Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 3
November 20, 2025
November 19, 2025
Yesterday the House of Representatives passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act. This measure gives the Department of Justice 30 days to release the files the Federal Bureau of Investigation collected when investigating the late sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein. The vote was 427 to 1, with Representative Clay Higgins (R-LA) casting the only nay vote. After the vote, Epstein survivors in the galleries cheered.
The strong vote in favor came after President Donald J. Trump, who had tried to kill the release of the Epstein files for months, on Sunday night suddenly reversed course. After failing to stop dozens of House Republicans from giving their support to the measure, he said he didn’t care if it passed, starting a stampede of Republicans eager to be on the popular side of the issue.
House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) evidently went along with this strategy because he expected Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) to stall the measure with amendments. If it finally passed nonetheless, the House would have to take it up again and could delay it further. After the House passed the bill, Johnson told reporters he would “insist upon” amendments.
But Thune was not inclined to play along. Johnson has been openly doing Trump’s bidding and jamming the Senate to force it to comply, and Thune appears to have had enough. Before the measure went to the Senate, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer asked for unanimous consent to pass the measure when it arrived. The Senate agreed, and thus the bill passed the Senate automatically by a unanimous vote in favor.
On social media, Just Jack posted: “Anytime you’re feeling embarrassed, remember that Clay Higgins woke up this morning to the realization he was the only one in the whole *ss Congress who voted to defend pedophiles.”
Mike Johnson did not take the news of the Senate passage particularly well, telling MS NOW congressional reporter Mychael Schnell: “I am deeply disappointed in this outcome…. It needed amendments. I just spoke to the president about that. We’ll see what happens.” Johnson said both he and the president “have concerns” about the bill.
Trump seemed to sense last night that the jig was up. “I don’t care when the Senate passes the House Bill,” he wrote in the early evening. “Whether tonight, or at some other time in the near future, I just don’t want Republicans to take their eyes off all the Victories that we’ve had….” He went on to record his usual list of exaggerations and fantasy successes, but the message seemed as if he was acknowledging defeat. Tonight, in the midst of another long rant on social media, Trump announced: “I HAVE JUST SIGNED THE BILL TO RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES!”
Meanwhile, those combing through the files from Epstein’s estate released by the House Oversight Committee last week are turning up more disturbing information. Just a week before his arrest in 2019, Epstein wrote to Trump ally Steve Bannon: “Now you can understand why trump wakes up in the middle of the night sweating when he hears you and I are friends.”
Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the horrors around Epstein will not be made easier by news reported yesterday by Robert Faturechi and Avi Asher-Schapiro of ProPublica that the Trump White House intervened to make Customs and Border Protection return the electronic devices they seized from accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan when they arrived in Florida earlier this year. The two have been accused of sex trafficking in Romania and the U.K.
Today Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Department of Justice would release the files within 30 days as the law requires, but suggested the administration might try to bottle up the files because, at Trump’s demand, she opened an investigation into the Democrats named in them. She told reporters that she couldn’t comment on that investigation because “it is a pending investigation.”
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released yesterday showed Trump’s job approval rating has fallen another two percentage points since a similar poll in early November. A Marist poll released today shows that registered voters prefer Democrats to Republicans on a generic ballot for the 2026 midterms by an astonishing 14%. In November 2024, voters’ preference was divided evenly: 48% to 48%.
Trump’s hope of rigging the 2026 midterm elections took another hit yesterday when a panel of three federal judges said Texas could not use the new, mid-decade district map Trump demanded to shift five Democratic-dominated districts to Republican domination. In the 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause decision, the Supreme Court said that federal courts cannot review partisan gerrymandering, and so the Texas Republicans who redrew the districts insisted their gerrymandering was strictly about partisanship.
But two judges disagreed. Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, wrote that “[s]ubstantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map.” Texas House minority leader Gene Wu, who led the Democratic lawmakers’ August walkout to prevent the redistricting, said the decision stopped “one of the most brazen attempts to steal our democracy that Texas has ever seen.”
Texas immediately appealed to the Supreme Court.
This afternoon the third judge, 79-year-old Reagan appointee Jerry Smith, released a scathing dissent, attacking Judge Brown personally and writing that “[t]he main winners from Judge Brown’s opinion are [Open Society Foundations founder] George Soros and [Democratic California governor] Gavin Newsom.”
