Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 35
May 21, 2025
May 20, 2025
Today was a rough day for administration officials on Capitol Hill as Senate committees held hearings on the 2026 budget requests for the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of State. The Senate Finance Committee also held a hearing for Trump’s nominee to be Commissioner of Internal Revenue, former Missouri representative William “Billy” Long. Democrats came prepared and demanded answers that the department secretaries and nominee were either unable or unwilling to give.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee about the Department of Homeland Security's budget for fiscal year 2026. When Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH) asked her to define “habeas corpus,” Noem’s response indicated she has no understanding of the nation’s fundamental law.
“Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country,” Noem said. Hassan corrected her: “Habeas corpus is the legal principle that requires that the government provide a public reason for detaining and imprisoning people. If not for that protection, the government could simply arrest people, including American citizens, and hold them indefinitely for no reason. Habeas corpus is the foundational right that separates free societies like America from police states like North Korea.”
Noem’s habit in these hearings is simply to ignore questions and to attack, and she tried that with Hassan, suggesting that the president has the right to suspend habeas corpus if circumstances require it. Her position echoes that of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, with whom she appears to be working to render immigrants to prisons in third countries, but it is dead wrong. The Constitution permits Congress to suspend habeas corpus; not the president.
While Republicans were generally supportive of the Republican officials in the hearings, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) used his time to beg Noem for help for Missouri. The state has suffered a number of natural disasters, including a deadly tornado last Friday, but the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has not shown up.
“The state has pending three requests for major disaster declarations from earlier storms,” Hawley told Noem. “[W]e’ve lost almost 20 people now in major storms just in the last two months in Missouri.” The Department of Homeland Security oversees FEMA, and Hawley asked Noem to expedite the requests and get them in front of Trump. “We are desperate for… assistance in Missouri,” he said.
When Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) asked Noem how she planned to meet the needs of American people when the administration is cutting 20% of FEMA employees and the agency has lost most of its leadership, Noem talked over him and said the problem was that the Biden administration had failed the American people.
Over in the Appropriations Subcommittee on Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies, things didn’t go much better.
Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. exploded when Senator Patti Murray (D-WA) asked him whose decision it was to withhold childcare and development block grant funding. Kennedy immediately pivoted to former president Biden’s 2021 budget. When she tried to get him back on track, he continued to talk over her, accusing her of “presiding over the destruction of the health of the American people” and of not doing her job. Murray repeatedly tried to recall him to appropriate behavior, finally appealing to the Republican chair of the committee, who asked Kennedy to stop.
When Murray repeated her question, he simply said the decision was made “by my department.” While he refused to take responsibility for the cuts himself, Murray did get him to admit that the department has blocked billions of dollars in federal child care funding.
Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) spelled out for Kennedy his concern about cuts to research funding for the neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), sometimes called Lou Gehrig’s disease. “On April 1, ten laboratory heads at National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes received their layoff notices,” he said. “They were all PhDs and senior investigators. They're not administrators, whatever that might be. They were running intramural labs at NIH. If you have your way, they'll all be gone on June 2nd. Science magazine reported 25 of 320 physician researchers at NIH's Internal Clinical Center are leaving, and the number of patients treated in the hospital has been reduced by 30%. Three grants involving ALS and dementia work at Northwestern University [in] Illinois have been paused…. Just last week, an ALS researcher at Harvard had his grant cut.” Durbin asked: “How can we possibly…give hope to people across the country who are suffering from so many diseases when our government is cutting back on that research?”
Kennedy replied: “I do not know about any cuts to ALS research.” When Durbin responded, “I just read them to you,” Kennedy reiterated that he didn’t “know about them until you told…me about them at this moment.”
Brenda Goodman of CNN noted that when Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) asked Kennedy about ending the childhood lead poisoning prevention program of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Kennedy assured Reed that “[w]e are continuing to fund the program.” Goodman notes that CNN reported in April that officials in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, had asked the CDC for help addressing lead hazards in Milwaukee Public Schools after the agency’s lead experts were fired. The CDC refused, possibly because Kennedy has said lead poisoning prevention would be moving from the CDC to his new “Administration for a Healthy America.”
Kennedy told Reed the federal government has “a team in Milwaukee, and we’re giving laboratory support to that, to the analytics in Milwaukee, and we’re working with the health department in Milwaukee.”
Officials in Milwaukee said that was untrue. “The City of Milwaukee Health Department is not receiving any federal epidemiological or analytical support related to the MPS lead hazard crisis. Our formal Epi Aid request was denied by the CDC,” spokesperson for the City of Milwaukee Health Department Caroline Reinwald told CNN. Earlier this month, Milwaukee’s health commissioner expressed dismay that the CDC’s entire team working on childhood lead exposure had been laid off. “These are the best and brightest minds in these areas around lead poisoning, and now they’re gone,” he said.
At the end of today’s hearing, Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) corrected the record, saying to Kennedy: “There are no staff on the ground deployed to Milwaukee to address the lead exposure of children in schools, and there are no staff left in that office at CDC, because they have all been fired.”
Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee took Secretary of State Marco Rubio to task for abandoning the principles they believed he held when they voted to confirm him.
The administration rendered Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen’s constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the notorious CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador through what the administration said was “administrative error,” and yet officials are refusing to bring him back despite court orders to do so. Van Hollen reminded Rubio that they had served together in Congress for 15 years and that while they didn’t always agree, “I believe we shared some common values: a belief in defending democracy and human rights abroad and honoring the Constitution at home. That’s why I voted to confirm you. I believed you would stand up for those principles. You haven’t. You’ve done the opposite.”
Senator Jacky Rosen (D-NV) spoke to him “as a mother, a senator, and a fellow human being,” saying, “I'm not even mad anymore about your complicity in this administration's destruction of U.S. global leadership. I'm simply disappointed. And I wonder if you're proud of yourself in this moment when you go home to your family?" She noted how he appeared to have abandoned all his past principles, and said she no longer recognized him.
