stengel noted, “Throughout history, autocrats use a false pretext to impose government control over local law enforcement as a prelude to a more national takeover. That’s far more dangerous than the situation he says he is fixing.” While Trump is mobilizing the National Guard under a pretext now, he memorably refused to mobilize it on January 6, 2021, to protect the lawmakers under siege in the U.S. Capitol as his supporters tried to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president.
Some clues to what the administration is attempting showed up today in a court in California, where Governor Gavin Newsom and California Attorney General Rob Bonta are suing the Department of Justice, saying it broke the law by deploying about 4,000 troops from the National Guard and 700 U.S. Marines to Los Angeles in June without authorization. A federal law known as the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits federal troops from acting as law enforcement officers.
Anna Bower of Lawfare Media was following the events in court today. She posted that the government agreed the troops in Los Angeles were subject to the Posse Comitatus Act and that they were put in place simply to guard federal buildings and law enforcement officials. But witnesses said that troops accompanied ICE when they made arrests and one of the documents introduced that related to the massive troop presence in MacArthur Park on July 7 said the purpose of the mission was to “protect the execution of joint federal law enforcement missions...while preserving public safety and demonstrating federal reach and presence.”
The words “demonstrating federal reach and presence” seem to get to the heart of the administration’s object, for it is showing federal troops exercising power over civilians even while telling the court they are not. Making people fear the government is key to the rise of an authoritarian.
This mobilization echoes Trump’s attempt to take over Washington, D.C., in June 2020 when he was angry about the protests over the death of George Floyd, murdered in May 2020 by white police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. In 2020, members of Trump’s first administration stopped him from using the military against U.S. citizens, and, dramatically, members of the military stepped up to declare their support not for a president but for the United States Constitution.
This time around, Trump has installed loyalist Pete Hegseth at the head of the military. Hegseth made his support for the president’s plan clear today as he stood with Trump at the press conference. Ominously for civil liberties, observers note that no one from the administration is specifying where the administration intends to send people from the homeless encampments, although Trump wrote Sunday, “We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital.”
The administration is also consolidating power over the economy. Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal noted today that the U.S. is marching toward a form of state capitalism in which Trump looks much like the Chinese Communist Party, exercising political control not just over government agencies but over companies themselves. “A generation ago conventional wisdom held that as China liberalized, its economy would come to resemble America’s,” Ip wrote. “Instead, capitalism in America is starting to look like China.”
Ip points to the government’s partial control over U.S. Steel that it took as a condition for Nippon Steel’s takeover, the $1.5 trillion of promised investment from trading partners that Trump has claimed the right to direct personally, the 15% of certain chip sales of Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices to China that will go to the administration (although who or what entity will get that money I can’t figure out), and Trump’s demand that the chief executive of Intel resign.
Ip calls this system of state capitalism “a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.” He notes that it is a “sea change from the free market ethos the U.S. once embodied.”
Ip also notes that state capitalism is a means of political control, using the power of the state to crush political challenges. “In Trump’s first term, CEOs routinely spoke out when they disagreed with his policies such as on immigration and trade,” Ip writes. “Now, they shower him with donations and praise, or are mostly silent.” Ip pointed out that Trump is deploying financial power and regulatory power to cow media companies, banks, law firms, and government agencies he thinks are not sufficiently supportive.
But Trump’s press conference did not show a president in control of these dramatic changes. His words echoed the rhetoric he used to win office in 2016, rhetoric he summed up in his inaugural address that turned a speech usually designed to be uplifting into a description of what he called American carnage: “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our Nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.”
But in the context of the president’s rambling nonsense, that apocalyptic rhetoric, along with Trump’s focus on renovating and redecorating the White House to look like one of his gold-splattered properties, seems like an attempt to return to a past in which he felt powerful.
Meanwhile, Trump’s second presidency has been following the plan outlined in Project 2025 closely, even though Trump denied any association with Project 2025 when he ran for office. Russell Vought, now director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote the section of the plan that called for an extraordinarily strong executive in order to put in place Christian nationalism. Increasingly, it looks like members of his administration are using Trump in order to create a system that will respond to whoever is in charge, making it possible for today’s leaders to retain control over the country even without Trump there to mobilize MAGA voters.
Trump’s press conference today showed a badly weakened president. His apparent connections to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have already weakened him with his base. That story is not going away, and Trump has made it clear he is frantic over it. Then today he indicated even he is worried about his mental deterioration. At 7:36 this morning, he posted on social media that Representatives Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) are “morons.” He wrote: “Each of these political hacks should be forced to take a Cognitive Exam, much like the one I recently took while getting my ‘physical’ at our GREAT Washington, D.C., Military Hospital (W[alter] R[eed]!). As the doctors said, ‘President Trump ACED it, something that is rarely seen!’ These Radical Left Lunatics would all fail this test in a spectacular show of stupidity and incompetence. TAKE THE TEST!!!”