The administration faced not just a loss but embarrassment in the Justice Department’s indictment of former FBI director James Comey. Trump holds a grudge against Comey, who in 2017 refused to drop an investigation into Trump’s then-national security advisor Mike Flynn’s contacts with a Russian operative shortly before Trump took office.
In September of this year, then–U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Maryland Erik Seibert, a career prosecutor, said there was insufficient evidence for an indictment against Comey. Under pressure from Trump, Siebert resigned on September 19. The next day, the president posted on social media a message to Bondi that he apparently intended to be a private message, demanding the Justice Department indict Comey and others. That night, Trump appointed Lindsay Halligan, a White House aide who had no experience as a prosecutor, to replace Seibert; the legality of her appointment is being challenged in court.
Days later, Halligan returned a grand jury indictment against Comey for obstruction of justice and making false statements to Congress. Comey pleaded not guilty, his lawyers arguing that the charges were an act of vindictive prosecution by the president.
As Joyce White Vance explained in Civil Discourse, in the process of working through some of the disagreements between the parties before trial in front of Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick, it emerged that the government had ignored rules for gathering evidence and also that Halligan appeared to have misled the grand jury, suggesting the grand jurors could “be assured the government has more evidence, perhaps better evidence,” than it had shown them. Vance called this “staggeringly wrong.” It also appeared that Halligan may have misled the jury by suggesting that Comey had to prove he was not guilty, when the actual requirement in a criminal case is that the government has to prove a defendant’s guilt.
Fitzpatrick also noted irregularities in the grand jury proceedings. As David French explained in the New York Times, Halligan initially tried to get an indictment on three counts, but the jury refused one of the charges. Somehow, Halligan signed two different indictments. The first “indicated that the grand jury failed to find probable cause as to any count,” and the second had two, rather than three, charges.
Today, in a hearing to consider whether Trump was prosecuting Comey vindictively, U.S. District Court Judge Michael Nachmanoff questioned Halligan herself, who admitted she had shown the final Comey indictment not to the whole grand jury but to only two of the grand jurors. Then one of the lawyers working with Halligan told the judge that the prosecutors who had handled the case before Halligan had drafted a memo explaining why they would not prosecute Comey. He noted that someone in the deputy attorney general’s office told him not to admit that information in court.
Comey’s lawyer, Michael Dreeben, is a national expert on criminal law who, in his time at the solicitor general’s office, represented the United States before the Supreme Court more than a hundred times. Dreeben urged the judge to throw out the case and strike a blow at Trump’s use of the criminal justice system to attack his perceived enemies.
Dreeben told the judge: “This has to stop.”
—
Notes:
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/11/18/congress/johnson-thune-epstein-files-gop-00658475
https://maristpoll.marist.edu/polls/a-look-to-the-2026-midterms-november-2025/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/18/politics/epstein-files-vote-house
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/11/19/congress/senate-clears-epstein-files-bill-00659041
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-trump-emails-texts-inner-circle/
https://www.propublica.org/article/andrew-tate-investigation-dhs-paul-ingrassia
https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/federal-court-blocks-texas-gerrymander/
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/08/18/texas-democrats-return-redistricting-map-illinois/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/10/trump-doj-prosecutions-comey-james-00601838
https://abcnews.go.com/US/us-attorney-plans-resign-amid-pressure-trump-after/story?id=125750006
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5523879-lindsey-halligan-trump-comey-prosecutor/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj07ndrnr34o
Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance What Happens When The Government Loses Its Credibility: The Comey ProsecutionThis is one of those long posts we occasionally have when a judge files a highly significant order. My apologies for starting the week off like this, but it’s a significant decision in a very important case. Understanding the details is critical to seeing the significance of a matter like this. Thanks for being here with me and understanding that…Read more2 days ago · 2213 likes · 251 comments · Joyce Vancehttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/17/james-comey-case-trump-justice-department
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/25/james-comey-trump-prosecution-history
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/19/us/politics/comey-vindictive-prosecution-trump.html
https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/dynamic/render
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November 19, 2025
November 18, 2025
November 18, 2025
For three hot days, from July 1 to July 3, 1863, more than 150,000 soldiers from the armies of the United States of America and the Confederate States of America slashed at each other in the hills and through the fields around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
When the battered armies limped out of town after the brutal battle, they left scattered behind them more than seven thousand corpses in a town with fewer than 2,500 inhabitants. With the heat of a summer sun beating down, the townspeople had to get the dead soldiers into the ground as quickly as they possibly could, marking the hasty graves with nothing more than pencil on wooden boards.