When Van Hollen told Rubio he regretted voting to confirm him as secretary of state, Rubio retorted: “Your regret for voting for me confirms I’m doing a good job.”
Billy Long had his own problems. In an opening statement, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) pointed out that Long was neither “an independent tax professional or somebody with extensive management experience.” He was simply a fierce Trump loyalist who would help Trump “use the IRS as a cudgel to beat his adversaries into submission.” Wyden also noted serious accusations against Long’s involvement with fraudulent tax schemes.
In his questioning, Wyden asked, “Did you promise any tax promoter you would help them if you got confirmed?” Long said no. Wyden followed up, asking if he had met with anyone when he was in Washington, D.C., for the inauguration and promised to help them. Long again said no, that he had been in his room for “about 50 hours” with food poisoning.
Wyden noted that staff investigators had tapes of a tax promoter saying he had met with Long at the inauguration and that Long had promised him favorable treatment. They also have another tape of a chief financial officer who had donated to Long after he was nominated for the IRS post, also saying he expected favorable treatment. Senators Wyden, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts are currently investigating these tapes.
Warren took up Trump’s misuse of the IRS to hurt his opponents. Trump has threatened to revoke Harvard University’s tax-exempt status, although federal law expressly prohibits any official from using the IRS to punish any individual taxpayers. Warren tried to get Long to say it would be illegal for the president to direct the IRS to revoke a taxpayer’s nonprofit status, but he refused to. Warren concluded: “[T]he fact that you want to sit there and dance around about this tells me that you shouldn't be within 1,000 miles of the directorship of the IRS.”
The House was also a troubled place today, as Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) used a hearing of the House Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation Subcommittee, which she chairs, to accuse her ex-fiancé and other men of sexual abuse. She showed what she claimed were naked photos of herself and other women, taken without their consent. These accusations echo those she made in a speech in the House on February 10th. The men deny the allegations, and one is suing her for defamation. She is taking the position that her attacks on them in Congress are legally protected by the Constitution’s speech and debate clause.
If Republican lawmakers didn’t seem up to their jobs today, neither did the president. He announced a “Golden Dome” missile shield defense system—a U.S. version of Israel’s “Iron Dome”—that he claims will be operational in 3 years and cost $175 billion. Experts say it is not yet possible to construct such a defense system for intercontinental ballistic missiles and that such a project could cost as much as $542 billion.
When a reporter asked Trump about the cost, Trump claimed “we can afford to do it…we took in $5.1 trillion in the last four days in the Middle East,” a wildly made-up number. Such a system would likely benefit at least one person: it would depend on thousands of satellites, a requirement that seems likely to benefit billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Administration officials today seemed to illustrate their utter disregard for the work their jobs require and their refusal to govern for Americans. Instead, they seem to see their offices as ways to get access to large amounts of money and power they can use to impose their will on the country.
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Notes:
no.gov/committees/hearings_meetings.htm
https://www.cnn.com/2025u/05/20/health/kennedy-lead-contamination-milwaukee
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-noem-fumbles-definition-of-habeas-corpus
https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/05202025_wyden_statement.pdf
https://www.levernews.com/ceo-says-trumps-irs-pick-promised-big-benefits/
https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/letters_to_seven_companies_rebillylong.pdf
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/02/nx-s1-5384897/trump-harvard-tax-irs-antisemitism
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/20/nx-s1-5405038/trump-golden-dome-missile-defense
https://www.404media.co/scientists-explain-why-trumps-175-billion-golden-dome-is-a-fantasy/
Public NoticeDonald Trump and the power of the big (fake) numberRead morea day ago · 343 likes · 16 comments · Paul WaldmanX:
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1924854771716129024
Bluesky:
atrupar.com/post/3lpmrtlv5y22y
murray.senate.gov/post/3lpn3iwj6ec2o
atrupar.com/post/3lpmrcjdvq22y
thebulwark.com/post/3lpmjn5yxcs2p
atrupar.com/post/3lpml3iyank2i
May 20, 2025
May 19, 2025
The House Rules Committee will take up the Republicans’ omnibus bill this week. Illustrating their confidence that the American people support this 1,116-page measure enacting much of MAGA’s wish list, the committee has set its meeting for Wednesday, May 21, 2025…at 1:00 in the morning (not a typo). The Republicans are trying to advance Trump’s entire agenda—from massive logging on public lands to slashing Medicaid—in one giant bill under a process known as “budget reconciliation,” which means it cannot be filibustered in the Senate. That means it needs only Republican votes to pass.
But even Republicans are deeply divided over the measure. While far-right Republicans insist cuts to the social safety net are not deep enough because of the massive deficits the measure’s tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations will create, other Republicans recognize that Medicaid cuts are hugely unpopular: according to a KFF poll released May 1, more than 75% of Americans oppose such cuts.
Catie Edmondson of the New York Times counts 12 swing-state Republicans who don’t want drastic Medicaid cuts, and 31 hardliners who do. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) can afford to lose only three Republican votes on the measure. Nicole Lafond of Talking Points Memo reported today that Trump will go to Capitol Hill tomorrow to talk Republicans into voting for the measure.
Right on cue, the administration served up another issue to draw attention. Trump lawyer Alina Habba, who is now serving as the interim U.S. attorney for New Jersey, announced that Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) will be charged with assaulting, resisting, and impeding law enforcement officers. On May 19, McIver was one of three Democratic representatives from New Jersey who, along with Newark’s Democratic mayor Ras Baraka, went to the Delaney Hall Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Newark, New Jersey, for an oversight visit. Such visits are permitted by law as part of a congress member’s oversight responsibility.