Vice President J.D. Vance appears to have been distancing himself from Trump and the administration by taking repeated vacations. As Bill Kristol noted today in The Bulwark, Vance also appears to be undercutting Trump over the Epstein files, twisting the knife while also seeming to make overtures to Trump’s MAGA voters, who have never warmed to Vance. As Kristol notes, Vance set up what Kristol calls a “very unusual” meeting at his residence to discuss Epstein, a meeting that just happened to leak to the press. Then yesterday, Vance brought up the issue again in an interview with Maria Bartiromo on the Fox News Channel, parroting MAGA beliefs that the files name prominent Democrats.
“[A] lot of Americans want answers. I certainly want answers,” Vance told Bartiromo. As Kristol notes: “With this bland statement, Vance succeeded—inadvertently, needless to say!—in reminding us that we don’t yet have the answers we want and deserve,” thus ginning up the Epstein story again.
Those people cheering on Trump’s drive for autocratic power because they still somehow think he will use that power to make their lives better might want to consider how their lives may change if that power is in the hands of J.D. Vance.
And so we have come full circle: the arbitrary nature of autocrats was, after all, what made our nation’s founders base a government not on men, but on impartial laws that defended the rights and liberties of the people.
—
Notes:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-year-low
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/08/11/trump-national-guard-dc-crime-crackdown/
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/inaugural-address-14
https://calmatters.org/justice/2025/08/newsom-vs-trump-national-guard/
The BulwarkEt Tu, JD? Andrew’s back from northern Michigan today. Thanks to Ben and Jim for shouldering the Morning Shots load in his absence—and if any of you are trying to offload a lake house right now, Andrew might be in a very suggestible mood. Happy Monday…Read morea day ago · 741 likes · 314 comments · William Kristol, Andrew Egger, and Jim SwiftYouTube:
X:
stengel/status/1954919790390247753
Bluesky:
markjacob.bsky.social/post/3lw4tv5ugkc26
mindcite.bsky.social/post/3lw2zrque6k2k
civictracker.us/post/3lw56z6pufh2j
annabower.bsky.social/post/3lw5dtvfvks2o
factpostnews.bsky.social/post/3lvvusmcmn22h
asharangappa.bsky.social/post/3lw3r5w5vtc2y
spbmckenna.bsky.social/post/3lw33uuoocc2p
farzaneh-f.bsky.social/post/3lvxz7e37c22b
August 10, 2025
August 10, 2025
On Friday, Democracy Forward Foundation sued the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to make it respond to its request for the release of the Epstein files, as well as all communications the administration has exchanged over the files and President Donald Trump’s inclusion in them, as required under the Freedom of Information Act. The Democracy Forward Foundation filed Freedom of Information Act requests on July 28, asking for expedited processing in light of public interest in the files, but the DOJ and the FBI have not responded.
The case has been assigned to Judge Tanya Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who presided over Trump’s criminal trial for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Drawing Chutkan for an Epstein case means decisions will not be weighted in Trump’s favor.
On Saturday, Trump posted a screed against former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) accusing her of insider trading and calling her “a disgusting degenerate, who Impeached me twice, on NO GROUNDS, and LOST! How are you feeling now, Nancy???”
Since Attorney General Pam Bondi announced on July 7 that the administration would not be releasing any more information about the Epstein investigation and especially since July 23, when the Wall Street Journal reported that Bondi had told Trump in May that his name appears in those files, the president has thrown up one distraction after another. The attack on Pelosi fits that mold.
But it is interesting that the president appears to have impeachment on his mind.
Also on Saturday, Trump launched new action against Washington, D.C. He has threatened to “federalize” the nation’s capital since the 2024 presidential campaign, and now has found a trigger in the alleged carjacking attempt by two unarmed 15-year-olds—one girl and one boy—on August 6 against 19-year-old former “Department of Government Efficiency” staffer Edward Coristine, also known as “Big Balls.” Law enforcement officers apparently stopped the alleged attempt while it was in progress and arrested the two youths, but Trump posted on social media a picture that he claimed was Coristine, covered in blood, and wrote that the incident showed that “crime in Washington, D.C. is totally out of control.”