A local lawyer, David Wills, who had huddled in his cellar with his family and their neighbors during the battle, called for the creation of a national cemetery in the town, where the bodies of the United States soldiers who had died in the battle could be interred with dignity. Officials agreed, and Wills and an organizing committee planned an elaborate dedication ceremony to be held a few weeks after workers began moving remains into the new national cemetery.
They invited state governors, members of Congress, and cabinet members to attend. To deliver the keynote address, they asked prominent orator Edward Everett, who wanted to do such extensive research into the battle that they had to move the ceremony to November 19, a later date than they had first contemplated.
And, almost as an afterthought, they asked President Abraham Lincoln to make a few appropriate remarks. While they probably thought he would not attend, or that if he came he would simply mouth a few platitudes and sit down, President Lincoln had something different in mind.
On November 19, 1863, about fifteen thousand people gathered in Gettysburg for the dedication ceremony. A program of music and prayers preceded Everett’s two-hour oration. Then, after another hymn, Lincoln stood up to speak. Packed in the midst of a sea of frock coats, he began. In his high-pitched voice, speaking slowly, he delivered a two-minute speech that redefined the nation.
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” Lincoln began. While the southern enslavers who were making war on the United States had stood firm on the Constitution’s protection of property—including their enslaved Black neighbors—Lincoln dated the nation from the Declaration of Independence.
The men who wrote the Declaration considered the “truths” they listed to be “self-evident”: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But Lincoln had no such confidence. By his time, the idea that all men were created equal was a “proposition,” and Americans of his day were “engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
Standing near where so many men had died four months before, Lincoln honored “those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.”
He noted that those “brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated” the ground “far above our poor power to add or detract.”
“It is for us the living,” Lincoln said, “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” He urged the men and women in the audience to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion” and to vow that “these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
November 17, 2025
November 17, 2025 (Monday)
President Donald J. Trump spent the weekend flooding social media with posts claiming that his economic policies are working and that his 34 felony convictions and the investigations into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russian operatives were illegitimate, and posting angrily about those people calling out his association with Jeffrey Epstein. He even reposted a statement from one of his own lawyers saying, “If Jeffrey Epstein had any dirt on Donald Trump, he would have had great leverage in the criminal case against him at the time he died,” which perhaps conveys a different message than he intended.
Then, after fighting furiously against the upcoming House vote over releasing the Epstein files the FBI collected as part of its investigation into the convicted sex abuser, at 9:15 p.m. last night Trump abruptly reversed course, saying that House Republicans should vote in favor of releasing the files “because we have nothing to hide.” “I DON’T CARE!” he posted.”
But of course, he does care, as is evident from how deeply he fought the release of the files the FBI collected during its investigation of Epstein right up until the final signature on the House discharge petition that would force the House to vote on a measure to require the Justice Department to release the files. As Meredith Kile of People magazine reported, when a female Bloomberg reporter at a press gaggle aboard Air Force One November 14 asked him if there was anything “incriminating” in the Epstein files, he pointed a finger in her face and said: “Quiet! Quiet, Piggy.”
In the hours before House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) swore in Representative Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) at 4:00 on Wednesday, Trump and his loyalists worked to pressure Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) to remove her name from the discharge petition. She refused. As soon as Johnson swore her into office, Grijalva signed the petition, teeing up a vote on a bill requiring the release of the files.
On Thursday, November 13, the people behind the White House social media account seemed to be trying to combat the Epstein story by pushing the image of Trump as a happily married family man. The account posted an image of Trump and First Lady Melania Trump listening to the U.S. Marine Band and chatting, then a video of Trump behind the Oval Office desk, giving a medallion and a pen each to four small children. The caption read, “The best president,” with a heart emoji.