As a mayor, Baraka was not covered by the law permitting congressional oversight. He waited outside the facility’s gates in a public area. Masked agents tried to arrest him there, and as Perry Stein, Jeremy Roebuck, and Liz Goodwin of the Washington Post reported, video released by the Department of Homeland Security showed McIver rushing after the agents and shouting to protesters outside to “surround the mayor.” The video shows a crowd of people jostling, and McIver’s elbows possibly making contact with a masked officer in the crush of the crowd, but no one breaks stride. McIver says she was the one assaulted by ICE officers. In a statement about charging McIver, Habba said “it is my Constitutional obligation to ensure that our federal law enforcement is protected when executing their duties.”
Charging a congressional representative after an event in which no one was injured is a dramatic move indeed, but the Washington Post reporters noted that: “[a]s of 10 p.m., no charging documents were posted in federal court, and a spokesperson for McIver’s legal team said neither she nor her lawyers had seen any charging documents.”
In a statement, McIver said she and her colleagues “were fulfilling our lawful oversight responsibilities, as members of Congress have done many times before, and our visit should have been peaceful and short. Instead, ICE agents created an unnecessary and unsafe confrontation when they chose to arrest Mayor Baraka. The charges against me are purely political—they mischaracterize and distort my actions, and are meant to criminalize and deter legislative oversight…. I look forward to the truth being laid out clearly in court.”
Congressional Democrats are condemning this attack on their colleague. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Whip Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar of California, Vice Chair Ted Lieu of California, and Assistant Leader Joe Neguse of Colorado issued a statement saying, “The criminal charge against Congresswoman McIver is extreme, morally bankrupt and lacks any basis in law or fact.” Habba’s statement “is a blatant attempt by the Trump administration to intimidate Congress and interfere with our ability to serve as a check and balance on an out-of-control executive branch. House Democrats will not be intimidated by the Trump administration. Not today. Not ever.”
And they pushed back, warning: “Everyone responsible for this illegitimate abuse of power is going to be held accountable for their actions.”
At the same time, the Department of Justice announced it was dropping all charges against Baraka stemming from the attempt to examine the ICE facility. Ten days ago, Habba broke the Department of Justice rule that it would not comment on ongoing investigations by posting that Baraka had “committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey this afternoon. He has willingly chosen to disregard the law. That will not stand in this state. He has been taken into custody. NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.”
Except, apparently, those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Alan Feuer, Devlin Barrett, and Glenn Thrush of the New York Times reported today that the Department of Justice is considering settling a wrongful death lawsuit with the family of Ashli Babbitt, whom a law enforcement officer shot and killed as she tried to break into the Speaker’s Lobby outside the House floor. The amount they are considering, the journalists report, is $5 million.
Reports that Walmart will raise prices because of the tariffs have Trump officials panicking. Walmart is the largest retailer in the United States, with a 2023 retail revenue of $534 billion. Higher prices there will hurt poorer Americans, particularly those in rural areas, the demographic most likely to have supported Trump in the past.
This, just as cuts to funding for food programs by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in March—programs started during Trump’s first term—have slashed the amount of food available to food banks. A USDA spokesperson said in a statement: “There is no need for new programs, but perhaps more efficient and effective use of current.”
So Republicans today continued their campaign to pressure Walmart into, as Trump put it “eating” the tariff costs. On CNBC today, Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) suggested that Walmart leaders “need to think hard” about raising prices. “I think they're going to be very careful about how they do this. I know they've received some criticism from the president,” he said, adding: “They should know the president has been working very hard with China to make sure we get this thing addressed as quickly as possible.”
Nora Eckert and David Shepardson of Reuters reported that Subaru of America said today it will also be raising prices by between $750 and $2,055 on several models because of “current market conditions.” Executives recently told investors that the tariffs are expected to amount to $5 billion. Eckert and Shepardson reported that Ford raised prices on three models produced in Mexico by as much as $2,000.
Finally, today—because I actually planned to take tonight off, and so am not prepared to cover some very important legal developments and am putting them off until tomorrow so I get them right—Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman, Adam Rasgon, and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported the backstory to the Qatari offer to give a 747 to Trump.
The planes serving as Air Force One are over 30 years old, and Boeing has a contract to build two new jets by 2024, a deadline far in the rear view with no new planes in sight. Apparently, Trump was angling for a new plane and put officials up to buying one. They identified eight options, one of which was the Qatari plane, which Qatar had been trying to sell for at least five years in part because of the enormous cost of operating such a plane. Qatar sent the jet to Florida at a cost the reporters estimate to be as much as $1 million on February 15 for Trump to see, and he loved it.
At that point, discussions turned from purchasing the plane to accepting it as a gift, although it was apparently not the Qataris who changed the terms—they were still expecting to sell it to the United States. A Qatari government official told the New York Times reporters that no decision had yet been made about a transfer rather than a sale. And Pentagon officials estimate that getting the plane repaired and ready for a president would cost at least $1 billion.
And yet, administration officials lined up to say that a $400 million gift from a foreign government to a U.S. president was just fine, despite its explicit prohibition in the Constitution. On Sunday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Qatar giving a plane to Trump was like France giving the Statue of Liberty to the U.S., or England giving the country the Resolute Desk.
These comparisons are not only wrong, but an offensive skewing of the real history of those gifts, which were intended to reinforce democracy, freedom, and the international cooperation of nations that value those principles.
It was the people of France who raised the money to send the Statue of Liberty, whose official name is “Liberty Enlightening the World,” to the United States to honor political democracy and freedom at the nation’s 100th anniversary. The people of the United States, in turn, raised the money for the statue’s pedestal. There was never any question about it being a personal gift to President Grover Cleveland. He would have refused it if such a thing were suggested, and Congress would have impeached him if he had not.
If the story of the Statue of Liberty is the story of the universal principles of democracy and freedom, the story of the Resolute Desk is one of diplomacy. After a famous British expedition to discover the Northwest Passage disappeared in the 1850s, a rescue expedition of five ships, including the HMS Resolute, set sail to find survivors. The Resolute became trapped in Arctic ice in April 1854 and her captain and crew abandoned the ship. When the ice thawed, the Resolute broke free and drifted south, where an American whaling ship found it in 1855. The captain, James Buddington, claimed it under the right of salvage.