Although violent crime in Washington, D.C., has reached its lowest level in 30 years, Trump announced that he will hold a press conference Monday “which will, essentially, stop violent crime in Washington, D.C. It has become one of the most dangerous cities anywhere in the World. It will soon be one of the safest!!! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
Today, he plugged his news conference again on social media and wrote: I’m going to make our Capital safer and more beautiful than it ever was before. The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY. We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital. The Criminals, you don’t have to move out. We’re going to put you in jail where you belong. It’s all going to happen very fast, just like the Border. We went from millions pouring in, to ZERO in the last few months. This will be easier—Be prepared! There will be no ‘MR. NICE GUY.’ We want our Capital BACK. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Two hours later, he posted again, appearing to refer to his false claim that Washington, D.C., is beset by crime and also appearing to refer to his new plan to replace the East Wing of the White House with a 90,000-square-foot event space. And then he pivoted to an attack on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, whom he appears to be trying to hound out of office with complaints about the cost of renovating two buildings the Fed uses. Then he turned back to crime in Washington, saying, “The Mayor of D.C., Muriel Bowser, is a good person who has tried, but she has been given many chances, and the Crime Numbers get worse, and the City only gets dirtier and less attractive. The American Public is not going to put up with it any longer.”
Then he turned to his immigration sweeps, saying: “Just like I took care of the Border, where you had ZERO Illegals coming across last month, from millions the year before, I will take care of our cherished Capital, and we will make it, truly, GREAT AGAIN! Before the tents, squalor, filth, and Crime, it was the most beautiful Capital in the World. It will soon be that again.”
Trump seems to be suggesting that he wants to take control over Washington, D.C., the seat of the United States government. That will not be easy, as the U.S. Constitution gives control of the federal district to Congress, and a 1973 law permitted the inhabitants of the district to elect a mayor and a city council.
Trump’s fascination with Washington, D.C., might also be a reflection of a turn toward a focus on real estate, the sector in which he is most comfortable, as his administration is flailing and his own cognitive abilities are slipping. In The Atlantic today, Peter Wehner and Robert P. Beschel Jr. noted that people were willing to vote for Trump despite his corruption because they believed he would be an effective leader who would make their lives better.
Now, though, the public’s faith in his governing ability has plummeted. A recent Gallup poll found his approval rating at 37%, and more people disapprove than approve of his handling of the economy, immigration, and government efficiency.
The crumbling presidency might be behind the rush to cement the land grab Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has wanted since at least 2016. Bojan Pancevski and Yaroslav Trofimov reported in the Wall Street Journal that Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, who is not a trained diplomat and does not speak Russian, appears to have misunderstood the terms Putin was offering for a ceasefire. After saying at first that Putin would withdraw his troops from parts of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in exchange for complete control of Donetsk, Witkoff later clarified that the only offer Putin had made was for Ukraine to withdraw from Donetsk.
“This is deeply damaging incompetence,” former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul posted on social media. “Witkoff should finally start taking a notetaker from the U.S. embassy for future meetings. That’s how professional diplomacy works.”
Trump is scheduled to meet with Putin in Alaska on August 15.
If Trump’s hope is to chum the news with stories about Washington, D.C., and his relationship with Putin so people forget about the Epstein files, he’s not getting much help from Vice President J.D. Vance. On Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo on the Fox News Channel this morning, Vance said: “We know that Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of connections with left-wing politicians and left-wing billionaires.... Democrat billionaires and Democrat political leaders went to Epstein Island all the time. Who knows what they did.”
Vance’s suggestion that keeping the files under wraps protects Democrats is unlikely to convince the MAGA Republicans clamoring for their release to let the issue go. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine any other angle Vance could have chosen that would have poured more fuel on that particular dumpster fire.
—
Notes:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.283567/gov.uscourts.dcd.283567.1.0.pdf
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/10/trump-crime-data-federal-takeover/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/07/politics/federal-law-enforcement-dc-trump
https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-year-low
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/08/trump-incompetence/683779/
https://www.wsj.com/world/ukraine-and-europe-counter-putins-cease-fire-proposal-6a16133c
https://www.newsweek.com/steve-witkoff-putin-russia-talks-trump-2111348
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social Post, August 9, 2025, 9:40 a.m.
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social Post, August 10, 2025, 11:03 a.m.
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social Post, August 10, 2025, 1:40 p.m.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/19-year-former-doge-worker-assaulted-dc-carjacking/story?id=124406722
https://www.rawstory.com/jd-vance-afraid-of-epstein/
X:
McFaul/status/1954223991331385557
Bluesky:
civictracker.us/post/3lvzhekhwdz2h
atrupar.com/post/3lw2iqyob2i2g
maxberger.bsky.social/post/3lw35yflc5s2z
mickeykuhns.bsky.social/post/3lw3jxmae3227
Heather Cox Richardson's Blog
- Heather Cox Richardson's profile
- 1333 followers