On Friday, November 14, the White House social media account posted an image of Trump and the First Lady embracing under the caption “I can’t help falling in love with you,” along with an emoji of musical notes and a heart. On Sunday, November 16, it posted a picture of the two of them striding toward the cameras holding hands, under the caption “America’s power couple,” with an eagle and an American flag emoji.
That Trump’s hand is weakening showed on Friday, when the leader of the Indiana Senate announced that it would not hold a meeting in December to gerrymander all nine of Indiana’s districts to favor Republicans. Currently, the Indiana delegation to the House of Representatives has seven Republicans and two Democrats. Trump and Indiana governor Mike Braun have put great pressure on the legislature to redistrict, but even though Republicans hold a supermajority in the Indiana legislature, not enough Republican senators are willing to face the anger of voters to back the plan.
Then, over the weekend, rumors spread that as many as 100 House Republicans would vote in favor of the measure. Their constituents are eager for the release of the files, which Trump promised on the campaign trail, and the material already released from the Epstein estate has been damaging enough that representatives have reason to worry whether the material in the FBI files is even worse, leaving them in the position of having defended that behavior if they continue to cover it up. On Sunday, Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) told Jonathan Karl of ABC News’s This Week that he was hoping to get a veto-proof majority in favor of the release.
The signs were clear: Trump had lost control of the House Republicans.
This is a big deal. The public outrage over ABC’s suspension of comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s show in September demonstrated in a much more public way than court losses had that the administration was not all-powerful. That outcry forced first ABC’s parent company, Disney, and then broadcast station owners Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group to backtrack and to reinstate Kimmel’s show.
While individual Republican lawmakers have groused about one or another of the administration’s actions, only a few have broken with Trump. He has generally been able to command loyalty by threatening to sic his supporters on those who step out of line and by warning that he will support primary challengers against them. Notably, over the weekend he hammered at one of those lawmakers, his former loyalist Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), calling her a traitor, “wacky,” and a “ranting Lunatic.” He said he was withdrawing his endorsement of her and would support another Republican to replace her.
His usual threats didn’t work; dozens of House Republicans still said they were going to vote in favor of releasing the Epstein files. So to get back in front of the party, Trump suddenly called for lawmakers to pass the measure, later telling reporters he would sign it if it came to his desk. Lawmakers who just hours before had maintained they would vote no suddenly switched to yes, indicating that Trump still commands many of them.
But his change in direction makes it far more likely senators, too, will vote to pass the bill. Tonight Trump loyalist Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) said he would vote for the measure, likely realizing a vote against it will hurt him in his upcoming campaign for governor, which is quite something considering Alabama’s previously strong support for Trump.
Don’t hold your breath for the release of the files, though: Trump’s post saying he didn’t care about the release included the qualification that “the House Oversight Committee can have whatever they are legally entitled to,” suggesting he will continue his stonewalling with the help of the Department of Justice. Remember: all the congressional machinations are only to force the release of the files. He could release them himself any time he wanted to.
On Sunday, Trump posted angrily about the Indiana Republicans’ failure to do his bidding, calling those Republican opponents of redistricting “RINOs,” or Republicans in name only, and accusing them of “depriving Republicans of a Majority in the House, A VERY BIG DEAL!” He went on: “It’s weak ‘Republicans’ that cause our Country such problems—It’s why we have crazy Policies and Ideas that are so bad for America.” He blamed Braun for “not working the way he should to get the necessary Votes,” and said “Any Republican that votes against this important redistricting, potentially having an impact on America itself, should be PRIMARIED.” He singled out two senators—one of whom had not publicly said he opposed the bill—saying if they didn’t “DO THEIR JOB, AND DO IT NOW!..., let’s get them out of office, ASAP.”
Hours later, one of the senators was the victim of a “swatting” incident, in which the police department received an email falsely saying someone in the home had been harmed, a malicious action designed to prompt police to launch a massive response to a potentially dangerous situation, thus putting the victims in danger.
Trump seems to be losing his iron grip on the Republican Party. Although Steve Peoples of the Associated Press reported yesterday that White House officials and other Washington, D.C., leaders say there is no affordability problem in the country, Trump is popular, and the way to win in 2026 is to stick with him, not everyone is so sure, especially after the party’s big losses earlier this month in elections across the country.