At the time, tensions between the U.S. and England were high, and Congress decided to purchase the Resolute from Buddington, fix it up, and send it back to England as a gesture of goodwill and friendship from the American people. After the work was done, a U.S. naval officer and crew sailed the Resolute to England, where Queen Victoria and Prince Albert accepted it on behalf of all of Great Britain. The Royal Navy used the Resolute as a supply vessel for the next 23 years.
When the ship was decommissioned in 1879, the British government launched a public competition to design a piece of furniture that could be made of its timbers to give back to the United States. The winning design was a desk, and it arrived in the United States as a gift for President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880, bearing a plaque that recounted the history of the Resolute.
The plaque noted: “The ship was purchased, fitted out and sent to England, as a gift to Her Majesty Queen Victoria by the President and People of the United States, as a token of goodwill & friendship. This table was made from her timbers when she was broken up, and is presented by the Queen of Great Britain & Ireland, to the President of the United States, as a memorial of the courtesy and loving kindness which dictated the offer of the gift of the ‘Resolute'."
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Notes:
https://capitaloneshopping.com/research/largest-retailers/
https://rules.house.gov/media/announcement/meeting-announcement-may-21-2025
https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/walmart-raise-prices-trump-tariffs-rcna207351
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/05/19/dc-food-bank-cuts/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/us/politics/ashli-babbitt-jan-6-settlement-trump.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/05/19/rep-lamonica-mciver-charged-doj-ice/
https://www.axios.com/2025/05/20/lamonica-mciver-justice-department-trump-jeffries
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/us/politics/trump-air-force-one-qatar-jet.html
https://www.nps.gov/museum/exhibits/statue_liberty/index.html
https://www.whitehousehistory.org/photos/treasures-of-the-white-house-resolute-desk
https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/budget-reconciliation-simplified/
Bluesky:
atrupar.com/post/3lpjrvqvkvj2c
annabower.bsky.social/post/3lpkwgk47ws2i
thetnholler.bsky.social/post/3lorcjzip422o
replamonica.bsky.social/post/3lpks65f6ck2q
May 19, 2025
May 18, 2025
Tonight, late on a Sunday night, the House Budget Committee passed what Republicans are calling their “Big, Beautiful Bill” to enact Trump’s agenda although it had failed on Friday when far-right Republicans voted against it, complaining it did not make deep enough cuts to social programs.
The vote tonight was a strict party line vote, with 16 Democrats voting against the measure, 17 Republicans voting for it, and 4 far right Republicans voting “present.” House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said there would be “minor modifications” to the measure; Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) wrote on X that those changes include new work requirements for Medicaid and cuts to green energy subsidies.
And so the bill moves forward.
In The Bulwark today, Jonathan Cohn noted that Republicans are in a tearing hurry to push that Big, Beautiful Bill through Congress before most of us can get a handle on what’s in it. Just a week ago, Cohn notes, there was still no specific language in the measure. Republican leaders didn’t release the piece of the massive bill that would cut Medicaid until last Sunday night and then announced the Committee on Energy and Commerce would take it up not even a full two days later, on Tuesday, before the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office could produce a detailed analysis of the cost of the proposals. The committee markup happened in a 26-hour marathon in which the parts about Medicaid happened in the middle of the night. And now, the bill moves forward in an unusual meeting late on a Sunday night.
Cohn recalls that in 2009, when the Democrats were pushing the Affordable Care Act, more popularly known as Obamacare, that measure had months of public debate before it went to the Committee on Energy and Commerce. That committee held eight separate hearings about healthcare reform, and it was just one of three committees working on the issue. The ACA markup took a full two weeks.
Cohn explains that Medicaid cuts are extremely unpopular, and the Republicans hope to jam those cuts through by claiming they are cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse” without leaving enough time for scrutiny. Cohn points out that if they are truly interested in savings, they could turn instead to the privatized part of Medicare, Medicare Advantage The Congressional Budget Office estimates that cutting overpayments to Medicare Advantage when private insurers “upcode” care to place patients in a higher risk bracket, could save more than $1 trillion over the next decade.
Instead of saving money, the Big, Beautiful Bill actually blows the budget deficit wide open by extending the 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that those extensions would cost at least $4.6 trillion over the next ten years. And while the tax cuts would go into effect immediately, the cuts to Medicaid are currently scheduled not to hit until 2029, enabling the Republicans to avoid voter fury over them in the midterms and the 2028 election.
The prospect of that debt explosion led Moody’s on Friday to downgrade U.S. credit for the first time since 1917, following Fitch, which downgraded the U.S. rating in 2023, and Standard & Poor’s, which did so back in 2011. “If the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is extended, which is our base case,” Moody’s explained, “it will add around $4 trillion to the federal fiscal primary (excluding interest payments) deficit over the next decade. As a result, we expect federal deficits to widen, reaching nearly 9% of GDP by 2035, up from 6.4% in 2024, driven mainly by increased interest payments on debt, rising entitlement spending and relatively low revenue generation.”
On the Sunday talk shows this morning, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent dismissed the downgrade, saying it reflected conditions already in the market (although Moody’s explicitly said it was concerned about the potential passage of the Republicans’ Big, Beautiful Bill). House speaker Mike Johnson said that the credit downgrade just proved the need for the measure with its “historic spending cuts” to pass (although Moody’s named that bill as its reason for the downgrade).
The continuing Republican insistence that spending is out of control does not reflect reality. In fact, discretionary spending has fallen more than 40% in the past 50 years as a percentage of gross domestic product, from 11% to 6.3%. What has driven rising deficits are the George W. Bush and Donald Trump tax cuts, which had added $8 trillion and $1.7 trillion, respectively, to the debt by the end of the 2023 fiscal year.
But rather than permit those tax cuts to expire— or even to roll them back— the Republicans continue to insist Americans are overtaxed. In fact, the U.S. is far below the average of the 37 other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an intergovernmental forum of democracies with market economies, in its tax levies. According to a report by the Center for American Progress in 2023, if the U.S. taxed at the average OECD level, over ten years it would have an additional $26 trillion in revenue. If the U.S. taxed at the average of European Union nations, it would have an additional $36 trillion.
But instead of considering taxes to address the deficit, in the 2024 campaign, Trump insisted that foreign countries would pay for further tax cuts through tariffs, no matter how often economists said that tariffs are passed on to consumers.
In October 2024, when editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News John Micklethwait corrected Trump’s misunderstanding of the way tariffs work in an interview at the Economic Club of Chicago, Trump replied: “It must be hard for you to, you know, spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you're totally wrong.” Referring to analysis that his plans would explode the national debt, including analysis by the Wall Street Journal—hardly a left-wing outlet, as Mickelthwait pointed out—Trump replied: “What does the Wall Street Journal know?... They’ve been wrong about everything. So have you, by the way. You’ve been wrong about everything…. You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff.”
Walmart’s suggestion that it will have to raise prices because of tariffs is forcing the administration to try to manage reality. “We’re wired for everyday low prices, but the magnitude of these increases is more than any retailer can absorb,” Walmart's chief financial officer John David Rainey during an interview with CNBC on Thursday. Rainey predicted higher prices by June.
In response Trump appeared to agree that tariffs are paid by consumers, posting that Walmart should “‘EAT THE TARIFFS,’ and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!” Today, Bessent reassured Americans that he had spoken to the CEO of Walmart, Doug McMillon, who had agreed that Walmart would, in fact, eat some of the tariffs.
So with the current Big, Beautiful Bill, we are looking at a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary Americans to those at the top of American society. The Democratic Women’s Caucus has dubbed the measure the “Big Bad Billionaire Bill.”
Lest there be any confusion about who will benefit from this Big, Beautiful Bill, one of the many pieces tucked into it is a prohibition on any state laws to regulate artificial intelligence for the next ten years.
Despite its gargantuan energy demands, harm to the environment, and threats to privacy, the administration is pushing AI hard, and the country’s leading AI entrepreneurs, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Ruth Porat of Google’s parent company Alphabet, and Andy Jassy of Amazon all traveled with Trump to Saudi Arabia last week. The Saudis are looking to diversify their oil-dependent economy and are now the world’s largest investors in artificial intelligence.
Speaker Johnson hopes to pass the bill through the House of Representatives by this Friday, before Memorial Day weekend.
In other news today, the office of former president Joe Biden announced he is battling an aggressive form of prostate cancer. As vice president and president, Biden was a fierce advocate for cancer research, with the goal of reducing the death rate from cancer by at least 50 percent by 2047, preventing more than 4 million deaths from cancer, and improving the experience of individuals and families living with and surviving cancer.
And in international news, Romanian voters today rejected a far-right nationalist who deliberately styled his behavior after Trump and whose victory, until recently, was being treated as a foregone conclusion. Instead, voters elected the centrist mayor of Bucharest, Nicușor Dan. Even before the election, Dan’s opponent insisted the election was illegitimate, claimed that he was the new leader, and called for his supporters to protest in favor of his election. But in the end, Dan’s 8-point victory was too much to overcome and he conceded.
“This is your victory,” Dan told his supporters. “It’s the victory of thousands and thousands of people who campaigned [and] believed that Romania can change in the correct direction.”
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Notes:
The BulwarkHow to Take Medicaid from Millions of Americans, in Less Than 72 HoursTHE REPUBLICAN EFFORT TO slash Medicaid stalled on Friday, when legislation cutting more than $625 billion from the program failed to get through a key House committee…Read morea day ago · 728 likes · 109 comments · Jonathan Cohnhttps://www.crfb.org/blogs/unpaid-tax-cuts-would-shrink-incomes-cbo-finds
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, May 17, 2025, 10:27 a.m.
https://time.com/7285637/walmart-raising-prices-us-tariffs-consumer-impact/
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/17/trump-tells-walmart-to-eat-the-tariffs.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/14/republican-budget-bill-ai-laws
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/us/politics/trump-saudi-business-lunch-musk-altman.html
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/us-economy-trump-bush-tax-cuts-deficit-rcna122322
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/johnson-house-gop-track-pass-trump-agenda-bill/story?id=121929563
OMB Historical Table 8.4 — OUTLAYS BY BUDGET ENFORCEMENT ACT CATEGORY AS PERCENTAGES OF GDP: 1962–2028, at https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/information-resources/budget/historical-tables/
https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/projects/cancer-moonshot.html
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/05/18/biden-diagnosed-prostate-cancer/83713295007/
https://www.politico.eu/article/romanian-presidential-election-results-nicusor-dan-george-simion/
https://substack.com/home/post/p-157883387
X:
atrupar/status/1846232232052101269
chiproytx/status/1924296387040080036
Bluesky:
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alfredlund.bsky.social/post/3lpffrltse227
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atrupar.com/post/3lphbcbiuha2c
May 18, 2025
May 17, 2025
May 17, 2025
This weekend there are two major anniversaries for the history of civil rights in the United States. Seventy-one years ago today, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. That landmark decision declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. It overturned the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision handed down 129 years ago tomorrow. On that day, May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court declared that the Fourteenth Amendment allowed segregation within states so long as accommodations were “equal.”
The journey from Plessy to Brown was the story of ordinary people creating change with the tools they had at hand.
Recently, scholars have shown how, after the Plessy decision, Black Americans in the South used state civil law to advance their civil rights. Insisting on their rights in the South’s complicated system of credits and debts, they hammered out a legal identity. Denied justice under criminal law, they sued companies, primarily railroad companies, for denying them equal protection against harassment. And, according to historian Myisha S. Eatmon, they often won these civil suits, even at the hands of all-white juries.