On Monday, November 11, Fox News Channel personality Laura Ingraham pushed Trump on issues that have cost him support. Although consumers have expressed concern over rising prices, Trump insisted prices are “way down.” Ingraham asked: “Are you saying voters are misperceiving how they feel?” She took on the administration’s recent call to address housing costs by issuing 50-year mortgages, noting that the proposal “has enraged your MAGA friends,” who recognize that such a mortgage would benefit banks over buyers and nearly double the time it would take for Americans to own a home.
“Don’t forget, MAGA was my idea,” Trump defended himself. “MAGA was nobody else’s idea. I know what MAGA wants better than anybody else, and MAGA wants to see our country thrive.”
Yesterday Trump defended right-wing podcaster Tucker Carlson, who has been under fire for his interview platforming white nationalist Nick Fuentes. Fuentes traffics in racism and sexism and has openly admired Hitler, insisting that many of the Republicans currently in office are too moderate. When the head of the Heritage Foundation, once thought of as the intellectual heart of the modern Republican Party, supported Carlson, at least six people resigned from the foundation, expressing dismay at the direction it was taking.
Today Representative Jared Golden (D-ME) announced that a bipartisan bill to repeal Trump’s executive order stripping the union rights from federal workers now has enough votes on a discharge petition to bring it before the House. Golden and Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) introduced the bill in April, but Johnson refused to bring it up. In June, Golden launched a discharge petition to force it to the floor.
Democrats and three Republicans signed the petition, but it was still two votes short of adoption. Today, Republican lawmakers Nick LaLota and Mike Lawler of New York signed it, bringing the number of signatures on the petition to 218. Enough Republican members have joined with the Democrats to override Johnson and challenge Trump’s executive order.
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Notes:
https://people.com/donald-trump-snaps-quiet-piggy-at-female-reporter-who-asks-about-epstein-11851131
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/11/12/congress/house-epstein-vote-gop-defections-00649624
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/16/indiana-republican-trump-redistricting-swatted-00654098
https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/11/media/laura-ingraham-trump-fox-news-interview-maga
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/16/us/politics/trump-tucker-carlson-nick-fuentes.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/17/heritage-resigns-robert-george-tucker-00654143
https://clerk.house.gov/DischargePetition/2025060406
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November 16, 2025
November 16, 2025
On Thursday, November 13, Michael Schmidt reported in the New York Times the story of the 17-year-old girl the House Ethics Committee found former representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) likely paid to have sex with him. The girl was a homeless high schooler who needed to supplement the money she made from her job at McDonald’s to be able to pay for braces.
Through a “sugar dating” website that connected older men with younger women, she met Florida tax collector Joel Greenberg, who introduced her to Gaetz. Both men allegedly took drugs with her and paid her for sex, allegedly including at a party at the home of a former Republican member of the Florida legislature, Chris Dorworth.
The Justice Department charged Greenberg with sex trafficking a minor and having sex with a minor in exchange for money. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a decade in prison. The Justice Department did not charge Gaetz. In 2022 the girl’s lawyers asked Gaetz and Dorworth about reaching a financial settlement with her. She didn’t sue, but Dorworth sued her, sparking depositions and disclosure of evidence. Dorworth dropped the case. That material has recently been released and made up some of Schmidt’s portrait of the girl.
Schmidt’s story added another window into the world depicted in the more than 20,000 documents the House Oversight Committee dropped from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein the day before. Those emails show a network of elite people—mostly but not exclusively men—from politics, business, academia, foreign leadership, and entertainment who continued to seek chummy access to the wealthy Epstein, the information he retailed, and his contacts despite his 2008 guilty plea for soliciting prostitution from a minor.
When accusations against Epstein resurfaced in 2018, along with public outrage over the sweetheart deal he received in 2008 from former U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta—who in 2018 was secretary of labor in Trump’s first administration—Trump ally Stephen Bannon worked together to combat the story. As Jason Wilson of The Guardian notes, Epstein and Bannon treated the crisis as a publicity problem to fix as they pushed Bannon’s right-wing agenda and supported Trump.
As David Smith of The Guardian put it, Epstein’s in-box painted a picture of “a world where immense wealth, privileged access and proximity to power can insulate individuals from accountability and consequences. For those inside the circle, the rules of the outside world do not apply.”