It was on these grounds that Black lawyers won discrimination suits over public schools early in the twentieth century. They relied on the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that allowed “separate” accommodations for Black and white Americans so long as they were “equal.” They would point out how much poorer the conditions in Black schools were than those in white schools, proving those conditions violated the “separate but equal” requirement in the decision condoning racial segregation.
Legal challenges to segregation were only one tool in the workshop of those trying to dismantle the system. After the organizers of the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 caricatured Black Americans, Black educator and suffragist Mary Burnett Talbert reached out to sociologist and writer W.E.B. DuBois to call for a movement to advance equal treatment.
In 1905, thirty-two Black leaders met in Fort Erie, Ontario, and launched the Niagara Movement to call for equal justice before the law and economic opportunities, including the right to an education, equal to those enjoyed by white men. A year later, journalist William English Walling joined the group. Walling was a well-educated descendant of a wealthy enslaving family from Kentucky who had become a social reformer. Another well-educated social reformer, Mary White Ovington, also joined. And so did their friend Henry Moskowitz, a Jewish immigrant from Romania who was well connected in New York Democratic politics.
A race riot in Springfield, Illinois, on August 14 and 15, 1908, sparked a wider organization. The violence broke out after the sheriff transferred two Black prisoners, one accused of murder and another of rape, to a different town out of concern for their safety.
Furious that they had been prevented from vengeance against the accused, a mob of white townspeople looted businesses and burned homes in Springfield’s Black neighborhood. They lynched two Black men and ran most of the Black population out of town. At least eight people died, more than 70 were injured, and at least $3 million of damage in today’s money was done before 3,700 state militia troops quelled the riot.
Walling and his wife visited Springfield days later. He was horrified to find white citizens complaining that their Black neighbors had forgotten “their place.”
Walling reached back to the principles on which the nation was founded. He warned that either the North must revive the spirit of Lincoln—who, after all, was associated with Springfield—and commit to “absolute political and social equality” or the white supremacist violence of the South would spread across the whole nation. “The day these methods become general in the North,” he wrote, “every hope of political democracy will be dead, other weaker races and classes will be persecuted in the North as in the South, public education will undergo an eclipse, and American civilization will await either a rapid degeneration or another profounder and more revolutionary civil war….”
In January 1909, leaders from the Niagara Movement met in the Wallings’ apartment in New York City to create a new civil rights organization. Sixty prominent reformers, Black and white, signed their call, and the next year an interracial group of 300 men and women met to create a permanent organization. After a second meeting in May 1910, they adopted a formal name, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was born, although they settled on the centennial of Lincoln’s birth as their actual beginning.
It was no accident that supporters of the project included muckraking journalists Ray Stannard Baker and Ida B. Wells, as well as Du Bois, for a vibrant Black newspaper culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was central to spreading knowledge of the atrocities committed against Black Americans, especially in the South, and of how to sue over them. In 1910, Du Bois would choose to leave his professorship at Atlanta University to become the NAACP’s director of publicity and research. For the next 14 years, he would edit the organization’s flagship journal The Crisis.
While The Crisis was a newspaper, a literary magazine, and a cultural showcase, its key function reflected the journalistic sensibilities of those like Baker, Wells, and especially Du Bois: it constantly called attention to atrocities, discrimination, and the ways in which the United States was not living up to its stated principles. At a time when violence and suppression were mounting against Black Americans, Wells, Du Bois, and their colleagues relentlessly spread knowledge of what was happening and demanded that officials treat all people equally before the law.
That use of information to rally people to the cause of equality became a hallmark of the NAACP. It took advantage of the skills of women like Rosa Parks, who after 1944 was the secretary of the NAACP’s Montgomery, Alabama, chapter. Parks investigated sexual violence against Black women and compiled statistics about those assaults, making a record of the reality of Black Americans’ lives.
It was NAACP leader Walter Francis White who in 1946 brought the story of World War II veteran Isaac Woodard, blinded by a police officer and his deputy in South Carolina after talking back to a bus driver, to President Harry S. Truman.
Truman had been a racist southern Democrat, but after hearing about Woodard, he convened the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, directly asking its members to find ways to use the federal government to strengthen the civil rights of racial and religious minorities in the country. Truman later said, “When a Mayor and City Marshal can take a…Sergeant off a bus in South Carolina, beat him up and put out…his eyes, and nothing is done about it by the State authorities, something is radically wrong with the system.”
The committee’s final report, written in the wake of a world war against the hierarchical societies of fascism, recommended new federal laws to address police brutality, end lynching, protect voting—including for Indigenous Americans—and promote equal rights, accounting for the internment of Japanese Americans as well as discrimination against Black Americans. It called for “[t]he elimination of segregation, based on race, color, creed, or national origin, from American life” and for a public campaign to explain to white Americans why ending segregation was important.
The NAACP had highlighted that the inequalities in American society were systemic rather than the work of a few bad apples, bearing witness until “the believers in democracy” could no longer remain silent.
Meanwhile, in South Carolina, an all-white jury acquitted the police officers who blinded Woodward. Presiding judge Julius Waties Waring, the son of a Confederate veteran, was disgusted at the jury’s decision and at the crowd that cheered when it heard the verdict. He began to stew on how to challenge racial discrimination legally when white juries at the state level could simply decide to nullify the law.
In 1940, Black NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall had founded the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., in New York City. Six years later, civil rights lawyer Constance Baker Motley joined him. He would go on to become the first Black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. She would become the first Black woman to argue before the Supreme Court and the first Black woman to become a federal judge. They were a powerhouse team.
In 1952, with the support of Judge Waring, Marshall and Motley and their collaborators took a new tack to oppose segregation in public schools. Rather than resting on the idea that poorly funded Black schools were not equal to white schools as Plessy required, they argued outright that racial segregation violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the same argument the Supreme Court had rejected in Plessy. This formula would enable the federal government to restrain white juries at the state level.
Truman had desegregated the military but had not been able to move civil rights through Congress because of the segregationist southern Democrats. After he took office in 1953, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower took up the cause. He appointed former California governor Earl Warren, a Republican known as a consensus builder, as chief justice of the Supreme Court. Warren took his seat in October 1953, as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, a group of cases from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware, was before the court.
The court’s decision, handed down on May 17, 1954, explicitly overturned Plessy, saying that segregated schools denied Black children “the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.”
The decision was a long time coming, even though Justice John Marshall Harlan had anticipated it almost 60 years before. Harlan wrote a dissenting opinion in Plessy harking back to the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision in which the Supreme Court denied that Black Americans could be citizens and said they had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The American people had emphatically overruled that decision by adding the Fourteenth Amendment—on which Brown v. Board was based—to the U.S. Constitution.
“In my opinion,” Harlan wrote in 1896, “the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case.”
—
Notes:
Myisha S. Eatmon, “Wielding an Unlikely Weapon: Black Americans, White Violence, and Damage Suits during the Early Days of Jim Crow,” Journal of American History, 111 (September 2024): 267–289.
Dylan Penningroth, “How Civil Rights Were Made—and Remade—by Black Communities in the Jim Crow South,” Time, at: https://time.com/6317203/civil-rights-jim-crow-south-credit-essay/
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep347/usrep347483/usrep347483.pdf
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep163/usrep163537/usrep163537.pdf
https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/to-secure-these-rights
May 16, 2025
May 16, 2025
MAGA world is performing over-the-top outrage over a photo former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey posted on Instagram, where he has been teasing a new novel. The image shows shells on a beach arranged in a popular slogan for opposing President Donald J. Trump: “86”—slang for tossing something away—followed by “47”, a reference to Trump’s presidency.
Using “eighty-six” as either a noun or a verb appears to have started in the restaurant industry in the 1930s to indicate that something was out of stock. It is a common term, used by MAGA itself to refer to getting rid of somebody…until now.
MAGA voices are insisting that this image was Comey’s threat to assassinate the president. Trump got into the game, telling Brett Baier of the Fox News Channel: "that meant assassination. And it says it loud and clear.... [H]e's calling for the assassination of the president...that's gonna be up to Pam and all of the great people.... He's a dirty cop.” Trump’s reference to Attorney General Pam Bondi and law enforcement paid off: yesterday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service are investigating Comey. He showed up voluntarily at the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., today for an interview.
In the past day, Trump’s social media account has also attacked wildly popular musical icons Bruce Springsteen and, somewhat out of the blue, Taylor Swift. Dutifully, media outlets have taken up a lot of oxygen reporting on “shellgate” and Trump’s posts about Springsteen and Swift, pushing other stories out of the news.
In his newsletter today, retired entrepreneur Bill Southworth tallied the times Trump has grabbed headlines to distract people from larger stories, starting the tally with how Trump’s posts about Peanut the Squirrel the day before the election swept like a brushfire across the right-wing media ecosystem and then into the mainstream. In early 2025, Southworth notes, as the media began to dig into the dramatic restructuring of the federal government, Trump posted outrageously about Gaza, and that story took over. When cuts to PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) and the U.S. Agency for International Development threatened lives across Africa, Trump turned the conversation to white South Africans he lied were fleeing “anti-white genocide.”
Southworth calls this “narrative warfare,” and while it is true that Republican leaders have seeded a particular false narrative for decades now, this technique is also known as “political technology” or “virtual politics.” This system, pioneered in Russia under Russian president Vladimir Putin, is designed to get people to vote an authoritarian into office by creating a fake world of outrage. For those who do not buy the lies, there is another tool: flooding the zone so that people stop being able to figure out what is real and tune out.
The administration has clearly adopted this plan. As Drew Harwell and Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post noted in early March, the administration set out to portray Trump as a king in order “to sell the country on [Trump’s] expansionist approach to presidential power.”
The team set out not just to confront critics, but to drown them out with a constant barrage of sound bites, interviews with loyalists, memes slamming Democrats, and attack lines.
“We’re here. We’re in your face,” said Kaelan Dorr, a deputy assistant to the president who runs the digital team. “It’s irreverent. It’s unapologetic.” The White House brought right-wing influencers into the press pool, including at least one who before the election was exposed as being on the Russian payroll. Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung, who before he began to work for Trump was a spokesperson for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, said their goal was “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.”
Dominating means controlling the narrative. That starts with perceptions of the president himself. Trump’s appearances have been deeply concerning as he cannot follow a coherent thread, frequently falls asleep, repeatedly veers into nonsense, and says he doesn’t know about the operations of his government. Yesterday, after journalist S.V. Date noted that the administration has posted online only about 20% of Trump’s words, Cheung told Date “You must be truly f*cking stupid if you think we’re not transparent.”
The White House also pushed back dramatically against a story that appeared in Business Insider Monday, comparing Donald Trump Jr. to former president Joe Biden’s son Hunter. The White House suggested it would take legal action against Business Insider’s German parent company.
Controlling the narrative also appears to mean manipulating the media, as Russians prescribed. Last month, Jeremy Kohler and Andy Kroll of ProPublica reported that Trump loyalist and political operative Ed Martin, now in charge of the “Weaponization Working Group,” in the Department of Justice, secretly seeded stories attacking a judge in a legal case that was not going his way. Martin has appeared more than 150 times on the Russia Today television channel and on Russian state radio, media outlets the State Department said were “critical elements in Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem,” where he claimed the Democrats were weaponizing the court system. Now he is vowing to investigate Democrats and anyone who criticizes the administration.
As Trump’s popularity falls, Trump’s political operators have spent in the “high seven figures,” Alex Isenstadt of Axios says, to run ads in more than 20 targeted congressional districts to push lawmakers to get behind Trump’s economic program. “Tell Congress this is a good deal for America,” the ad says. “Support President Trump's agenda to get our economy back on track.”