On Tuesday, November 4, Elizabeth Dwoskin of the Washington Post described the ideology behind this world. She profiled Chris Buskirk of the Rockbridge Network, a secretive organization funded by tech leaders to create a network that will permit the MAGA movement to outlive Trump. Dwoskin wrote that political strategists credit the Rockbridge Network with pushing J.D. Vance—one of the network’s members—into the vice presidency.
Dwoskin explains that Buskirk embraces a theory that says “a select group of elites are exactly the right people to move the country forward.” Such an “aristocracy”—as he described his vision to Dwoskin—drives innovation. It would be “a proper elite that takes care of the country and governs it well so that everyone prospers.” When he’s not working in politics, Buskirk is, according to Dwoskin, pushing “unrestrained capitalism into American life.” The government should support the country’s innovators, network members say.
We have heard this ideology before.
In 1858, in a period in which a few fabulously wealthy elite enslavers in the American South were trying to take over the government and create their own oligarchy, South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond explained to his colleagues that “democracy” meant only that voters got to choose which set of leaders ruled them. Society worked best, he said, when it was run by natural leaders: the wealthy, educated, well-connected men who made up the South’s planter class.
Hammond explained that society was naturally made up of a great mass of workers, rather dull people, but happy and loyal, whom he called “mudsills” after the timbers driven into the ground to support elegant homes above. These mudsills supported “that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement,” one that modeled itself on the British aristocracy. The mudsills needed the guidance of their betters to produce goods that would create capital, Hammond said. That capital would be wasted if it stayed among the mudsills; it needed to move upward, where better men would use it to move society forward.
Hammond’s ideology gave us the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, in which the Supreme Court found that Black Americans “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.”
In 1889, during the Gilded Age, industrialist Andrew Carnegie embraced a similar idea when he explained that the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few was not only inevitable in an industrial system, but was beneficial. The wealthy were stewards of society’s money, administering it for the common good by funding libraries, schools, and so on, to uplift everyone, rather than permitting individual workers to squander it in frivolity. It was imperative, Carnegie thought, for the government to protect big business for the benefit of the country as a whole.
Carnegie’s ideology gave us the 1905 Lochner v. New York Supreme Court decision declaring that states could not require employers to limit workers’ hours in a bakery to 10 hours a day or 60 hours a week. The court reasoned that there was no need of such a law for workers’ welfare or safety because “there is no danger to the employ[ee] in a first-class bakery.” The court concluded that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution protected “freedom of contract”: the right of employers to contract with laborers at any price and for any hours the workers could be induced to accept.
In 1929, after the Great Crash tore the bottom out of the economy, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon did not blame the systemic inequality his policies had built into the economy. He blamed lazy Americans and the government that had served greedy constituencies. He told President Herbert Hoover not to interfere to help the country.
“Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” he told Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”
Mellon’s ideology gave us “Hoovervilles”—shantytowns built from packing boxes and other salvaged materials—and the Great Depression.
Today, an ideology of “aristocracy” justifies the fabulous wealth and control of government by an elite that increasingly operates in private spaces that are hard for the law to reach, while increasingly using the power of the state against those it considers morally inferior.
Yesterday Arian Campo-Flores of the Wall Street Journal reported that the net worth of the top 0.1% of households in the U.S. reached $23.3 trillion this year, while the bottom 50% hold $4.2 trillion. Campo-Flores outlined a world in which the “ultrarich” are living in luxury and increasingly sealed off from everyday people. “They don’t wait in lines. They don’t jostle with airport crowds or idle unnecessarily in traffic,” Campo-Flores writes. “Instead, an ecosystem of exclusive restaurants, clubs, resorts and other service providers delivers them customized and exquisite experiences as fast as possible. The spaces they inhabit are often private, carefully curated and populated by like-minded and similarly well-heeled peers.”
On the other end of the spectrum is the Trump administration’s crusade against not just undocumented immigrants but also against legal immigrants and darker-skinned Americans in general.