In their advertising efforts, Musk’s mining of U.S. government records is deeply concerning, for the treasure trove of information he appears to have mined would enable political operatives to target political ads with laser precision in an even tighter operation than the Cambridge Analytica program of 2016.
The stories the administration appears to be trying to cover up show a nation hobbled since January 20, 2025, as MAGA slashes the modern government that works for ordinary Americans and abandons democracy in order to put the power of the United States government into the hands of the extremely wealthy.
Trump vowed that high tariffs on goods from other countries would launch a new golden era in the United States, enabling the U.S. to extend his 2017 tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations, some of which expire at the end of this year. But his high tariffs, especially those on goods from China, dramatically contracted the economy and raised the chances of a recession.
His constant monkeying with tariff rates has created deep uncertainty in the economy, as well as raising concerns that at least some of his pronouncements are designed to manipulate the market. Today, Walmart announced it would have no choice but to raise prices, and the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index dropped to its second lowest reading on record.
Trump insisted earlier that other countries would come begging to negotiate, but now appears to have given up on the idea. “It’s not possible to meet the number of people that want to see us,” he said, announcing today that he will simply set new rates himself. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump argued that other countries would pay high tariff duties, helping the U.S. Treasury to address its high deficits at the same time the wealthy got further tax cuts.
Over the course of this week, Republicans tried to push through Congress a measure that they have dubbed “One, Big, Beautiful Bill,” a reference to Trump’s term for it. The measure extended Trump’s tax cuts at a cost to the nation of about $4.6 trillion over ten years and raised the debt ceiling by $4 trillion. At the same time, it cut Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and a slew of other programs.
The Republicans failed to advance that bill out of the House Budget Committee Friday afternoon. Far-right Republicans complained not that it cut too much from programs Americans rely on, but that it cut too little. Citing the dysfunction in Washington, D.C. and the uncertain outlook for the American economy, Moody’s downgraded the credit rating of the country today from AAA to AA1.
Since Trump took office, the “Department of Government Efficiency” also claimed to be slashing “waste, fraud, and abuse” from government programs, although actual financial savings have yet to materialize. Instead, the cuts are to programs that help ordinary Americans and move money upward to the wealthy. News broke today that cuts of 31% to the enforcement wing of the Internal Revenue Service will cost money: tax evasion among the top 10% of earners costs about $700 billion a year.
The cuts were driven at least in part by the ideological extremism of Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought was a key author of Project 2025, which calls for decimating the federal government.
Vought talked about traumatizing federal workers, and has done so, but the cuts have also traumatized Americans who depend on the programs that DOGE tried to cut. Cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) meant about $2 billion less in contracts for American farmers, while close to $100 million worth of food that could feed 3.5 million people rots in government warehouses.
Cuts to the Federal Aviation Administration have left airports without adequate numbers of air traffic controllers. After two 90-second blackouts at Newark Liberty International Airport when air traffic controllers lost control with airplanes, yesterday the air traffic controllers at Denver International Airport lost contact with planes for 2 minutes.
Cuts to a program that funds the healthcare of first responders and survivors of the September 11 World Trade Center terror attacks are leaving thousands of patients unclear whether their cancer treatments, for example, will be covered. Yesterday, acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) David Richardson told staff that FEMA is not prepared for hurricane season, which starts on June 1, and will work to return responsibility for the response to emergencies to the states. A document prepared for Richardson and obtained by Luke Barr of ABC News said: “As FEMA transforms to a smaller footprint, the intent for this hurricane season is not well understood, thus FEMA is not ready.”
Yesterday, news broke that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has been in talks with the producers of the reality show Duck Dynasty for a new reality show in which immigrants compete against each other in cultural contests to win the chance to move their U.S. citizenship applications ahead faster. It is made-for-TV, just like so many of the performances this administration uses to distract Americans from the unpopular policies that are stripping the government of benefits for ordinary Americans and moving wealth upward.
Such a show might appeal to confirmed MAGA. But it is a profound perversion of the American dream.
—
Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/03/06/trump-white-house-media-social-influencers/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/16/politics/comey-interviewed-secret-service
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-fiscal-impact-of-irs-staffing-cuts/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/16/markets/us-stock-market-tax-cuts-tariffs-treasury-bonds
Bill SouthworthLook! A squirrel!On the morning of November 4, 2024—forty-eight hours before the most consequential election in a generation—Donald Trump tweeted, in all caps, about a squirrel…Read morea day ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Bill Southworthhttps://www.axios.com/2025/05/09/trump-ad-tax-cut-plan-budget-bill
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/05/02/white-house-influencers-propaganda-leavitt/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/15/politics/steven-cheung-communications-director
https://www.yahoo.com/news/top-trump-aide-steven-cheung-213312444.html
https://www.propublica.org/article/ed-martin-trump-interim-dc-us-attorney-secret-judge-attacks
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/02/19/trump-justice-operation-whirlwind-democrats/
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/07/irs-budget-cuts-doge.html
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/house-gop-works-bill-advance-trumps-agenda-back/story?id=121870988
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-aid-cuts-leave-food-millions-mouldering-storage-2025-05-16/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/13/trump-health-cuts-world-trade-center-program-911
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/15/nx-s1-5399623/denver-airport-air-traffic-control-outage
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fema-ready-hurricane-season-internal-review-finds/story?id=121837637
https://www.propublica.org/article/ed-martin-trump-interim-dc-us-attorney-secret-judge-attacks
https://www.thedailybeast.com/white-house-freaks-out-at-don-jr-being-compared-to-hunter/
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/15/walmart-price-increases-trump-tariffs.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/16/business/us-credit-downgrade-moodys.html
https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/trump-bruce-springsteen-taylor-swift-uae-rcna207266
Bluesky:
sky.skymarchini.net/post/3lpcipprgek2a
raging-techie.bsky.social/post/3lpcevocrvc27
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