But using the power of the state against those outside the “aristocracy” is more widespread than attacks on Brown Americans. Ellen Barry and Jason DeParle reported on October 29 in the New York Times that the future of Trump’s policy for criminalizing unhoused people is taking shape in Utah. On the outskirts of Salt Lake City, the state is building a facility where it will commit 1,300 inmates. Refocusing homeless initiatives from providing housing toward rehabilitation and moral development, the involuntary confinement will end a harmful “culture of permissiveness” and guide homeless people “towards human thriving” through social and addiction services, according to political appointee Randy Shumway, who chairs the state’s Homeless Services Board and whose business promotes software used in case management for unhoused people.
Critics note that funds are not currently available for those seeking such services, and with the Republicans’ deep cuts to Medicaid it’s hard to see where more funding will come from, although at least some of it is being redirected from currently-operating housing programs.
On November 6 the Supreme Court reinstated a Trump policy requiring all new passports to reflect a person’s biological sex at birth. As Steve Vladeck explained in One First, from 1992 to 2010 the State Department had allowed people who had undergone surgical reassignment to change their identification on their passports; from 2010 to 2025 they could submit a certificate from a doctor saying they had undergone clinical treatment for gender transition.
When he took office on January 20, Trump issued an executive order overturning this 33-year policy, saying “[i]t is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” which it defined as “an individual’s immutable biological classification” as assigned “at conception.” Transgender identity, the order said, is “false” and “corrosive” to the country. Plaintiffs led by Ashton Orr sued, and on April 18 U.S. District Judge Julia E. Kobick granted a motion to make the case a class action. She also granted a stay, finding that the plaintiffs would likely win on the merits of their claim that the new policy violates their right to equal protection under the Fifth Amendment. The administration went to the Supreme Court for emergency relief.
In Trump v. Orr the right-wing justices on the Supreme Court reinstated Trump’s policy, writing: “Displaying passport holders’ sex at birth no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth—in both cases, the Government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment.” In addition to using a passport to travel, transgender Americans who live in states that don’t recognize their transition often use their passports as identification in the U.S. On Friday the State Department updated its website, committing to the new policy that effectively erases those people and forces them to conform to the MAGA ideology.
In 1858, the year after the Dred Scott decision, rising politician Abraham Lincoln explained to an audience in Chicago what a system that set some people above others meant. Arguments that those deemed “inferior” “are to be treated with as much allowance as they are capable of enjoying; that as much is to be done for them as their condition will allow…are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world,” he said. “[T]hey always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden…. [This] argument…is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it.”
“Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent….”
In Lincoln’s day, and in the Gilded Age, and in the 1930s, Americans pushed back against those trying to establish an aristocracy in the United States. That project appears to be gaining speed as well in today’s America, where the rich and powerful are increasingly operating in cryptocurrencies and avoiding accountability, but where a majority of people would prefer to live in a world where a child does not have to sell her body to older men in order to save enough money to get braces on her teeth.
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Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/11/04/chris-buskirk-maga-vance-post-trump/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/15/steve-bannon-jeffrey-epstein-text-messages-publicity
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/dred-scott-v-sandford
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep198/usrep198045/usrep198045.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/us/politics/utah-trump-homeless-campus.html
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25a319_i4dj.pdf
https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-02090.pdf
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.280559/gov.uscourts.mad.280559.74.0_1.pdf
One First189. The Breezy Inequity of Trump v. OrrWelcome back to “One First,” a (more-than) weekly newsletter that aims to make the U.S. Supreme Court more accessible to lawyers and non-lawyers alike. I’m grateful to all of you for your continued support, and I hope that you’ll consider sharing some of what we’re doing with your networks…Read more10 days ago · 297 likes · 108 comments · Steve Vladeckhttps://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/speech-at-chicago-illinois/
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/passports/passport-help/sex-marker.html
Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Cabinet and the Presidency, 1920–1933 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), pp. 30–31.
James Henry Hammond, “Speech on the Admission of Kansas . . . March 4, 1858,” in Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond (New York: John F. Trow, 1866), pp. 301–357.
Andrew Carnegie, The Gospel of Wealth and Other Timely Essays (New York: The Century Co., 1901), pp. 1–44.
Bluesky:
November 15, 2025
November 15, 2025
A friend has asked for a picture tonight, and I’m happy to oblige. It’s been quite a week.
This one is a little different, but I loved how crisp the colors were in the autumn light.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
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